Our own romantic fiction

Jacques Bonnet

And as for autobiography, it is no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction.

Jacques Bonnet, Phantoms on the Bookshelves

Putting a life into a book, whether your own life or somebody else's, must necessarily be selective. It would take as much time to write a complete life story (or read it) as it took to live the life. Selectivity means not just deciding what to put in but also what to leave out.

Biographers are always going to focus on those parts of a life that are most documented by letters, diaries, public records, memories of other people, newspaper accounts, etc. What happened behind closed doors is much harder to write about and usually must either be ignored or guessed at. Writers may also choose to ignore those documented parts of a subject's life that are uninteresting or don't happen to fit into the chosen narrative.

As for those who write autobiographies and memoirs, they are most likely to omit or downplay their own failures and embarrassments, or color them in the most flattering way possible. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and so the story is shaped to make the hero look like a hero. Jacques Bonnet calls this "romantic fiction." Autobiography puts the focus on the good parts, the interesting parts, the noble parts, the amusing parts. It may all be true, but it is never the whole truth, not even those supposedly tell-all memoirs.

A year ago I wrote my own brief autobiography, something to leave my family so that I will be more than a memory to my grandchildren and more than a name to my great-grandchildren. Mostly I just wanted to tell my stories, and like everyone else, I have some good ones. They are all true, at least in so far as my memory is true, but still, yes, some of them probably qualify as romantic fiction.

Bertie turns seven

When a little boy's best birthday present is not just that his mother leaves for Dubai for several days but that she is kidnapped while she's there, you've got to feel for the kid. And so you do in Alexander McCall Smith's Bertie Guide to Life and Mothers (2013).

About a third of the way into the novel McCall Smith throws in a line that will be humorous only to regular readers of his 44 Scotland Street series of novels: "His seventh year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven."

Bertie Pollack had been six years old since the first novel in the series in 2005. That's eight novels and eight years by the time this one was published. The author joked about Bertie staying stuck at six when I heard him speak in Clearwater a year or two before this book.

So finally turning seven is a big deal for Bertie, as it is for readers of this series. These books follow the lives of several characters, yet Bertie has been the fan favorite. We tend to tolerate the other characters so we can get past them to read about Bertie and his oppressive mother, Irene. A progressive feminist with a will of iron, Irene wants to raise Bertie in a gender-neutral world. She frowns on typical boy toys and activities, insists there be girls at his birthday party and takes him to see a shrink, which he may actually need by the time she is through with him. He wants a Swiss Army knife for his birthday. Instead she gets him a Junior UN Peacekeeping Kit and a doll.

But then Irene wins a vacation for one to Dubai where, well, a string of delightful complications ensue. It all but proves that there is a God. Bertie, meanwhile, has the time of his life.

As for the other characters, Pat finds love, as does her father; Antonia returns to visit Angus and Dominica, bringing along a nun who has a way of stating the obvious while making it sound like wisdom; Matthew and Elspeth's au pair gets her own au pair; and Big Lou becomes a foster mom. All this is interesting enough, but let's get back to Bertie.

How to lie better

I've come to a point in my life where I think almost exclusively in narrative, and as my own fiction-writing students this semester can attest, about the only reliable advice I have to give is on how to make stories more plausible, more moving, more true — in other words, how to lie better. On life, I'm not so reliable.

Richard Russo, The Destiny Thief

Richard Russo

Richard Russo's comment above from a commencement speech he made to Colby College graduates in 2004 may be worth some comment.

First, I concur with his implication that we all tend to think the way we were trained to think. We may be trained partly by our parents, our teachers, our peers or our employers. Sometimes we may train ourselves as a result of our reading, our interests, our religious beliefs, whatever. As a longtime novelist, Richard Russo thinks like a novelist — in narrative, in stories, in characters and plots. And so his mind works a bit differently than someone who thinks like a mechanic, a full-time housewife, a pastor, an accountant or whatever.

