Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir 0395901502, 9780395901502

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Inventing the Truth

Inventing the Truth

THE ART AND CRAFT OF MEMOIR RUSSELL BAKEr/aNNIE DILLARD

ALFRED KAZIn/tONI MORRISON LEWIS THOMAS Edited with a memoir and an introduction ^3;

WILLIAM ZINSSER

BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

NEW YORK

Copyright

©

Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc. All rights reserved. Writing

1987

and Remembering, copyright copyright Dillard.

©

1987

William K. Zinsser. Lije With Mother,

To Fashion a

The Past Breaks Out, copyright

Memory, copyright 1987

©

1987 Russell Baker.

Lewis Thomas.

©

1987

No

©

Text,

copyright

©

Toni Morrison. A Long Line

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical

and recording, or by any information storage and

of Cells, copyright

Book-of-the-Month Club, 485 Lexington

York,

New

retrieval

Inc.

Avenue York

10017

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Inventing the truth. 1.

Autobiography.

3.

Authors, American

United States— Biography. —20th century— Biography.

2.

Baker, Russell, 1925-

II.

Zinsser,

William Knowlton. CT25.158

1987

973.9i'o92'2 [b]

© in

—including photocopying system —without

written permission of the publisher.

I.

Annie

book may be reproduced or transmitted

part of this

New

1987

1987 Alfred Kazin. The Site of

87-3875

ISBN 0-395-44526-4

Printed in the United States of America

Nou

This book originated

duced by Book-of-the-Month Club, at

The New York

Inc.

The talks were held

Public Library in the winter of 1986.

earlier series, held in 1985,

resulted in the

conceived and pro-

as a series of talks

on the

art

book Extraordinary

The Club would

like to

and

An

craft of biography,

Lives.

thank Vartan Gregorian, presi-

dent of the Library, and David Cronin, coordinator of public

education programs, for the Library's gracious collabora-

tion as host of the series.

Two of the talks,

those of Russell Baker and

Toni Morri-

son, are followed

by excerpts from the question-and-answer

made

further points about the writing process.

period that

TONI MORRISON The Site of Memory lOI

LEWIS THOMAS

A

Long Line

of Cells

125

Bibliography 149

Contributors 16"]

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Writing and

Remembering

In the early 1960s

book.

I

was

The book was

sisted of

invited to write one-fifth of a

called Five Boyhoods,

con-

it

men who grew up in twentieth century. The first

memoirs written by

successive decades of the

and

five

by Howard Lindsay, described his turn-ofthe-century boyhood in Atlantic City, a sunny Victochapter,

rian

world not much

inhabited

many

different

from the one

years later as the co-author and star of

one of Broadway's longest-running Father.

The second

Golden, evoked

a

chapter

world

as

Lower

East Side. Chapter

3,

as Lindsay's

on the

was

New

1920s,

was

to an Irish clan that

to be in perpetual migration

port and Philadelphia

by Harry

immigrant Jews on

by Walt Kelly, who belonged seemed

plays, Life with

("1910s"),

cramped

spacious: the dark ghetto of

York's

that he

between Bridge-

—hardly the twenties of

F. Scott

WILLIAM ZINSSER Fitzgerald's "Jazz Age," but could Fitzgerald have

My

created Pogo?

hood spent

chapter ("1930s") was about a boy-

in a prosperous vale of

north shore of

John Updike,

Long

Island,

recalled

what

and the it

was

WASPs fifth

like to

on the

chapter,

by

grow up

in

the 1940s as the only child of schoolteachers in a small

town

in Pennsylvania;

fear of poverty,

poorhouse

—

if

Updike's father, haunted by the

was glad the family

lived next to a

necessary he could walk there.

Five boyhoods, as unalike as American boyhoods

could be. Yet what struck

me

about the

five

accounts

common. One was

was how many themes they had

in

loneliness, the universal plight.

Another was humor,

the universal solvent.

memory, one

I

was

also struck

by the

fact that

of the most powerful of writers' tools,

is

one of the most unreliable: the boy's remembered truth

was often truth.

My

diff^erent

from

his

mother, after reading

parents'

my

remembered

chapter, cried be-

my memory of my boyhood was less golden than her memory of my boyhood. Had I subconsciously reinvented my early years to make them lonelier than cause

they really were?

Had

she subconsciously never no-

ticed?

Mine was

the most privileged of the five boyhoods.

my

parents had built a large and unusually

In 1920

pleasant house

houses with

—one of those summery, white shingled of screened porches — on four acres of

a lot

[12

Writing and Remembering

end of King's Point, overlooking

hilly land near the

Manhasset Bay and Long Island Sound. Boats and water were

my

location for a

view;

home

was

as beautiful a

My

for.

York withstood the Depres-

my three older sisters and I were sheltered from

cold winds, and

its

it

any child could ask

as

New

father's business in

sion, so

thought

I

we grew up

loved and well provided

in a

happy

family, well

for.

But the beautiful house was two miles from the nearest

town and not near any other

on

a block, like

was

also the

delian fluke,

nearby that's

everybody

house.

wanted

I

doing block things.

else,

no males had been born

was

a

what our house was

to

any of the

neighborhood of full of:

my

One

of the

and

sisters

first

never

knew and never

Outflanked, that

I

dared to

words

else.

in their direction or

got thrown out. girls

13]

Once

Sometimes during the long summers

Brown, ever optimistic

I

that they

throw

a

mean?

I

entered

thought about

I

cajole the girls into playing ball.

it

I

can

I

ask.

escaped into baseball.

world of flanneled heroes

their

language

remember hearing was "organdy." What did I

and

girls,

friends, giggling over girlish secrets, talking a

laden with mysteries.

I

By some Men-

only boy for miles around.

families. It

to live

was

I

tried to

a proto-Charlie

would catch

runner

little

out.

a fly hit

But no runner

learned very early the dismal fact that

"throw funny." They explained

that

it

was

be-

WILLIAM ZINSSER cause their arms were "set different."

tomical

was stuck with the So began the of

my

a

I

result.

solitary ballgames that

boyhood. Every day

for hours against the side of

with

school food and poison

like saltpeter in the

center of the golf ball? Whatever the reason,

at the

much

an ana-

this

or just another strand in the folklore of

fact,

growing up,

Was

huge glove the

were

threw

I

occupy

to

a tennis ball

our house, adroitly fielding

line drives

and grounders that

sprang out of the quivering shingles, impersonating

whole major league teams and keeping elaborate box scores.

did

Little

booming home, grass wasn't me.

my

parents,

realize that the

trapped inside their

person out there on the

That impeccable

stylist at

second base

was Charlie Gehringer of the Detroit Tigers; zelle in the outfield

was Joe DiMaggio.

If

that ga-

my

family

had only looked out the window they could have seen greatness.

Being

a baseball addict in those

work than

days was harder

today. Television hadn't been born, and

it is

games weren't even broadcast on the

was nine

my

parents sent

me

Cape Cod, probably hoping ness for canoeing or

some

I

to a

radio.

When

I

summer camp on

would develop

a

fond-

other, less tyrannical sport.

camp I made a wonderful discovery: an announcer named Fred Hoey on a Boston radio station did play-by-play accounts of all the home games of the But one day

at

[14

Writing and Remembering

Red Sox and

the Braves.

near Boston; no

How idyllic, I thought, to live

wonder

it

was

America. For years afterward dial like a

called the

Athens of

fiddled with

I

my

radio

crazed ham, hoping that some atmospheric

quirk would bring Hoey's magical voice through the air to

me. Once

I

even thought

heard him, very

I

faintly.

In such a deprived environment printed word.

At

baseball stories

and box scores

Tribune and the

waited for his

New

breakfast

New

on the

gorged myself on the

I

in the

New

York Herald

York Times. In the evening

I

my father to come home so that I could grab I

was, and in between

of Baseball magazine, to

which

I

I

would reread copies

subscribed, and study

with monkish dedication what was biggest Big League

from those

a

life's

I

was

It

glimpsed what

it

my first

who nudged me down

the

work.

But the memoir that

I

wrote for Five Boyhoods was

only indirectly about baseball.

boy contending with

was another

becoming the

newspaperman; they were

"influence," the mentors

my

fast

Gum collection in the East.

baseball writers that

might mean to be

a

subsisted

York Sun, a paper as ludicrously devoted to

baseball as

path to

I

It

was

really the story of

certain kinds of isolation. Size

isolating factor. I

was one of the

smallest

of boys, late to grow, living in a society of girls

who

shot up like mutants and were five-foot-nine by the age

>5]

WILLIAM ZINSSER Nowhere was the disparity sharper than at the dances I was made to attend throughout my youth. The tribal rules required the girls to invite the boys to of twelve.

these rites

the

boy

—another Amazonian

to bring the girl a gardenia,

bosom

pin to the

the bosom,

I

of her dress.

was

just tall

pressed into the gardenia

—and required

which she would

Too young to

enough

so that

was

like

nose was it.

The

floor.

me

Talk was

my partner was just as isolated and

What I remember most

resentful.

my

chloroform to

lurched round and round the dance

out of the question:

appreciate

had bought to adorn

I

sickly smell of that flower as I

detail

the quality of time standing

still. I

about those nights

thought they

is

literally

would never end. In Five Boyhoods

cloaked

I

all

unhappy mo-

these

—an old habit of mine. Humor the writer's armor against the hard emotions — and therements

in

humor

is

fore, in the case of

memoir,

the truth. Probably

I

my

family.

When

half paralyzed

I

also

still

used

another distortion of

humor

as a

kindness to

my chapter I that my parents

started writing

by the awareness

my shoulder,

was and

my

sisters

ally

perched there, and would read whatever version of

their life

were looking over

came out of

were impossibly

warmer with each

my

stiff,

typewriter.

and though the

rewriting,

never really enjoyed

it.

My

I

if

not actu-

first

style

drafts

became

never really relaxed and

Since then, reading the

mem[i6

Writing and Remembering

oirs of other writers, I've

always wondered

how many

passengers were along on the ride, subtly altering the past.

My

grandmother,

presence in our

lives.

my

A

mother, was a stern

father's

second-generation American,

she hadn't lost the Germanic relish for telling people off,

and she had

a

copious supply of grim maxims to

reinforce her point. "Kalt Kaffee

would

declare,

wagging her

macht schon," she

forefinger, leaving us, as

always, to deconstruct the dreadful message. "Cold

makes

coffee

beautiful,"

some kind of

it

hot coffee were

said, as if

self-indulgence, or perhaps a

known

The maxim was a cousin of "Morgen Gold im Mund," or "The morning hour has

cause of ugliness.

Stund hat gold in

mouth," delivered to grandchildren

its

slept late. Frida Zinsser

was

a

woman

who

of fierce pride,

bent on cultural improvement for herself and her family, I

and

also

in

my memoir

made

it

I

duly noted her strength. But

clear that she

was no

After Five Boyhoods came out, straight. "

'Grandma' wasn't

shy,

from

easy.

my

who had made

"She was unhappy and

and she very much wanted to be

the truth

is

somewhere between

and mine. But she was

my

set

me

her

own

really quite

liked."

Maybe

so;

mother's version

—

me and that's the memoir can work with.

like that to

only truth that the writer of a

17]

mother

really like that," she said,

defending the mother-in-law life far

fun.

WILLIAM ZINSSER was probably only

All else being subjective, there

one part of

my memoir

that

got "right"

I

tively accurate to all the principal players

—objec-

—and that

was the part about the much-loved house and the it

occupied.

rooms and

its

I

described the house, with big

that enabled us to

motor

sailboats,

windows and

its

sunlit

its

agreeable porches

watch an endless armada of boats,

excursion

six,

boats,

boats:

launches,

and barges, navy de-

freighters, tankers, trawlers, tugs

stroyers and, every night at

site

one of the two night

steamers of the Fall River Line, aging belles the Priscilla and the Commonwealth.

I

named

described the

sounds of the water that were threaded through our lives:

the chime of a bell buoy, the mournful foghorn

of Execution Light, the unsteady drone of an out-

board motor, which, even more than the banging of a screen door, the

hill in

still

means summer

froze over

A

One

War

II

to the city.

—my

By then

sisters'

my

described

down on

Island

parents began to

few of

—had

Sound

ice.

and they sold

quite a

children

I

sledded

Long

winter

find the house hard to manage,

children

me.

and cars drove around on the

decade after World

moved

we

front of the house that

our Flexible Flyers.

to

it

and

their grand-

played on those

porches and watched those boats and heard the foghorn at night.

The home had become

generation would remember

it. I

a

homestead; another

only went back to see

[i8

Writing and Remembering

it

—

once

in 1980, after

my

My own

family church.

mother's funeral

children were with me, and

down the once-rural road

drove

that led to our house.

suburb anywhere.

I

at the old I

—King's Point Road

could have been in any affluent

The

sloping fields that

remem-

I

bered on both sides of the road were so dense with

ranch houses and three-car garages and swimming pools that

knew At

it

I

had no sense of their topography;

my

in

hill. I

had heard that

tor

to be

was

show how interior

Hills

between occupants

there.

He

the

was

still

had changed hands

again.

this

day

Only

it

hap-

a contrac-

and took us around

invited us in

new owner had

and was preparing

it

and on

several times over the years,

pened

only

bones.

the end of the road, however, our house

king of the

I

much

torn out

to reincarnate

it

to

of the

in Beverly

modern. Terrazzo squares were piled on the old

wooden

floors that they

would soon

cover; unassem-

bled parts for several Jacuzzis awaited the plumber. Fair

enough

—

gone, but

I

had no claim on the house. at least

children, "This

is

it

was

still

the house

I

there.

Its I

could

grew up

But the Jacuzzi man must have

sister

New

it

my

in."

for sale again;

advertised in the section of the

York Times Magazine that features "luxury es-

tates."

19]

Nancy saw

tell

was

tired of his pleasure

dome. Several years ago the house was up

my

integrity

Somebody

later told

me

it

had been bought by

WILLIAM ZINSSER an Iranian.

I

wondered how much more improving the

old house could take.

summer an unexpected errand took me

Last

the family church.

My

wife, Caroline,

out to

was with me.

I

had an uneasy feeling about the house and didn't want to confront the pain of finding out to

it.

But Caroline urged

once again

At

I

pointed the

what had happened

me to put the past to rest, and car down King's Point Road.

end of the road

I

turned into our driveway.

Something was missing:

it

was the house. Without the

crowning house, the

hardly seemed to be a

the

hill

our Flexible Flyers really hurtled cline?

We

walked up the former

down

hill

that

many months.

it

I

looked

as

if it

mere

had in-

and stared into

huge hole where the house had been. The

was unkempt;

hill;

a

entire place

had been abandoned for

could only guess that some Iranian

holding company, having cleared the land, was holding it

for development.

We walked around the big hole and went and sat on the seawall.

was

It

was

a perfect blue

as beautiful as I

July day.

The view

The

waters of

had ever seen

it.

Manhasset Bay and Long Island Sound

glittered in the

summer

sun, and there

sailboats

and power boats and fishing boats and excur-

were boats

as far as

I

could

sion boats and freighters and tugs and barges.

I

see:

heard

buoy and an outboard motor. I was at ease and only slightly sad. The view was intact: the unique a bell

[20

Writing and Remembering configuration of land and sea

dream about

I still

I

is

a

so well that

it.

But the house survived only This

remember

book by

as

an act of writing.

Americans

five

who

looking for their past with acts of writing. originated as a series of talks, called of Memoir,"

The book

"The Art and

Craft

conceived by the Book-of-the-Month

New

Club, co-sponsored by the

and held

have gone

at the library

York Public Library

on successive Tuesday evenings

"Memoir" was defined as some Unlike autobiography, which moves

in the winter of 1986.

portion of a

life.

in a dutiful line

from birth

to fame, omitting nothing

memoir assumes the life and ignores most it. The writer of a memoir takes us back to a corner his or her life that was unusually vivid or intense

significant,

of of

childhood, for instance events.

By narrowing

focus that

—or

that

was framed by unique

the lens, the writer achieves a

isn't possible in

autobiography; memoir

is

a

window into a life. What I hoped these talks would tell us was how other writers had wrestled with the form: how they had sorted out their memories and their emotions

was

and arrived

at a

version of their past that they

felt

true.

Russell Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist

of the

New

York Times, had written in Growing

only a superb memoir;

21]

it

was

a classic

Up not

book about the

WILLIAM ZINSSER Depression

—

good memoir

a perfect illustration of the fact that a is

also a

moment

tinctive

society. Baker's

work

of history, catching a dis-

both a person and a

in the life of

memoir took

strength from

its

public

context.

Annie and

five

Dillard, the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

other books,

is

writing a

memoir

called

American Childhood, in which she places her

An

lively

Pittsburgh childhood in the larger frame of the Ameri-

can landscape, "the vast setting of our

Her memoir,

tory."

about what

down

in a

it

she says,

feels like to

is

common

his-

"about waking up"

"notice that you've been set

going world."

Alfred Kazin, dean of American literary

critics,

has

written three memoirs covering successive phases of his

life,

which Jews

the most enduring being

A

Walker in

dealt with his childhood as the son of

the City,

immigrant

in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

I

still

remember how sensual that book was. Kazin wrote with his nose, making me smell what his mother was cooking for the Sabbath dinner when, at sundown, "a

—

healing quietness

would come over Brownsville"

—and

how his father's overalls smelled of shellac and turpentine when he came home from his job as a housepainter. Seldom has a writer put memory to such evocative use. Toni Morrison identified

is

a novelist

with memoir,

and therefore not usually

a nonfiction form.

Yet

mem[22

Writing and Remembering

ory

is

one of the animating currents of her work, and

few American writers have tapped it with such richness of language. In her novels such as Song of Solomon

we

hear voices far older than her own: the fragments of recollection

and imagery and handed-down

constitute the black oral tradition.

my

things

"When

mother or father or aunts used

once remarked,

"it

lore that

think of

I

to say," she

seems the most absolutely striking

thing in the world."

Lewis Thomas, with Lives

of a Cell,

tion of

American readers

in 1974 as a

as that

even rarer species

—the

caught the atten-

born writer and

scientist

who

is

a hu-

manist. In a subsequent book, The Youngest Science, the life

cycle that Dr.

result

was

a

Thomas studied was his own, and the

double memoir: the coming of age of an

American doctor and the coming of age of American medicine. In

its

early chapters he recalled

accompany-

ing his father, a general practitioner, on his rounds in the days

when medicine was

"a profoundly ignorant

occupation" and his father carried only four medications in his black

that

were known

"I'm glad

/

bag because they were the only ones to

do any good. Reading

it,

I

thought,

wasn't treated by those doctors."

remembered, "I was treated by those doctors."

Then I Memoir

puts lives in perspective, not only for the writer but for the rest of us.

The sixth writer in the 23]

series,

William L. Shirer, had

WILLIAM ZINSSER to

drop out because of

and Fall

illness. Shirer,

of the Third Reich

is

whose The

Rise

the Book-of-the-Month

Club's all-time best-seller, recently returned to that

theme

in The Nightmare Years, ip^o-ip^o, this time tell-

ing the story in the form of a memoir, recalling that nightmarish decade looked to a

young

how

foreign cor-

Shirer had been a reporter and

respondent. All his

life

a writer of history;

now,

in his old age,

he was putting

the same events in the frame of personal experience. "I

think most of us in this business want to have a final

we never had time to stop and ask what it all meant. And I'm sure there are other reasons, like egotism, which you deny having." Deny say," he told me, "because

it

or not,

it's

there.

why anybody a

pamphlet or

we

Ego

is

writes a memoir, whether a letter to

reasons

at the heart of all the it's

a

book or

our children. Memoir

is

how

validate our lives.

These were some of the suppositions

that

went

into

What came out of them were five trips to the of memory that touched deep emotions. One cen-

the talks.

well tral

point also emerged: the writer of a

become

the editor of his

own

His duty

is

He must

life.

prune an unwieldy story and give

memoir must

it

cut and

a narrative shape.

to the reader, not to himself.

"The

autobi-

ographer's problem," Russell Baker says, "is that he

knows much too much; he knows

the whole iceberg.

[24

Writing and Remembering

not just the

any

"The writer of work must decide two obvious ques-

first-person

what

tions:

Annie Dillard

tip."

to put in

and what

says,

to leave out."

Nor is it enough just to decide what to put in; to the facts

is

no

free pass to the reader's attention, as

Russell Baker discovered

writing of Growing journalist.

in

What

which he

when he approached

Up with

he wrote was "a reporter's book," one

faithfully re-created the

propriety, story.

What

it.

was

he

his

Reviewing

left out,

Depression era

who had

make

it

more

nephew.

with

a

that disastrous

had

first

vitality

who had

good

mother and himself

that the only chapter that

uncle

The

colorful.

lesson

Baker rewrote

his

—in short, the

version, he

only

know

How much

that

it felt

of that

was not

memoir

lost it

life

to

on the

became

a

woman and

drama was

artifice? I

true.

Toni Morrison, another searcher buried past, also

saw

was one about an

dramatic story about an "extremely strong

weak male."

lived

reporter's

largely invented the story of his

When

the

the reflexes of a lifelong

after interviewing all his older relatives

through

fidehty

knows

that

it

for truth in the

can only be quarried by

an act of imagination. She takes

as her literary heritage

the slave narratives written in the eighteenth and nine-

teenth centuries to persuade white Americans that blacks

were "worthy of God's grace and the immediate

abandonment of

25]

slavery."

But because those writers

WILLIAM ZINSSER wanted

argument and not anger

to elevate the

"dropped

masters, they

a veil"

no

of their daily existence;

their

over the terrible details

and

trace of their thoughts

emotions can be found. Toni Morrison wants access to that interior

life

—

contains the truth about her past

it

that she needs for her work.

imagining

by an

it:

She can only get

fiction,

was

Toni Morrison

real.

Unlike Russell

act of writing.

Baker, heightening reality to give

by

it

drama of

the

it

uses fiction to conjure

up what

Both of them have skipped over research and

landed on the truth. Putting

"My

advice to

oir for the

memoir

writers

same reason

that

like to

into a text.

itself

reau

we

went back

Pond and

just

It

to

is

to

embark on

The

We

Concord

wrote up

mem-

advice sounds too

think that a good

won't.

a

says,

you would embark on any

other book: to fashion a text."

academic;

Annie Dillard

in formal terms,

all this

like to

life

will fashion

think that

after his sojourn at

his notes.

Tho-

Walden

He didn't. He wrote

seven different drafts of Walden in eight years, finally piecing together by what Margaret Fuller called the

"mosaic" method

a

book

even chatty. Probably no

was more

texts.

classic of

deliberately fashioned.

woodsman by a year;

that strikes us as casual

vocation

American

and

literature

Thoreau was not

when he went to

the

woods

a

for

he was a writer, and he wrote one of our sacred

By

the time he had written

it,

in fact, he

had

[26

Writing and Remembering

almost surely forgotten what he did If

you

prize

takes so

Walden Pond.

your memories, Annie Dillard

memoir

write a

at

much

—the

act of writing about

longer and

is

so

itself that

have written,

just as the

an experience

much more

you're

the experience

left

says, don't

intense than

only with what you

snapshots of your vacation

become more real than your vacation. You have cannibalized your remembered truth and replaced it with a

new

one.

For Alfred Kazin, the son of Russian Jews, these

memoir

in

exercises

finicky

Emerson's journals and

essays.

—Thoreau's

Walden,

The Education of Henry

Adams, Whitman's Leaves of Grass and his Civil War were the door that he walked diary. Specimen Days

—

through to claim struck

his

own American

him was how personal

heritage.

