The Fall of Memory

In her early books about a child’s life on the frontier, Laura Ingalls Wilder tells of her family’s wanderings from a log cabin in the big woods of Wisconsin, to a little house on the prairie in southern Kansas, and on to a sod dugout on the banks of Minnesota’s Plum Creek. Her later volumes, however, chronicle her pioneer girlhood once her parents had settled down permanently, in a farmhouse near De Smet, South Dakota. And when an old Kansas neighbor visits on his way out to the new territory opening up in Montana, the teenaged Laura cries that her family should be moving west, too.

“‘I know, little Half-Pint,’ said Pa, and his voice was very kind. ‘You and I want to fly like the birds.'”

But for me, east is where I flew away to, and west is back toward home. When I think about abandoning the life I have these days, I imagine living on one of those dry Dakota buttes overlooking the river, alone with my family, miles from the nearest neighbor–a final refuge from the noise and rush, a perpetual anti-Washington, anti-New York, anti-East, forever set apart and free.

Then I shake myself awake and remember that I’d probably starve to death attempting it. Perhaps my dreams of the prairie are merely the standard-issue reveries in which settled people imagine they might somehow throw off their responsibilities and make a change. Perhaps they’re merely daydreams of difference: the perpetual illusion that life might be lived down some entirely other path, the always-shimmering mirage that promises we can find what our spirits are missing simply by relocating our tired bodies.

But there is also a current in the mind that seems, inevitably, to pull fantasies about the future down into the dangerous eddies of the past. I know that what we might call “second innocence”–our grown-up goodness, our adult perfection, if we could ever reach it–will have to be something different from the first innocence we knew as children. What we lost when we were young is not what we should seek when we are old. I know all that–and yet, the logic of human imagination always joins what might be with what has already been: every possible future somehow dependent on the past. Anyone can cure a patient’s neurosis, an old psychoanalysts’ joke runs. All you have to do is travel back in time and change the way his parents and grandparents were treated as children.

“It’s in vain to recall the past unless it works some influence upon the present,” Betsy Trotwood warns the young hero of David Copperfield. Sound advice, but the damaged boy, Charles Dickens’s most autobiographical character, cannot take it. We do so much in vain, attempting with memory to repair the broken past–as though we might arrange thereby a perfect future, as though the Eden we lost at the beginning is the same as the Heaven we must find at the end. In looking back we perform a kind of simulated eavesdropping: a listening-in, as adults, on what we experienced as children; but this time, we imagine, with understanding. This time, getting it right.

So, what’s a memoirist to do? Every human situation, Epictetus once warned, is like a vase with two handles: If you have quarreled with your brother, you can grasp the handle which is the fact that you have quarreled, or you can grasp the handle which is the fact that he is your brother.

For more than a decade now, America has seen the publication of innumerable memoirs and lightly fictionalized accounts of childhood. Books like Mary Gordon’s The Shadow Man, Lois Gould’s Mommy Dressing, Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother, Jacki Lyden’s Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and Michael Ryan’s Secret Life–they appeared in such a ceaseless stream that even professional book reviewers felt flooded by them, and half the New York literary crowd swore they’d never read another, no matter what former best friend wrote it.

What’s interesting, however, is that all these books are gripping accounts, beautifully told, of strangeness, peculiarity, and unpleasantness. And they are all deeply determined to be revelatory, as though the truth that hides beneath memory’s evasions can be uncovered only by grasping Epictetus’s handle: the quarrel of daughters with their mothers, of human beings with their existence.

Some 60 years ago, America suffered through a similar run of memoirs and lightly fictionalized books about childhood, from Betty Smith’s Irish Catholic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to Sydney Taylor’s Jewish All-of-a-kind Family, to say nothing of Wilder’s eight Little House on the Prairie volumes. It is unfair, of course, to lump these books together. Clarence Day’s Life with Father, published in 1935, was wry about being a child back in the 1890s. But the Gilbreth children’s Cheaper by the Dozen, unabashedly Victorian in its worship of a dominating paterfamilias, seems oddly more old-fashioned than Clarence Day’s story, though it was published a decade later.

