Durrell never mentioned pain, but he was always making jokes. Burroughs cannot be amusing, although he can describe madness well, choosing just the right detail to send the reader away heaving. But Sedaris is a comic genius. He is Thurber, if not Wodehouse, and he is certainly Perelman. He has no “side,” as the British say. He thinks little of himself and I suspect accepts compliments with mystification.
The baddies have much to fear now. Before memoirs became popular, child molesters had things very much their own way, for instance. No more. Mary Tyler Moore was a little girl when she was sexually assaulted by a neighbour and her mother either didn’t believe her or didn’t care. The British writer Jill Craigie was raped by the historian Arthur Koestler, a revelation that caused consternation at the university that was about to erect a memorial to the man, plans hastily changing there. Alan Bennett now writes of being cornered as a little boy by a pedophile in a cinema. It is a terrifying story, but he typically insists on making little of it.
It does appear that a great many people—judging by the stories we read of the prominent—were raped as children, and we have the Pain Memoir to credit for this knowledge. Two—and as of last Friday, let’s make that three—of my closest friends now tell me of having been sexually attacked by male family members when they were children; another friend was raped by a psychopathic dinner date, a professor, who put a pillow over her face. He was perfectly friendly afterwards, which was the terrifying thing, she said, aside from asphyxiation. They tell me this only because the Pain Memoir appeared in my lifetime and began to unwrap the real world for us, making it acceptable for us to tell our own stories.
And yet people still yearn for the mythical days when children were sent out to play. Nobody worried about molesters then. The truth is, the molesters didn’t worry in those days either. They were home-free.
Children accept the lives they are given, which is one of the blessings of being a child. You’re like an animal in that you don’t question your own existence, you simply live it. But at some level, all children yearn for a “normal” family, knowing in their hearts that there is something very wrong: drunken parents, a central shared lie that is never articulated, a mystification about how Daddy brings in money, why Mummy sleeps all day, the relatives who are permanently shut out, the pills, the endless hasty moves.
Good memoirs are based on meticulous observation and no one is better at that than children. The interpretation of what the child saw comes later.
The odd thing is that there is nothing more fascinating than unperceptive people. In fact I know several people who are utterly incurious. They don’t read. They watch a smattering of bad TV, though I’m guessing here, because they never talk about high and low culture or anything in between. They cannot catch a current reference beyond the year they turned twenty-one. If they’re women, they have never worked and they despise women who do. They have never had any achievement or any ambition to achieve. Is it some sick element in me that is drawn to people like this? It mystifies my husband how I chat with them at parties or in stores. It’s like talking to a parrot, whose best effort is to mouth your words back at you perfectly. But they don’t know it. Tell me about your life, I urge them. They do say the most astonishing things, if only they knew it.
Sometimes I think the greatest loss of all is not the unexamined life (for Socrates was referring to examination of the self) but the unobserved life. Unobserved people are fascinating.
A woman named Sylvia Smith wrote a very strange little autobiography in 2001. She lived in London, had done various odd jobs throughout her life, had very little money, no education or sense of aesthetics, read nothing, took everything at face value, was plain. She sent in a manuscript and Canongate published it. It was called Misadventures and took the form of a series of vignettes. She would agree to meet a date at the station to have dinner at his house. Asked to bring sausages, she would. And he wouldn’t show up. There she’d stand with her packet of tubular processed meats until she left alone to go home and fry them. That would be a chapter.
Or she would negotiate bath times with her fellow boarders and they would inevitably fall out. People cannot live together, I think. Smith had a habit of giving her age and the age of those she described at the start of every incident, as if she had been taught in grade school that this was a means of authentication. Instead, it sends out the hum of madness.
I swear, Misadventures was gripping stuff. What was distressing, though, was the newspaper feature writers who were sent out to interview Smith and failed to form any kind of connection with her or to translate her for their readers. She was not rich. She was not beautiful. She had never met the great and rarely the good. It was as if her kind were beyond the writers’ ken. They dismissed her while nervously praising her publisher for having taken on such a nonentity, as though she were a member of another species.
