Summer Wine
“And here!” In triumph she flashed her trump card, a postal picture of herself when she was seven years old, in a dress like a yellow butterfly…
“Who’s this little girl?” asked Jane.
“It’s me!”
The two girls held on to it.
“But it doesn’t look like you,” said Jane simply. “Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere…”
“…But this picture proves I was young!”
“That’s some other girl, like us. You borrowed it.”
“I was married!”
“Where’s Mr Bentley?”
“He’s been gone a long time. If he were here, he’d tell you how young and pretty I was when I was twenty-two.”
“But he’s not here and he can’t tell, so what does that prove? …Only way I’ll believe you were ever young” – Jane shut her eyes to emphasize how sure she was of herself – “is if you have someone say they saw you when you were ten.”
“Thousands of people saw me but they’re dead, you little fool – or ill, in other towns… I just moved here a few years ago, so no one saw me young.”
“Well, there you are!” Jane blinked at her companions. Nobody saw her!”
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (1957)
It’s June and the days are warm. The season for summer readings and re-readings. But just as the light falls differently on our memories from one year to the next, so it does on the loved books of childhood. Mrs. Bentley’s story troubled me even as a young reader, but now I can anticipate a similar fate to hers – the invisibility of our younger selves to others. The question of whether to fight for the visibility of all our years and changes or give into a world in which the numbers of those who remember us ‘back then’ are dwindling. Mrs. Bentley’s story is one of many encounters between young and old in Dandelion Wine, some cruel, some tender. But certainly, this was a theme that troubled the middle-aged Bradbury when he wrote the novel.
In the opening pages, twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding begins the summer of 1928 with a revelation. While harvesting berries with his father and brother, Douglas is struck by the tidal-wave realization that he is alive. He is alive and never quite knew it until that moment. By the novel’s end, this revelation of youth, life, and possibility will be followed by its dark corollaries of inevitable aging and death. In between these signal moments (between Douglas’s June and October, if you like), we move through the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Bradbury’s fictional stand-in for his childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois. Douglas keeps a written record of the season and his related discoveries and insights, sharing these with his younger brother, Tom.
Dandelion Wine is perhaps the closest Bradbury’s work comes to autobiography, or what we might nowadays describe as autofiction. The latter term remains a contested one, some say an ineffectual or even meaningless one. I have decided nothing about it, other than that it interests me. So here, for us to read together, is the simplest of ‘working definitions’ for which I claim no ‘truth,’ only that it should stimulate further ideas about narrative:
“Though autofiction has a broad and malleable definition, it may be understood as a work of literature that depicts real events from the author’s life, but takes liberties associated with fiction. In short, autofiction blends the autobiographical and the fictional.” [1]
A five-minute Google search brings up dozens of essays about the ‘autofiction turn’ in literature, as well as suggested titles. Some of these note that autofiction has been there all along, shadowing most fiction writers, even if the chatter about it has only recently grown louder. See, for example, Jessica Winter’s short piece on the form, “Our Autofiction Fixation.” Here, she notes the enigmatic presence of the author-as-self in virtually every attempt to write fiction:
“Part of [the] mystery is due to the chaotic consciousness native to the novel-writing process, which requires a degree of possession. Nobody is asking you to do what you are doing. There are more than enough novels in the world, and nobody is more painfully aware of that than the person attempting to write one. To dig a book out of the ground can be backbreaking, hand-tearing work; you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from or who will recognize it as belonging to them, too. And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you.”[2]
As someone whose writings have often been of the ‘thinly veiled’ variety, I have certainly felt the pressure of self, even the tendency by readers to view my fiction pieces as ‘purely’ autobiographical, to declare me a ‘sad person,’ or minimally, to wish to disentangle fact from fiction in ways that are simply not possible. To borrow from Jessica Winter’s remarks above, I can only respond that I made up my stories, but my stories are made up of me. If I cannot always disentangle these threads neatly, then nor should I expect readers to do so. When we release a story into the world, we are lucky to find readers at all. We should not, then, tell them how to read it.
It seems unlikely that Ray Bradbury would have found autofiction-the-term of much interest, but (or because) he was already comfortable drawing from life experiences and life ‘truths’ to write fiction. Yet, some two decades after the publication of Dandelion Wine, even Bradbury found it necessary to conduct some entangling/disentangling of his own. See, for example, his defense of the fictional Green Town as a ‘real’ place, as given in his Introduction (titled Just This Side of Byzantium) to a 1975 edition of the novel:
“Waukegan/ Green Town/ Byzantium. Green Town did exist, then? Yes, and again, yes.
