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

Speak, Memoir title!

Considerations on those of Nabokov, Violet Trefusis, and Sarah Bernhardt's leading man

"It has been rated the greatest of autobiographies, but since such judgements depend so much on the criteria we bring to them, I will call it only the most artistic of autobiographies... it fuses truth to detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, an acute awareness of time with intimations of timelessness."

I encountered this heady description of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography in Stalking Nabokov, Brian Boyd's new book about the forty years he has spent pursuing, as a passionate reader and as the world's foremost Nabokov scholar, the great lepidopterist and author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada. Why did I never read this book, I was immediately asking myself.

I ordered myself in a copy -- it turned out to be the Everyman's Library centenary edition of 1999 with Brian Boyd's introduction -- and as I picked it up, I remembered. It was the title which had put me off! Speak, Memory. So stilted, so bloodless.

But look at that! There was Nabokov in his foreword telling us that Speak, Memory was not the title he had chosen. He had wanted Speak, Mnemosyne, an invocation to the goddess of memory and inventor of language and words. Now this is a phrase which resonates. I loved it! But the publishers did not, on the grounds, Nabokov says, that 'little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce.'

What? Little old ladies? On the authority of having inherited the Classical Greek textbook which my great-grandmother (who would have been in her seventies during the period in question) had used during her grammar school days, I figure that in the 1950s little old ladies were probably one of the very few population-types who would have known to pronounce Mnemosyne.

Coming up with a good memoir title is evidently not as easy as it looks. Humourists do well: I love Jules Feiffer's Backing into Forward, and SJ Perelman's The Hindsight Saga, which I'm not sure if he used or just quipped that he ought to, is up there too. Actually all Perelman's books have great titles, another favourite of mine being Under the Spreading Atrophy. The painter Jacqueline Fahey told me that this American humourist, whom Bill Maher called "the greatest wordsmith America ever produced", will play a key role in the upcoming Part Two of her memoirs. Part One, by the way, was Something for the birds, quite a good title as well, especially if you have ever seen her thickly-forested Hansel and Gretel home in Grey Lynn.

Memoir titles have also been the inspiration for some memorable wisecracks after the fact. Here are two of my favourites, from a couple of famously witty women.

1. Women have been kind ... of dumb 
 
When the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt left for her second “farewell tour” of America, aged sixty-six, she took with her a new leading man, who was also her new lover, twenty-seven-year-old Lou Tellegen. The son of a Dutch general and a Greek dancer, Tellegen had left home at 15, supposedly with his father's mistress in tow, and subsequently been a prize fighter, trapeze artist, champion fencer, murderer (so he said), gambler and gigolo, before trying acting -- or at any rate leading-manship -- with Bernhardt, after a brief apprenticeship with the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse. He was famed for having the body of a Greek god, and had posed for a number of sculptors, including Rodin, who used him for his statue Eternel printemps.

Tellegen arrived on the scene in time to star opposite Bernhardt in her two silent films, Camille and Queen Elizabeth, in which he played Essex to her Elizabeth (the age difference was just about the same as the real-life love story). Here's a clip of the film from youtube, in which Bernhardt emotes fantastically as Tellegen, as her executed lover, lies perfectly still, Greek profile well on view. Keep in mind that the film was made one hundred years ago (1912) and you can love it.




After a taste of the roar of the crowd in America, Tellegen left Bernhardt in order to follow his own star to Hollywood, where he became a silent film actor with the nickname "The Great Lover". He also became the lover, and then husband, of the great opera diva Geraldine Ferrar, and when that story ended, of a movie actress or two. Not uncoincidentally, things began to falter for him. The arrival of sound ruined his career as a film star, and age, drink and drugs his personal career as a lover. He wrote a memoir and called it Women have been kind. In her review of it in Vanity Fair, Dorothy Parker said the title should have been Women have been kind... of dumb.

One day shortly before his 50th birthday, he shaved, touched up his face with a bit of powder, and put an end to it all by stabbing himself seven times with a pair of golden scissors (engraved with his name, yet), surrounded by newspaper clippings of his career. I’m not sure if any of the tabloids which reported these details saw fit to note Lou Tellegen's prescient star turn, years before in London, in a theatrical version of The Portrait of Dorian Gray he produced himself.
 
2. Here lies Mrs. Trefusis
 
I spent many years in Florence as a member by marriage of a large Italian, sorry, Florentine, family, most particularly large in there being a great number of uncles. One of them, my husband's favourite, was a handsome and witty man who had earned himself a place in high society through these attributes, as well as from being a good hand at cards and a passable tennis player. He married an American heiress who had previously been married to a Neapolitan aristocrat, if I remember correctly a Count, and I used to love looking through the pages of their old guest book, where names like Cyrus Sulzberger and Hamish Hamilton rubbed shoulders with the names of various posh Florentine families.

I don't remember ever seeing the name of Violet Trefusis, who lived out her old age in Florence as the chatelaine of Villa L'Ombrellino, but I do remember that there was a family saying which would be delivered with gusto when, for instance, you'd just agreed to a third helping of food, "Like Mrs. Trefusis, who never refuses".

What Mrs Trefusis never refused was passion. You can read about her great love story with Vita Sackville-West (famed for having been immortalised by Virginia Woolf in Orlando) in the book Vita's son Nigel Nicolson wrote about his parents called Portrait of a marriage. It lasted from 1918 to 1921, three exalted years during which the lovers had no scruples about exhibiting their affair, going dining and dancing in London and Paris, Vita dressed as a soldier named "Julian" and Violet as Julian's girlfriend "Lushka". Later there were other lovers, such as Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune and wife of the homosexual Prince Edmond de Polignac, who introduced Violet to the Parisian beau-monde.

