Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What ties these memoirs together?
They are all books about identity and questions of belonging and non-belonging, as the best memoirs always are. Interesting memoirs all reflect on questions on the self – both the particular self which is being presented, and the self altogether.
Why does one write a memoir? Why did you?
Good question. I actually came to the idea of writing a memoir reluctantly. I knew I wanted to write about living in a second language and in a second culture, and the relationship of language and culture to the self. I wanted to write about this because in America – where I was living at the time – there is a large immigrant literature, but it has traditionally been a very narrow literature about stories of struggle and triumph. I thought that the internal trajectory of emigration had not been talked about. I thought of writing a novel, or about Eastern European writers who had been exiled. But I decided that I wanted to write about the intersection between subjectivity and the external world. That was at the heart of it. Slowly I came to the idea of writing a memoir.
I think that memoir is a good genre for two kinds of circumstances. First of all, it is good for talking about marginal experiences, which have not entered the larger public discourse. An obscure life as opposed to autobiography. Autobiography is a record of a known life; memoir is a probe into an aspect of experience, in which the person himself or herself is not of automatic public interest. It’s also good precisely for expressing this intersection, the relationship between the internal and external life. As is a novel, of course, in other ways. But the memoir can combine narrative with stylistic writing.
And why does one read a memoir?
I think readers like testimonies from within – that kind of intimate, personal writing. Sometimes memoirs by well-known writers are among the best things that they write. I didn’t choose Experience by Martin Amis, for example, but I think it’s one of his best books. Or The Words by Sartre, which I did choose, is one of his strongest works. And there is often an element of identification on the part of the readers. I think we can learn about our own lives by reading about others’. Memoir is a way of reflecting on the inner life and on our existential situation.
From existentialism, perhaps we should begin with Sartre. Tell us about The Words.
The Words is a memoir of Sartre’s childhood. It takes him up to the age of 10, and it is a brilliant piece of self-analysis. I think of it as philosophical psychoanalysis, because he decodes philosophically his inner conflicts and his very deep and perhaps unconscious motivations. Sartre’s childhood was spent in a bourgeois household, full of heavy furniture, grandfather clocks and books. He grew up with his mother and his grandfather (his father died when he was very little). His mother was related to the Schweitzers, so it was a very distinguished French family. He was a very coddled, adored and stifled child. His grandfather initiated him into the cult of culture. And the memoir is really about the effect of the cult of culture on him – about a childhood spent among books, and a child who has no self outside of his relationship to books and the written word.
I gather that it is also a renunciation of literature.
It is a renunciation if not quite of literature, then of the worship of literature. In order to confirm his grandfather’s and his mother’s idea of him, he reads all the time. He hardly goes out of this rather stifling apartment. He creates himself, a kind of false self, through his identification with literary characters. He begins to strike literary postures. He has no access to himself and to his emotions except through literature. Eventually, he realises that this prevents him from having a real self, from living a real life, from engaging with the present and from taking risks. Among other things, it is a brilliant analysis of bad faith. So Sartre’s leap from his early youth to his later philosophical notions is quite direct, through a reaction against the worship of culture and the unengaged, tradition-formed self.
How do you write a memoir of the first 10 years of your life? I can hardly remember enough to fill a paragraph.
That is what’s so wonderful about this book. It’s really a very deep decoding, of himself, his surroundings and the bourgeois lifestyle – but it's steeped in his later ideas and his analysis of the whole tradition of literature and the culture cult. He deconstructs particular moments of his childhood with great acumen, as when he strikes a literary pose and how strangely false it makes him feel. It’s a work of great brilliance.
Next is Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory. I gather Nabokov originally titled it Speak, Mnemosyne but his publisher complained that readers “would not buy a book whose title they could not pronounce”.
I can see how publishers would say that. This was written in fragments, parts of which appeared in The New Yorker. It is a memoir which emerged from exile. Nabokov was forced into exile after the Russian revolution. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, then to Paris and finally to America in 1940. The memoir is a reconstruction of his own life, but also of his lost world. He grew up in the most privileged circumstances imaginable, in a palatial house in St Petersburg, part of a very prosperous and aristocratic family. His father was a liberal statesman, and was assassinated in 1922 by a stray bullet meant for someone else at a political conference. But Nabakov had a very happy childhood. He was convincingly loved by both of his parents, what I think of as the “Oedipal winner”. He was nurtured, nourished and loved.
Then, exile – and all of this was utterly lost. His mother lived in very meagre circumstances in Prague. He was reduced to impoverishment himself, and had to give tennis and language lessons to support himself. Fortunately, he was good at tennis. His wife was Jewish, and as World War II approached there was an increasing sense of threat. That is why they eventually went to America. The memoir takes them up to the point of emigration, but really is about the old world. He claims the rights to his bit of ecological territory – I mean the human ecology. And the memoir constitutes an almost palpable reconstruction of that ecology, of a lost world, through the powers of language and memory.
Eva Hoffman is the author of eight books. Her memoir Lost in Translation describes her emigration from post-war Poland to America and the process of transculturation. She was a books editor at The New York Times, and has taught literature and creative writing at Columbia, MIT, University of East Anglia and CUNY. She currently teaches writing at Kingston University and lives in London.
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