I rarely read books by celebrities, and the ones I've looked at are not well written. Just recently, a few days after watching an old movie by Mel Brooks, The Twelve Chairs, I saw a book by the star of the movie, Frank Langella, who has had a long career on the stage and in some movies. I could tell right away it was not a book of mere gossip but something of quality.
The book, published last year, is called Dropped Names, a collection of perhaps two dozen vignettes in which Langella recalls some of the famous people he has known or met. Some, like an amusing encounter with the Queen Mother at the Ascot Derby in 1972, are memories brought to life with deft dialogue and description. And like nearly all of the chapters, this one is concise.
The portraits are rarely flattering; in fact, Langella has devastating insights into some of the 20th century's most notable narcissists, from Yul Brynner and Bette Davis, whom he meets in her old age, to Anne Bancroft, Elizabeth Taylor, and Brooke Astor. His encounters with Noel Coward and Laurence Olivier are memorable and witty; his appreciation of Alan Bates and Jackie Kennedy are moving.
Especially memorable is one of his early memories as an unknown actor being invited to an afternoon party attended by President Kennedy and Jackie in 1961, where the romance and glamor of the day (at the Mellon estate on Cape Cod) is remembered with beauty, where the reader can share his picture of Jackie radiantly happy to see her husband totally relaxed, laughing until tears ran down his cheeks. There is an elegiac quality to this gem of an essay.
So, you might ask, is this book another example of a noted actor dropping names and little more? No, it is an example of excellent writing that has something to teach would-be authors. Actors, if they are good, are sensitive, intelligent, and keenly observant. They make carefully planned entrances and exits. So do good writers.
Langella is a sensitive observer of behavior, and he obviously has written a lot over the years. He knows how to bring a scene alive with details, then end it gracefully.
Langella shows himself to be a man who has lived a very full life. His portrait of his close friend Raul Julia is beautiful. He is typically honest in saying that he, a very healthy and active heterosexual, fell in love with Raul (also a married man with kids), calling him playfully his "boyfriend." He was devastated when Raul died young. At the end Langella writes:
"Unconsummated love between men can be as powerful as any love between a man and a woman, and equally if not more powerful than physical love with either." There is great wisdom and courage in this statement and the insight of a man who has experienced life fully.
This chapter alone might make Dropped Names memorable; but all the portraits, in their searing honesty, offer skillful models of the writer's craft, which may have more in common with acting than I ever realized.
Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts
Friday, July 26, 2013
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Memoirs Revisited: Nabokov
Last month I considered what makes a good memoir. This month I have been reading a few notable memoirs, one (by Vladimir Nabokov) with great delight, and with some new insights.
Gore Vidal, who died recently, did a memoir in 1992 called Palimpsest, which, in its gossipy, meandering, self-serving way, is a reflection of the author. Although I found it finally unreadable, I found several of Vidal's observations valuable: "A memoir is how you remember you own life," he says, whereas an autobiography is history, requiring facts and research. A memoir, then, uses the details of daily life to trigger the memory about people and events long buried.
"A memoir is set off by a thousand associations, often by objects in the given room." So proclaims Vidal. A master of this idiosynratic method who nevertheless follows a roughly chronologically order is Nabokov in Speak, Memory, one of his great works because of its poetic style and originality. He looks at a sofa or a hand and is transported to his youth in pre-revolutionary Russia where, cosseted and comfortable, he was raised in what he calls a "perfect childhood."
What emerges from these sensory recollections is not the dramatic story of the man himself--forced to flee the Russian Revolution in 1918, forced to flee the Nazis in 1940 because of his marriage to a Russian Jew, etc.--but his memories of people, the impressions that reveal certain things about the writer while concealing many personal(autobiographical) facts.
What emerge are reflections on time and memory. Nabokov intended to call his book "Conclusive Evidence" --evidence that he had indeed lived--but the change was wise. The fact that he was composing most of it in the American West while writing the celebrated and controversial novel Lolita in the back seat of his Buick while in search of butterflies-- Nabokov being a noted lepidopterist as well as writer--is all the more remarkable when you find several pages of the book devoted to his French governess and very little on his own family. He even includes several sentences on some troubling mosquitoes that he recalled from a trip to the Riviera in 1937. Only a trained entomologist, I suppose, with a sense of humor, would do so.
The result is a richly detailed, elegiac narrative of a creative mind at work, the work of a gifted, cultivated man in exile from his native land who finds contentment nearly everywhere he lands: Cambridge (where he gets a degree at Trinity College), Berlin, Prague, Paris, New York, Boston, and finally Montreux, Switzerland, where he spends his last 20 years, having finally earned enough money to return to the style in which he was raised.
