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December 4, 2003
OGIC: Real plums, fake cake
What Dale Peck has to say in this interview--which is as engaging and compulsively readable as all of Robert Birnbaum's author chats--reminded me of a book that I have been obsessed with off and on the last ten years, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood: Mary McCarthy's classic, heartbreaking account of her embattled childhood. Peck's latest book, What We Lost, is a memoir of his father's childhood, an essentially uncategorizable work that its publisher calls a work of fiction "based on a true story":I always got confused in English classes and such where you would be reading Colette and then they would tell you it was based on such-and-such love affair and they would tell you the name of the real person and all this kind of thing. And I'd think, ‘Why did she write the novel and all that?' And at the end of the day I would think that it was not terrifically important to me when you choose not to indulge in or claim that particular weightiness that attaches to the claim of truth. Which is part of the reason I considered publishing this book as a novel. I didn't want to make too great a claim to the truth here. These are things that actually happened to my father. His reaction to them is something I can only base on my own observations of what he said. And to some degree, as in any act of writing like this, part of what I am trying to do is give voice to feelings that I feel like he has never been able to fully express. Or else the story would not be as resonant as it is in our family history.
In its different way, Peck's book (which I own but have not yet read) seems to be as interested as McCarthy's in the borderland between fiction and nonfiction, the pitfalls of memory, and the tricky, haunting work of fitting together and gaining perspective on one's own family's history.
Mary McCarthy's parents died when she was six years old, victims of the terrible flu epidemic of 1918 (as good a reminder as any, Our Dad will say, to get my flu shot) that perversely struck down young, healthy adults like them in huge numbers. She and her brothers were thrown on the questionable mercy of their relations.
Whenever we children came to stay at my grandmother's house, we were put to sleep in the sewing room, a bleak, shabby, utilitarian rectangle, more office than bedroom, more attic than office, that played to the hierarchy of chambers the role of a poor relation....Thin white spreads, of the kind used in hospitals and charity institutions, and naked blinds at the windows reminded us of our orphaned condition and of the ephemeral character of our visit; there was nothing here to encourage us to consider this our home.
Poor Roy's children, as commiseration damply styled us, could not afford illusions, in the family opinion. Our father had put us beyond the pale by dying suddenly of influenza and taking our young mother with him, a defection that was remarked on with horror and grief commingled, as though our mother had been a pretty secretary with whom he had wantonly absconded into the irresponsible paradise of the hereafter. Our reputation was clouded by this misfortune.
McCarthy's book has a curious form and genesis. It began as individual essays about her childhood, many of them first published in The New Yorker. When she collected these together as chapters of her memoir, she discovered errors of memory: memories recorded in the essays that, while vivid to her mind, turned out to be dubious or disprovable.
As much out of fascination with this problem as for conscience's sake, she added short critical interchapters to discuss these inconsistencies, half-truths, and outright fictions. The beauty of this tactic is that it not only preserves the fictions that, for aesthetic or practical or no discernible reasons at all, had insinuated themselves into McCarthy's self-presentation, but recognizes these fictions as a vital part of the truth. Throughout the book, she muses on the distinction:
Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. I do not know how my grandmother got the way she was; I assume, from family photographs and from the inflexibility of her habits, that she was always the same, and it seems as idle to inquire into her childhood as to ask what was ailing Iago or look for the error in toilet-training that was responsible for Lady Macbeth.
Some of the most poignant moments of McCarthy's book come when she struggles to know who her lost parents were, having only very limited resources at her disposal: her own shallow well of memories, and the unreliable sources that are the grandparents, uncles and aunts who make her young life such a trial. The book explores the especially close connections between family, myth-making, and misremembering, and persuades you that autobiography is inescapably the most fictional of nonfictional genres.
I won't know until I read Peck's book whether it backs up or bucks against McCarthy's implicit assertion that when it comes to family, what counts is less the historical record than the ways that history is remembered, recounted, and felt. But Peck's project of writing his father's autobiography must be founded on the same kind of search for self-origins, and he appears to share both her healthy skepticism of received family history and her writer's faith in the value of family fiction.
Posted December 4, 2003 12:09 PM
