A Literary Loss, the Oral Tradition, White Blindness

My brief studies with N. Scott Momaday

I was working on a post about being back in Oregon after six months on the road when I heard that N. Scott Momaday has left us. I don’t like the requisite outpourings and quote-postings every time a writer dies, which often seem performative and insincere. Nevertheless, I was surprised by what struck me as a muted response, at least in my filter bubbles, to Momaday’s death. Lesser writers’ passings have gotten more attention, and while that’s probably not a contest worth having, it made me want to offer a minor appreciation of a man who was one of the major American writers of the last century.

I was lucky enough to study with Momaday. Only one class,¹ so I don’t claim to have known him well, but he left an impression. The class was Studies in the Oral Tradition, Spring of 2005, while I was doing my MFA at Arizona. It met once a week, in the evening, in one of those subterranean rooms in Modern Languages that are supposedly haunted.

The first night, I showed up on time, for once, and was talking to a classmate when two heralds arrived and held open the door. They were of a certain Tucsonan type, felt-hatted caucasians who quote Ed Abbey and drive battered pickups with dreamcatchers dangling from the rearviews; later, during introductions, they explained that they were not actually registered for the class, but were acolytes of Scott’s. I’d never heard someone say that word aloud.

Momaday himself struck a dapper figure, in a sport coat and glasses and a black-banded Panama hat. Apparently he claimed in his PBS documentary to be a reincarnated bear. In his presence, as he trundled up front on his cane, it seemed possible: his grizzled hair, the way he carried himself, the weight and grace and the pain underneath it. He sat behind a small table and greeted us warmly. That voice: I’ve tried to describe it by comparisons—Sean Connery, Charlton Heston, God—but you should probably just go listen. 

He was only seventy then, now that I do the math. He seemed both older and younger. By then he’d long since entered the bittersweet territory of literary legends. All his obits lead with the Pulitzer, and while I loathe the credentialist culture awards reinforce, his was a watershed moment, the first such honor given to a Native writer. But Momaday’s reputation, particularly in the American West, was built on much more than the Pulitzer. Among many other things, he was the vanguard of what’s often called the Native Renaissance. And what gets lost in the legend is that he was also one hell of a writer.

That’s pretty much what I knew about him at the time, the result of a seminar paper I’d written the semester before, for my first Native American literature course, about House Made of Dawn. Before that, I’d gone to undergrad at Arizona, where I was an English major, and where he was the most famous member of the faculty. So although I hadn’t seen Momaday in person until that night, I’d heard stories about him for years. People said he lived in Santa Fe but the university flew him in once a week just to be able to say he taught there. That his classes were strange. That sometimes he didn’t show up.

I don’t know about the first part, but the others were true. The first couple times he was absent, our woebegone TA—who seemed never to know whether Momaday was coming, himself—would get up there and do his best, but it was like watching the understudy do Hamlet. By the end of the semester, we’d wait fifteen minutes and go to the bar.² When Momaday was there, though, the class was like no other. It wasn’t about the oral tradition so much as an act of the oral tradition. We did have readings.³ And we had to write papers, although they were only a few pages.⁴ But mostly, Momaday would tell stories. 

Those stories. Hot damn. They were sprawling and oracular and often didn’t make sense to me, addled as I was with received⁵ ideas about what a story was supposed to be, scenes and arcs and clarity. But understanding things is overrated; the point is, I paid attention. You couldn’t not. In some ways it reminded me of my childhood in a place where people told a lot of stories; I can’t tell you how many times, around some tire fire at a boonie party, I listened to Tombstone dudes try to make themselves out to be heroes. This was different. You didn’t listen to Momaday’s stories so much as you entered them.

I still remember one. I’m not going to try to retell it here. I couldn’t do justice to it, and besides, it’s his story, in this world or the next. But I remember it like he told it to me across a fire in the dark. That story’s what I think of when someone says “oral tradition.” The longer I teach, the longer it’s been since I was a student, the more I think that’s the sign of a great professor, when twenty years later—even after they’re gone—you carry with you things they said in class.

The seminar paper I wrote, which survives only on some long-discarded flash drive, was about the blindness of white characters in House Made of Dawn and two other books by Native authors. Blindness is a problematic metaphor—my good friend George has written eloquently about this topic—but it was a useful concept to think about for me, at the time, in that context. And I’ve thought about it a lot since in other contexts.

I spent the first fourteen years of my academic career at Arizona, Stanford, and New Mexico, places where Momaday had worked or studied, where he and his work were known and revered.⁶ So it was a surprise to move away and find that his work did not seem as well known or appreciated elsewhere. It struck me as a major oversight, one that smacks of all the pernicious -isms afflicting literary culture, but that’s another post.

