memoir-guide companion

March 10, 2010

Multiple views of a U-turn

Filed under: audience, interpreting life, perceptual filters, writing techniques — Genus @ 6:10 am

No memoir can trace very many of the consequences of a life — but even if we had all the space in the world, no memoirist would have the patience to follow the effects of every ripple that resulted from every pebble we have thrown into the ponds of our existence. Still, there are times when our choices and actions extend our influence so obviously beyond its normally limited sphere that we feel obliged to call attention to them.

For somebody who has been reading my memoir from the beginning, Chapter 8 may feel like somebody else’s life. This is perfectly understandable because the story has reached a point when I began to feel that I had moved into somebody else’s life as well.

The prospects that had seemed so bright were far away; the future once so promising became unpredictable. The good little boy who had tried to be more religious than his parents and who had stretched their academic ideals far beyond anything in his or their experience, then had moved into a respected position of responsibility, now found himself back at what amounted to square one, forced to learn the most basic facts of life again in a new environment.

Transitions are never easy. First you have to survive them. Then you have to try to understand what happened. If you are willing to stare at the past, this is even more complicated than living the events in the first place. Months or years after the fact, the memoirist goes a step further and tries to make others understand as well. This means going far beyond tossing off a simple description of the experience or a facile explanation of what it seemed to mean at the time.

I knew that it was going to be a challenge to make readers grasp the sense of moving to the farm. To some people it would never make “sense.” But as a writer offering a continuous story, I have presented the situation from a number of perspectives. Within a page, talking about how Carol and I transported our family, transformed our lives, transfigured our whole orientation, I show the reader that the shift in our lives meant different things to our Crysler family, to the large Detroit family, even to the shattered Thunder Bay connections.

I begin by recalling the obligations to the university that I could not escape even on the farm. I show my metamorphosis from professional teacher to amateur farmer, and hint at my family’s bewildered response to the direction (or apparent indirection) of my life. I talk about the books I gave away and the university files that became fuel for a wood cookstove, leaving no doubt that I was slamming the door on what had been my life’s work.

Readers coming to one of the major transitional periods of my life might feel as if they are looking at these events through a crystal polygon, not through a pane of clear glass. Such an object makes events infinitely multi-faceted, and nothing looks the same if you move even just a micron to the left or the right. Add to that complex filter the personal filters that readers bring to the story, and the result is a germ of the chaos promised by the title of my book. Some readers will be peeved by the story of an educated adult who threw away a career; others will admire the innovative way I found to make the best of a bad hand.

A memoir may be about you, but it need not be solipsistic. You do not hold the only key to your past. You know only part of your story, and you admit or are willing to tell only some of that. The reader knows something else, and makes that a part of the perceived narrative.

While I can no more control how readers respond to my story than I could when I lived it, I must concede that my life has had consequences. One of the neighbor boys down the road sized up the educational path that had led me to the farm and was inspired never to go back to school. And, by personifying my books as betrayed, abandoned friends, I acknowledge that moving from Thunder Bay to Crysler may have affected far more than the people than I am aware of, and far more than just people.

March 2, 2010

Short memories, wishful thinking, personal mythology

Filed under: memory — Genus @ 5:54 pm

When he headed the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch used the closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games as a platform for flattering the host city, again and again expressing his pride and joy at having attended the best Olympic Games ever. He said the words so many times and in so many cities that they became a predictable formula, adding weight to the straight-line theory of human life — that we are advancing as a race, that our experience helps us do things better and better.

This past Sunday, I cringed in anticipation of the adjectives that might be used by Jacques Rogge, current president of the IOC. He had delivered a solemn opening speech soon after the death of the Georgian luger in a training mishap, and I hoped that Dr. Rogge would not fall back into the tradition of euphoric hyperbole that sends people away from the Games with the feeling that they have just witnessed a landmark of human history. I was not disappointed. While he complimented the spirit that had infused Vancouver over the two weeks of the Games, he limited his description to the words “excellent and very friendly.”

Compared to the expressions of flimflam and hoopla that had been floating through my mind, those words seemed so tame and restrained that I thought he might have complimented Vancouver more without saying anything.

But whatever the speech was in reality, its tone will improve in time for the people who heard it, especially those who participated in the Games, as athletes, as volunteers, or as spectators. It will not take long for people to remember how Jacques Rogge couldn’t get over the most excellent Games ever, the very friendliest.