Still, however much the old memoirs and novels of American childhood varied from one another, they had certain things in common: a similarity of conceit, a determination to be generally pleased with the past, only one handle picked in the choice of Epictetus. Does anyone still read these forgotten bestsellers? Bellamy Partridge’s Country Lawyer and its sequel, Big Family, about being a lawyer’s son in upstate New York? Hartzell Spence’s One Foot in Heaven and its sequel, Get Thee Behind Me, about being a preacher’s son on the Methodist circuit in Iowa?

Though often dismissed as unbearably sentimental, the earlier American memoirs are not, in truth, much more sentimental than their later counterparts. Both typically accept the old family picture of larger-than-life parents dominating the adult writer’s memory of childhood. The newer books differ mostly by calling this a bad thing. In her 1997 memoir The Shadow Man, Mary Gordon seems to believe that by being anti-sentimental about her father she will achieve the accuracy of the un-sentimental, as though black-tinted lenses see better than rose-tinted ones.

There is some dispute about who coined the description of bad biographies as adding a “new terror to death.” It may have been John Arbuthnot, describing the torrent of miserable, catchpenny books that 18th-century publishers issued immediately upon the death of anyone famous, or it may have been a 19th-century lawyer, reviewing John Campbell’s extremely peculiar Victorian series, Lives of the Lord Chancellors. Regardless, the phrase ought to have been reserved for the way deceased parents are treated in many of the recollections of childhood published in the last few years. Who would risk bringing up literary children, if the reward were those children’s adding this new terror to their parents’ deaths?

A few years ago, reviewing a mild memoir by a woman who had adopted a disturbed boy, Richard Howard wrote: “I must acknowledge an interest, or rather a dismay, in discussing this ‘family memoir,’ for from experience and observation Ihave come to regard the American Nuclear Family in the last 50 years as the enemy of individual determination, of personal autonomy–in short, as a disease.”

It hardly seems necessary to point out that the old style of memoir held the opposite: Family was not the disease, but the cure. Probably that’s why most of those accounts of pre-World War II childhood were determined never to grasp the handle of the quarrel.

Believing the moral order interwoven with the facts of the physical universe, memoirs like Kathryn Forbes’s Mama’s Bank Account (1943) imagine that suppressing everything personally unpleasant about parents is truer to reality–simply for being the moral thing to do in a world in which morality itself is true. Believing facts utterly divorced from the values of the moral order, memoirs like Lois Gould’s Mommy Dressing (1998) hold that accurate reporting of the unpleasant is the more honest thing to do, at least in part because the very fact of the unpleasantness loudly proclaims the honesty of the reporter.

There is something self-serving in either form, of course. For that matter, the whole idea of writing a memoir serves a doubtful purpose. Autobiographies are rarely undertaken by the humble or the shy. But compelled to choose, we should pick, I suppose, the old style as the more honorable. Every memoir of childhood is necessarily overshadowed by parents, and I imagine I could find, were I to turn my mind that way, a few stories of my father’s madness, his drinking, his pretension, his bounce.

But my father, being dead, is not here either to be triumphed over by my telling those stories, or to defend himself against them. The death of parents leaves their honor in their children’s hands, and the cruel accuracies we might fling in anger against the living seem even more wrong to use against the dead.

Memory may be our best tool for self-understanding, but only when we remember how weak a tool it really is: prone to warping under the narrative drive of storytelling, vulnerable to self-interest, susceptible to outside influence.

Here, for example, is a memory: To visit that hard South Dakota country in which I grew up is to recognize what price the homesteaders had to pay, for each town was claimed from the plains, grave by grave. Inside are carefully planted trees and tended hedges, small square parks, right-angled corners with stop signs and streets laid out true to the compass: an aiming at an ordered life. Outside lies the wilderness: not the manicured wilderness of postcard rain forests and picturesque mountain peaks, but the real thing.