But the fact is, she was normal. One thing I always remind myself when I walk about the streets of my own city is that I am the freak. I am endlessly thinking, rethinking, analyzing, watching, missing out on things that should claim my attention, my brain a buzzing mess. I’m the oddity.
A man named Joe Fiorito interviews normal people for my local paper. And I am sure his editor considers the column to be some kind of social service with a human face. The most startling interview he ever did was with a poverty-stricken Asian man who had been arrested for shoplifting at a drugstore. He had stolen skin-lightening cream. For he had noticed that brown-skinned people didn’t make anything of themselves in this country. I hadn’t even known such creams existed. I wanted to scream, Don’t press charges. Give him a barrel of the stuff.
Ten years later, I was prescribed a birth control pill that my doctor explained had given me the “mask of pregnancy.” There were slightly darker patches on my cheeks, something that pregnant women sometimes develop. She prescribed the same skin-lightening cream for my vanity that the man had stolen to survive. I wonder what happened to him.
Joe understands that the people he interviews are normal. He is the strange one, with his writing talent and his interest in cookery and his astonishing kindness. I am the weird one brooding over my tube of Lustral and what this means in the grand scheme of things, a tide of sorrow sloshing inside me.
This year, I read that there’s an ingredient in the cream that may be carcinogenic. Is all of life like this, an accretion of odd facts that we hope will somehow form a pattern? Am I writing the book because my role is to figure out the pattern? I know I am worth less than I think. Writers are small people. They are on the fringe. They write their memoirs with great authority, not realizing that they’re the minion of the group, the person who tells the story instead of just living it.
Better to write a memoir with humility, as Sedaris does. One of the great frustrations of the book world—and I suppose the journalism world, although it is a much more callous surface-skimming place—is that the right books don’t sell. The bestseller lists contain books like Minge: The Left Behind Code for Women Who Dish that sustain publishers and yet you’d probably pay not to read them. Editors despair of trying to bring a great memoir to the attention of readers. Thanks to the book club, word of mouth, perhaps even Book Crossing, whose members leave books in public places for strangers to pick up, there’s a wisp of hope. How else would good memoirs get a chance?
The best Second World War memoir (and like many people, I went through an intense Second World War phase) was And No Birds Sang, written by Farley Mowat, a Canadian writer of great reach. He could write comic novels, adventure novels for kids and scientific works, but at some point he sat down and wrote the tale of his joining the Hasty Pees, his father’s army regiment, and fighting through Italy, including at the horrific battle for the citadel village of Assoro. The terror of Assoro was that it was a fortress on a mountain, perched on the edge of a massive cliff. The task was to climb the cliff in the dark, undetected by German sentries, and take the town.
Mowat is good at detail. His d
escription of a German sniper slowly firing bullet after bullet at a donkey as it wiggled in agony until a disgusted Canadian soldier finished the animal off has stayed with me to this day. We are told that the Americans admire Canadian snipers in the latest war in Afghanistan. I think snipers are cowards. I despise them. How clever you are to shoot someone in the back.
Mowat describes a soldier falling forward at the waist, his body perfectly sliced in two by a series of bullets. Journalism doesn’t tell you this; readers might disapprove of war if they knew such things happened.
Not until I read Robert Fisk’s dispatches about Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians in The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East did I read war described in this way again. Fisk says that telling readers what is done to human bodies, especially those of civilians, is the key to reporting. We have no idea what war is. He tells us of a squishy feeling under his boots and the realization that he was standing on a pile of murdered civilians in a refugee camp, the pile gathered by Israeli bulldozers. He describes a halo of wooden clothes pegs around the head of a woman shot to death as she was hanging up her laundry. He describes the vomiting of reporters as they came upon the slaughter that was abetted by Ariel Sharon, a war criminal later elected leader of Israel (and now he’s a vegetable, tra-la).
Thanks to those small details, I see the Sharonistas differently than many people do. Clothes pegs. Sharon’s bulging face, the face of an assistant killer.
