Excerpt from The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
From “The Time of Our Lives”
If I had a dollar for every time some writer or student or chance acquaintance has confided to me their desire to write a memoir, I could buy myself a mossy castle in the west of Ireland and disappear once and for all into my private mythology. There’s no getting around it: where we find the sense-making itch—the urge to capture and memorialize personal experience—there we find the scratching of pens. Or, far more likely, the chattering of keys. Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times, and I have now read and worked with enough would-be memoirists to recognize the force of the need as well as some of the obstacles to its artistic realization. Again and again people say to me, “If I could just tell it,” and I know exactly what they mean. But how hard it is to disabuse them of the idea that if they just started at the beginning and worked their way forward, all would be revealed. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is in fact no faster way to smother the core meaning of a life, its elusive threads and connections, than with the heavy blanket of narrated event. Even the juiciest scandals and revelations topple before the drone of, “And then … and then …”
Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story. There is no telling when—or if—the transformation will come, and I am wary about universalizing. What reflections I offer are based on my own experience and necessarily provisional.
A curious thing happened to me personally and as a writer—I do make some slight distinction—when I entered my late forties, that time zone I reluctantly acknowledge as marking the onset of middle age. Quite suddenly, at least in retrospect, my relation to my own past changed. How can I describe it? It was as if that past, especially the events and feelings of my younger years, had taken a half step back, had overnight, following no effort on my part, arranged themselves into a perspective. No, “perspective” isn’t quite right, for that suggests a fixed, even static arrangement. Rather, these materials had, without losing their animation or their savor, become available to me. They were there to be looked at and handled without as much of the usual emotional murkiness, with fewer complicating regrets, sadnesses, and so on.
More interesting still, those earlier years—from early childhood to the time of my late twenties—offered themselves to me as a mystery. I don’t mean that there were crimes, literal or figurative, to get to the bottom of, only that behind the chronological accumulation of happenings, of this following that year after year, I discerned the possibility of hidden patterns, patterns that, if unearthed and understood, would somehow explain to me—my life—to myself. These memories presented themselves discontinuously, as found bits of evidence, and I often felt, as they arrived, that they were trying to tell me something. I was possessed by the “stuff” of my own life, and on the strength of this I undertook—at first hesitantly, later with grim resolution—to write about those years of formation. A memoir had announced itself—though it was some time before I dared to apply that loaded term to what I was writing.
Why did this all happen when I was forty-eight and not when I was forty-five? What had changed in my psychic mix? I wish I knew. Or maybe I don’t, for my inability to answer leaves a certain enigma intact at the heart of the enterprise. All I know is that there came a point in my life when the memories and feelings started coming in loud and clear. It was as if cause and effect had fallen into some new alignment. Things fit, but not so much side by side as associatively, in unforeseen orderings. I began to see that events and circumstances were not as contained as I had once thought, but were, rather, part of a complicated weave, their influence appearing and disappearing over long stretches. And with this came a changed understanding about time, that it was not, psychologically, a linear continuum—the whole business was much closer to four-dimensional chess, but even that is a simplification, for life contains four-dimensional chess and a good deal else.
As for trying to write about it, clearly 4-D chess would be an impossible model to try to follow. The best default seemed to be a work comprising at least two time lines—present and past. The now and the then (the many thens), for it is the juxtaposition of the two—in whatever configuration—that creates the quasi-spatial illusion most approximating the sensation of lived experience, of recollection merging into the ongoing business of living.
Now, then. Present, past. The sine qua non of memoir, with the past deepening and giving authority to the present, and the present (just by virtue of being invoked) creating the necessary depth of field for the persuasive idea of the past.
I won’t dwell on the writing or its various revelations except as I need to, but I begin here because the undertaking allowed me to see how the search for patterns and connections is the real point—and glory—of the genre. And if I hurry to specify this aspiration, I do so to draw a sharp marking line between the kind of literary memoir I’m talking about and the sensation-driven (and all too often chronologically told) kind that has been getting so much airplay these last few years. Indeed, it seems that wherever I turn lately—allow the exaggeration for effect—I find another pundit or disgruntled editor bemoaning the much-publicized memoir “boom,” more often than not declaring that it has, or will soon have, run its course. As if memoir were nothing more than a New Age excrescence, a latest fad, the apotheosis of a self-as-victim movement sponsored in equal parts by therapists, confession gurus, and scandalmongers eager to cash in on the bottomless societal appetite for self-exposing disclosure. Were you abused, neglected, discriminated against; did you turn in your pain to pills, drink, or satanic cults? Write a memoir!
But we cannot allow the many to wreck things for the few. The fact of rampant sensationalism must not be allowed to obscure the other fact, which is that recent decades have seen the flourishing of a sophisticated and quietly vital mode of literary expression. By which I don’t mean to suggest that memoir itself is a recent coinage—what is St. Augustine’s Confessions but a memoir?—only that in the last quarter century or so it has refurbished itself in an expressively contemporary way and that a tall stack of these works marks a genuine contribution to our literature. I’m thinking of, among others, Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Maureen Howard’s Fact’s of Life, Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, and Clark Blaise’s I Had a Father.
What do these works have in common, other than their stylistic grace and honesty of disclosure? Apart from whatever painful or disturbing events they recount, their deeper ulterior purpose is to discover the nonsequential connections that allow those experiences to make larger sense; they are about circumstance becoming meaningful when seen from a certain remove. They all, to greater or lesser degree, use the vantage point of the present to gain access to what might be called the hidden narrative of the past. Each is in its own way an account of detection, a realized effort to assemble the puzzle of what happened in the light of subsequent realization. I think of the circular search patterns of Frank Conroy or Geoffrey Wolff, for example, how both writers use the narrow platform of an adult circumstance to launch their ambitious backward-flinging dives. In this, as in so many of the other strategies, we see the attempt at mastery, the push toward wisdom. Each account in some way proposes the idea that a life can be figured on the page as a destiny, a filling out of a meaningful design by circumstance, and that this happens once events and situations are understood not just in themselves but as stages en route to decisive self-recognition.
From The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. Copyright 2008 by Sven Birkerts. All rights reserved.
