Tell Me True

by Patricia Hampl

  I was back where I’d started with A Romantic Education, writing from shards and memories, taking notes as well on the last months of her life, finally the last night. With her death, perhaps as the solemn residue of a life, I hardened my purpose. And found, or was given by her death, my form.

  I had written a sentence in my notebook that proved to be the book’s launch, though I had actually written it in despair: Nothing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life. My father’s life, my mother’s, indeed the life of my family and everyone we had known in St. Paul—modest, middling, gone now. It struck me, in the hush of grief, after they were gone, that this was a way in. More than that, this modesty was a subject. My father, my mother, their world.

  The book I wrote, set on the final night of my mother’s life, as I held her hand in the hospital, writing, with my other hand, her obituary for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, was a memoir of that modest world. The Florist’s Daughter traveled nowhere on the globe as my other books had in my persistent search for historical meaning. The journey I made in this book was not geographic. It was entirely temporal, into history itself, the Depression that had formed my parents and deformed their hopes and dreams, the postwar life of hard work, the qualities of quiet idealism (my father) and furious political grudges (my mother), the sweep of their decades leading each of them to pure acquiescence. Theirs was the acquiescence of humble lives, lived well but without glory, as the world changed around them and left them at the side of the speedway.

  This, then, was history. I had to acquiesce to it, too. I no longer had the illusion, no matter how well intentioned, that history was Out There—behind the Iron Curtain, in the dawn star of the Renaissance in Italy. It was possible—actually it was necessary—to write history from the inside if I hoped to preserve my bit of truth, put it forward on the great heap of history.

  “Doubtless every family archive that perishes,” Czesław Miłosz wrote in Native Realm, “every account book that is burned, every effacement of the past reinforces classifications and ideas at the expense of reality. Afterward, all that remains of entire centuries is a kind of popular digest. And not one of us today is immune to that contagion.” He, like all my heroes of memoir, had been writing out of the same sense of worthlessness that had haunted me. I had thought they at least—Miłosz, Mandelstam, Hoffman, Kazin—had known they were writing about the great occasions of world history. Surely, with the deaths and exiles, the wars and political hauntings from evil times they had witnessed, endured, or inherited, they were assured the value of their enterprise in writing their lives.

  But here it was again, evidence of the fragility of the homely detail, of intimate family life. This ordinariness is the fact of most of our lives. It is, paradoxically, what history strains against, in its recording of wars and migrations, glorious triumphs and traumatic changes. For this personal modesty of ordinary lives is what we mean, finally, by happiness. And happiness, it appears, is the opposite of what history usually concerns itself with.

  This modesty is what must not be lost in the telling of our lives. The glory of the ordinary is an oxymoron, but ordinary life is family life, daily life, what we cherish and strive to sustain. Yet it is always lost, over and over, again and again, war by war, age by slippery age. And so to write an elegy, as I learned again with my book about my Mother and Dad, is to write history—and to write history is, inevitably, to write an elegy.

  CHERI REGISTER

  Memoir Matters

  • • •

  WITH AN EXCERPT FROM

  Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir

  FROM Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir

  In a town without museums or amusement parks, which Albert Lea still was in the late 1950s, elementary school field trips tend to be excursions in industrial technology. Touring the sites where people do their daily work has to serve as both entertainment and education. My classmates and I clucked at baby chicks still wet and sticky and confused in the electric incubators at the hatchery, and watched a row of women at Kroger’s Produce “candle” freshly laid eggs; lighting the eggs with a lamp from behind, they could see inside and check for embryos. We crowded around the printing press that clanked out the Albert Lea Evening Tribune, made our voices echo in the tall stairwell of a grain elevator, and stood entranced as bottles and cans moved along conveyor belts to be automatically filled and sealed at the Morlea Dairy, the Coca-Cola bottling plant, and the National Cooperatives cannery. We never did visit the mysterious, brick-walled Olson Manufacturing Company on South Broadway, so we could still chime in with the local joke, “Why are there so many Olsons in Albert Lea? They make them here.”