Mrs. Trefusis called her memoirs, which were published in 1952, Don't look round. The Times Literary Supplement called the book "unreliable"; while on her part, Nancy Mitford, who had run with the same London-Paris-Florence crowd, suggested a better title would have been Here lies Mrs. Trefusis.

--Karen

You can read Brian Boyd's introduction to Speak, Memory on the Random House website

Roger Ebert on going gently

The memoir which came out at the end of last year from Roger Ebert, the American film critic who was half of the classic Siskel-Ebert "Two thumbs up!" TV duo, and which I've just recently read, is full of humourous (but never simplistic) and intelligent (but always just discursive enough) stories about his life and, you know, about Life itself. I wouldn't have expected less; no one could not be fond of Roger Ebert, either back when he was "the fat one" of the famous duo, or now, when he pours his gift for communication into his blog, having lost his ability to speak after a series of operations for cancer of the thyroid, and then of the salivary glands.

If you're not interested in movies, or American life of the last half-century or so, or don't like memoirs, it might not be the book you want to pick up. But there are a number of passages which would speak to any human heart, and none more directly or wondrously than the one I am about to let you read.

It comes in a chapter at the end of the book called "Going gently". Ebert is sixty-nine and has had cancer; as he says, he doesn't expect to die anytime soon, but knowing that he could, and in fact is more likely to than most of the readers of his book, has led him to the contemplation of death, "the distinguished thing", as he quotes Henry James calling it on his deathbed.

What follows is one of the most affecting takes on death, and early death in particular, I've ever encountered. I've read it several times now, including once out loud to someone close to me who was recently brought by illness to a contemplation of death, as Ebert was, and the mix of feelings is as electrifying every time.

Ebert writes:

***

... I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. in 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named "Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh". Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself "a simple worshiper of the external Buddha." Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:

     Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.     To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, "Not by foot, I hope!"

***
Life itself: a memoir by Roger Ebert

Diagram Prize announces year's oddest title!

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes is the winner of the Diagram Prize for the year’s oddest title, followed by What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua? and Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich.

My vote had gone to Collectible spoons of the Third Reich. I was disappointed to see it come in behind a kids book (shouldn’t kids books be handicapped, like overly endowed racehorses, in a contest for odd titles?) but Horace Bent, custodian of the prize, more than made it up to me with these comments quoted in the The Bookseller's official announcement on March 26th:

"Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes proved to be the initial front runner. It defended its poll-topping position despite strong support for the spoon-carrying Third Reich, once again attempting to muscle in on someone else’s territory.

"But the public proclivity towards non-Euclidian needlework proved too great for the Third Reich to overcome. If only someone had let the Poles know in ’39.”

Titles have been on my mind recently. I finally got around to reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin, one of my favourite literary personalities since the times of In Patagonia, considered one of the great travel books, which it is, but not only. In Patagonia is the reason why, when we had to clear out my childhood home after my parents died, I put at the top of the list of the things I wanted the fragment of dinosaur egg which a student of my father’s had sent him from some dig somewhere in France, and which resided ever after on the dining room bookshelves amid H Rider Haggard books, family snapshots and rock samples. Those of you who have read In Patagonia will get it: it's my brontosaurus skin. If you haven't read it, do.

When I saw how thick Nicholas Shakespeare's book was, I was afraid that it might be one of those biographies like Norman Sherry’s magnum opus on Graham Greene, in which for every day of Mr. Greene’s life we are given such details as where he had tea and what kinds of cakes he had, or the postcard he sent to his colleague at The Times, and what room that colleague's office was in. But it wasn’t. In fact, 600 pages seemed the only length one could possibly use to close in – a bit – on someone as complicated, contradictory, elusive and talented as Bruce Chatwin.

I kept it on my bedside table and every night for about a month I’d pick it up and read ten or twenty pages wherever the book opened to, and every time there’d be a different -- how does Yeats put it, "the careless planets in their courses”. Loulou de la Falaise, Werner Herzog, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gregor von Rezzori, and so on and so on, and… a British film maker named Peter Adam, who wrote an autobiography with the fantastic title Not drowning but waving. Maybe it’s because I’m not English (I was told, as I went around the library enthusing, that it’s a common phrase in Britain) but for me this went right up on there on the best-ever autobiography titles list.

Who out there has played the game of  'What would be the title of your autobiography'?  Back in my twenties I found this jewel in an old phrasebook for travellers and thought it could be mine: The lady wants hers with cream.

And now I’ve found a new one, for my prime. Danger vehicle exit lane. Driving into the Civic Car Park the other day I caught sight of this trenchant, punctuation free warning on a sign posted alongside the carriageway opposite mine.  My first thought  - I swear this is true - was that it was indicating an exit lane reserved for “danger vehicles” eg giant diggers and such. And it flashed through my mind that if they only knew, they’d be making me use that lane. This was a few days after I’d knocked off a hubcap on the approach to the Hopetown bridge. I had an image of my little white Vitz with its missing hubcap, like a tomcat with a torn ear, bursting out of the Danger vehicle exit lane into the night.

Which is my favourite autobiography title? Probably this one from the great adventurer Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo over the Atlantic from east to west:

West with the night

At the library:

Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

West with the night by Beryl Markham