Modern American Memoirs Read online

  MODERN AMERICAN MEMOIRS

  SELECTED AND EDITED BY

  Annie Dillard and Cort Conley

  FOR ROSY, AND FOR KEATS

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Harry Crews

  from A Childhood

  Eleanor Munro

  from Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter

  Wallace Stegner

  from Wolf Willow

  Kate Simon

  from Bronx Primitive

  Russell Baker

  from Growing Up

  Maureen Howard

  from Facts of Life

  Frederick Buechner

  from The Sacred Journey

  Vivian Gornick

  from Fierce Attachments

  Richard Selzer

  from Confessions of a Knife

  Cynthia Ozick

  from Art and Ardor

  Hamlin Garland

  from A Son of the Middle Border

  Frank Conroy

  from Stop-time

  Malcolm X

  from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  Harry Middleton

  from The Earth Is Enough

  Reynolds Price

  from Clear Pictures

  Richard Wright

  from Black Boy

  Tobias Wolff

  from This Boy’s Life

  Don Asher

  Shoot the Piano Player

  Wright Morris

  from Will’s Boy

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  from The Woman Warrior

  James Baldwin

  from Notes of a Native Son

  William Owens

  from This Stubborn Soil

  Ralph Ellison

  from Going to the Territory

  Geoffrey Wolff

  from The Duke of Deception

  Chris Offutt

  from The Same River Twice

  Left Handed

  from Left Handed

  Anne Moody

  from Coming of Age in Mississippi

  James McConkey

  from Court of Memory

  William Kittredge

  Who Owns the West?

  Barry Lopez

  Replacing Memory

  Zora Neale Hurston

  from Dust Tracks on a Road

  Margaret Mead

  from Blackberry Winter

  John Edgar Wideman

  from Brothers and Keepers

  Loren Eiseley

  The Star Thrower

  Henry Adams

  from The Education of Henry Adams

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Books by Annie Dillard

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION:

  Edwin Muir, the poet, and translator of Kafka, wrote the magnificent first two thirds of his Autobiography just before World War I, thinking he would get killed. He recounted the story of his early years on Orkney; he put the manuscript in a drawer. As the Second World War broke out, Muir again assumed he would die; he wrote the final third, and again he survived. An inevitable worldliness marks his adult life. Muir’s Autobiography is one of the most vivid and thoughtful memoirs in English, but only because he wrote about his childhood while he could still remember it and before he became a well-known figure describing other well-known figures.

  There is something to be said for writing a memoir early, before life in society makes the writer ordinary by smoothing off character’s rough edges and abolishing interior life. Tolstoy published the beginning of his three-part autobiographical novel, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, when he was twenty-three years old. Anne Moody was twenty-seven when she wrote Coming of Age in Mississippi. Frank Conroy was thirty when he wrote Stop-time. Recently, Bernard Cooper, Deborah Digges, Albert Goldbarth, Lucy Grealy, Patricia Hampl, Teresa Jordan, Alice Kaplan, Paul Monette, Chris Offutt, and Susan Allen Toth have written good memoirs while still young.

  Memoirs offer a powerfully fixed point of view. From a picket in the past, the retrospective narrator may range intimately or intellectually across a wide circle of characters and events. The memoirist may analyze ideas or present dramatic scenes; the memoirist may confess, eulogize, reflect, inform, and persuade. By convention, memoirists tell true stories about actual people. Their tones may be elegiac, confiding, scholarly, hilarious, or all of these seriatim. In addition to such brilliant advantages, the memoir form naturally has a few pitfalls.

  Some memoirists berate themselves in public, all too convincingly. Sometimes the writer parades his faults and sins manipulatively: You forgive these, do you not? Sometimes the memoirist confesses in a pure spirit, but the incidents that purge the writer may nauseate the reader. The aftertaste of John Cowper Powys’s bizarre Autobiography may scare a reader from his good novels, like A Glastonbury Romance. Ford Madox Ford omits his actual misdeeds, and admits disingenuously to harmless faults, apparently that the reader may admire, among his other virtues, his frankness. The otherwise excellent Ellen Glasgow, in The Woman Within, confesses, “At the very beginning of the war in Europe, I did not feel the fullness of its impact, all at once.”

  Irony about oneself, at any age, becomes the memoirist better. Henry Adams is steadily ironic. His Education of Henry Adams scants a lifetime of extraordinary achievement; he claims to be puzzled throughout, and “trying to get an education.” Geoffrey Wolff describes dining out as a boy with his father and stepmother; he learned to request oil and vinegar with salad, and to order his steak rare. “I was almost ready for an artichoke.”

  The Duke of Deception, about Wolff’s father, is one of many great memoirs in which the narrator is not the object of all attention. In fact, one may leave oneself out of one’s memoirs altogether, or use the first person only sparingly, as a fixed viewpoint, to good effect, for the chief danger memoirists face is starring in their own stories, and becoming fascinated.