And quite a style it was: the Nabokovs, wealthy and aristocratic, had a permanent staff of 50 on two estates in and near St. Petersburg. He was raised in a trilingual household, learning to write English before he wrote in Russian or French. He had English and French governnesses, described memorably, with hilarious attention to detail, and tutors. He never learned to drive, to type, to use the telephone: his was a pampered upbringing.
Anyone who wants to learn about descriptive writing, about writing that uses memorable details, would be well to study Nabokov's memoir, with its lapidary style, the product of his scientific interests. He later wrote about chess and did crosswords in Russian; throughout his life, wherever he was, he wrote poems in Russian. He later translated his earlier Russian fiction into English. All this linguistic background gives him material for puns and alliteration and wit, some say too much stylistic attention at the expense of content. But I have not read much of his other work.
From his cultivated mother, young Vladimir learned to feel the beauty of intangible things, which he calls "unreal estate." There are times when his style becomes overripe, and it is certainly more European than American, but he has a perfect ear and above all an eye for details that bring places, people, and his own early years to life. Consider this sentence on the mosquitoes, for example: "Hardly had I extingished the light in my room than it would come, that ominous whine whose unhurried, doleful, and wary rhythm contrasted so oddly with the actual mad speed of the satanic insect's gyrations." He is having fun with language, and the wit consists of some playful exaggeration.
He wrote such carefully wrought sentences by hand, usually standing up at a lecturn, where he also wrote out lectures given at Wellesley and Cornell on European literature to large classes in the late 1940s. I have saved a number of my favorite passages in which the author is lost in a timeless reverie, surrounded by words or butterflies, conveying his love of nature in hypnotic prose. He conveys emotions intensely but not sentimentally.
Whether his style can inspire today's American writer is doubtful, but his approach to the memoir, and his eye for descrptive detail, are of great value.
Of course, a basic question in any such memoir arises, as it certainly did with Vidal's book: who cares about all this detail, about this life (exotic and privileged though it was)? Presumably the reader's attention is held by the author's power of memory and imagination as well as by reflections on other issues of time and exile. And, of course, what is personal is said to be universal; certainly, we get, or I do, vicarious pleasure about being taken back with such clarity to an amazing world a hundred years ago in places I have been or, more likely, would like to have been.
Having spent a summer in Cambridge, for example, I can identify with Nabokov's description of the colleges where he, too, was mindful of all the great writers who have lived in that place: "Nothing one looked at was shut off in terms of time, everything was a natural opening into it, so that one's mind grew accustomed to work in a particularly pure space..." As he learns to distance himself as an outsider in England from his foreign fellow students, he is constantly aware of "the untrammeled extension of time" he felt: it was the source of much writing when he was supposed to be attending lectures.
But the emphasis is not on what he studied or what happened but on the mental furniture that shaped his extraordinary life. The emphasis is not on telling us the facts of his life, which he is relucant to do. Rather something of a game is going on, an ambivalent tease in which much is revealed while even more is concealed. One critic has said that Nabokov's style combines passionate lyricism with dispassionate precision: an admirable, almost unique achievement. His approach to his life is similar, the style reflecting the man.
Enough of the inner life of the man emerges, as it should in a great memoir, which Speak, Memory is.
Gore Vidal, who died recently, did a memoir in 1992 called Palimpsest, which, in its gossipy, meandering, self-serving way, is a reflection of the author. Although I found it finally unreadable, I found several of Vidal's observations valuable: "A memoir is how you remember you own life," he says, whereas an autobiography is history, requiring facts and research. A memoir, then, uses the details of daily life to trigger the memory about people and events long buried.
"A memoir is set off by a thousand associations, often by objects in the given room." So proclaims Vidal. A master of this idiosynratic method who nevertheless follows a roughly chronologically order is Nabokov in Speak, Memory, one of his great works because of its poetic style and originality. He looks at a sofa or a hand and is transported to his youth in pre-revolutionary Russia where, cosseted and comfortable, he was raised in what he calls a "perfect childhood."
What emerges from these sensory recollections is not the dramatic story of the man himself--forced to flee the Russian Revolution in 1918, forced to flee the Nazis in 1940 because of his marriage to a Russian Jew, etc.--but his memories of people, the impressions that reveal certain things about the writer while concealing many personal(autobiographical) facts.
What emerge are reflections on time and memory. Nabokov intended to call his book "Conclusive Evidence" --evidence that he had indeed lived--but the change was wise. The fact that he was composing most of it in the American West while writing the celebrated and controversial novel Lolita in the back seat of his Buick while in search of butterflies-- Nabokov being a noted lepidopterist as well as writer--is all the more remarkable when you find several pages of the book devoted to his French governess and very little on his own family. He even includes several sentences on some troubling mosquitoes that he recalled from a trip to the Riviera in 1937. Only a trained entomologist, I suppose, with a sense of humor, would do so.
