I COULD TELL YOU STORIES: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
By Patricia Hampl
Norton, 229 pages, $23
THE BOY ON THE GREEN BICYCLE
By Margaret Diehl
Soho Press, 309 pages, $25
THE DISAPPEARANCE: A Memoir of Loss
By Genevieve Jurgensen, translated from French by Adriana Hunter
Norton,168 pages, $22
They do keep on coming — books of personal nonfiction, written by everyone, it seems: the lovers and daughters of the famous, serious poets, traumatized novelists, the well-traveled in time and space, nature lovers, the benighted, the recovered, the warriors, the seekers of adventure and godhead.
The experts have been nattering and pontificating about why personal nonfiction now, blaming or crediting a number of confluences. I think the most likely suspects are the current culture of secular confession, the American heritage of self-examination and the legacy of liberation movements, which put value on personal testimony.
I may pretend to disparage all this public sturm und dranging, but really, I love it. I’m nosy, I’m confessional and I like knowing what really happened. The other night at a barbecue a friend concluded a detailed story about his radical youth, adding a bit apologetically, “Now that’s more than you needed to know.”
Everyone agreed with him, except me.
Yet I, too, have limits to what I can absorb about other people’s lives, and reading three recent nonfiction books helped me figure out when, even for a voyeur like me, more is too much. These three books also provide a snapshot of the concerns of personal nonfiction in mid-1999.
The most philosophical of the books is Patricia Hampl’s “I Could Tell You Stories,” a compilation of autobiographical and literary essays, some previously published in anthologies and literary magazines. In many of the pieces, she argues, however subtly, that a personal story gains importance and meaning when it is part of something greater. In the case of Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz, the greater matter is history. In his memoir, Hampl writes, Milosz calls himself a “typical Eastern European,” not out of modesty but because he is aware of his place in history and culture. Biographical pieces about St. Augustine and the newly canonized Edith Stein are informative, on occasion intriguing. The 4th Century Bishop Augustine, Hampl cautions us, was not seeking a self, as contemporary memoirists are, but using memory to praise creation. His life was God’s creation, and in seeking to understand his own life he sought to understand creation in general, and God.
The best of Hampl’s personal narratives is the simplest. It presents the author as naive woman, in retrospect much younger than her 30 years, who starts taking Czech-language lessons from Mrs. Beranek, an elderly emigree in St. Paul. The writing is lovely, as much of Hampl’s is when dealing with the personal, and contains the wry, self-deprecating humor readers may have grown accustomed to in her memoir “Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life.” After describing Mrs. Beranek’s bounteous strudel, Hampl notes, “Eating in fact proved to be my main accomplishment as her student.” The piece is full of detail and reflection, as she tries to figure out why Mrs. Beranek seems secretive. Eventually Hampl realizes she was not so naive after all; her instincts about Mrs. Beranek were right.
The author of two memoirs and two poetry collections, Hampl brings a poet’s depth to this collection. I appreciate especially her thoughts on memoir — that they are grounded in despair about and protest against our mortality. In the weaker pieces, the language is still lovely, but Hampl repeats herself, and the essays lack an emotional or intellectual center.
The other two books are memoirs of deaths in the family. “The Boy on the Green Bicycle,” by novelist Margaret Diehl, is about her brother’s death in a car-bicycle accident. Diehl tells us of her lonely, dreamy childhood, her old-fashioned belief in fairies, her glamorous parents, who she imagines must be the Kennedys. The first few chapters move languidly, recording her early perceptions. “I was always astonished as a child that no one seemed to notice how astonishing it was, to be alive,” she says. She’s entranced by watching her mother cook: “I loved how the rice drank all the water and puffed up.”
But early on the story starts to drag. We don’t need to know the names of all her cats or of the fairy tales her mother read to her. Mere mention is not enough to make them significant, and in this case, mere mention is too much.
Eventually, the story moves closer to the heart of darkness in the family. She was taunted by siblings, snarled at by her enraged, terrifying father, who’d never wanted a family life. She thought all men smelled of alcohol because her father did. She never had a private conversation with him. Once evening her sister dressed up their brother Johnny as a girl — but added no makeup — and introduced him as a neighborhood friend. The father didn’t recognize his own child.
