LOCKPORT, NIAGARA COUNTY & MILLERSPORT, ERIE COUNTY

My father was born in 1914 in Lockport, N.Y., a small city approximately 20 miles north of Buffalo and 15 miles south of Lake Ontario, in Niagara County; its distinctive feature is the steep rock-sided Erie Canal that runs literally through its core. Because they were poor, my grandmother (the former Blanche Morgenstern) frequently moved with her son from one low-priced rental to another. But after he grew up and married my mother (the former Carolina Bush), my father came to live in my mother's adoptive parents' farmhouse in Millersport; and has remained on that land ever since.

My mother has lived on this attractive rural property at the northern edge of Erie County, by the Tonawanda Creek, in the old farmhouse (built 1888) and then in the newer, smaller house in which my parents now live (wood frame, white aluminum siding and brown trim, built in 1961 largely by way of my fathers efforts), virtually all her life. This is over 70 years: Carolina Bush was born Nov. 8, 1916, the youngest of a large farm family, given to her aunt as an infant when her father suddenly died and left the family impoverished. (Is "die" too circumspect a term? In fact, my maternal grandfather was killed in a tavern brawl.)

In time, Frederic and Carolina had three children: I was born in 1938 (on Bloomsday: June 16), my brother Fred ("Robin" for most of our childhood, thus to me Robin forever) was born in 1943, my sister Lynn (who has been institutionalized as autistic since early adolescence) in 1956 . . . .

Though frequently denounced and often misunderstood by a somewhat genteel literary community, my writing is, at least in part, an attempt to memorialize my parents' vanished world; my parents' lives. Sometimes directly, sometimes in metaphor. Of my recent novels, "Marya : A Life" (1986) is an admixture of my mother's early life, some of my own adolescent and young-adult experience, and fiction: reading "Marya," as they read evrything I write, they immediately recognized the setting—for of course it is the setting—that rural edge of Erie County, not far from the Erie Canal (and the Canal Road where Marya lives). The quintessential world of my fiction. "You Must Remember This" (1987) is set in a mythical western New York city that is an amalgam of Buffalo and Lockport, but primarily Lockport: the novel could not have been imaginatively launched without the Erie Canal, vertiginously steep-walled, cutting through its core . . . .

But it is in an early novel, "Wonderland" (1971), that my parents actually make an appearance. My beleaguered young hero Jesse stops his car in Millersport, wanders about my parents' property, happens to see, with a stab of envy, my young mother and me (a child of 3 or 4) swinging in our old wooden swing; and when my father notices Jesse watching he stares at him with a look of hostility. So I envisioned my father as a young man of 27—tall, husky, with black hair, intent on protecting his family against possible intrusion. "In such a way," thinks my fatherless hero, "does a man, a normal man, exclude the rest of the world."

From "My Father, My Fiction." NYT Magazine, 3-16-89, p45,80,84.

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NIAGARA AND ERIE COUNTIES
FEATURING, RESPECTIVELY, THE CITIES OF LOCKPORT AND BUFFALO

You Must Remember This , like Marya : A Life (1986), is one of the most personal of my novels; though it is not, except in its setting, and certain of its specific incidents, autobiographical. It takes place in a fictitious city, Port Oriskany, an amalgam of two cities in upstate New York—Buffalo (the first large city of my experience) and Lockport (the city of my birth, my paternal grandmother's home, suffused forever for me with the extravagant dreams of early adolescence—I attended sixth grade in Lockport, and all of junior high school there; the city is probably more real to me, imaginatively, than any I have known since). While writing the novel I had a map of Port Oriskany taped to my wall so that, dreamy as all novelists are, when not in the throes of acute anxiety or the fabled and so often elusive heat of composition, I could simply stare at it; and, like Enid Stevick, in fact very much like Enid Stevick, the contours of whose soul so resemble my own, traverse its streets, ponder its buildings and houses and vacant lots, most of all the canal that runs through it, as it runs through Lockport, New York . . . that canal that, in Enid's heightened and often fevered imagination, as in my own, seemed an object of utter ineffable beauty. (It must be rembered that beauty does not mean mere prettiness but something more brutal, possessed of the power to rend one's heart.)

From (Woman) Writer : Occasions and Opportunities, p379-380.

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NEW YORK

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Last updated 5-1-96
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