The Memoir and the Memoirist. Thomas Larson

      3

       The Past Is Never Over

       The Remembered Self and the Remembering Self

      What many memoirists of the past twenty years have discovered—some following Woolf ‘s lead—is how much the intervention of the rememberer, the person writing now, is pertinent to the work. Intervention may sound heavy-handed. But I mean it as the degree to which memoir writers are attentive to the interplay of the story and their remembering the story, and how this interplay helps an author discover herself. I realize there should be a concise definition for the memoir—a book about an important or difficult relationship or phase in the author’s life. But such a subject- or theme-focused definition begs the question: What actually happens as we write and remember that becomes the memoir’s narrative? Recall Mary Karr: “What I wanted most of all was to tell the truth.” But what is this truth? Where does it exist? In memory? In the writing? In the intermixing of the two? Anyone who wants to tell the truth soon learns that the truth may not want to be told. It may like staying holed up in its lair, bouldering exit and entrance. Truth-telling requires a kind of demystification of the ever-mystifying notion of how memory works. To get at the truth (fact and emotion) of what happened, we must understand, as concretely as we can, what the past is and how we relate to it in the present.

      Barrett J. Mandel analyzes the shell-game quality of memory, its tendency to be, like electrons, moving and fixed simultaneously. Mandel says that memory is paradoxical. On the one hand, he writes, “I can trace events with my memory, I can peruse old documents, study snapshots, and speak to others who affirm that my past actually occurred.” On the other hand, “I have to admit that it often seems as if my past, or at least my memory of it, has not remained fixed.” Mandel cites an example: one day he finds out that one of his “cherished elementary school memories never occurred—or not in the way I had always remembered it.” The event he recalled was a “screen memory … a vivid and totally convincing substitution of a less painful version of reality than one which a person is willing to accept as his or hers. My past, I learned, wasn’t fixed at all. As vividly remembered as it was … I had to relinquish it for another past—the one which has now been labeled the real one. In short, ‘my’ past changed” (76–77).

      What we learn in memoir writing is that memory has far more of its own agency than we thought, that the very act of remembering may alter what did occur. This altering, Mandel says, is key. “Since my past only truly exists in the present and since my present is always in motion, my past itself changes too—actually changes—while the illusion created is that it stays fixed” (77). If the past is both fixed and unfixed, then it is always in process. And, not surprisingly, this process lies in the present where our minds and feelings make sense of the past as we recollect the past. Mandel calls this active participation with memory “presentification.” He stresses that memory cannot exist without a present stage on which to unfold: “This presentification is not a distortion of any so-called real past; this is the only way ‘my life’ comes to me” (83; italics in original).

      Mandel’s estimation of memory as a present act has great import for the memoirist. The memoir writer works now, writing and remembering. Woolf’s remembrances of a difficult childhood were wedded to her current fears of war. Those fears drove her to recall the past in a way that would have been different had the bombs not been falling and the family tragedies not been mounting up. Thus, our present situation means everything to how and what we remember. From this we can extrapolate several relationships that are anchored in present-time remembering. For one, as Mandel suggests, what we remember may or may not be accurate. It has been altered and may be altered again by our recollecting. For another, our remembering selves can rouse us to action today. The past may impinge on the present, but the present can also direct the past with a purpose. What comes back in memory may no longer dominate our lives; however, the recollection may require us to re-evaluate it. My mother’s miserly affection, which I experienced as a boy and attend to in memory today, can debilitate me now just as it did then. And I can also take responsibility for that feeling and deal with it, not let it run or ruin my life.

      Let’s say I’m writing about my first year in college, for me a traumatic year: I dropped out because of a failed love affair. Writing about it, I find three levels operating: first, the events of that year that I can establish via letters, photos, a journal, and others’ reminiscences; second, the events of that year that I’ve recalled (no doubt revised and re-evaluated) numerous times in the intervening years; and third, the event of my writing about it today pushing me to say why that year and the end of the romance remain important. Thus, the drama of that first year in college appears to me the writer as an event in its time, as an event processed in the times in which it’s been recalled from then to now, and as an event I’m dealing with today.

      This layered simultaneity, time over time, is the prime relational dynamic between the memoir and the memoirist: the remembering self and the remembered self.

      In Lost in Place (1995), Mark Salzman tells of his teenage devotion to kung fu and his fall from its embrace. In one passage, Mark’s father tells his son that some of his bravado from the martial arts that he’s learning is, well, ridiculous, and that Mark, even at fourteen, should be questioning what his teacher is telling him. His father punctuates his mini-lecture by saying, “Just be yourself, Mark. You’ll do just fine as you are” (60). In response, Salzman writes a paragraph in which he argues with his father and with himself about the meaning of this phrase. He does so by abutting his remembered (1975) self and the intervening selves (roughly 1975–94) who have thought about it. First is his reaction to his father, what he, Mark, was feeling at the time, and second is his mature, later-in-life reaction to what his father was posing to him, what he has felt over time.

      Be yourself! What a can of worms he opened there. Of course I was trying to be myself! That was the whole point of the kung fu; to become the me I thought I ought to become, instead of some half-assed loser. Anyway, who was to say who I really was? I didn’t even know that—that was half my problem right there. All I knew was that when you’re a really little kid, your parents praise you when you do something they like. If you do something they don’t like, they say, “You’re not the sort of person who does that! Don’t try to be somebody you’re not! Be yourself!” So maybe, I reasoned, being yourself means being the person your parents or teachers want you to be. Do we have anything to do with who we are at all? As we get older, we think of ourselves as having unique personalities, and we take credit for these personalities when we do something good, as if we created these personalities ourselves. But maybe we didn’t! Maybe our personalities were shaped by how people around us responded to us. So who are we? As I said, this was a can of worms I didn’t care to dip into—at least not that day. (60–61)

      We can hear the voice of the narrator shifting from the defensive feeling of the moment to the more “reasoned” feeling that comes with writing and with time. This is how I felt that day and this is how I have also felt about how I felt since