A Strong West Wind: A Memoir - Softcover

Gail Caldwell is the chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she has been a staff writer and critic since 1985. In 2001, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. She is also an avid rower. Caldwell lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Poised at the heart of so much open land, Amarillo, too,
sprawled in a sort of languid disregard, as though territorial hegemony
might make up for all that loneliness. Route 66 cut through
the center of town as a streamlined reminder of what was out
there to the west, and the trucks roared through town day and
night, slaves to hope and white-line fever, heading for California
or just somewhere else. The steak houses and truck stops at
either end of the city confirmed these great distances, offering
twenty-four-ounce T-bones along with the diesel fuel, and the
neon from the all-night signs must have looked from the sky like
paths of light—bright flashes of pink and green and white as the
town grew sparser, flanked on the highway to the east and west
alike by miles of open country.

Downtown in the 1950s was only a few blocks long, and the
two banks, the two movie theaters, the Silver Grill Cafeteria, and
the Amarillo Grain Exchange were all within shooting distance of
one another. The Mary E. Bivins Memorial Library stood on the
outskirts of these necessities, on Tenth and Polk, a generous old
Georgian mansion with two sets of stone steps up to its wide verandas.
The place had been built as a private home at the turn of
the century, and its interiors still held traces of domestic calm—
the foyer smelled wonderfully of floor wax and printer’s ink and
no doubt years’ worth of muted librarians’ cologne. The books
were spread luxuriantly over four floors, with the aisles between
shelves feeling as wide as city streets. It was here that an entire
generation of kids enjoyed a certain benign neglect in the scorching
Texas summers: Scores of mothers deposited their children
at the library each day to snatch a few hours of freedom in between
the swimming pool and the grocery store. The place was
safe, it was cool (in the days before air-conditioning,we had only
swamp coolers), and, with its gruff librarians posted like marines
between Adult Fiction and the checkout desk, it offered a semblance
of day-care-cum-self-improvement. In a city five hundred
miles from the Texas Gulf Coast and a day’s car ride from the
mountains of neighboring New Mexico, the town pools and the
library were the closest thing a lot of people had to getting away.
Our idea of escape was an order of fries at the snack bar of
the Western Riviera—a cross-shaped turquoise swimming pool
slapped across the prairie like an SOS sign to God—and then the
insouciant promise of the library, where you could lose yourself
for hours in sanctioned daydreams.

Maybe such repositories of childhood are always graced by
memory, each of them archives of that wider world to come. But
for me those rooms were my Elysian fields, possessing a grandeur
and reach that would blur over time but scarcely diminish after I
had taken flight. My mother drove us to the library in an old Ford
station wagon, two-tone Palomino Pink, and I can see it still,
idling on the street below, as I half staggered down the stone steps
with my weekly haul. There was a limit to the number of books,
probably ten or twelve, that children were allowed, and the librarian
at first admonished me that my appetites were likely to
prove grander than my capabilities. But I was bored beyond measure
without a book in my hand, and each week I surprised her
by showing up for more.

This doggedness had revealed itself early on, an adaptive trait
for a would-be toddler who had struggled to walk until well past
the age of two. By the time I finally got to my feet, I stayed there—
a victory that must have assured me, on some profound and preverbal
level, that determination was a mighty ally. Certainly it
proved useful in the library’s summer reading contests, where,
one sweltering July, our literary progress was tracked by tiny flags
ascending a papier-mâché mountain. Each Friday the young explorers
would report to base camp to summarize the books we
had finished; once the librarian had determined we were telling
the truth, she would move our flags closer to the summit. I remember
this textual expedition with pain and pleasure both: the
giddy journey into higher altitudes, as I left the pack behind, the
weekly anticipation of receiving our sentry’s seal of approval.
And finally, the misery of coming in second to a boy in my age
group—I was probably nine—who had dared to outread me.
The realms of athletics and other hand-eye endeavors had
found me thus far undistinguished. When she was five,my sister
had drawn a horse of such promise that the picture won a local
contest; I promptly got out the tracing paper and copied her masterpiece,
an act that suggested the visual pursuits be left to her.