We tend to play with our memories, suppressing what we cannot face, exaggerating what we wish had happened. What we remember years after the fact is only vaguely related to any objective reality.

I think about this whenever I hear somebody talk about how much worse things were at some distant time. I have spent most of my seventy-two winters in Canada, but I still hear people who were children during the Great Depression talking about how life today doesn’t come close to the intensity, the inconvenience, the discomfort of a past I am too young to have known.

If children are encouraged to make the best of the future, some older people seem to want to make something better out of their past as well.  Many people who once had to walk home from school in a snowstorm — emphasis on once — complain that kids today are pampered by school buses, that it’s criminal when schools are closed because of an extra snowflake or two — as if they themselves routinely battled shoulder-high drifts of snow to get to school and back home.

More than 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!” He meant that we generalize, we symbolize, we stand in awe of nature, we apprehend spiritual reality behind physical appearance. But these are not our only poetic gifts. We also make the past real for others, fill their heads with pictures of a time long gone.

The straight-line theory is only partly responsible for how we see history. Memory makes things seem better today because it perverts how we view what we endured in the past.

To hear people talk, even last winter can be a distant time. There’s a heroic tone I often hear when Canadians boast of surviving last winter, regardless of how mild it actually was. It doesn’t take long to create a personal mythology.

If only we could write our life stories without judging them. It is an excellent achievement to recall the distant past without getting carried away by what seems in retrospect to be the most excellent, or the snowiest, or the most painful, events.

February 22, 2010

Beginnings and endings in life and in memoir

Filed under: fiction and memoir, stories, writing techniques — Genus @ 7:10 am

My son died more than five years ago, under conditions described by the coroner as unusual but natural. The causes were explained to me at length, until I almost accepted their validity. But, while my mind and my heart know that I will never see him again, the ritual of putting his remains into the ground could not end the emotions I felt when I heard that he had stopped breathing. There are still times when the thought of him so unnerves me that I must clutch the nearest stable object for support.

How much more unsettling it must be for people whose loss of a close relative seems totally irrational or random. When somebody is missing, the papers tell us that the relatives would be happy to get closure. And after a murder trial they say the moment has arrived for the family.

It would be nice to get closure. But that is more of a literary concept than an emotional reality.

You never feel the artifice of memoir more than in beginnings and endings. The literary nature of the form makes it seem as if something begins at the opening of a story and ends when the tale concludes. But whatever it might be, that something is not life. It is only one personal experience.

Beginnings and endings are inherently difficult. It is easier for novice writers to work with them in events with a limited time frame — for example, in stories explaining survival from a dangerous experience or reminiscing about the quirks of a memorable group of colleagues. Retelling these events, it is relatively easy to introduce readers to circumstances and to ease them out, to explain context and to resolve issues at the end.

There are additional complexities in a complete life story. It takes years for us to understand even the most fundamental things about our environment, and what we write about our youth is often based entirely on the awareness we gain at a much later age. We arrive at context only with effort. If an author does not make that effort, the result can be a life-length memoir that retains the mystery of unawareness, without a clue about the attitudes of parents or relatives, without a sense of a real emotional world swirling around the narrator.

The ending of a complete first-person life story poses a more serious problem, which I need not spell out.

These observations come to mind partly because I recently read an article by Jonathan Sachs, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, which dealt in part with how we think of tragedy in human life. I was especially impressed by this passage:

. . . life can imitate art and become part of its intertextuality; . . . life, unlike art, has no closure. It can repeat itself endlessly, re-enacting tragedy time and again in different ages, with different actors, who may think they’re the audience but in fact they’re onstage and part of another drama.

Who can forget the last scene of The Graduate, with Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson at the back of a bus, her wearing a wedding dress, a refugee from her own wedding, both of them laughing uproariously? It is futile to think about the laughter they might share in five years or ten, or to think of the sniping that might force them apart. That is not part of the story. Exit laughing.

We have all stopped reading stories because they didn’t begin or end properly. They parachuted in while something was happening or they faded out in the middle of the action. In other words, they implied that the world would go on regardless. But stories aren’t supposed to do that. Life does it. Exit bewildered.

As memoirists we control the illusion of calling lives into being and rounding them out. This illusion must give aesthetic satisfaction even if we are describing unsettling events. When readers turn away from the little world we have created, they should feel a sense of finality — of closure. We cannot overcome death, but the end of our stories can give readers a contentment far removed from the confusion and frustration that normally come with the close of life.

