The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts
mark beyer
MEMORY IS FLEETING but experience is powerful. The first follows the second, of course, yet not always. How is this so? We forget events; we invent where we want memory to accede to our wishes; each of us remembers different details about a collectively witnessed incident. As these are so, the question arises, How do we get back the original, the actual, the truth?
Perhaps we shouldn’t try. This is Sven Birkerts’ thesis in The Art of Time in Memoir, an intelligent, sometimes academic, and clever collection of short meditations on capturing memory in writing, and of those who have succeeded in transferring memory—or its essence—into an art form. The predicate is key for Birkerts – as it should be to us all – in this age of the written life. In the face of tell-all, simpering, seedy, and just-badly-written memoirs written by politicos, actors, sports figures, and celebrities, flies the memoir that strives to do more than just tell what happened to “me.”
This other memoir finds voice through the concentrated image, or the what’s-not-there-in-life, or how memory affects the relation between what was and what was thought to be. And then there is the memoir that strives to find perspective. Birkerts writes, “Hindsight is transformative: what felt like a murky day-to-day travail can start to look like a fate, a destiny, an intended wresting of a single outcome from many possibilities.” As you might guess, memoirs of this sort are written mostly by writers of broad talent.
First things first. Birkerts’ “books cited” list is extensive, some 44 titles, showing his deep interest of and reading in the genre. He’s able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and doesn’t waste much time exploring why self-pitying memoirs, or tell-all biography, or even tales from behind-the-walls-where-power-lies, fall below the acceptable bar hoisted for literary, artistic merit. What Birkerts explores, then, are those memoirists who have grafted memory with the essence of its importance to a life. Therefore we find Nabokov and Virginia Woolf paired in an essay titled “Paradises Lost: The Lyrical Seekers.” Yes, these two authors were indeed lyricists of the highest order in their fiction and nonfiction. Why would they accept anything less of themselves insofar as they explore their own lives? Frank Conroy’s “Stop-Time” and Geoffrey Wolff’s “The Duke of Deception” and Maureen Howard’s “Facts of Life” help define memoirs devoted to formative years. The relationship between mothers and daughters are as scintillating as those of fathers and sons, and Birkerts chose Jamaica Kincaid’s “Annie John” and Vivian Gornick’s “Fierce Attachments.” And we’ve all heard of or read a memoir of tragedy or trauma, but have you delved into the minds/memories of Mary Karr (“The Liars’ Club”) or Richard Hoffman (“Half the House”)?
The curious part of The Art of Time in Memoir is Birkerts’ musings on his own memoir “My Sky Blue Trades,” and how he battled with form, memory, structure, and a certain apathy with the genre in general, in order to achieve direction and the perseverance to find what he wanted to write about. In the end, reading many memoirs, picking them apart, distilling their individual essences, helped him learn how to write a memoir of some artistic merit.
With this in mind, the reader discovers several ways how he and she can look at memoir, to search its prose for insight into not only what’s on the page, but why that incident was included, or that image stressed, or even how words are executed, and especially, perhaps, why information was left out of the memoir. Take, for instance, Jo Ann Beard’s “The Boys of My Youth,” a memoir whose publisher labels it MEMOIR/ESSAYS and one reviewer (Barbara Fisher) had stated, “This is what a first collection of stories should be.” Birkerts explains the confusion: “… it’s less a doubt about the veracity of the separate pieces and more an uncertainty about whether certain kinds of ‘artistic’ arrangements of autobiographical materials must not automatically be regarded as ‘fictions.’” Birkerts continues with a short summary of what Beard has done:
The Boys of My Youth basically keeps faith with the suggestion of its title. Its main energies are devoted to tracking the ordeals of growing up and finding a way to live happily. The book ends with a nostalgia-laden closing of the circle that at the same time manages to suggest that the worst hurt of a failed marriage has been dealt with and that new experiences are in the offing.
Straightforward, precise. But then Birkerts shows his prowess at understanding what is happening on the page vis-à-vis the writer’s intent:
The book has a memory-inspired structure, shuttling freely back and forth, only the process is scenic rather than meditative. Beard is not concerned, at least on the page, with figuring out how one thing influenced another. I can see how Barbara Fisher mistook these essays for stories—they lack essayistic tissue—but Beard’s manipulation of counterpointed perspectives feels purposeful. The brooding that brought the pieces together is, in Hemingway fashion, left for the reader to supply.
Birkerts treats all his subjects with this same careful inspection. This is what makes the book as much an academic treatise as a writerly meditation. So, too, then, it’s a how-to that anyone can approach at least thinking about putting together his or her memories. One might have thought Marcel Proust would have been duly dissected, but wouldn’t/couldn’t that be a book or several volumes on its own? Birkerts does not neglect Proust, but in fact sees La Recherche du Temps Perdu as the Holy Grail of memoirs—even though it is a work of fiction. The reason lies in the fact that, argues Birkerts, Proust used very selective memories, images, and incidents from his life to infuse the “novel” with those pushpin moments from life that create for the reader a single whole. Nothing is missing, because nothing is missed.
You won’t have had to read Nabokov, Dillard, Woolf, Proust and the others to get a firm grasp of those memoirs, or be entertained and challenged by Birkerts’ thesis and insightful commentary on a variety of texts. Of course, an understanding of who those authors are and their works will be helpful; otherwise his discussion is a great introduction to finding these authors.
For the best of memoirists, you’ll be challenged with those same devices used in novels: character, metaphor, narrative, the sheer poetic writing, and a life built upon action, intent, consequence, and analogy to the world beyond that single mind scratching out words on rough white paper. Birkerts describes such difference and similarity admirably, with acute insight about how we all come to memory, and how such images and episodes from life are written as art.
The Art of Time in Memoir
by Sven Birkerts
Graywolf Press, 2008
195 pages; $12
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