In any case, if you haven’t read Momaday’s work, you should. Anyone who cares about American literature should know House Made of Dawn. I remember liking The Way to Rainy Mountain, although it’s been a long time, and The Man Made of Words might be my favorite of his books. I haven’t gotten to most of the poetry yet, but here’s a poem of Momaday’s that reminds me of the brief time I knew him:

To an Aged Bear

Hold hard this infirmity.
It defines you. You are old.

Now fix yourself in summer,
in thickets of ripe berries,

and venture toward the ridge
where you were born. Await there

the setting sun. Be alive
to that old conflagration

one more time. Mortality
is your shadow and your shade.

Translate yourself to spirit;
be present on your journey.

Keep to the trees and waters.
Be the singing of the soil.

---

I have no good transition, so, some links:

• At two different points this month I stumbled upon this old essay about Airspaces, and I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot. I’m writing this in what’s hopefully the last of many Airbnbs. I spent most of the last six months in them.⁷ I think this is my thirteenth; I might be forgetting one. The best, by far, have been the ones the owner lived in at some point, or still did part-time. There’s something great about stepping into someone else’s life for a while, especially when you get stuck in one for a few days. I snuck into Portland between two big storms and couldn’t get the Prius up the hill at the end of the driveway until the ice melted. I was very glad the place I was stranded was a bachelor pad with a dartboard and a hot tub.

• In excellent literary news, Steven Moore’s The Distance from Slaughter County is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.⁸ I told you that book was good!

• Another OSU grad, Karie Fugett, one of my favorite people and writers, started a Substack. Her first post resonated with me for a lot of reasons. I’ve felt much of what she describes. The impostor syndrome attendant to being a working-class person in college. (Or, worse, grad school.) The idea that the smarter you get, the less you have to say. How hard it becomes to write vulnerably again after you’ve finished a memoir about the worst experience of your life. The strangeness and self-consciousness involved in writing something like this, with no editor, for immediate publication. Her memoir, a book that’s near to my heart, is forthcoming next year. In the meantime, you should subscribe.

• There could not be two more different Substacks, but while we’re on the subject, I’ve also been enjoying Slavoj Žižek’s. He’s not for everyone, to put it mildly. I have a weakness for agents of chaos.

• I recently watched Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis’ 1974 documentary about Vietnam. I don’t think liked is the word for a movie that includes footage of a man shooting another in the head, among other atrocities. But it’s really good, both an informative and concise overview of American involvement in Vietnam, and a canny, well-made, and innovative documentary. It’s hard to believe it was, as far as I can tell, the first and only film he directed.

• I liked this essay from the Paris Review about the author’s visit to the CIA’s creative writing group.

• This essay from DIAGRAM about attending a Modest Mouse concert hit pretty close to home.

• Not a recommendation at all, but I did subject myself to the latest in a long line of abysmal Atlantic articles about higher ed. A professor with the interviewing skills of Chris Farley talks to a university president who thinks the problem with universities is shared governance and tenure. Bless his heart. What a shame that pesky professors prevent heroic university presidents like him from instituting much-needed reforms like hiring more underpaid adjuncts to teach online classes to kids in Singapore. I actually agree with him about one thing: college is too expensive. I said as much here last month. On that note, maybe it would’ve been worth discussing the exorbitant salary he made for decades at Macalester while insisting that he’s not rich.⁹

• My childhood best friend, Marques, a high school principal in Phoenix and an all-around mensch, made the news for encouraging his students.

• Recently I’ve been poking around in VOCA, the U of A Poetry Center’s audiovisual archive, a treasure I wasn’t aware of when I was there. Two favorites so far: this reading of a poem I could once recite by heart, and this Momaday reading from 1982.  

1. I would’ve sworn it was two, but I checked my transcripts, and it was only one. And yes, I have become the kind of person who keeps his college transcripts handy.

2. The Red Garter, our designated MFA hangout, which despite its name is not that kind of bar. I went back not long ago and was glad to see it hadn’t changed a bit.

3. I’ve lost the syllabus, but I remember Christopher Logue’s War Music, Lewis Thomas’s The Fragile Species, Luci Tapahonso’s Blue Horses Rush In, and Momaday’s own book, illustrated by his brother, The Way to Rainy Mountain. It may have been the only time in recorded history that a professor taught his own book and it seemed neither absurd nor tragic.

4. Momaday graded one of mine; he gave it a B+, the grad school equivalent of a D, which was probably fair.

5. And Western/colonialist/patriarchal/problematic in any number of ways.

6. He grew up mostly in Arizona and New Mexico, attended UNM, and taught there as well as at U of A. He got his PhD at Stanford, where I once TAed a lit course that read House Made of Dawn.

7. The rest I spent in the houses of the few people who love me enough to host not only me, but also my dog, who sheds like a snake, paces and snores, and might occasionally go for your heels.

8. I know I just said I hate literary awards, and I do, on the macro level, but I also know the difference they can make for a book and a career.

9. Is there some kind of class they teach at Ivy League colleges on how to pretend you’re not rich?