In most of my recollections of the prairie, the wind is blowing. Sheltered down between the river hills–picking chokecherries for jam with my grandmother in the hollows by the cemetery, or crawling with my friends through the gullies left by the flash floods–we felt it less. But out on the giants’ dancing plain, the wind seemed never to stop. Sometimes in the fall the family would go rock collecting on the buttes north of town, looking for agots to tumble in the rock polisher we got for Christmas when Iwas six or seven. And Ialways wondered that my mother and father, even my sisters, didn’t seem to hear how much the dry wind was filled with hate, stunting the trees and twisting the scrub, gouging at anything that stood up right, scaling our skin and eyes, screeching in our ears cruelties and obscenities just beyond the edge of hearing. Ialways came home sick and trembling.

Except, of course, that the wind often wasn’t north-northwesterly, grinding down against us from the Canadian plains. Leaping from a particular moment to some great universal claim about the way things always were, memory is false, even when it’s true–maybe especially when it’s true, maybe especially at the moment we think we’ve finally gotten the story right.

Partly, I imagine, that comes from the universal decay of reality that happens when we begin a story about the past, for everything runs a little smoother in the telling than it did in the living. I have a theory I sometimes put to friends late at night, and it goes like this: Each time you tell a story, it loses 10 percent of whatever truth it still had left in it.

The first time you explain what happened, the story is probably around 90 percent in contact with reality. It’s also not much of a story. It lacks a sharp beginning, sags in the middle, and sputters out to a weak conclusion. So, without really meaning to, just obeying the internal logic of storytelling, you sand it off a little when you go over it again. You leave out what have come to seem the extraneous bits, you make your own role perhaps a little more central than it appeared the first time around, and you let stand out a shade more clearly the especially comic or dramatic moments.

And thus the tale loses, in its second telling, 10 percent of that 90 percent of the first telling. Tell a story 10 or 12 times, and it’s only a third true. Tell a story 50 times, and the accuracy plummets down pretty close to zero–pretty close, but never quite reaching the absolute zero of pure fiction.

Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, there also enters the temptation to weave into what actually was a thread or two of what should have been. The French call it l’esprit d’escalier, “the wit of the staircase,” the clever thing you ought to have said, which only comes to you on the stairs as you’re leaving, rather than back at the party when it might have done some good.

When Judy Blunt’s prize-winning memoir Breaking Clean appeared in 2002, nearly every reviewer praised its account of a childhood and marriage on the harsh Hi Line in northern Montana–and every reviewer mentioned the astonishing moment in which, as punishment for not having lunch ready for the farmhands, Blunt’s father-in-law took her typewriter into the barn and battered it to pieces with a sledgehammer. As an image for the woes of an aspiring writer, the scene was hard to beat. Unfortunately, it also turned out to be made up: more proof of the iron law that when an anecdote is too perfect to be true, it isn’t. The danger in all this–well, actually, storytelling has lots of dangers. There’s something morally questionable about any activity that treats real human beings as pawns in a game whose goal is self-congratulation.

Meanwhile, there’s the fact that every dishonesty weakens reality by one effect or another. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, George Bernard Shaw remarks that people who routinely lie suffer from more than merely having their friends and family cease to believe them. A habitual liar eventually comes to suppose that everyone else must be lying all the time, too, and human interaction turns ghostly and unreal.

The worst danger, however, may be when we stop remembering just how much an exaggeration is exaggerated. Stories can reach back to change the shape of memory, even while memory is providing the basis for those stories.

When I was very young, I was an escaper: a prison-breaker of toddlerdom, a Houdini of the stroller, a scaler of stairs, a mountaineer of the barriers with which parents try to cage their children. I remember it clearly. Or, at least, I remember later hearing stories about it–so many stories, and there was a photograph of me, as well, one or two years old, with one leg up on the rail of the playpen at my grandparents’ house. It’s not as though I have no genuine recollections of those days. I can still close my eyes and see, in undatable fragments of perfect memory, the towering look of my grandparents’ bookshelves. The long, parallel channels carved down the curved legs of the chairs, seen from under the dining room table. The way the deep red in the borders of an oriental rug would blink, light to dark, dark to light, as Ibrushed the threads back and forth. But now I begin to doubt my vision of climbing from the playpen. I begin to suspect I have cobbled that would-be memory from listening to my father’s stories of my childhood–illuminated by a photograph and the few surviving flashes of early recollection.