The result is a richly detailed, elegiac narrative of a creative mind at work, the work of a gifted, cultivated man in exile from his native land who finds contentment nearly everywhere he lands: Cambridge (where he gets a degree at Trinity College), Berlin, Prague, Paris, New York, Boston, and finally Montreux, Switzerland, where he spends his last 20 years, having finally earned enough money to return to the style in which he was raised.
And quite a style it was: the Nabokovs, wealthy and aristocratic, had a permanent staff of 50 on two estates in and near St. Petersburg. He was raised in a trilingual household, learning to write English before he wrote in Russian or French. He had English and French governnesses, described memorably, with hilarious attention to detail, and tutors. He never learned to drive, to type, to use the telephone: his was a pampered upbringing.
Anyone who wants to learn about descriptive writing, about writing that uses memorable details, would be well to study Nabokov's memoir, with its lapidary style, the product of his scientific interests. He later wrote about chess and did crosswords in Russian; throughout his life, wherever he was, he wrote poems in Russian. He later translated his earlier Russian fiction into English. All this linguistic background gives him material for puns and alliteration and wit, some say too much stylistic attention at the expense of content. But I have not read much of his other work.
From his cultivated mother, young Vladimir learned to feel the beauty of intangible things, which he calls "unreal estate." There are times when his style becomes overripe, and it is certainly more European than American, but he has a perfect ear and above all an eye for details that bring places, people, and his own early years to life. Consider this sentence on the mosquitoes, for example: "Hardly had I extingished the light in my room than it would come, that ominous whine whose unhurried, doleful, and wary rhythm contrasted so oddly with the actual mad speed of the satanic insect's gyrations." He is having fun with language, and the wit consists of some playful exaggeration.
He wrote such carefully wrought sentences by hand, usually standing up at a lecturn, where he also wrote out lectures given at Wellesley and Cornell on European literature to large classes in the late 1940s. I have saved a number of my favorite passages in which the author is lost in a timeless reverie, surrounded by words or butterflies, conveying his love of nature in hypnotic prose. He conveys emotions intensely but not sentimentally.
Whether his style can inspire today's American writer is doubtful, but his approach to the memoir, and his eye for descrptive detail, are of great value.
Of course, a basic question in any such memoir arises, as it certainly did with Vidal's book: who cares about all this detail, about this life (exotic and privileged though it was)? Presumably the reader's attention is held by the author's power of memory and imagination as well as by reflections on other issues of time and exile. And, of course, what is personal is said to be universal; certainly, we get, or I do, vicarious pleasure about being taken back with such clarity to an amazing world a hundred years ago in places I have been or, more likely, would like to have been.
Having spent a summer in Cambridge, for example, I can identify with Nabokov's description of the colleges where he, too, was mindful of all the great writers who have lived in that place: "Nothing one looked at was shut off in terms of time, everything was a natural opening into it, so that one's mind grew accustomed to work in a particularly pure space..." As he learns to distance himself as an outsider in England from his foreign fellow students, he is constantly aware of "the untrammeled extension of time" he felt: it was the source of much writing when he was supposed to be attending lectures.
But the emphasis is not on what he studied or what happened but on the mental furniture that shaped his extraordinary life. The emphasis is not on telling us the facts of his life, which he is relucant to do. Rather something of a game is going on, an ambivalent tease in which much is revealed while even more is concealed. One critic has said that Nabokov's style combines passionate lyricism with dispassionate precision: an admirable, almost unique achievement. His approach to his life is similar, the style reflecting the man.
Enough of the inner life of the man emerges, as it should in a great memoir, which Speak, Memory is.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
What makes a good memoir?
My friend Ned, a regular contributor to this blog, thanks to his many thoughtful comments, suggested that I say something about what makes a good memoir. A big order; here goes.
Having edited a friend's story of his life in America as an immigrant who still loves his native land, and having read two memorable books in the past year or so, I can say that all three, though widely different, are, above all, honest and interesting. They hold the readers' interest because something happens: they go beyond being a simple, chronological narrative that focuses on the individual writer.
First, my friend's immigrant narrative, was written mainly for his family; but people like me, outsiders to his life, can find many life lessons here, including fascinating insights about Americans vis a vis Europeans as well as humorous cultural differences. What might seem like a family story of limited interest becomes a narrative that many readers will enjoy; they will see, when it is published, that what is personal is often universal.
My second example is "Bread of Angels," an amazing narrative of an American, a single young woman, Stephanie Saldana, who journeyed to Damascus alone in the middle of the Iraq war to learn Arabic and found herself also in the Syrian desert undergoing a dark night of the soul. As my review in America mentioned, the book reads like a novel. It is filled with faith and despair and love; a lot happens. The style is often poetic and memorable. The author chooses her words and crafts her sentences carefully so that, as a writing teacher, I can take pleasure not only in the vicarious experiences of someone in that dangerous part of the world but in the craft of writing.