Henry James said writing was all about seeing the pattern in the carpet. It occurs to me that many modern readers won’t get this. For one thing, everyone but me has fashionable planked wood flooring. Even if they have carpet, as I do, there’s no pattern. My carpet is a flat expanse of grey. James was a Victorian, which means he lived in an era of such fantastically complicated patterned carpeting that staring at it would make you go mad like that woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper. I love you, Henry, but the complexity of your novels goes beyond even the maddest of Victorian flooring.
Nevertheless, a Pain Memoir has to have some kind of pattern or theme. The Rotten Parents theme is probably the most fruitful, given that most parents are spectacularly inept—family values, indeed—even when they mean well. Subsets are Handed Over to Rotten Relatives (City of One by Francine Cournos, a great book by the way), Donated to Pedophile Cult (see Burroughs, above) and Evil Stepmother.
My favourite of this last subset is Helga Schneider’s Let Me Go, if only because the author is a lovely person who to this day doesn’t grasp that no court would convict her for having split her mother’s head open with axe. Hers was a careerist mother. Helga’s mother abandoned the family to join the SS and become a concentration camp guard who really loved her work and found the post-war years a letdown. Helga subsequently endured a sadistic stepmother (what are the odds?) and an orphanage.
Then as an adult, out of blasted hope, Helga takes her beautiful little son to meet the mother she has not seen since childhood. Mum ignores the child, fortunate boy, but makes a peace offering. She has handfuls of expensive jewellery, which Helga realizes instantly were stolen from Jewish and Romany women stripped as they entered the gas chamber. The reunion goes downhill from there, and later Helga visits her mother in a German old folks’ home, where everyone knows she was a Nazi torturer partly because she still behaves like one. At this point, it’s actually funny, because the staff and other patients show a saintly patience toward the hideously insane old woman who serves as a relic of an era for which Germans (and everyone else, I suppose) can’t forgive themselves. It made me think better of Germans.
American Pain Memoir, Subset: Evil Mother writers aren’t like Helga Schneider. They don’t take any crap. They take notes. An American writer would have smothered that woman with a pillow in 1967. Pain Memoirs, Subset: War, are often very fine, because the pattern in the carpet is of the individual as well as the mass. One of the greatest war memoirs is Roman Frister’s The Cap: The Price of a Life, in which he explains the selfish human desire to survive, to the point of stealing a fellow prisoner’s cap in Auschwitz to replace the one stolen by the kapo who has just sodomized him. The kapo has taken the cap of his latest victim, knowing that all prisoners without caps are automatically shot. The next morning, Frister watches the capless man shot to death at roll call.
Frister writes his memoir as he travels to a court where Wilhelm Kunde, the Nazi, is tried and sentenced. When he sees Kunde—the terrifying man who split the boy’s beautiful mother’s skull open with his pistol, in front of the child, her body falling to the polished wooden floor with a thud that Frister can still remember—he is numb and indifferent.
Kunde looks like a little old man in a suit too big for him, a tiny human doll. He is convicted and sentenced to seven years.
Frister thinks morality cannot be judged by one standard. It varies according to circumstance. He is right, but I notice that I have yet to meet anyone who has read Frister’s great book. And that is the point of the memoir, to study uncomfortable questions like that, things otherwise left unsaid. Readers aren’t happy with Frister’s shrug, so to speak. Very few Second World War memoirs—and I swam in them for years, out of a moral sense possibly, but more likely out of morbid fascination—are like this, like a broken arm. Frister offers his jagged limb; readers would prefer a nicely healed straight arm.
Thanks to the Americans, there are a great many war memoirs, by soldiers, by little girls whose skin was burned off by napalm from the Dow “Better Living Through Chemicals” people, and by war photographers like Don McCullin who can’t shake their guilt.
There’s a man named Andrew Neil who used to edit fine papers bought by Rupert Murdoch and inevitably bring them down to a low sour standard that would make the good journalists who used to staff them weep. This isn’t necessarily to denigrate Neil, who stole the journalistic notion of “Treat light things seriously and serious things lightly” from the New Musical Express staffed by Julie Burchill et al., and made newspapers interesting again. Worse, but interesting.