  Memoirists may leave out family members, possibly to lingering resentments. Martin Van Buren left his wife out of his autobiography; Victorians considered such a gap a delicacy, and it was usual. Henry Adams understandably omitted from his Education of Henry Adams his twenty-year marriage, which ended in his wife’s suicide. More recently, from his gargantuan Autobiography, already 672 pages long, John Cowper Powys excluded, with apologies, all the women in his life. Loren Eiseley excluded his wife from All the Strange Hours; both Eiseleys prized their privacy. From his beautiful A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin omitted all mention of his sister.

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nonfiction had more literary cachet than fiction. Novelists like Defoe, Melville, and Poe peddled some of their fabrications as memoir (Journal of the Plague Year; Robinson Crusoe; Typee; The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym). Twain’s first title for his novel was Huck Finn’s Autobiography—to distinguish it from mere romance, and thereby presumably to plead for a serious reading. In this century, opinion shifted for a time; a writer may well call a memoir “fiction” to stress its bonds with imaginative narrative. Consequently, some of this century’s finest works of fiction have strongly autobiographical elements, and may be more or less autobiographical: Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep; Fred Chappell’s I Am One of You Forever; William Maxwell’s Billy Dyer and Other Stories; James Agee’s novels; early John Updike stories; much of Henry Miller’s fiction; Louis D. Rubin, Jr.’s The Golden Weather; Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage; Paul St. Pierre’s Smith and Other Events; J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun; V. S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World; Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It; Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis; Elena Castedo’s Paradise. On the other han
d, which of those memoirs published as fact have strongly fictional elements is anybody’s guess.

  The writer usually has the privilege, or onus, of labeling the work. Calling it memoir vouches for its veracity; calling it fiction may, on a good day, alert the world to its literary qualities. The writer may vacillate. Louise Bogan published part of her memoir, Journey Around My Room, in The New Yorker as fiction. One of the chapters of Edward Dahlberg’s classic memoir, Because I Was Flesh, appeared in Best Short Stories of 1962. Editors may step in. Albert Goldbarth calls those perfectly structured narrative prose pieces in A Sympathy of Souls and Great Topics of the World poems; his publishers call them essays. Bernard Cooper, who wrote the grand Maps to Anywhere, says he tends to call it nonfiction. Magazine and journal editors called various selections from it poetry, fiction, fable, or essay. Best Essays of 1988 reprinted one chapter. The book won the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Ernest Hemingway Award for fiction.

  Certain classic memoirs evoke whole generations of American life; one can survey history by leaping, as it were, from memoir peak to peak: Franklin’s Autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Walden, Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery—and in this century The Education of Henry Adams, Hamlin Garland’s Son of the Middle Border, Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (not a great book, but an iconic one), and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  Of the recent spate of memoirs, some are fast becoming classics: Frank Conroy’s Stop-time, Harry Crews’s A Childhood, Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons, Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, James McConkey’s Court of Memory trilogy, Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception.

  It is possible to imagine the writers in this disparate volume as a single, composite American of any heritage or gender, who appears in a family, grows up somewhere, and somehow watches, learns, falls in love, works, and perhaps has children and grandchildren. The writer celebrates, as Charles Wright did in a poem, “all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.” Because the collection represents only seventy-five years of published memoirs, and then only of memoirs whose action takes place in this century and on this soil, the editors excluded many great favorites. An afterword lists these.

  A.D.

  HARRY CREWS (1935-)

  Harry Crews was born the son of a farmer in Bacon County, Georgia, and grew up there. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a sergeant, then attended the University of Florida, where he became a professor of English in 1974.

  Author of more than a dozen novels, from The Gospel Singer (1968) to Scar Lover (1992), Crews has also written stories, essays, and nonfiction.

  Crews’s memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, describes the first six years of his life, under circumstances “where there wasn’t enough money to close up a dead man’s eyes.” His family lived on a series of tenant farms in Bacon County. His father died when he was two. The “daddy” in this memoir is his stepfather, whom he loved. Later he learned that this man was his uncle.

  from A CHILDHOOD

  It has always seemed to me that I was not so much born into this life as I awakened to it. I remember very distinctly the awakening and the morning it happened. It was my first glimpse of myself, and all that I know now—the stories, and everything conjured up by them, that I have been writing about thus far—I obviously knew none of then, particularly anything about my real daddy, whom I was not to hear of until I was nearly six years old, not his name, not even that he was my daddy. Or if I did hear of him, I have no memory of it.

