[blog category this is in] Book look (see here for an example from 2012 of my past blog-type
book reviews, of which there weren’t many)
[main concern the entry below serves] Chris Welles Feder’s Purified Memories—Too Abstract? Or Just Right?
[specific theme here]
A Detour to Help Explain My Agreement with Feder’s Way of Concretizing a Memoir—Parts
of My Drafted Review of Rosemary Mahoney’s A
Likely Story (here, precise details
provide wallpaper for a story of a bitter encounter)
[integrally related entry to come, on my other blog] Back to Feder—Her “Idealized” Memories
Reflect a Semi-Deprived Girl’s Encounters with Her Almost Crazy-Fictional
Father
Now what kind of cumbersome stuff is this? Well, I had originally
thought it would be good to include some variety of the below within a review
of Chris Welles Feder’s In My Father’s
Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill,
2009), but then I thought it was too big a load to include as a subsection in
that potential blog entry. And since I had planned (in spring 2013, on this
blog) to review the 1998 book that I do, partially below, here it is a bit of
it.
“But this stuff is a bore!,” you might say. “This is slag
you generated two-plus years ago” (I say: Right about the time, but off-base
about the content). “Who can boogie
to this?”
In the following, you will see where I’m coming from about
Feder’s book. And I didn’t, and don’t, mean to simply be negative about
Mahoney’s book, either.
Feder’s book proceeds with a ton of conversations with
family members, going back to when she was a young girl, and the conversations are
with her father Orson Welles, with her mother, and with many others. The
conversations often define important attitudes or tactics such as would take a
rather mature person to understand the intent of. Can Feder as a girl have
remembered what was said enough to reproduce such conversations when writing 50
or more years later?
As she points out herself, the conversations may not be
precisely as they were articulated, but reflect what she remembered (with, one
presumes, the emotional rooting of the family issues involved guaranteeing something
of a good memory). Aside from the question of whether, to remember these
conversations, she has been as smart as Orson Welles (this, I think, isn’t
necessary to assume to accept how she “remembered” the conversations), I think
she could well have understood family situations, attitudes, etc., well enough
to write many years later and give life to the old events that happened with
the conversations kept “abstract” or “ideal” enough in what they aim to say,
without being so “realistic” that they reflect every bit of (so to speak) body
odor, dirt, stumble, etc., that might have gone on at the time. In fact, I
think Feder’s approach here is very good, as I have used a similar approach,
albeit in a fiction based on real events that had just happened, with my
feeling in recounting conversations that I recorded the
general-but-precise-enough sense of the talk, if not the way they might have
really been if written in Joycean style.
As a contrast, we can look at Rosemary Mahoney’s memoir,
which—somewhat like Feder’s memoir—recounts experiences with (like Welles) another
trying but talented cultural figure, Lillian Hellman (though Hellman was not a
relative of Mahoney’s, as of course Welles was of Feder’s). Here, Mahoney
represents so many precise details, especially ones not central to the
exchanges going on, that we—not just myself, but other critics—could ask how
true to life her memoir is/was. I think Mahoney can be excused in what she
does, but for different reasons—related to the aims of her memoir (about the
pungent multiple-month experience of a difficult personage)—than Feder with her
own (as different from Mahoney’s) strategically suited memoir.
##
A Detour to Help
Explain My Agreement with Feder’s Way of Concretizing a Memoir—Parts of My
Drafted Review of Rosemary Mahoney’s A
Likely Story (here, precise details
provide wallpaper for a story of a bitter encounter)
[book reviewed] A Likely Story: One Summer With Lillian
Hellman, by Rosemary Mahoney (Doubleday, 1998).
[Written November 2015: In starting this
review in spring 2013, I was thinking of telling a range of things about
Mahoney, as related to themes on this blog. Here, I am giving select parts. I
had met Mahoney in 1986 at the Johns Hopkins University summer writers’
conference. In a tiny nutshell, I had found her—she was a sort of junior
teacher/mentor there—a provocative, if not provoking, personality; I felt, not
as I would have precisely said this then, that she was a bit of a punk and a
brat; and there was talk at the conference, as others found as I did that she
was not a good reader of others’ writing work, as if she would not be brought
back as a teacher. Her 1998 memoir suggests the reason she wasn’t back, which
would have been on the indifferent side (not to her discredit) had to do with
her getting her master’s degree and moving on. Anyway, when I heard about her
memoir of Hellman in 1998, I was inclined to be skeptical about it and Mahoney,
based on my 1986-situated memories (as unfair as this might have been). After
reading it, a relative of mine and her husband talked at the time with
enthusiasm about the memoir, which made a splash then (including a New York Times leisure-section feature
piece) because, I think as cultural mavens seemed to relish (and I don’t know
how much this was my relative’s and her husband’s views), it seemed to shed a
healthy light on the dubiousness, on a level, of Hellman. Related to my opinion
of Mahoney, I refused to read the book for years.