But I hate Andrew Neil because he fired McCullin, one of the finest news photographers who ever lived. McCullin’s picture of a Biafran child, a boy, stooped over with such a look of hurt in his eyes, sits in McCullin’s own Pain Memoir on a shelf behind me as I write this. I’ve seen the picture twice, once as a child and once for the purposes of this book. I suppose we’ll call it Pain Memoir, Subset: Photos of Misery. Neil’s autobiography, on the other hand, is fairly disposable. He’s a dodgy man famous for his deeply strange hair. I shan’t recommend his book.
This brings us to Pain Memoir, Subset: I Am Deeply Strange. These are written by people who travel the foreign galaxies of suffering, always aware at some level of the madness of their self-inflicted torture. Marya Hornbacher’s bulimia memoir, Wasted, in which she neared death at 50 pounds and thus now knows she will die young, is informative. I do wonder, though, how a teenager who eats so much and vomits undigested food so frequently and lavishly that she repeatedly bursts the pipes of her parents’ home … well, wouldn’t anyone reading this book out of fellow feeling—a similar pipe-cracker—be beyond the help of literature?
Emily Colas’s memoir of obsessive-compulsive disorder is a masterpiece. There isn’t a word in it about the agony of existence, because Colas won’t give herself the comfort. It’s a comedy. A hideous comedy, true. Colas’s misfortune was to marry a man who could cope with her fear that he might be putting cyanide in her food. As an enabler, he was excellent, but her description of the process they’d both go through so that she could safely brush her teeth takes three pages. It starts with the purchase of six toothbrushes and goes on to a packaging-leak test. Her title for the book? Just Checking.
As in the writing of David Sedaris, who had Tourette’s and also OCD to an extraordinary degree but in later life managed to sublimate his jitters with cigarettes, even moving to Paris where he could smoke everywhere, anywhere, there’s no analysis beyond an implied �
�Don’t be like me. I was odder than fuck and it was unpleasant for those around me.” Sedaris’s mother, rather than putting him in hospital, made a joke of it. She took his condition as a given. This carpet has no pattern, Colas and Sedaris are saying, and I admire them for it.
The Pain Memoir, Subset: Abusive Husband, is huge. It’s all entirely convincing and wrenching to read, but it has not made the police smarter or more determined to protect women and tiny children from the fists and knives of men. It may be the only Pain Memoir that has done no far-reaching good. Nevertheless, read them if your husband gets out of line. Keep a Running-Away Account at the bank. That’s all I will say.
I don’t really count Pain Memoir, Subset: Sexual Disorders, as real Pain Memoirs. Sex to me is a category in itself, partly because most good memoirs are written only after writers achieve a mastery over their material, a real understanding of what went wrong and precisely who was responsible. The pattern isn’t in the carpet; it’s painted on their reading glasses. And even the most sexually driven people cannot seem to successfully put into words why they’d go out looking to be gang-raped. The American writer Daphne Merkin is the only human who has ever explained why some people like to be spanked. One. Writer. Explains. That’s a terrible success rate.
And frankly, no one’s interested in why some people favour scatology. It’s bad enough that they do, no one wants to wade through the incidents; there may be faint curiosity about what it tastes like but you’re not going to pay for a book to find out. The materials are always close to hand if you wish to experiment. Only the childhood roots of the disorder are interesting. But no shit-fancier is ever clever enough to explain that one.
I must apologize, therefore, for the number of scatological references in this essay. Me, who won’t even tolerate conversation on the subject, not even in daily life, and yet I dwell on it, as do Pain Memoirs. Kathryn Harrison wrote about her affair with her father, but what I remember of that book is her father’s new wife pounding wheezing young Kathryn’s back to free her lungs of mucus, even as she knew that Kathryn was sleeping with her husband/Kathryn’s dad. She probably pounded hard.
Cake or Death Page 3