What

these writers were; they

used the most intimate literary forms to place them-

American

selves in the landscape of

history.

Their

books brought Kazin the news that was to shape life:

"One could

Every

taxi driver

wanted

be a writer without writing a novel.

and bartender

to be a novelist. It

Thing, in America." Kazin.

A

He

It

Personal history

is

his story

was the expected, the Big

was not the Big Thing

found

the City,

"obstinately refuses to

27]

who told you

recalls that Leslie Fiedler, in his

Walker in

his

it

become

to

review of

perverse that the book a novel."

the one true form for Kazin.

He

WILLIAM ZINSSER tells

US that since he was a boy he has started every day

by pouring

into his journal "everything that

describing and writing about." effort to think

think his

life

in.

was, he says, "some

It

But

like

was

it

also

an effort to

and mind of the country

His daily journal became "a cher-

with something fundamental to

connection

American

out."

into the heart

was born

that he

ished

way

my

I felt

literature

—the writing of personal

diaries, journals, letters,

memoirs.

ritanism had created a habit of

The

mind

history:

influence of Pu-

that

had persisted

into the 'American Renaissance' and the peculiarly per-

sonal reverberations in Emerson, Thoreau,

and

how many others

—the need to present

Whitman

to

God, the

Eternal Reader and Judge of the soul's pilgrimage on earth, the veritable record of one's inner life."

Obvi-

him when he wrote sequels. Starting Out in the

ously Kazin took this habit with

A

Walker

Thirties

in the City

and

New

and

its

York Jew.

Memoir was

his

way

of

planting his roots alongside those of his literary idols in the memoir-rich

No his

American

soil.

such connections matter to Lewis Thomas. In

chronometry, centuries

nationality has

rise

and

fall

in a flicker

no meaning. Dr. Thomas

a cell biologist,

by training

and when he turns reminiscent he

thinks of himself as a collection of division of cells

is

and

went

cells.

What

into his being here at

massive

all?

What

miracle of cellular activity enabled this bundle of cells

[28

Writing and Remembering

to acquire the gift of language? "It

guage," he says, "that

back into

my

I

am

able

because of lan-

is

now

to think farther

lineage, to the family stories of

men, back into the shadows when

all

Welsh-

Welsh were

the

(maybe

kings," back to the beginnings of writing

lo,-

ooo years), back to the beginnings of speech ("100,000 years, give or take 50,000"), cell biologist to talk

satisfied until

"We

are

back to

.

.

.

where? Ask

a

about memoir and he won't be

he gets back to the original bacterial

cell.

he concludes, "in the same family:

all,"

and voting

grasses, seagulls, fish, fleas

citizens of the

republic."

What

a trip

Lewis Thomas takes us on!

ney of unimaginable length oir of life

on

earth.

At

—nothing

am," he

here only a few

than a

says, "a

moments

sured, a juvenile species.

cells

member

known

as

our

moment

fossils,

mem-

Homo

of a fragile species,

as evolutionary

time

is

mea-

We are only tentatively set in

place, error-prone, at risk of fumbling, in real at the

jour-

the end, however, his thoughts

turn back to the collection of sapiens. "I

less

It is a

danger

of leaving behind only a thin layer of

radioactive at that."

Like every good practitioner of memoir, he has placed himself in context.

29]

RUSSELL BAKER

Life with

Mother

I'm primarily find

odd

it

a journalist, a

commercial writer, and

to be talking as a memoirist.

remembrance.

And

they take book form, are what

then

met" books. In

many what we But

in

call

I

I

whom

whom

terribly

was

men

—

think of as "and

at least celebrated

was not

met" book.

brate people I

I

my time as a journalist I have met

great

Growing Up

"and then

are for

the remembrances of journalists,

when I

Memoirs

I

men.

interested in doing an

My prime interest was to cele-

nobody had ever heard fond

of, for

of.

And

the most part, and

thought deserved to be known.

Why did I write this book? other day,

"What should

Library next week?"

why you

I

And

say

I

asked

when

she said,

I

my daughter the talk at the Public

"You should

say

thought you had something so interesting to

say that a large

number

of people

would want

to read

RUSSELL BAKER And

it."

I

said

I

people wo.uld want to read write a book that a

number

two very

My

feh

I

I

at birth.

the cradle, because

families.

of

it;

what

I'd

wanted was

to

had to write.

grew out of

It

my Hfe,

of things that had been happening in

perhaps starting

into

number

hadn't anticipated that any

The

father

a writer

I

was blessed from

had the good fortune to be born

I

large,

As

some people would say immense,

sort they don't

was one of

make anymore.

thirteen children, twelve of

whom were boys. My mother was one of nine children, seven of whom were boys. So I came into the world well equipped with uncles. if

Twenty

you count my uncle Emil and

of

them

—

Sister,

respectively.

What's more,

a lot of these uncles got married,

has provided

me

if

a healthy

and

supply of aunts.

you're destined to have a not very interesting

and

I

was so destined

going to be

you up

a

a writer,

chance to learn

—the next

is

to have a

a lot

is,

my uncle Harold, who

married Aunt Sally and Aunt

with

that

best thing,

if

huge family.

this

Now life

you're

It

gives

about humanity from close-

observation.

I

worry about people who get born nowadays,

cause they get born into such tiny families into

no family

at

all.

When

be-

—sometimes

you're the only pea in the

pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the

Hope Diamond. And

that encourages

you

too much. Getting into the habit of talking too

to talk

much [34

Life with

is

fine

if

Mother

you're destined to be a lawyer or a politician

or an entertainer. But

We

death.

realize this. life if

have

if

you're going to be a writer,

many

it's

nowadays who don't

writers

Writers have to cultivate the habit early in

of listening to people other than themselves.

you're born into a big family, as

well learn to

listen,

you much chance dozen aunts,

all

was, you might as

because they're not going to give

With twenty

to talk.

enough

old

I

And

uncles and a

to have earned the right to

speak whenever they wanted to open their mouths,

was not

there

demand

a great

for us three children to

put in our oar and to liven up the discussion. I've

of the

never been able to complete an accurate count

number

of cousins

I

have. But

the utmost degree. In addition to

I

first

have cousins to cousins,

second, third and fourth cousins, plus cousins times removed. to be

my

I

have

my

to be

cousins

who were

verted

I

cousins

have

born when else.

I

about the

why 35]

I

first

my

cousins

attention I

young

cite these battalions fertility

of

spent most of

was

di-

learned that the

Johns Hopkins lacrosse team

my first cousin Myrtle, him my great-grandcousin.

Now

many

who are old enough

Just recently

grandson of

makes

have

children. I'm constantly discovering

somewhere

star of the

and

parents,

enough

first

I

is

the great-

which

I

suppose

of relatives not to boast

my blood line, but to my childhood learning

illustrate

to listen.

RUSSELL BAKER

When

the grown-ups in a family that big said that

children were born to be seen and not heard, they

weren't just exercising the grown-up right to engage in picturesque speech and tired old maxims.

they trying to sion.

children's right to creative expres-

For them holding

of survival.

going to be off

stifle

and be

And

it

a writer: a

down the uproar was a question

was wonderful training

if

you

are

having to give up the right to show

childhood performer and

quietly watching

Nor were

just sit there,

and listening to the curious things

grown-ups did and

said.

Out of this experience, at least in my family, there grew a kind of home folklore tradition, which was sustained among those of us who had been children together a habit of reminiscent storytelling, whenever we got together, about what we remembered from childhood. About the lives, deeds, sayings and wisdom

—

of elders.

About

aunts, strangers

who

—

awful

as the

aunts, uncles, grandparents, great-

who would come

phrase always went

courting,

—put

women

up with an

lot.

Putting up with an awful lot was what

seemed

to

Lillian,

who was

do

in the days of

my

nearly eighty

for

Growing Up about

my

father, said,

my

childhood.

when

I

women

My cousin

interviewed her

mother's relationship with

"Well, Russell, people said Betty was

hard to get along with. But she had to put up with an

[36

Life with

awful

Mother

lot."

Indeed she

did.

had

I

my own stock of these

when

family tales and was fond,

dining out and the

wine was flowing

a little too generously, of telling the

company about

the

my

time

grandmother Baker

scolded a visiting delegation of the

Ku Klux

making

sheets.

a

mess of their mothers' bed

Klan

for

Or the time

the Jersey City cops arrested Uncle Jim for running a

away his shoelaces so he wouldn't try hang himself in the cell. With that many uncles you

red light and took to

had

a great variety of material.

My

editor,

these dinners a

Tom when

Congdon, was present I

was

me

it

was

antique time in a big family. as "the

it.

I

a

I

sand words was hardly

a year for

1960s

—

that

my

Tom

waters, something had

My

an it

a

newspaper

my job.

idea of

Spending

hundred thou-

amusement.

started stirring the creative

begun

to bother me.

To

wit,

children arrived at adolescence in the

slum of a decade

the vintage decades either.

—and the And

observe, as elderly folk usually do

37]

in

had no intention

leisure writing another couple of

middle age.

some

week, which meant grinding out

hundred thousand words

But long before

into

began referring to

was already turning out

column three times

my

He

them

after

growing up

like

growing up book." Of course

of writing

a

to put

few of

and

telling old stories,

while he began cajoling

kind of book about what

at a

I

1970s,

not one of

was dismayed

to

when the children hit

RUSSELL BAKER adolescence, that the values I'd been bred to cherish

and

my

live

by were now held

children's age.

in

What was

contempt by people of

even worse, those values

—remnants of the despicable,

were regarded

as squalid

social-political

system that

my

generation had con-

nived in creating for the suppression of freedom. It

seemed

to

me

that these views

found ignorance of

came out of

a pro-

Not uncommon among

history.

As I vaguely recalled from my own experience, adolescence was a time when you firmly believed that sex hadn't been invented until the year you started adolescents.

when

high school,

the very idea that anything interest-

ing might have happened during your parents' lifetime

was unthinkable. cent myself.

was

that

youth

I

I

knew

because

I

had been an adoles-

remembered how ludicrous

anybody could have

thought

it

tolerated spending their

in the dreary decades of

Woodrow Wilson

I

Theodore Roosevelt,

War

and World

I,

as

my

parents

had.

With my

children in this insufferable phase of

became harder and harder father

ought to speak to

them and undertook took

to speak

his children.

to advise

my

life it

with them

as a

When I corrected

them on how

to

do

example from the way things

things right,

I

were done

my days. Which produced a great deal of

in

invisible but nevertheless palpable sneering. Adoles-

cence was finishing

its

nasty

work

of turning

them

[38

Mother

Life with

from dear sweet children into the same ornery people

you meet every day

who

of people

behaving

you go through life. The kind on disagreeing with you. And

as

insist

like people.

In the hope of breaking through that communications blackout

For

a few.

I

letters that

I

tried writing a

I

different

from; to lived

letters to

bore the eyes right out of an adolescent. descriptions of

tried to

convey

to

my own

childhood, in

them some sense of how

and remote was the world that tell

them. Just

soon realized that these were the kind of

They were long which

few

them about

their

own

I

had come

forebears,

who had

and died before they were born, so they might

glean at least a hint that

life

was more than

journey from the diaper to the shroud. children to

know

that they

were part of

a single

wanted

I

a

my

long chain

of humanity extending deep into the past and that they

had some responsibility for extending

it

into the future.

Going through the carbons of some old correspondence recently, I was astonished to come across a couple of these letters that

I

had written the kids a long

time ago and to recognize long blocks of writing that

would appear again, not much changed, in Growing Up, which I wrote ten years later. And I realized that I'd

been writing that book to

Tom

children long before

Congdon heard me writing

dinner.

39]

my

it

over the wine

at

RUSSELL BAKER But what

book was what of

my

prompted the book

finally

mother

though every

came

I

—whose

circuit in

to

become

a

to think of as the living death

mind went out one day as the city had been blown. I was

Key West at the time; my sister Doris called me and told me what had happened, and I flew up to Baltimore in

and went

what to

I

my

to the hospital

was going

—completely unprepared

to encounter.

She was suffering from something

have since come to recognize derly folks but that

I

started talking

I

mother, and she was completely gone.

speechless.

tainly

And

I

as

very

was

I

that

common

I

to el-

had never seen before and cer-

my

had never thought would happen to

was so astonished

for

that

my

mother.

only reaction was to

taking notes on what she was saying.

I

start

had stopped

at

the hospital gift shop, as people sometimes do, to take

some knickknack up going to

find,

and

I

tore the paper bag

could write on the back of

it.

record of our conversation.

What I was I

stuffed

found

it

it

it

I

I

a

It's

on the back of

in a raincoat

many weeks

and again

And

forgot

it

Growing Up

—

that

I

making

a

reporter's reflex. I

instinctively

When

this bag.

I left

pocket and forgot about

later

and put

it

for a long time.

in a

it.

I

desk drawer

And

that turned

out to be the conversation that appears in the ter of

was

I

open so

started

hearing was so amazing that

began recording

what

to her, not realizing

first

chap-

that disjointed conversation.

[40

Mother

Life with

When I

was

what had happened

realized

I

in a kind of intellectual shock,

and

my

to I

mother

didn't

know

how to deal with it for a long time. Gradually it seemed to me that the way to deal with it was to write about two of us had passed through

the times that the gether.

And

reporter, I

I

began

that.

knew nothing about So

piece.

interviewed

many

—people nineties — about living

took

I

of

it; I

But being the good

how

had no concept of

I

magazine

do

to

only

my

to-

to write a

knew how

memoir.

to report a

tape recorder out and

I

my relatives, those who were still

in their eighties,

one or two

the family, things

I

in their

had never been

interested in before.

And my

doing the genealogy.

Who were these people? I had no

wife

Mimi and

notion of who they were or where they had

And

in the process

they were.

I

They were

began to learn people

I

began

come from.

how

interesting

who would be extremely

boring to read about in the newspaper, but they were fascinating.

notes.

I

And

I

transcribed

I

these interviews

and

reported everything very carefully: a long piece

of newspaper reportage.

what

all

wrote was

Then

a reporter's

I

started writing,

book

in

which

I

and

quoted

these elderly people talking about

what

was

like

long ago in that time and place.

was reporting

my

own

life

out of

it.

and, being the

And

because

good I

I

life

journalist, I

was uneasy about what had

always been an awkward relationship with

41]

kept myself

my mother

RUSSELL BAKER and because she wasn't there to her out of it

it.

And

wrote

I

a rather

ran to four hundred and

was very pleased with

I

my

and

editor and

it

testify for herself, I

I

sent

it

thought, "Well,

I

twenty-four hours to

up

sit

I

think

pages in manuscript.

fifty

and

long book.

kept

off to

my agent

night and read

all

them

give

I'll

it

and

phone me back tomorrow." You always have

they'll

that feeling of euphoria just about having finished any-

thing. Well, there

Nobody

the day after.

week

was no phone

call

the next day, nor

called the next

week, nor the

A month passed and nobody called. By

after that.

then

Tom Congdon had his own publishing company,

and

I

knew he was

"Tom

myself,

in financial trouble,

too busy trying to raise

is

And

bother reading this great manuscript." the drawer and forgot

Eventually

down

in

my

on about page thing

.

.

."

office

20.

But

Everything in

I

told

money

to

put

in

I

it

it.

began to sense that there was something

I

wrong, and one night sat

and

it

it

took

I

it

out of the drawer and

and started

And

I

to read.

thought, "If

I

nodded

off

can't read this

I

was an intensely responsible book.

was

correct, the quotations

were accu-

rate,

everything had been double-checked. Finally,

Tom,

in despair, asked for a conference.

worked together figured out to tell

for

how

somebody

any

editor,

I

Tom and I had

a long time, but he has never quite

to

tell

that a

me something whole book

is

is

no good, and

no good

is

tough

guess.

[42

Mother

Life with

But by

that time

had made

I

second judgment

a

myself that the book was in terrible shape and

what was wrong with were

it:

my mother wasn't in

I

it.

knew There

these interesting relatives, the uncles and the

all

aunts and people talking from the present about the old days, but

was

it

nothing but journalism

really

iscences of today about yesterday.

Tom and

I

book and

that

it

was

said that

book about

a

had lunch with

I

knew what was wrong with

I

would rewrite the whole

I

a

—remin-

boy and

thing.

his mother. It

I

the said

was about

the tension between a child and his mother, and every-

thing had to hinge on that

was

—

right

that

I

And Tom

that.

had made

thought

said he

a grievous mistake in

trying to write a book about myself in which

He

appear.

didn't realize the strength of the

character as

mother

did,

I

and

I

knew

I

Now and

I

told at

pass

to write

didn't

mother

brought the

if I

and made her the hinge on which everything

in

swung, the book would be book.

that

I

Tom

that's

one point

it

a story. It

what

Tom

gave

I

as a

intended to do.

I

on to any of you who

your memoir. As

would work

me

a piece of advice,

are tempted

say, I

had given

someday

Tom

this

manuscript of faithfully reported history of what people

remembered of the

written what

uncle Harold.

was famous

I

thought was It's

I

and a

and

'30s,

in

it

I

good chapter about

had

my

the one that begins: "Uncle Harold

for lying."

chapter because

43]

'20s

And

I

knew

that

"got" Uncle Harold

—

I

was

a

good

turned him

RUSSELL BAKER into a character.

man whose memory hved book

the

made

I

made him the me. At some point in

hadn't reported him;

I

inside

I

a conclusion about him:

I

said that

Uncle Harold, an uneducated and an unread man, was famous for being he

just

He

wanted

a great liar.

to be

life

lived a very dull

time

—and he

very well.

I

life

liked to

more

—he was

sent that page back to

that I

it,

at the

fiction.

me

at that

tell

them

way Uncle Harold achieving art

lie

And Tom Congdon

underlined in red, and he

honor Uncle Harold."

"I

time

I

I

knew, and that

though

it

Tom didn't

resolved to rewrite the book,

had been dishonest about

written,

but he didn't

liar;

was.

it

gravedigger

possibilities of

Well, the problem that

know

a

said that in his primitive

not in reporting, but in

really a

interesting than

tell stories,

had perceived that the

wrote on

But he wasn't

was

my mother. What I had

was accurate

to the extent that the

reporting was there, was dishonest because of what

had

left out. I

I

had been unwilling to write honestly.

And that dishonesty

left a

great hollow in the center of

the original book.

you when you really start to research something like this. I made a couple of well, my serendipitous discoveries. One was that

Funny

things happen to

.

mother kept ladies kept a life,

and

my

a trunk.

I

knew

that. All

.

.

good Southern

trunk that they carried with them through

mother was no exception.

When

she be-

[44

Mother

Life with

my

came incompetent,

took custody of this

sister

my sister has no interest in that sort of thing, and she called my younger son, who was a pack rat, and trunk, but

told

him

come over and

to

ested in out of

He was

1933,

inter-

He went

through the trunk and

among

other things, a series of love

had been sent to

my mother in the years 1932

he came back with,

and

was

it.

delighted.

letters that

take anything he

the depths of the Depression, by an immigrant

Dane named

Oluf.

I

love with this man.

mated love

affair

had never It

known

that she

was

in

was obviously an unconsum-

because he was away most of the time.

He moved to western Pennsylvania and they never saw each other after the most casual encounters.

Now

knew

I

that

what

I

about the Depression, and yet about dull

it.

knows the out any way to make

the Depression this

I

book.

I

it,

letters.

I

was the very essence of the

writing in terms of

my

They were

book

extremely

this interesting.

kept worrying about

went through

is

and

statistics,

handle the Depression chapter.

a

dreaded having to write

Writing about the Depression

—everybody

figure

was writing was

I

how

made

I

couldn't

And

yet

setting of

was going

to

several passes at

statistical reports.

Then my son

mother's trunk and found Oluf's almost illegible

—he wrote

in a frac-

tured English that was hard to read, in a big flowing script,

45]

and there were many of these

letters.

I

gave

RUSSELL BAKER them

my

to

"Read these and

said,

I

anything in them," and

there's

evening

when

"This

said,

wife.

got

I

home

if

went off to work. That

I

she was visibly moved. She

the story of a

is

me

tell

man who was

destroyed by

the Depression."

So

was

It I

read them, and

I

was

was the most moving

also delighted, because

of problems and

The second

prise call.

grinning.

it:

I

my

the Depression

Depres-

meant

to

my

mother.

came from

was

One summer day "You won't

my

son came in the yard

certificate.

March

was

sitting in the back-

guess what I've got," he

mother's marriage

I

was

I

And

of the year in

fifty-four years old

I

said. It

looked

which

and

I

I

at

was

realized

a love child.

Well, I

was moved,

serendipitous discovery that

in August.

was

had solved

some mysteries about

she was married in

born

I

chapter which cleared up a lot

a

yard sunning myself, and

my

while

story.

my mother's marriage certificate, which brought me in Nantucket. He paid me a sur-

that trunk

son

it

Here was what

one man. That made

was

And

a self-contained story.

sion problem.

my

it

was.

it

made me

And

it

mysteries that

also cleared I

hadn't been able to solve in the

version of the book.

mother (my deeply.

father's

Why my

more interesting than up a number of things

feel a little

Why my

mother and

my

first

grand-

mother) detested each other so

mother

left

that part of the

world so

[46

Life with

Mother

my father

rapidly after that he

was dead, she

and announced

died.

The morning

called her brother in

was going

that she

to

she learned

New Jersey

come

live

with

him. All of these things that had left

suddenly

fell

into place.

And

woman who was

thing

fell

Could

write this?

I

made

I

a story.

hadn't written

too,

why

relationship with

ultimately to be

into place,

utterly baffled

I realized,

my own

she had opposed so deeply the

then

me

my

The it

wife. Every-

question was,

in the book,

and

made that first book a lie. So, in revising, I determined I would write that story. I thought, "If I want it

to

my

honor

But

did

I

it

mother

in this

book

I

must be

truthful."

with great trepidation. Because you could

be accused of vulgarity, of airing dirty linen and ex-

your dying mother

ploiting

And

yet

So

I

body's

I felt

life

makes any it

stairs to

writing, I

to

commercial purposes.

dishonored her to it.

I

as

my

if

about

you're going to

well

it.

make

it

make

a

into a story.

am now going upmy life." And I started

wife, "I

invent the story of

on the days when

lie

decided that although no-

sense,

you might

remember saying

and

it

decided to do

book out of I

that

for

I

wasn't doing

rewrote that whole book

my column,

—almost

the entire

thing, with the exception of a couple of chapters

—

in

about six months. That was the book that was eventually published.

47]

RUSSELL BAKER But the it.

took the manuscript to

first I

my

Doris

sister

—

two of us had grown up together and had her read I anticipated that she was going to raise violent

objections to

my

mentioning the

had been pregnant before her marriage. thought that was

And

Mother.

you: that

And

she did

I

I

a disgraceful thing to publish

told her pretty

it

would make her

book, in which she might right.

And

"So be

it,"

worked cared.

Still, I

much what

my

plausible in this

anyhow, nowadays, no-

said Doris,

and we published.

was very worried about the public

God knows what was

mother

longer than most of us

live

that

about

I've just told

thought honesty would serve

best in the long run;

body

mother

but not violently. Rationally, she said she

object,

if it

my

fact that

reaction.

going to happen about

that. I

worried about that more than about anything

else in

the book.

And I remember being deeply moved the day

the Wall Street Journal ran

Michael Gartner.

The

first

its

review, which was by

sentence began: "Russell

Baker's mother, a miraculous

woman

." .

.

