On the joys of the writerly memoir

"Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks."

Was Pippa Middleton the beginning of the end?


Penguin would have thought it a sure-fire win. An in-law of the royals (and not just any in-law, but the one the press nicknamed "Her Hotness" when she burst onto the scene at her sister's wedding to the second in line) imparts the secret of -- not curing the King's Evil, no, something much more 'of our time': brilliant parties year round.

They handed Pippa a £400,000 advance, and she handed them Celebrate: a year of British festivities for family and friends. And it flopped! Only 2000 copies sold in its first week. In a nation of 65 million people! Plus the Commonwealth!

It wasn't the first celebrity title to flop -- earlier, a book by Alec Baldwin on fatherhood failed even more spectacularly, not surprisingly, I think you'll agree -- but maybe because of the personality in question, it was the first time I noticed the word "bubble" being used. When was the bubble going to burst on celebrity titles (most often memoirs, naturally, followed by -- you guessed it -- cookbooks)?

Well, it looks as if the answer may be 'Now'. With the 2014 sales figures totted up, and various biggies in the book industry weighing in, including the editor of The Bookseller, whose impeccable adjective they used in their headline, The Guardian reported ‘Exhausted’ readers shun celebrity memoirs as autobiography sales fall. 

I, for one, am not disturbed at the idea that the self-indulgent celebrity memoir (which I once saw described as being either the ghostwritten account of 'How I got to be what I am', or ghostwritten advice on 'How you can get to be what I am') may be going into a tailspin.

The great memoir, on the other hand, is my working week and Sunday rest in this moment of my life. What makes a great memoir? I like what the American writer and memoirist Ta-Nehisi Coates said: "Great memoir requires great courage and an appetite for sincere self-skepticism. To do this, you cannot fucking lie."

My appetite for memoir has become such that I'm even reading a book about the appetite for memoir, David Shields's Reality Hunger. Shields maintains that we are living in the Age of Memoir. "Urgency attaches itself now more to the tale taken directly from life than one fashioned by the imagination out of life", says Shields. "Novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia." I am not sure it is The age of the memoir - but it surely is My age of the memoir. In the sense of, my age. This was the theory also of Geoff Dyer, who was the first writer who drew my attention to this phenomenon -- he called it "Reader's block", though I learned in this book that he didn't invent the term, David Markson did -- of realising, after many years of gorging on them, that you're having a hard time getting excited any more over invented plots and invented characters.

Never say never (and I'm always still up for classics, maybe because characters like Becky Sharp -- Vanity Fair being the next I plan to read -- have by now become real, with quotation marks, pace Nabokov, and I'll be forever grateful to David Shields for his paraphrase quoted above) but right now, I'll take a good memoir over any other book.

And if you are looking for a good memoir, you can't do better than a writerly memoir. Writers do it better! They know how to write, above all. But also, I am a big fan of how often they write a whole book on an aspect of their lives, rather than attempt to set down the whole shebang.

Here are the writerly memoirs I've got on my table right now:

Original, dreamlike, feminist: Things I don't want to know : a response to George Orwell's 1946 essay 'Why I write'  by Deborah Levy, which ends

I rearranged the chair and sat at the desk. And then I looked at the walls to check out the power points so I could plug in my laptop. The hole in the wall nearest to the desk was placed above the basin, a precarious socket for a gentleman's electric razor. That spring in Majorca, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it occurred to me that where I had to get to was that socket. Even more useful to a writer than a room of her own is an extension lead and a variety of adaptors for Europe, Asia and Africa. 

Odd, intimate, witty: Revertigo : an off-kilter memoir by Floyd Skloot

I'm actually not sure if the whole book is odd, intimate and witty, as I haven't read it yet, but the last part, which I have read, is. Also touching and heart-breaking. It's about mothers, and about memory, intense and intertwining subjects for anyone over a certain age. A family friend, leafing through an old "East End Temple Young Family Set" recipe book from the 1950s discovers that Skloot's mother, who had never cooked a day in her life, had contributed a recipe for Veal Italienne "Sklootini" to it.

From the moment I saw the recipe, I felt I had to cook it. As avid about cooking as my mother was about not cooking, I saw this as a chance to complete something for her. It would be a tribute to her intention, as I understood it, in submitting the recipe, in presenting herself as the kind of person who cooked such a dish. 


