Life as art
It is only a couple of blocks from the heart of the Wayne State campus to the Detroit Institute of Arts, a museum that often gave me relief from the pressures of undergraduate life. I had my favorite stopping points there — in front of paintings, murals, sculptures — which would transport me from the present back to an earlier period of time and off to another place. But one of my most vivid memories of that building is not of art at all. It is of an inscription over a doorway that reads “VITA BREVIS LONGA ARS.”
In the sixty or years since I first saw those words and inquired about their meaning, I have never lost my sense of the contrast between the brevity of life and the durability of art.
Plowing through the dense prose of Henry James or Marcel Proust, as you read about the experience of a single moment spread out over several pages, and then perhaps in only a few lengthy sentences, it is possible to wonder whether the moment will ever end — the moment you are reading about and the moment you are living. Most authors are much more selective about what they put on the page. Their choice of details determines a story’s denseness or looseness, its intimacy or distance, its familiarity or strangeness.
In fiction, there is no end of such choices. By contrast, memoirists are not entirely free to decide what elements will make a good story. What they write is constrained by the reality of what they remember and tempered by what they may have learned between then and now.
As much as I try to give the chapters of my memoir their own integrity, they are best understood as they fit into the structure of the whole. Many of the multiple strands, sideroads, and diversions in Chapter 9 depend on elements introduced elsewhere in the memoir. This already makes the chapter different from the traditional short story, which has a single focus and economy of expression. If I had been writing short fiction, I would have done everything I could to emphasize the emotional plunge of the central character. I could easily have dispensed with the discussion of Judaism; the story would not have needed many of the characters who now round it out.
To be a memoirist, you have to be a creative artist. You must convert the raw material of events into sequences of cause and effect, of pattern, of something that will make sense to readers. But life is not art, and memoir is not fiction. My leisurely way of getting to the denouement is more a reflection of the fact that what happened at Lanark actually happened to me, and of its importance in my life, than an attempt to fit into any literary genre.
No event or period of life is automatically interesting just because somebody has endured it or witnessed it. Things just happen. They come and go. Vita brevis. But your story is more likely to be read widely if it is approached with the skill and attention of a master story teller, if you superimpose meaning, structure, and pattern onto it. Understanding how the structure of fiction treats events, you can make your memoir feel like a work of art.