Q. What were the reactions of your children? A.

I

don't know. Although

we

are very close to our

children, there are certain things children don't their parents.

The

children liked the book, surely.

they were proud of

it, I

think.

tell

And

My daughter, our oldest, [48

Life with

said she

Mother

was

her grandmother,

was

it

gave her

whom she had only known when she

a baby.

Q^ is

book because

grateful for the

How

much

of your book

is

truthful

and how much

good writing? A. Well,

that has certain things in

thing that

phy.

The

is

A

the incidents are truthful.

all

common

autobiographical

is

biographer's problem

with

book

like

Any-

fiction.

the opposite of biograis

that he never

knows

The autobiographer's problem is that he knows much too much. He knows absolutely everyenough.

knows the whole iceberg, not just the tip. I mean, Henry James knew all the things that have puzzled Leon Edel for years; he knew what that tragic thing; he

moment was

about yourself, the problem I

just left

it

is

what

out almost everything

half a percent in that book.

thing;

So when you're writing

that happened.

would be

But the incidents

like

—

And

to leave out.

there's only about

You wouldn't want

every-

reading the Congressional Record.

that are in the book, of course they

happened.

For example, father's death, said,

happen

the curtain

49]

account of the day of my

which occurred when

"How could you

That was the to

there's a long

first

as if I

have

thing

was

I

known

I

was

that?"

five. I

People

knew

that.

knew. That whole day began

sitting in the theater of life

was going up.

It

was the

start of

my

and

life. I

RUSSELL BAKER can

Still

hear people talking that day.

I

know what

the

know what people's faces looked like. How they were dressed. What they were eating. Don't ask me what I did yesterday I'd have to look in my air

smelled

like. I

—

diary

book Q^

—but

knew.

that I

I

didn't

do anything

in the

that wasn't right.

How did you decide what to put in and what to leave

out?

A.

I

decided that the story line was the mother and

the son: this extremely strong

There

and weak male.

women in the book—the grandmother and the woman that the son mar-

are three strong

mother, the ries at the

end

these various figure.

woman

I

—and

it's

the story of the tension that

women put on each other and on the male

don't have a lot in the book that doesn't con-

tribute to that point of

view of what the story material

was.

Q^ I wanted to ask you about another woman that I found unforgettable: your wife. Was she version as she

was

the business about

saw her

that to

I

—she was

my

didn't

make

in the first

in the book that I read?

A. She didn't appear in the

need Mimi.

in the book

version. Because of

mother and

want

the

first

to

my

go that

book an

birth, I didn't

far.

integral

But

work

I I

finally

needed

the logical completion of the series of

events that started with material because

it

my

birth. I

was material

hated to use the

for another

book

that

[50

Life with

Mother

I'd often

thought of writing.

And

I

threw

away

it

in

ten or fifteen thousand words.

Mimi was a good sport, though. When I

thought the book needed

told her that

I

she was very support-

this,

"Do you mind if I write about "No, go ahead." And I interviewed

and she

ive. I said,

it?"

said,

her just the

way

I

She

lied like a politician.

did everybody

She was

else.

But

a terrible interview.

interviewed her and

I

went up and wrote those concluding

went very

quickly.

And

said,

"Read through

want

cut,

thought it

more

I

I'll

cut

had

it."

left

interesting.

it,

I

brought

and

it

to her finally

Well, after reading

it

she said she

out certain events that would make I

"Look, I'm

a writer

tive material

—

sion

was not

to

was

sort of

shocked

who's used

at

some of the

book

one, took

add

all

to the

afternoon.

with sensi-

we

got the

first

copies of

and Mimi immediately grabbed

bedroom, closed the door and read

When

she

came out she looked

"Well, what do you think?"

I

said to her,

"That's what they always say,"

I

appalled.

and she

"It looks different in print."

51]

said,

a thing.

in the mail, it

to dealing

I

me make the decision." And my deci-

Well, after several months the

and

anything you

things she suggested ought to be added, and

let

They

chapters.

there's

if

I

told her.

said,

ANNIE DILLARD

To Fashion

a Text

I'm here because I'm writing a book called An American

which

Childhood,

is

any account, usually that

and

happened it

isn't

a

memoir

a

—insofar

as a

memoir

is

in the first person, of incidents

while ago.

"memoirs."

I

It isn't

an autobiography,

wouldn't dream of writing

memoirs; I'm only forty years

old.

Or my

my

autobiogra-

phy; any chronology of my days would make very dull reading

—

book or

I've spent

a desk.

about thirty years behind either a

The book that I'm writing is an account

of a childhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,

grew

where

I

up.

The best memoirs, I think, forge their own forms. The writer of any work, and particularly any nonfiction work, in

must decide two

and what

So

I

crucial points:

what

to put

to leave out.

thought,

"What

shall I

put in?" Well, what

is

ANNIE DILLARD the

book about? An American Childhood

passion of childhood. originality,

about the

is

about a child's vigor, and

It's

and eagerness, and mastery, and

It's

about waking up.

again,

and notices that

loving the exuberant

joy.

A child wakes up over and over she's living.

life

She dreams along,

of the senses, in love with

—and then sud-

beauty and power, oblivious of herself denly, bingo, she wakes notices her set

down

own

up and

And

awareness.

she notices that she

here, mysteriously, in a going world.

world

is

collect

and enjoy.

full

She

feels herself alive.

is

The

of fascinating information that she can

And the world is public;

its

issues are

moral and historical ones.

So the book

—

is

about two things: a child's interior

vivid, superstitious

and timeless

ing awareness of the world. the

book

own

is

from the

The

idiosyncratic topography

—

sees

child pinches the skin

where God made

painter.

Adam

city's bridges,

yet, she

and

—one

brain's

American land-

common

from

on

as a detective, or

Older

motion of

history.

The

on the back of her hand and

older child explores the city

on her future

structural

to the

grow-

a child's

interior landscape

scape, the vast setting of our little

—and

life

foot

spit

and

and

clay.

starts to

The work

an epidemiologist, or a

runs wild and restless over the

finds in

Old Testament poetry and

French symbolist poetry some language sounds she loves.

56

To Fashion a Text

The

interior life

trombone.

above; and

The

It

every hour like

below;

and

too,

itself,

scales

down

dreams

notices

it

in constant vertical motion; con-

up and down the

sciousness runs a slide

is

its

it

notices

own

up

alertness.

motion of consciousness, from inside

vertical

outside and back, interests me. I've written about

once before,

wanted For

to

do more with

simply

I

years ago, while in

Maine,

tive,

cause

I

I

was walking

thought

I

could make

it all

it

on the

because

I

decided to write

around

—

a prose narra-

this

it

do what

I

wanted, and

coast of Maine.

fifties.

it

I

decided

man,

first

was Pilgrim

whole shebang

of writing about myself.

in Vir-

Then I man. Not

Virginia.

chapter and showed

at Tinker Creek

— did

I

in the first person as a

I

I

a

A month or so later

in the first person, as a

wasn't out to deceive people;

57]

Acadia National Park

knew more about

up the pretext of writing I

in

set the

had written the

—

About twelve

in the third person, about a

decided reluctantly to

I

at

to write prose. After a week's

sort of metaphysician, in his

until

—almost

decided to write mostly about nature, be-

decided to set

ginia,

I

aside, this isn't as evident as

like to write books.

wanted

I

further to write

I

picked

decided to write a narrative

because

thought

I

I

I

it

it.

—my own. As an

may seem.

and

a solar eclipse,

a private interior life, I've

random it

an essay about

in

to

it

give

man.

just didn't like the idea

knew

I

wasn't the subject.

ANNIE DILLARD So

own was

in this book, for simplicity's sake, I've got

interior

myself. I

I

it

—

loved to

put in what

it

feel its

a baseball

many

I

life

in

things in

put in what

it

ball fly off as if

it

I

found

their force.

throw

at the target

were your own head.

my

drawing pencil studies of

baseball mitt

and fooling around with

lecting insects

all

feels like to

—you aim your whole body

watch the

which

play with the skin on your

feels like to

mother's knuckles.

in

my

put in what

I

had

loved the power of the

I

fall.

a lively one.

me so excited all the time the sensation pelting me as if I were standing under a water-

that

of time

was

life. It

I

and

and put col-

a microscope.

my study on Cape Cod, where I write, I've stuck above my desk a big photograph of a little Amazonian In

boy whose

face

White water

is

is

sticking out of a waterfall or a rapids.

pounding

of wreath, but his face

and

his black eyes are

That

little

boy

is

I

think he

around

his head, in a

absolutely

still,

distance.

alive; he's letting

on him. He's having

knows

it.

kind

looking up,

open dreamily on the

completely

tery of existence beat

hood, and

is

all

the mys-

his child-

And I think he will come

out of the water strong, and ready to do some good. see this

photograph whenever

I

look up from

I

my com-

puter screen.

moment of waking up and noticing that you've been put down in a world that's already under way. The rushing of time wakes you: you play So

I

put in that

[58

To Fashion

a Text

along mindless and eternal on the kitchen

time streams in

flood beside

full

down

rages beside you,

wakes you you're so

When you wake "Here," in

my

its

you

you

when

It it

fall in.

notice that you're here.

was Pittsburgh.

case,

and

the floor.

swollen banks, and

startled

up,

you on

floor,

put in the

I

The Allegheny from

three rivers that meet here.

the

north and the Monongahela from the south converge to

form the Ohio, the major tributary of the

Mississippi,

which, in turn, drains the whole continent east of the divide via the Missouri River rising in the

Mountains.

The

Rocky

great chain of the Alleghenies kept

pioneers out of Pittsburgh until the 1760s, one hundred

and I

fifty

years after Jamestown.

put in those forested mountains and

way

the three rivers

lie flat

and the way the low land the

way

hills,

and the

and moving among them,

lies

wooded among them, and

the blunt mountains rise in the darkness from

the rivers' banks. I

put in Lake Erie, and summers along

New

its

mild shore.

home of Dixieland jazz, where my father was heading when he jumped in his boat one day to go down the river like Huck Finn. I

put in

I

the

Orleans, the

put in the pioneers

who

"broke wilderness," and

romance of the French and Indian Wars

tered around Fort

59]

Duquesne and Fort

Pitt. I

that cen-

put in the

ANNIE DILLARD brawling rivermen I

—the flatboatmen and keelboatmen.

put in the old Scotch-Irish families

Pittsburgh and always have. Irish,

I

The Mellons

are Scotch-

and so were Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay They're

Frick.

world

who dominate

—

think

Presbyterians.

all

at the lunatic fringe of

it's

important.

I

think

—that mixture of piety and

it

—and

it's

fascinates me.

American

acquisitiveness, that love of

think

I

in this

I

—

just like the

Mas-

can make a case that

on American thought was greater than

their influence

the Puritans'.

—and

it

peculiarly

work. They're Calvinists, of course sachusetts Puritans

grew up

I

There were

byterians, after

far

and they

all,

more Scotch-Irish

settled

all

Pres-

over the Ameri-

can colonies and carried their democracy and pragmatism with them. In Pittsburgh the Scotch-Irish constitute a world of

many

families

whose forebears knew each

respect each other's discretion and

who

withdrawn, the

their world; they

women

all

are ironic.

who

admire each

fuss.

The men

They

believe in

and

their chil-

other for occupying their slots without are

other,

stay in Pittsburgh,

am escaped to tell thee. I and David McCuUough, who grew up a few houses away. And James Laughlin, the publisher. All of us Pittsdren stay there.

alone

I

burgh Scotch-Irish Presbyterians.

in

My

sisters

An

American Childhood.

and

I

grew up I

in this world,

and

I

put

it

put in our private school

[60

To Fashion a Text

and quiet club and hushed neighborhood where the houses were stone and their roofs were

dancing with at the

little

boys

at

put in

slate. I

dancing school, and looking

backs of their interesting necks at Presbyterian

church. Just to

make

mother used

trouble,

to tell

me

I

My

put in money.

never to touch

grand-

money with my

bare hands.

put in books, for

I

with an essay

I

that's

interests,

and

all

as

I

doing

my many

work

passionate

made

to

my-

the world

for Scotland Yard,

in freshwater streams, rock collecting

in the salt desert, painting in Paris.

me

I

me away from

dreamed about working field

started,

York Times Magazine

many vows

Nonfiction books lured

self.

of

book

this

my many changes of mind, came through

books. Books prompted the

—

New

wrote for the

on reading books. Almost

where

back into the world

—because

And novels dragged I

would read what-

ever was handy, and what was handy in those years

were novels about the Second World War.

I

read so

many books about the Second World War that I knew how to man a minesweeper before I knew how to walk in high heels. You couldn't read much about the war without figuring out that the world was that required I

a

moral arena

your strength.

had the notion back then that everything was

inter-

Now,

writ-

esting

6i]

if

you

just learned

enough about

it.

ANNIE DILLARD ing about

it, I

have the pleasure of learning

and finding that

it is

interesting. I get to

and any readers about such esoterica

which

I

as

it all

again

inform myself

rock collecting,

hadn't thought about in almost thirty years.

When I was twelve a paperboy gave me two grocery bags

full

of rock and mineral chunks.

At

of a year to identify them.

cards of

what they

a

took

It

museum shop

me most I

bought

And I people who

thumbnail specimens.

called

read books about a fairly absurd batch of

called themselves rockhounds; they spent their even-

ings in the basement sawing

wavy

slices suitable,

Now, mance that

in this

they

memoir,

up

slabs of travertine into

wall hangings.

said, for I

get to recall

where the

ro-

of rock collecting had lain: the symbolic sense

underneath the dreary highways, underneath

Pittsburgh,

were canyons of

find treasure

reading

I

crystals

—

that

you could

by prying open the landscape. In

my

learned that people have cracked knobs of

granite and laid bare clusters of red garnets and topaz

spudomene and emerald. They hands crystals that had hung in a hole in

crystals, chrysoberyl,

held in their

the dark for a billion years unseen. that. I

would lay about me

and bash the landscape to crust like a piiiata

right

bits. I

and spread

to the light. That's

what

I

and

I

liked the idea of

left

with

a

hammer

would crack the

earth's

vivid prizes in

chunks

its

wanted

to do.

So

I

put that

in.

[62

To Fashion a Text also a great pleasure to write

It's

about

because they're both great storytellers tually

—which gives me

stories.

We

were

all

chance to

a

young,

my

—comedians,

tell

their

ac-

wonderful

our house, and

at

parents,

we

en-

joyed ourselves.

My

was

father

a

dreamer; he lived differently from

men around him. One day he abruptly quit family firm when I was ten and took off down other

—

the

by himself

to search out the roots

—

Ohio River of jazz in

in a boat

New

He came

Orleans.

back after several

months and withdrew from corporate

knew

the

the world well

—

all

life

forever.

sort of things,

He

which he

how people build bridge pilings in the middle of a river, how jazz came up the river to be educated in Chicago, how the pioneers made their way westward from Pittsburgh, down the Ohio taught us to take an interest

River, sitting

"Bang Away,

My

on the tops of

My

their barges

a thinker

and what one might

she lay on the beach with friends and

found the conversation push with her heel and

would give a little away. People were stunned.

dull,

roll

she

She rolled deadpan and apparently arms and

legs

distant water's

and singing

Lulu."

mother was both

call a card. If

in:

extended

tidily,

down

edge where she lay

effortlessly,

her

the beach to the

at ease just as

she had

been, but half in the surf, and well out of earshot. She

was not only

63]

a card but a wild card, a force for disorder.

ANNIE DILLARD She regarded even tiny babies

hked

to step

gown, so

men, and

as straight

on the drawstring of

a

crawhng baby's

baby crawled and crawled and never

that the

got anywhere except into a

little ball at

the top of the

gown. She was interested I

were

father

in the kitchen listening to a ballgame

rates playing the utility

Once my

in language.

infielder

New

—the

and Pi-

York Giants. The Giants had

named Wayne

a

Terwilliger. Just as

Mother walked through the kitchen, the announcer said,

and said,

"Terwilliger bunts one." Mother stopped dead

"What was that? Was that English?" Father "The man's name is Terwilliger. He bunted."

said,

Mother thought

that

was

twelve years she made her own.

If

terrific.

For the next ten or

this surprising string of syllables

she was testing a microphone, or

pretending to whisper a secret in "Terwilliger bunts one."

my

if

she was

she said,

ear,

she had ever had an occa-

If

sion to create a motto for a coat of arms, as

Andrew

Carnegie had, her motto would have been "Terwilliger bunts one." Carnegie's was "Death to privilege."

These

fine parents taught

courage, insofar as to

dance

partner,

all

we

have

my

it,

sisters

and

me

moral

and tolerance, and

how

night without dragging your arms on your

and

how

to time the telling of a joke.

by writing this book, not only about writing but about American history. Eastern woodland I've learned a lot

64

To Fashion a Text

many more

Indians killed

By

did.

the time settlers

than plains Indians

settlers

made

it

to Sioux

and Apache

country those Indians had been so weakened by disease

and by

much

with the army that they didn't have

battles

fight left in

them.

sylvania forests and in

was the

It

settlers in the

Penn-

Maryland and Virginia who

kept getting massacred and burned out and taken cap-

and tortured. During the four years the French

tive

held Pittsburgh

at

them out from

ans and sent

English-speaking Irish,

Fort Duquesne they armed the Indithere, raiding

if

killing

These were mostly Scotch-

settlers.

because the Penn family

sylvania only

and

let

them

they would serve

between Quakers and Indians.

settle in

Penn-

as a "buffer sect"

When

the English held

Pittsburgh at Fort Pitt they gave the Indians unwashed blankets from the smallpox hospital. I

put in early industry, because

interesting.

Before there was

made out

wrought iron

Railroad

of

ties

iron

is

all

made by

steel,

—which

I

Men

had

you

everything was

find just amazing.

to carry

iron, as

if

they

wrought iron

up and down the country. Wrought iron puddlers,

who

puddlers' union, the Sons of Vulcan. process:

was unexpectedly

were made out of wrought

were candle sconces. railroad ties

it

stir slag

skilled labor because

belong to the iron It's

a

very

back into iron, and

it

difficult

requires

carbon monoxide bubbles up.

The

To sinter, for instance, is to convert flu dust to clinker. And I finally learned what coke language

65]

is

also nice.

ANNIE DILL ARD is.

a

When

was

I

a child I

thought that Coca-Cola was

by-product of steelmaking. I

learned about the heyday of the big industrialists

and the endless paradox of Andrew Carnegie, the only one of the great American moguls

who

not only read

books but actually wrote them, including one with very American Steel to

J.

man who

P.

title.

a

He sold U.S. and he said, "A He gave away

The Gospel of Wealth.

Morgan

for $492 milhon,

dies rich dies disgraced."

ninety percent of his fortune in the few years he had left.

While he was giving away money, many people

were moved, understandably,

to write

admirer

God P.S.

to be in prosperity.

a dollar

&

a half to

will bless you.

I

feel

it.

It said:

a

hymn-book with?

know

it.

Don't send the hymn-book, send the money.

Carnegie was only

weighed

133

pounds.

five feet three

He

and museums and an

built the

inches

workers

art gallery at the

at

tall.

He

free libraries

same time

he had them working sixteen hours a day,

week,

He

Could you lend an

buy I

letters.

Mark Twain.

got one such letter from his friend

You seem

him

six

subhuman wages, and drinking water

that

days a full

of

typhoid and cholera because he and the other business

owners opposed municipal works plants.

By

like

water

filtration

1906 Pittsburgh had the highest death rate in

[66

To Fashion a Text the nation because of wretched Hving conditions, and

yet

it

was the

seat of

weahh beyond

"weahh beyond computation,

imagination." People built stables for

with gold mirrors in the

their horses

stalls.

Scotch-Irish families were horrified at the

The old new mil-

who popped up around this time because they things pretty quiet. One new millionaire went to

lionaires

liked

a barber

on Penn Avenue

for his

first

shampoo and the

barber reported that the washing brought out "two

ounces of

fine

Mesabi ore and

a scattering of slag

and

cinders."

And what

to leave out?

Well, I'm not writing social history. This of those books in the

titles

TV

on the

radio.

want

names

the

I

don't like

all that.

to direct the reader's attention in equal parts to

—

the text

as a

formal object

interesting place in

The

—and

which we

So another thing myself.

Or

programs, or advertising slogans or

product names or clothing fashions. I

not one

which you may read the lyrics or even

of popular songs

of radio and

is

I left

to the world, as an

find ourselves.

out, as far as I could,

was

personal pronoun can be the subject of the

verb: "I see this,

I

did that." But not the object of the

verb: "I analyze me,

I

discuss me,

I

describe me,

I

quote

me. In the course of writing this

67]

memoir

I've learned all

ANNIE DILLARD about myself and

sorts of things, quite inadvertently,

various relationships. But these things are not impor-

book and

tant to the

subject of the follow.

book

them

easily leave

out. Since the

not me, other omissions naturally

many

leave out

I

is

I

things that were important to

my life but of no concern for the present book, summer I

spent in

Wyoming when I was fifteen.

the action in Pittsburgh;

body

off to

about a

and I

Wyoming

my summer

memoir not say,

to

like the

see

I

just

because

vacation.

hang on the

"And then

I

no reason

to drag every-

want

I

You have

keep

I

them

to tell

to take pains in

reader's arm, like a drunk,

did this and

it

was so

interesting."

don't write for that reason.

On

the other hand,

I

dig deeply into the exuberant

heart of a child and the restless, violent heart of an

adolescent

—and

I

was

that child

and

I

was

that adoles-

cent. I

leave out

young men.

I

my

private involvement with various

didn't

want

to kiss

and

tell. I

did put in

several sections, however, about boys in general

the fascination they exerted.

crowd most

and

ran around with one

I

of older boys so decadent, so accustomed to the

glittering of social lives, that

with him

one of them carried

at all times, in his jacket pocket, a canister of

dance wax so that he could be ready for anything.

Other boys carry Swiss sions

wax

Army

knives for those occa-

which occur unexpectedly; for the

same reason.

He

this

could

boy carried dance just sprinkle

it

on

[68

To Fashion a Text

room

the dining

floor

and take you

in his

arms and

whirl you away. These were the sort of boys

they had

worn

from the moment

ties

their

I

knew;

mothers

could locate their necks. I

family.

My

watching about

is

parents are quite young.

book

this

alive

and

carefully.

My

my

sisters are

Everybody I'm writing

well, in full possession of his faculties,

and possibly willing I

anything that might trouble

tried to leave out

Things were simpler when

to sue.

wrote about muskrats.

Writing

in the first person can trap the writer into

When

airing grievances.

taught writing

I

of time trying to convince literature

is

an

art, it's

young

I

spent a lot

writers that, while

not a martial art

—

that the pages

of a short story or a novel are no place to defend yourself

from an

attack, real or imagined,

which to launch an the very people

and no place from

attack, particularly

who

an attack against

painstakingly reared

you

to

your

present omniscience. I

have no temptation to

no grievances

left.

air

grievances; in fact,

Unfortunately,

I

seem

I

have

to have writ-

my impassioned adolescence so convincingly that my parents (after reading that section of my book) think I still feel that way. It's a problem that ten the story of

I

have to solve

parents and I

—one of many

my

youngest

have to handle

As

it

My

sister still live in Pittsburgh;

with tongs.

a result of all of this, I've

69]

in this delicate area.

promised

my family that

ANNIE DILLARD each

may

pass

on the book.

promised to take out

I've

anything that anyone objects to

When burgh

was growing up

I

society,

and

any other world

I

I

find.

throw myself

to

But

I

guess

my family may think that I

because

at

I

know

who

writer

a

and

his short stories

all

his

mother

father

is

confuse them with

still

pleases

them

but

I'll

a writer's

make

all

advice to

memoir

that better yet.

for the

They

memoir

writers

same reason

to preserve

memories

they

as

that

by

You

It's a

named peo-

don't believe in

embark upon

Don't hope If

you

means avoid

it is

your

a certain

prize

in a

your

—eschew way

to lose

memoir without canniparts. The work battens on them.

matter of writing's vividness for the writer.

you spend

a

can't put together a

own life for your memories. And it replaces balizing

I

you would embark on

a text.

all

writing a memoir. Because

them.

to

is

your memories.

are,

had,

can't defend themselves.

any other book: to fashion

memoir

I

all

I

who don't have access

kicking around people

to a printing press.