Hypnotic, disquieting, hard-boiled: My dark places: an LA crime memoir by James Ellroy, in which "America's greatest crime writer investigates his mother's murder" -- and his obsession with it.

My father put me in a cab at the El Monte depot. He paid the driver and told him to drop me at Bryant and Maple. I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to leave my father. I wanted to blow off El Monte forever. It was hot--maybe ten degrees more than L.A. The driver took Tyler north to Bryant and cut east. He turned on Maple and stopped the cab. I saw police cars and official-type sedans parked at the curb. I saw uniformed men and men in suits standing in my front yard. I knew she was dead. This is not a revised memory or a retrospective hunch. I knew it in the moment--at age ten--on Sunday, June 22nd, 1958. I walked into the yard. Somebody said, "There's the boy." I saw Mr. and Mrs. Krycki standing by their back door. A man took me aside and kneeled down to my level. He said, "Son, your mother's been killed." I knew he meant "murdered."

Fierce, hilarious, astute: The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle

A whole 300+ pages of "autobiographical writings" which I'm reading for the second time, there's so much to enjoy: the hilarious "Desperately seeking Susan" recollection of Susan Sontag, "Travels with my mother" about taking her mother (who takes mournful pleasure in noting that Castle is beginning to resemble David Hockney) to see a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition, and "My heroin Christmas", about a holiday spent under the spell of Art Pepper's Straight Life, a book whose Reality Hunger credentials I vouched for in a "What I'm Reading" from 2010. 


Warm, frank, virtuosic: Inside a pearl by Edmund White 

If you read lots of Edmund White, you may think you've already read this -- a book on Paris, love, sex, and, in general, being "the kind of guy who always wants to be elsewhere". I did. But no, it's new, and he's still in form, as in:

When I broke up with him (I found the rancid smell of menthol cigarettes daunting), all he did was warn me that I was getting old and should settle down before it was too late. "Tu viellies, Edmond," he hissed. If only he'd known how many more decades of gallantry lay before me. Which didn't stop a reporter from the London Times from calling me and asking me politely, with a nice Oxford stutter, what I thought of "intergenerational sex". I answered him sincerely and described my relationship with Michael, who's twenty-five years younger than me. A few days later, as we were about to board a plane to London, Michael opened a newspaper and found an article about ourselves headlined "The Frisky Old Goat Is Still At It". 

Obsessive, personal, loving: Famous builder by Paul Lisicky

I've just noticed the first quote on the back is from none other than the Frisky Old Goat. "This book shows all the vital signs of genius. In Famous builder Paul Lisicky asks the tragic American question: who are you if you've recreated yourself? And he answers it: you are alone, vulnerable and fully loaded."

"Lisicky." What? I try to project my name toward the ridged roof of my mouth. I try to keep my jaw loose, my eyes animated, secure. I think: Smith, Stevens, Bishop. "Li-sick-y," I say again. "Paul Lisicky." How do you spell that? I note the hushed quality of the bank teller's voice, the tender, quizzical lift of her penciled-in brow. She leans in closer to me, palms flattened against the counter as if I've just told her my condition is terminal.


And for those of you who like the classics:


Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning. 

THE END



--Karen

George Orwell gets a day!

By now he's gotten it, actually, but I've been away in California where among the many memorable experiences California always offers, I had not one but two that were distinctly Orwellian.

The first involved a menu where grilled veggies tacos were dubbed "no-blame", or maybe it was "no-crime", anyway an irksome example of groupthink, a term directly inspired by the newspeak vocabulary of Orwell's 1984; and the second was being threatened with a $285 jaywalking ticket by a policeman strangely reminiscent of Richard Burton as O'Brien in the film version of 1984, pockmarked complexion and all, who, just like O'Brien, came on bland and friendly at first, only to unexpectedly reveal a dark and dangerous side when I didn't seem to appreciate the seriousness of my position, suddenly spewing out a stream of incensed resentment towards all the people, including me, who had ever jaywalked across "his" street, as he called it -- one of the reasons I hadn't understood I was supposed to be taking it seriously.

So yes, George Orwell is as timely as ever, and now the Orwell Estate, The Orwell Prize and Penguin Books have launched an annual "Orwell Day" to recognise him as one of Britain's greatest writers ("of the 20th century" the Estate specified with what might be exaggerated modesty) and to "celebrate his writing in all its forms and explore the profound influence he has had on the media and discourse of the modern world".

