JUST THIS SIDE OF BYZANTIUM[1]
An introduction
I must say that this book was a surprise. The nature of such surprises is that you begin your work around any word, or series of words that happens along in your head instead of trying to develop a made up idea. I call it a word-association process.
Thank God, I found this method quite early in my writing career. I would simply get out of bed each morning, walk to my desk, and put down some word. Then associations with that word would show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my surprise, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely.
So, first I searched my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night from my childhood, and made stories from these.
Then I looked back at the green apple trees and the old house of my parents, and the house next door where my grandparents lived, and all the lawns of my childhood summers, and I began to try words for all that.
So in this book you have a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully appropriate. I was gathering images and impressions all of my life, and forgetting them. Words (like, for instance, dandelion wine) were catalysts that sent me back and opened the memories out, and helped me see what those memories had to offer.
From the age of twenty-four to thirty-six, it was my nearly every day game: to walk myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass in order to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves or about picking wild grapes with my father and brother, and, perhaps, remember a fragment of a letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his sorrows.
I also wanted to see the ravine, especially on those nights when walking home late after seeing The Phantom of the Opera, my brother Skip would run ahead and hide under the ravine-creek bridge like the Lonely One and jump out and seize me, yelling, so that I ran, fell, and ran again, babbling all the way home. That was great stuff.
Through word-association in my game I came upon old and true friendships. I borrowed my friend John Huff from my childhood in Arizona and shipped him East to Green Town so that I could say good-bye to him properly.
In my recollections, I sat me down to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with the long dead and much loved, for I was a boy who did indeed love his parents and grandparents and his brother, even when that brother “dumped” him.
Or I found myself on the front porch Independence night helping my Uncle Bion fire his home-made brass cannon.
When I learned to go back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is just the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the emerald-green grass of other Augusts while starting to grow up, grow old, and feel darkness waiting under the trees to spill the blood.
A critical article analyzing Dandelion Wine amused and somewhat surprised me a few years ago. The author wrote about the ugliness of the harbor and how depressing the coal docks and railroad-yards were down below the town of Waukegan (which I named Green Town in my novel), and wondered why I, who had been born and grown up there, hadn’t noticed all that.
Naturally, I had noticed them but, being a genetic magician, I was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Counting box-cars is a usual activity of boys. Their elders get annoyed at the train that blocks their way, but boys happily stand and count, and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places.
As to that so-called ugly railroad-yard, it was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants that washed the brick pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark morning.
As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my cellar every autumn to wait for the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which shot down a ton of beautiful meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures.
In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him and that, of course, is what horse manure has always been about.
In a poem of mine I tried to explain about the germination of all the summers of my life into one book.
I started the poem thus:
Byzantium, I come not from,
But from another time and place
Whose race was simple, tried and true;
As boy I dropped me forth in Illinois.
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan, there I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