He suggests that learning to write well means learning to lie better. Novelists do tell stories, and "telling stories" is another phrase we use for "telling lies." Yet as Russo himself implies, these "lies" are a writer's way of getting at the truth. A manufactured truth, such as in the parables told by Jesus, can reveal a real truth.

As a novelist, Russo thinks his best advice is about writing, not about living. "On life, I'm not so reliable," he says. Yet I suspect most college graduates would love to hear a speech like Russo's at their commencements. I know I would have. Not only is it humorous — and any speech, sermon or political address can be tolerable if it's humorous — but he actually had some good advice for these Colby grads. He concludes, for example, with these words:  "Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around." Where are the lies there?

On dying alone

When I walked into the bookstore I was looking for a novel called How Not to Die Alone by Richard Roper that I had seen reviewed. Instead I found a book called Something to Live For by the same author. When I picked it up I saw that it was the same book, just with a different title.

This confusing change of title from hardback to paperback was probably intended to give it a more positive spin, but I think it was a mistake, for not dying alone is what this wonderful British novel is all about.

Andrew has an odd government job. When bodies of individuals are found, often weeks after their deaths, it is his responsibility to go into the foul-smelling residences and search for signs of relatives or, failing that, enough money to pay for the funeral services.

As it happens, Andrew himself lives alone with his model trains. Yet to the people he works with he pretends to have a wife and two children. His fantasy somehow strengthens him. Roper writes, "They were his happiness and his strength and the thing that kept him going. Didn't that make them just as real as everyone else's family?"

Then he meets Peggy, a new employee with a marriage that is all too real. Her husband keeps promising to stop drinking but never does. She actually envies Andrew's happy home life.

Peggy gives Andrew an incentive to rethink his life and his lies. Perhaps he won't have to die alone like those people whose debris he must sort through for his job. Or, if you wish, perhaps he now has something to live for.

I enjoyed this book for Roper's humor and insights. This is his first novel, but we can look forward to his next one, whatever its titles.

Poems for the ear

E.E. Cummings

Ursula K. Le Guin makes an interesting distinction between eye-poems and heard poems. Some poems are best read with our own eyes and at our own pace. We may need to reread them again and again to begin to understand them. Their very appearance on the page offers clues to their meaning. Other poems, especially those that rhyme, are heard poems, those written to be recited or read aloud, perhaps to groups of people.

Le Guin, in an essay in Words Are My Matter, specifically mentions E.E. Cummings as a poet famous for his eye-poems. These poems are best read and appreciated silently, not just because they are difficult and sometimes totally incomprehensible, but also because of the way Cummings arranged the words on the page. Noticing the placement of the words helps us interpret the poem.

I first encountered Cummings in a fine arts class as a college freshman. The poem was Just spring, which ends like this:

it's

spring

and

    the

        

        goat-footed

ballonMan           whistles

far

and

wee

The textbook author noted that the phrase "whistles far and wee" appears three times in the poem, and each time the words are placed closer together, suggesting that the little lame balloonman is getting nearer to the children at play on this first day of spring. The linking of names — "bettyandisbel" — hints at their excitement. This particular Cummings poem is actually fun to read aloud, with words like mudluscious and puddle-wonderful, but its meaning comes through more clearly as an eye-poem.

Le Guin says that eye-poems — and most poetry written today can probably be considered eye-poems — are "offshoots, technologically enabled derivatives of the heard poem." That must surely be true because poetry existed long before there was a printing press. Poetry was meant to be recited, to be heard and appreciated by groups of people. Heard poems can more easily be turned into music.

Heard poems seem to be frowned upon today in literary circles. They must remind modern poets too much of Casey at the Bat, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, children's nursery rhymes, moon and June, and Robert Frost. Some places still do have poetry readings. I just hope some of these performing poets dare sometimes to please their audience with a poem that actually rhymes.

Memories on paper

As I downsize in preparation for moving from a large house into a small condo, I find it absurdly difficult to throw out some of the oddest items. One example is a four-page document called Movies In Auditorium Schedule listing the movies shown in Memorial Auditorium at Ohio University during the fall semester in 1962 when I was a freshman there.

