In Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time (1967) he doesn’t try to jack up a mediocre experience into dramatic spectacle. Rather, he takes a small moment and renders it so poetically you can’t forget it. Here he’s a way-smart, pseudo-delinquent high school student before school.
Eyes closed, head back, I drank directly from the carton of milk, taking long gulps while cold air from the refrigerator spilled out onto my bare feet. Leaving an inch for [my stepfather’s] coffee, I replaced the carton and pushed the fat door shut. End of breakfast.
The scene captures the feral hunger of any adolescent male standing in the fridge door. Yet it feels so specific—the long gulps, the cold spilling on his feet, even the inch of milk he has to leave behind for his stepfather. Is he doing it thoughtfully or sullenly or automatically? You’ll have to read the book to find out, for Conroy manages to make even the most quotidian event mean. Nobody’s rendered a teen’s cynical morning haste any better. And the rhythm of the paragraph: the long sentence—three lines—followed by a short sentence—two—leads up to three perfunctory words “End of breakfast.” This is an outlaw boy scrabbling for small sustenance, and the authority of the fat fridge door and his seminal voice—in the context of the rest of the book—lines up with Conroy’s cool, I-can-take-being-neglected persona. So powerful is Conroy’s voice that—at the zenith of his powers—he’s able to sexualize the throwing of a yoyo:
That it was vaguely masturbatory seems inescapable.
I doubt that half the pubescent boys in America could have been captured by any other means. . . . A single Loop-the-Loop might represent, in some mysterious way, the act of masturbation, but to break down the entire repertoire into the three stages of throw, trick, and return representing erection, climax, and detumescence seems immoderate.
Conroy puts himself into a trance practicing the yoyo, thus disassociating from his family’s profound lack of care. Finding that “cool” spot—in the old hep-cat jazz sense of finding a groove—means finding order, silence, a place where time can stop. In such instants of cool, the boy-in-pain Conroy can vanish. He’ll later find sex and music and liquor and driving too fast as other modes of escape into selfless silence.
Having taught Conroy’s Stop-Time for some thirty years, I can testify that students seem to trust this voice. They believe it—that it won’t lie or mislead, fabricate events or pander, confess the lesser sin to hide the greater, bore or beg for pity. Ergo, in literary terms, it sounds true.
Again: voice grows from the nature of a writer’s talent, which stems from innate character. Just as a memoirist’s nature bestows her magic powers on the page, we also wind up seeing how selfish or mean-spirited or divisive she is or was. We don’t see events objectively; we perceive them through ourselves. And we remember through a filter of both who we are now and who we once were.
So the best voices include a writer’s insides. Watching her mind feel around to concoct or figure out events, you never lose sight of the ego’s shape, its blind spots, dislikes, wants. The books I reread don’t seek to record as film does—a visual medium tethered to surface action (these days, in popular film, the flashier the better); nor as a history does—by weighing and measuring various sources and crafting a balanced perspective.
To tell the truth, such a memoirist can’t help but show at each bump in the road how her perceptual filter is distorting what’s being taken in. In other words, she questions her own perceptions as part of the writing process. The deeper—and, ergo, more plausible-sounding—writer inquires.
Just as memory distorts, so too does the ego’s synthesizer shape even the simplest of our sensations, and voice should reflect that distortion. Conroy in his no-nonsense milk guzzling doesn’t sound frail or sentimental, nor does Wright in his righteous rage. The noise each makes speaks his character into being. Both sound tough and cynical, even as kids. Since a personal theory about the world and one’s place in it can make it appear so, we can assume they’re as wary in the world as on the page. They translate events coming at them to conform to ideas about how they presume stuff works—in their cases perhaps through a scrim of smart, canny suspicion.
But how dare I speak of truth in memoir, when it’s common knowledge that the subjective, egoistic perception is a priori warped by falsehood—perhaps mildly so in self-serving desires, or wildly so in hardwired paranoia? A Buddhist monk might call how the ego takes in the world maya or “delusion”; a psychologist might point out how you project past traumas onto today’s innocent events. So how’s veracity possible?
It’s not that memories aren’t shady, but the self-aware memoirist constantly pokes and prods at his doubts like a tongue on a black tooth. The trick to fashioning a deeper, truer voice involves understanding how you might misperceive as you go along; thus looking at things more than one way. The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.
For me, say, a penchant for gloom has to be confessed to throughout any book I write. Bleak humor right at the edge of being wrong has kept me alive, so it’s wound up in my work. Asked by my sister why I was sexually assaulted as a child but she wasn’t, I quipped, “Maybe you’re not cute enough”—which takes one of the darkest events in my life and tries to turn it into a putdown for somebody else. Talk about grim. To chirp my story like some bouncy cheerleader would be to lie. That grimness has to make it in.
A believable voice notes how the self may or may not be inventing reality, morphing one’s separate “truths.” Most of us don’t read the landscape so much as we beam it from our eyeballs.
