What Makes a Memoir Memorable?

The answer to my question comes in the form of two books recently read: one, relatively new, by Terry Eagleton, the British literary critic with a great comic gift that makes THE GATE KEEPER sharp-witted, insightful, often hilarious; the other a classic in its genre, Vladimir Nabokov's SPEAK MEMORY, perhaps the greatest of autobiographies.

Eagleton has had the ability to use language as his main weapon in the British class system. With that skill, he has moved from an Irish-Catholic working class background to the elite world of academia while at the same time using this skill to satirize the Oxbridge scene.  His portrait of his Cambridge don is memorable and hilarious yet also reverent since he, like the nuns the young Eagleton once served as a boy, opened doors to a wider world than he might have ever known.  The resulting memoir is not merely about Eagleton but about several other things, too: Britain in the past fifty years, being a Catholic, and an outsider.

So, too, Nabokov's memoir is not only about his early life, in all its rich detail, but about time, memory, and the writing of autobiography itself.  As he recalls his aristocratic upbringing in pre-revolutionary Russia, where he was taught English first, then Russian and French, where his household staff numbered fifty servants, he situates his detailed recollections in a broader context.  He shows us how recording in words a remembered scene from boyhood is to see it in relation to time, which he says is "but memory in the making."

Like St. Augustine's Confessions, the first Western autobiography we know of, Nabokov is concerned with the relation between time, imagination, and memory.  As a scientist (specializing in butterflies), he has an eye for specifics, and his details provide the vivid thrill he had that we the reader can share as we learn what made him what he is, a man with poetic gifts in several languages, whose baroque sentences convey an old-world aura. He tells us that his mother's ring is of "pigeon-blood ruby" (not merely ruby), thereby re-creating with such specifics the atmosphere of his privileged upbringing. He is grateful to his mother's memory of past details since, he says, he has inherited her taste for the beauty of "unreal estate," intangible associations that sustained him in later years in exile and relative poverty.  Recalling these bits of past delights is important in maintaining happiness later, as the past informs the present.

Probing his childhood becomes, for Nabokov, an "awakening of consciousness" shared with our remote ancestors as they discovered time. "How small the cosmos," he writes, how puny "in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection and its expression in words."

The focus, then, is not just on various, discontinuous fragments recollected in the writing process, not just on his own personal life but on re-staging the past in the present and reflecting on our shared human sense of how time functions. He resists the wall of ordinary time that separates us from timelessness. We feel lucky to share in recollected days when time seemed to stand still.

And so, in "Speak, Memory," Nabokov has created a poetic text, rich in detail, that defines what it means to write about oneself, one's own life, in the context of the vast ocean of consciousness and the mystery of time. His book is both a remarkable memoir and a guide to exploring one's past and using language to say often inexpressible things. It is about how the personal can be universal.

It is a memoir about how, ideally, to write a memoir (if only one were as richly talented as he).

Not the Best of the Best, but....

At the end of a calendar year, many writers make their predictable lists of the top ten whatever that impressed them in the past twelve months.  What follows is not such a list, not the best of the best; it is instead a sampling of a few articles that struck me as important and worth remembering amid all the stuff I've read during the year.

I read a lot--articles on everything from Trump's lies to the Catholic Church's failings along with fiction and film reviews--and by recording the following pieces I save them from being lost to myself, and maybe to you. Isn't writing chiefly an act of remembering?

1.  This brings me, first, to an article by Lizette Borreli on the Medical Daily website. The topic involves handwriting and memory, specifically the use of notetaking by students vs. the common practice of laptop notetaking. I have commented before on the sad neglect in our schools of cursive writing in favor of printing and computers.

I was pleased to learn from this source and several others that typing is less advantageous for learning and retention.   W. R. Klemm wrote in Psychology Today that cursive writing produces activity in various areas of the brain because writers have to pay attention to what and how they are recording. The fact that writing cursively takes longer is itself beneficial to learning; it involves thinking and summarizing skills that keyboard work does not.  Typing can be done without understanding, these psychologists report.  I am fascinated by memory and cognition as related to the writing process and maybe one day I'll understand this mysterious connection better.

2. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece in June, Frank Bruni weighed in on an issue in higher education: the abolition of major fields of study (English, philosophy, etc.) in favor of vocational subjects.   This raises many familiar questions about the purpose of a college question, which he is able to avoid by stating simply that majoring in something--focusing in depth on one subject--is a valuable corrective to the short attention spans, distractions, and overall speed of the smartphone era. "Perhaps now, more than ever," he says, "young people need to be shown the rewards of sustained attention and taught how to hold a thought."  Amen to that, I say.

