MAN OF LETTERS: AN ELEGY by Eva Saulitis
I always knew that I came from another language.
– W.S. Merwin from “The Blind Seer of Ambon”
A Sunday afternoon in April, coastal Alaska. Partly sunny, the air temperature not much above freezing. Quiet except for a small plane droning across Kachemak Bay like a buzz saw, the woodstove ticking. Now, clouds move in, shoved by a north wind. I start a fire, brew coffee, wander upstairs to my writing room.
Absentmindedly, I pick up an old magazine, flip it open to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s essay, “My Father’s Suitcase.” Pamuk is one of my favorite writers. After reading the first paragraph, a strange sentence forms in my head: I get to spend the afternoon alone in the house with Orhan. I tuck the magazine under my arm, gather my notebook and pen, and go downstairs. The view outside – a forest and sky scene scribbled over with a few snowflakes – leaves me cold, so I clear the round table by the woodstove, drag in a kitchen chair, sit down, open the notebook and magazine, and read Pamuk’s words: “To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.” We bring forth, that way, another person who exists inside us, the writer, what I think of as the third person, the she in me. Orhan (apparently, she is on a first-name basis with the man) describes words as though they’re tactile, like stones someone could use to build a wall or a cairn. He makes me want to put words down on paper, the old-fashioned way, with a pen.
What is it about a few sentences, a certain quality of light, a mood, an odor, a memory, the song of a long-awaited spring bird, that opens the door to the inner world, where the third person waits, the part who’ll scribble all day, drinking coffee, pausing only to wonder if there are any cigarettes in the house (she smokes; I don’t)? I imagine Orhan saying to me:
You’re standing on a bridge. There’s a landscape on the other side where it’s begun to snow. Maybe just one or two stingy flakes parsed out of a late-winter sky, the sun bright but cold through a haze of traveling clouds. Here’s dark chocolate for your pocket, pears for your hands (don’t forget your red mittens). Here’s a thermos of coffee. Now go.
You’ll find your father there on the other side of the bridge. When he died, he didn’t leave you a thing. In his later years, he offered you books from his library; most you refused. What were you thinking? What you wouldn’t do now to get your hands on that encyclopedia of grapes. That green hardback tome on North American trees. But it’s not too late. Cross this bridge and you can walk all the way back to Silver Creek, to 19 Division Street, through the front door, into the living room and see for yourself. The books are there on the shelves on either side of the fireplace. Yes, you can have the old turntable. It’s still on the bottom shelf, beside the row of vinyl: the Latvian Dance Party album, the Perry Como, the Sibelius, the Gregorian chants. Whatever you need, you’ll find. Even him.
Look out the kitchen window. There he is, your father, in that field planting potatoes. His bony blue-white knees exposed between black socks and cotton shorts. Muddy loafers on his feet – clodhoppers that never hopped, clods stuck permanently to the soles. The ubiquitous white handkerchief knotted on his head. Or he could be dressed as his doppelganger, in the gray suit he wore to his job at the Daniel Reed Library. Peasant to intellectual was a hard leap for your father, one you, too, have tried to make. A wide gorge to span with that flimsy footbridge of yours: words.
How completely I fall under the spell of imagination, inhabiting this quiet afternoon with Orhan. He writes of how his father came to his studio one day and left a suitcase of his own writings for Orhan to read. Orhan was afraid to open it. I long for such a suitcase. I’d pick it up by its plastic handle, lug it five paces to my writing desk, set it down. Set myself down in the chair to begin the process of finding the elusive bridge – the trigger between outer and inner worlds – that leads to writing, that leads to my father, now two years dead. I could open the latches of the suitcase, sift through letters, old photos, mementos, the few books I did salvage when my siblings and I emptied out my parents’ house.
My father spent the Saturdays of my youth haunting auctions and garage sales for old books. He housed the eclectic, uneven collection in his basement office, a musty, paneled, windowless room crammed with books. Amid the Shakespeare and dictionaries, poetry, regional histories, Latvian novels, treatises on plants, cheap trade paperbacks, Steinbeck and Sandburg stood out as passions, objects of focused collecting. I never got to ask him – the immigrant from Latvia, philologist son of poor farmers, college librarian, a man who never stopped calling himself a foreigner, an exile and a peasant – what it was he loved about Steinbeck, that quintessentially American writer – of the American West, no less – a place my father never saw until he took the train, in his seventies, with my mother, from Buffalo to California for my sister’s wedding. There, he spent most of his time indoors, writing a speech for the rehearsal dinner.
