Discovery in Morgantown
by Roger J. Porter, Ph.D.
The author is a professor of English at Reed College in Portland,
Oregon. He and his father both grew up in New Jersey. He has
written extensively on autobiography, and is finishing a book
entitled Autobiographical Reflections: Intention and Performance
in the Writing of Self, from which this essay is taken.
In the early fall of 1998, I presented a portion of my writing on Vladimir Nabokov at a conference on autobiography sponsored by West Virginia University. I wanted to participate in the conference in part because my father had gone to college at WVU, and I thought it would be interesting and instructive to stroll the lawns and the walks where 70 years before he had been a student. When I was nine I had visited the campus with him, but this new occasion would allow me to see the place through adult eyes and, more importantly, to reaffirm a bond with my father, who had died when I was only a college freshman.
Midway through the
conference I took a break from the sessions and wandered about
in the crisp autumn air, soon coming upon a cluster of brick
buildings, prairie Gothic in style, that formed an open quadrangle.
They had been remodeled, but retained their 19th-century aura.
As I sat on a stone bench, I tried to imagine my father in the
same spot, when he was here during the late twenties, I vaguely
recalled. But much as I might, I could not fathom why he had
come to this place, far from his native Newark, New Jersey. West
Virginia did not seem a likely destination for a poor but ambitious
Jewish boy, son of a butcher and later a tradesman, his eyes
set on either a medical or a legal career. Did he experience
isolation and loneliness? Did he get along with the farm kids
and coal miners' children? How alien—or perhaps comforting—did
the gentle hills of Appalachia that surrounded the town appear
to him in his first long journey from home?
My mother had come from Uniontown, a scant 30 miles up the road
across the line in Pennsylvania. My father had met her on a blind
date. As the family lore had it, he was up on a ladder decorating
his fraternity house for a party, and when she walked into the
room he told himself he would one day marry that girl. While
I stared at the venerable buildings, wondering why he had chosen
this remote place for his education, I suddenly realized that
if he had not ventured here I would not exist. It was a simple
and obvious revelation, but it struck me with brute force.
The next day I decided
to explore the town, and found myself in a musty bookstore, browsing
with no particular plan. Eventually I noticed a shelf filled
with old University yearbooks; I could not remember ever having
seen yearbooks for sale, and was intrigued. As it happened, the
last volume in a row of The Monticola: The Annual of West
Virginia University and the Class Book of the Junior Class, was
dated 1927. I suddenly recalled that my father had graduated
in 1929, so he would not be among the juniors in the volume;
but each fraternity had its own page in the yearbook, and knowing
that he had belonged to Pi Lambda Phi, I began anxiously to search
for that page. And all at once there he was, my 20-year-old father,
looking out from an oval photograph with the caption: "Joe
Porter, Pledge." I stood in the aisle of the bookstore,
transfixed and shaking. Who could say how long that book had
lain on the shelf, but for a moment I believed that the book—and
my father himself—had waited for years to be ransomed from
oblivion. I felt as if I were rescuing my father from exile,
taking him home to shelter.
There were pictures of other young men whose names I dimly remembered from childhood dinner-table conversations: Robert Wallach, Erwin Nelowet, and Mose Boiarsky. And there too was a photograph of the fraternity house, a stately, stone residence with a wrap-around, columned porch, the very site of the conception of my conception.
Yet another image caught my eye, the photograph of a man whose name was legend in the family, but whom I never realized had been a fraternity brother of my father: Sonny Schlossberg. Years before I was born, my mother's sister, on a night when both she and Schlossberg were roaring drunk, had decided on a dare to marry; the marriage lasted four months, and Aunt Harriet never wed again. And now I understood how my parents must have met. Sonny, no doubt dating Harriet at the time, had likely told my father that his girlfriend up in Uniontown had a kid sister, and that sometime he should fix him up for a double date.
I bought the yearbook for $7.50.
Walking up the street with my treasure in hand, returning to the autobiography conference, I felt as if I had drawn a circle of commemoration, or rather as if a circle had been drawn for me, enclosing memory, speculation, and dream. I had plucked a piece of my past from that unlikely shelf, a tangible memorial that seemed to complete the previous day's reverie on the stone bench. I had looked out over the West Virginia hills, and from the fragile page my father had gazed back at me—I who had already lived 14 years more than he had, but who, in the way these things inevitably work, felt younger by far than he, and imagined not so much his astonishment at my great find as a father's pride and praise. He could no more have dreamed that one day I would inadvertently stumble upon his innocent and fresh face in that bookstore, where perhaps he had once bought his textbooks, than I could have dreamed that I would never have a child—someone who might memorialize me, much as I had celebrated my father in an unforeseen act of observance.
Face to face with my past, in a place crackling with discovery, I remembered that in Speak, Memory, Nabokov's autobiography that I had just lectured on, the author discovers in a European library a book written by his father, long since dead, a book the child had never seen. Sons unearth their fathers, and run themselves to ground. That afternoon, in the unlikely soil of Morgantown, my criticism on autobiography and my own autobiography melded into one flesh.
As I faced the picture of my youthful father in that bookstore, I could at last regard him as an equal. Of course I had seen photos of him from the flapper era, but I was a young child when I had gazed on those photos pasted into my "Baby Book" with its light blue quilted cover, photos meant to chart the beginnings of our small family. A little boy, I thought of the man in those pictures, though only in his mid-20s, as large, wise, definitive. Now I looked at my young father, his lost youth meeting my aging face, and I felt as if he were a beloved subject, but one unfamiliarly shy, even fawn-like, not quite certain of himself, a haunting and perhaps haunted figure that I, detective of missing persons, had brought to light. It was as if I could see him forming before me, even as I could see myself being formed in and through him. How often as a child I had heard the phrase "when you were just a gleam in your father's eye." Now, in his West Virginia photograph, I saw that gleam in the big gray-green cat's eyes I remembered, the unmistakable charm, the glint. And I saw myself, deep within those eyes, and reflected back.
Then an uncanny thing happened. I suddenly recalled the last photograph ever taken of him, when he returned home from an over-indulgent party one day in 1955, just moments before he collapsed with the heart attack that, at age 48, proved fatal. In that final image, which sat on my mother's dresser for years until she remarried, he always looked ancient to me, older by far than he did when dressed for his coffin. And although, as I've said, he was 14 years my junior on that day in Morgantown, I felt far younger than the figure I summoned to mind from that last photograph; and yet, of course, I felt older and riper than the face that looked out at me from the timeworn page of the yearbook.
Call us equal, then, two men meeting in the middle. It's my fantasy that we stared at one another, with mutual wonder.
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