Who am I…to write a memoir? 4: You naval-gazer!

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Who am I to...write a memoir?

“Solipcism!” someone yells at the memoirist from behind a tree.  Solipsism is the theory that only the self exists and to be called solipsistic is to be accused of seeing things through the too-narrow focus of the self.

Here I sit at my desk, examining my fingernails, my moles, my split ends—And what’s that little pimple on my chin?–because I am more interesting than anyone else.  You may accuse me of being this way, of gazing at my own navel or thinking only of myself, but I say it really isn’t the case.  The last person I really want to write about is myself, but I just can’t help it.  I’m all I’ve got.  My inside information into the human condition can only come from me.

It is true that one can decide to write about other people’s lives, to shine a light on others as an ethnographer does, or to write fiction, but those are other tasks.  At its best, memoir provides an arc of light from a single person out toward the majesty and hugeness of the world.

Farman-Farmaian writes this of the self-contained universe inside her father’s walled compound in Iran.  Her father had nine wives and thirty children:

Everyone there was linked with everyone else, for “family” in our small universe meant not only our father and mothers and brothers and sisters and other relatives who lived in and around the compound, but all the other people inside our walls: our nannies, our lalehs or male caretakers, the cooks, guards, porters, stewards, secretaries, artisans, old military pensioners, and everyone else my father supported.  They and we all belonged to him, and were fed, protected, and cared for by him.  This supreme bond with our benefactor, which Iranians call “the bond of bread and salt,” gave us all an indissoluble connection.  No one in the compound, from the most decrepit ex-sergeant to the youngest school-child, ever forgot this allegiance for a single moment.  I seemed myself to remember it almost hourly.

Farman-Farmaian is not naval-gazing, but transporting us to a vanished time, a world we’d otherwise never know.

Who am I…to write a memoir? 3: You narcissist!

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Who am I to...write a memoir?

“Narcissism!” we memoir-writers hear someone shout in our heads.  But why should sharing one’s perspectives be seen as conceit?  What nobler effort could there be than to attempt to shed some light on the frightening, generous ways of the world, even if it’s a ha’ penny’s worth?  We all read memoirs—all books, in fact—to discover pieces of ourselves on the page, to feel less alone.  To comfort a stranger, rather than to flaunt oneself: this is the memoirist’s highest hope. Whatever one writes about with honesty will surely have been felt by at least one person before—and perhaps that someone’s heart will ping on reading it described by another.  We write, admittedly, to clarify and give heft to our own inner joys and sorrows, but also we offer these in-the-buff experiences to others so that they might see their own feelings more clearly.  As W.H. Auden wrote, “Art is not magic, ie., a means by which the artist communicates or arouses his feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is disenchanting.”  In other words, art’s aim is to give the reader him or herself.

Nabokov writes of his first love:

I cannot remember the way Tamara and I parted.  There is possibly another reason, too, for this blurring.  We had parted too many times before.  During that last summer in the country, we used to part forever after each secret meeting when, in the fluid blackness of the night, on that old wooden bridge between masked moon and misty river, I would kiss her warm, wet eyelids and rain-chilled face, and immediately go back for another farewell.

To read of Nabokov’s youthful ardor is to give us our own.

Truth: this is the job of the memoirist.  Naked truth, as naked as we can make it.  The literary memoir offers the reader a mirror: not one that woos by enhancement or adornment, but which reflects with rare and precious, shimmering truth.  The job of memoir and all good literature is not to glaze or make up or cloak but to reveal the skin of a thing.  And perhaps bare truth—stepping into the clearing—is a greater wonder, a greater gift, a greater mystery than mystery.

And furthermore, isn’t the greatest gift one may give, the gift of oneself, or one’s honest truth, one’s story?  Each person’s iris is unique–to the extent that the eye is now used as a fail-safe identification method at airports. Like her iris, each person’s memoir is a rarity: a particular mix of time, place, and individual, a particular irreplicable perspective.  This endlessly fascinating kaleidoscope of human experience, I submit, is one of the most satisfying curiosities, one of the greatest treasures of life.  Don’t we all want to hear about different lives?  What is more delicious than a real-life story?  This is not narcissism, but an act of generosity.  This is how it’s been for me.  Does any of  it ring a bell in you?  And so a conversation begins.

Who am I…to write a memoir? 2: A Caveat: Fine versus cheap memoirs

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Who am I to...write a memoir?