Steinbeck and Sandburg. Perhaps they showed him the imaginative leap he’d need to make, the size of the gap between Latvia and America. Where were those beloved authors when, in his last years, he retreated into psychosis, a hell no pen could transcribe? When he returned to the secrets of his deep past, was any literature with him, then? Orhan, will you stay with me till I die?
My father, like me, had a notion of writing – it was part of the narrative he told about himself. He spoke mainly of his intention to write his childhood memoirs and the story of Aglona, the rural Latvian village where he was born, the village he left at seventeen to join the Latvian division of the Waffen SS to fight the occupying Russian army. Aglona. A place he never saw again. After he retired from his job at the Reed Library, we set him up with an Apple computer. And he did begin; I can almost make out those first paragraphs on the computer screen. I can almost hear his writer-voice, a voice I found jarring – strange, inflated, put-on, like a costume.
He began, but stopped writing his story. Perhaps his letters contain clues as to why. He was a devoted writer of very short letters – vestulites – little letters – he called them. He took any occasion for writing with utmost seriousness. I remember how he labored over that speech for my sister’s wedding, all those days in Bodega Bay. The pages written and rewritten longhand, in his distinctive script – fine, Edwardian, upright. I know I’ll have to get up from my writing table now, go upstairs to the cedar chest, and find those letters. I want to show Orhan what I mean by his penmanship, by his writer-voice.
The pile of his letters I find turns out to be surprisingly thin, written between 1989 and 1994. When I received those letters, I was in my mid-twenties. There’s a shock when I realize my middle stepdaughter will turn 25 this year. How would she interpret letters like these? How did I? There’s another shock when I read the top letter on the pile, dated 3 January 1994, a year into my first marriage. A jolt from reading his Americanisms, something I don’t remember.
Happy New Year to you and John! Both of you have a lot to look for this year. I hope everything will turn out in your favor . . . Mom must have written and told you about our trip to Darien. We brought back some wicked microbes. I had to declare total war against them and it feels like today that microbes are retreating.
Wicked microbes? A letter from 1995, sent to a fish hatchery in Prince William Sound, where I was working on a research boat, reassures me with its more familiar style – formal, self-conscious – reminds me of the dislocation I always felt, how the man of letters spoke in another voice than the man of flesh.
We are happy to hear that your project is progressing despite of mechanical “handicaps” you are experiencing with your boat. I wish I could have studied a bit of mechanical engineering along with classical philology so that I could give you some advice, but . . . I am sure everything will turn out “o.k.” and winds will be favorable as you navigate the oceanic waters.
The sense of dislocation is nothing new. The man of flesh lived between poles of peasant and intellectual, of Latvian and American, of past and present, the immigrant’s journey. He even spoke in two Latvians, my mother’s educated Latvian (her father was a judge), his mother’s peasant Latgalian, a round-voweled, apple mush, potato pancake dialect unique to the rural region of his birth. A Latvian I associated with his mother’s thick-soled shoes, her walking cane, her two plain dresses, one green, one blue, her wax paper-covered prayer books with crumbling pages, her rosary of coarsely carved wooden beads. At the dinner table as a child, I was unnerved by his stylistic segues: the distinguished-looking gray-haired man in spectacles, still in a suit jacket, in one breath explicating library politics to my mother (in Latvian), in the next, barking Latgalian at my grandmother, who had, after two shot glasses of schnapps, begun telling jokes, vot, Paloitz klusa! Shut the hell up! Would Orhan understand my sense of disorientation, my impression of this man as quixotic, contradictory, unpredictable, violent in his shifts of persona and voice, if I present the following juxtaposition? Here, see him smearing lard on a slab of black bread, taking a bite, smacking loudly, then, still chewing, his eyes never leaving his plate, explaining why some colleague at the college was a kaku maic (bag of shit) to my mother. Now, see his arm thrust across the table, nailing my sister on the forehead with his fork. Now see him reading an antique edition of Goethe, lying on the couch with the TV on.
Today, my father’s letters read as though they’ve just arrived. Like letters to pioneers, they’ve taken years to reach me, bringing news no longer news – news already filed away somewhere, on sheets of microfiche. Like this bit from 12 April 1990:
The “Baltic depression” continues – as far as I am concerned. Gorbachev is humiliating Lithuanians – and Bush is looking away from Lithuania. And yet – where there is life, there’s hope. Someday we will be free!
Tiny snow like dandruff falls harder as the afternoon stretches on. The clouds fill in the remaining blue blanks. I can no longer see the wind. Spring has stalled somewhere far to the south. I unfold another letter.
This year for colder days I have woolen socks. I feel their warmth and am grateful to you for sending me a pair.
