Subject: | 8. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov (1966) |
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Date: | Wed, 08 Feb 2006 07:27:33 +0100 |
From: | A. Bouazza <mushtary@yahoo.com> |
To: | Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU> |
"I've always been intrigued by memoirs and autobiographies. I remember
my mother telling me that Helen Keller's autobiography was 'all true.'
I was eight years old and had no idea there was a distinction between
books that were 'made up' and 'real'. Of course, there can be a fine
line between the two, as the recent James Frey debacle has proven once
and for all, however, you could argue that this is part of what makes
the genre so interesting. For the most part, a well-written memoir can
bring an intimacy to our relationship with an author that doesn't
happen when you're reading a novel. With a memoir you know that the
protagonist has truly lived to tell the tale. The unfolding of memories
on a page - exactly how and why a writer decides to recreate the past -
can be fascinating to witness."
1. The Book of My
Life by Girolamo Cardano (1576)
Contrary to popular belief, memoirs weren't invented in the mid-1990s.
The genre is, of course, ancient - the Romans and Greeks wrote about
their own lives; St. Augustine penned The Confessions, his full-length
life story, at the turn of the 5th century. One of my personal
favourites amongst the earlier works of autobiography is The Book of My
Life, written in Renaissance Italy, by the polymath Girolamo Cardano.
Each chapter describes a different aspect of Cardano's life - his
career and relationships; his appearance and temperament, not to
mention difficulties with his sexual health. A classic of
self-examination.
2. Harriette
Wilson's Memoirs by Harriette Wilson (1825)
Wilson was the most famous courtesan in Regency England - a mistress of
aristocrats, politicians, poets, and military men alike. When she came
to publish her memoirs in 1825, however, she was past her prime and
losing her looks. In desperate need of money, Wilson posted letters to
each of her ex-lovers demanding £200 or an annual pension if they
wished to be omitted from her kiss-and-tell. The Duke of Wellington
reportedly told her, "Publish and be damned!" (as a result, the Duke
appears in her Memoirs portrayed as a dreadful bore with the looks of a
"rat-catcher"). Wilson's first line gives you a good idea of her
seductively mischievous tone: "I shall not say why and how I became, at
the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven..."
3. Autobiographical
Fragment by Charles Dickens (1847)
I hadn't known about this prior to my work on the anthology and so it
was exciting to discover that Dickens had the original Dickensian
childhood. This "autobiographical fragment" was included in John
Forster's 1872 biography of the great writer and although it's only a
few pages long, it's a riveting and vivid depiction of 10-year-old
Dickens after he was forced to leave school and work in a factory when
his father landed in debtor's prison. The details are grim - cruel
factory masters, scuttling rats, abject hunger, a small boy's
loneliness. Dickens had planned to write a longer description but was
so overcome by the anguish of remembering this period of his life that
he couldn't continue. Soon afterwards he began work on David
Copperfield, where the factory of his youth is transformed into
Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse.
4. The
Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant by Margaret Oliphant (1899)
Oliphant was one of the most prolific and beloved novelists of the 19th
century. Today, if she's remembered at all, it's usually as "Queen
Victoria's favourite novelist" which doesn't seem like much of a
recommendation. Her Autobiography, however, is unusually affecting. It
was written as a private record over a period of 30 years, and was
patched together by her descendents after her death in 1897. Even
Virginia Woolf, who reviled Oliphant's novels, described The
Autobiography as a "most genuine and moving piece of work." Each of
Oliphant's six children and her husband died before her - including two
sons in infancy and two daughters in childhood. The book ends with the
death of her last surviving child: "I have nobody to stand between me
and roughest edge of grief," she writes.
5. Father and Son
by Edmund Gosse (1907)
A memoir about the relationship between the English writer Edmund Gosse
and his father, the naturalist and evangelical Phillip Gosse. Although
the events it recreates take place in the mid-19th century, the book
feels timeless. This is partly because it's so poignant but also
because the Gosses' complex and conflicted relationship is so well
rendered. In the course of the book we witness the young Gosse emerging
as his own person, despite enormous pressure from his father to fit
into a staunchly evangelical mould. Eventually Gosse Jr and Gosse Sr go
their separate ways - a schism that's ostensibly cause by their
divergent views on Darwinism. Incredible to think such matters are
still contentious in certain parts of the States.
6. My Childhood by
Maxim Gorky (1913)
The first part of the Russian writer's autobiographical trilogy, this
is Gorky's description of growing up poor in late 19th-century Russia -
no fun by all accounts. Gorky's picture of the punishing impoverishment
of daily peasant life is brilliantly lucid. After his father dies, the
four-year-old Gorky goes with his mother to live with his appallingly
cruel grandfather. Later, our hero is orphaned entirely and like a
real-life Russian Huckleberry Finn, he sets out to make his way in the
world, aged only 11. A masterpiece amongst "miserable childhood"
memoirs.
7. If This Is A Man
by Primo Levi (1947)
This is Levi's legendary account of his year in Auschwitz when he was
25 years old. The book first appeared in 1947 and it remains the most
profoundly civilised description of profoundly uncivilised events.
What's so extraordinary is Levi's tone, which is never one of simple
outrage, but instead springs from a kind of principled curiosity; the
astonishment of the scientist confronted with wholly foreign phenomena.
"How is this possible?" Levi seems to be always asking us. If This Is A
Man can make for extremely disconcerting reading, not only because of
the systematic cruelty of the Nazis it describes, but because Levi
doesn't let you dismiss the Holocaust as the work of monsters. This was
the work of men.
8. Speak, Memory:
An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov (1966)
Speak, Memory - about Nabokov's "lost" childhood in pre-Revolution
Russia, and the early years of his post-Revolution peregrinations in
Europe - is literary memoir at its finest. Nabokov weaves the stuff of
memory into a luminous work of art, definitively upping the ante for
memoir writers to come. While working on the anthology, I sought out
his notes for a sequel to Speak, Memory (in the New York Public
Library), which he began in the late 1960s but never finished or
published. A single, immaculately fashioned paragraph from these notes
is included in the anthology.
9. The Perfect
Stranger PJ Kavanagh (1966)
The English poet PJ Kavanagh called his 1966 memoir, "the story of a
recognition and a rescue." It's a book that charts how one person can
change another's life completely. Kavanagh begins with his childhood,
growing up in wartime Bristol, and follows the course of his youth
through boarding school and the army, until he winds up at Oxford, a
rather lost and disgruntled 20-something. Here he meets a fellow
student, Sally Phillips, the "perfect stranger" of the title, and they
fall in love. What follows is a magical depiction of Sally, their
short-lived happiness together, and the transformative effect she has
on his existence.
10. Borrowed Finery
by Paula Fox (2001)
My favourite memoir of recent times. Sadly, I didn't manage to include
an excerpt in the anthology (I couldn't find a single section that
would work when divorced from the rest of Fox's book) so it's very
pleasing to recommend it here. Fox - the American novelist and
children's book author - wrote this story of her childhood in her late
70s and she's a very good advertisement for waiting until old age to
write about the past. Borrowed Finery is a model of exactitude and
restraint, in which Fox manages to evoke her abandonment by her parents
and a childhood spent in the care of a succession of strangers and
relatives without a shred of self-pity. A second memoir, The Coldest
Winter has just come out in the States and forms a kind of sequel. It's
just as good as its predecessor.
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