“Was there a real boy named John Huff? There was. And that was truly his name. But he didn’t go away from me, I went away from him. But, happy ending, he is still alive, forty-two years later, and remembers our love.
“Was there a Lonely One? There was, and that was his name. And he moved around at night in my hometown when I was six years old and he frightened everyone and was never captured.
“Most importantly, did the big house itself, with Grandpa and Grandma and the boarders and uncles and aunts in it exist? I have answered that.
Is the ravine real and deep and dark at night? It was, it is. I took my daughters there a few years back, fearful that the ravine might have gone shallow with time. I am relieved and happy to report that the ravine is deeper, darker, and more mysterious than ever. I would not, even now, go home through there after seeing The Phantom of the Opera.
“So there you have it. Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply.”[3]
I have taken a detour away from the worries of Helen Bentley, but I assure you she has been on my mind all along. Her worries are my worries, never more so than in this latest summer dip into the old, cherished novel.
Whether Helen was drawn from a remembered inhabitant of Waukegan, we cannot know. But like virtually all the characters – young and old - in Dandelion Wine, she is haunted by existential fears, in her case, the fear of her 72 years of life being reduced to a single, crushing present, that of an old lady who could never have been young. She has no witnesses to her younger years, no one to vouch for her, no one who remembers her as a child or young woman. These, it seems, are the only forms of evidence the neighborhood kids of Green Town might be prepared to accept. Her defiantly produced evidence - a rhinestone-crested hair comb from girlhood, her baby ring, an old set of jacks, and finally a photograph of her taken at the age of seven – these fail to convince children who see before them only an old woman without a passport back to youth. Helen recalls the warnings given by her husband, long dead, perhaps the last person who might have acted as her witness:
“Why do you save those ticket stubs and theatre programs? They’ll only hurt you later,” he says. “You can’t really prove you were ever young. Pictures? No, they lie. You’re not the picture.”[4]
Helen Bentley finds herself alone having lost the others in her life, those long-gone others who testify to our pasts. It seems that our human task is not only to remember one another but remember for one another. Those of us who have lived close to a person with dementia understand this all too well. The imbalance that dementia creates between two people is destabilizing: not only must we try to remember the person who has forgotten herself, but we must accept that this person cannot do the same for us.
The project of shared memory and recognition of/between ourselves becomes harder as our closest people begin to fall away, one by one. I have long maintained that when we see the people we have known most if not all our lives, we see all their ages. I see their lifelong ages etched upon the faces of my brother and sister, and those of cousins and earliest friends. Face to face with them, I have only to blink to see the little boy my brother once was, the rebellious teen my sister was.
For people we meet later in life, this is not possible. I state the obvious here, I know, but sometimes the obvious is precisely what should give us pause. Think about the imbalance our parents faced, not unlike that experienced by Helen Bentley. Our parents see us from our earliest moment when we open our infant eyes to the coming confusion of life. If they are lucky in later years, our parents will guard that memory as precious. If we are lucky, we will have our parents to remember us for as long as possible. They will get us wrong sometimes, but the history is there. “I knew you first!” our mothers might say. But think now, in reverse. The parent-child transfer of memory and recognition begins early for us (from birth) but late for them. We never saw our mothers and fathers as children. We never will. This is not something we can give to them, much as they might long for it.
There is a photograph that has always haunted me.
The photograph is a glance at the remote history of a strange girl who would one day be my mother. I don’t know her. Here she is in the last days of childhood with her Louise Brooks haircut, her face turned away from me. I am a ‘not yet’ in her story. Sometimes while looking at this picture, I am brushed by a feather of guilt at my own arrival. As if to look is to violate her claim to a life before me, a private moment with her dog, her right to childhood, play in the snow, the chance of free time before marriage and motherhood.
Growing up, I overheard the grandparents and old folks – those who had known my mother as a child – say “Shirley had springs in her legs!” In their memories, my mother had great physicality and she was prone to mischief. She was a strong swimmer, a lover of pranks, and she brought a charge to the girls’ basketball team (they called her the ‘spark plug’). When the grandparents died, these stories faded. When my mother lost her memory, they faded again. The names of her basketball teammates were lost. I can repeat the stories, but I cannot claim them as memories. She was never Shirley to me; she was Mom. My direct memories of her begin with a short, round, thirty-something mother who I loved to distraction, who I would come to battle during my teenage years, and who I would love anew when motherhood came to me.
