Read Modern American Memoirs Online
Authors: Annie Dillard
Modern American Memoirs
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
Annie Dillard and Cort Conley
FOR ROSY, AND FOR KEATS
E
dwin Muir, the poet, and translator of Kafka, wrote the magnificent first two thirds of his
Autobiography
just before World War I, thinking he would get killed. He recounted the story of his early years on Orkney; he put the manuscript in a drawer. As the Second World War broke out, Muir again assumed he would die; he wrote the final third, and again he survived. An inevitable worldliness marks his adult life. Muir's
Autobiography
is one of the most vivid and thoughtful memoirs in English, but only because he wrote about his childhood while he could still remember it and before he became a well-known figure describing other well-known figures.
There is something to be said for writing a memoir early, before life in society makes the writer ordinary by smoothing off character's rough edges and abolishing interior life. Tolstoy published the beginning of his three-part autobiographical novel,
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
, when he was twenty-three years old. Anne Moody was twenty-seven when she wrote
Coming of Age in Mississippi
. Frank Conroy was thirty when he wrote
Stop-time
. Recently, Bernard Cooper, Deborah Digges, Albert Goldbarth, Lucy Grealy, Patricia Hampl, Teresa Jordan, Alice Kaplan, Paul Monette, Chris Offutt, and Susan Allen Toth have written good memoirs while still young.
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Memoirs offer a powerfully fixed point of view. From a picket in the past, the retrospective narrator may range intimately or intellectually across a wide circle of characters and events. The memoirist may analyze ideas or present dramatic scenes; the memoirist may confess, eulogize, reflect, inform, and persuade. By convention, memoirists tell true stories about actual people. Their tones may be elegiac, confiding, scholarly, hilarious, or all of these seriatim. In addition to such brilliant advantages, the memoir form naturally has a few pitfalls.
Some memoirists berate themselves in public, all too convincingly. Sometimes the writer parades his faults and sins manipulatively: You forgive these, do you not? Sometimes the memoirist confesses in a pure spirit, but the incidents that purge the writer may nauseate the reader. The aftertaste of John Cowper Powys's bizarre
Autobiography
may scare a reader from his good novels, like
A Glastonbury Romance
. Ford Madox Ford omits his actual misdeeds, and admits disingenuously to harmless faults, apparently that the reader may admire, among his other virtues, his frankness. The otherwise excellent Ellen Glasgow, in
The Woman Within
, confesses, “At the very beginning of the war in Europe, I did not feel the fullness of its impact, all at once.”
Irony about oneself, at any age, becomes the memoirist better. Henry Adams is steadily ironic. His
Education of Henry Adams
scants a lifetime of extraordinary achievement; he claims to be puzzled throughout, and “trying to get an education.” Geoffrey Wolff describes dining out as a boy with his father and stepmother; he learned to request oil and vinegar with salad, and to order his steak rare. “I was almost ready for an artichoke.”
The Duke of Deception
, about Wolff's father, is one of many great memoirs in which the narrator is not the object of all attention. In fact, one may leave oneself out of one's memoirs altogether, or use the first person only sparingly, as a fixed viewpoint, to good effect, for the chief danger memoirists face is starring in their own stories, and becoming fascinated.
Memoirists may leave out family members, possibly to lingering resentments. Martin Van Buren left his wife out of his autobiography; Victorians considered such a gap a delicacy, and it was usual. Henry Adams understandably omitted from his
Education of Henry Adams
his twenty-year marriage, which ended in his wife's suicide. More recently, from his gargantuan
Autobiography
, already 672 pages long, John Cowper Powys excluded, with apologies, all the women in his life. Loren Eiseley excluded his wife from
All the Strange Hours;
both Eiseleys prized their privacy. From his beautiful
A Walker in the City
, Alfred Kazin omitted all mention of his sister.
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In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nonfiction had more literary cachet than fiction. Novelists like Defoe, Melville, and Poe peddled some of their fabrications as memoir (
Journal of the Plague Year; Robinson Crusoe; Typee; The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
). Twain's first title for his novel was
Huck Finn's Autobiography
âto distinguish it from mere romance, and thereby presumably to plead for a serious reading. In this century, opinion shifted for a time; a writer may well call a memoir “fiction” to stress its bonds with imaginative narrative. Consequently, some of this century's finest works of fiction have strongly autobiographical elements, and may be more or less autobiographical: Tolstoy's
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
; Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past;
Henry Roth's
Call It Sleep;
Fred Chappell's
I Am One of You Forever;
William Maxwell's
Billy Dyer and Other Stories;
James Agee's novels; early John Updike stories; much of Henry Miller's fiction; Louis D. Rubin, Jr.'s
The Golden Weather;
Somerset Maugham's
Of Human Bondage;
Paul St. Pierre's
Smith and Other Events;
J. G. Ballard's
Empire of the Sun;
V. S. Naipaul's
A Way in the World;
Norman Maclean's
A River Runs Through It;
Peter Taylor's
A Summons to Memphis;
Elena Castedo's
Paradise
. On the other hand, which of those memoirs published as fact have strongly fictional elements is anybody's guess.
The writer usually has the privilege, or onus, of labeling the work. Calling it memoir vouches for its veracity; calling it fiction may, on a good day, alert the world to its literary qualities. The writer may vacillate. Louise Bogan published part of her memoir,
Journey Around My Room
, in
The New Yorker
as fiction. One of the chapters of Edward Dahlberg's classic memoir,
Because I Was Flesh
, appeared in
Best Short Stories of 1962
. Editors may step in. Albert Goldbarth calls those perfectly structured narrative prose pieces in
A Sympathy of Souls
and
Great Topics of the World
poems; his publishers call them essays. Bernard Cooper, who wrote the grand
Maps to Anywhere
, says he tends to call it nonfiction. Magazine and journal editors called various selections from it poetry, fiction, fable, or essay.
Best Essays of 1988
reprinted one chapter. The book won the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Ernest Hemingway Award for fiction.
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Certain classic memoirs evoke whole generations of American life; one can survey history by leaping, as it were, from memoir peak to peak: Franklin's
Autobiography
, the
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Walden
, Ulysses S. Grant's
Personal Memoirs
, Twain's
Life on the Mississippi
, Booker T. Washington's
Up from Slavery
âand in this century
The Education of Henry Adams
, Hamlin Garland's
Son of the Middle Border
, Helen Keller's
The Story of My Life
, Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
(not a great book, but an iconic one), and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
.
Of the recent spate of memoirs, some are fast becoming classics: Frank Conroy's
Stop-time
, Harry Crews's
A Childhood
, Alice Kaplan's
French Lessons
, Alfred Kazin's
A Walker in the City
, James McConkey's
Court of Memory
trilogy, Geoffrey Wolff's
The Duke of Deception
.
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It is possible to imagine the writers in this disparate volume as a single, composite American of any heritage or gender, who appears in a family, grows up somewhere, and somehow watches, learns, falls in love, works, and perhaps has children and grandchildren. The writer celebrates, as Charles Wright did in a poem, “all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.” Because the collection represents only seventy-five years of published memoirs, and then only of memoirs whose action takes place in this century and on this soil, the editors excluded many great favorites. An afterword lists these.
A.D.