February 19, 2010

Brotherhood day in a time of chaos

Filed under: writing techniques — Genus @ 8:47 am

Chapter 7 ends today, which means that readers can download a printable .pdf version by clicking on the proper icon at the top of the chapter.

The final installment of the chapter is a speech I gave in Thunder Bay forty years ago. In earlier drafts it interrupted the running narrative, at about the point where I described how I interacted with the community at large. But I moved the long quotation when I realized that parts of the speech could represent a commentary on my own situation when I left teaching for an uncertain future. The first sentence (“None of us can escape himself”) and the last two paragraphs in particular are relevant to the person who had to rebuild his own kingdom on earth.

This is only the first time I use a long quotation to end a chapter. There is a second speech at the end of a later chapter, and still another chapter concludes with a very long excerpt from an even longer letter. If this memoir had been strictly chronological, they would not have been nearly as effective and I would probably not have used them.

February 16, 2010

Beginnings and endings in memoir

Filed under: selection of details, stories, writing techniques — Genus @ 7:10 am

There are many kinds of memoirs, but all of them tell the stories of human life. And, as stories, they are most effective if they depict characters that are well fashioned and incidents that are unusual or interesting, and if they contain a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Whether I am writing life stories or creating fiction, I have always found beginnings and endings the most challenging parts of narrative. The heart of a story itself is what I start with, but readers must be drawn in, and their satisfaction with the final experience depends on how the story ends.

I have repeatedly insisted that most of the chapters of my memoir can stand as memoirs on their own. What happens in them does not depend on what took place earlier, and I try to end with a denoument. Chapter 7, for example, is the end of a major phase of my life. All that education, all that movement in a conventional direction, all that effort to satisfy Carol’s wish to be a faculty wife — finished. Turn the page and our family heads east. There is no more to say about the university story.

It ends as a story should, not too soon — it would have crash-landed if I had ended by quoting my letter of dismissal — and not too late, taking three pages to editorialize about university life or campus politics or life changes. Rather, it eases the reader from the past to today’s reality off the page.

When Carol and I transplanted Lianna, Steven, and Adam to a 100-acre piece of prime farmland somewhere in a land we did not know, it was just something that people did. In those days, it was a conventional way of being unconventional. People did it for a while, and nobody ever thought about whether they would ever come back.

The ideal is to stop when you have no more to say. It is better to leave your readers wanting more than to have them wish you had shut up sooner.

Like the tale of grandfather’s old ram, related by Mark Twain in Roughing It, some stories wander all over the landscape. Impatient readers fade away. Polite readers suffer in silence:

Jim Blaine’s peculiarity was that whenever he reached a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather’s old ram — and the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him get, concerning it. He always maundered off, interminably, from one thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep.

Some novice writers who are interested in writing “their memoirs” worry about how to end the story because they are still alive. They must be reminded that it is not possible to write a story without a sense of where it is going. You cannot write the definitive story of your own life. It will not work even if you try to contrive the ending by composing a suicide note first and then going on to the next logical step. Readers will be curious about your emotional response to what happened, and you will not be able to respond or edit the text. Just accept the fact that “a memoir” is a story about a particular feature of your life, not the whole story.

Beginnings are harder for me, but more interesting. When I start writing I usually just jump in without thinking of where those passages will fit. The words almost always get shifted to another place or altered beyond recognition. First thoughts suggest others, and they in turn expand until at last some longer narrative structure suggests itself.

Chapter 8 reflects a dramatic shift in my life. It represents a clean break with what went before, it shows a new side of me, and it is easier to see as a separate memoir than are some of the earlier chapters. But because the setting with the endless sky is probably as alien to most readers as it was to us when we first saw it, they must be eased into it. Their introduction to the farming environment takes as much care as their contact with the uncompromising yeshiva environment years earlier. The narrative must make them as comfortable with country life in a few paragraphs as we became only after months of experience with livestock and grain and haying.

The beginning of the chapter assumes nothing about what went before. It describes the farmland in eastern Ontario, our next home after Thunder Bay. It opens with some of my basic memories about Crysler — of an expanse of sun-drenched corn and wheat fields, a variety of unfamiliar machines dredging and mining the earth, punctuated in the distance by utilitarian buildings — unimaginative grey barns, and houses where you saw signs of life only on Sundays.

A stranger traveling around the farms of eastern Ontario will find few landmarks along the straight roads and fence lines of Finch Township, midway between Ottawa and Cornwall.