My

both, because

pleased to see his father look bad and his

thought, nothing but good to say about ple,

'50s.

cruelly sticks his parents into

pleased to see his mother look bad.

is

into

can't say so,

conventional Pittsburgh society people in the I

all.

didn't really take to Pitts-

I

was happy

could

—anything

a

couple of days writing

a tricky

If

paragraph,

[70

To Fashion a Text

and

if

you spend

a

week

or two laying out a scene or

more time writing

describing an event, you've spent

about

it

than you did living

much more

it.

The

writing time

is

also

intense.

After you've written, you can no longer remember

anything but the writing. However true you make that writing, you've created a monster. This has

me many, many

to

happened

times, because I'm willing to turn

events into pieces of paper. After I've written about any experience,

my

memories

—those —

patches of color and feeling replaced by the work.

on the doorstep baby rather

like

elusive,

are gone; they've

The work

is

—not your baby

it,

fragmentary

different in

a sort of

changeling

but someone

some way

been

that

you

else's

can't

pinpoint, and yours has vanished.

Memory Your batch

memory

is

of snapshots will both

fix

from your

The

You

trip except this

painting

will forever alter the

can't

and ruin your

remember anything

wretched collection of snap-

you did

of the light

on the water

way you see the light on the water;

so will looking at Flemish paintings. If

you describe

dream you'll notice that at the end of the verbal tion you've lost the tion.

up

it.

of your travels, or your childhood, or your

children's childhood.

shots.

Things keep replacing

insubstantial.

You have

dream but gained

descrip-

a verbal descrip-

to like verbal descriptions a lot to keep

this sort of thing. I like verbal descriptions a lot.

71

a

ANNIE DILLARD

me

Let

put in a word

genre: literary nonfiction. I

try to write

it

now

It's

and because

for a

misunderstood

interesting to

me because

respect the art of

I

it

very

much. I

like to

aware of

want it.

I

tion

be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and

its

structure as a product of mind, and yet

to be able to see the represented

admire

artists

more or

books and the

who

I

world through

succeed in dividing

my

atten-

evenly between the world of their

less

we might Henry James and Herman

art of their books. In fiction

say that the masters are

Melville. In nonfiction the writer usually just points to

the world and says, "This

Lincoln. This

is

its

own

make

also

and crafted works of

of his

work an

may

original

study the

well as the world that

it

de-

of nonfiction can be coherent

literature.

not simply that they're carefully written, or vivid

and serious and pleasing, say, or St. tion,

biography of Abraham

right, so that a reader

work with pleasure as scribes. That is, works It's

a

what Abraham Lincoln was about."

But the writer may object in

is

like Boswell's Life of Johnson,

Exupery's wonderful memoir of early avia-

Wind, Sand, and

Stars. It's

not even that they

may

contain elements of fiction, that their action reveals itself in

scenes that use visual descriptions and that

often use dialogue.

It's

not

just these things,

although

[72

To Fashion a Text these things are important.

may

be Kterary insofar

as the parts of their structures

cohere internally, insofar the sake of the

work

that nonfiction accounts

It's

as the things are in

itself,

and insofar

exists in the service of idea. (It

is

as the

them

for

work itself

especially helpful

if

the writer so fully expresses the idea in materials that

only a trained technician can find stract structure of a

to the writer

given

text,

Because the ab-

it.

which

is

of great interest

and serves to rouse him out of bed

morning and impel him

to the desk,

is

of

little

in the

or no

and he'd better not forget

interest to the reader,

it.)

Nonfiction accounts don't ordinarily meet these teria,

but they may. Walden Pond

is

cri-

the linchpin of a

metaphysic. In repeated and self-conscious rewritings

Thoreau hammered

at

its

unremarkable and rather

dreary acres until they fastened eternity in time and stood for the notion that the physical world presses a metaphysical one.

and ran with

it.

something

—

do quite

else

a bit

He

He

itself

ex-

picked up that pond

could just as readily have used

a friend, say, or a chestnut.

You can

with language.

Hemingway

in Green Hills of Africa

narrative account of killing a kudu, the

wrote

a sober

whole of which

functions as an elaborate metaphor for internal quests

and conquests. Loren Eiseley with

a trowel, splashing

they hold. In his essay

73

lays in narrative

mortar

all

symbols

over the place, but

"The Star-Thrower,"

Eiseley's

ANNIE DILLARD beachcomber who throws dying surf stands for

any hope or mercy that

of harsh natural law.

gant

He

back into the

flies

in the face

stands finally for the extrava-

behind creation

spirit

starfish

as a

whole; he

is

god

a

hurling solar systems into the void. I

my

only want to remind

great deal can be

done

writing colleagues that a

in nonfiction, especially in first-

person accounts where the writer controls the materials absolutely. Because other literary genres are shrinking.

Poetry has purified erary fiction

be

like

fiction

can do

and

art.

All that the

is

its

to

map and

is

up your own form every

I

sur-

most engage

literary nonfiction

is all

over

has been for three hundred years. There's

forbidden, no structure

I

book he has

narrow

subject matter to such

nothing you can't do with

When

writer of

"Good idea." going the way of

some extent

our hearts and minds. But

getting to

is

can't handle the things that

it

it's

unknown

that his friends can say

all

poetry, limiting

the

—

to tell his friends about the

is

short story

faces that

right out of the ballpark. Lit-

scarcely being published

conceptual

written,

The

is

itself

it.

No

proscribed.

You

get to

is

make

time.

gave up writing poetry

had devoted

subject matter

fifteen years to the

I

was very study of

sad, for

how

the

poems carry meaning. But I was delighted nonfiction prose can also carry meaning in

structures of to find that its

structures and, like poetry, can tolerate

all

sorts of

[74

To Fashion a Text

and even

figurative language, as well as alliteration

rhyme. The range of rhythms grander than

it is

and

in poetry,

and plain information

ideas

it

as

can do everything.

story. It

in prose

I

is

larger

and

can handle discursive

well as character and felt as

though

switched from a single reed instrument to a

had

I

orches-

full

tra.

me common Let

close with a

notion

word about

that

peculiarity of writers

process. There's a

self-discipline

—

freakish

a

is

that writers differ

from other

people by possessing enormous and equal portions of talent

and willpower. They

and go into

their

little

grit their

rooms.

powerful teeth

think that's a bad mis-

I

understanding of what impels the writer. the writer

is

a

about in sentences

powerful

thing.

You

impels

deep love for and respect for language,

for literary forms, for books.

off a

What

morning.

all

effect,

don't do

It's a

it

or to

privilege to

It's a

tell

challenge to bring

the truth about some-

from willpower; you do

an abiding passion for the

field.

muck

I'm sure

it's

it

from

the

same

in every other field.

Writing has very

a

book

little

to

is

like rearing children

do with

it.

If

you have

crying in the middle of the night, and

if

—willpower a little

baby

you depend

only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve.

75]

You do

it

out of love. Will-

ANNIE DILLARD power

is

a

weak

idea; love

is

strong.

You

don't have to

scourge yourself with a cat-o'-nine-tails to go to the baby.

You go

to the

baby out of love for that particular

baby. That's the same

way you go to your desk. There's

nothing freakish about

something

human

isn't

nature.

it.

Caring passionately about

against nature,

It's

and

what we're here

it

isn't

against

to do.

[76

ALFRED KAZIN

The

Fast Breaks

Out

A

Walker

memory

published in

in the City,

of

boyhood

Brooklyn, began Hitler's war,

was

as

1951 as a

in the Brownsville district of

something

over,

I

else.

When

the war,

returned from wartime report-

ing in England to find that there was no in

sensory

room

for

me

New York except in a ramshackle painter's studio on

Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights, indifferently left to

me when

commercial

art.

the painter

He

which consisted of series of

clenched

even

The house

left

me

to big

money

camp

in

his old paintings,

violently colored images, a

concentration fists

moved on

whole

prisoners standing with

behind barbed wire. itself

had seen better days. The greasy,

spattered front steps, just off the Chinese in the basement, led into

hand laundry

what must have been the

vestibule of a traditionally stately

Brooklyn Heights

ALFRED KAZIN mansion. Despite the metal shields holding up the battered front door,

you could

a beautiful door, like the

old brownstones Street

and the other

it

many beautiful

streets

had once been doors of grand

Columbia Heights, Hicks

lining

still

see that

veering toward the harbor

and Brooklyn Bridge. a

poor way

street, just

above the

Pineapple Street, just off Fulton, was in just then,

and so was

I.

Across the

garbage cans put out by the local coffeeshop, hung the lopsided bronze plaque put up by the Authors League

commemorating

the exact site

where

in

1851

Walt

Whitman himself helped put Leaves of Grass into type. Whenever I went up to my top floor studio I could smell the remains of

once been

a fire.

two rooms on

The

some ancient smoke. There had building

still

smelled of

fire.

My

the top floor had obviously been cut out

of something larger, and despite the makeshift wall

between the Puerto Rican carpenter next door and

woke me every morning when Pineapple was still dark just by the racket he made on the

myself, he Street

other side of the wall getting himself ready to leave for

work. I

would

lie

in

bed listening to tugs hooting three

blocks away; the harbor was it

rained,

my

all

around me, and, when

windows were The floors went every

painter's great north

awash with foggy

sea light.

which way, but there was

a skylight; the place

was

full

[80

The Past Breaks Out

of light.

The

evenings were lonely and even a

room staring colored concentration camp prisoners, on

terrible as I lay at the violently

a

couch

grim behind barbed wire. paintings, but

Much

as I

little

would not

I

in the other

had no respect for these

take

them down.

had always loved the neighboring

streets

and walking the promenade below Columbia Heights, with of

its full

view of

New York,

I

ment had come

bridge of bridges and the port

was unsure of everything

into

A

else.

mo-

my life, as can happen to men after

when only the opening of Dante's Inferno spoke

thirty,

to

the

my

condition: "In the middle of our

myself in a dark wood, for the straight

A marriage

had broken

down

would never be over

I

was

still

for me.

found

I

way was

during the war;

not recovered. Hitler and his war had it

life,

come

On April

15,

to

lost." I

had

an end;

1945,

when

reporting political discussion groups in the

Army, a British detachment in the north of Germany had stumbled on the deeply hidden Belsen concentration camp in the vicinity of Hanover to find British

typhus raging, forty thousand

sick,

starving,

prisoners, thirteen thousand corpses stacked

ground.

The London Times

carried a dispatch

dying

on the from

a

correspondent with the army unit: "I have something to report that lies

A

week

or so

beyond the imagination of mankind."

later,

waiting out in the rain in the en-

trance to a music store,

81]

I

heard a radio playing into the

ALFRED KAZIN Sabbath service from Belsen.

Street the first

When

the

Hberated Jewish prisoners in unison recited the Shema

— "Hear, O One" — feh a

Lord Our God, the Lord

home, when with the Sabbath

at

New

In Pineapple Street, surrounded by

which

the harbor through

I

unknown

my

to each other

parents as

York and

young

rebels

had entered the country,

dreamed of putting

my life in order by writing a book

New

York background. This was no

set against the

from the

great departure

for years. Criticism for a

sundown

at

would come over Brownsville.

healing quietness

still

Is

myself carried back to the old Friday

I

evenings

the

Israel,

criticism

me was

I

had been writing

not a theory,

theory holding academics together.

of literature, a

my

life,

mode

I felt

like describing

What

liked

most about

it,

spontaneity and naturalness,

life

It

was

and thinking about.

this intimate

lifelike

and

me away from

dogmas about

this, at least,

had

which went everyrecord was

at the quick, as

represented some effort to think

out. It also got

subjective

I

thing every morning, in complete

first

the French say.

of writing,

since boyhood, a voluminous

thing that

writing in

branch

and almost physical empathy.

daily journal, or sketchbook, into

I

a

of writing like any other

Far from feeling confined to one all

was

—of cha-

way

racterization, analysis

been keeping

It

least of all

all

editors

and

my

their

the public taste and capacity;

for myself.

At

the

same time

it

was

[82

The Past Breaks Out a cherished

connection with something fundamental to

American Hterature

—the writing of personal

diaries, journals, letters,

memoirs.

ritanism had created a habit of into the

The

mind

history:

influence of Pu-

that

had persisted

"American Renaissance" and the peculiarly

personal reverberations in Emerson, Thoreau, Whit-

man and how many

others

—the

need to present to

God, the Eternal Reader and Judge of the grimage on

soul's pil-

earth, the veritable record of one's inner

life.

At fourteen or raphy

fifteen

as narrative

my

fascination with autobiog-

had accelerated when The Education

Abraham and Straus department store on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. Without being able to say why, I knew that this particular book was more for me than the other

of

Henry Adams went on

book on

sale.

sale at the

The Autobiography of Benvenuto

Cellini.

There was something odd and even comic about

what was

to develop into a lifelong passion for every-

thing to do with the Adamses.

I

was the

first

child of Russian Jews, lived in the mostly Jewish

mostly black) Brownsville

district

native

(now

near the end of the

I.R.T. subway, a notoriously rough, tough neighbor-

hood trailing out into haunts of the Mafia.

If

my mother

had known the sour opinions of Jews developed by the violently disillusioned patrician

Henry Adams,

the

grandson and great-grandson of presidents, the most

83]

ALFRED KAZIN descendant of the most gifted American

brilliant

cal family, she

would have thrown The Education

Henry Adams out of the house But

my

anything.

mother gail

of

politi-

—and me right

after

of it.

mother didn't read English; she didn't read It

that

might have been interesting

to

my

inform

Henry Adams's great-grandmother Abi-

had written to her husband John during the Battle

Bunker

Hill,

"The

race

is

battle to the strong, but the

giveth strength and

not to the swift, nor the

God

of Israel

power unto His

is

He

that

people. Trust in

Him at all times, ye people pour out your hearts before Him. God is a refuge for me — Charlestown is laid in ashes." After the Civil swift,

Henry Adams

War, when the

felt

likened himself to a Jew.

race was to the

himself so out of

it

"Had he been born

that he

in Jerusa-

lem under the shadow of the Temple, and circumcised in the

Synagogue by

high

his uncle the

priest,

under

name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century."

the

There was never

a

chance to go into such interesting

items of American history with

my mother—to explain

why Henry Adams so came to associate capitalism with Jews that he habitually referred Jew. treds.

My

mother

lived apart

She had come

to

to

J.

from such

America

as a

P.

Morgan

as a

intellectual ha-

young

seamstress

because she believed herself to be unmarriageable, a

[84

The Past Breaks Out

plain girl in a family

named Shana

where

good-looking

a

was the

("Beautiful"),

main unmarried was unthinkable

favorite.

sister,

To

re-

good Jewish

for a

girl.

my mother found my father-to-be. That,

In America so to speak,

was the

limit of her acquaintance

with the

my

mother's

country. But getting to America did save life;

Shana and her husband were

by the Nazis

my

in a

to be horribly killed

roundup of their village. In any

mother's America, though not extensive, was cer-

tainly intense. It consisted of her family alive in ica,

in

Amer-

dead or dying in Russia, and the sewing machine

our kitchen, where

my

event,

sister

when my

and

me

as a

"home" dressmaker she kept

in college

during the Depression

father, a housepainter,

day jobs only when the painting of

subway

My debt to

New

stations

could find occasional

Deal shelled out for the

and bridges.

The Education of Henry Adams and other

"personal" American classics

—the essays and journals

of Emerson; Walden and the journals of cially;

Thoreau espe-

Leaves of Grass and Whitman's diary of the Civil

War, Specimen Days

—

is

simply

stated.

One

could be a

writer without writing a novel. Every taxi driver and

bartender ist.

It

told

you

his story

wanted

to be a novel-

was the expected, the Big Thing,

especially;

85]

who it

had raised to the heights

in

America

literary

prima

ALFRED KAZIN Norman

donnas from Mark Twain to

seemed

positively perverse to Leslie Fiedler,

my A

reviewed

Walker

nately refuses to

At

the

my

in the City, that the

become

when he

book

York, so different from the Depression life

in Brownsville, I

ing to write something about the city

would do I

"obsti-

a novel."

in Pineapple Street to the glare of

early working-class

range

It

moment, however, waking up uneasily every

morning

New

Mailer.

postwar '30s

and

was

try-

at large that

justice to the color, the variety, the imperial

encountered walking about the city every day.

Every next day

Whitman

I

my

tried to get into

in his greatest

New

York poem, "Crossing

Brooklyn Ferry," had called "the beads on

notebook what

glories strung like

my smallest sights and hearings—on the walk

in the street,

and the passage over the

There was some connection tween writing and roaming the

I

river."

had to

city,

establish be-

between writing

my ability to react to everything in the open street. To my delight and everlasting gratitude, I was assigned and

by Harper's Bazaar

to

work with

Henri Cartier-Bresson on

a piece

Bridge and the different worlds

at

later to describe this great artist as

the photographer

about the Brooklyn each end of

it. I

was

an aristocratic radi-

new mass housing projects crowding the view of the Lower East Side from the Brooklyn Bridge many of them named after cal;

he was gently disdainful of the

—

[86

The Past Breaks Out

my father worshiped.

labor and Socialist heroes

New

York,

still

visible in the late '40s,

gave particular

pleasure to Cartier-Bresson's genius eye as

the

wooden boardwalk down

But old

we walked

the center of the bridge.

"It breathes!" Cartier-Bresson said happily about this

central

devastating clarity and

we

how

promenade. "See

it

breathes!"

ries,

his

my zeal for those leftover streets

brought home the Brooklyn Bridge

in the iron age, the

With

"Swamp"

still

anchored

district of leather facto-

old assayers' shops, dealers in perfumes and wines,

the ornamental

fire

escapes

still

sculptured with John

L. Sullivan prize-fighter figures out of the old Police Gazette. Cartier-Bresson

thought of doing tout

New

never worked out, and

book on It

my

and

I

got on so well that

York in a book. But this

soon began writing such a

New

York,

like

a sort of

mid-

noon and

first

in the rush hour, the crowds, the

libraries.

New

section

in Pineapple Street, the blaze of

town

in

and Hart tried

morning

Sunday

all

I

to cover

museums, the

personal epic

Leaves of Grass

Crane's The Bridge, in prose. In the

at

we

own.

was very ambitious,

around

I

The

York,

full

third section

was

all

about

of color, poignance and

what I thought was dazzling prose. The middle section, called "The Old Neighborhood," consisted of some dozen pages of childhood memories, which

I

had writ-

ten in a strange burst of enthusiasm in just one after-

87]

ALFRED KAZIN noon but which

didn't

seem grand enough

by comparison with midtown

at

as a subject

noon and

the city

on

Sunday.

What I went through for an absurdly long time trying to hammer the thing together does not deserve extended description here. But how I tried! I was a critic

with

a critic's

then was a

long time,

weakness for

ideas,

and

critic's ideas. Finally, after a I

realized that

I

all I

had

ridiculously

was not going

to write a

personal epic like Leaves of Grass or The Bridge or Paterson or

any other of the "Columbiads" that ever

since the eighteenth-century Joel

Barlow have tempted

our would-be Homers and Virgils. Carlyle sneered that

Whitman thought

he was a big poet because he lived

in a big country.

suddenly opted for

my

I

natal country.

The only

a small country,

thing emotionally authen-

my vast manuscript was those carelessly scribbled pages about growing up in Brownsville. On these, once

tic in

I

realized just

how

sensory the material really was and

how vivid the prose would have to be, book.

But Brownsville

—"Brunzvil,"

ous Jews long removed from

I

as the

it still

could build

my

newly prosper-

described

it?

It's

Meyer Schapiro had passed through it, along with various Nobel laureates, Danny Kaye and John Garfield in East New York next true that the splendid art historian

door.

Murder Incorporated, the crazy neighborhood

[

The Past Breaks Out

thieves

I

actually

saw skipping from roof

to roof just

ahead of the cops. But Brownsville? Poor ghetto Brownsville?

My

parents

the war, poor as ever. the spirit of

still

hung on

for years after

My father, no doubt praying that

Eugene Debs would

forgive him, timidly

complained that non-union black painters were taking

work away from him

at

lower

now so far behind the Jews,

rates.

Brownsville was

so far behind me, that after

one particularly sad Friday evening supper with parents it all

I

wrote in

feels like a

my notebook,

go back

I

foreign country."

But when

I

came

"Every time

I

go back

never been away."

to write the actual

It

to Brownsville

book

to

I

as

it is

was not behind me

White removed

E. B.

"Every time

my

at

began:

if I

all.

had

When

Maine from Manhattan he

described himself as "homesick for loneliness." That

was to

my case. As the past broke out in my book,

me more and more

solution to ness.

I

my

that there

was no

it

came

intellectual

long search for the meaning of Jewish-

would never

fully

fathom the hatred behind the

would never become pious in the orthodox Jewish fashion. I would never settle in a country that desired to be all-Jewish. I would never believe in Holocaust.

I

socialism's "final conflict."

I

would

certainly never ally

myself with the financially and politically powerful or the born-again patriots ideologies

89]

from the

who were

ex-Left.

picking up their

ALFRED KAZIN There was some enduring mystery, some metaphysical

conundrum about being

hkely to abandon.

Jewish, that

I

was not

could not get over the extraor-

I

dinariness of Jewish persistence through the ages, matter-of-fact continuity with

itself,

in

all

its

periods and

places.

The key was some heightened

sense of exis-

tence,

living

experience

through and

The

through.

Jewish

the

basic fact, as

Saul Bellow had

shown

my

exact contemporary

wonderful second book,

in his

The Victim, was the singularity for even a gifts, in

man

of small

our increasingly suspicious and disenchanted

world, of remaining a Jew, of remaining unsuspicious in one's deepest soul

Norman Walker

—unwearied.

Mailer was to complain that the boy in

was too

in the City

virtuous; Irving

he did not correspond to the original Trilling that the subject that there

too,

a

by going

what anyone

else

realized that

I

were its

correct; the

own

way.

would have

was thinking

physical sensations.

facts;

Lionel

It

in the book. All

book astonished

was

written.

definitely not

But early on

stirring

up

tangential, very slight, endlessly

memory of being taken to the old BrookChildren's Museum. Was it on Brooklyn Avenue?

reverberatory

lyn

I

in color, luxuriating in

The breakthrough was

from the depths some

that

"schmo"; Oscar Handlin

were not enough people

these Jewish sages

me,

was

Howe

A

[90

The Past Breaks Out

The

Children's

with

my

museum

Museum had some Audubon's

sight of

first

itself, as I

memory, was

a

followed

wooden

its

basic connection

prints of birds.