It could easily have been something worse. During the 1980s, a kind of madness seized pop psychology: Suddenly, nearly everyone seemed to be in therapy to recover “repressed memories.” Is it significant that this was in the years that set the stage for the recent boom of unhappy childhood memoirs? A notion Sigmund Freud entertained briefly before abandoning it as damaging to his patients, the idea was somehow resurrected decades later in America to become a national obsession. Major universities, well-known teaching hospitals, and even the National Institutes of Mental Health joined the craze for bringing forgotten horrors to consciousness. By 1991 it was routinely claimed that half the patients in psychiatric care suffered repressed memories of abuse during childhood–a perfect circle in which the failure to recall abuse became proof that abuse had likely occurred.

“Repressed-Memory Syndrome” was only a brief episode in medical history, a classic instance of extraordinary popular delusion and the madness of crowds. But it had a certain plausibility–or, at least, the appearance of plausibility–for it was, in one sense, merely an extreme version of a fairly common psychological transaction: blaming on the past the failures of the present.

Nearly every family I know has an adult sibling or two whose lives are dominated by memories of their parents, all their stories and self-explanations looping back to some frightening or awkward moment of childhood. There is a disturbing quality about middle-aged people who still haven’t quite taken responsibility for their world, and I often feel a kind of stern judgmentalism welling up in me while I listen to them. And yet, if there is a harsh judgment to be made here, I have to turn it on myself, for I do it, too, from time to time: chewing on the past, mulling my parents over and over, gnawing at childhood for an explanation of the way I live now. South Dakota: Ah, yes, that strange wind-blown world of South Dakota is the reason, or my eccentric relatives, or the endless cycle of divorces and remarriages that plagued my parents’ generation. And why not? If we could shove back into the past the causes of all our present anxieties and discontents, we might find them finished: There’s a reason we’ve been behaving in certain bad and self-destructive ways, but that reason belongs to a different time, and now we’re free to move on.

And so each foray into childhood becomes a story, with all the usual temptations for shading the truth that storytelling offers–and with the great additional temptation to blame the poison of the present on poisoners from the past, constructing not just a story but the story, the overarching master tale that explains everything away. The key, especially in the modern run of memoirs, is that the past gets explained away–lost somehow, used up, even while it is being recounted.

“An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned,” V.S. Naipaul once wrote, in a last grand defense of the traditional novel. “But fiction never lies; it reveals the writer totally.” If what we want is to make the past meaningful, then memoirs–in either their sentimental or their anti-sentimental form–are probably not the solution to the modern writer’s peculiar situation.

Back in 1989, after the massive success of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe took to the pages of Harper’s with a “manifesto for the new social novel.” In our “weak, pale, tabescent moment,” he claimed, there’s no one doing what Dickens and Balzac and Zola did. We have plenty of talented writers, but the “American novel is dying of anorexia” because writers won’t go out and report on anything other than themselves. Looking around at the world of serious American literature, Wolfe saw a thousand authors all possessing a professional prose so finely honed it seemed capable of cutting to the heart of almost anything. And he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t use it to carve up something important.

There have been some enjoyable childhood memoirs in recent years, of course. My own preference runs toward unpretentious Americana, like Homer Hickam’s Coalwood memoirs, especially Rocket Boys, and Terry Ryan’s The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less. But it was awfully hard not to climb on Frank McCourt’s Irish bandwagon as Angela’s Ashes rolled onto the New York Times‘s bestseller list for 117 weeks. I don’t trust David Sedaris when he insists, as he sometimes does, that his viciously funny stories are accurate autobiography, but nobody milks comic anecdotes better than he does in such books as Holidays on Ice and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

Still, you understand the complaint about the perfect preciousness and self-absorption of America’s high literary types. The sensitive set-pieces of childhood memoir are their natural form–rehearsing old wounds in faultless prose, like precocious children picking delicately at the scabs on their pale knees.

