Word Saucery

The recent death of Frank McCourt has prompted this New York Times article on the memoir.

It notes that:

‘The memoir genre has taken plenty of hits from moralists, fact checkers and freelance scolds in the 13 years since “Angela’s Ashes” sold four million copies in hardcover and spent more than two years on the best-seller lists. But it endures as perhaps the dominant genre of contemporary literature…’

It traces the growth of the literary memoir from Tobias Wolff’s ‘This Boy’s Life’ in 1989 through Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation,” Susanna Kaysen’s “Girl, Interrupted”, Lucy Grealy’s “Autobiography of a Face” and Mary Karr’s “Liar’s Club.” Karr is a particular favourite of mine.

I could also add many earlier memoirs to this list including the ground-breaking ‘A Model Childhood,’ Christa Wolf’s vivid and challenging account of growing up in Nazi Germany, first published in Germany in 1976.

As a poet drawing almost entirely from my own personal experience - I can’t think of a poet who doesn’t - and as a therapist actively engaged in using writing to help people to process, work through or simply celebrate their own personal experiences, I am always fascinated by the way that the media covers issues of memoir and autobiographical writing.

The idea that any kind of memoir writing is ‘true’ - i.e. not in itself a kind of re-imagining or fiction - and therefore must be subject to fact-checking and complex legal manoeuvers, has always seemed a little absurd to me. On the other hand, as writers we often feel inhibited by our responsibilities to our imagined readers, often freeing ourselves to publish our best stories after our loved ones are dead and gone.

The critic Paul John Eakin offers an excellent analysis of what he calls ‘the unseemly profession’ of  life writing in his book ‘How Our Lives Become Stories.’ I know from personal experience that the “I” of my poems is only part of me, a particular self at a particular time.

I think it’s important to distinguish between the process of writing and the process of reading; between the ‘I’ who writes and the ‘I’ on the page; just as it is important to distinguish between our memories as we reimagine,  re-experience and re-read them in therapy and the many different ways that others may have experienced these same memories differently in relation to ourselves.

This way, our memoirs, autobiographies and autobiographical fictions become personal truths, truths that are only as ‘true’ and ‘real’ as they can be to us at a particular time in our lives. And isn’t that a more honest and ultimately responsible undertaking than trying to write The Truth?

I couldn’t resist capturing these fish laid on ice in the market at Olhao. Their scales were almost like sequins in the sunlight.

The lustre and shimmer reminded me of a poem by the wonderful Mark Doty called ‘Favrile,’ (in Sweet Machine.  1998. Cape Poetry), a study of description and making and perhaps imitation, in which he describes the way that:

‘Glassmakers,
at century’s end,
compounded metallic lustres

in reference
to natural sheens (dragonfly
and beetle wings,

marbled light on kerosene)…’

Later in the poem, he writes:

…’art’s a mercuried sheen
in which we may discern,
because it is surface,

clear or vague
suggestions of our depths.
Don’t we need a word

for the lustre
of things which insist
on the fact they’re made,

which announce
their maker’s bravura?’

Yes. And making glass, making a poem, isn’t it the same? Or, as Doty asks, don’t  we need a word:

‘For everything
which begins in limit
(where else might our work

begin?) and ends in grace,
or at least extravagance…’

I am still searching for words to make the poem of these fish; the poem of standing in the market, admiring in their surface lustre the suggestion of everything that is beauty and grace and, yes, extravagance.

Does your life feel too fast right now for writing?

I have just got around to reading Nick Laird’s wonderful ‘Author, author’ article in last week’s Guardian. The online version is available here.

Laird is a poet, a very good poet, and he writes in praise of slow. He isn’t bemoaning technology in that neo-Luddite way that is suspicious of all things computer and blames the ills of the world on the internet.

Instead, he is writing about something more complex. He seems to be asking - and asking himself just as much as he is asking us -  how we can live in this fast, fast world and make space for writing and reading.

He writes:

‘The level of communication is being changed, and - why not say it? - reduced. We used to read books and newspapers. Now we scan through reams of text for something, or hyperlink between pieces, or search an essay for the salient word. Everything is immediate, impulsive, and getting shorter. Twitter “novels” are less than 140 characters. This is obviously the absurd end of the wedge, but I’ve been trying to read Dr Johnson this week, and engage with syntax of a complexity and subtlety that my mind is simply not used to. I found the same thing initially last year when I read Henry James for the first time since university.’

The feeling that Laird is writing about is something that I have been struggling with for a long time now. And not always slowly. He talks of iPhones and laptops, file-sharing and Facebook, that feel like ‘more and more virtual mouths beeping and chirping and demanding to be fed.’

He talks of the democratisation of writing on the internet but also of the ‘rushed’ feeling of it all; of making so little progress with his last novel that he cut through his internet cable with a pair of scissors after wasting time browsing property sites without really knowing why.

I understand this feeling. I have two blogs, two Twitter accounts, and I run an Online Writing Programme. Sometimes the hungry ‘mouths’ seem to be everywhere. Some of this I love. There is wonderful work that I can do online with committed and interesting and generous writing students; and stimulating discussions I could never otherwise have enjoyed with writers, therapists and people who are simply kind enough to be interested in what I do, living in California, Moscow, Italy, Sydney.

And yet on some days I long for quiet with nothing to do but simply experience being, living, writing rather than this compulsive chattering and filtering and sharing and reporting of experience.

Like Laird, I love the connection with people but I also need the space. I need what Laird calls Slow Language.

I dream of creating a space for others to be together in simple, companionable, creative quiet. There will be opportunities for solitude when required, and the sharing of words and wine and laughter at other times. There will be self-hypnosis exercises, guidance about how to re-member and re-access the realms  of Slow. One day soon, I will make that space happen.

In the meantime, I create a little slow space whenever I can.

I don’t think Nick Laird has a blog and, in a funny way, though I am glad that he does not, I aImost wish that he did.

I am sure that it would be beautifully written, slowly and with craft and care. It would be a place where people could pause for a moment and immerse themselves in the dreaming depths of words.

Perhaps we need a Slow Blog Movement?