The

extensive filaments in

construction vaguely reminis-

cent of some old American farmhouse already stamped in

memory

standing alone on the prairie.

as

was writing

my

favorite section of the book,

my

Block and Beyond," on

"beyond" Brownsville

The day

earliest

itself, I

light

—

I

was

I

stirring

left

between

found

small

Audubon

in

"The

found myself writing:

Museum

wooden

were hazel

prints

I

walks into the city

they took us to the Children's

dripping on the porch of that old lined with

When

—rain was

house, the halls

in the thin antique

with the distinct impression that

I

had been

my fingers dried earth and fallen leaves that

between the red broken paving stones of some

American town.

From straight

the

beginning

from the

—

I

wanted physical images,

—

memory again "It's mem"the memory that goes with

belly. In

ory," said Willa Cather, the vocation"

I

step off the train at

Rockaway Ave-

nue, smell the leak out of the men's room, then the pickles

from the stand

these opening pages feelings involved in

I

just

am

below the subway

eager to get

all

homecoming— "an

steps.

In

the contrary instant rage

comes over me, mixed with dread and some unex-

91]

ALFRED K AZIN pected tenderness." This

is still

the end of the city, the

faraway place that thought of everything

making every journey

city,"

the verv old

It is

seem

alwavs the old

me. In their

Only

left:

women in their shapeless flowered house-

dresses and ritual wigs to

into the city a grind.

have been

to

else as "the

soft

I

see

dumpy

first;

they give Brownsville back

bodies and the unbudging

way

they occupy the tenement stoops, their hands blankly folded in each other as

if

they had been sitting on these stoops from

the beginning of time, all

I

mv

life

would be

remember

"We

I

sense again the old foreboding that

like this.

my mother's earliest complaint against me:

are iirime yidn,

poor Jews.

What do you want

of

us

But not forgetting or forgiving some early hopelessness,

I

am

grabbed by the aliveness of the scene, the

inextinguishable contrasts, the absurdity. There in the

shadows of the El-darkened canvas sign

still

listing the

street

boys

is

the torn flapping

who went

to war, the

stagnant wells of candy stores and pool parlors, the torches flaring at dusk over the vegetable stands and pushcarts, the neon-blazing fronts of liquor stores, the piles of

halvah and chocolate kisses in the

the candy stores next to the

old drugstores

windows

of

News and Mirror, the dusty

where urns of rose and pink and blue [92

The Past Breaks Out colored water

still

swing from chains, and where next

door Mr. A's sign

still

Rockawav Avenue

tells

anvone walking down

that he has pants to

anv color

fit

suit.

These

details

now make me happy;

much packed-up humanit\% makes

street, so

tuously commercial lent transactions,

In the

last

street, all these

something

make minute on

to

tumul-

automatic and vio-

a pleasure to unravel,

it is

paper.

all

their

wares

street of everv personal

in a

cosmetic smile, but

a single

flame the acid smell of half-sour pickles in their brinv barrels,

strip the

shadow and concealment. The

ches over the pushcarts hold in

sheets

this

crazv afternoon light the neons over the delicat-

essens bathe

per

the energ}^ of the

There

is

a

drv

tor-

breath of vellow

and herrings floating

rattle of loose

newspa-

around the cracked stretched skins of the

"chinev" oranges. Through the kitchen windows alon^ everv ground floor the fresh

I

can alreadv see the containers of milk,

round poppvseed evening

rolls.

Time

for supper,

time to go home.

On

this last

note

I

have found

toward home and the

pull

awav

mv

rhvthm, the push

again, the longing for

the secret treasure of familv and Jewish togetherness,

and the that

93

is

contran,-

motion of seeking the open treasure

the great citv. infinite Xe\^-

York

that

belonged

ALFRED KAZIN

A

not to "us" but to "them."

my

key to

book

is

of

course this constant sense of division, even of flagrant

home

contradiction between wanting the enclosure of

and the open

city,

both moral certainty and intellectual

independence. This conflict has never ended for me, confess,

which may be one reason why,

ago in Pineapple

Street,

I felt

that

I

was

I

thirty-six years at last

discover-

ing an inescapable truth about myself and no doubt

about other Jews of

my

generation brought up on the

old immigrant poverty and orthodoxy. the tradition

To want of the

was somehow

it

whom

to hold fast to

it.

both ways was also to span a good deal

vehemence of Jewish history

unimaginable

To rebel against

just

in a

way

perhaps

now to those children of suburbia for

Jewishness

is

psychology and troubled

self-

defense. Or, wearing a chic inch of yarmulke, relishing

the ballet and the nudes at the as for so

many Jewish

museum

of

art.

For me,

writers and intellectual trou-

blemakers of a certain age and condition,

life

in the

twentieth century has been essentially political

—with

Jews usually

When

at

every crux of our turbulent century.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused, on the

basis of forgeries gleefully

committed by

ultra-rightists,

of betraying French military secrets to imperial Ger-

many, he was driven out of the army liating public

and shrieked,

in the

most humi-

ceremony. The crowd looking on hooted

"A

bas les Juifs!"

The

future state of

[94

The Past Breaks Out

Israel

was

in the

Theodor Herzl.

mind

of one observer in that crowd,

When

Dr.

Sigmund Freud

found himself virtually ostracized for insights he proudly said,

"Being

a

Jew,

in

Vienna

his professional I

knew I would

be in the opposition." Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg,

Gregory Zinoviev, Osip Mandelstam were confident that their being Jewish

was

historically insignificant;

those

who

cant.

Replacing nineteenth-century

destroyed them did not think

it

insignifi-

illusions that the

"Jewish question" would disappear under socialism, the twentieth century everywhere has seen the perse-

cution and even the extermination of Jews wherever the state has total control.

The crowd

that cheered

Dreyfus's disgrace was replaced by the crowd in occupied

Warsaw

cheering as Jews locked into the ghetto

flung themselves out of windows to escape deportation.

A child of poor Russian Jews living a commonplace life

in

Brooklyn nevertheless feasted on every scrap of

my innocent, literary associations with a Russian life that my parents had not Russian memory. But beyond

—imagine not speaking —my the language of the country you were born really experienced themselves

in!

real passion

was hearing

West from my

way

95]

to

As

a

of the early

American

young immigrant painting

Union Pacific Railroad he had gone all Omaha, had heard his beloved Debs making

boxcars on the the

father.

tales

ALFRED KAZIN fools of

Bryan and Taft

in the 1908

campaign, had been

offered a homestead in Nebraska!

"Omaha" was

the most beautiful

"Homestead" was almost

heard.

never forgive

my

word

I

had ever could

as beautiful. I

father for not having taken that

homestead.

"What would I have done "You should have taken it!

there? I'm

Why

no farmer."

do we always

live

here!" "It

body

would have been unnatural," he wound I

knew."

"What

a

chance!"

"Don't be

childish.

Nobody

"Why? Why?" "What do you want Under

eleven,

my

more

my

with

hero

—the

a stray

when

book was The Boy

's

I

Life

Year by year T.R., the only

American president born

New

knew."

of us poor Jews?"

favorite

of Theodore Roosevelt.

identified

I

the cover of those Friday evenings,

was about

ever

"No-

up.

in

New

York

City,

became

police commissioner

Jewish policeman

who

as "straight

York," the historian and author, the only

New

who could write an essay on "Dante in the Bowery." He was my guide to that other New York, the New York of Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Frederick Law Olmsted, AlYork

politician in history

fred Stieglitz

—the New York

to be achieved, in

Whit-

[96

The Past Breaks Out

man's words, by "the passage over the river." This was a

New York that began

ium

that

had

first

became the immigrant receiving

it

had been the opera house where Whitman had

been intoxicated by

"Beyond," can

old Aquar-

been Castle Clinton, then Castle Gar-

den, which before station

at the Battery, the

—the

Italian sopranos.

as I wrote,

name

"was anything old and Ameri-

Fraunces Tavern repeated to us on a

school excursion; the eighteenth-century muskets and glazed

paintings

oil

on the

wall; the very streets, the

deeper you got into Brooklyn, named after generals of the Revolutionary

War— Putnam,

Gates, Kosciusko,

my

DeKalb, Lafayette, Pulaski." "Beyond" was covery in the Brooklyn

Museum

of "a circular

dis-

room

upstairs violently ablaze with

John Singer Sargent's watercolors of the Caribbean" and a long room lined with dim farmscapes of old Brooklyn

itself in

the early

"And I knew I would come would have to come back."

nineteenth century. that

I

The more

I

got into

my book,

the happier

getting back into the Metropolitan

old

American Wing (not so

Museum,

I

back,

became into the

lavishly laid out as

it is

now). Far in the back, in an alcove near the freight elevator,

hung so low and

light that

New

I

the figures so

crouched to take them

York sometime

in,

after the Civil

dim

in the faint

were pictures of

War. Skaters

in

Central Park, a red muffler flying in the wind; a gay

97

ALFRED K AZIN crowd moving round and round Union Square

Park;

horsecars charging between the brownstones of lower

my eyes. Room on room they had painted my city, and this city was my Fifth

Avenue

at

dusk.

I

couldn't believe

Winslow Homer's dark oblong of Union soldiers making camp in the rain, tenting tonight, tenting on the old campground, as I had never thought I would get to see them when we sang that song in school; Thomas Eakins's solitary sculler on the Schuylkill, country:

resting to have his portrait painted in the yellow light

bright with patches of

showing on the other

raw spring

side of him.

in Pennsylvania

Most wonderful

to

me then was John Sloan's picture of a young girl standing in the

wind on

the deck of a

—surely Staten —looking out

Island,

to

birth?

to

become

When

I

Brown

Decades, a

just

York ferryboat

my

about the year of

to water.

America between the

War" was

and

New

Civil

my

War

and the "Great

favorite period for study.

eventually discovered Lewis Mumford's The

prime book on the

subject,

with

its

loving portraits of Emily Dickinson, John August Roebling, the creator of

Brooklyn Bridge, and the painter

Albert Pinkham Ryder (in those days you could

still

on University Place the Hotel Albert, named after the mystical painter by his brother), I was hooked for see

life. It

as

had everything to do with such

Park

Row

on

historical items

a winter afternoon in the i88os, the

[98

The Past Breaks Out

snow

falling into the

dark stone streets under the

Brooklyn Bridge, newsboys running under the maze of telegraph wires that darkened every street of the lower

How those wires haunted me in every photograph found of old New York. Indescribably heavy, they

city. I

sagged between the poles; the very sink under their weight.

The

past

seemed

streets

was

to

that forest of

hung over lower New York at five o'clock. Ever more vivid to me as the years went on were certain prime figures moving against that dark, brood-

wires

ing landscape: Melville the customs inspector checking

cargoes on newly arrived ships to

Harlem,

that

Gansevoort

was named ary

bitter at the

War

Street,

after his

all

along the

ignoramuses

who

Hudson up

didn't

where Melville took

own

know

his lunch,

grandfather, the Revolution-

hero. Later, seeing the ghosts of

writers in their old neighborhoods,

it

New

was easy

York

to imag-

Mark Twain still living at Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, more picturesque than anyone else as, with silk hat perched on his snowy white hair (washed every ine

morning with laundry nue

just

walked up Fifth Ave-

ahead of the crowd that always recognized and

followed him. there

soap), he

And

finally,

joining one past to another,

was Henry James on

Lower East

Side of

his native's return to the

New York in 1905, studying the fire

escapes heaped with Jewish immigrants just like father

99]

and mother.

He would

describe

them

all

my

in that

ALFRED KAZIN most majestic of

me

unlike

travel books, The

American

But

Scene.

he would see them only in the mass,

as

faintly repellent intruders, agents of "future ravage."

All this did not complete the circle of memories;

Out

forays into the past continued with Starting Thirties still

my

in the

and New York Jew. Now, past seventy,

I

am

make a book out of my lifetime notebooks Too Much Happens. Mrs. Hines, Joe Christmas's

trying to

called

grandmother his death: "It

is

much

because so

What happens

happens."

Too much

happens.

still

that

I

have to put

in writing. Let the future decipher

it is

My

it.

volvement with so much personal history has cuse:

after

every day, virtually every

moment, can be an amazement

down

muses

in Faulkner's Light in August,

in-

this ex-

about someone taken up in history, someone

—

who was in history born. And I cannot

like all his

people

—before he was which

fully explain the necessity,

me than to the people I write there was a moment when I felt

can be more unnerving to about.

But recently

repaid for

A

my

Walker in

courses,

lege

all

I

struggles.

the City

and while

I

was

is

much used

in

composition

teaching

at

Hunter Col-

still

was asked by some freshman students

questions about the book. angrily: "I

the place.

to

answer

A black girl said to me, a little

come from Amboy and Teach me to write like

Sutter.

I

sure

know

that."

[

100

TONI MORRISON

The

Site

of

Memory

My inclusion in memoir

is

a series of talks

not entirely

on autobiography and

misalliance.

a

Although

it's

probably true that a fiction writer thinks of his or her

work

as alien in that

suggest

why

one thing,

between

I

company, what

I

have to say

may

I'm not completely out of place here. For

might throw into

self-recollection

also

some of the

two

crafts

relief the differences

(memoir) and

similarities

fiction,

and

—the places where those

embrace and where that embrace

is

symbi-

otic.

my presence here lies in the part of my own literary heritage

But the authenticity of fact that a is

very large

the autobiography. In this country the print origins

of black literature (as distinguished from the oral origins) tives

were

slave narratives.

(autobiographies,

These book-length narra-

recollections,

memoirs),

of

TONI MORRISON which well over

a

texts to historians

hundred were published, and students of black

range from the adventure-packed

dah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,

history.

life

Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of

are familiar

They

of Olaudah

the Life of

Olau-

Written by

the African,

Himself (1769) to the quiet desperation of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:

Written by Herself

(1861), in

which Harriet Jacob ("Linda Brent") records hiding for seven years in a room too small to stand up in; from the political savvy of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,

an American Slave, Writ-

Himself (1845) to the subtlety and modesty of

ten by

Henry

whose

Bibb,

Henry

Bibb,

(1849),

is

voice, in Life

an American Slave,

and Adventures

surrounded by ("loaded with"

phrase) documents attesting to

its

of

Written by Himself is

a better

authenticity. Bibb

is

careful to note that his formal schooling (three weeks)

was

short, but that he

adversity, whips,

was "educated

and chains." Born

in the school of in

Kentucky, he

put aside his plans to escape in order to marry. But

when

he learned that he was the father of

watched the degradation of

his wife

and

a slave

child,

and

he reac-

tivated those plans.

Whatever the tives,

style

and circumstances of these narra-

they were written to say principally two things.

One: "This

is

example that

my is

historical life

—my

singular, special

personal, but that also represents the

[104

The

Site of

Two:

race."

—you, the are

Memory

human

"I write this text to persuade other people

reader,

who

is

probably not black

—that we

beings worthy of God's grace and the im-

mediate abandonment of slavery." With these two missions in mind, the narratives

were

clearly pointed.

In Equiano's account, the purpose

Born

in 1745 near the

is

quite up-front.

Niger River and captured

at the

age of ten, he survived the Middle Passage, American plantation slavery, wars in

Canada and the Mediterra-

nean; learned navigation and clerking from a Quaker

named Robert King, and bought twenty-one.

and is

living

freedom

his

at

He lived as a free servant, traveling widely

most of

his latter life in

England. Here he

speaking to the British without equivocation: "I hope

to have the satisfaction of seeing the renovation of lib-

on the

erty and justice resting

...

to

government.

hope and expect the attention of gentlemen of

I

power. is

British

.

me

.

.

May the time come

pleasing

—when the

—

at least the

speculation

sable people shall grate-

commemorate the auspicious era of extensive freedom." With typically eighteenth-century reticence he

fully

records his singular and representative pose: to

change things. In

did change things. Their that abolitionists

More ary

difficult

critics.

105]

were

fact,

life

for

one pur-

he and his co-authors

works gave

fuel to the fires

setting everywhere.

was getting the

The writings

fair appraisal

of

liter-

of church martyrs and confes-

TONI MORRISON sors are

and were read

for the eloquence of their

mes-

sage as well as their experience of redemption, but the

American

slaves' autobiographical narratives

were

fre-

quently scorned as "biased," "inflammatory" and "improbable." These attacks are particularly difficult to

understand in view of the important, as

fact that

you can imagine,

it

was extremely

for the writers of these

narratives to appear as objective as possible

—not

to

offend the reader by being too angry, or by showing

too

much

recently

outrage, or as

by

Edwards,

Paul

1966,

As

calling the reader names.

who

edited

and

abridged Equiano's story, praises the narrative for

its

refusal to be "inflammatory."

"As

a rule,"

Edwards

writes, "he [Equiano] puts

no

emotional pressure on the reader other than that which the situation strain after

itself

contains

—

his

language does not

our sympathy, but expects

it

to be given

naturally and at the proper time. This quiet avoidance

of emotional display produces

many

of the best pas-

sages in the book." Similarly, an 1836 review of Charles Bell's Life

and Adventures

which

of a Fugitive Slave,

appeared in the "Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine," praised Bell's account for

the

...

its

book the more, because It

objectivity. it is

not

"We rejoice in

a partisan

work.

broaches no theory in regard to [slavery], nor

proposes any

mode

As determined

or time of emancipation."

as these black writers

were

to per-

[106

The

Site of

Memory

suade the reader of the

mented him by assuming high-mindedness.

they also compli-

evil of slavery,

They

and

his nobility of heart

tried to

summon up

his

his finer

him to employ it. They were the people who could

nature in order to encourage

knew that their readers make a difference in terminating

—of

brutality, adversity

slavery.

and deliverance

popularity in spite of critical hostility in

and patronizing sympathy

when five

in others.

stories

—had

many

was

great

quarters

There was

the hunger for "slave stories"

quiet, as sales figures

Their

a time

difficult to

show. Douglass's Narrative sold

thousand copies in four months; by 1847

it

had sold

eleven thousand copies. Equiano's book had thirty-six editions

between

1789

and

had ten editions from

1850.

1837

to

Moses Roper's book 1856;

Brown's was reprinted four times

omon

in

William Wells

its first

Northrop's book sold twenty-seven thousand

copies before

two years had

Henson (argued by some

passed.

A

book by Josiah model

to be the

"Tom" of Harriet Beecher Stowe's (77zc/e had

year. Sol-

for the

Tom's Cabin)

a pre-publication sale of five thousand.

In addition to using their

own

lives to

expose the

horrors of slavery, they had a companion motive for their efforts.

The

prohibition against teaching a slave to

read and write (which in

many Southern

states carried

severe punishment) and against a slave's learning to

read and write had to be scuttled at

107]

all costs.

These

TONI MORRISON writers

knew that literacy was power.

was inextricably connected acy was

a

way

Voting, after

all,

to the ability to read; liter-

of assuming and proving the

"human-

why the

ity" that the Constitution denied them.

That

narratives carry the subtitle "written

by himself," or

"herself,"

is

and include introductions and prefaces by

white sympathizers to authenticate them. Other narratives,

as

"edited by" such well-known anti-slavery figures

Lydia Maria Child and John Greenleaf Whittier,

contain prefaces to assure the reader

how

little

editing

A literate slave was supposed to be a con-

was needed.

tradiction in terms.

One

has to

remember

that the climate in

which they

wrote reflected not only the Age of Enlightenment but its

twin, born at the same time, the

Racism. David Jefferson, to

Age

of Scientific

Hume, Immanuel Kant and Thomas

mention only

a few,

had documented

their

conclusions that blacks were incapable of intelligence.

Frederick Douglass refutations of

what

a

otherwise, and he wrote

Jefferson said in "Notes

"Never yet could

State of Virginia":

had uttered

knew

thought above the

never see even an elementary ture."

A sentence

be engraved

that

at the

I

I

on the

find that a black

level of plain narration,

trait

of painting or sculp-

have always thought ought to

door to the Rockefeller Collection

of African Art. Hegel, in

1813,

had said that Africans

had no "history" and couldn't write

in

modern

lan-

[108

The

Site of

Memory

guages.

Kant disregarded

a black

man by

from head

a perceptive

observation by

was

saying, "This fellow

quite black

what he

to foot, a clear proof that

said

was

stupid."

Yet no slave society in the history of the world wrote

more

—or more thoughtfully—about

own

its

enslave-

ment. The milieu, however, dictated the purpose and the style. The narratives are instructive, moral and obviously representative. Some of them are patterned after the sentimental

time.

novel that was in vogue

But whatever the

popular

taste

level of

at

the

eloquence or the form,

discouraged the writers from dwelling

too long or too carefully on the their experience.

Whenever

more sordid

details of

was an unusually

there

violent incident, or a scatological one, or something "excessive," one finds the writer taking refuge in the literary

conventions of the day. "I was

left in a state

distraction not to be described" (Equiano).

now leave the rough usage

of the field

attention to the less repulsive slave

the house of

my

.

.

.

"But

of

us

and turn our

life as it

existed in

childhood" (Douglass). "I

about to harrow the feelings of

let

am

not

my readers by a terrific

representation of the untold horrors of that fearful sys-

tem of oppression.

... It

is

not

my purpose

to descend

deeply into the dark and noisome caverns of the hell of slavery"

(Henry Box Brown).

Over and over, the writers pull the 109]

narrative

up short

TONI MORRISON with

a phrase

such

"But

as,

let

us drop a veil over these

proceedings too terrible to relate." In shaping the expe-

make

rience to

palatable to those

it

position to alleviate

they were silent about

in a

many

and they "forgot" many other things. There

things,

was

it,

who were

a careful selection of the instances that

they would

record and a careful rendering of those that they chose

Lydia Maria Child identified the problem

to describe.

in her introduction to

am

abuse: "I

indecorum

"Linda Brent's"

well aware that

many

tale of sexual

will accuse

me

of

for presenting these pages to the public; for

the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured

woman jects,

belong to

and others

a class

which some

indelicate.

sub-

call delicate

This peculiar phase of Slav-

ery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be I

made acquainted with

am

monstrous

features,

and

willing to take the responsibility of presenting

them with the

veil

drawn

But most importantly mention of For

its

me

—

their interior

—

[aside]." at least for

me

—there was no

life.

a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth

much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman the exercise is very different. My job becomes how to rip

century, not

—

that veil late." is

drawn over "proceedings too

The

black, or

exercise

who

is

also critical for

terrible to re-

any person

who

belongs to any marginalized category.

[

no

The

Site of

Memory

we were seldom invited to participate discourse even when we were its topic.

for, historically,

in the

Moving

that veil aside requires, therefore, certain

things. First of I

must

also

must

all, I

depend on the

my own

trust

find to be significant.

I

in

how I begin

Zora Neale Hur-

ston said, "Like the dead-seeming cold rocks,

memories within

went

to

came out of the

that

Thus

recollections of others.

memory weighs heavily in what I write, and in what

recollections.

I

have

material that

make me." These "memories within"

are the

subsoil of

my

won't give

me total access to the unwritten interior life

work. But memories and recollections

Only

of these people.

the act of the imagination can

help me.

writing

If

is

thinking and discovery and selection

and order and meaning, mystery and magic. last

four

I

also

it is

suppose

I

awe and reverence and

could dispense with the

were not so deadly serious about

if I

to the milieu out of

which

I

fidelity

write and in which

ancestors actually lived. Infidelity to that milieu

absence of the interior

from the records precisely the

without

what

us.

drives

III]

I

me and

distinguishes

my

—the

the deliberate excising of

that the slaves themselves told

problem

How

life,

in the discourse that

the part of this talk

fiction

—

it

is

proceeded

gain access to that interior is

my

life is

which both

from autobiographical

strate-

TONI MORRISON and which

gies

strategies. It's a

embraces certain autobiographical

also

kind of literary archeology: on the basis

some information and

of

journey to a

and

What makes

my

act:

it

is

ply

on the image

"image," of course,

mean

left

behind

the nature of the imaginative

—on

addition to recollection, to yield

By

you

of guesswork

world that these remains imply.

fiction

reliance

little bit

what remains were

site to see

to reconstruct the

a

don't

I

up

the remains a

—

in

kind of a truth.

mean "symbol";

"picture" and the feelings that

I

sim-

accompany

the picture. Fiction,

bly

it's

by

definition,

is

distinct

the product of imagination

from

fact.