I linger on this sentence, its ordinary, humble language, reminding me of Pablo Neruda’s sweet ode to a pair of handmade socks. I want to perch there, but I’m thrown off the train into another strange landscape, the mention of socks triggering a recent memory: December 1, 2007, Manchester, Vermont. My sister panicked at the thought of our father’s body lying in cold storage, waiting for his four children to converge for the Catholic rite of the cremation. He hated to be cold in those last years. Even in the sticky heat of a Vermont summer, he claimed it was snowing outside. My sister ransacked his closet, brought an armload of clothes to the funeral home: long-sleeved knit shirt, wool sweater, wool suit jacket, wool slacks, wool socks, thick-soled shoes – as if for a journey to Siberia. My brothers and I tucked pound-sized Hershey candy bars with almonds, his favorite treat, and dollar bills, one of his obsessions in his last years, into the inner pocket of his jacket.
Orhan writes: “. . . discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. Patience and toil are not enough: first we must feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary life, and shut ourselves up in a room.” And further, that “once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought.” How true. How ironic. Because here we sit, not two, but three, Orhan, my father and me, smoking, lost in our own thoughts. As a child, I begged my father to stop smoking, but now that he’s dead, I’m relieved to see that he’s taken it up again. Perhaps it’s in the spirit of discontent, of disobedience to the past and its implications, that we raise a glass of schnapps, a cigarette, to his incongruous loves: Steinbeck, Sandburg, Miss America pageants, Scrabble, wine, Wheel of Fortune, dictionaries, ping-pong. I notice, with satisfaction, that he’s gone back to his old brand (like Steinbeck, quintessentially American, western, not-him) – Marlboros in the red packet.
I wish I could have known this man. I stare at his photograph, taken shortly after he arrived in the United States. He’s not the man of letters. Not the pious, Catholic man – follower of Aquinas and Augustine – who led us down into his basement library for punishment: knee to knee with him on hard chairs, saying the rosary. Nor the big peasant who punished us with a fork to the forehead, or a birch switch to the legs, or a belt or a kick or a Latgalian curse, Vai drit, vai kocin? Nor the smoldering man who punished us with silence. In my imagination, on the other side of the bridge, he’s the man in this photograph, smiling, gangly, wild-haired. The one who never went to war. This man plays cards but knows no tricks. He drinks whiskey straight, out in the open. Says what he has to say or keeps quiet. But I know, like my imaginary Orhan, who sits, chin in hand, staring out the kitchen window, fiddling with his pen, that I’ve invented him, my young father. To what purpose, I don’t know.
And the man of letters? I invented him too. Reading the letters, I see I had many fathers. He played with language as though words were endlessly interesting pebbles, and in that way, he truly was a writer, in spirit if not in deed. There was a fat, antique dictionary he consulted almost daily, on a lectern in our living room. My childhood friend Faye recently told me how weird she’d found it, a dictionary displayed so prominently in our house, my father often standing there, his finger pressed to a page, belting out a definition, arguing with it. He kept an ironic distance from the English language, approached words with wariness, a stance that annoyed me no end as a young adult who wanted to be American, who wanted to take language for granted. I thought he was trying to pull a fast one, distract me with his Latin derivations, his insistence upon the exact definition, and his failure to find it. English words let him down. And now I see that he had, in that way, also the sensibility – if not the confidence or courage – of a writer. But it takes more than confidence and courage, it takes freedom, if only psychic. It takes access to that expansive, inner landscape on the other side of the bridge – something he longed for, but never had. Latvia, the war and his displacement, his sense of exile, his secrets, kept him a hostage.
From 12 April 1990:
Our mission in Toronto has been accomplished. We brought to the U.S.A. cloth for a suit to my godchild (= my nephew Jazeps) [ in Latvia], a nice piece of hunter’s sausage made in Canada, 3 books in Latvian language, and one book – in English. One of the books contains surrealist poetry. No Latvian poet thus far has written surrealist poetry. Incoherent – that’s what it is. Somewhat weird passages – that is what surrealist writing is supposed to be.
It’s 5:30. Orhan exclaims at the amount of light in Alaska in spring, how impossible it is to tell time by looking outside, at the vague position of the sun. I continue reading, first one of my father’s letters, then a few paragraphs from Orhan’s essay, then back to the letters, then back to my notebook. My father’s letters seem, after reading several, to be addressed to someone I don’t recognize. They wouldn’t be read by their intended audience – this adult me, this she sitting here reading them carefully, sentence by sentence – for nearly two decades, and years after he was dead. Years past his being able to read or make heads or tails of her reply. How would she reply? My responses always felt presumptuous, off the mark. Any intimacies we shared were bounded by the four corners of a particular vestulite, envelope, date, hour.