  These field trips rarely bored us. I assumed my classmates were as fascinated as I was with the notion of work and its secret words and special skills. Mom taught me “dart” and “tuck” and “gusset” and showed me how to use a gauge and a tracing wheel. As I helped Dad with his house projects, I learned “dowel,” “trowel,” “sillcock,” and “miter box.” I looked forward to the day when I would master something and speak its language with confidence, but until then, I enjoyed peeking in on the work that grown-ups did, and seeing who did what, and where. For the parents of us Lincoln School kids, “where” was likely the Wilson & Co. packinghouse.

  We knew that a visit to Wilson’s required some degree of maturity, or at least the early signs of adolescence. A hodge-podge of brick buildings and tin and wooden sheds, Wilson’s sat in a shallow depression between U.S. Highway 16, our Main Street, and the Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul and Pacific railroad line that ran along the weedy shore of Albert Lea Lake, also known as Lower Lake. “The plant,” we called it, a name that marked it as the primary local industry. Security fences and a large employee parking lot made it look vast and impenetrable and even a little scary, yet it imposed itself on our lives in ways so familiar and habitual we rarely paid attention. The ceaseless industry of the packinghouse filled the air on the north side of town with a smoky, rancid odor, turned Albert Lea Lake slimy with effluents, alerted us to the passage of time with a steam whistle at noon, blared out livestock prices on our radios, and kept many of us fed and clothed and sheltered. “The Wilson label protects your table,” was not only an advertising slogan, but the literal truth. We knew there would be no table to sit at if it weren’t for Wilson’s.

  • • •

  Memoir Matters

  In the 1990s, as memoirs like Mary Karr’s The Liars Club and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes began to compete with novels in popularity, a few literary critics grew alarmed. James Wolcott warned in Vanity Fair that literature might devolve into “a big earnest blob of me-first sensibility.”1 Paul Gray, writing in Time, puzzled over “the success of unhappy stories by the largely or completely unknown.”2 While they could certainly cite examples to warrant their fears, the critics overlooked memoir’s promise. Despite beginning with “me,” both orthographically and narratively, memoir draws on shared, or public, memory as well as the strictly personal. The most fully realized memoirs situate personal memory in precise public places, the specific geographical, historical, and cultural settings where life-shaping events occur.

  Overwrought confessionalism is, of course, a risk in any form of writing derived from personal experience. Without deliberate attention to context, memoir can indeed fail to convey much meaning. What would Angela’s Ashes be without the crowded lanes of Limerick, or The Liar’s Club without the Texas Gulf Coast oil rigs? Memoirists who let their personal pinings float in a featureless nowhere, mistaking it for everywhere, misrepresent the genre, but they do not negate its value. Hokey novels, too, find their way into print yet leave the genre untainted.

  The surest way for memoirists to win readers’ interest and empathy is to locate their personal stories in public space. I have worked to accomplish this in my own writing, yet when I teach creative nonfiction writing, I realize how hard it can be to convey.
Many of my students, creatures of American individualism, believe that their stories derive from a uniquely personal vision known as “my truth.” Context is clutter, added as illustrative detail but tricky to integrate with the main story. History is an especially hard sell. Asked to write about public events that determined the course of their lives, some students come up blank, while others recount TV news stories that aroused their sympathies or opened their eyes to the plight of others. Only a few look back to determinative events before their births, as Diane Wilson has done in Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past.3 She traces her family’s welfare and her mother’s “passing” as a white, suburban housewife to the Dakota War of 1862, which demanded painful loyalty tests of mixed-race people who had previously enjoyed access to both cultures. As the state of Minnesota celebrates its sesquicentennial and reencounters this troubling moment in its past, the personal witness offered in Wilson’s memoir can enrich the public discussion.