[Finally, in
about 2012-13 I did, and found it interesting, enough to work up a substantial
review of it. But one of the things I discovered from it was how similar in family-psychological
background, particularly as starting writers, Mahoney and I were—we were not
far apart in age—which made how she had dealt with me in 1986 even more a good
focus of trenchant and otherwise human-interest discussion (such as on how
hypocritical she could be said to have been, and/or how much of a
social-climbing brat—again, remember that several people at the conference had
complaints about her). Suffice it to say that the full range of my responses to
her memoir, shown in the fuller review, are, overall, more sympathetic than may
seem here.
[Below I’ve
edited the excerpts as if I am preserving the right of the original draft to
stay basically as it was, though I could well adapt my changes here to the final
review, if I ever finish it.]
[…]
2. RM as a fastidious technician to square with, in her memoir
Not only has Rosemary Mahoney (“RM,”
hereafter) in her career been a “belletrist,” as I would have said before I
read A Likely Story—i.e., someone
whose memoirs or essay-type works (as I believe Whoredom in Kimmage is) have a sort of high-minded, style-conscious
aspect to them—but she seems to have taken a general tack of writing close to
her personal identity and personal experience. This isn’t to say she has been
essentially narcissistic in her themes as a writer, but instead she can be said
to take a certain narrow (or esthetically defined or based) approach to what
she will write probing books about. Actually, I do this to a large extent myself,
but while my own approach has relied a lot on homely experiences—droll and
consensually identifiable career situations, and community-related issues—which
aren’t necessarily grist for intellectual games or stylistic exercises, RM is
bucking for recognition of a different sort. My own writing has tended at
times, when creative, to encompass wider political reality [than what RM does].
At least, this is what I would
say in having read a lot of A Likely
Story, where the creative-writing teacher’s admonitions to “show, not tell”
and to “concretize” perceivable things seem to call out loudly: there is a lot
of focus on details, and on ways of precisely rendering those details, with
beautiful use of metaphors and so on. […] But to me a memoir of a months-long
interpersonal encounter—which was largely about who these two talented women [Mahoney
and Hellman] saw themselves as, and the obvious unfairness of an older woman
humiliating a younger one for no other apparent reason than sheer spite or
arrogance of some kind—seems to lose some focus as to what the account is about,
when it dwells on details of the summer almost as if it wants to be a novel
pursuing its story via a review of the many glittering details of a sensuous
experience at a sun-accented beach house.
In fact, this esthetic strategy
turns out to make us ask, Did RM really remember her whole experience of
Hellman as integrally tied to a memory of all these details? Or did an editor
want her, technique-wise, to flesh out this book with vivid details, so that it
wasn’t simply a “film of a memoir shot in the middle distance,” but went to a
length to have a novel’s way of plodding through “concretized” experiences, so
that we feel “we are there”?
If the answer to the latter
question was yes, then we have to say that when a novel uses all such details,
there should also be a certain suspense to the story, which the details may (in
their gliding past) help support, as would more generally justify the
unspooling and feel and glitter of all the details. But when we realize we are
reading the memory of a young woman’s being humiliated at an old woman’s shore
house, we are brought to ask after a while, Was
RM’s memory of that experience so essentially tied to a writerly way of, for
example, comparing Hellman’s skin color to a certain kind of vegetable?
3. Her sensualized approach keeps from politics or psychological cant,
but serves a personal-view agenda
So we have a sort of mix of
genres: memoir and a sort of highly “sensualized” novel. In either case, you’re
talking about the sort of work of a Fancy Creative-Writer Program, not genre
slag, and not even the more standard kind of memoir (which may embrace an
unassuming narrator’s economy with details and narrative strategy) that many
people have written. You’re also talking, here, of a talented writer who wants
to fashion lasting work.
But then I’m reminded that some
of us aspiring writers, even when we wanted to do fiction, didn’t all want to
conform with the teachers’ advice to “show the details, concretize the action.”
[My adult life, starting with scalding interpersonal experiences in college,
potentiated that my most creative writing would to a large extent move around
two “poles”:] (1) psychological reality, which is more a matter of “talk and
interpretation” than of telling how a sunshine-reflecting fork looks, and of
(2) interpersonal politics, which involves not only broader politics as more
normally understood but the mess of conflicted and unnecessarily complicated
interpersonal relations you can get at work, or in a local community, or within
the localized history of a certain profession.
[…] The question arises with
this memoir, What is RM’s main agenda, for the basic skeleton of the book? And
how well is it served by the flesh on that skeleton?
[…]
7. The perceptual/realist esthetic approach, exercising a phenomenology
of middle-class life
[Going back to cover the same
issue:] One aspect of Mahoney’s book that I think has impressed readers and
critics the most, along with its more morally and “historically” oriented
aspects (growth of a young writer, or revelation of a figure like Hellman in
old age), is its clear-eyed, detail-oriented style, using metaphors in often
clever ways to describe some of the most minute details in a vivid way.
Different things can be said about this; I certainly will say different things.