Presuma-

—invention—and

it

claims the freedom to dispense with "what really hap-

pened," or where

it

really

happened, and nothing in able,

although

much

in

it

happened, or it

when

it

really

needs to be publicly

verifi-

can be

verified.

By

contrast,

the scholarship of the biographer and the literary critic

seems to us only trustworthy

when the events of fiction

can be traced to some publicly verifiable research of the "Oh, yes, this

from" school, which gets

its

is

fact. It's

the

where he or she got

own

credibility

it

from ex-

cavating the credibility of the sources of the imagination,

not the nature of the imagination.

The work

that

I

do frequently

most people, into that realm of

falls,

in the

minds of

fiction called fantastic,

com-

or mythic, or magical, or unbelievable. I'm not

[

n2

The

Site of

Memory

fortable with these labels.

consider that

I

my

gravest responsibility (in spite of that magic) lie.

When

I

hear someone say, "Truth

fiction," I think that old chestnut

know, because fiction; just that

may

stranger,

it's

be excessive,

important thing

may

it

that

is

we

truer than

is

meaning

not to

is

stranger than

is

doesn't say that truth

it

single

is

that

truer than

odd.

it's

It

be more interesting, but the

random

it's

—and

fiction

is

not

random. Therefore the crucial distinction for difference

between

human to find

people

between

fact

and

fact

truth.

and

fiction,

Because

who

they didn't have

it); if

not the

facts

can exist without

So

if

I'm looking

about the interior

a truth

didn't write

is

but the distinction

intelligence, but truth cannot.

and expose

me

life

(which doesn't mean that

it

I'm trying to

that the slave narratives left

—

fill

in the blanks

to part the veil that

was

so frequently drawn, to implement the stories that

heard

—then the approach

most trustworthy

from the image

for

me

that's

Not from

to the text.

I

most productive and

the recollection that

is

of

moves

the text to the

image.

Simone de Beauvoir, don't

know why

death."

When

I

"3]

A

Very Easy Death, says, "I

was so shocked by

she heard her mother's

called at the funeral

seized

in

by the

me by the throat.

.

.

.

priest,

my

mother's

name being

she says, "Emotion

'Frangoise de Beauvoir': the

TONI MORRISON words brought her to from birth

Hfe;

to marriage to

Frangoise de Beauvoir

summed up her history, widowhood to the grave.

they

—that

retiring

named, became an important

woman,

which the

Mme. de

Unlike

The book own grief and

person."

becomes an exploration both into her into the images in

so rarely

grief lay buried.

Beauvoir, Frederick Douglass asks

the reader's patience for spending about half a page the death of his grandmother

found

he had suffered

loss

ing, in effect, "It really

hope you

no attempt

it,

which

leaves

is

my

indulgence." its

no room

relationship to his father, "All of texts

and songs, which

I

were ranged before me for

me."

its

he can make

life

my

and

his

had decided were meaningless, at his

death like empty bottles,

would

give

And then his text fills those bottles.

Like

image that

it

comes

and

I

I

can't

was

tell

own

father's Biblical

life

Simone de Beauvoir, he moves from the event

first

mean-

in Notes of a Native

waiting to hold the meaning which

them

I

for subjective speculation.

recording his father's

says, in

me.

to

He makes

images or

as close to factual as

James Baldwin, on the other hand, Son,

most pro-

was very important

to explore that death:

His narrative

ing.

easily the

—and he apologizes by say-

bored by

aren't

—

on

left.

My

route

is

to the

the reverse: the image

me what the "memory" is about. you how I felt when my father died. But tells

able to write Song of Solomon

and imagine, not

[114

The

Site of

Memory

him, and not his specific interior hfe, but the world that

he inhabited and the private or interior hfe of the people in

it.

And

can't tell

I

you how

my

reading to

I felt

grandmother while she was turning over and over

in

her bed (because she was dying, and she was not com-

but

fortable),

she lived that

my

I

could try to reconstruct the world that

I

And I have suspected, more often than not,

in.

know more than she

grandfather and

know

also

that I'm

my

I

know more than

great-grandmother did, but

no wiser than they were.

whenever

I

and prove

to myself that I

my own,

I

on

And

know more, and when I have

their interior

life

and match

it

compared

to

my own.

Like Fred-

and

erick Douglass talking about his grandmother,

James Baldwin talking about

his father,

and Simone de

Beauvoir talking about her mother, these people are access to me; they are life.

them

Which

is

first,

pellingly that

my

why

—the remains, so

—surface

up

have been overwhelmed every time by

the richness of theirs

rior

I

have tried earnestly to diminish their vision

tried to speculate

with

did, that

entrance into

my own

my

inte-

the images that float around

to speak, at the archeological site

and they surface so vividly and so comI

acknowledge them

as

my

route to a

reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that

was not written and

kind of truth.

115]

to the revelation of a

TONI MORRISON

my

So the nature of as ineffable

and

research begins with something

dimly recalled

as flexible as a

corner of a room,

began

a voice. I

to write

figure, the

my

second

book, which was called Sula, because of my preoccupa-

I

heard her

and

I

woman and

way in which name pronounced. Her name was Hannah,

tion with a picture of a

think she was a friend of

my

the

mother's.

I

don't

remember seeing her very much, but what I do remember

is

the color around her

—

a

—and her

of something violet

kind of violet, a suffusion eyes,

which appeared

to

remember most is how the women said her name: how they said "Hannah Peace" and smiled to themselves, and there was some secret

be half closed. But what

I

about her that they knew, which they didn't talk about,

my

at least

not in

way

which they

in

she was a in

little bit

said her

it

name.

seemed loaded

And

I

in the

suspected that

of an outlaw but that they approved

some way.

And

then, thinking about their relationship to her

and the way in

hearing, but

in

which they

which they talked about articulated her

able in the

And what

world of women.

I

me

name, made

about friendship between women. forgive each other for?

her, the

What it is

is it

that

is

don't want to

way

think

that they

unforgiv-

know any

more about Miss Hannah Peace, and I'm not going to ask my mother who she really was and what did she do and what were you laughing about and why were you [ii6

The

Site of

Memory

my

smiling? Because

my

mother

is

you ever

their

keep

all

my

of

mystery when

That way

I

this

with

you

the

most

heard, and

my

remains and begin. Later

I

do

I

so crushing: she will give

pedestrian information like to

when

experience

images intact in

will get to the facts.

I

can explore two worlds

would

I

—the

and the

actual

possible.

What

want

I

from picture

to

to

do

this

evening

is

—

meaning

to text

a

to track an

journey which ap-

now, which

pears in the novel that I'm writing

image

is

called

Beloved.

I'm trying to write a particular kind of scene, and see corn

mean

on the

that

it

cob.

I

this

"see" corn

suddenly hovers;

keeps coming back. is all

To And

in trying to figure out

corn doing?"

I

where

I

see the house

house, and they didn't

discover what

grew up

some

parents had a garden

on the cob doesn't

only means that

it

it is

because

we were

the things that they didn't, so

able to hoe, or weed, until see

looking

them walking, at their

117]

when

My

much

together,

not able to

wanted

we were

to

not

later.

away from me. I'm

backs and what they're carrying in

their arms: their tools,

times

doing.

away from our

distinguish between the things that they

I

"What

in Lorain, Ohio.

distance

it

welcome me and my sister there,

when we were young, grow and

I

and maybe

they walk away from

a

peck basket. Some-

me

they hold hands,

TONI MORRISON and they go to

some

to cross

this

at night.

my

that

odd hours because works

my

what

when

And

later

from the

and

nagging us in any way. In

to do, or is

some

feeling of pleasure in

aware

They're very

of.

they take these naps.

on

in the

which

to eat corn,

jobs

nobody's giving us chores, or

that I'm only vaguely

rested

works many

at

And these naps are times of pleasure for

addition to which, there

them

mother and father sleep

father

me and my sister because telling us

They have

railroad tracks to get there.

am aware

I also

other place in the garden.

is

summer we have an opportunity

the one plant that

and which

others,

is

I

can distinguish

the harvest that

food that no child

best; the others are the

I

like the

likes

—the

collards, the okra, the strong, violent vegetables that

now. But

would give

a great deal for

because

sweet, and because

and

it,

cold, in,

it's

it's

finger food,

it's

and there are neighbors

and

The

it's

easy,

and

it's

in,

I'm

it

now

became

a

do

like the

all sit

and

hot,

down

it's

corn

to eat

even good

and there are uncles

nice.

picture of the corn and the

surrounding script

and

we

I

I

nimbus of emotion

powerful one in the manu-

completing.

Authors arrive

at text

and subtext

in thousands of

ways, learning each time they begin anew ognize a valuable idea and

how

how

to rec-

to render the texture

that accompanies, reveals or displays

it

to

its

best advan-

[ii8

The

Site of

tage.

The

Memory process by which this

endlessly fascinating to me. as

an editor for twenty years

ter

than their most careful

the manuscript in each of the author's process,

was a

I

understood writers bet-

I

subsequent stages

had

that the critic Still,

for

to

result

least

—the book—was

"fictional" the ac-

how much

of invention, the act of imagination

was

it

is

a

product

bound up with

memory. You know, they straightened out the sippi River in places, to

places.

"Floods"

not flooding; it

make room

word they use, but in fact it is remembering. Remembering where

is

it is

the

where

ran through, what the banks were

was there and the route back

remember

memory

as well as

imagination

is

is

was. Writers are

like,

valley

we

the light that

to our original place. It

—what the nerves and the skin how

it

appeared.

And

a rush of

our "flooding."

Along with personal

119

it

memory and

remembering where we were, what

emotional

and

Occasionally the river floods these

forever trying to get back to

is

Missis-

for houses

used to be. All water has a perfect

like that:

to

important aspect of

no matter how

count of these writers, or

livable acreage.

knew

go on.

me, that was the

the work. Because,

I

where the "solution"

time,

problem came from. The end

all

because in examining

how his or her mind worked, what

what took

effortless,

is

have always thought that

critics, its

accomphshed

is

recollection, the matrix of the

TONI MORRISON work I do

is

the wish to extend,

fill

like water,

I

and complement

But only the matrix.

slave autobiographical narratives.

What comes of all that is not least among them the

in

dictated

own

novel's

remember where

by other concerns,

I

integrity. Still,

was before

was

I

"straightened out."

Q.

/

would

like to ask

about your point of view as a

novelist. Is it a vision, or are

you taking

the part of the

particular characters?

A.

I

try

ters just

sometimes to have genuinely minor charac-

walk through,

easily distracted

like a

by them, because

tion goes like that: every

adventure, and once it,

it

walk-on

you begin

looks like more, and

I

get

a novelist's imagina-

road looks to

little

But

actor.

to claim

it

me

like

an

and describe

you invent more and more

mind doing

my first draft, but

and more.

I

afterward

I

distracted,

and people have loomed much larger than

don't

that in

have to cut back.

I

have seen myself get

had planned, and minor characters have seemed bit

more

reveal,

a little

interesting than they need to be for the pur-

poses of the book. In that case there are

I

little

I let

I

endow them:

try to

pieces of information that

them do some of the work. But

to get carried

away;

the texture

consistent and nothing

is

I

try to restrain

it,

want

I I

if

to

try not

so that, finally,

is

wasted; there

[

I20

The

are

Site of

Memory

no words

no people who

As that

are not absolutely necessary.

for the point of view, there should be the illusion

isn't;

who is there my case) known in

really the narrator

it's

make

doesn't

herself (in

it,

and you think and

voice. It's a comfortable voice, it's

but

a

it's

it's

pen next

it

doesn't

know

So you have

either.

that role. a voice

your

own

guiding voice,

and you have to this voice

feel

But that

can only have a sound,

it

comfortable with this voice, and

can easily abandon

interior dialogue of a character.

itself

So

it's

and reveal the a

combination

of using the point of view of various characters but retaining the

when I'm

power

to slide in

reader

is

I

want

really

is

It's

unfolding, and he's always

is

participating in

characters and right

Q^ You have

on

fingers

it

two

which the

isn't really read-

as

he goes along.

beats ahead of the

target.

said that writing

you go into steady

little

that intimacy in

this; that

]

out, provided that

under the impression that he he

still

text.

ing

121

and

"out" the reader doesn't see

pointing to what's in the

What

is

what's going to hap-

this sort of guide.

guide can't have a personality;

it

who

alarmed by the same things that the reader

alarmed by, and

then

in fact

where you hear

the feeling of a told story,

but you can't identify

and

when

the characters' point of view,

it's

I like

and

in the final text that are unnecessary,

seclusion

is

a solitary activity.

when you're

Do

writing, so that

TONI MORRISON your feelings are

sort of contained, or

away, and go out shopping and A. I

I

do

of

all

it.

I've

been

go out shopping, and

goes away. Sometimes

mean,

I

I

don't.

up

I

and

I

throw

just

it

know how

working.

thought

I

I

I

walk

you

And

up.

go do

it,

away. But

and

I sit

if I

don't like

down and do

had was interesting

—

sometimes I

get

it

the next

it.

By now

where something

always know;

It

outside

write long hours every day.

I

didn't

do whatever.

I

jump up and run

to get to that place

I

for three years.

very intense and

it's

sort of beats

Sometimes

at 5:30

day,

it

book

and

stare,

I

to get

?

.

.

at this

write a sentence and

or something;

.

do you have

is

thought every

I

—because

it

was mine.

Now I know better how to throw away things that are not useful.

can stand around and do other things and

I

think about

same time.

at the

it

I

mind not

don't

writ-

ing every minute; I'm not so terrified.

—and think of beginning writers —you're scared

When you for a lot

first start

writing

I

you don't get that sentence right never going to show up again. And

that

if

doesn't matter better.

And

I

days because

—another one

don't I

again and again, and

passages that

I

and

—and

I

can

it

will be better.

fix it

minute

it's

But

it

probably be

for a couple of fix it

I

true

to death

isn't.

it

it'll

mind writing badly

know

hysteria that used to

will,

that

it's

again and

don't have the

accompany some of those dazzling

thought the world was

just

dying for

[

me

122

The

Memory

Site of

remember. I'm

to

more sanguine about

a little

it all,

cious part,

and then doing

finishing

it

the thrill of a lifetime for me: that first phase

change it

I

it.

looks like

touched

it,

rewrite a I

if I

and then have lot,

never did.

and that takes

it

over. That's

done with

just get

time to

fix it

and

over and over again, so that

make

a lot of

In ''Song of Solomon, "

Q^

can

infinite

try to

I

now.

the absolutely most deli-

Because the best part of is

it

look like

it

time and

what was

I

never

a lot of sweat.

the relationship

between your memories and what you made up?

Was

it

very tenuous?

A. Yes,

it

was tenuous. For the

first

time

I

was

writ-

ing a book in which the central stage was occupied by

men, and which had something

my

perception of

world that disappeared with him. that his

it

did.)

So

I

was re-creating

—not biographically

whatever's around. But

that

was about men because

had had sense I

seemed

void after he died, and

this big

it

women

(It didn't,

I

was

loss,

or

and the

but

I felt

time period that was

anything in to

me

I filled it

my two

it; I

that there

with

a

use

was

book

previous books

So

was about my memories and the need

in that

to invent.

in such a rage because

my

was dead. The connections between us were

threads that

I

either

mined

were purely invention. But

123]

my

father)

as the central characters.

had to do something.

father

a

his life or it

do with

man (my

of a

loss,

to

for a lot of strength or they I

created a male world and

TONI MORRISON inhabited

it

and

it

had

this quest

pidity to epiphany, of a

my way

of exploring

man,

all that,

a

—

a

journey from stu-

complete man.

It

was

of trying to figure out

what he may have known.

[124

LEWIS THOMAS

A

Long Line of

Cells

should be

It

a

easier, certainly shorter

work

memoir than an autobiography, and

to

sit

and

ography,

listen to the I

take

it, is

another, leading

a linear

other, discounting

compose

it is

easier

An autobi-

account of one thing

—progressively,

would run

surely

one than to the other.

personal state of affairs at the case this

to

one hopes

—

to one's

moment of writing.

to over seventy years,

maybe twenty-five

one

after

In

my

after the

of the seventy

spent sleeping, leaving around forty-five to be dealt with.

Even

so, a lot

of time to be covered

if all

the

events were to be recalled and laid out.

But discount again the portion of those 264,000 waking hours, spent doing not

thing

—reading the papers,

paper, walking from one

16,500 days,

much

of any-

staring at blank sheets of

room

to the next, speaking a

great deal of small talk and listening to

still

more, wait-

LEWIS THOMAS ing around for the next thing to happen, whatever. Delete

all this as

irrelevant,

then line up what's

the proper linear order without fudging.

with an autobiography,

now

left in

There you

are

relieved of an easy three-

fourths of the time lived, leaving only eleven years, or

4,000 days, or 64,000 hours.

but

now

But

much

too

still

take out

Not much

to

remember,

down.

the blurred memories,

all

all

the

you suspect may have been dressed up by

recollections

your mind

to write

in

your

favor, leaving only the events

you

can't get out of your head, the notions that keep leaping to the top of your

mind, the ideas you're stuck with, the

images that won't come unstuck, including the ones

you'd

just as

enough utes,

In I

to reduce 64,000 hours to

and

my

there's case,

find that

ries of

soon do without. Edit these

around

sharply

thirty

min-

your memoir.

going

down

most of what

my own

down

this

shortened

I've got left are

list

not

of items,

real

experience, but mainly the

memo-

remem-

brances of other people's thoughts, things I've read or

been

told,

metamemories.

A

surprising

number turn

out to be wishes rather than recollections, hopes that the place really did

work

the

way everyone

said

it

was

supposed to work, hankerings that the one thing leading to another has a direction of some kind, and a hope for a pattern

from the jumble

—an

epiphany out of

entropy.

128

A Long

To

Line of Cells

begin personally on

a confessional note,

I

was

at

my outset, a single cell. I have no memory of this stage of my life, but I know it to be true because one time,

at

everyone says

There was of course

so.

when

before that, literally half,

two half-endowed,

the

haploid gametes, each carrying half

were

on

off

and did

so,

their

own

looking to

my

bump

by random chance, sheer

do not remember

dividing.

I

skill

what

—

lot

I

I

got under way.

know

that

I

and

At

certainty.

all

it

of

began

a certain

very young, a matter of hours of youth,

myself out and became for

but

into each other

have probably never worked so hard, and

never again with such stage,

this,

chromosomes,

luck, for better or

worse, richer or poorer, et cetera, and I

a sort of half-life

was

to

a

become

system of

—brain

them signaling

their territories, laying

sorted

each labeled

cells,

cells,

I

limbs, liver, the

to each other, calculating

me out. At one stage

possessed

I

an excellent kidney, good enough for any higher then

I

thought better and destroyed

stalling in

didn't plan

with

on

this

when

memory,

Thinking back,

I

my

it

on

land. I

my cells,

was going on, but

did.

count myself lucky that

in charge at the time. If

mapping of

at once, in-

place a neater pair for living

its

a better

it all

fish;

it

had been

left to

me

I

was not

to

do the

would have got it wrong, dropped something, forgotten where to assemble my cells

neural crest, confused

129]

I

it.

Or I might have been stopped

LEWIS THOMAS

my tracks, panicked by the massive deaths, billions of my embryonic cells being killed off systematically to in

make room

for their

more

think of

a scale so vast that I can't

By

the time

survived.

time

I

It is

I

on

senior successors, death it

without wincing.

was born, more of me had died than

no wonder

can't

I

went through brain

remember; during that

after brain for nine

months,

one model that could be human,

finally contriving the

equipped for language. It is

because of language that

my

farther back into

remember two

lineage.

parents,

I

am

By

able

now

myself,

I

to think

can only

one grandmother and the fam-

Welshmen, back into the shadows when all the Welsh were kings, but no farther. From there on I must rely on reading the texts. of

ily stories

They

instruct

immediate

human

line,

its

I

go back

to the first of

through, or not quite

measure humanness

and

that

the beginner, the earliest

way

the

all

me

as I

my

Homo sapiens, human if you

do by the property of language

property, the consciousness of an indisputably

singular,

unique

takes me,

self.

I'm not sure

and no one has yet told

vincingly.

Writing

When is

did

my

how far back that me about this con-

relations begin speaking?

easier to trace,

having started not more

than a few years back, maybe 10,000 years, not

more. Tracking speech requires guesswork.

slow learners,

as

slow

as

we seem

If

much

we were

to be in solving

[130

A

Long Line

of Cells

today's hard problems, talking until

sometime within the

give or take 50,000. tific

my guess is that we didn't begin

That

is

time ago, and

I

am

100,000 years,

what's called a rough scien-

But no matter,

guess.

last

it

is

embarrassed

an exceedingly short at the

thought that so

—

many of my ancestors, generations of them all the way back to the very first ones a million-odd years ago may have been speechless. I am modestly proud to

—

have come from a family of tool makers, bone scratchers,

grave diggers, cave painters.

hurts to think of their lives tion,

them

Humans

as so literally

dumb,

all.

But

it

living out

without metaphors, deprived of conversa-

even small

arrive fully

talk. I

would

endowed, talking

prefer to have had

them

their heads off, the

mo-

ment evolution provided them with braincases large enough to contain words, so to speak. But it was not so, I

must

back to

guess,

and language came

late. I

will

come

this matter.

What

sticks in the top of

my

my mind

is

another, unav-

my memory, but remembered still, I suspect, by all my cells. It is a difficult and delicate fact to mention. To face it oidable aspect of

genealogy, far beyond

come from a line that can be traced straight back, with some accuracy, into a near-infinity of years before my first humanoid ancestors turned up. I go squarely,

I

back, and so do you, like

131]

it

or not, to a single Ur-

LEWIS THOMAS whose remains

ancestor

approximately

are

on display

thousand million years ago, born

3.5

billion or so years after the earth itself

began cooling down. That first of the

was unmistakably

uncle, I

the

cannot get

in rocks dated

this

a

took shape and

line,

our n-grand-

a bacterial cell.

my

out of

head.

It

has become, for

moment, the most important thing

I

know, the

obligatory beginning of any memoir, the long-buried

source of language. ria,

and

very long line

a

at that.

we came from

tury, that

Never mind our embar-

when we were

rassed indignation

chimps

We derive from a lineage of bacte-

as near-cousins.

accommodate, having

cen-

family of apes and had

That was

relatively easy to

at least the distant

new

of relatives. But this

a

first told, last

look of a set

connection, already fixed by

recent science beyond any hope of disowning the parentage,

is

something

news must come

else again.

as a

At

first

encounter the

kind of humiliation.

Humble

origins indeed.

But then,

it

is

some comfort

to

acknowledge

that

we've had an etymological hunch about such an origin since the start of our language.

Our word "human"

comes from the Proto-Indo-European root dhghem,

meaning simply

word

is

"earth."

The most

telling

cognate

"humus," the primary product of microbial

industry. Also, for

"humane."

