The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  “I get it,” he said. “Nothin’s ever happened to you—and you write books about it.”

  In pronouncing this acute critical remark, he touched on the most peculiar aspect of the rise of the memoir—or perhaps the personal essay, the miniature form that relies in our age on autobiography—namely, that fundamentally it isn’t about having a more interesting life than someone else. True, there is a strand of autobiographical writing that relies on the documentation of extraordinary circumstances, lives lived in extremity, often at great peril. But such memoirs have always been part of the record, and of literary history. What characterizes the rise of memoir in recent times is precisely the opposite condition—not a gripping “narrative arc,” but the quality of voice, the story of perception rather than action.

  The self is not the subject in this kind of book, but its instrument. And the work of the self is not to “narrate” but to describe. There is something fundamentally photographic about memoir, photographic rather than cinematic. Not a story, but a series of tableaux we are given to consider. No memoirist is surprised by the absences and blanks in action, for another unavoidable quality of autographical writing as I am thinking of it—as lyrical quest literature—is that it is as much about reticence as it is about revelation.

  It is often remarked that the advent of the movies and the ever-faster pace of modern life have conspired to make description a less essential part of prose narrative in our times. We don’t need to be told what things look like—we are inundated with images, pictures, moving or static. In this view, we need the opposite of the photographic quality so beloved of nineteenth-century descriptive writing in which the landscape is rolled out, sentence after sentence, the interior of a room and the interior of the character’s mind meticulously presented, paralleling each other.

  We require writing, instead, that subsumes description, leaps right over it to frame episode and to create the much-sought-after narrative arc. The motto—even the mantra—of this narrative model is of course the commandment of introductory fiction-writing workshops: Show, don’t tell.

  But as recent memoir writing shows, descriptive writing abounds. And it proves, finally, not to be about the object described. Or not only. Description in memoir is where the consciousness of the writer and the material of the story are established in harmony, where the self is lost in the material, in a sense. In fiction of the show-don’t-tell variety narrative scenes that “show” and dutifully do not “tell” are advanced by volleys of dialogue in which the author’s presence is successfully obscured by the dramatic action of the dialogue of his characters. But in description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene.

  This personal absorption is what we mean by “style.” It’s strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word—style—for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could more exactly call this relation between consciousness and its subject “integrity.” What else is the articulation of personal perception?

  Style is a word usually claimed by fashion and the most passing aesthetic values. But maybe that’s as it should be, because style in writing is terribly perishable. It can rot—that is what we mean when we recognize writing to be “precious,” for example. But at its best, style is the register between a writer’s consciousness and the material being wrestled to the page. It is the real authority of a writer, more substantial than plot, less ego-dependent than voice.

  In 1951, Alfred Kazin published his memoir of his boyhood in Brooklyn, A Walker in the City, the book that established the modern American memoir. Leslie Fiedler admired the book, but was also frustrated by it. It “perversely refuses to be a novel,” he said with some annoyance, as if Kazin’s book, deeply dependent on descriptive writing, were refusing to behave. And it was.

  * * *

  —

  I was one of those enthralled teenage readers of long nineteenth-century English novels. I toiled my way through dense descriptions of gloomy heaths and bogs to get to the airy volleys of dialogue that lofted back and forth down the page to give me what I wanted. Would Jane and Mr. Rochester . . . or would they not? Would Dorothea Brooke awaken—would Mr. Lydgate? I didn’t relish the descriptive passages. I endured them. Just as Jane and Dorothea endured their parched lives, as if these endless descriptive passages were the desert to be crossed before the paradise of dialogue and the love story could be entered.

  Yet all this description was, after all, the world of the book—not simply because it gave the book a “sense of place,” as the old literary chestnut puts it. It wasn’t a “sense of place” I cared about, but the meeting place of perception with story—the place where someone claimed the story, where I could glimpse the individual consciousness, the creator of the scene. The person pulling the wires and making Jane and Dorothea move. I was looking, I suppose, for a sign of intimacy with the invisible author. That “dear reader” moment so familiar to nineteenth-century novels. Think of Thackeray pausing to have a chat with the reader—with me!—about how to live on nothing a year. Or George Eliot breaking off to describe the furnishings of Dorothea’s ardent mind.