  Sometimes a lesson about the importance of context arises naturally in class yet takes an offensive form. A student of color who reads to the class from work-in-progress might hear, as peer criticism, that he should make clear from the start that he is Korean or Ojibwe. Otherwise, how will readers know? Yet the student offering the advice has not owned up anywhere in her text to being white or Methodist or a native of Illinois soybean country. To shortcut this class dynamic, I like to assign an excerpt from John Edgar Wideman’s Fatheralong, plucked out of the text in such a way that it places his child self squarely in Pittsburgh without immediately identifying him as African American, unless the reader knows the city neighborhoods and bus routes. White students sometimes tell me they have to adjust their image of the narrator when they realize he is black. Without evidence to the contrary, they assume a white norm, and finding themselves suddenly face-to-face with someone else is unnerving. This gives us a chance to talk about the double standard applied to “mainstream” and “marginal” memoirists. As readers, we justly expect a clear view of the person narrating the memoir, yet as writers, we who imagine ourselves as mainstream easily forget to say who and whose we are, where we come from, which places, events, and cultures have shaped us, and how.

  Maybe the Korean or Ojibwe student will plant a jar of kimchi or a bit of beadwork in the story as a quick—and stereotypical—signal to the reader. The white student might confess to being middle class. The Catholic student might cite first communion jitters about fumbling the host or describe the slap of an ornery nun’s ruler. But it is not enough just to peg ourselves. These clues have become too hackneyed to carry any news, and sometimes such hints obscure the truth. Whenever I identify my upbringing as Scandinavian Lutheran, in a Minnesota town of less than twenty thousand, I risk drowning in the deluge that Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon has become. The memoirist’s task is to complicate the oversimplified, to rescue truth from the truisms that readers adopt as shorthand for lives they see only from a distance, comic or otherwise.

  Description alone won’t rectify misperceptions. I learned this lesson years ago, backwards, in a personal essay class taught by Phillip Lopate in his term as visiting creative nonfiction mentor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He had spoken encouraging words about the first essay I submitted for class critique, so I sprang to attention when he announced that my second essay had left him cold. In an attempt at lyricism, not my natural mode, I had written an elegiac piece about my love-hate relationship with cornfields, and I had pulled out all the sensory stops to awe the reader with corn. Lopate confessed that he just didn’t get it. There was nothing at stake in my essay for a reader not already obsessed, let alone unfamiliar, with cornfields. Moreover, he admitted, as a native of Manhattan, he didn’t really get the Midwest or midwestern writers’ reverie about prairies. I showed the essay to Minnesota writer Paul Gruchow, who wrote brilliantly of prairies, and he gave me one of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve received: Remember that you come from an exotic landscape. You are introducing your landscape to a reader who can’t even imagine it.

  Cornfields, exotic? Yes, as much in need of careful, accurate, astonishing representation as the surface of Mars.

  During the darkest days of winter, I like to ask my students to spend a chunk of class time—maybe fifteen minutes—writing something that will make winter vivid to a reader from the tropics. Both native Minnesotans and newcomers go right for the sensory detail: the prickly touch of an icy wind on the cheek, the crunch and ping as the ice scraper battles the frosty windshield, the sound the snow makes underfoot at varying temperatures, the stark beauty of light and shadow in mid-December, the bright Arctic blue sky on a subzero January day. They write with precision and passion, and once they have taken their turns reading aloud, we feel reinvigorated, ready to head back out into the cold.

  I take weather seriously. I grew up in southern Minnesota’s Blizzard Belt, known in the summer as Tornado Alley. When the prominent feature of your childhood landscape is a huge sky of ever-shifting moods, you learn that human resourcefulness is no match for nature, even if human folly and greed are altering its age-old patterns. A quick spatter of sticky snow on a windshield, a skid through a red light, or a tree limb cracking under the weight of the snow can mean sudden death. My learned respect for the Upper Midwest’s climate, and thus for uncontrollable turns of fate, shows, I believe, in my writing. A colleague from the urban East once called my take on life “passive.” I call it “responsive.”

  In the years since my conversation with Paul Gruchow, I’ve expanded his advice and passed it on: We all come from exotic landscapes. We all live in dramatic times. We are all raised in inscrutable cultures. For uninitiated readers to get it, we have to push beyond description to interpretation. Here is what my place in the world looks and feels like, here is what happens there, and here is how it shapes my vision and my encounter with life.