What I possessed was a capacity to absorb and retain great quantities
of words, a skill useful in spelling bees, Latin conjugations,
and, for one shining moment, onstage. My dramatic talents were
confined mostly to a deep second alto, but I snared the lead in the
sixth-grade school play simply because no other child could
memorize the lines. Dressed in a red, white, and blue flowing
gown that my mother had painstakingly sewn, I was cast as the
small embodiment of the American flag. Like a one-girl chorus in
a Greek drama,my role was to deliver great swatches of truth and
beauty from a pedestal on high. “I am the American flag!” began
my soliloquy, then marched on through the ages to the rockets’
red glare.

Such fervor must have met with a forgiving crowd in those
Cold War and Camelot years. With the native-son exception of
Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, Amarillo would vote overwhelmingly
Republican in every presidential election for the last
half of the twentieth century—a conservatism that displayed its
colors everywhere from Sunday-morning sermons (where might
was always right) to young girls camouflaged as American flags.
My father had been a master sergeant in the Eighth Air Force
during the Second World War, stationed for three years in a
supply-command base in Blackpool, England, until months after
the European theater was over. A tall, brown-haired man with
pool-dark eyes and a slow, trustworthy grin, he had the type of
young-Jimmy-Stewart physical stature that Hollywood had lionized
in its soldier-heroes. I was born five years after his return, in
1951, and I grew up cloaked in the sweet mysteries of his having

belonged to such an exotic mission. This aura of intrigue was
heightened by the stories he told and the ones he wouldn’t: the
poker games he’d played and won throughout the war, the scar
on his chest he refused to explain but that I imagined was a knife
wound. Mostly, though, I had a notion of my father as a soldier in
charge of a company of men, where his physical strength and
bluster-rough camaraderie must have been on full display. For a
child, these heroic images were part of a larger dimension that included
physical warmth and the smell of coffee and Camel cigarettes;
taken together, they offered a portrait of a dad who was
already larger than life. When I stood on that stage in my patriotic
garb, delivering my lines to a full house, I knew the audience held
a man who had come back from the war to take care of me. I must
have believed myself at the very center of the home of the brave.
The war novels were housed in the basement of the library,
within the larger territory of Adult Fiction, where I wasn’t supposed
to be. So this was where I headed, preferring the remote
aisles of the last rows of the alphabet, where I was less likely to be
apprehended. There was a vague warning, issued by mothers
and librarians both, to be on the lookout for strange, nonreading
men—the ones who smelled of whiskey, nodded off at the reading
tables, or seemed too interested in children. I was far too young
to consider that most of these dispossessed were veterans of their
own wars, real or illusory, and were, like me, simply looking for
shelter. They never bothered me and I hardly noticed them, for I
was curled up on the lineoleum before the rows of Leon Uris and
Herman Wouk—men whom I followed, without anyone’s permission,
into battlefields and drop zones of untold danger and intrigue.
Did other girls love war novels the way I did, in those years
when the national mythos was still dizzy with the aura of Allied
victory? I know only that my passion for the genre was probably
the beginning of a tragic worldview—that Uris’s Battle Cry and
Mila 18 would send me on to the grittier likes of James Jones and
Norman Mailer; that the moral ambiguities of Wouk’s The Caine
Mutiny may have prepared me for Dostoyevsky in adolescence. If
The Yearling had been my first literary instruction in grief—in the
unalloyed pain of love and separation—then the messy heroics of
fallen soldiers only secured that terrible lesson: the idea that
valor could face off with evil in a field of mud, and lose.
That’s grim fare for a child, no doubt sweetened by the pulpy
promise of Uris and Wouk; like most Americans, as William
Dean Howells noted, I still preferred my tragedies with happy
endings. And not for me the local wars of either Texas or the
Deep South. I was bored by literary accounts of the Alamo and
the Civil War, though this distinction, in which I eschewed
provincial battles for the European fronts of modern war, had
more to do with my father than with any sense of regional shame
or estrangement. Because he had returned unscathed from “his”
war—which had, astonishingly, managed to take place before I
existed—I needed to know everything about it. The legacies of
World War II were part of the story that mattered most: a home
for my unfolding consciousness, with a good-and-evil plot that
offered the last vestige of innocence in America.
Our fathers had come home to a nation infused with relief and
ideological certainty, two commodities that would never again be
in such abundance. Buoyed by the ticker-tape parades and necessary
fictions that allowed them to go on, they could look beyond
the devastation to a future that promised, at least on the surface,
protection from the past. The lines had been so thoroughly drawn
by the rise of Nazi Germany and the aggression of Japan that our
response was accompanied by a sort of mandatory amnesia—it was
essential, if not easy, to overlook the legacies of a Great War two
decades earlier, in what was billed as the War to End All Wars.Now
we had Kilroy instead of doughboys; now we had the liberation of
the camps to justify and amend the casualty lists.And we had Dresden,
too, instead of Ypres, but that was a subplot best neglected. If
the campaigns in Europe had demonstrated America’s valor, the
ones embellished by Hollywood and Madison Avenue confirmed
it. The darker story, found in classics like The Best Years of Our
Lives and The Naked and the Dead, would outlive the boosterism
of the postwar years, eventually becoming part of the elegiac truth
about war and modern history. But for now, before the fences went
up, we were still a land of suburban war games and toy bombers,
where the Nazis always got what was coming and where nobody
good ever died—except maybe for a few minutes, only to be resurrected
as the other side’s troop commander. Our dads were
heroes—all of them were heroes, it seemed—and it was our tender
burden to be the little soldiers who had made it all worthwhile.

