Gornick

The question must have lingered in me because the next morning I awakened to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, the eulogy standing in the air before me like a composition. That was it, I realized. It had been composed. That is what had made the difference.

The eulogist had been remembering herself as a young doctor coming under the formative influence of the older one. The memory had acted as an organizing principle that determined the structure of her remarks. Structure had imposed order. Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the expressiveness of the language. Expressiveness deepened association. At last, a dramatic buildup occurred, one that had layered into it the descriptive feel of a young person’s apprenticeship, medical practices in a time of social change, and a divided attachment to a mentor who could bring herself only to correct, never to praise. This buildup is called texture. It was the texture that had stirred me; caused me to feel, with powerful immediacy, not only the actuality of the woman being remembered but— even more vividly—the presence of the one doing the remembering.

It was the act of imagining herself as she had once been that enriched her syntax and extended not only her images but the coherent flow of association that led directly into the task at hand.

The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. It was, after all, a baptism by fire that was being described. To see her ambitious young self burning to know what her mentor knew, we had to see the mentor as well: an agent of threat and promise: a figure of equal complexity.

This last, I thought, was crucial: the element most responsible for the striking clarity of intent the eulogy had demonstrated. Because the narrator knew who was speaking, she always knew why she was speaking.

To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly—inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires—but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from.

The eulogist is flooded with confusion. She realizes suddenly that what she’s been calling experience is only raw material.

Now she starts thinking. Who exactly was the doctor to her? Or she to the doctor? And what does it mean, having known her? What does she want this remembrance to exemplify? or embody? or invoke? What is it that she is really wanting to say?

Precisely the place to which our eulogist finally puzzles her way: her own mixed feelings. First she sees that she has them. Then she acknowledges them to herself. Then she considers them as a way into the experience. Then she realizes they are the experience. She begins to write.

Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard, hard work.

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts. “Good writing has two characteristics,” a gifted teacher of writing once said. “It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.

In nonfiction, never. In nonfiction the reader must believe that the narrator is speaking truth. Invariably, of nonfiction it is asked, “Is this narrator trustworthy? Can I believe what he or she is telling me?

The narrator records his rage, yet the writing is not enraged; the narrator hates Empire, yet his hate is not out of control; the narrator shrinks from the natives, yet his repulsion is tinged with compassion. At all times he is possessed of a sense of history, proportion, and paradox. In short, a highly respectable intelligence confesses to having been reduced in a situation that would uncivilize anyone, including you the reader.

After a while he [J. R. Ackerley] thought, I’m not describing a presence, I’m describing an absence. This is the tale of an unlived relationship. Who was he? Who was I? Why did we keep missing each other? After another while he realized, I always thought my father didn’t want to know me. Now I see I didn’t want to know him. And then he realized, It’s not him I haven’t wanted to know, it’s myself.

My trip to Egypt and the book that emerged from it now seem to me an embodiment of my own struggle to clarify, to release from anxiety the narrator who could serve the situation and find the story—a thing I was not then able to do.

This was the story I wanted to tell without sentiment or cynicism; the one I thought justified speaking hard truths. The flash of insight I’d had—that I could not leave my mother because I’d become my mother—was my wisdom: a tale of psychological embroilment I wanted badly to trace out.

To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused; above all, it accused. Then there was the matter of syntax: my own ordinary, everyday sentence—fragmented, interjecting, overriding—also wouldn’t do; it had to be altered, modified, brought under control. And then I could see, this as soon as I began writing, that I needed to pull back—way back—from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure.

I found a diary I had kept one summer ten years earlier; it contained information that I knew I could use. I opened the diary eagerly but soon turned away from it, stricken. The writing was soaked in a kind of girlish self-pity—“alone again!”—that I found odious. More than odious, threatening. As I read on, I felt myself being sucked back into its atmosphere, unable to hold on to the speaking voice I was working hard to develop. I threw the diary down in a panic, then felt confused and defeated. A few days later I tried again, but again felt myself going under. At last, I put it away.

One day—when I had been looking over an accumulation of pages possessed of what seemed to me the sufficiently right tone, syntax, and perspective—I opened the diary again, read in it a bit, laughed, got interested, even absorbed, and within minutes was making notes. With relief I thought, I’m not losing myself. Suddenly I realized there was no myself to lose. I had a narrator on the page strong enough to do battle for me. The narrator was the me who could not leave her mother because she had become her mother. She was not intimidated by “alone again.” Nor, come to think of it, was she much influenced by the me who was a walker in the city, or a divorced middle-aged feminist, or a financially insecure writer. She was, apparently, only her solid, limited self—and she was in control. I saw what I had done: I had created a persona.

In each case the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight. I became enraptured, tracing out the development of the persona in memoir after essay after memoir (it was out of this rapture that I realized I was a nonfiction writer). I began to read the greats in essay writing—and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae.

