In the absence of wolf willow

I think about writing a memoir, or a maybe just part of one –- a long piece about growing up in Vermont.  I have thought about it before.  I think about it more lately, as I have been reading Wallace Stegner’s excellent Wolf Willow, which is not entirely a memoir, but is roughly equal parts memoir, history of the Canadian plains, and fiction based on both.  The memoir portions concern the six years that Stegner spent as a boy in Whitemud, Saskatchewan, where his parents struggled as homesteading wheat farmers until they ultimately acknowledged the defeat that they had suffered from bad weather, ignorance of better farming techniques than the ones being practiced in that place and time, and ultimately the simple fact that the plains of Saskatchewan are a crushingly hard place to grow wheat with nothing more than the physical exertion of horses and men.  It is a damn fine book.

And so I think about writing a memoir, although I don’t particularly like the idea of it.  I spend enough time at my computers, and enough time being self-absorbed.  The trick is to write about one’s own experiences in a time and a place, with self-awareness and reflection, but without sentimentality and cliché.  Without it being too much about yourself.

While I am thinking about all this, the death of Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes, triggers a wave of commentary about the state of the modern American memoir.  Jay Parini, the poet and novelist who teaches at Middlebury College, goes so far as to claim that “memoirs have always been the central form of American literature.  From Governor Bradford’s memoir of the original settlers in Plymouth, Of Plymouth Plantation, through Benjamin Franklin’s fabulous autobiography, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Mary Antin’s Promised Land or Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington or any of a thousand wonderful immigrant memoirs from the 19th and 20th centuries, this has been our most essential form. … The reason for this, I suspect, is that the United States has always been about singing one’s self, as Walt Whitman might say. The individual stands in for society.”  Parini also notes that novels “are, quite often, simply disguised memoirs, and people read these novels for the same reasons that they read ‘true’ narratives: it’s always bracing to find out how other people have managed to live their lives, to endure them, even to take delight in them.”

Gerald Howard, an executive editor of Doubleday, rightly says that the best memoirs “are works of literary art.”  The “twin massifs of the contemporary American memoir,” he says, are Angela’s Ashes and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, while “[t]he foothills leading up to them were the two masterpieces by the brothers Wolff:  Geoffrey’s The Duke of Deception and Toby’s This Boy’s Life.  The noble ancestor and progenitor of these books is Frank Conroy’s immensely influential but now under-acknowledged memoir from the ’60s Stop-Time.”

William Zinsser, an author and an instructor in memoir writing, would add Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life to this list.  Zinsser says this about his students:  “I’ve taught memoir writing for two decades at The New School, and most of my students are older men and women trying to make sense of their family narratives.  Memoir has to be an honest transaction with your memories and your emotions.”

Trying to make sense of your family narrative.  Or maybe just yourself.  That seems a worthwhile endeavor.  But writing a memoir requires one to actually sit down and write it, instead of thinking about writing it, planning to write it, outlining it, preparing a format for it, and all of the other preliminary, peripheral, procrastinating things that I am prone to do.  This would include writing about writing it.  Like this.

Eventually I do make a start.  But after plowing and working ten pages or so I admit –- like Stegner’s family finally admitted about wheat farming in Saskatchewan -– sometimes the land just isn’t worthy of the enterprise.  My family history, how we ended up in Vermont, the small town where I grew up –- it just isn’t that interesting.  There is no compelling landscape, no brutal weather, no great adventure.  No cowboys or Indians or Royal Mounted Police.  No one who bet the family home or a month’s wages on a poker hand or a horse race.  No great deprivation or hardship or addiction or abuse.  Nor even any wolf willow –- a plant the smell of which transports Stegner back to the Indian-watching, gun-toting, muskrat-trapping adventures of his youth in Whitemud.

But I’ll take my childhood over Frank McCourt’s any day.  He was in his sixties when Angela’s Ashes was published, and was often asked what he was doing all that time before he finally wrote the incredible memoir of his childhood.  His answer was, “Recovering.”