It

what

gives a

new

it's

worth, "humble." Also

sort of English, in the sense

[132

A

Long Line

of Cells

of a strange spin, to the old cliche for an apology:

"Sorry, I'm only human,"

Where did that first microorganism, parent of us all, come from? Nobody knows, and in the circumstance it's

anyone's guess, and the guesses abound. Francis

Crick suggests that the improbability of itself

here on earth

drifted in

so high that

from outer space,

scientists in

some other

Others assert that itself

is

it

its

we must

shifting the

forming

suppose

it

problem to

part of the galaxy or beyond.

happened here indeed, piecing

together molecule by molecule, over a billion

years of chance events under the influence of sunlight

and lightning,

finally achieving

by pure luck the ex-

actly right sequence of nucleotides, inside the exactly

membrane, and we were on our way.

right sort of

No not

doubt the

first

much doubt

success occurred in water.

that the

first

event,

however

it

pened, was the only such event, the only success.

And hap-

It

was

Bang of the cosmophenomenon, a piece

the biological equivalent of the Big physicists,

very likely a singular

of unprecedented

good luck never to be repeated.

sheer improbability of the thing taking place

If the

more than

once, spontaneously and by chance, were not enough,

consider the plain fact that right

up

strings of

to

the cells that

our modern brain

cells,

came

later,

carry the same

DNA and work by essentially the same

netic code. It

133]

all

is

ge-

the plainest evidence of direct inheri-

LEWIS THOMAS

We

tance from a single parent.

family

—

are

in the

all

and voting

grasses, seagulls, fish, fleas

same

citizens

of the republic. I all

ought to be able to remember the family

my

cells are alive

tie,

since

with reminders. In almost every-

thing they do to carry

me

along from one day to the

next, they use the biochemical devices of their mi-

crobial forebears. Jesse

Roth and

his colleagues at the

National Institutes of Health have shown that the king-

dom

of bacteria had already learned, long before nu-

cleated cells like ours to each other

came on the

like insulin

the same peptides that

my

to signal

I

and

make use

for this

a brilliant array of

of today for instruct-

brain cells in proper behavior.

More than light,

how

by chemical messages, inventing

purpose molecules

ing

scene,

this, I

could not be here, blinking in the

without the help of an immense population of

specialized bacteria that

around

a billion years

swam

into cells like

ago and stayed there,

mine

as indis-

pensable lodgers, ever since, replicating on their own,

generation

after

generation.

These

are

chondria, the direct descendants of the

how

my

first

mito-

bacteria

make use of oxygen for energy. They occupy all my cells, swarming from one part to another wherever there is work to do. I could not lift that learned

a finger

to

without them, nor think

they live without me.

We

a thought,

are symbionts,

nor can

my

mito-

[134

A

Long Line

of Cells

chondria and

I,

bound together

for the advance of the

biosphere, hving together in harmony, affection.

and

I

For

sure,

I

am

fond of

my

maybe even

microbial engines,

assume they are pleased by the work they do for

me.

It

Or is it necessarily that way,

or the other

could be,

of

I

suppose, that

mented carapace

all

me

is

way round?

a sort of

orna-

for colonies of bacteria that decided,

long ago, to make a try

at real

evolutionary novelty.

Either way, the accommodation will do.

The

plants are in the

same

They have

situation.

same swarms of mitochondria

in

all

their cells,

the

and

other foreign populations as well. Their chloroplasts,

which do the work of tapping

solar

sugar, are the offspring of ancient

energy to make

pigmented microor-

ganisms called cyanobacteria, once green algae. These were the at least 2.5 billion years

from the

air

ago

first

—how

all

known

as blue-

creatures to learn to use

carbon dioxide

and plain water, and sunlight, to manufac-

ture food for the market.

I

am obsessed by bacteria,

of the horse chestnut tree in in general.

We

135]

my backyard,

We

but bacteria for the pro-

without the nitrogen-fixing bac-

most of them living

of legumes.

my own and those

would not have nitrogen

teins of the biosphere teria,

not just

like special tissues in the roots

would never have decay; dead

trees

LEWIS THOMAS would simply

lie

there forever, and so

would we, and

nothing on earth would be recycled.

keep cows, for

cattle can't

have worked

cycle the

wood; they

are, literally, alive

would not have luminous

over,

and

fish for

to

with bacteria.

our aquariums,

around

for the source of that spectacular light is

it

same reason there would be no termites

for the

eyes

couldn't

absorb their kind of food

until their intestinal bacteria

We

We

their

their private colonies of luminescent bacteria.

And we would breathe, for

all

never

the

have

oxygen

in

oxygen

obtained

our

air is

to

exhaled for

our use by the photosynthetic microbes in the upper waters of the seas and lakes and in the leaves of forests. It

was not

that

of cell with a

we

invented a sophisticated

modern nucleus and then

new

kind

invited in the

more primitive and simpler forms of life as migrant workers. More likely, the whole assemblage came together by the joining up of different kinds of bacteria; the larger that

had

cell,

the original "host,"

lost its rigid wall

defect.

Lynn Margulis

chetes

were part of the

the progenitors of the

may have been one

and swelled because of

has proposed that the spirooriginal committee, cilia

on modern

becoming

cells, also

organizers of meiosis and mitosis, the lining

chromosomes, the allocation of effect,

the reading of

this

all wills. If

DNA to she

is

the

up of

progeny

—

in

right about this,

[136

A

Long Line

of Cells

the spirochetes were the inventors of biological sex and

including conclusive death.

all that,

The modern

we thought It is an organism in its own right, not the single entity

cell is

it

was

a

condominium, run by

few years

a

ago.

trustees.

If all this is true, as I believe

earth

This

another thing on

these days that

my

life

feet

sit

straight

and then knocking

The whole

works.

up

of the

to think.

my mind, so much in my head

crowds out other thoughts

it

making me

have,

to be, the

more intimately connected than I used

is

is

it

earth

is

me

I

used to

now, bringing me off

them.

alive, all

to

The world

of a piece, one

living thing, a creature.

breathes for us and for

It

and what's more

itself,

regulates the breathing with exquisite precision.

oxygen way;

in the air

it is

is

random, any old

at precisely the

optimal concen-

tration for the place to be livable.

points

more than the present

would burst strangle. It

into flames; a

is

few

the

few percentage and the

and most

life

forests

would

held there, constant, by feedback loops of

dioxide, inhaled

low

A

level

less

information from the conjoined

bon

The

at

not placed there

maintained

it

level that

lifeless planet.

by the

life

plants,

of the planet. Caris

held at precisely

would be wildly improbable on any

And this happens to be the right concen-

tration for keeping the earth's temperature, including

the heat of the oceans, exactly right. Methane, almost

137]

LEWIS THOMAS all

of

it

the product of bacterial metabolism, contributes

greenhouse

also to the

steady. Statesmen

bers these days

CO2 by burning forest,

must keep

—we

and methane

effect,

is

held

eye on the num-

a close

are already pushing

up the

level of

much fuel and cutting too much may be in for a climatic catastro-

too

and the earth

phe within the next century. But there

it is:

except for our meddling, the earth

the most stable organism

we

can

know

about

—

plex system, a vast intelligence, turning in the of the sun, running infallibility

its

a

is

com-

warmth

internal affairs with the near-

of a huge computer.

Not entirely

infallible,

however, on the paleontological record. Natural

catas-

trophes occur, crashes, breakdowns in the system: ice ages,

meteor

volcanic

collisions,

eruptions,

clouding, extinctions of great masses of It

goes down, as

we

The newest of all things, parts,

global

living tissue.

say of computers, but never out,

always up again with something

working

its

new to display to itself.

the latest novelty

seems to be us

among

its

—language-speaking,

song-singing, tool-making, fire-warming, comfortable,

warfaring mankind, and I

can't

I

am

of that

ilk.

remember anything about learning language

as a child. I

do have

a

few memories of studying

and write, age four or recollection at

all

five, I

think, but

I

have no

to read earlier

of learning speech. This surprises me.

[138

A

Long Line

of Cells

You'd think

that the

remain fixed

moment

gest it

to

in

may have known came, I

at

just the

all,

my

day

be that

troubled.

Or

perhaps

mind. Being human,

I

along about language, from the faces,

and speech

The

just

reason

at that

time they were not mistakes

normal speech of childhood, no more

adult

like a

forever, the big-

have forgotten.

my

stunning

the learning process, the early mis-

memorable than the All

a

thing to do as breathing.

remember

may

I

memory

glimpse of human

first

takes,

in

itself in all

as natural a

can't

But

life.

never embedded

time of my

triumphant

first

would have been such

finished sentence,

landmark

word, the

first

first

life I

drawn

have hoped to speak French one

Frenchman, but

Why

breath.

I

am

near to giving up,

should any small French child, knee

do so quickly something

high, be able to

that

I

will

never learn to do? Or, for that matter, any English or

few months

Turkish child living for

a

the answer, but

much

as

well.

Childhood

about

good

it.

at

species,

Young it,

it is

is

like to

hear

children, the

child's play;

implying

have

lost as

I

younger the

better, are

one-time

gift to the

it is

withdrawn sometime

it all

I

it,

know

the time for language, no doubt

never to be regained.

spent I

don't

does that there are other knacks that

it

off,

I

in Paris? I

a

in adolescence, switched

must have had

it

once and

on ordinary English.

possessed a splendid collection of neurones, nested

139]

LEWIS THOMAS in a center

somewhere

in

my left hemisphere,

similar to the center in a songbird's brain left side

was

—used

still

on

also

his

song while he

for learning the species'

a nestling.

—

probably

Like mine, the bird's center

only

is

there for studying in childhood;

if

he hears the proper

song

in

mind

at that stage

menting his

own

it

later

he

is

for

orna-

life,

it

becomes

particular, self-specific song, slightly but per-

he can't hear

compose

it

with brief arpeggios so that

ceptibly different if

he will have

on

it

its

from the song of

all

his relatives.

But

young child, the center can't own, and what comes out later when

it

as a

ready for singing and mating

buzzing noise. This

is

is

an unmelodious

one of the saddest

tales in experi-

mental biology. Children

may do more

than simply pick up the lan-

guage, easily as breathing. Perhaps they first

place,

and then change

it

around

make

as

it

in the

time goes by,

so that today's speech will, as always, be needing scholars as translators centuries hence.

Derek Bickerton,

professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii, has

studied the emergence of a brand-new language called

Hawaiian Creole, which spread across the sometime

up

after 1880,

when

for sugar export

the plantations

islands

were opened

and large numbers of polyglot

workers came from abroad to work the

fields.

The

languages brought in were Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish and Korean,

all

added

to the native

[140

A

Long Line

of Cells

Hawaiian and the then-dominant EngHsh speech. For while nobody could understand anyone

a as

always happens in such language

pidgin English developed (pidgin

is

else.

Then,

form of

crises, a

the mispronuncia-

tion of "business" English), not really a language,

more

crude system for naming objects and pointing

work

a

to be done, lacking structure

and syntactical

Within the next generation, between

1880

at

rules.

and the

turn of the century, Hawaiian Creole appeared. This

was

a

proper language,

flexible

and

fluent, capable of

saying anything that popped into the head, subtle metaphors

and governed by

its

matical rules for sentence structure.

guage, borrowing

words

its

own

It

was

filled

tight a

with

gram-

new

lan-

vocabulary from the original

in the various tongues but arranging

them

in

novel strings and sentences. According to Bickerton, the

new grammar

resembles that of Creoles in other

—the Seychelles, for instance, and places in New Guinea — formed by other multilanguage communities. places

It also

resembles, he asserts, the kind of sentence struc-

ture used

by

all

children as they

grow up

in the acquisi-

tion of their native speech.

Hawaiian Creole was entirely new the important sense that

it

to the islands, in

could not be understood or

spoken by the adults of the community. Bickerton's conclusion, logically enough,

is

that

it

had to be

a lan-

guage invented de novo by the young children of Ha-

141]

LEWIS THOMAS

He

waii.

uses this observation for the deduction that

children must possess in their brains what he calls a

"bioprogram" for language, generating of

Noam If

grammar (and

Chomsky's

Bickerton

is

mechanism

a neural

a confirmation,

on the

for

facts,

insight three decades ago).

right, the

way

is

open

for a

new

kind

of speculation about one of humanity's deepest secrets:

How

did language

talking,

develop?

Who

started

and under what circumstances? The

believe, tells I

first

imagine

were only

a time,

story,

when

thousands of years ago,

a million or so

humans on

place to place in search of food

Nobody

the I

itself.

and out of touch, traveling

scattered

all

there

the earth, mostly in families

from

—hunters and gatherers.

spoke, but there were

human sounds

every-

where: grunts, outcries imitating animals and birds, expletives with explanatory gestures.

ancestors

were an impatient,

Very

likely,

our

frantic lot, always indig-

nant with each other for lacking understanding. Only recently

down from

the trees, admiring their apposing

thumbs, astonished by intelligence, already studying fire,

they must have been wondering what was missing

and what was coming to

make

next. Probably they

the sounds needed for

plants, animals, fish

—but no

had learned

naming things

real speech,

—

trees,

nothing

like

language.

Then

they began settling

down

in places for longer

[142

A

Long Line

stays,

of Cells

having invented the beginnings of agriculture.

More famihes gathered together, settled in communities. More children were born, and ways had to be found to keep the youngest ones

and out of the way of the

safe

from predators

adults. Corrals

were con-

structed, fenced in, filled with children at play. I

imagine one special early evening, the elders

around the

sitting

grunting monosyllables, pointing

fire,

at

the direction of the next day's hunt or the next field

human

to be slashed, thinking as hard as

think

when

Then more ters,

they are

at a

permanent

beings can

loss for

words.

noise than usual from the children's quar-

interrupting the thought.

A

rising surf of voices,

and louder, exul-

excited, high-pitched, then louder tant, totally

incomprehensible to

all

the adults. Lan-

guage. It

must have been

sense.

resisted at

first,

regarded as non-

work so communication but only among the

Perhaps resented, even feared, seeing

beautifully for

it

children. Magic.

Then,

magic, parts of

learned by some of the adults from

their ical,

it

later on,

accepted as useful

own children, broken creole. Words became magsentences were miraculous,

grammar was

(The thought hangs on: the Scottish cognate

mar

is

sacred.

for

gram-

"glamour," with the under-meaning of magic

with words.)

"Kwei,"

143]

said a

Proto-Indo-European

child,

meaning

LEWIS THOMAS "make something," and later, our word "poem." But it all

how

word became,

the

did the children get

the time, and have

it still,

it? I

centuries

imagine they had

latent in their brains,

ready to make the words and join them together articulate, as a sufficient

—

to

we say. What was needed at the outset was

concentration of

young

children, a critical

mass, at each other day after day, experimenting, trying

words out

for sense.

Whatever happened

in the

human brain to make

talent a possibility remains a mystery. It

been

a mutation, a

new

all

earlier primates.

Or

might have our

set of instructions in

for the construction of a it

new

this

DNA

kind of center, absent in

could have been a more gen-

eral list of specifications:

i.e.,

don't stop now, keep

making more columnar modules of neurons, build

a

bigger brain. Perhaps any brain with a rich enough cortex can

become

a

speaking brain, with a self-con-

scious mind. It is a satisfying

ancestors all

whose

notion for a memoir.

brains evolved so far

their relatives that speech

this in

was the

I

come from

beyond those of result,

and with

hand they became the masters of the

earth,

God's image, self-aware, able to remember generations back and to think generations ahead, able to write things like "In the beginning lies

was the word." Nothing

any longer beyond reach, not even the

local solar

[144

A

Long Line

of Cells

system or out into the galaxy and even, given time,

beyond

that for colonizing the Universe. In charge of

everything.

But

this

kind of talk

is

embarrassing;

it is

the

way

I

must

children talk before they've looked around.

mend

the

and

don't

a

I

member

ways of

my

know how

mind. This it

of a fragile species,

ments

is

evolutionary time of a species.

very big place,

how I fit in. I am new to the earth, the

still

scale,

cies, a child

a

works, nor

youngest creatures of any as

is

We are only tentatively set in

place, error-prone, at risk of fumbling, in real

moment

at the

our

fossils,

With

so

as

radioactive at that.

much more

to learn, looking around,

be sure, but not so

much

we are.

We are differ-

because of our brains

in with each other, to

fit

life

seem

to get along,

accommodate, even

concede when the stakes are high. They

live off

niches, but always within set limits, with like restraint. It

is

a

each

to us a while back. If

can

see, all the

game

that

it

stan-

seemed

we look over our shoulders as far way past trillions of other species

to those fossil stromatolites built

145]

something

rough world, by some of our

dards, but not the winner-take-all

we

to

devour each other, scramble for ecological

other,

as

we

because of our discomfiture, mostly with each other.

All the other parts of the earth's to

danger

of leaving behind only a thin layer of

should be more embarrassed than ent, to

mo-

here only a few

measured, a juvenile spe-

by enormous com-

LEWIS THOMAS munities of collaborating microorganisms,

no evidences of meanness or vandalism

on

we

in nature. It

balance, an equable, generally amiable place

natured, as

We

we

can see is,

—good-

say.

are the anomalies for the

moment, the

self-con-

scious children at the edge of the crowd, unsure of our

We

place, unwilling to join up, tending to grabbiness.

much more But we are not

have

to learn than language.

bad

as

a lot as

some of us

say.

agree with this century's fashion of running

human

species as a failed try, a

we may

worst,

is like.

don't

down

sport.

the

At our

be going through the early stages of a

species' adolescence,

that

doomed

I

and everyone remembers what

Growing up

is

hard times for an individual

but sustained torment for a whole species, especially

one

as

brainy and nervous as ours.

get through the phase, shake off

century, wait for a break,

we can last it out, the memory of this If

we may find ourselves off and

running again. This

is

an optimistic, Panglossian view, and I'm

quick to say that

I

could be

indeed come our

full

all

wrong. Perhaps

we

have

evolutionary distance, stuck

forever with our present behavior, as mature as will be for as long as

we

last. I

doubt

it.

we

ever

We are not out

of options. I

am just enough

persuaded by the sociobiologists to

believe that our attitudes

toward each other are

in-

[146

A Long

Line of Cells

more than

fluenced by genes, and by

making grammar.

genes for

alone were our only wired-in

If these

guides to behavior,

just the

we would

be limited to metaphor

and ambiguity for our most important messages other.

we do some

think

I

From

earliest

expressions, and It

goes too far to

other, but

we

we

we

can smile and laugh

recognize faces and

we hanker say that we

for friends

facial

and company.

have genes for liking each

tend in that direction because of being a

biologically social species. are

other things, by nature.

infancy on,

without taking lessons,

to each

I

am

we

sure of that point:

more compulsively social, more interdependent and

more

inextricably attached to each other than any of

the celebrated social insects.

We

are not,

marginally so committed to altruism as a the bees or ants, but at least

trait,

way

of

we are able to sense,

tively, certain obligations to

One human

I fear,

even life as

instinc-

one another.

urging us on by our nature,

is

the

drive to be useful, perhaps the most fundamental of

our biological it

necessities.

wrong, confuse

but

it is

it

We make mistakes with

it,

there in our genes, needing only a better set of

So we

I

we

have yet agreed on.

are not entirely set in our ways.

may have more dominant

147]

get

with self-regard, even try to fake

definitions for usefulness than

others.

it,

all

suspect, glancing

Some

of us

genes for getting along than

around

my

life,

that

we

are

LEWIS THOMAS endowed with

also

other, inhibitory alleles, widely

spread for the enhancement of anomie. Most of us are a mixture. If

we

we

like,

can

sit tight,

trusting nature

come.

Or we can hope

for the best of possible worlds to

for better breeding, in both senses of the term, as our

evolution proceeds.

Our

made

microbial ancestors

use of quicker

ways

for bypassing long stretches of evolutionary time, I

and

envy them. They have always had an abundance of

viruses, darting lines,

from one

cell to

another across species

doing no damage most of the time ("temperate"

viruses, as they are called), but

and ends of

DNA

from

always picking up odds

their hosts

and then passing

these around, as though at a great party.

The

bits are

—new

then used by the recipients for their betterment tricks for I

coping with

new

hope our species has

to think of

of our

own

it,

maybe we

viruses,

a

contingencies.

mechanism

do. After

all,

like this.

we

most of which seem

no purpose, not even

to

make us sick.

Come

live in a sea

to be there for

We can hope that

some of them might be taking hold of useful items of genetic news from time to time, then passing these along for the future of the species. It

makes

feel a cold

may

a cheerful footnote,

coming on,

reflect

anyway: next time you

on the

possibility that

you

be giving a small boost to evolution.

[148

Bibliography

When we us that

were planning

we would

this series of talks,

like to

it

occurred to

know what books our

consulted or remembered or somehow found writing their list

own

authors

helpful in

We asked them for an informal

memoirs.

of their favorite first-person narratives or other works

that influenced their writing.

This bibliography

is

their an-

swer to our request.

RUSSELL BAKER Here

are

some of the books

that

were valuable

to

me

during

the writing of Growing Up:

Not So Wild a Dream by Eric Sevareid (Atheneum, 1976), Personal History Co., 1936),

(Harper

by Vincent Sheean (Doubleday, Doran

and In

& Row,

&

Search of History by Theodore H. White 1978). All three are journalists'

memoirs

Bibliography

distinguished by a great deal of frankness about their child-

hoods and private

perman

lives.

After thirty-three years as a newspa-

had trouble writing candidly about

I

history" and found encouragement to try fine

books by three of our best (Farrar, Straus

Exiles

&

Ararat (Farrar, Straus

Aden. The prose little

is

so

&

it

my

"personal

anyhow in these

journalists.

Giroux, 1970) and Passage

Giroux, 1975), both by Michael

good

that

better after reading them.

to J.

couldn't help writing a

I

The books are models of how

to write about sensitive family relationships

and the most

private emotions without falling into squalor

and vulgarity.

The Dream of Golden Mountains by Malcolm Cowley (Vi-

king Press, 1980) and Starting Out

Kazin

(Little,

sense of

1965). Because

I

wanted

what the Great Depression meant

only a child's

who had best.

Brown,

in the Thirties

memory

been adults

of

it, I

by Alfred to create a

to adults

and had

looked for memoirs by people

in the 1930s.

These were two of the

Because they dealt with an urban, intellectual America

totally different

from anything

1930s, they helped

world of

my

Because so generation,

best of

it

Exile's

I'd

been aware of in the

understand the simplicity of the

childhood.

much

of the book

which came

and the Jazz Age, a sense of

me

how

I

my parents' World War I

would be about

to maturity during

looked for material that would convey

that period

might have shaped people. The

included:

Return by Malcolm Cowley (Viking Press, 1934;

revised, 1951)

and The Twenties by

Edmund Wilson (Farrar,

[152

Bibliography

Straus

&

Giroux, 1975), with their picture of

Hterary Bohemia.

It

was

startling to

New

York's

be reminded that the

twentieth century was already blazing away so furiously just

250 miles north of the rustic backwater where

was

still

my

family

living so close to the nineteenth.

The Mauve Decade by

Thomas Beer

1926) was valuable in helping

me

(Alfred A. Knopf,

understand the social tyr-

anny exercised by women during the mother was born, and

how

1890s,

that tradition

when my

might have been

passed on to her.

Goodbye

to

All That by Robert Graves (Jonathan Cape,

War and Modern Memory by Paul

1929), The Great

Fussell

(Ojfford University Press, 1975), and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

&

(Faber

&

Faber, 1930) and Sherston's Progress (Faber

Faber, 1936), both by Siegfried Sassoon, are invaluable to

an understanding of

how World War

I

shattered the nine-

teenth-century sensibility and prepared us for twentieth-

century brutality.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by ard,

McCann & Geoghegan,

Edmund

1979) conveys a marvelous

American

spirit

understand

how

sense of the optimism that characterized the

before

World War

I

and makes

Morris (Cow-

it

easier to

devastating the Great Depression must have been to adults

born

at the start

of the century.