The inability to don angel wings—to shirk culpability or justify past sins—seems innate to the voice of every memoirist I revere. The life chroniclers who endure as real artists come across as folks particularly schooled in their own rich inner geographies. A quest for self-knowledge drives such a writer to push past the normal vanity she brings to party dressing. She somehow manages to show up at the ball boldly naked.
A memoirist’s nature—the self who shapes memory’s filter—will prove the source of her talent. By talent, I mean not just surface literary gifts, though those are part of the package, but life experience, personal values, approach, thought processes, perceptions, and innate character.
Here’s Elif Batuman in The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, dramatizing her talent for surreal metaphor along with her passion for Russian lit. The passage comes from her magnificently slapstick chapter detailing an academic conference on Batuman’s hero, Soviet martyr Isaac Babel.
When the Russian Academy of Sciences puts together an author’s Collected Works, they aren’t aiming for something you can put in a suitcase and run away with. The “millennium” edition of Tolstoy fills a hundred volumes and weighs as much as a newborn beluga whale. (I brought my bathroom scale to the library and weighed it, ten volumes at a time.)
The detail of her hauling a scale to the library marks her an adorably obsessive kook, and we hope her passion for Russian lit will infect us. (Hint: it does.)
Like Batuman’s work, Babel’s is also earmarked by shocking juxtapositions and unforgettable similes. One of his Red Cavalry stories begins, “The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head.”
You can watch Batuman hone her talent for metaphor if you read the first version of this essay, as I did, in the literary cult mag n+1, where Tolstoy’s collected volumes first weighed as much as “a large timber wolf.” Most of us would’ve let the wolf metaphor stand—it’s jolting and funny and echoes a Russian landscape. But she rewrote, and the beluga whale is the far better animal, springing as it does from salty caviar, which echoes the lost empire of the czars. Plus the whale, like Tolstoy, is a behemoth, reigning in a rarer element than the wolf. It’s hard even to believe he’s a mammal like the rest of us.
As you start out in rough drafts, setting down stories as clearly as you can, there begins to burble up onto the page what’s exclusively yours both as a writer and a human be
ing. If you trust the truth enough to keep unveiling yourself on the page—no matter how shameful those revelations may at first seem—the book will naturally structure itself to maximize what you’re best at. You’re best at it because it sits at the core of your passions.
Cheryl Strayed, whose Wild still rides the best-seller list, was blessed with a passion for poetry that informed her language. That and the discipline to keep a daily journal during her solo hike of the Pacific Trail gave her the skeleton of that book. Strayed speaks of truth as a quest: “I tell students they want to find the true, truer, truest story.” Her first draft scraped the surface, but she found deeper psychological truths in revisions. How you approach the truth depends on your passions—Russian books and surreal metaphor, journal keeping and poetry and hiking.
You can witness two different talents approaching some of the same material by reading brothers Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff. Geoffrey’s seminal Duke of Deception (1979) partly grew from his extraordinary skills as a biographer: he used a historian’s investigative research to rout out his con-man father’s lies. Research and interviewing were gifts Geoffrey had mastered in his fascinating and immaculately documented biography of Lost Generation suicide Harry Crosby, Black Sun. Geoffrey’s memoir uses photos and documents to announce it as an investigated work. But nonfiction’s notions of the truth kept evolving. By the time his brother Tobias brought out This Boy’s Life in 1989, he used no photos, no interviews. His work is an act of memory. Two men, two talents, two approaches.
Developing a voice is actually learning how to lodge your own memories inside someone else’s head. In some ways the narrator comes to exist as a stand-in for the reader.
The only way I know to develop a voice is to write your way into one. As a memoirist moves words around on a page, telling stories, she starts to uncover that thing she does best, which should stay in view during most of the book.
And you need not be fancy in diction and syntax to win an audience—only true. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes uses the proletariat’s blunt, monosyllabic diction to work magic.
My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister Margaret, dead and gone.
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.
Above all—we were wet.
Other than a peppering of Latinate words like loquacious, McCourt uses words we learned by fifth grade. It’s what he writes and when and the directness of his utterance that we connect with. A polymath like Nabokov (more on him in the next chapter) wows us with his linguistic surface; McCourt works to make us identify with him more.
The first paragraph posits family trouble—My father and mother should have stayed in New York—then draws the simplest list of siblings, ending with the awful presence of a dead infant. And since McCourt knows in some ways that we as readers fear the cliché of an awful Irish childhood, he addresses that fear right off. So he comes straight to where the reader’s cynicism about his enterprise hides. McCourt then routs it out with mockery: the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters. . . . He ends with a simple, understated, carnal joke on himself in the physical cold of his island home: “Above all—we were wet.” McCourt raised psychological stakes while wowing us with both tragedy and humor—promises for what the book will hold.
He would’ve failed trying to use Nabokov’s diction, syntax, or psychological approach.
5 | Don’t Try This at Home: The Seductive, Narcissistic Count
. . . I mean what
would you do if you had to create Beauty?
I’m afraid I’d start screaming, the most irksome
forms of insects coming from my mouth. I’m afraid
I’d come up with Death.
