y first Book was a study of autobiography, Versions of the Self (Basic Books, 1966). Thirty years later I return to the genre as a practitioner of a branch of it.

Why should I suppose that my recollections of childhood . . . deserve attention? Perhaps no one's time in the world is entirely unremarkable. The real difficulty has to do with composition. The memoirist or autobiographer must turn himself into sentences, hoping to compose a book more interesting than the life it records. . . .

The minor excruciations of childhood are part of my subject but not all of it. I want to report on those "others" too, chiefly my family. On both sides they were old-stock Americans, respectable, serious-minded, self-aware, disciplined and honorable, confident of their status as a superior middle class and at ease with privileges they enjoyed as if by right. . . . But the world was beginning to puzzle them a little. Without quite realizing it, they--we--were about to lose our nerve, edging off into the corners of American life. . . . By the middle of the century, as a class or caste we were beside the point. . . .

[My recollections] proceed by association rather than strict chronology. In the first of them the near identity of my parents' names--Charles Morris and Charlotte Maurice--invites me to set the two families in complementary relation: Southerners and Northerners; landowners, lawyers and academics on the one hand, manufacturers and moneymen on the other. Against this background I set my father's madness and my parents' divorce and my early sense of all these things. . . . [The] war years were rich in impressions for any noticing child, and I try to convey glimpses of the wider life that then opened itself to my view. These were the years, too, when I negotiated my relationship with my stepfather: war years of another sort, perhaps. Throughout, settings and their atmospheres matter: the . . . North Carolina countryside; Greenwich Village and the Norfolk Navy Yard;. . . eastern Long Island . . . upstate New York. These changes of place anchor recollection.

he Civil War ruined the Morrises; the years just after it made the Maurices. In a box of not very interesting letters my great-grandfather Charles Stewart Maurice fails to tell me clearly how he manufactured his fortune. Elsewhere I glean that, Salutatorian of the Williams class of 1861 and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, he trained as an engineer at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and, commissioned in the Union navy, served in the blockade of the Confederacy, duty in which, in the family's irreverent phrase, he "offered up his digestion on the altar of his country." After a peacetime false start or two, by 1871 he was a prospering partner in a bridgeworks venturous enough to be the second in America to build in steel, a new kind of work requiring, his obituarist wrote, "original designs or improvements on tools already in use." By 1895 when he retired, the partnership of Kellogg and Maurice had become the Union Bridge Company; his firm had by then erected bridges across the Hudson at Poughkeepsie, the Niagara River and the Platte and the Tombigbee, the Cairo bridge across the Ohio and the Memphis bridge across the Mississippi, others in Nova Scotia and Brazil, and a section of the Third Avenue El. "The sinking of the caissons for the piers" of the Hawkesbury River Bridge in New South Wales "in the tidal flow of the river was . . . the most hazardous work undertaken by the Company." No doubt the realest risks were run by the Australian construction workers. Still, on such caissons and piers it is respectable to found or erect a fortune, making something besides money. Never mind the dullness of his letters.

I think we never quite recovered from him. Or is this speculation merely a cliché about descendants? He was at any rate unrepeated, his sons declining to contest with him on precisely his terms. My grandfather--George, the second of them--was to be sure himself a civil engineer and a builder of bridges: one across the Susquehanna near Harrisburg I know was still in use in 1958. But about 1912 Grandfather bought 600 cheap acres of land in the Sandhills section of south-central North Carolina and set up as a peach farmer. In the tale we came to tell ourselves about his decision, he borrowed money from his father to disobey his father's advice. . . .

Grandfather was not particularly interested in raising peaches. A generation or so too late he wanted to live as if on a frontier. In this underpeopled, not very fertile part of North Carolina he could in a fashion reinvent the past. In a drama of his own devising he surveyed and cleared the land and constructed his life in the image of an American country gentleman, freestanding and independent. He built his house out of steel and concrete, forthright as any bridge, lovely and serviceable and as lasting (I hope) as stone. Yet in part of his mind, I think, he suspected the whole thing to be a sort of fiction. Grandfather was a latecomer and he knew it.