So why would this be so hard to part with? Because it triggers many memories of my freshman year when college life was so new, so exciting, so promising.

Mostly this is a list of movies that a student could see for a mere quarter, which even the most impoverished student could usually afford. That semester I saw The Brothers Karamazov, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Butterfield 8, The Magnificent Seven, North by Northwest, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Absent Minded Professor, Gone with the Wind, Bell, Book and Candle and other movies.

Yet the auditorium was used for more than just movies, and these other events are listed too. Bob Newhart appeared on Sept. 29, just a couple of weeks after the semester had begun. I had heard most of his routines on records, but they were so much more enjoyable in person. Afterward I happened to be among a small group of people gathered around Newhart in a little room behind the stage, where he signed autographs. I can recall looking around for some scrap of litter I might ask him to sign, then realizing that just being in a room with Newhart and listening to him speak within touching distance was reward enough.

Judith Anderson appeared in a production of Medea in October, and the opera Marriage of Figaro was performed in English in mid-November. I was there for both events, as I was for the Mock United Nations held later that semester.

Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor
in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Did I need this nearly 60-year-old schedule to remember those good times? In some cases, yes. I had forgotten that Newhart had appeared that early in my freshman year and that Butterfield 8 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were part of a series of Elizabeth Taylor movies. The list somehow helps package fragments of memory into a whole.

Joshua Foer discusses this sort of thing in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, reviewed here the other day. He makes a distinction between internal memory and external memory. The first is what we actually remember. I don't need any piece of paper to remember seeing that Bob Newhart performance. I often recall being there and hearing his routines and then seeing him backstage. External memory is those four sheets of paper, something I've kept for all these decades so I wouldn't have to remember every detail.

"The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent," Foer writes. "Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory." When we have something written on a piece of paper, even if it's a book we have never read, we somehow think we remember it. It's right there when we need it, just like an actual memory.

When we die our internal memories die with us. External memories stay behind, at least until somebody else throws them away. Perhaps the reason we find it so difficult to dispose of such things as that MIA schedule is that they somehow expand our hope of immortality. Perhaps that small bit of external memory will somehow survive longer than we do.

But now I may be able to put that old schedule in the recycling bag. The essential details of the external memory have been placed more securely into this blog.

How to remember

How can some restaurant servers remember how you like your eggs when you haven't eaten in that restaurant for a year or more? It has more to do with training and discipline than with intelligence or even a superior memory. These same servers probably forget where they left their car keys as often as you do.

Joshua Foer explores "the art and science of remembering everything" in his entertaining 2011 book Moonwalking with Einstein.

In the manner of A.J. Jacobs, author of books about reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and attempting to follow every law in the Bible, Foer immerses himself in the techniques used by those with the best memories in the world and within a year wins the United States memory championship. Yes, there really are competitions for memorizing playing cards in order and people's names and phone numbers.

The basic trick is something called a memory palace. You think of a building that you know very well, such as the house where you grew up, and imagine yourself walking through it while conjuring up outrageous images, such as Einstein moonwalking, at various points. You link these images to whatever it is you are trying to remember. 

I know this works because I tried it myself several years ago when I wanted to remember the books of the Bible in order. To remember the Book of Judges I pictured some local judges I knew holding court in my refrigerator. A mental image of a tiny Esther Williams swimming in my bathtub helped me remember where the Book of Esther is to be found.

The author writes that a dirty mind helps us remember simply because we are more likely to remember salacious images. Perhaps I should have pictured Esther Williams without the swimsuit.

Foer writes about many of those who have developed outstanding memories, as well as those who memories result from autism or some other mental quirk, such as the man whose story became the subject of the film Rain Man.

At earlier times in history people seemed to have better memories than we have today. That was because better memories were once necessary for survival. Today we have books, shopping lists, phones that store all the addresses and phone numbers we might need and Google to tell us in an instant practically anything we want to know. Good memories are now developed mainly by those, like servers in restaurants, who use them for their jobs, and those like Foer himself who use them for sport.