So a memoir has to be well written. In the case of the late Tony Judt, whose final book, The Memory Chalet, this is taken for granted; he was an internationally known writer and gifted stylist. The book was produced in extremis, while the British historian was enduring the horrors of Lou Gehrig's disease, which meant that he had to dictate most or all of it since he gradually lost control of his muscles.
He planned and completed a series of separate episodes, 25 in all, loosely connected, and written at various times before his death nearly two years ago. It is an unusual memoir, with a candid but dispassionate account of his illness, yet filled with Judt's remembered experiences in many places, being happy.
This last example of a memoir is, like the man himself, distinctive, unconventional, showing that there are no rules about what form a memoir takes. My friend's narrative is a traditional, chronological account of his life; Saldana's is limited to one short period in a young life; Judt's is a series of memories, witty and unsentimental, a record of a brilliant life and career.
In all case, the readers encounter voices alive with enthusiasm. The writers undergo changes, both good and bad, and share their journeys with the reader in clear, often poetic prose. In their stories, something happens--many things, in fact--which hold the reader's interest.
The distinction between fiction and non-fiction gets somewhat blurred in good memoirs, it seems to me. Saldana's is a good example, not that I accuse her of fictionalizing her life, but in selecting the episodes and describing the people she met, she is, like all writers, re-imagining and re-inventing the past. Doesn't every writer do this?
I could go on about the genre of autobiography, from St. Augustine on down, and how the story of the self from A to B is always addressed to more than the self who is the subject; it's as if the writer-self is creating himself in words. And to talk about such personal writing is to raise the question of the audience and the fact that, as my Jesuit professor Walter J. Ong convincingly showed, every audience is a fiction. We imagine our readers just as we imagine our literary selves.
No wonder writing is a challenge; it remains in part a mystery, as words and sentences take on a life of their own and recount, in the case of memoir, nothing less than a human story.
Having edited a friend's story of his life in America as an immigrant who still loves his native land, and having read two memorable books in the past year or so, I can say that all three, though widely different, are, above all, honest and interesting. They hold the readers' interest because something happens: they go beyond being a simple, chronological narrative that focuses on the individual writer.
First, my friend's immigrant narrative, was written mainly for his family; but people like me, outsiders to his life, can find many life lessons here, including fascinating insights about Americans vis a vis Europeans as well as humorous cultural differences. What might seem like a family story of limited interest becomes a narrative that many readers will enjoy; they will see, when it is published, that what is personal is often universal.
My second example is "Bread of Angels," an amazing narrative of an American, a single young woman, Stephanie Saldana, who journeyed to Damascus alone in the middle of the Iraq war to learn Arabic and found herself also in the Syrian desert undergoing a dark night of the soul. As my review in America mentioned, the book reads like a novel. It is filled with faith and despair and love; a lot happens. The style is often poetic and memorable. The author chooses her words and crafts her sentences carefully so that, as a writing teacher, I can take pleasure not only in the vicarious experiences of someone in that dangerous part of the world but in the craft of writing.
So a memoir has to be well written. In the case of the late Tony Judt, whose final book, The Memory Chalet, this is taken for granted; he was an internationally known writer and gifted stylist. The book was produced in extremis, while the British historian was enduring the horrors of Lou Gehrig's disease, which meant that he had to dictate most or all of it since he gradually lost control of his muscles.
He planned and completed a series of separate episodes, 25 in all, loosely connected, and written at various times before his death nearly two years ago. It is an unusual memoir, with a candid but dispassionate account of his illness, yet filled with Judt's remembered experiences in many places, being happy.
This last example of a memoir is, like the man himself, distinctive, unconventional, showing that there are no rules about what form a memoir takes. My friend's narrative is a traditional, chronological account of his life; Saldana's is limited to one short period in a young life; Judt's is a series of memories, witty and unsentimental, a record of a brilliant life and career.
In all case, the readers encounter voices alive with enthusiasm. The writers undergo changes, both good and bad, and share their journeys with the reader in clear, often poetic prose. In their stories, something happens--many things, in fact--which hold the reader's interest.
The distinction between fiction and non-fiction gets somewhat blurred in good memoirs, it seems to me. Saldana's is a good example, not that I accuse her of fictionalizing her life, but in selecting the episodes and describing the people she met, she is, like all writers, re-imagining and re-inventing the past. Doesn't every writer do this?
I could go on about the genre of autobiography, from St. Augustine on down, and how the story of the self from A to B is always addressed to more than the self who is the subject; it's as if the writer-self is creating himself in words. And to talk about such personal writing is to raise the question of the audience and the fact that, as my Jesuit professor Walter J. Ong convincingly showed, every audience is a fiction. We imagine our readers just as we imagine our literary selves.
No wonder writing is a challenge; it remains in part a mystery, as words and sentences take on a life of their own and recount, in the case of memoir, nothing less than a human story.
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