If William Hazlitt hadn’t awakened each morning crawling inside his own skin, he could not have written “On the Pleasure of Hating.” If Virginia Woolf didn’t have difficulty attaching herself to life, she would not have written “The Death of the Moth.” If James Baldwin wasn’t in perpetual violent struggle to bring the black and the white inside himself under control, there would be no “Notes of a Native Son.” These pieces are the work of writers engaged at the deepest level with the essay.

These writers might not “know” themselves—that is, have no more self-knowledge than the rest of us—but in each case—and this is crucial—they know who they are at the moment of writing. They know they are there to clarify in relation to the subject in hand—and on this obligation they deliver.

We’d realize the writer is struggling to make sense of feelings whose complexity he acknowledges. The struggle alone would have made the subject vital.

It’s the absence of dynamism that keeps the essay static, stifles its growth from within.

In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the “other” as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir —where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster—the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.

Three essays that demonstrate wonderfully the way self-implication can visibly shape a piece of nonfiction writing are Joan Didion’s “In Bed,” Harry Crews’s “Why I Live Where I Live,” and Edward Hoagland’s “The Courage of Turtles.” In each case, the piece begins in a tone of voice—one elegant, one swaggering, one reasonable—that announces a position. As the essay progresses this tone modulates—it softens, it inquires, it invites speculation. Modulation causes the narrator’s position to alter. That process of alteration is at once the conduit for the story being told and, in some important way, the story itself. We are in the presence, in each instance, of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows—moving from unearned certainty to thoughtful reconsideration to clarified self-knowledge. The act of clarifying on the page is an intimate part of the metaphor.

Didion’s “essay” into herself tells us a thing we all know to be true: that the power of everyday anxiety is ruthless: it makes us act against our own well-being, sometimes it even makes us court perversity, a thing we are ashamed of, can hardly bear to look at.

The reader realizes that the man who’s using turtles as a stand-in for human intimacy has been there from the very beginning. He tells us clearly enough: He had grown up loving all the animals, expecting to live in peace with his fellow creatures. But the developers had just kept coming. And the creature within had become entombed in the mud. Yet he, like the turtle, had survived: cold, quiet, alert. Containing within himself not multitudes but a sufficiency of response just large enough to avoid the charge of unnatural.

It is Hoagland’s complexity—the intentness of his observation coupled with the elegance of his withdrawal—that gives this essay its inner life. His mixed feelings provide the texture, and the drama. Patiently and “quietly,” they lead us into the starkness of solipsism. The turtles have taught the narrator that nothing outside himself is quite real to him.

The ability of these voices to compose themselves into monologues that entertain and instruct rather than weary and exhaust is an extraordinary achievement.

But when he brings it under control, Krim’s work becomes a dazzling example of what American writing in particular can do with the personal essay. In “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” he pulls it together with rare power.

You may sometimes think everyone lives in the crotch of the pleasure principle these days except you, but you have company, friend. I live under the same pressures you do. It is still your work or role that finally gives you your definition in our society, and the thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will. I think what I have to say here will speak for some of their secret life and for that other sad America you don’t hear too much about. This isn’t presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I’ve lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog.

So where does this leave the narrator? Hating whites and wishing them all dead? Of course not. “In order really to hate white people,” he now observes, “one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black.

Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” have a powerful commonality. Both turn on race, both continuously interweave the personal with the political, and both are dominated by a murderous truth-speaking voice: the narrator using himself to demonstrate that none are exempt from the dehumanizing effects of racism. At the same time, in neither case is the writing pulled around by the emotions that actually drive the essay. Orwell, too—composing paragraph after paragraph of measured narrative, analysis, and commentary so that the writing itself is continually bringing the heat of reaction under control—is holding it all together through the hard, clear, civilizing voice he was making distinctively his own; “civilizing” being the operative word.

But memoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required. As V. S. Pritchett once said of the genre, “It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.

When Rousseau observes, “I have nothing but myself to write about, and this self that I have, I hardly know of what it consists,” he is saying to the reader, “I will go in search of it in your presence. I will set down on the page a tale of experience just as I think it occurred, and together we’ll see what it exemplifies, both of us discovering as I write this self I am in search of.” And that was the beginning of memoir as we know it.

The immensity is the story; the rest is situation. That this son must come into his own by making war not on a parent who is willful and self-involved (which he is) but on one filled with the tender regard that alone gives a growing creature the ability to declare itself (which he also is). This is the thing the reader is meant to register; this is the narrator’s wisdom. It is the betrayal of love that is required in order that one become.

At the end of this memoir we do not know everything there is to know about Edmund Gosse, not by a long shot—of Gosse the Victorian aesthete or the literary man-about-town, nothing. We know only one thing: we know what it was to be his father’s son. That is, we know the man who is recording the struggle and the value of the separating self: the man who is speaking.

Often in later years I heard men and women say that ‘people get what they deserve,’ and always my mind has swept back to our canyon-like existence. ‘Deserve’ is the word which the possessors use as a weapon against those they dispossess. The darkness of not-knowing—who can realize what that means unless he has lived through it! Those who speak of ‘deserving people’ are the most ignorant of all. Because the world of knowledge was far removed from us, we in our canyon reacted instead of thinking.