In fact, the modern memoir was born the day the writing teacher’s slogan, “Write About What You Know,” dandied itself up, bought some flowers, and went to call on Thoreau’s defense of autobiography at the beginning of Walden: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives.” Thoreau may have been trying to make a joke, but after the run of recent memoirs, Tom Wolfe’s protest seems more telling than ever: The last thing we need from writers is another simple and sincere account of their own lives; we’d love it if only they would go out to hear about people other than themselves.

And yet, Wolfe missed the extent to which a specific kind of prose creates its own uses, the extent to which a particular style requires a particular sensibility. The problem is that they write too well, our literary boys and girls. There’s hardly a writer now alive whose schooled prose cannot paint in sharp detail almost anything you’d care to name: a catastrophic train wreck, the death of a giant redwood tree, the way the tone-arm on a 1960s hi-fi would quiver just before it settled on the spinning phonograph album. Without being witty, they know what humor looks like on a page; without being wise, they know what shape an insight has. They have a literary instrument ready to say almost anything. And they have almost nothing ready to say with it.

Our age, in other words, is an age of the literary academy, and it has all the virtues and all the vices Matthew Arnold promised when he urged English literature to build itself a counterpart to the Académie Française. Its virtues are a teachable consensus about what constitutes good writing, and a singleminded concentration on the art of it all. Its vices are harder to describe precisely: a certain ennui that infects all highly stylized human activities, a prose that takes the form of revelation more often than it actually reveals anything.

It’s as though our authors have all been forced to absorb something as exquisite as, say, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book of semi-mystical nature observation that’s been mandatory at writers’ workshops for years. And once an author’s been annie-dillardized, the prose gets finer and finer, and the subject gets smaller and smaller. More, detail-studded prose is fun to write, and maybe even fun to read, in short bursts.

Every fall in Pierre, to mark the end of the summer’s bare feet and sneakers, my mother would take us downtown to buy school shoes–those heavy, round-toed Buster Brown monsters that children used to wear: binding torture devices with slick tan soles that slippered across the shoe-store carpet and needed a week’s scuffing on the curbs back and forth from school to make them walkable. By spring–snickered through piles of leaves, stamped in puddles, the winter’s first thin frosts shattered with their heels, salted with the de-icing on the neighbors’ snowy walks because the ugly black-rubber galoshes my mother wanted us to wear had been carefully forgotten at home–the shoes had faded from their original chocolate-linoleum brown to a kind of colorless gray, the tape aglets on the ends of the laces long disappeared, the broken laces themselves knotted together down the tongue of the shoe, the once-smooth brown toes roughened down to blotting paper.

But what advance is made by this sort of writing? The endless focus on details acts, in contemporary writing, mostly as artistic expansion: the writer’s equivalent of what modern painters do when they blow up on large canvases the tiny brush strokes that classical painters once used to fill in corners of the background or the drape of a green velvet dress. A Victorian like Dickens would have thrown away all this kind of thing in a passing paragraph to describe a waiter he wouldn’t even bother to name. Then he would have indulged a little facetiousness, described in telling detail a few of the other waiters, then drawn a large moral, and followed his story’s hero out the inn’s door, never to return.

Well, easy enough for Dickens. His prose is driven by the story he uses it to tell, and story is exactly what has become a problem for most high literature these days. Victorian novels dwell in a more complete world than ours, for they assume at least the possibility of what old-fashioned philosophers would have called the unity of truth.

One way to tell the literary history of the twentieth century is to follow the progression of an extremely bookish people who grew more and more uncertain, more and more diffident, more and more self-conscious, about the entire idea of telling a story or using the narrative finality of stories to convey such unified judgments about society, history, or even themselves. How could we do what the Victorians had done, when we were quickly losing confidence that the way a story works must reflect, in some measure, the way the world actually is?