  Henry James, crown prince of nineteenth-century describers, flaneur of the sentence, lounge lizard of the paragraph, takes his own sweet time to unfurl an observation, smoking the cheroot of his thought in the contemplative after-dinner puffery of a man who knows how to draw out the pleasure of his rare tobacco. Or—because James himself never hesitates to pile up opposing figures of speech until he has sliced his thought to the refracted transparency he requires—why not just switch metaphors and say that James sits mildly at his torture apparatus, turning the crank in meticulously calibrated movements as the reader lies helplessly strained upon the rack of his ever-expanding sentences, the exquisite pain of the lengthening description almost breaking the bones of attention. In short (as James often says after gassing on for a nice fat paragraph or two on the quality of a Venetian sunset or the knowing lift of a European eyebrow glimpsed across a table by an artless American ingénue), in short, he loves to carry on.

  Carrying on, I was discovering, is what it is to describe. A lot. At length. To trust description above plot, past character development, and even theme. To understand that to describe is both humbler and more essential than to think of compositional imponderables such as “voice” or to strain toward superstructures like “narrative arc.” To trust that the act of description will find voice and out of its streaming attention will take hold of narration.

  By the time I was considering all of this, I had passed from being a reader and had become the more desperate literary type—a writer trying to figure out how to do it. I was practicing without a license, never having taken a prose-writing course. I had no idea how to “sustain a narrative,” and didn’t even understand at the time (1980) that I was writing something called a “memoir.” Yet when I read Speak, Memory, and later read Nabokov’s command—Caress the detail, the divine detail—I knew I had found the motto I could live by, the one that prevailed over “show, don’t tell.”

  Perhaps only someone as thoroughly divested of his paradise as Nabokov had been of his boyhood Russia, his native language, and all his beloved associations and privileged expectations could enshrine the detail, the fragment, as the god of his literary religion, could trust the truths to be found in the DNA of detail, attentively rendered in ardent description. The dutiful observation that is the yeoman’s work of description finally ascended, Nabokov demonstrated, to the transcendent reality of literature—to metaphor.

  Nabokov was asked in an interview if his characters ever “took over.” He replied icily that his characters were his galley slaves.

  Yet when it was a matter of locating the godhead of literary endeavor, even a writer as imperious as Nabokov did not point to himself and his powers but to the lowly detail. Caress the detail, the divine detail. Next to grand conceptions like plot, which is the leg
itimate government of most stories, or character, which is the crowned sovereign, the detail looks like a ragged peasant with a half-baked idea of revolution and a crazy, sure glint in its eye. But here resides divinity. Henry James emerges again with his faith in “the rich principle of the Note.”

  In attending to the details, in the act of description, the more dynamic aspects of narrative have a chance to reveal themselves—not as “action” or “conflict” or any of the theoretical and technical terms we persist in thinking of as the sources of form. Rather, description gives the mind a place to be in relation with the reality of the world.

  It was a desire for the world’s memoir—history—that, paradoxically, drew me to memoir, that seemingly personal form. I wanted to understand—or at least touch—the oppositions of the Cold War that had formed me. My Czech grandmother, a stray foreign figment from “the old country,” living with us in what I grew up calling the free world. Yet the great world—the place I wanted to find—could not possibly be in Minnesota. You had to get out on the road to find it, let it rough you up. Another reason Montaigne appealed: a man who said he was most at home on his horse, riding free across unknown terrain, but who comes to us as the man sequestered in his tower, alone with words. The personal and the historical, twisted together. So that old motto of my Sixties Generation youth—the personal is political—wasn’t true after all. The personal isn’t political, it’s historical. A rangier, yet more intimate embrace of oppositions, as the Cold War was a neat polar division for decades, the prevailing myth of most of my life.