I can’t help but wonder if my mother sometimes lamented this ‘lag’ of parenthood: that children arrive halfway through one’s history. That our children cannot visit our early years to understand the forces that shaped us. From the margins of her dementia in later years, my mother sent me a commemorative booklet produced by the local heritage association in her hometown. Struggling to find words, losing the ability to spell the words she could find, she tried to draw my attention to her lingering memories. On the cover, determined to tell me that this was where she went to school, she made three attempts to spell the word, never quite managing it, but these efforts signaled its importance to her.
Inside the booklet, she had written in the margins here and there, to impart added information (“Grandma Chase worked for him”) but mainly to assert her memory of a person or place (“I sure remember Frank Lee”).
Although the arrival of dementia may have added a sense of urgency to some of these communications from my mother, my guess is she had often felt invisible to us. Without meaning to, we narrow the life project of our parents. It’s an unavoidable predicament insofar as our knowledge of them is so deeply informed by the parent-child relationship, a lopsided thing at best, yet a defining element in the lives of both parties.
I wish I could tell my mother that I regularly look at her childhood photos and I pull out that old commemorative edition of the Middleville Sun newspaper with her notes in the margins. I cannot hold her early life in my memories, but I can hold her late-in-life desire to hold them for herself, and her labored efforts to communicate them to me.
When it came to the writing of Dandelion Wine, mortality, the anticipation of death not only of ourselves but of those who remember us, this imperfect yet earnest holding of one another - these would be the great levelers of Bradbury’s characters:
“The people [in Green Town] were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!?”[5]
And Bradbury showed no interest in detaching himself from his Helen Bentleys:
“Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy hid in the man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees…”[6]
With her thinly scrawled messages in the margins of the Middleville booklet, my mother was humbly doing what Bradbury had done: sending me her bottle of dandelion wine.
My son is ever generous and loving in his recognition of me not only as his mother but as a being beyond the confines of motherhood. Yet the laws of time and generation mean that he cannot go back to find - in his memory - the young person who first read Ray Bradbury’s novel.
Here she was, in a photo that gently suggests the blurring, the loss of girlish assurance that attended her adolescent years:
I was on the cusp of bodily changes and mysterious urges. The confident little girl I had been was being overtaken by a shy and self-conscious one. The novel, in places, brought soothing reminders of early, easier childhood: new tennis shoes to start the summer, rolling on freshly mowed lawns, running through the sprinkler on hot days, playing until dark when the streetlights came on to call us home. From black and white televisions set in heavy, varnished wood furniture, the late news resounded throughout the small house. In our beds, we heard the network announcer gravely address our parents: “It’s 11 pm. Do you know where your children are?”
I’m here! I whispered beneath the covers. I’m not lost!
These years later.
I’m here, I call to my son. I’m not lost!
[1] Frances Egan and Beth Kearney, “How Autofiction Turns the Personal into the Political” in The Conversation, January 10, 2023.
[2] Jessica Winter, “Our Autofiction Fixation,” New York Times, March 14, 2021. And to remind us of the personal/political urgencies that may haunt the author as much as the reader, Winter cites Alexander Chee: “In his essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee posits a kind of epistemological mystery: A reader may see himself accurately reflected in such a novel, but the writer may not. Of his debut, “Edinburgh,” Chee writes: “I wish I could show you the roomful of people who’ve told me the novel is the story of their lives. … I still don’t know if I’d be in that room. See Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.
[3] For the full text, see The Introduction / Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury, posted by Waukegan Public Library.
[4] “You’re not the picture.” For more on photographs, memoir, and identity, see The Life and Times of a Photograph - Amy Kenyon (substack.com)
Your mother looks very cool in - and very central to - the basketball team photo. I wonder if strong characters all too easily get lost in the midst of motherhood? I only really grasped, after she died, that my mother had a young life - and writing a novel capturing (in my imagination) her thoughts and experience was my way of filling the gap that you speak of here. It was a strange but fulfilling experience for me to do that. As ever, a very thoughtful and interesting piece, Amy. Thank you.