  When I make that shift in my own work, I arrive at testimony, which is where my voice feels most authentic. My particular vocation as a writer is to bear witness to what I know because of where and when I am living. I home in on experiences I share with some others but that most people don’t understand or may even misperceive. Still the blizzard-bound girl, I am alert to the dangers lurking within beauty—the injustice in the happily-ever-after story of international adoption, for example,4 and the beauty that is danger’s reward—the clarity and purpose in a life of chronic illness.5 The witness says: I bring you vital news; here is what I know that I want you to understand.

  The most useful testimony is often counterintuitive. Rather than confirming readers’ assumptions about the lives that others lead, memoir ought to shake them up. D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir certainly freed me from my skewed view of suburbs as transitory, trumped-up places. Waldie has described his writing on greater Los Angeles as a counternarrative meant to undo the film noir version of LA as an ugly, menacing city where dreams are dashed for evil gains. My current work, using memoir, family history, and the public record to examine perceptions of Minnesota, tosses me up against a similar cynicism. The story favored on public television, abetted by certain academic historians, depicts the rural Midwest as a depopulating wasteland.6 It reduces Minnesota’s 150-year history since European settlement to a relentless trajectory of ruin. Lumbering denuded the forests. Agriculture uprooted the prairie and drained its wetlands. The railroads spawned towns too close together to survive and abandoned some of them outright. Decline set in on day one. Although it is true, the story doesn’t account for the lives and dreams of the people who settled in Minnesota. At any one moment in this century and a half, you find plenty of hope to counter the overriding narrative’s despair.

  I found, as I began to write, that I must test the resonance of this public story against what rings true personally. I grew up in this doomed landscape, the great-great-granddaughter of territorial pioneers and the granddaughter of Danish immigrants. They came neither to destroy the land nor to sub
mit to the hardships of a crass, exploitive plundering of resources. My paternal ancestors were populists who believed that human society could be progressively improved. Their 1893 train trip from Moscow, Minnesota, to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition likely confirmed their vision.7 My maternal grandmother, a boardinghouse kitchen servant in Denmark, toiled over a hot stove as the proprietor of a small-town beer joint–café in America. On her first visit to Denmark forty-seven years after her emigration, she bought a set of Royal Copenhagen china as proof of her good fortune. Never mind that the dishes were factory discards. I own a share of them now, and I cherish their imperfections. The lens of decline would focus on the Registers’ financial failures and the alcoholism in the Petersen family to squeeze them into the currently fashionable template. Yet both families taught me to hope, to work, to laugh, and to tell stories, even in the face of gloom.

  Packinghouse Daughter, my childhood memoir, came into being as a counternarrative. The prevailing images of the rural Midwest and of the American working class seemed discordant and didn’t suit my life within them. I heard the Midwest described as stodgy, conservative, homogeneous, impervious to new ideas, resistant to social change. The American working class consisted of urban, ethnic industrial workers with a radical grasp on social ills, eager to strike and bring on the revolution. The first image seemed an insulting caricature; the second, a romantic fantasy. They were mutually exclusive, besides. There could be no such working class in that rural Midwest. Yet I knew myself to be a midwestern working-class girl. Both those attributes were so central to my identity and to my family history that I had to make better sense of them than any existing narrative could.

  Telling “my truth” was no simple task. At one of many moments of frustration, I handed my writing group—a remnant of Phillip Lopate’s class—a long, shapeless draft. They advised me to write two separate books: one, my personal memoir, and the other, a book about labor and the meatpacking industry. I mulled their advice for several days, and although it was off the mark, it worked wonders. I realized that without the meatpacking story, I had little to say about myself that would hold even my own interest. Without my personal stake in the subject, a book about packinghouse labor would be dry and unmoving. I felt no passion or motive to write either book. A firm conviction set in that my memoir would matter only if I wrote it at the intersection of private life and public history. I’ve been parked on that corner ever since.