  These oppositions meant that as a writer I tended toward description, not to narrative, not to story. Maybe the root of the impulse to write is always lost—properly lost—in the nonliterary earth of what we call real life. And craft, as we think of it, is just the jargon we give to that darker, earthier medium.

  It was my mother who was the storyteller in our house. I was her audience. Her dear reader, in a way. I simply—sometimes bitterly—understood that nothing much was happening in our modest midwestern lives, yet I clung to the drama with which she infused every vignette, every encounter at the grocery store. Nothing came of it all, but still, the details as she cast them before me were enthralling. Our nothing life sparkled with words. With description.

  And when I sought to make sense of the world that kept slipping away to the past, to loss and forgetfulness, when I protested inwardly at that disappearance, it was to description I instinctively turned. Coming from a first love of poetry and therefore being a literalist, it didn’t occur to me to copy other prose writers. If I wanted to learn to write descriptively, I needed—what else?—pictures.

  I took myself off to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and sat down in front of a Bonnard. I wrote the painting. Described it. I went home and looked at a teacup on the table—wrote that too. Still-life descriptions that ran on for several pages. I wrote and wrote, describing my way through art galleries and the inadvertent still lifes of my house and my memory, my grandmother’s garden, her Sunday dinners.

  To my growing astonishment, these descriptive passages, sometimes running two, three pages, even longer, had a way of shearing off into narrative after all. The teacup had been given to me by my mother. And once I thought of the fact that she had bought these cups, made in Czechoslovakia, as a bride just before the Second World War, I was writing about that war, about my mother and her later disappointments, which somehow were—and were not—part of this fragile cup. Description, which had seemed like background in novels, static and inert as a butterfly pinned to the page of my notebook, proved to be a dynamic engine that stoked voice and, even more, propelled the occasional narrative arc.

  Written from the personal voice of my own perception, description proved even to be the link with the world’s story, with history itself. Here was my mother’s teacup, made in Czechoslovakia before the war, and here, therefore, was not only my mother’s heartbreak, but Europe’s. The detail was surely divine, offering up miracles of connections out of the faithful consideration of the fragments before me. No wonder Nabokov was a passionate butterfly hunter—more bright details pinned to a board.

  We sense this historical power at the heart of autobiographical writing in the testaments from the Holocaust, from the Gulag, from every marginal and abused life that has spoken its truth, which is often its horror, to preserve its demonic details—and in so doing has seen them become divine.

  The history of whole countries, of an entire era and even lost populations, depends sometimes on a little girl faithfully keeping her diary. The great contract of literature consists in this: you tell me your story and somehow I get my story. If we are looking for another reason to explain the strangely powerful grip of the first-person voice on contemporary writing, perhaps we need look no further than the power of Anne Frank’s equation: that to write one’s life enables the world to preserve and, more, to comprehend its history.

  But what of lives lived in the flyover? Lives that don’t have that powerful, if terrible, historical resonance of radical suffering. Ordinary lives. Mine in middling Minnesota in the middle of the twentieth century. Why bother to describe it? Because all details are divine, not just Nabokov’s. In fact, the poorer the supposed value, the more the detail requires description to attest to its divinity.

  Which brings me to—if not a story, yet another vignette. Early in my teaching life, I went (foolishly) through a killer Minnesota snowstorm to get to the university because I had student conferences scheduled. You tried to dissuade me, but there was no stopping me (you can count on me). The university had closed by the time I arrived. The campus was empty, whipped by white shrouds of blizzard snow, the wind whistling down the mall. I sat in my office in the empty building, cursing my ruinous work ethic, wondering if the buses would keep running so I could get home. Don’t go, you’d said that morning. I’ll worry about you. Don’t go. Surely you knew any attempt to “control” me—my word, not yours—only ratified any scheme or plan I had in mind.