I think, for one thing, that it helps give grounds to criticize the book
negatively (some critics in 1998 seemed to feel that RM showed, if along with a
certain brilliance, a level of heartlessness in her descriptions, such as
describing Hellman’s face like a beaky sea turtle’s [e.g., see Sharon O’Brien’s
review in The New York Times Book Review,
[date]]). But this method also has its saving
graces in some ways.
My own theory is that, apart
from whether you could call RM brilliant in her account, generally she seems to
hew to a sort of esthetic strategy that (at times) can seem to be more about artifice
than about the nature of life as more globally considered, as she is ostensibly
recounting a story that samples a particular stretch of “gritty” life she has
become privy to. […]
[A general, psychologically
oriented criticism of her own approach is that] people don’t ordinarily
remember an experience of living with a stranger, 15 or 20 years before writing
about it, with the level of details she shows. This is both human nature and a
matter of how even our most esteemed writing artists have tended to function. I
mean, when she refers, for one example that is typical of something seen often
here, to the color of Hellman’s face as of that of an artichoke heart (p. 71),
is this how any of us remember the full flower of a story of 15 years before,
even if we’re passionate about it (because of how the experience initially
shook us) and remember many little facets important to the telling? Of course
not.
[…]
8. The detailed portrait is solid grounds for broader judgments
Whether RM would disagree that
she took a set of memories—even if possibly with her journal entries from 1978,
if she had them, rooting some of the details—and “tarted them up” with a sharp
verisimilitude-seeking style as a writing artifice (embraced with “artistic
license”), and yet generally she really remembered the bulk of the esthetic
details, this all is a little beside the point. The book offers a lot of
perceptual details, and in some ways this is a major virtue, and in other ways
it tends to make the book (as “a read”) a bit tedious, if not also raising a
bit of a question about credibility. But the credibility issue, when it comes
to the concrete descriptions, can be dispensed with, I think.
Sharon O’Brien, more severe
among reviewers of this book, makes a point about RM’s concretizing style, even
seeming to accuse RM of hypocrisy, in that while RM seems to take a severe eye
to Hellman, who was famously accused late in life of faking some of her
supposed nonfiction, RM uses apparently
made-up details in her account, talking about how sunlight strikes things, how
a view through binoculars looks, etc.—all stuff one couldn’t have specifically remembered
over about 15-17 years as part and parcel of RM’s ostensible memoir.
But to me, whatever “fakery,” or
glossing things up a bit, that goes on here is rather beside the point. I think
the main outlines of the memoir—what Hellman said when, how a series of actions
happened, etc., all sounds credible. Whether her skin looked this tone or
that—this is a sort of fictional convention, adapted to a memoir.
We can let it pass. It lets us
feel the vibrations of the experience RM is recounting, even if the main point of
her memoir has to do with rather “macroscopic” moral issues and the relevant
vibrations these sent through her—matters of clashing personalities, in a way.
Sidebar:
An example of my remembering an old character of a professor. Say I was to
describe a professor whom I had a major clash with at graduate school, Steven
S. Schwarzschild. He was a smart, very European-flavored man, but he was an odd
duck in a host of ways. In dress and hair style, he looked like a European
version of a U.S. “hepcat” (an old term), with Semitic facial hair. That is, while
by no means would he have been a fan of rockabilly star Carl Perkins’ music, the
professor looked somewhat in conformity with that Perkins-music style of
clothing and hair. As the professor stood splay-footed in a lobby (as I saw one
time), he had his shirt collar, without tie, spread out on top of his jacket
lapels. His hair was rather full, and his dark beard was the sort that sprouted
all along the edge of his lower lip. He wore eyeglasses of a European sort—they
reminded me of something Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev wore in a photo I
saw. He spoke English with a British accent. He smoked, too, including in the
seminar rooms, and if you made an issue of this, his response was to say you
could move to the other side of the room.
Now this
doesn’t seem like a grand, fine-grained Flaubertian effort to portray this
person. If, now, I added to this details such as how the sun glinted off his
glasses, or how shadows played on his clothing, or how his eyes (I think they
were blue) looked a certain hue in a given shaft of sunlight, would this make
my portrait especially suspect? I don’t think so. Maybe too adorned, but not
clearly faked. (But it wouldn’t necessarily be my preferred style for writing
about him.)
I think we can live with the
assumption that RM’s details by and large follow the reality she had lived in
closely, or are reasonably compatible
with what happened (e.g., whether Hellman’s skin was green or brownish on
one day, this coheres with a more readily accepted conversational account of
Hellman’s being nasty at the same time).
[…]
[When we return to looking at Feder’s book, she stays in a
sort of “middle distance” describing life situations, recounting conversations,
and so on almost in a semi-amateurish memoir-writing way. Yet the conversations
are gripping for revealing the often-poignant, if not provocative, family
situations going on. It’s quite possible the family realities were such,
including in their bitter aspects, that they assured that Feder would remember
the conversations, at least in their essence. To this extent, I favor Feder’s
way of doing a memoir more than Mahoney’s, though both have their virtues.]