In manners, conduct and dress a conservative by instinct, Grandfather was nonetheless with almost his whole heart a technological modernizer (witness the materials of his house). A hunter of elk in Wyoming, in his pleasures he was preindustrial, archaic; yet he drove to the wilderness in a Chrysler, approving of every new mile of paved road opening before him. In very old age Grandfather published at his own expense a booklet called Daniel Boone in North Carolina, in which he settled to his satisfaction the tiny question of just where that itinerant sojourned in the state. This modest enterprise expresses Grandfather's lifelong interest, not unusual among men of his class and generation, in America in its simpler condition, an interest in the exploration and settlement of the continent. Books on these subjects made up most of his library. This interest was in a first view innocent, even romantic. His booklet displays as epigraph Byron's jaunty stanza about "The General Boone, backwoodsman of Kentucky." Yet the question engaging him was the humblest matter of trivial biographical fact: where precisely in Yadkin County did Boone's cabin stand, on what surveyable, what mappable square feet of ground? My grandfather's father had erected bridges, some of them of original and ingenious design, over rivers on the routes of exploration. Perhaps nothing now was left but detail work. In North Carolina Grandfather was filling in the map.

In an old American style Grandfather named his place after one of the family's points of origin: Ballintoy, a village on the Scottified north coast of Ireland. Here after the year in Iowa City I began the process of my own affiliation. In six or seven years under the spell of family and the place I succeeded in becoming imperfectly a Maurice.

With Father, December 1931 I was born about two in the morning on the eighteenth of June, 1931, in the Acland Nursing Home in Oxford, England, the twelve-pound son of Charles and Charlotte Maurice Morris, married nine months to the day. The birth was difficult, and my enormous pineapple of a head (with red ringlets to the shoulders) a nurse reshaped by hand. For several days my mother ran a fever. "What's that book you're reading?" the doctor asked. For Anna Karenina he substituted Evelina and The Vicar of Wakefield and her temperature subsided. An emblematic nativity.

Even at first I was not entirely a stranger. Between the Richmond hospital and Georgia my father had been set to sanative hard labor, and in a glimmer of recollection I am proud to watch him plow behind a mule, breaking ground for the new parterre at the bottom of Grandmother's garden. From a yet earlier visit arises what I think is my earliest memory of all: I am climbing into bed in my grandparents' room, my cot set near the fire. This room, thirty or thirty-five feet long by perhaps twenty, I would come to know much better. Against the north wall to the left of the door as one entered stood my grandparents' four-poster. Windows at the gable end looked over the levels of the acre or so of rather formal garden to the pine trees and blackjack from which the whole place had been claimed. To the east French doors opened onto a tiny balcony. Beyond the flagstone terrace and the lawn the forest fell away as if it all belonged to us; on the horizon a glint of white picked out a steeple in Carthage, the county seat eleven miles into the distance.

In those days this seemed the center of silence, where even a child might be for an hour or two at a time alone. I remember what seem to be months of the middle of the morning or endless afternoon. Pausing from my moony concentration on this or that I might hear the voice of a dove or a bobwhite or the bird, whatever it was, that by the hour claimed my aunt's attention: "Miss Maurice! Miss Maurice! Miss Maurice!" No human sound anywhere, unless now and then pots clashing in the kitchen or a maid's footsteps on the flagstones on the hall. Listening hard I might just make out, half the house away, the longcase clock in the living room, the slow clack of its pendulum, the whir of its machinery gathering strength to strike each quarter of the hour. At noon the dull bell in its cupola on the barn released the hands from work. All morning for years, as it seemed to me, and uninterruptable, Grandmother sat writing on crinkling paper airmail letters to wisemen in India. In 1989 I sold her chair at auction for some thousands of dollars, the price of perfections invisible to my eye.

In my earliest time in that house such a day might have begun with my tiptoeing in my pajamas toward my grandparents' bedroom (for now of course I had a room of my own) along the gallery above the stairs. There I would join Grandmother in their bed, sharing from her tray her porridge and egg, though not her breakfast drink, warm water and lemon juice taken for the sake of her bowel. Through the openwork tester or canopy I inspected the grainy plaster of the ceiling and in a sidetable drawer discovered over and over again Grandfather's untouchable .45 pistol. What we spoke of in these comfortable half-hours I wish I could remember, especially since I am alone in not recalling this uniformly kind and gentle woman with a reflex of warm regard. This defect of feeling puzzles and reproaches me.