  Then a rap on my office door. I opened it and there, like an extra out of Dr. Zhivago, stood my eleven o’clock, a quiet sophomore, Tommy.

  He looked anxious. He was really glad I was there, he said, because he had a big problem with the assignment. I had asked the students to write short autobiographies. “I just can’t write anything about my life,” he said, head down, boots puddling on the floor.

  I waited for the disclosure. What would it be—child abuse, incest? What murder or mayhem could this boy not divulge? What had brought him trooping through the blizzard to get help with his life story? How would I get him to Student Counseling? Was Student Counseling even open?

  “What’s the problem?” I asked, not wanting to know, but adopting what I hoped was a neutral therapeutic tone.

  “See,” he said miserably, “I come from Fridley,” naming one of the nowhere suburbs sprawling drearily beyond the freeway north of Minneapolis.

  I stared at him. I didn’t, for a moment, comprehend that this was the dark disclosure, this the occasion of his misery: being from Fridley meant, surely, that he had nothing to say. In effect, had no life.

  There it was again—nothin’ had ever happened to him and I was asking him to write about it.

  “I have good news for you, Tommy,” I said. “The field’s wide open—nobody has told what it’s like to grow up in Fridley yet. It’s all yours.”

  Wasn’t this Montaigne’s problem—and he a seigneur, un grand homme—setting himself the assignment to sit in his cold tower and say what he saw, what he thought, professing in his “To the Reader” note, the half page that precedes the Essais, that “you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” Even Montaigne felt compelled, though nothing had happened to him, to write books about it.

  Sit there and describe. And because the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, the world lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalue
d, comes to life. The little world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit, angles into the great world. It’s voice, your style. Or, call it what it is—your integrity.

  * * *

  When you come upon the statue of Montaigne in Paris, you find him amid overgrown greenery in the Carré Paul-Painlevé, across from the main approach to the Sorbonne on the rue des Écoles. He’s sequestered in the bushes, as if in bronze he preferred the margin he chose in life. The first thing you notice is his shoe. Even at night, the shoe emerges clearly, golden against the dusky bronze of his casually seated figure, cross-legged, bending forward as if to catch what you might be saying there on the sidewalk.

  People rub the shoe for luck or maybe out of affection. A shoe-rub is said to assure a good exam result across the street. It glows from all this human touch, an elegant sixteenth-century Mary Jane dancing slipper, blushing from generations of twentieth-century fondling. The sculptor, Paul Landowski, is better known for his gigantic 1931 Flash Gordon statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro, an art deco Jesus. Montaigne’s statue was done two years later, in 1933, perhaps to honor the four hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1533.

  Something of the dandy about that shoe. Then the face, surprisingly intent, looking back at you. The face of a man who appreciates the finer things, wryly amused by this weakness for pleasure, not haunted by his appetites. Landowski has given Montaigne a twentieth-century face, nonchalant, warm, easy—a winning American midcentury face.

  This bronze Montaigne, like the one I’ve been reading these recent years, sees it all and accepts it all in advance—the “all” of human perversity and contradiction and marvel played out on the field of avidity and longing. With abundant relish and genial curiosity, he would take easily to the shape-shifting of our times. Gay/straight? Transgender? Intersex? He was pondering versions of these possibilities in an early essay from 1572, “Of the Power of the Imagination,” piling up examples (“a man whom the Bishop of Soissons had named Germain at confirmation, but whom all the inhabitants of the place had seen and known as a girl named Marie until the age of twenty-two. He was now heavily bearded.”). Without dismay, he regarded this richness of possibility as evidence of the natural state of human affairs, an aspect of the legitimate sovereignty of the imagination and, thus, imagination the best judge of reality: “It is not so great a marvel that this sort of accident is frequently met with”—his laconic response to the array of identities. This is, after all, the man who said of his work that he didn’t portray being—“I portray passing.” Ripeness is not all. Change is. Flux as the only genuine constant. Life not as a circle but a spinning spiral, the imagination running the show.