With the sparseness of landmarks, it could have been a challenge to describe the flat, treeless countryside. And it would have been at first. But after a few years on a prairie you learn to recognize the significance of even the smallest topographic differences. Eventually, you can take a train across the heartland of North America and feel your soul jumping with appreciation for every ditch and gully, every pitch and roll, on a plain that might put Coloradans to sleep.

Readers become more familiar with the rural landscape as the chapter progresses, just as it did for me.

February 7, 2010

All we can do is tell the story

Filed under: reason for writing, stories — Genus @ 12:47 pm

As Gene’s academic career heads toward the wall, the memoir quotes a letter from a friend. I reached out to Cam because I needed to share my experience with somebody elsewhere in academia. I had read a column in Esquire criticizing him for his unconventional, libertarian approach in the classroom, and I felt that he was a kindred soul. His response appears near the end of Chapter 7.

Now forty years later, the thought of Cam Tatham conjures up thousands of new memories of the Madison experience. To tell them all would require far more detail than I put into Chapter 6. I begin on a bus returning to the hotel from the Newberry Library in Chicago, sitting next to one of the venerable, legendary Wisconsin professors of American literature, Harry Hayden Clark, wondering in flabbergasted bewilderment, two octaves above his normal squeaky tone, how Cam Tatham could, as he put it, get away with writing a thesis on John Barth. Then I hear the dignified southern drawl of the other ageless figure in the department, Henry Pochmann, as he exposes Edgar A. Perry, an 18-year-old impostor in the United States Army, who turns out to be Edgar Allan Poe. The old geezah, one of my classmates used to say about Henry Pochmann; he probably knew Poe when he was growing up in the south.

The bus, the hotel, the library — there’s no end to memories once you start dredging them up. But there is an end to Harry Hayden Clark and Henry Pochmann and Campbell Tatham.

You cannot mistake this world for the one you knew when you were younger. You never played with electronic gizmos as a kid. There were none. But there were parking spaces wherever you wanted to shop. Milk bottles clanged when they were delivered to your door. And, of course, there were magazines that no longer exist. They used to come to your house every month thanks to a post office that now questions the reason for its own existence. The differences go on and on. What I feel most acutely is the disappearance of the people who used to make up my world.

After my first funeral I wondered out loud why death makes people cry. I could be amused by Schopenhauer’s contention that we should cry when people are born and laugh when they die. But the departure of every close friend and relation has evoked more of an understanding of how my world was being diminished.

In a small jewel of a book called Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard describes this sense of loss with a stunning image:

The pain within the millstones’ pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other . . .  is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones’ sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit here. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother, when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.

Neuroscience is still discovering what time does to memory, but there is no question that it obscures and confounds  discrete memories. If any of the people I knew at Wisconsin were still here to tell what they remembered about me, their stories would have little in common with mine. We all take part in the same story, and we all have our own perception of events. Our separate tales say as much about us as about the things that happened; but, like spotlights on a stage, they offer a new way of looking at the past because they come from a different angle.

The story that prompted the Elie Wiesel quotation on the home page of my web site (“God created man because He loves stories.”) illustrates this in a unique way. It describes how the the founder of Hasidic Judaism would go into the forest and light a fire before saying a special prayer. A miracle would follow. His successor did not know how to light the fire, but he would say the prayer in the proper place and the miracle would happen. The rabbi in the third generation knew only the place. He spoke what was in his heart, and a miracle was again accomplished. The next rabbi could only sit in his study and say, “I am unable to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient.”

Writing memoir, our situation is analogous. We cannot repeat the past, only tell its stories. With them we maintain our attachment to a world that is gone. We revive the squeaky voices of those who can no longer speak. Memoir writing helps us ground the live wires Annie Dillard describes and gives our stories the focus that only we can provide.

February 3, 2010

Notice to readers

Filed under: admin — Genus @ 8:02 am

An untraceable (and thus untreatable) virus has affected the blog portion of this web site since the beginning of 2010. It has been an exasperating few weeks for me, but I am starting again. I am back at square one with a visible new look and an invisible new outlook.

It will take me a while to get back to writing, but I will eventually return to the subject matter of memoir-guide instead of fretting over the mechanics. Please check back from time to time. Though the blog entries for 2009 are gone, I am planning to post them as .pdf documents in a number of forms: by month, by theme, and by chapter of the memoir. I expect to complete this redevelopment within the next few weeks.

Thanks for your patience.

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