Huddled there in my barracks on the basement floor of the
Mary E. Bivins Library, I envisioned myself to be of particularly
steely character. Otherwise, how could I bear the horrors of Normandy,
or the lousy C rations that awaited me each day? I lived
for such extended fantasies, believing that the canned peaches
and tinned beef I read about were the food of giants—and that
consuming them, in my imaginary way, would nourish me as
well. This empathic identification guided me in the real world as
often as it transported me into the next. I’d heard all about the
fish-and-chips, wrapped in newspaper and sold for a dime, that
my father had subsisted on in England; though he described
them as dreadful, I ordered them every time I had the chance. Because
the grunts in my war novels were, like him, card sharks and
betting men, I made him play me at gin rummy or casino until I
dropped off to sleep at the kitchen table. It was hardly a parental
sacrifice: In the card games and dominoes we both loved, he was
already grooming a straight man for his pastimes. He had begun
teaching me the bones of arithmetic when I was about four, trying
to outfox me by making change for a quarter. I assumed this, too,
was part of what made a good soldier: Laugh and shake your
head as part of the bluff, never look away from your opponent,
and never bet the farm.
No g i r l can live forever on blood-soaked heroism and fivecard
draw, and I still had to train for my relatively peaceful future.
I was at the age when compassion and excess go hand in hand,
and I had cried so hard and long over Gone with the Wind (not its
casualty lists, but Rhett’s exit) that my tears had alarmed my
mother, then annoyed her. Staggering from Herman Wouk’s war
stories to the tamer domestic pastures of his Marjorie Morningstar,
I responded to the exotic constraints of Marjorie’s Jewishness
by giving up bacon for a month—and, considering my
naive day trips into other people’s religions, I probably gave it up
for Lent. The heroines who seized my heart belonged to the sophisticated
urban settings of Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke and
Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Joy in the Morning; if
precocious girls elsewhere, poised on the verge of puberty, were
reading Austen or the Brontës, I didn’t know it and I doubt I
would have cared. I was enflamed by the purpler stories that captured
the young women of modern America, hoping that, like the
field manuals that had given me my father’s war, they could teach
me how to grasp my life—how to grab hold and ride it to victory.
At a time when television had only a tentative foothold as cultural
authority, such moral and practical guidance still belonged
to the word, be it secular or scriptural. We learned how to get
where we were going by the stories we heard, whether we found
them in the classroom, the sanctuary, or the closet with a flashlight.
So we listened to tales in the schoolyard about the fates
awaiting the craven and depraved, or we plotted our getaways by
memorizing the escape routes of Calico Kate or Pioneer Polly.
More pious girls, no doubt, absorbed these life lessons from the
Good Book itself—“How should we then live?” Ezekiel was
taught to ask—and yet the educational merits of Scripture eluded
me throughout my childhood. When my parents gave me an inscribed
Bible one Christmas, my heart sank with disappointment,
then guilt at my ingratitude.
This religious drift was not for lack of access: As the product
of a long line of Calvinist preachers and congregants, I had inherited
their severity but not their devotion. My mother’s hangover
from her Southern Baptist upbringing still made her frown
upon the idea of cards on Sunday, though none of us, especially
my dad, could take her disdain seriously. Instead of the terrifying
strictures of a fire-and-brimstone world, my own spiritual domicile
held a kind watercolor Jesus wi...