Not having written much in a personal vein until I started the book, I read many books to see how the thing was done, to see if I could discover the trick, as it were. The best of these were:

153]

Bibliography

Dispatches

report from

by Michael Herr (Alfred A. Knopf,

Vietnam by

a

man

trapped inside

a

1977), a

nightmare.

This extraordinarily personal piece of war reporting

umphs because

own

the writer

scrupulously honest about his

is

terror, fatigue, ignorance,

Happy

tri-

cowardice and anger.

Days, 1880-1892 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1940) and

Newspaper Days, 1899-1906 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941) by H. L.

Mencken. Mencken does

ered after several false

Mencken's way, you

it

starts,

like

nobody

though,

if

else.

As

you

try to

produce only

will

a

I

discov-

do

it

very inferior

counterfeit.

The Years with Ross by James Thurber 1959).

Thurber wrote

that they're not quite as

Roughing Mississippi

Nobody

It (F. (J.

S.

G. Gilman

Osgood

&

also discovered that

defeated by insensate Life on

wanted

&

as

It

I

reminds

they think they

are.

Co., 1872) and Lije on the

Co., 1883)

Twain

What

by Mark Twain.

that a

memoir

a pleasure to

is

not

watch him

dull stretches of arid fact with inventions of the

improve I

good

understood better than

biography, but an art form.

mind.

and

better than almost anybody,

believe writers should always read their betters.

them

Brown,

(Little,

demands of

the Mississippi it

even the greatest writer can be

is

editors.

The

last half

of

heavy going because an editor

to be twice as long as

it

should have been.

Autobiography by Anthony Trollope (Williams

&

Nor-

gate Ltd., 1887). Looking for tips from the most relentless

writer ever,

however,

work

I

found only advice

to write relentlessly. It

on the

a fascinating look at a literary life built

ethic,

and

a valuable

book

for

all

is,

writers to

know

[154

Bibliography

"How

about.

When

reply,

"Read Trollope's autobiography; the

asked,

can

become

I

now

a writer?" I

secret

is

there."

Autobiography (various versions have appeared under erent

titles

from

c.

1791) by Benjamin Franklin.

to write about this in the as

book and wanted

hard to stay awake through

The answer

it

was

know

to

in

my

diff-

intended if it

was

childhood.

was: not quite. of Things Past (Bernard Grasset, vol.

Remembrance

Nouvelle Revue Frangaise,

I;

La

1914-1927; Holt

&

1932) by Marcel Proust. This

is

vols. II-VII,

Random House,

Co., 1922;

as

I

the ultimate memoir. Proust's ability to startle the reader

with some revelatory scene that suddenly in a

new

light

is

a gift I envy.

I

read through

long volumes again in search of the time, while learning that

Proust's effects it

was

if I

unlikely.

So

I

casts

secret. I

might

all

had

a

everything

seven very

wonderful

possibly achieve

just

wrote seven very long volumes, though I

wrote only one rather short volume.

ANNIE DILLARD These

are

some

first-person narratives

I

dearly love:

NINETEENTH-CENTURY UNITED STATES The Education of Henry Adams (Houghton Mifflin, 1918). I like its

vigorous thought and

count of one's intellectual

life is

its

assumption that an ac-

indeed an account of one's

life.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Ticknor

•55]

& Fields,

1854).

Bibliography

In it

its

formal shapeliness and metaphorical, hyperbolic prose

far

exceeds the scrapbook journals

Thoreau the

of

artist.

Richard Henry Dana,

&

monument

as the

Two

Mast (Harper

Years Before the

Brothers, 1840).

Mark Twain,

Life on the Mississippi

&

Osgood

(J. S.

Co.,

1883).

TWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES Alfred Kazin, 195

1).

A

Walker

This stirringly

in

the City

illustrates a

(Harcourt, Brace,

paradox on which,

the finest autobiographical literature depends, that the

life

of the

spirit,

which

book over and over

Russell Baker,

Most of the refrain

in

Growing Up (Congdon

self at

essayists

of

structural integrity I

have read

and genial one,

Memory (Dutton,

and

1982).

life

1983).

lived deeply.

literary intelligence.

A I

More

find these aesthetic satisfactions in nonfiction;

and other nonfiction writers are taking the care and

perhaps practicing the

artifices that

English prose writers

used to practice in the seventeenth century.

whose work Mary Heaton Vorse, Time and

writers

life

all.

recent and elegiac account of a calm

and more

I

& Weed,

best memoirs, like this vivid

from examining the

its

that

again.

James McConkey, Court

admire

is,

an adult often becomes the

of the mind, enters the child through the senses. this

think,

I

Many

fiction

sees print apparently are not. the

Town:

Chronicle (Dial Press, 1942). Like Marjorie

A

Provincetown

Kinnan Rawl-

[156

Bibliography

(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1942) in

ings's Cross Creek

broad-spirited

decades

among

re-creation

of

and

energetic

its

hospitable

friends.

The Autobiography of Malcolm

X

(Grove

Press, 1965).

A

magnificent narrative.

Norman MacLean, A

River Runs Through

It

(University

of Chicago Press, 1976). Published as fiction, this reads like the best of memoirs.

It is a

favorite of

Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Press, 1983).

medicine of

A

The

Science

many

(Oxford University

genial medical researcher

his father's

writers.

remembers the

day and the researches of

his

own.

matter-of-fact quality to his writing and a pure, clean

attention to the materials at

hand make Lewis Thomas's

writing modest, honest and serious.

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time (Viking

Press, 1967).

Conroy

masters a narrative, dramatic, novelistic handling of scenes.

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (Doubleday, Page

&

Co., 1901). This classic holds up;

it is

a pleasure to

read.

Henry

&

Beston, The Outermost House (Doubleday,

Co., 1928). This

ple. Its

Cape Cod masterpiece

power derives from two images:

and the

fateful, killing

Maureen Howard,

Howard grew up

is

Doran

broad and sim-

the cold, pagan stars

waves.

Facts of Life (Little,

Brown,

in Bridgeport, Connecticut,

1978).

among a vari-

ety of colorful people she describes with insight.

Maxine

Hong

Kingston, The

Knopf, 1976). There

157

is

a

Woman

Warrior (Alfred A.

long story in here about a Chinese

Bibliography

aunt that

is

one of the funniest

Kingston

is

a sophisticated

Thomas Merton, The

stories I've seen in print.

and original writer.

Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt,

Brace, 1948). Merton's account of the steps that led

from

a privileged childhood in France,

him

through Columbia

University and to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky.

James Thurber,

My

Brothers, 1933). This

is

vintage Thurber.

Ethel Waters, His Eye 1951).

The

on the Sparrow (Doubleday,

Is

singer Ethel Waters

music, hardship and

her moving story of

tells

faith.

Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive (Viking vivid,

&

and Hard Times (Harper

Life

rough-and-tumble childhood in

a

Press,

A

1982).

Bronx immigrant

neighborhood in the 1930s.

AND ABROAD John Cowper Powys, Autobiography (John Lane,

An

1934).

extreme of the genre, written with the usual Powys

restrictions. In this case

and omits

all

he belabors

mention of the

women

his so-called eroticism

in his

life.

many odd books. Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (Hogarth

The

oddest

of this great writer's

Press, 1954).

A

beautiful evocation of the timelessness of early childhood, in

the

Orkney

Islands,

Ved Mehta,

Vedi

by the poet and

translator of Kafka.

(Oxford University Press, 1982). In

beautiful, formal, vivid language, the writer describes his

blind, vigorous

boyhood

in India.

Kildare Dobbs, Running

to

Paradise (Oxford University

[158

Bibliography

The Canadian man

Press, 1962). els

and impressions following

of letters recounts his trav-

his

immigration from North-

ern Ireland.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report 1965).

This strong,

to

storyteller's

&

Greco (Simon

Schuster,

autobiography escapes the

usual hazards of Kazantzakis.

Maxim Gorky, 1915);

My

House, 1952,

My

the trilogy:

My

Childhood (T.

W.

Laurie,

Apprenticeship (Foreign Languages Publishing

The Century

also as In the World,

Universities (Boni

hood was actually

&

Co., 1917);

Liveright, 1923). Gorky's child-

colorful; his father

vats in the yard stained everything.

was a dyer, and the dye

The

usual Russian ex-

tremes of living and of writing are right here.

Graham Greene, A

Sort of Life (Bodley

Head, 1971).

An

austere, intelligent autobiography.

Pablo Neruda, Memoirs (Farrar, Straus

The

&

Giroux, 1977).

poet writes a muscular prose; he describes the literary

camaraderie of his early

manhood

in Valparaiso.

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955).

The

with

happy boyhood.

a

Christian's intellectual autobiography begins

Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie (Simon 1985).

His parents were low-church British

&

Schuster,

evangelists,

great and lively characters.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak,

Memory

Nabokov's memoir of old Russia tional in

its

spareness.

is

(Putnam,

1966).

pure description, emo-

He describes a needlepoint chair seat.

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (Gallimard, 1964; George

159]

Bibliography

Braziller, 1964). Sartre's original

most

literary

memoir

is, I

think, his best,

work.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars mard, 1939; Reynal

&

(Galli-

Hitchcock, 1939). In the early days

of aviation the author flew the mails over

North

Africa.

A

dandy book.

ALFRED KAZIN Because of the Puritan passion for constantly keeping in

mind

the report of one's doings and misdemeanors to be

delivered to Almighty

and memoirs from the

rich in journals

especially

is

earliest period.

Waldo Emerson (Houghton

journals of Ralph

1909-1914);

God, American writing

Henry David Thoreau, one

The

Mifflin,

of the longest ever

kept (Houghton Mifflin, 1906); Walt Whitman's Specimen

Days (Donald McKay, 1882); John Quincy Adams's

diaries,

sometimes called "Memoirs" and supposed to be the longest journal ever kept by a public

1874-1877), are I

all

(J.

B. Lippincott

&

Co.,

conscious autobiographies in this sense.

have been preoccupied

ture,

man

probably because

I

knee pants, and because

much

of

have kept

my

my

with

this litera-

a journal since I

interest in

keeps returning to the "personal"

life

American

—by which

I

was

in

literature

mean

"the

self as history."

American

classics in this context:

Adams (Houghton ful

example of

Mifflin, 1918)

how

The Education of Henry

—to me the most wonder-

to see one's life as history.

[i6o

Bibliography

Earlier, of course,

The Autobiography of Benjamin Frank-

the prototypical story of the self-made American, but

lin,

distinctive also for

Theodore There

is

nothing

seizing for

wry humor.

its

Dreiser's

Dawn (Horace

else like

wonder and

it

Liveright,

1931).

for portraying the "provincial"

literary inspiration

upon

the "Big

City" (Chicago).

Hemingway's A Moveable 1964). Full of lies or shall

nonetheless because

went

make up

to

Moving about

it

Feast (Charles Scribner's Sons,

we

say delusions, but marvelous

shows the same

artifice of

at

random,

I

would

also include

X's Autobiography (Grove Press, 1965).

had

a lot of "help" in this, to

story

I

know

genius that

his classic short stories.

put

it

I

am aware

gently, but

of the black experience in

purely personal, sensory point of view.

it is

Wright remains

in

Though

my mind

that he

the best

America from

a

of course

have to add Richard Wright's Black Boy (Harper ers, 1945).

Malcolm

&

I

Broth-

the most gifted of

twentieth-century black American writers.

all

I

have forgotten such central items in American autobiog-

raphy

as

The Autobiography of Lincoln

Brace, 1931), a classic portrait of

scandals and Steffens's

own

subject of Soviet Russia,

which

Steffens

American

(Harcourt,

politics,

urban

Utopian self-delusions on the are

now as funny as they are

sad.

One

can hardly omit from any table of American au-

tobiography such succulent dishes Grass (Fowler

nor

&

i6i]

&

as

Whitman's Leaves

of

Wells, 1855), Thoreau's Walden (Tick-

Fields, 1854), Saul Bellow's

The Adventures of Augie

Bibliography

March (Viking 1964),

1953) and Herzog

Press,

and Robert Lowell's Life Studies

There

Cudahy,

1959).

this vein

—Sylvia

no need, perhaps,

is

James

Plath,

(Viking Press,

(Farrar, Straus

Merrill,

Anne

to

go on

Sexton,

& in

etc.,

etc.

The prime example novel

pher,

literature of the

autobiography, the autobiography as novel,

as

Proust's

modern European

in

Remembrance

George

is

of Things Past. Proust's great biogra-

Painter, said he

documented much of his biog-

raphy from the novel!

TONI MORRISON As Toni Morrison

points out in her talk, a large part of her

literary heritage consists of the

were written by centuries.

book-length narratives that

slaves in the eighteenth

Well over

and nineteenth

hundred were published, she

a

says,

and she names the ones that have been particularly important to her as a writer.

She

also

books by modern writers such

James Baldwin. Her

talk

is

mentions several as

influential

Simone de Beauvoir and

her bibliography.

LEWIS THOMAS For the bibliography,

Most

of

my

I

suggest the following:

reading time

Science, Cell, Cellular

is

spent on journals: Nature,

Immunology, Journal of Experimental

[162

Bibliography

PNAS

Medicine,

(Proceedings of the National

Academy

of

Science), several others for library browsing.

The books I keep

near

at

hand,

late

American Heritage Dictionary (the taining Calvert Watkins's section

European

nights and weekends: earliest editions

con-

on philology and Indo-

roots).

The Roots of Language, by Derek Bickerton (Karoma Publishers,

Ann

Arbor, 1981). Here

is

the evidence for the role

of children in Creole language formation.

by E. O. Wilson. Models

Insect Societies,

for

complex

social systems, beautifully illustrated.

Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, by crocosmos,

Lynn

Margulis, and Mi-

by Margulis and Dorion Sagan. The mechanism

of interliving

is

the most important problem for

biology, just beginning to

Wallace Stevens,

all

modern

open up.

editions.

Part of Nature, Part of Us, by Helen Vendler, the most interesting critic alive.

Montaigne, the Donald Frame translation. The Spectator Bird (and other assorted novels) by Wallace Stegner. E.

M.

Forster,

all of,

for picking

up anywhere.

WILLIAM ZINSSER Two

of

my

favorite

in this

series:

Kazin's

A

163]

memoirs

are

by writers who gave

Russell Baker's Growing

Walker

in the City.

Here

are a

talks

Up and Alfred dozen others that

Bibliography

I

enjoyed with unusual intensity

them and that

I still

Arlen, Michael

A

stylish

and

J.

what

it

Exiles (Farrar, Straus

Brown,

&

like to

S.

1972).

N.

encountered

Giroux, 1970).

sensitive recollection of a father

was

Behrman,

I first

remember vividly as models of the form.

who were known on two of

when

and mother

continents for their glamour and

be their son.

A Memoir

People in a Diary:

(Little,

An extraordinary gallery of famous friends

most memorably, the young Siegfried Sassoon and the dying George Gershwin

—

recalled with

by Behrman from the diary he kept

charm and warmth

for fifty years.

Doctorow, E. L. World's Fair (Random House, Posing a

as a novel, this

Bronx boyhood

1985).

minutely observed reconstruction of

in the thirties, culminating in the great

New York World's Fair of

1939, has too

much

truth not to

be true. Hart, Moss. Act

One (Random House,

America's most successful playwrights had a

boyhood of such grinding poverty told here with a prise, still

that the

One

1959).

New

memory

of

York

of

it,

as

born dramatist's sense of timing and sur-

haunts and troubles me.

Houseman, John. Run-Through: A Memoir (Simon Schuster, 1972).

The

vative productions as the Virgil

Thomson-Gertrude

opera Four Saints in Three Acts, the Project and

&

author's role as midwife to such inno-

WPA's Negro

Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre and

Kane

is

huge

risks gladly taken.

recalled with gusto

and

a

Stein

Theatre Citizen

remembered enjoyment of

[164

Bibliography

Day

Lee, Laurie. The Edge oj

England (William Morrow, prose, this evocation of

—A

1960).

growing up

richness and imagery of poetry. affected by the seemingly

Mencken, H.

L.

I

West of

in the

Thinly disguised

as

Cotswolds has the

in the

effortless

Happy

Boyhood

remember being

still

beauty of

language.

its

1880-1892 (Alfred A.

Days,

Knopf, 1940); Newspaper Days, 1899-1906 (Knopf, 1941);

and Heathen Days, 1890-1936 (Knopf, pery memoirs, which during World

War

North Africa and ing,

among

II,

Italy

the

in

with their exuberant

other things,

perman when

These pep-

1943).

Armed Forces Editions brightened many long nights in found

I first

my

war was

style, reinforc-

dream of becoming

over. In 1980,

from the three volumes were published

a

newspa-

twenty chapters

book

in a

Choice oj Days (Knopf), selected and introduced

called

A

by Edward

L. Galligan.

Mortimer, John. Clinging

(Ticknor

&

specialized in divorce cases

—

lific

Wreckage:

The son

Fields, 1982).

aloud to him, Mortimer

to the

whose

Part oj a Lije

of a blind barrister

lurid details

a barrister himself

author and playwright

A

—has written

a

who

had to be read

and

also a pro-

memoir

that

is

both tender and hilarious.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory (Putnam,

1966). Al-

though English was Nabokov's fourth language, no English or American author has written a this

more elegant memoir than

meticulous recollection of a golden childhood

of private tutors and

burg.

165]

summer houses

—

—

a

world

in czarist St. Peters-

Bibliography

Origo,

Images

Iris.

& Shadows:

Brace Jovanovich, 1971).

an American

The

who grew up

wise and graceful memoir of

had many

and Europe,

partly in Ireland

married an Italian, and created a that

Part of a Life (Harcourt

life

on

fulfillments, not the least

a

farm in Tuscany

being the chance to

hide Italian partisans and Allied soldiers during the Nazi

occupation of

World War S. A

Pritchett, V.

Pritchett recalls a

—

hardship

Cab

II.

at the

boyhood

Door (Random House, 1968).

that

was almost Dickensian

his apprenticeship to the

belongs to the nineteenth century

even with a certain

London

its

leather trade

—without

merriment and gratitude.

in

self-pity

A

and

wonderful

memoir. Woolf, Leonard. Growing: 1904-1911 (Harcourt, Brace of an eventual

six

young

&

Autobiography of

World,

1962).

is

my

—Woolf

British civil servant in a village in tells

The second

favorite because

one man's exotic experience

extension

the Years

memoirs by the man Virginia Woolf

would marry. This volume presses

An

the story of

all

s

com-

years as a

Ceylon

the earnest colonials

found themselves trying to administer

it

—and by

who have

justice in strange

and

bewildering lands.

[i66

Contributors

RUSSELL BAKER was born in rural Virginia in 1925, spent II,

two years

training as a

Navy

flier in

World War

graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1947 and

began

his

newspaper career with the Baltimore Sun. In 1954

he joined the

New

York Times and covered the White

House, the Senate, the State Department and several dential

campaigns before starting in 1962

presi-

his thrice-weekly

column, "Observer," for which he subsequently

won

the

He has published eleven books, most recently Book of Light Verse, which he edited. He is now

Pulitzer Prize.

The Norton

working on

a

second autobiographical memoir,

this

one

about the glory of being a young newspaperman in the golden-age America of the 1950s.

He

lives

Miriam, in northern Virginia near the village born.

with

his wife,

where he was

Contributors

ANNIE DILLARD'S

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

won

the

Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1974 and has since been translated into

many

book of poetry,

a

(Teaching a Stone

Her

languages.

other books include a

book of literary theory and to

a

book of essays

Talk) that originally appeared in leading

magazines and that have also been widely reprinted in anthologies. Writers.

tional

Her most

recent book

She has been awarded fellowships from the Na-

Endowment

for the Arts

genheim Foundation. She Press Club nor's

Award

is

a

and the John Simon Gug-

New

winner of the

for Excellence

and

a

York

Washington Gover-

Award. In 1982 she delivered the Phi Beta Kappa

commencement exercises of Harvard UniverShe lives in New England with her husband, Gary

Oration sity.

Encounters with Chinese

is

at the

Clevidence, and their daughter, Rosie.

ALFRED KAZIN

was born

in Brooklyn, graduated

from the City College of

New

York, and began his career

The

New

Republic in 1942.

as literary editor of

Distinguished Professor of English of

New

York

He

oirs

A

New

has also

versities here

at the

York Graduate Center from 1973

been

and abroad.

Walker

University

at the State

Stony Brook from 1963 to 1973 and

in

City University of to 1985.

He was

many unithree mem-

a visiting professor at

Among

his

in the City, Starting

books are

Out

in the Thirties

and

—

New York Jew and such major works of literary criticism as On Native Grounds and An American Procession. He has [170

Contributors

also edited anthologies

and

critical studies

of such writers as

Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James and Fitzgerald.

He

is

Institute of Arts

a

member

and

Howard

gree from Cornell.

F. Scott

American Academy and

Letters.

TONI MORRISON ted from

of the

was born

in Lorain, Ohio, gradua-

University and received her master's de-

As an

editor at

Random House for many

years she brought to publication such writers as

Toni Cade

Bambara, Angela Davis and Gayl Jones. She has taught

at

many

universities, including Yale, Rutgers and Stanford,

and

is

now

ties

and Fine Arts

Schweitzer Professor in the College of Humaniat the State

University of

New

York

in

Albany. Her novels include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon,

Award

which won the National Book

in 1978,

Critics

and Tar Baby. Her new novel.

be published this year. She

is

Circle

Beloved, will

also the author of a play,

Dreaming Emmett. She holds eleven honorary degrees and is

a

member of the American Academy and

Institute of Arts

New York

Public Library.

and Letters and She

lives in

a trustee of the

Rockland County, N.Y.

LEWIS THOMAS,

president emeritus of Memorial

Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was born in Flushing,

N.Y., graduated from Princeton University and got his

M.D. degree from Harvard.

171]

He

has been on the faculty of

Contributors

five

schools of medicine and dean of

two

N.Y.U.-

of them:

Bellevue Medical Center and the Yale School of Medicine.

He

has published

more than 200

scientific

papers on virol-

ogy, immunology, experimental pathology and infectious disease, has received

more than twenty honorary

degrees,

and has served on many government advisory committees.

He received the National Book Award for Lives oja the

American Book Award

for The

His two most recent books are Youngest Science,

and

Thoughts on Listening

the-Month Club, spent the

critic.

New

and

of his career. The

Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

WILLIAM ZINSSER, with the

memoir

Cell

the Snail.

collection of essays, Late Night

a to

a

Medusa and

general editor of the Book-offirst

thirteen years of his career

York Herald Tribune

He left the paper in

as a writer, editor

1959 to become

and

a freelance writer

and has since written regularly for leading magazines. From 1968 to 1972 he wrote a column for

he was ing and

He

is

at Yale University,

Life.

During the 1970s

where he taught nonfiction writ-

humor writing and was master

of Branford College.

the author of eleven books, including the classic

On

Writing Well and Willie and Divike, a portrait of the jazz

musicians Willie Ruff and

Dwike

Mitchell.

He

Extraordinary Lives, the book derived from the talks

and

also edited

first series

sponsored by the Book-of-the-Month Club, on the craft of biography.

town, with

He

lives in

New

York, his

of

art

home

his wife, Caroline Zinsser.

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