3. More recently, Maria Popova in her Brainpickings newsletter, commented on a recent book by Jason Farman on waiting, a topic I had never considered.  The book is Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting, a reflection on the positive aspects of waiting.

Popova quotes Farman as contending that waiting isn't an in-between time, a hurdle that keeps us from intimacy. "Instead, waiting is essential to how we connect as humans through the messages we send."  He sees it as essential to learning and being: "In waiting, we become who we are" because the hope that occurs while waiting is essential to the meaning of life.

It's not clear from these excerpts whether Farman discusses patience or mindfulness, but it seems he goes beyond those predictable topics into new areas. I want to know more.

I hope the year about to begin gives us access to more lively ideas and above all inner peace amid the noise around us.

Memory in the Classroom

In this age when artificial memory has become so important, it is common to find students bringing their laptops to class to take notes.  In fact, when they are told not to do so, as Dan Rockmore did, it tends to make news. Of course, he wrote about it, and the responses to his piece on Andrew Sullivan's bog the Dish today caught my attention.

A few years ago, in one of my senior literature classes, most of the students had their laptops and seem to make good use of them. But I had mixed feelings about this intrusive technology.  A few were apparently sending messages to friends or surfing the Net or doing something other than listening.

And listening well is often a problem, not only in school. That prompts some respondents to Rockmore's piece to sing the praises of old-fashioned memory.

One of these says his or her literature professor forbade even note taking. "He wanted us to use our memories and so we had to become good listeners."  As a result, forty years later, he can still recite passages from Chaucer, Milton and other poets to impress his friends.

Yet the purpose of memory work, often neglected in today's schools, is not to impress others but to allow something like poetry to remain part of us, its cadence and imagery stored of the vast collective bank we draw upon as we move on. This is especially valuable for those who write.

I can remember my Latin and Shakespeare passages from many years ago, and being an English professor and writer, I am grateful that they have stuck in my brain. I am grateful for the Jesuits who insisted on these unpopular assignments. But they did not forbid note-taking.

That seems to be an extreme reaction to the conflict between memorizing and note-taking that goes back many centuries.  In the larger oral culture of the medieval university, where written texts were scarce, lectures were delivered rapidly so that the students could take them in "but the hand could not," according to one of Sullivan's respondents.

As my work on Matteo Ricci (d. 1610), the Jesuit who amazed the Chinese with his memory skills, indicates, education in earlier times and in cultures other than that of the West has long relied on memorizing vast amounts of material. This is a skill we have lost.

Ricci could recall long passages of material he had learned as a young man in Rome and was able to translate these into Chinese, which he mastered because of his training in the art of memory.

Shakepeare and other writers of his era, while relying on source books for their plays, could easily recall lines and passages from Ovid or Virgil that they had been required to know by heart.  Poetry is essentially an oral medium, even now, and the sound of language is something writers of prose often forget about when they revise their work.

Knowing things "by heart" has a lot to recommend it, even at the time when artificial memory dominates most of our communications media. Don't  both kinds of memory have a place in the classroom?

The past is not past.

"The past is not past," James Joyce wrote. It is present here and now." The truth of this often comes home to me in unexpected ways, as when a St. Louis classmate yesterday forwarded a picture of me and a few fellow high school students from 50 years ago. . . .At once, I was there, in that place and time, remembering their faces and personalities as if time had stopped; in fact, to realize that one of these men is now gone and the others are grandfathers is so startling as to be unreal. The past events seem more real. . . . I found myself thinking excessively about the photo and what it evoked and decided that the best thing to do was not save it and spend the weekend in the vividness of my memories but to return to the present. . . . I felt the immediacy of what is past as a timeless moment, frozen in my memory. I have often associated my longing for the past with the fact that my mother told me stories of her family early on and so I became connected to her earlier life. Then came my Catholic education, with its traditions and reverence for the past, and then my love of history. . . .Joyce, I gather, had similar experiences. But from what I have read in the excellent new biography of Joyce by Gordon Bowker, there was a powerful socioeconomic factor: young Jim's father was a spendthrift who plunged the once-prosperous family into poverty; they moved frequently from one Dublin house to another, the dreary streets finding their way into the elegiac stories of "Dubliners." . . . .Young Joyce turned to his ancestral roots and to family lore about a more dignified past; he escaped from the grim reality of the present by imagination, which, says Bowker, was haunted by ghosts. For the young Joyce, the past was more immediate than the present. . . .This can certainly be helpful for a poet and writer, but most of us are content--and better off--with momentary epiphanies, glimpses of the past that live on into the present. . . .I remember William Faulkner's statement, based on his connection to the American South: "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." What is the past but our remembering/imagining of earlier events in the present?