Orhan writes: “What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears – the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin.”
I kneel beside the woodstove. Orhan lights up, blowing smoke through the cracked-open kitchen door. The snow outside swirls. I consider my bookshelves, how my father would be unimpressed by the paperback to hardback ratio, by the paucity of Latvian titles. He’d be disappointed by my single, outdated dictionary, stashed on a table behind the couch.
I shove a fat oblong of birch into the stove, listen to it sputtering as it catches. My father would approve of the woodstove. Five years ago, peering into the ruin of his childhood farmhouse outside Aglona, Latvia, I saw the mammoth wood cookstove he grew up with. I crawled into the log pirts, the collapsing sauna house, where he was born. He took pride in his fire places in Silver Creek – the one in the living room; the one in his basement library; the funky brick smokehouse he built in the backyard; the ritualistic bonfire he constructed each June for Jani, the ancient Latvian solstice celebration.
By American standards, by the standards of our rural town, my father was more intellectual than peasant, more bookish than practical. It’s true, he was no mechanic, not in the modern American sense. He once put the plumbing fixtures in the shower on backwards. I grew up thinking he was hopeless as a handyman. It wasn’t until I went to Latvia that I recognized his style: make-do, patchwork, unadorned, built-to‑not-last. Nothing in our backyard or garage would make it into a House & Garden magazine. Nothing was plumb. Repairs were made from straightened nails, twine, wire, broken scrap lumber. His favorite tool was his scythe. Like these carryovers, his fires added a peasant aspect to our house, which was filled with television and Latvian art, with words and shouts and silence, with dress shoes and work boots, with canning jars and hundreds of books.
“Whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing will, in the end, take us to other, very different places,” writes Orhan. “It will take us far from the table at which we have worked in sadness or in anger; it will take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world.”
Perhaps that’s what my father feared, why he abandoned the Apple computer. On the diskettes I salvaged during the dismantling of our childhood house, I found empty files. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to revisit that other world. He never returned to Latvia, even after it achieved independence. In his dotage, he wept for it. I must have asked him repeatedly for stories from his childhood, judging by his letters, in which he frequently referred to those stories, but deferred them to the future: I’m sending out this letter without reflecting on my childhood and youth. That will follow. “They say” that one of the signs of old age is dwelling in the past. I still like to live in the present time. Or he presented obstacles to their telling: Do you write your diary/journal? Do that. It’s a good thing to do – you will never regret. I wish I had done it. It is so difficult to write about the past without any notes. It feels like one is recreating past that never was . . .
What’s more dangerous, the risk of recreating a past that never was, or of remaining silent? Is the unsung past a past that never was? Why does it feel, years after his death, that the past he never wrote or told is my past now, more so than if he’d spelled it out? I’m 52, I have cancer, and the question of “the fear of counting for nothing” seems increasingly real. The only thing that matters, I tell myself, is to make the story we’ve lived whole inside us and give that wholeness meaning.
In only one letter, from 1988, do I find reference to my father’s writing project, do I find some of the promised stories, and they are, like his letters, partial and tantalizing glimpses.
I’m getting back to putting together the materials I gathered about Aglona. I will have to start writing soonest (?) There is no soonest for soon, for soon is now & . . . I’m still expecting a booklet that was published in 1929 and it contained story (history?) of my Aglona. The book is in the hands of a Latvian priest (Jazeps Savikis) in Lecester, England. I asked this priest to loan me the booklet.
You asked me to tell you stories of my life. I really don’t know what would interest you most. Everything in my childhood was so different – except for feelings of pain or joy or fear. These feelings are common to all of us. I think loneliness was painful, so was hunger (not having as much as one desired). Fear of losing parents, especially [of] losing Mom, when my Dad passed away in 1935 when I was 14 years old.
. . . How about some joyful events, such as finding red raw sugar my mom was hiding from us kids. When I finished nibbling at those pieces of sugar, I hoped Mom will blame some mice for nibbling at her “treasure.” How about linen thread converted into phone line to my friend 1 km away.
I don’t miss the awkward phone calls. I’d find a landing place on the moving train of his words but there was nothing to hold onto, and I’d lose my grip. There were, in our communications, as someone said of John Ashberry’s poems, “islands of significance” in an uncertain terrain. I can, even now, grasp in my hands only a few charming childhood stories, random snippets of Latin, which he knew well (along with Greek), his painstaking and fastidious uses of English, his disappointment with his Latin students at the college (he taught evening Latin classes for a time after he retired). For midterm my students (now only 10) were graded as follows: A− (1); B (4); B− (2); C+ (1); C (1); C− (1). Four got E & they never came back.