He is, rather, a man who sets out to document what the narrator of every work of twentieth-century literature has been at pains to demonstrate—that the task is to become acquainted with the stranger who lives inside your own skin, the one who answers when your name is called. Especially when called by your father, if you’re a boy and he is the one you cleaved to from the moment you first drew breath, the one in whose image you think you have been made.

Resistance to earning our way is the common lot of humanity—we all resent deeply having to grow up—but one way or another, most of us make our peace with the requirement short of criminal recalcitrance. Arthur Wolff could not. The compulsion never to bring himself under discipline ruled his psyche. There was, finally, nothing and no one that could more command his loyalty. The need to have the best, and not pay for it, determined every move he made until the day he died.

That year he [Oscar Wilde] met Alfred Douglas and fell desperately in love. The affair was obsessive, and it was nasty: public scenes, low-life amusements, voyeuristic sex. The two were mismatched in every way except the only one that mattered: each one touched in the other the secret sense of unworthiness to which both were devoted. Each became the instrument of downfall the other craved. Nothing but scandal and prison could separate them. And, as it turned out, not even that.

The writing continues to dazzle while the structure falls apart. And rightly so. Because, after all, what difference does it really make—the second and third times around—which comes first? We are in the presence of a man in a trance of self-analysis: a man who will never act on what he knows and therefore is compelled to go on “knowing.

A few pages later Eiseley describes a dinner with W. H. Auden, an admirer of his work. The dinner goes badly. By his own admission, he has been feeling uncomfortable with the great poet, diminished somehow in his presence. Auden, aware of the stiffness between them, is chatting to set them at ease. He asks Eiseley, who is exactly his age, to name the earliest public event he remembers, and mentions, briefly, that in his case it was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Eiseley replies by falling into an extended reverie over a prison break (also in 1912) that took place near his home, letting his voice go self-consciously “poetic” as he speaks (“He blew the gates with nitroglycerin. I was five years old … already old enough to know one should flee from the universe but I did not know where to run … There was an armed posse and a death … We never made it”). The tale is long, self-dramatizing, and unmistakably competitive. Yet we are touched, not embarrassed, by it because we’ve already been given a taste of the rawness inside the man.

To a considerable degree, the entire book is an ever-deepening clarification of these two passages, each in its own way harrowing: the one a transparent denial of pain everlasting, the other of a longing akin to the pain that dare not be addressed openly. Chapter headings may read “The Rat That Danced,” or “Toads and Men,” or “The Coming of the Giant Wasps,” but we are engaged by the man who told us more than he meant to tell himself when he rapped out “Nothing, do you understand?” and then related the story of his dinner with Auden. What that man is grappling with is the experience this memoir is wanting to shape.

On a village or a town street, in an estate park or garden, on an expanse of beach or a landscaped something-or-other: hardly a living soul is ever to be seen. Casually these observations are inserted. Here or there. In a word, a sentence, a fragment. At what turns out to be just the right moment in just the right paragraph. The one that resembles a stone dropping straight to the subliminal bottom.

Every description of the visible world; every association past, present, future; every bit of memory, conjecture, or speculation implies a state of being destitute of human connection. On a small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich the point is suddenly driven home:...

Clearly, the bleakness originates from within. It is the material condition of the narrator’s inner life, the walls that contain him, the prison of his own personality. It is from inside this prison that he is speaking.

The human absence in The Rings of Saturn does not feel bad or painful or sinister. It feels, in fact, quite natural, as though it is being experienced by a man in his element, one for whom the solitary wander has long been the only reality. The calm of Sebald’s solitariness is immense—as large as Loren Eiseley’s universe—the calm and the silence. The narrator is neither repelled by this silence nor does he embrace it. He simply rests in it: concentrates on it: without shock, resentment, or the need for sedation. Rather like a Trappist monk who might also have the power to move into and then beyond anomie, thereby rediscovering the world.

From the moment I found myself standing in front of a memoir-writing class with a hunk of manuscript in my hand, asking, What is this all about? —and the answer came back, It’s about this dysfunctional family in Cincinnati, and I said, No, no. What is it about?—I saw that my classes would be reading as I needed to read: looking for the inner context that makes a piece of writing larger than its immediate circumstance; places a writer’s thought and feeling; imposes shape and reveals inner purpose; the thing that is invariably being addressed when one says to any writer of imagination, But what is it about? and does not expect to hear, It’s about this family in Cincinnati.

Clearly, the piece was on its way. It was simply the repeated act of asking, What is this all about? that had led the writer to the point of view that had released the narrator and focused the subject struggling to emerge from inchoate material.

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at the time that we are reading. How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all. When a book of merit is trashed upon publication, or one of passing value praised to the skies, it is not that the book, in either case, is being read by the wrong or the right people, it is that the wrong or the right moment is being intersected with. This book, good or great though it may be, sinks like a stone because what it has to say cannot be taken in at the moment; while that book, transparently ephemeral, is well received because what it is addressing is alive—now, right now—in the shared psyche. Which is perhaps as it should be. The inner life is nourished only if it gets what it needs when it needs it.