Marcel and Me

THE REDWOOD COAST Volume 16, Number 2 REVIEW Spring 2014 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer Hampl herself takes as her starting PERSONAL HISTORY point for the discussion of the memoir St. Augustine (340-430 AD), whose Confes- sions, written to describe his conversion to Christianity, is credited with inaugurat- Marcel ing the memoir genre. I have taped this statement of Augustine’s to my desk while working on my memoir: In the immense court of my memory . I come to meet and Me myself. This is still the best definition I know for the work this form does. Most Barry Fruchter memoirs concern childhood, where our families and the adults who raised us appear indeed larger than life, the kings n the spring and summer of my and queens of our young age. Augustine’s sixteenth year I began to read Proust. words also point to the fact that memory IOr rather I began to read C. K. Scott is malleable and thus can be manipulated Moncrieff’s curious Victorian translation for political purposes, that every truth of Proust’s 1912 novel Swann’s Way (Du the memoirist tells is influenced by those Coté de Chez Swann). I do not recall courtiers milling around his head. “I come how it all started, only that gray quality to meet myself”: The memoirist writes to that caught me up in the opening pages of meet the parts of himself he cannot other- “Ouverture,” in which the narrator/par- wise see, to sort out the disparate threads ticipant remembers the time when he used of his personality, and to fashion that into to go to bed early and the way in which art. The memoirist must be unrelentingly objects in the room, images of his mother, and unflatteringly honest while still em- episodes of medieval history all imprinted ploying all the technical skills that a good themselves on his brain and found their novelist wields. way into his childhood dreams. Within a AIGNE (1602-1674) P few weeks I was caught in the processes hat’s in it for the reader then? If of Marcel’s memory and the morphing of Wmemoirs are an act of imagination his childhood desires into the full-blown E DE CHAM as much as memory, why not just read a PP passion for young Gilberte Swann, daugh- good novel? While the typical novel por- ter of Odette de Crecy, a former prostitute, PHILI trays a society, an age, a situation through and of Charles Swann, a wealthy Jewish Saint Augustine, author of Confessions the prism of relations between a family gentleman who has seemingly “lowered or other small group, a good memoir himself” through his obsession with the portrays a person at a moment of stress, much-used Odette. change, or growth; the society is second- So, at age sixteen, I too tasted the LONE SURVIVOR ary, and is portrayed mainly to support petite madeleine dipped in the spoonful of the growth of that soul. If you find that Tante Leonie’s tisane, her lime-blossom self-involved or narcissistic, beware: good medicinal tea, and I too drifted back into Self-making and the memoir memoirs skate on the edge of narcissism; the memory of passion and its question- not-so-good ones fall in. The memorable able origins, I too encouraged by Marcel Roberta Werdinger ones are saved only by the memoirist’s to reconstruct the elaborate network of honest amazement at the new self that he personal and family history that was does meet, a being as vibrant as any in a making me the person I then was: restless, n the summer of 2010 I lay dying, the author’s humdrum or grand existence, novel. Good memoirists make good char- journalistic, given to pursuing the exotic, or at least I was convinced it was even as those facts can be (and often are) acters out of themselves, and this can only needing to “rise above” in a way I would so. It turned out to be nothing more called into question. Memoirist and essay- be done by achieving a merciful distance, only learn imperfectly later, with a new than a digestive ailment which my ist Patricia Hampl states, “There may be a psychological space (that “immense Marxist consciousness, could be identified mind, tending toward hypochondria no more pressing intellectual need in our court”) wherein they can function in many as “petit bourgeois,” and above all fixated Ithen aided and abetted by the dubious culture than for people to become sophis- dimensions, cast a shadow, and engage on the beauty, exoticism, and poignancy modern advantage afforded by Googling ticated about the function of memory.” in a hopeful upward trajectory. (Or, if the of women—including my cousins and one’s symptoms, worked into terminal “Memoir” itself derives from the trajectory is not hopeful or upward, it can especially the exotic redhead I briefly colon cancer. In those few moments when French word memoire, meaning “mem- offer a cautionary tale to the reader, a kind danced with in my seventeenth year and to the reality of mortality penetrated my ory.” Although people have written of modern Pilgrim’s Progress.) whom now, fifty years later, I am married. recalcitrant brain, I didn’t feel much regret memoirs since the early Christian era, it Augustine was writing at the dawn of Inchoately or perhaps self-consciously nor sadness, just the emergence of this is only in the last twenty years or so that the Christian era; more than a millennium I was drawn to Marcel because he was, resolution: “I have to write about what it has generated enough critical and com- later, more worldly concerns would come like me, a participant-observer who never happened.” mercial interest to be regarded seriously into play. “I mean to lay open to my fel- dropped the “observer” part—a Jew who I knew it was a memoir I needed to as a genre in its own right, spawning a low-mortals a man just as nature wrought never identified as such and who rejected write, specifically, even though I was in new category in writing programs and him; and this man is myself,” trumpets the acquisitiveness, the imitativeness, the the middle of preparing a manuscript of conferences. What is behind our current Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), politics, the clannishness of Jews in his poetry. I knew I needed to write about fascination with memories, our own and whose own Confessions brought the (my) country. how brief and lovely it had been to be those of strangers? memoir into the modern age. Relentlessly In the fall of 1963—that fatal autumn here. I wanted to press the quietest and ambitious and brilliant, Rousseau signaled that changed our country and the world truest moments of my life between the a new preoccupation with the promotion forever and helped construct a culture pages of a book so that its scent would Writing a memoir of the individual self that was a hallmark that would last, one way or another, until waft out to the reader when he or she is already an act of of the Age of Reason. Rousseau’s ego and the other fatal autumn, 2001—I began opened it. sense of self-importance can be off-put- my studies at Hunter College. Though I When it comes to crafting a memoir, taboo-breaking, of ting. “I am not made like anyone I have stayed there only one year, transferring to I have discovered that it is obnoxious to seen; I dare believe I am not made like Bard College after that and leaving New write about yourself, and dishonest not silence-smashing. anyone existing,” he proclaims. Perhaps York City forever, it was a significant to. Since I had specifically undertaken It means you leave this shows that the impulse to use memoir year on a multitude of levels. Typically I to write a spiritual autobiography, how as a cri de coeur, to carp, to justify, is not walked to school through a side street, the could I use words to describe an experi- your tribe by mark- just a symptom of our hyper-therapized, one which held my fifty-family apartment ence that is undergone in silence? The navel-gazing age. While traditional folk building but which in one block became sense of breakthrough a memoirist can get ing—no, by writing— songs and stories as well as many forms a neighborhood of small attached homes from putting words to taboo experiences of poetry and prose tell the story of a (now known as townhouses), with a huge is so intense that she may forget about her a line in the sand: tribe, Rousseau wants to separate himself castle, the Kingsbridge Armory, looming audience. This happened. If from his founding conditions in order to ahead at the end of the street. At Kings- Writing a memoir is already an act celebrate his individuality. In describing bridge Road, facing the castle, I would of taboo-breaking, of silence-smashing. others remember a moment of emergence from the mass of turn left one block to the traffic light to It means you leave your tribe by mark- conscious and unconscious assumptions cross to Reservoir Avenue, which started ing—no, by writing—a line in the sand: it differently, then that make up the family, the tribe, and the on the castle’s left flank and went on past This happened. If others remember it your memory can native culture, the stage for the memoir’s a series of schools: PS 86, Walton High differently, then your memory can serve drama is set.

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