'One Needs at Seventeen a Passing Public Manner'

There’s an unhappy paradox built into reading most biographies and memoirs. They customarily begin with scenes of childhood, which almost invariably are boring but must be endured before we get to the good parts. Who wants to read the biography of a child? Don’t get me wrong. I have three sons. They’re loveable and I’m proud of them but I wouldn’t inflict their biographies on Mr. Rogers. Turner Cassity begins his unpublished autobiography like this: 

“How does one become what one is? Not, surely, by way of childhood, in spite of what genetics, psychology, and economics may suggest. I find it difficult to believe that experienced adults can regard childhood as sufficiently interesting to describe as happy or unhappy. The temptation for me is to deal with it as Mrs. Wharton dealt with divorce (hers; not others’)—to treat it as something hardly worthy of mention.”

 

Last year, the poet R.L. Barth, Cassity’s literary executor (he died in 2009 at age eighty), loaned me the typescript of the 106-page autobiographical essay Cassity wrote in 1988 for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. It’s one of the funniest documents I know, and I wish it were widely available. In recalling his childhood in Jackson, Miss., Cassity does little navel-gazing and romanticizes nothing. He devotes attention to his mother’s job as a pianist in silent-movie theaters and his father’s work in a sawmill, not the usual crap about the delights of carefree youth.

 

With two of my sons (ages twenty and seventeen) home for Christmas and the third (age thirty-three) expected next week with his wife, I’ve been watching the sort of men they are becoming and looking for traces of my influence on their thinking and behavior. Cassity was gay and had no children but seemed around the age of sixty to be thinking about his origins, the people and places who made him. In a poem written around the time he was composing the autobiography, “One of the Boys, or, Nothing Sad About My Captains” (Between the Chains, 1991), Cassity writes:

 

“One needs at seventeen a passing public manner.

Mine was no urge to raise a mast, or nail a banner.”

 

One can’t imagine Cassity erecting barricades, boosting a cause or becoming an “activist” of any sort. He defined reasoned independence. He was a one-man non-aligned nation. Even when writing about himself, Cassity kept things under wraps. The poem concludes: “The inner me on view? He’s doing nicely, thank you.”