becomes animated by this idea. Given the time and the calm, the ideal way to write her life would be to contrast the intense present, one being-full and intense, with a part of the past, itself equally being-full and intense, and make their dueling exceptionalities work on each other.
Without doubt, the present is full of being: England is under attack. What would the past recollected during this dire present be like were she to write of it under these imposed conditions? Woolf ventures forth. Her first attempt is placid, before the bombing of London has begun, while the second is much different because it includes the bombs.
On July 19, 1939, Woolf has just returned from an uneventful crossing of the Channel. Before she writes about one of her stepsister Stella Duckworth’s lovers, she longs to recall the past because the present is running “so smoothly.” It is like the “sliding surface of a deep river.” “Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else” (98). How curious that a smooth present is tantamount to seeing the past smoothed of its turmoil.
But once the bombs start falling on London, everything changes. The destruction agitates Woolf about how and what she remembers. Upset, she recalls the pain of so much unexpressed feeling for her parents. She begins “venting that old grievance” once again. Her mother died prematurely and her father, whom she “alternately loved and hated,” became a ward to his daughters, particularly Stella and Vanessa. That sullied thought shifts her back to the present. Aflutter, she enquires of her husband Leonard whether he thinks there’s a “third voice” between the past and the present that can express her “vague idea.” She wonders “whether I make up or tell the truth when I see myself taking the breath of these voices in my sails and tacking this way and that through daily life as I yield to them.” She wonders if anyone cares: “Which of the people watching the incendiary bomb extinguished on the hill last night would understand what I mean if they read this?” (133). Remembering her difficult aging father and a Nazi bomb in her midst isolates her in rough seas. To calm down, she recalls sailing at St. Ives, which momentarily stabilizes the lurching. To calm down, she tries taking control of the present so she can take control of the past.
Is Woolf suggesting that what we remember about ourselves can be—perhaps should be—influenced or changed by present circumstances? Is she suggesting that depending upon the degree of unsettlement, the past can mislead the present as much as the present misleads the past? If the past’s moments of being are what we tend to recall, while the present mixes, pell-mell, being and non-being, must we write out of an exceptional present whose energy, in turn, ignites a more luminous portrayal of the past? Does it matter that who we are can change who we were? Won’t the past always be the same in memory, whether we are rushing to a bomb shelter or disembarking from an uneventful passage over the English Channel?
Such are the questions Woolf posed about her life and, by extension, our lives as well. I think of Woolf’s “Sketch” as the gauntlet to this generation of memoir writers. On one hand, this probing memoir is enthralling because it’s unfinished. Woolf may have left off completing this autobiography because she was forced to deal with the raw emotions the work unleashed in her life. Attempting a memoir about a past that felt sketchy and disruptive during the daily scare of an expanding war may have brought a sense of failure on her, which her depression only worsened. Memoir, too, can usher in a tragic consequence. Recalling life’s disappointments may lead a writer back to a past where the exceptional moments are all bad ones, which, in turn, rain doom (like German bombs) upon the present. On the other hand, Woolf’s incompleteness, her mulling over the possibility of the form itself as she writes the form, is just as enthralling. She gives birth to a radical idea—the interconnectedness of past and present in the act of memoir writing—which is as profound and lasting as anything else she bequeathed us in her work.
3
The Past Is Never Over
The Remembered Self and the Remembering Self
What many memoirists of the past twenty years have discovered—some following Woolf ‘s lead—is how much the intervention of the rememberer, the person writing now, is pertinent to the work. Intervention may sound heavy-handed. But I mean it as the degree to which memoir writers are attentive to the interplay of the story and their remembering the story, and how this interplay helps an author discover herself. I realize there should be a concise definition for the memoir—a book about an important or difficult relationship or phase in the author’s life. But such a subject- or theme-focused definition begs the question: What actually happens as we write and remember that becomes the memoir’s narrative? Recall Mary Karr: “What I wanted most of all was to tell the truth.” But what is this truth? Where does it exist? In memory? In the writing? In the intermixing of the two? Anyone who wants to tell the truth soon learns that the truth may not want to be told. It may like staying holed up in its lair, bouldering exit and entrance. Truth-telling requires a kind of demystification of the ever-mystifying notion of how memory works. To get at the truth (fact and emotion) of what happened, we must understand, as concretely as we can, what the past is and how we relate to it in the present.
Barrett J. Mandel analyzes the shell-game quality of memory, its tendency to be, like electrons, moving and fixed simultaneously. Mandel says that memory is paradoxical. On the one hand, he writes, “I can trace events with my memory, I can peruse old documents, study snapshots, and speak to others who affirm that my past actually occurred.” On the other hand, “I have to admit that it often seems as if my past, or at least my memory of it, has not remained fixed.” Mandel cites an example: one day he finds out that one of his “cherished elementary school memories never occurred—or not in the way I had always remembered it.” The event he recalled was a “screen memory … a vivid and totally convincing substitution of a less painful version of reality than one which a person is willing to accept as his or hers. My past, I learned, wasn’t fixed at all. As vividly remembered as it was … I had to relinquish it for another past—the one which has now been labeled the real one. In short, ‘my’ past changed” (76–77).
What we learn in memoir writing is that memory has far more of its own agency than we thought, that the very act of remembering may alter what did occur. This altering, Mandel says, is key. “Since my past only truly exists in the present and since my present is always in motion, my past itself changes too—actually changes—while the illusion created is that it stays fixed” (77). If the past is both fixed and unfixed, then it is always in process. And, not surprisingly, this process lies in the present where our minds and feelings make sense of the past as we recollect the past. Mandel calls this active participation with memory “presentification.” He stresses that memory cannot exist without a present stage on which to unfold: “This presentification is not a distortion of any so-called real past; this is the only way ‘my life’ comes to me” (83; italics in original).
Mandel’s estimation of memory as a present act has great import for the memoirist. The memoir writer works now, writing and remembering. Woolf’s remembrances of a difficult childhood were wedded to her current fears of war. Those fears drove her to recall the past in a way that would have been different had the bombs not been falling and the family tragedies not been mounting up. Thus, our present situation means everything to how and what we remember. From this we can extrapolate several relationships that are anchored in present-time remembering. For one, as Mandel suggests, what we remember may or may not be accurate. It has been altered and may be altered again by our recollecting. For another, our remembering selves can rouse us to action today. The past may impinge on the present, but the present can also direct the past with a purpose. What comes back in memory may no longer dominate our lives; however, the recollection may require us to re-evaluate it. My mother’s miserly affection, which
