The Memoir and the Memoirist. Thomas Larson
a mother’s dying farewell, another conjures her trip to Cuba in the 1970s. Each piece is read aloud by the author and critiqued by the class. What are we looking for? I call it the “heat.” Where—page, paragraph, or sentence—is the writing alive with a felt intimacy? Where does your attention rivet, your skin go galvanic? Where do you hear the writer affected by what she reads? Where do complaint and nostalgia weasel in, where does the narrator become defensive? One night a woman who has been asking me for more exacting guidelines, which she thinks I’ve got clasped in my hand and will not share, utters a sudden truth.
“God, this is hard,” she says.
“Good,” I reply. There’s chagrined laughter. Good. Your toes should feel the precipice. What’s so hard about memoir? I ask. Samples of frustration. Trying to find which part of my life is the best part to unlimber right now. Trying to see that other parts, just as vital, may not pertain to the part I’ve chosen. Trying to understand why my life has had so many beginnings. Trying to identify which of my past selves still confound me. Trying to discover why I remember things differently than others do, either about me or about shared experience—and why I remember things differently today than I did five years ago.
Fifteen are now twelve, and these hardy ones press on. Soon, they want to examine the controversies of memoir. Primed by nattering editors and critics, the group worries that memoir is tainted and untrustworthy. It’s become a lurid, gut-spewing enterprise, whose reputation is suspect because its ubiquity is thought to subsume its artistry. Anybody is an author. The form is regularly slighted as exhibitionistic, confessional, whiny. They’ve read the headlines in the oft-dismissive New York Times: “Woe Is Me. Rewards and Perils of Memoir” or “We All Have a Life. Must We All Write About It?” The group feels sullied by the East Coast elites. They feel seduced and spurned by the publishers, carnival bosses who want acts of murder, sex, and abuse, preferably all three—and little else. In despair, one says, “Who’s ever going to want to read about my two years in Costa Rica in the Peace Corps, thirty-five years ago? No one was murdered. No one was raped.”
As we go, I get something unexpected. The class is pursuing me. They want me to enlarge on the memoirs I’ve read and studied, the writers I’ve worked with as an editor, the life-writing I’ve done, the ways my pieces have affected those I’ve written about, and the ways my life has changed because I’ve written about my major relations: father, mother, children. What is washing over them, they insist, must have already washed over—and enlightened—me.
WHAT I KNOW comes from teaching, reviewing, and writing memoir for the last two decades. My pursuit, bolstered by the current cultural push, is born of character: I am fascinated by the art and science of memory, personal literary criticism, and the different forms of autobiography, biography, and memoir. A few years ago my story “California, Here I Come” was published in the San Diego Reader, where, as a contributing writer, I specialize in narrative nonfiction. The piece told of how I decided in 1982 that by moving my family (my wife and our young twin sons) to California, I could save our crumbling marriage, an emotional lie which had entrapped us. Not only did the promise of sun-kissed California hasten the marriage’s collapse, but the breakup unleashed something unexpected. I had always hated the inauthentic in others, so when I saw how it had taken over my life, I was horrified. I began to see how my self-deceit had buried my once-intact self-identity. That self, which I regarded as artistic and which I had cultivated before the marriage, was long gone, exiled and unconscious. The new person, when told he had to work at a minimumwage job, put his fist through the wall. That was me, whose shame I had to feel concurrently with the failure the divorce brought up before any sense of my core artistic self would return. The tale my long story for the Reader tells is about a family’s fall as well as my change into a person less self-deceitful, what California culture in the 1980s was so good at freeing me to do.
I had torn through the caul; divorce had freed me. Indeed, I had no idea how fully I was locked in a bad marriage, no idea how fully I was the jailer. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that, during the mid-1980s, I got myself through the pain and back to sanity by writing. At first I tried to write the story into a novel. But it felt false, derivative, distant. I longed to discover what I felt (memoir), not invent what I might have felt (fiction). A few years after the breakup, I taught an undergraduate class in modern American literature. I had read James Baldwin’s fiction in graduate school when I wrote my thesis about left-wing and minority writers in America. I decided to teach his Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel about a black kid who becomes an adolescent preacher in 1930s Harlem. Intrigued that the novel was based on Baldwin’s life, I turned to his essays to learn more. Those autobiographical pieces, particularly the title essay of his 1955 collection, “Notes of a Native Son,” were extremely moving. True, Baldwin’s invective about racial tension and the power such racism has over those who hate often dominates his thought. But his narrative writing about his family reveals the universal stickiness of our parents’ lives: whatever has angered and disillusioned them often rears up as unresolved themes in their children. Whether parents are alive or dead doesn’t matter. Their vulnerabilities and paradoxes live on in us.
Baldwin’s father’s hatred of white people is so intense that it transforms the teenage Baldwin before he has had his own episodes with racist whites (which come soon enough). The son’s path is clear: not to let his father’s malice poison him but, instead, as he writes in “Notes of a Native Son,” “to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition”: liberating himself from the anger which is also necessary to his fight against injustice. Baldwin says that hate begins “in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair” (84).
Surely, this was an African American sensibility, one historically and community-determined. Baldwin’s kith and kin have no doubt benefitted from his personally emancipatory essays and his politically motivated novels. But what came through for me, a white middle-class Midwesterner, was Baldwin’s blooded inheritance, which, infected by his father’s bile, was his and his alone to repair were he to be free.
At once, I felt an emotional parallel in my life. My father had his own store of hatred—it wasn’t racial but religious and class-based. Argumentative by nature, he was a seminary student in the Catholic Church and fought with the priests about God’s purpose following the mass deaths of the First World War. He quit seminary and the church and went to college. There, he studied fine arts (he was a talented designer) but, because of the Depression, he left his artistic calling for commerce. Next, the Second World War waylaid him with what he described as three years of boredom on a naval supply ship. After the war, he became a salesman and, eventually, a marketing director for a St. Louis paper company. By the 1960s, however, he was miserable, in large part because he had turned his back on his calling. Another factor: my father struggled his entire life with obesity. Throughout his childhood, my older brother Steve, who was bigger than my father, got the brunt of Dad’s wrath. I escaped the onslaught because I was athletic and not fat. In fact, I was shamelessly favored while Steve was cruelly teased. Because I was better and compliant, my father would confide his hatred of work to me, rationalize his despair. His three sons needed feeding, he’d say; Mother’s “lifestyle”—a Lincoln Continental, country club fees, carpet cleaning, color TV—needed funding. Feuding with Steve, a fat man’s diet, and office politics took their toll. He would have two heart attacks, the second of which, at sixty-one, killed him, a couple months into retirement. That was 1975.
Marriage and a postwar family had set my father on a career track where promotions were keyed to long hours and company servility. The work was soulless, and its tedium was killing him. Plus, because of his complaints, no promotion was forthcoming. When he told me all this, I said he should quit. But he didn’t quit. He just ground it out, year after year. Feeling his desperation, I tried to be empathetic. Along with my friends, many of whom had bitter fathers as well, we blamed the business world for our fathers’ collapse. We choose paths in the arts or education. Plus, we thought that sensitivity to our fathers’ entrapment would keep us from repeating the walling-in of ourselves by career, marriage, and children. Not a chance. Families bring us our fate. My father, like Baldwin’s father, had a morbid sense that the American male had no choice but to be enslaved. This feeling that both men shared—though