Before I plunge into deep waters to make the case for the legitimacy of memoir-writing, I must make one caveat: I am considering here fine literary memoirs.  There are memoirs that merit the accusations of narcissism, solipsism, and all the rest.  It is true that some scribblers do gain through exposé.  There are celebrities who sell their memoirs on the basis of their good looks and politicians who sell millions by way of notoriety.  The worst memoir can be self-aggrandizing, self-centered, and illicit–there are good memoirs and bad ones, like there are good and bad novels–but many memoirs are elegant literary jewels.

Nabokov’s Speak Memory, for instance, written before he became famous, is the memoir of a boy growing up in great privilege in Russia—obsessed with butterflies.  Through his associative reports on his passion the reader becomes willing to follow anywhere the track of this brilliant mind.

By reading another book, Sattareh Farman-Farmaian’s Daughter of Persia, written by the woman who started the first school of social work in Iran, we experience what it is to grow up in the harem of a benevolent, Muslim patriarch, and thereby gain comprehension of what it means to live in an entirely different social structure that offers, at its best, a deep security unknown in the west.

Kay Redfield Jamison’s The Unquiet Mind, another beautifully-composed memoir, offers a lens into the devastating cruelties and seductive exhilarations of bi-polar illness, a high-profile book that has transformed our understanding of madness.

All three of these memoirs are transformative; they turn turmoil to treasure. By using a magnifying glass to look within, the authors illuminate ways of living and thinking about life in its varied facets and grandeur.  These books are the kinds of memoir I aspire to.  Through beautiful language and precise description of individual experience, they stretch us on many different levels.

Nevertheless, every memoirist, even the one with the most refined sensibility and motive hurls at herself, or is hurled the accusations: “Narcissism! Naval-gazing!  Self-aggrandizement!”

Who am I, and ordinary person, to write a memoir? 1: Revelations from skinny-dipping

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Who am I to...write a memoir?

SKINNY DIPPING WITH MISSIONARIES

The Question of Legitimacy:

Who am I…to write the story of my life?

Isn’t memoir-writing self-centered, whorish naval-gazing?

In the following six posts, I will consider this question:  Who am I, an ordinary person, to write a story of my life?

Changing all names, to protect the innocent, I begin with a story from my adolescence…

I learned from a fatherly Canadian missionary, one sunny day in Hokkaido, Japan that it is not illicit or exhibitionistic or narcissistic, but a fine and natural thing, to skinny dip.

I was seventeen.  It was the summer between high school and college and I was spending July at a work-camp in then-wild northern Japan, helping young, pioneering dairy farmers bring in their hay.  This was a rare afternoon off, and the father of one of the twenty or so of us Canadian and American kids had fetched eight of us and transported us to a lovely spring in the hills up behind our sea-village dormitory.

It was a warm day, and we were all sticky with sweat and muscle-strained from our morning’s efforts—pitching hay is back-and-arm-killing toil—and giddy with freedom.  Once out of the van, we girls started casting about for a tree behind which to change into our bathing suits, when Hamish, the son of our chauffeur, said, “Phooey!  Forget all that.  Let’s just skinny dip. We do it all the time at home.”  We all looked at Hamish’s father, a worn-looking man with his shirt tails out and a kind, sun-beaten face.  In a small Hokkaido town, he taught the Japanese both good agricultural techniques and the bible.

I had skinny dipped with my family once or twice in the past, but never with friends, and never in mixed company. To think of it made my heart race.  It seemed daring, risqué, and—potentially–acutely embarrassing.  I’d never displayed my breasts or bottom in public before.  Wouldn’t it be immodest, exhibitionistic, improper?  What would the boys think?  If I revealed my body, wouldn’t it be a sexual come-on?  I didn’t want that.  I was a nice person, these were my pals, and I had a crush on one of them.  (And if I was worried about that boy, wasn’t this revealing too much?  Shouldn’t I keep the mystery, the allure, like in my eighth grade Victorian romance novels?)  And then, when you came right down to it, wouldn’t it be showing off?  And: Wouldn’t it be sort of bad?  I was with a Christian missionary, and a lot of these kids were missionary kids too.  Some of their parents, I knew, forbid them to dance or play cards.  Surely they viewed the body as sinful.

