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William Kittredge Learns How To Live


Hole In The Sky: A Memoir
by William Kittredge
Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, hard cover
Vintage books, 1993, paper, 238 pages, $11


Reviewed by Kent Chadwick
The Free Press

William Kittredge became a major cultural voice with his 1987 collection of essays Owning It All, which mapped the emotional terrain of the modern West. In Those essays, he wrote with grace and authority against the dead myths of the West, which lured us into believing that we live in some separate kingdom where we own it all and can do whatever we damn well please.
Kittredge's tone is different in his newest book, Hole in The Sky: A Memoir. Here his prose is marked by questionings, qualifications, wonderings. His task is introspection, the examined life, a cutting away of rationalizations, self-dissection. It's hard to watch; there is a smell of ether in the text. He accepts and explains from the outset that his is a memoir of failure.
But after you are through it, Kittredge's life rests in your memory. With lean writing, every sentence carrying significance, Kittredge covers his territory - his family's ranching empire in southeastern Oregon - rapidly and consummately. He gives us a complete life as offering. He becomes an intimate because he takes us deep into his confidences.
Hole in the Sky is a cultural antidote to narcissistic autobiographies, just as Owning It All was an answer to pulp and B westerns. Kittredge eats his own sins; he doesn't shift blame. And he is modest about the accomplishments of his later years, writing and teaching within that vital circle of writers who have gathered at the University of Montana in Missoula. He doesn't indulge in name dropping, his palling with Raymond Carver and all, but stays true to his focus - his family and what tore it apart.
Kittredge was born in 1932 to a proud ranching and farming family in Oregon's Warner Valley, "a conjunction of wetland and desert [that] seemed like a true condition of life." That northwest corner of the Great Basin had been home to the northern Paiutes before they were driven out in a series of wars with the U.S. Army. "We lived surrounded by ghosts," Kittredge writes, "but we forgot... We were heedless people in a new country; we came and went in a couple of generations. But we plowed a lot of ground while we were there."
Kittredge's evocation of that landscape is a song that flows through Hole in the Sky. At 61, Kittredge is understanding the territory of his childhood, and the losses he lived through illuminate the crisis we face in the West. Our contemporary economy rationalizes and simplifies the land, but Kittredge has rediscovered that "In our right minds we want to seek out places that reek of complexity."
Kittredge's grandfather and namesake, despite having grown up poor, built a kingdom of more that 15,000 acres through constant work, invention, sharp-dealing, litigation and luck. He believed in land. "Love was not very real to him; what he demanded was dedication to his purposes, and obedience."
Silences followed the family fortune. His grandfather made his first land purchase with money he had borrowed from his brother, "at 12 percent - they never spoke after it was paid off." Once land was owned, people didn't talk about how it'd been won. "Nobody told us anything revealing from the history of our family, or our neighbors' families. It was right there, as I understand it, that our failures, in my family, began. Without stories, in some very real sense, we do not know who we are, or who we might become."
Kittredge tries to right the balance; he tells so many stories in this book, heartbreaking stories, perfect stories, stories with characters made vivid with two sentences and impressed on us in a paragraph.
Kittredge's father knuckled under to the grandfather and gave up his dream of law school to work the family land; and they came to hate each other. His grandfather pushed his father out of the business. His parents' marriage wrecked on this failure. And the covert lesson within the horsemanship his father taught him was "the art of keeping intimacy at some distance, and living with power."
Kittredge grew up knowing "nothing more valuable than self." Hole in the Sky is the case record of his recovery from that "antidysthanasia," a word he coined in one of his short stories to mean "failure to take positive efforts to preserve life."
Through childhood polio, a life of drinking, leaving home, a young marriage, immersion in books, suburban dreams, a return to the farm, Kittredge had been wishing for life lessons. What he had acquired were habits: the expectation that there'd always be time, the readiness to run for cover.
But his books and dreams of writing broke him. The time, the book (The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann), the physical panic of his nervous breakdown, are all still vivid to him. His life fell apart. Yet he fell in with a woman who pitied him for an afternoon, who taught him the lesson he had been wanting: "touch one another, and go out into the world smelling and tasting." Hole in the Sky is about learning how to live.

Kent Chadwick is a journalist and fiction writer who lives in Florence, Oregon.

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Contents on this page were published in the December/Jan, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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