The date chosen was January 21st, the anniversary of Orwell's death in 1950, aged just 47, from tuberculosis. I confess to wondering why, with the moving forces behind Orwell Day all being based in Britain, they didn't pick the date of his birth, June 25th, instead of that of his death, so that the celebrations could take place in summer, something British royalty finds so desirable as to institutionalise fictional summer birthdays for their monarchs. Not to mention that January 21 already has a celebration tied to it, namely, Squirrel Appreciation Day.

Of course, if it had been Toad Appreciation Day, that would have been apt for the author of "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad", one of my favourite Orwell essays, the one where he describes the toad emerging from the hole where he has been hibernating all winter like this:

At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.

It had not, on the other hand, occurred to me to conjecture about whether crass marketing was behind the date or indeed the whole initiative, until I read this comment on The Guardian's piece on the inaugural Orwell Day:

 I can see the PR people at penguin rubbing their hands with glee. "Oh look Caroline, golly gosh, what a super wheeze. An Orwell day. Lovely." It is so obviously a crass marketing ploy. Why not a Shakespeare Day, a Chaucer day, Dickens day, Waugh day, Kipling day, Conrad day, Greene day, Larkin day, Austin day, Conan Doyle day, an agatha christie day etc.

I can't help considering a point made that wittily. And there is something to it: Orwell Day is different from say, Bloomsday, or Alice's Day, the first started by Joyce aficionados and the second by a Museum (the Story Museum in Oxford), in being "unilaterally" declared by enterprises who stand to make money by it.

So perhaps instead of lingering on the Orwell Prize website, where a big deal is made out of making one of George Orwell's essays, "Politics and the English Language", available for free when, as another Guardian reader pointed out, since Orwell's books are out of copyright in Australia, you can read all of Orwell's essays for free on Project Gutenberg Australia (I used it just now to get my Toad Appreciation quote), I could highlight the month-long "The Real George Orwell" programme being run by BBC Radio 4, with biographical dramas, serialisations of the novels, and someone reading Orwell's letters aloud with an old-style English accent which nearly had me jumping out of my chair and to attention when it came at me out of my computer. (Orwell's voice was never recorded. In fact, it was deemed unsuitable for broadcast in a 1943 memo included in the BBC Archives' George Orwell collection, where however it was acknowledged that his name "is of some value in quite important Indian circles".)

Penguin Books, on its part, has contributed a clever new cover for 1984:

which you can compare to other 1984 covers from around the world on goodread's 401 editions of 1984.

Guardian Books celebrated the first Orwell Day by starting an Orwell fest on Twitter, getting people to join an #orwellquotes hashtag with their favourite Orwell quotes. This didn't work for me, as my favourite Orwell quote is too long for Twitter, plus it's not a quote from Orwell but from Joan Didion about Orwell. Actually, about Homage to Catalonia, his book about the Spanish Civil War, during which he joined and fought with an anti-fascist militia because, as he explains at the start of the book, what he saw in Spain seemed a "state of affairs worth fighting for". It appears in her novel Democracy, a tour-de-force of writerly skill in which she is able to make an aging CIA agent a plausible love interest even for the young leftie I was when I read it, many years ago. I still have my copy, and although I had to hunt around a bit I eventually found the passage so I can share it at least on Books in the City and pay my own "Homage to George Orwell".

The CIA agent has given Inez, the heroine of the book and his lover on those rare occasions when their paths cross, the key to an apartment in Hong Kong where she can wait for him to get back from Saigon where he has gone to find her missing daughter. The apartment is pretty much empty, the closet containing only a macintosh and some galoshes. She asks the CIA agent who it belongs to. "Somebody in Vientiane" is all he has to say.

She presumed it was a woman because the galoshes and macintosh were small. She presumed the woman was an American because the only object in the medicine cabinet, a plastic botttle of aspirin tablets, was the house brand of a drugstore she knew to be in New York. She presumed that the American woman was a reporter because there was a standard Smith-Corona typewriter and a copy of Modern English Usage on the kitchen table, and a paperback copy of Homage to Catalonia in the drawer of the bed table. In Inez's experience all reporters had paperback copies of Homage to Catalonia, and kept them in the same place where they kept the matches and the candle and the notebook, for when the hotel was bombed.

Homage paid, I leave you with a trailer for the film version of 1984, made in 1984 with Richard Burton as O'Brien (his last role) and John Hurt, looking a lot like George Orwell, as Winston.