reason for this confusion between memoir and fiction, between how memoir and autobiography overlap, is that the memoir form, so newly emerged, is less understood than written. Function noses out form: writers write, and analyze what they’ve done only after they’ve written. It’s this avidity to leap in and get at one’s past and present selves that’s so contagious among authors, both first-timers and pros. The hoped-for reward is self-knowledge, not self-mystification. The writing will guide us there, if we write and reflect on what we write. But, though my pep talk may sound empowering for the author, the writing alone can lead to despair. Many give up: trying to make sense now of then incurs sudden, resistless anguish. The material may get too hot to handle.
Joan, the woman in my writing group with the transplanted heart, desperately wants to tell that story—how she was a candidate on the waiting list for two years, six months of which were spent in the hospital; how two transplants failed, the first “harvest” (she was given twelve minutes to get to the hospital) canceled once bruises were discovered on the donor’s heart and the second called off by an ice storm in Oregon that delayed the plane’s arrival; how the third try was successful and she joined a family’s loss of their son, whose sudden death must be a part of her tale. One scene she’d like to write: waking to the shock of having a man’s heart in her chest and hers gone, and then wondering how long his will keep beating. But she can’t write that scene. Not yet. Joan’s vitality is easily sapped (she says she has one-third the energy of the normal person), and then there’s her mother’s illness to deal with every morning before she gets to her desk.
The quotidian gives Joan plenty to work with, but now another fin cuts the surface. Before her surgery, Joan was locked in with no past or future—she could only wait, in dread and hope, for another’s death. A few years later, when she begins writing (a friend took notes during her surgery and recuperation), she is over-come by grief. A man has died and she has lived: two unrelated beings are now inextricable. What is she remembering? Is it the shock his heart suffered from the loss of his body? Is it the trauma of her twice-thwarted expectation that two harvests came to naught? Is it the responsibility that she must live for both? Now these and other emotions well up in eerie, invasive detail until she has to stop: The writing she attempts goes only so close to the experience, then won’t go any closer. Everything she is writing now she is discovering now, and every discovery now must be felt. The heart-fullness allows her to live. But there is much strain, ebbing from the conflicted hearts of her memory, and to tell it all may be impossible.
Now and Then: Virginia Woolf
The first personal narrative to interweave the author’s I-now and I-then is Virginia Woolf’s stunning and incomplete “A Sketch of the Past.” This ninety-five-page memoir-essay was posthumously published with four other pieces under the title Moments of Being. (The history of its publication is interesting: “A Sketch” was first published in 1976; its second half, reworked and expanded by Woolf, was discovered in 1980, necessitating a second edition in 1985 of the “complete” “Sketch.”) The work is diary and journal, meditation and memoir, written sporadically during 1939 and 1940 and planned as her autobiography. It may be only coincidence that these were difficult years for Woolf because of the threat of war, which she engages forcefully in the piece. Woolf went no further than what amounts to a second draft. She died, a suicide, in March 1941, four and a half months after the final entry in the “Sketch.” A series of a dozen dated entries, the book is fragmented, undisciplined, and impassioned: Woolf, at age sixty, mainly recalls her mother, father, sisters, brothers, half sisters, and half brothers and her family’s summer home at St. Ives in Cornwall. Her most disturbing admission is that her stepbrother Gerald Duckworth fondled her “privates” when she was thirteen. As in her novels, Woolf details individual lives and places with animated and felt imagery. She microscopically enlarges her most precious memories. To our joy, she is incapable of giving equal weight to equal events. She ends the time of her recollections around 1900, when she was eighteen. A world gone forty years ago. And yet not gone at all.
The beginning ten pages are a salvo in which Woolf reflects on how her memory will shape this very remembrance she is writing. Her perceptions are briefly examined, then exampled in the remaining pages. At the onset of the second entry, she discovers “a possible form for these notes.” She would like to remember the past by making “the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast” (italics added). She believes the past is or should be “much affected by the present moment,” though her remunerative task at hand is to finish the biography of art critic and Bloomsbury friend Roger Fry. Thus, she “has no energy at the moment to spend upon the horrid labour that it needs to make an orderly and expressed work of art” (75).
The self-consciousness of the opening pages is beguiling. The book Woolf didn’t write, and the one she left us, may be better than any we might imagine. (In part, Woolf is known for the thoughtful development of ideas and emotions in her intimate diaries, letters, and essays. Though less artistically composed than her novels, her personal writing abounds with inspired commentary.) The first entry of “A Sketch” is written at Monks House, near Rodmell, Sussex, and the River Ouse, on Tuesday, April 18, 1939. Before her family memories (some going back more than fifty years) become the focus, Woolf considers how she remembers, what memory means, what “one’s memoirs” might be. All of a sudden, consideration turns to criticism and she begins thinking about new methods of representing the self and the past. She first says that most memoirs are failures because the writers “leave out the person to whom things happened” (65). They err on the side of overnarrating events, and gossip, instead of uncovering the character of the rememberer, a character alive as much now as then. To flesh out the author, it is important to know who the parents were, their class, their proclivities. It is more crucial, however, to know the perception of the rememberer. Woolf follows suit, recalling first pictures—a nursery and the sensual feelings of St. Ives’s air, beach scenes, wave sounds. So strong are these memories that she tests them against a view of her present surroundings. “At times,” she writes, “I can go back to St. Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen” (67).
How marvelous that she reports her mental state in the throes of remembering early childhood. She does not merely catalog the past, nor tell the psychiatrist the lurid details. Her own psychotherapist, she moves from analysis to objective fact to a self-possessed intimacy. She is aware of her present “rapture” with recollecting St. Ives. And then, as quickly as she raises the ship of the past, she questions its seaworthiness. She writes that life makes childhood memories “less strong … less isolated, less complete” by adding “much that makes [memories] more complex” (67). Looking back over an accumulation of years gives memories their depth. More is made of them as we mature; we need to cherish or resolve what is recalled. The question is, can such memories ever be recollected for what they were? Woolf says no. To revisit such brief scenes and moods is “misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important” (69). The more important the memory, the harder it is to retrieve. But memories are imprinted and, because of their imprint, contain wholeness. Woolf labels such memories “exceptional,” which means the few and the intense. For her the exceptional memory always possesses “being,” while other parts of life—conversation, meals, weather, train rides, running a press, waiting around (Woolf says the unconsciousness of life is “a kind of nondescript cotton wool”)—comprise “non-being” or boredom (70–71).
The exceptional moments are “moments of being” (70). They are physically overwhelming and, over time, represent a legendary quality about the self. The moments require days and weeks of unexceptional life to pad and pace the distance between them as moments. The quotidian life is a complement to these peaks of being. Moments are enlarged by our memory; this grandiosity makes much about the past seem more exceptional than it probably was. Moments are self-selective: they highlight, expand, over-power, and change the past. Moments argue for their