But this was 1972, and other currents were also in the air.  Hippies reigned these days, and nudity and greater physical openness had taken hold of the culture, even among us kids sheltered far away from London or Berkeley.  To reveal the body no longer had to imply loose morals.  It could mean care freeness, spontaneity, a kind of fearless stripping down to the truth.  And another thing, this was Japan: where communal bathing was the norm, and where the human body was viewed as as much a part of nature as a pine or a rabbit…

These various breezes wafted and these thoughts tumbled through my mind but Mr. Crowe, the missionary and good Christian who, I think, simply viewed people as clean and good like cows, just nodded to his son.  “Sure,” he said, as if this were the most normal and natural suggestion in the world.  And then he settled himself under a tree with a book.

His daughter, Rowena, and Hamish both threw off their clothes, stood with their strawberry-blond heads, lanky legs, and slender pink bottoms poised at the edge of the pond, shouted “Ready, Steady, Go!” and tore into the water.  Seeing them reveal their whole selves, natural and free as elves—and imperfect and perfect as apples in a gnarled tree–gave us all courage to hurl off our own clothes, devil-may-care, and fling ourselves, too, into the cooling, equalizing elixir of the pool.

Stealing looks at each other’s bodies, was revelatory, arousing even, but not in the way you’d think.  What was striking was that none of us was perfect like the kids in the Seventeen magazine ads.  Hamish was long and lanky, a little loose at the joints.  Sakiko was perfectly proportioned, but certainly her legs were shorter than a model’s legs.  Dan was tall as a statue but narrower in the shoulders than the average Marlboro man.  And my breasts were nearer to mikan-tangerines than grapefruit.

But, with all we were (and weren’t), we charged into the water and swam and splashed and dunked each other until we were exhausted.  Then we dried off on rocks in the sun.

Almost immediately that day, on seeing that first naked flank, I realized all my worries had been off.  Skinny dipping wasn’t self-centered, show-offy or whorish.  It was natural—innocent, even.  (These were days before MTV, when innocence was still possible.)  It was freedom.  It was just plain old human.  This conferred a deep and refreshing comfort: We were all imperfect.  And, here, splashing about in the buck together, shining-wet in the glinting pool, we were—at the same time and in the truest sense–perfect.  Showing all our birthmarks, warts, and scabs, we were beauteous, mammal-sublime.  This is what I learned that day from that middle-aged missionary in Japan.

All the same, an analogous series of second-guessings, frettings and self-questionings have beset me as I’ve set about writing a memoir of my childhood abroad: yet another kind of skinny-dipping:  “Isn’t this naval-gazing?  Strutting?  Whoring?  Or just basic and bald self-promotion?” I thought. “Who am I, an ordinary person, to think my story interesting?  To strip down before the world?  Wouldn’t I be better off to maintain the sense of mystery, to hide my tiny breasts?”   Accusations of self-aggrandizement, of solipsism, of cheapness: these are the poised daggers held to the throats of all memoir-attempters.  The torture of these taunts—especially to the shy people many of us memoir-writers are–is enough to make one crawl into a cave.  But that’s what many of us have always done, and that’s why we’re writing.  So the wooly bear of truth can slink out into the sun.  Splash in a shining pool.

 

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 12: To claim one’s own small portion of the globe

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Why Write a Memoir?

Finally, at the end of the day, I wrote a memoir to claim my small, rightful portion of the globe:  To claim my bit of air time, to claim a place for my bare feet on the dirt—something that was tenuous in my growing up.  I wrote to claim the standing-space my father the spy didn’t, because he walked so lightly, and in the shadows.

I wrote this memoir because—due to the sediments of my particular psyche—I’d spent years searching other people’s roots, rather than my own.  As a “diplomat’s daughter,” (“diplomat” was my father’s cover), I was trained to be humble, to—out of respect for other cultures—put other people’s experience above my own.  And later, as an anthropologist, to bring into focus my curiosity about the other, using myself only as conduit.  I’ve written two books in honor of people of other cultures—Argentine sheep ranchers and French artisans—acts coming from my pleasure and belief in recording the struggles and strengths of ordinary man.

I wrote my memoir, by way of balance.  Montaigne asserted, “Every man bears the entire form of human nature.”  Nabokov—complementarily—wrote that each life has “an intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.”  I wrote my story in an effort to convince myself that I, too, was an ordinary fool, a member of that human race whose watermark was as worthy of tracing as any other.

So, there I sat, at my table, all alone, writing.  It could seem a bare life, but as I said above, I was a queen at home among riches—the riches of memory.  I wrote in order to fill my sack with gold coins—and then, to move on. Toward the horizon, into the future.