I don’t miss the sense that my inability to find a common language with my father might have placed me with his E students.
In one letter, on top of a page, he’s printed out
o p t h a m o l o g i s t = 14 letters
On the other side of the coin – I have to see opthamologist tomorrow . . . I never used this word before, so I misspelled it. It happens. Good I have about ten English dictionaries to help me.
I put down the letters. The feeling that they have arrived from far away, that I can finally read them as they were intended, has vanished. I’m buried under his evasions, his newspaper clippings, his classical references, the frequent use of dashes, the way he addressed every envelope Ms. Ieva (Eva) Saulitis or Ms. Eva (Ieva) Saulitis. The lists of synonyms and adjectives, stacked one against the other, trying to convey something for which there was no word. The letters, like the view out the window, leave me cold. The moments of understanding, of connection, aren’t islands of significance after all. They’re boulders in a river. Reading his letters feels like swimming through a rapid. I can cling to a boulder, but the force of the river is stronger. It jerks me free and drags me along.
Orhan writes, “After sitting down to write because we felt marginalized, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.” I will not find that world in my father’s letters. But here in my house, this quiet afternoon, I find it. Writing places me in that other world, that shifting landscape. My world expands to include my father, his untold stories, my failure to understand him and him me, Orhan’s father’s suitcase, the weather, the act of writing itself. Perhaps it’s simple. We write to shore ourselves against the slow process of deposition, the everyday pile‑up of resentments, pettiness, annoyance, melancholy, crumbs, and dust motes. To travel away, expanding our world, preventing the world from closing in.
My father’s world closed in slowly. Into his late seventies, he continued to make forays to the Seneca Indian reservation, to the east, where all of the old white men in Silver Creek drove their Town Cars, Cadillacs, Pontiacs and Bonnevilles to get cheaper gas. Then it shrunk to the village itself, the supermarket, pharmacy, bank, town hall, barbershop, doctor’s office. In his own old-man sedan, he navigated the simple topography of Silver Creek to arrive back at Division, the perfect name for our street, where we lived out being Latvian-American. Three years before he died, he retreated into his mind, lived deep inside its hidden terrain. He wrote no more letters. Once in a while, he’d send out strange dispatches. In life he knew seven languages. Near death, he added a buried eighth. It described black dogs. Gas chambers. KGB men. The FBI. The World Court. Trains. “Red, white, red,” he urged me one day, “like Latvian flag. Three roses for my casket. You have to get them today. There’s money in the desk drawer. Did you find it? Now go. When you come back, you can pick up my remains at the front desk.”
Orhan, don’t leave me, I plead as I read the last sentence of his essay. As consolation, I retrieve a copy of his book Istanbul and place it on the round table with the letters, a ceramic milk pitcher, the coffee pot, a cup. A still life, foreground for the wind-blown snow outside the window. And as I reach for the letters, perhaps I’m saying this too: Dad, don’t go yet. Please, just one more letter. A lifetime isn’t enough to find the bridge we could have crossed together. Despite myself, I attack the last letters like a detective, desperately seeking clues, scanning the lines, searching for something definitive. Skimming each page for an island of significance, for a rare moth to catch in my net, for some useful instruction, some clue to the heart of the man, and the meaning of his journey, some clue to the meaning of being his daughter, she who became a writer.
I look up from my notebook and stare out the window to a scene my father would recognize: a wintry, Baltic, snow-spitting sky. Like me, he was obsessed with weather, but in opposite ways. He feared storms; I love them. His letters referred to the winds off Lake Erie as zephyrs. An obsessive watcher of The Weather Channel in his later years, he’d call me on the phone, and without saying hello, he’d tell me the weather in Alaska: In Homer, it is cloudy and twenty degrees. His news of the world, delivered to me, one phone call, one letter at a time. Fragments of his life revealed, like rare red sugar he doled out to me, one sentence at a time.
I’m left with just a few sheets of airmail paper on which he practiced his chosen writing form, the vestulite. On which he scribbled brief scenes of a childhood and a world gone forever. The remaining pieces of his story amount to very little. Yet I gather them up, those bright but vivid flashes. Those breaks of blue in a sky that can’t stop moving and changing.
Eva Saulitis is the author of two books of nonfiction: Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas (Beacon Press, 2013), Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist (Boreal Books, 2008); and two poetry collections, Prayers in the Wind (Boreal, 2015) and Many Ways to Say It (Red Hen Press, 2012).