The American memoirs from the middle of the twentieth century were still story-driven, or at least anecdote-driven: still confident enough in the completeness of the universe to assume that narrative is the motor on which books run. The newer memoirs are, instead, detail-driven. They have their own set of moral certainties, of course, but their prose always tends to convey events with the flood of particular circumstances rather than with moral-aiming storylines–using details like a great and inarticulate ocean, throwing wave after wave of sharply observed fact against the shore in the hope of washing out to sea the stranded meaning.

And why shouldn’t we use this technique? Indeed, how could we use any other, these days? Details exist, in a way that stories don’t, apart from moral judgment. They swim beneath the messy world of virtue and vice, down in the clear, clean waters of the purely physical, as though what confronts us in memory is not the assailant’s pistol, but merely molecules of blue steel arranged by some chance in this particular way. Those details can be used to draw a picture in such a way that readers will make the expected moral judgments, of course. But the prose needn’t make those judgments itself. And as for the rightness and wrongness of the things described in such detail, that’s left a sort of epiphenomenon, a spume that plays above the facts–which is, perhaps, a perfect literary expression of the divisions the twentieth century suffered between the moral and the real.

Ido not see clearly how to mend the rift between them. Writers were once people who imagined that a king’s madness should call forth echoes in a disordered kingdom and a mad storm upon a heath, while their audiences were once people who believed that the stars themselves have a story to tell. They may all have been righter than we are today, with our demythologized details and our mistrust of sentimental stories. Poetic justice, the sense of an ending, a tale with a moral like the clicking shut of a well-made box: Perhaps we don’t look for them in life because we found them in stories; perhaps we look for them in stories because we saw them first in life. Forget ambiguity. The entire universe wants a neat and happy conclusion. Creation is God’s own cliffhanger, the Perils of Pauline in 600 billion installments, played across the stars.

And yet, the simple truth of autobiography is this: The accurate details of memory do not seem to come naturally packaged into stories. You have to take a hammer and beat them into shape, just a little. For that matter, our modern memoirists are describing lives that don’t actually feel story-shaped, with some grand narrative marching from childhood’s beginning to the moral of old age. And when these recent autobiographers try to force an overarching plot onto their childhoods, it always seems to turn odd and dark in their hands, just as the 1980s fascination with repressed memories was destined to do.

I remember once climbing a hill with my grandfather on a warm October afternoon, up into that endless South Dakota wind–although, in truth, the wind may have been gentler than I recall it. When you’re five or six, and carrying a large paper kite against your chest like a lateen sail, a simple breeze feels like a giant’s hand that wants to pick you up and fling you back to the bottom of the hill.

Still, the actual details of that day remain perfect in memory. The heart-sinking dip and the upturn’s reprieve as the kite first found the wind. The burn of the twine as it raced between my thumb and the side of my fingers. The bright red diamond, crisscrossed with balsa sticks, against the pale blue sky, while the long knotted streamer spiraled below it. Then the slow, agonizing drift to the right I couldn’t halt, and the tangle with the cord of my grandfather’s own dark green diamond. Back and forth like a broken fan my kite whipped while my grandfather strained to bring them both down intact. But the string wouldn’t hold. A hundred feet of loose tether fluttered gently down from the sky, and the red paper kite dwindled in the distance, sailing east across the empty plains.

Maybe I remember this now because it seems a figure for the loss of meaning in contemporary writing, broken free from the earth. Or maybe I recall it as a metaphor for what we lost when we were young, and why we need to revisit the past if we want to find some escape for the future. Or maybe it stands, finally, only as a small set of incidental facts–detailed but empty, dense in recollection but signifying nothing. I don’t know. But until we decide what memory means, we will not grasp which of Epictetus’ handles we must use to pick up the vase of the past. We will not be able to choose between the narratives of the old sentimental versions of family life, and the details of the new antisentimental accounts.

We will not have much of a way to write an American memoir, or tell the story of an American childhood.

Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and editor of First Things.