Or precisely at seven I might join Grandfather at the glimmering long oval table in the dining room. In memory this meal never varies: an apple, a bowl of oatmeal, a three-minute egg. As in his portrait above the fireplace behind him he is dressed in a Norfolk jacket, riding breeches and boots or puttees. (His costume cannot have been so uniform; perhaps the portrait has frozen the recollection.) Grandfather pares our apples, each peeling a coil single and entire upon the plate. These leavings we preserve as a present to the horses, our first piece of morning business.

Ballintoy . . . seemed a full, perfect and sufficient world to me, a plenitude of fascinations for a noticing child.

My grandfather was a gentleman, certainly, and a farmer, but not a gentleman farmer; there was no rich man's nonsense, no tax loss Kentucky grandeur about the working buildings on the place, a showiness Grandfather would have disdained even if he could have afforded it. The forge or shop, the sheds for the tractor and combine and the trucks and the plows and the harrow, the gashouse and the lubrication ramp or greaserack, the wooden water tower, the dogrun and chickenhouse and pigsty, the corncrib--among these log and pineboard plainnesses I could if I wished pass my day. Over them all the barn, though no great size, seemed to me to loom tremendous. . . .

On most days the fire in our forge was out, its rare hours of life therefore drawing me the more strongly. No one man on the place was master there, but almost everyone could turn his hand to tinkering or replace a cast horseshoe between visits from the itinerant smith. Under direction I turned the handle of the mechanical bellows and the coals bloomed and I gazed sleepy and unblinking as the workpiece turned white-hot, till Grady, perhaps, or Robert or Albert or Jesse withdrew it from the fire. Everything I see in this recollection is hard as fact. Yet already I lived in a book, and the hammer I hear rings out in every such memoir as this one. In my overalls I longed to hale from the anvil the authenticating sword in my Howard Pyle version of King Arthur.

The barn, the shop, the sheds, the gashouse--here at every season something was doing, and from a perch in the mulberry tree by the greaserack I looked on, at once fascinated and almost extinguished with boredom. In summer the whole farm gathered purpose. Now a hundred pickers hired by the day swarmed in the orchards, and trucks bound for New York loaded at the packinghouse, a great open shed clattering with machinery. Overhead dangerous-looking leather belts transmitted power from a huge, unmuffled gasoline engine, and for three months a ramshackle factory roared in the middle of miles of country silence. I longed to join the responsible girls deftly culling the bruised or overripe peaches passing rapidly on rollers up an inclined plane before them, and I watched entranced as the fruit rolled across a long, tilted table-like affair, sorting itself by size as it moved through a maze of baffles, to be tumbled at last into fragile-looking springy bushel baskets. And over it all the booming and rattling noise--and a cloud of poisonous, itchy dust, as if from a thousand carpets vigorously beaten. This was a place of work, and it seemed, I think, to the remembered child inexpressibly festive.

Or did so until the summer when, twelve or thirteen, I was set to pasting labels on those baskets, required in hundreds. This task was assigned me--allowed me, really--out of kindness and lasted, I suppose, no more than a couple of weeks; yet it remains, preposterously, my version of the Blacking Factory. In a sort of attic under the peak of the tin roof, in panicky haste I worked in the ridiculous fear that if I fell behind the whole operation below me would halt. Crammed tight in nested stacks, each basket had to be wrenched or wrestled free with a force that might destroy it; so that to succeed was sometimes to fail and I labored under a kind of judgment, hurried and ashamed.

Of this matter imagination made--or makes--enormously too much. I solicit no tears for this fortunate boy. Ballintoy--Home; the House; the Place: always the honoring capitals when any of us spoke or thought of it--seemed a full, perfect and sufficient world to me, a plenitude of fascinations for a noticing child. . . .

(More, to Part 2 of 3)