  I awoke in the middle of the morning in early summer from the place I’d been sleeping in the curving roots of a giant oak tree in front of a large white house. Off to the right, beyond the dirt road, my goats were trailing along in the ditch, grazing in the tough wire grass that grew there. Their constant bleating shook the warm summer air. I always thought of them as my goats although my brother usually took care of them. Before he went to the field that morning to work, he had let them out of the old tobacco barn where they slept at night. At my feet was a white dog whose name was Sam. I looked at the dog and at the house and at the red gown with little pearl-colored buttons I was wearing, and I knew that the gown had been made for me by my Grandma Hazelton and that the dog belonged to me. He went everywhere I went, and he always took precious care of me.

  Precious. That was my mama’s word for how it was between Sam and me, even though Sam caused her some inconvenience from time to time. If she wanted to whip me, she had to take me in the house, where Sam was never allowed to go. She could never touch me when I was crying if Sam could help it. He would move quietly—he was a dog not given to barking very much—between the two of us and show her his teeth. Unless she took me somewhere Sam couldn’t go, there’d be no punishment for me.

  The house there just behind me, partially under the arching limbs of the oak tree, was called the Williams place. It was where I lived with my mama and my brother, Hoyet, and my daddy, whose name was Pascal. I knew when I opened my eyes that morning that the house was empty because everybody had gone to the field to work. I also knew, even though I couldn’t remember doing it, that I had awakened sometime in midmorning and come out onto the porch and down the steps and across the clean-swept dirt yard through the gate weighted with broken plow points so it would swing shut behind me, that I had come out under the oak tree and lain down against the curving roots with my dog, Sam, and gone to sleep. It was a thing I had done before. If I ever woke up and the house was empty and the weather was warm—which was the only time I would ever awaken to an empty house—I always went out under the oak tree to finish my nap. It wasn’t fear or loneliness that drove me outside; it was just something I did for reasons I would never be able to discover.

  I stood up and stretched and looked down at my bare feet at the hem of the gown and said: “I’m almost five and already a great big boy.” It was my way of reassuring myself, but it was also something my daddy said about me and it made me feel good because in his mouth it seemed to mean I was almost a man.

  Sam immediately stood up too, stretched, reproducing, as he always did, every move I made, watching me carefully to see which way I might go. I knew I ought not to be outside lying in the rough curve of root in my cotton gown. Mama didn’t mind me being out there under the tree, but I was supposed to get dressed first. Sometimes I did; often I forgot.

  So I turned and went back through the gate, Sam at my heels, and across the yard and up the steps onto the porch to the front door. When I opened the door, Sam stopped and lay down to wait. He would be there when I came out, no matter which door I used. If I went out the back door, he would somehow magically know it and he would be there. If I came out the side door by the little pantry, he would know that, too, and he would be there. Sam always knew where I was, and he made it his business to be there, waiting.

  I went into the long, dim, cool hallway that ran down the center of the house. Briefly I stopped at the bedroom where my parents slept and looked in at the neatly made bed and all the parts of the room, clean, with everything where it was supposed to be, just the way mama always kept it. And I thought of daddy, as I so often did because I loved him so much. If he was sitting down, I was usually in his lap. If he was standing up, I was usually holding his hand. He always said soft funny things to me and told me stories that never had an end but always continued when we met again.

  He was tall and lean with flat high cheekbones and deep eyes and black thick hair which he combed straight back on his head. And under the eye on his left cheek was the scarred print of a perfect set of teeth. I knew he had taken the scar in a fight, but I never asked him about it and the teeth marks in his cheek only made him seem more powerful and stronger and special to me.

  He shaved every morning at the water shelf on the back porch with a straight razor and always smelled of soap and whiskey. I knew mama did not like the whiskey, but to me it smelled sweet, bette
r even than the soap. And I could never understand why she resisted it so, complained of it so, and kept telling him over and over again that he would kill himself and ruin everything if he continued with the whiskey. I did not understand about killing himself and I did not understand about ruining everything, but I knew the whiskey somehow caused the shouting and screaming and the ugly sound of breaking things in the night. The stronger the smell of whiskey on him, though, the kinder and gentler he was with me and my brother.

  I went on down the hallway and out onto the back porch and finally into the kitchen that was built at the very rear of the house. The entire room was dominated by a huge black cast-iron stove with six eyes on its cooking surface. Directly across the room from the stove was the safe, a tall square cabinet with wide doors covered with screen wire that was used to keep biscuits and fried meat and rice or almost any other kind of food that had been recently cooked. Between the stove and the safe sat the table we ate off of, a table almost ten feet long, with benches on each side instead of chairs, so that when we put in tobacco, there would be enough room for the hired hands to eat.

  I opened the safe, took a biscuit off a plate, and punched a hole in it with my finger. Then with a jar of cane syrup, I poured the hole full, waited for it to soak in good, and then poured again. When the biscuit had all the syrup it would take, I got two pieces of fried pork off another plate and went out and sat on the back steps, where Sam was already lying in the warm sun, his ears struck forward on his head. I ate the bread and pork slowly, chewing for a long time and sharing it all with Sam.