Older brother Jimmy, also a prankster, was her mother’s favorite. He was calm, sure of himself, but his death at age 14 outweighs any description of him alive. The second half of the book is given over to the funeral and mourning, and the sudden suicide of their father and the relief and grief that follows. She writes of feeling she wasn’t human, that underneath she was a “being of lead” with a “criminal soul.”
This is important and dire, but I grew impatient. I got a glimpse of what was missing in the last chapter, where she tells us that in the 30 years since, she has substituted LSD, marijuana and Southern Comfort for the candy that comforted her in her youth. Only through Alcoholics Anonymous did she realize that her terrible loneliness was common. If Diehl had devoted the second half of the book to adulthood and its insights, this memoir would have been gripping and enlightening. It feels as if as a writer Diehl loitered in childhood so she wouldn’t have to enter into the really hard, close, more recent stuff.
Hampl and Diehl are fine writers, and they needed fine editors to cut the words they kept madly spinning after their points were made. After reading their books, I realized that my impatience is not with emotion that overwhelms but with writing that suffocates. The rules for writing literary nonfiction are not the same as those for making speeches, where the common wisdom is: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them what you came to tell them, then tell them what you told them. Even in Hampl’s mostly successful piece about Mrs. Beranek, there’s metaphor that adds nothing:
“Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it.”
And on the book goes for another paragraph that takes away from the meaning, which is in the story itself. Hampl doesn’t trust readers to get it on their own.
I did find room to pause and reflect in the third book, “The Disappearance,” by Genevieve Jurgensen. Originally written in French, this is another book of two deaths. It is in the form of letters written to a friend by Jurgensen, a novelist and former speech therapist. She writes about her young daughters, Mathilde and Elise, who died in a car accident a dozen years before, in 1980, in order to bring them back to life.
From the beginning, Jurgensen universalizes her particular sorrow: “For every human being, the separation inflicted by the death of those without whom we would never have wanted to live is an enigma; I was of course incapable of resolving it, but I wanted to expose its terms.”
Because she is writing as any person who loses a loved one, it’s not surprising that she quotes Ovid and shows sympathy for the bereaved who are in the news at the time: Roman Polanski, Eric Clapton.
Diehl is aware that her emotions are mirrored in the lives of people in other circumstances. “The working class, immigrants, the self-taught cranks, the handicapped, the unemployed and grieving parents are more alike than people think,” she writes. “They have at least one thing in common: they have to make herculean efforts to hold a normal, banal, bouncy conversation.” So immigrants and the working class have to pretend to be normal and cheerful? Was something lost in the translation? This lapse by the otherwise likable Jurgensen is disturbing.
Just as Diehl suffers in isolation, Jurgensen suffers in the bosom of friends and family. This book is for the part of all of us that wonders: How would I survive if . . . ? And it could also serve as a guide about what to do when a friend is suffering. After Jurgensen and her husband, Laurent, arrive home in Paris for the first time after the deaths, she finds, “My friends had put flowers in all the window boxes and filled the fridge with good food.” These are people who are loved by lovely people. When you’re loved, it’s easier to be empathic. She recognizes the courage of her brother-in-law — the driver of the fateful car — who telephoned her to tell of the deaths. She writes of Laurent, “I can’t believe that my beautiful young husband has known such heartbreak.”
As a writer, Jurgensen knows what to do with details. She and her husband traveled to Italy soon after their daughters’ deaths. Looking back, she reflects on their window-shopping and concludes, “(T)he beautiful images from other centuries gave me the gift of a past so ancient that the immediate past lost some of its power.” Although she spends several sentences describing the calzone she and her husband ate in Siena, this is no random travel aside, but a mention that resonates: “The childless parents stuffed their faces.” Each detail does its job.
Because these are letters to a friend, much is not explained. Jurgensen and a friend “stood for our local by-elections” on a road-safety issue, and she founded a group against road violence. But she doesn’t add much else about these movements.
What do these books tell us about the state of personal nonfiction at this moment? A better question: What do they tell us about life?
Loneliness can be shared. History reminds us we are not alone. Bring growing flowers to the bereaved.