Dean Young, “One Story”
So enchanting is the atmosphere Nabokov conjures in my brain that reading him almost rewires it. I lift my face from a folded-down page to find colors brighter, edges sharper. Trash I glimpse on my otherwise shoddy street—a ticket stub or lipsticky cigarette butt—come across as souvenirs from some intrigue that dissolved right before I looked up. The world becomes a magic collage or mysterious art box à la found-object assembler Joseph Cornell. And it works every time you reread—a miraculous widget for perceptual transformation. As Philip Larkin once said of poetry’s slot machine, you put the penny of your attention into it, pull a handle, and a feeling comes out. Like my students, I’ve tried to copy Nabokov’s mysterious dance methods, and I looked like a fool—some stout and hirsute cross-dresser trying to pass as pretty in pink ballerina tights.
Having taught this book at least a dozen times, I still find it a mystery. Trying to catalogue Nabokov’s talents would take a library, and yet not to call out Speak, Memory in a book about memoir would be like Fourth of July sans fireworks.
Looked at through the lens of a more ordinary writer’s gifts, Speak, Memory leaves out much that a normal reader tends to identify with. Yet we wander its pages with wonder and feel bereft as any exile at its end.
Recently, from sheer frustration, I started combing it for what isn’t there, which—it surprised me to find—is the kind of deep link with an author that hooks me into most other great memoirs. Speak, Memory lacks long-run, personally dramatic stories of the type we associate with normal plots. There’s no dialogue; the occasional instant or anecdote, but very few scenes. You’re intimate with the writer’s thought processes without feeling he has anything in common with the likes of you. The writing is intoxicating and irresistible—but you can’t find your experience anywhere in it. His extreme refinement frees him from the humdrum where most of us live. Novelist Jenny Offill refers to him as “an art monster”: “Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. [His wife] licked his stamps for him.”
The creature you find in Speak, Memory is rare enough to be zoo-worthy. He’s not just smarter but somehow more effete than most of us without seeming put on. Resenting him for it would be like resenting a gazelle for her grace. He doesn’t sound prissy painting himself as a cultivated synesthete who can hear colors and see music, nor vain talking as a polyglot who translates his own work back and forth into many languages. He’s just your standard virtuoso aristocrat from a gilded age.
Which is the miracle of his talent. He has shaped the book to highlight his own magnificent way of viewing the world, a viewpoint that so eats your head that you never really leave his very oddly bejeweled skull, and you value things in the book’s context as he does, never missing what you otherwise adore in another kind of writer.
In fact, if you could list some of the information Nabokov reports about his relationships apart from his magical atmosphere, you’d find he fails to meet many measures we use for being a halfway decent person. If we weren’t so in love with him, we might cringe from him. His aristocratic social mores and emotional quirks—absent the beguiling atmosphere he woos us into—could come off as foppish at best or malignantly misanthropic at worst.
The book is a mesmerizing meditation on the nature of beauty, time, and loss, played out against backdrops of fairy-dusted interiors. And it’s a cry of longing for his lost parents and of joy for his wife and son. Nabokov unabashedly identifies with imperial Russia’s lush allure as the rich lived it in the early 1900s—enchanted rooms he steers us through page after page. H
e gives us philosophy and moments of transcendence. He leaps and drags us in his wake across the century, and we follow him without envy at his privilege. We’re just glad to get past the velvet rope.
Nothing in his existence is banal. He is never bored or irritated. His parents are never less than glorious dolls, incapable of doing anything petty or commonplace. Both “shone like the sun.” His mother wears white and shades of rose, bestowing on him sugary advice, i.e., love with all your soul and leave the rest to fate. His father, resplendent in Horse Guard uniform, “with that smooth golden swell of cuirass burning upon his chest and back,” is the luminous king in a myth. Nabokov gets away with this by making us fall in love with his aristocratic mindscape.
Of all his talents, it’s Nabokov’s flair for carnality—by which, again, I mean physicality, not sexuality—that first lures me in. He can light on a physical object and—by filtering it through his perceptual machine—transform it into a relic that shoots off poetic associations like sparks. His whole childhood seems devoted to ingesting as much beauty from memory as he can wolf down—thus forging the lost empire into art before it turns to ash in his memory. He makes these objects signify in metaphorical ways that merge them with the book’s themes: he must, as an expression of love for the lost, become sophisticated enough in taste to travel back and forth through time at will, to find the underlying patterns that order what’s otherwise been obliterated. The whole effort is a salvage operation with life-or-death stakes, and the “plot”—so far as one exists—organizes itself around his making a sensibility fine enough to save the “perceptual Eden” he claims he was born into.
In another writer’s hands, to focus on a single object at length reads as off-point or decorative. But for Nabokov, every object portends a whole slew of other meanings—ideological, moral, spiritual—that weave into the book’s leitmotifs.
So the objects he dwells on aren’t just pretty gewgaws from antique parlors; he infuses them with emotional consequence and symbolic weight and philosophical resonance. Early on, he starts training you to read into things like a necromancer deciphering the stars.