For a while I tried telling people, “Oh, we’re trying.” Oh God, people were chuckling or laughing and saying, “Oh, isn’t that all the fun.” Yeah, it’s loads of fun going to the doctor all the time and spending tremendous amounts of money, and having all these painful tests, horrible things, and not being able to have sex normally, loads of fun, let me tell you how much fun I’m having. Anyway, it was terrible. Those comments were terrible.3
People like her poured out their hearts and their stories. Voilà, a third book.
I have built a career on the memoirs of others—unsuspecting people who deposited their personal stories in places where I could steal them with ease. But there is a little secret here that may be obvious by now. Through the stories of unwitting memoirists, I have investigated the worlds of my own family past. Is it a matter of mere coincidence that I found myself passionately interested in the rapidly changing urban life that my Jewish immigrant grandparents encountered when they arrived in New York City in the early twentieth century? Is it any surprise that I next became fascinated with the middle-class suburban world my parents entered when they contributed my three siblings and me to the baby boom? And surely it is relevant that as the daughter of a birth-control-activist mother and an infertility-specialist father I became interested in the culture of reproduction.
Perhaps my little secret is the secret of most historians. We disavow the first person in our writing and bury the “I” in our data and interpretations. Yet like those who write memoir, we are interested in the past viewed through our own eyes. In my case, I have managed to investigate the environments of my family over three generations. So have I stolen all these minimemoirs in order to write my own megamemoir? I am a historian. I am a memoir thief. And finally, I turn out to be...a memoirist.
1 Divorce Case D492, Los Angeles County Archives, 1920, in May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.
2 Case 244, Kelly Longitudinal Study, in May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 101, 182–85.
3 Quoted in May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 13.
ALICE KAPLAN
Lady of the Lake
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
French Lessons: A Memoir
FROM French Lessons: A Memoir
Teaching, I discover, is not really about my French, my body, and whether or not they’re correct. It’s about generating words—other people’s words. Making people change, making them make mistakes, making them care and not care, making them sensitive, but not oversensitive, to the nuances of language. Making them take risks. It is physical, shockingly physical. Not just because I am there, walking across the room so their eyes won’t fall asleep, but because I, Madame, have to make their mouths work. I walk up to a student and I take her mouth in my hand; I arrange it in the shape of a perfect O. Too close, a little too close to repeat.
Occasionally I divide our bodies in half, our left side speaking English, our right side speaking French so we can feel the difference in our posture, our hands, our muscles. Our English side slouches, while our French side is crisp and pointed. In English we gesture downwards with one hand, in French our entire arm is in a constant upward movement. With our French side, we shake imaginary dirt from our hand with a repeated flick of the wrist, to show we are impressed, scandalized, amused. This is interesting, to be double like this with them, and funny enough for comfort. Also from Capretz I learn to teach tricks that no one ever taught me for making French sounds. For the “r,” gargling with mouthwash to feel the vibration in your throat. This tells you where the French “r” is, until finally you can do it without the aid. Making the “u” sound—the “u” in “tu” or “fondue” or “bu,” that most French of French sounds—is a three-part pedagogy. First you say “o” with your mouth in a perfect round (as though you were going to peck someone on the cheek), then “eee” (with your mouth stretched out in a horizontal smile like a trout, or a wide pumpkin), then a combination of the two: with your mouth in the shape of a perfect “o,” you say “eee.” The sound “u” comes out. This works well.
The Capretz method depends on students not making things up, it teaches them to absorb and recycle ready-made bits of language. It asks them to listen to the tapes in the lab and let the story of the week sink in, like a hit song that you listen to in the car on your way into work and end up knowing in spite of yourself. This is hard. American students want A’s for originality. They can’t believe that language isn’t theirs to remake. They compensate with theatricality: by the end of a good semester a Capretz class is a repertory theater, the students, method actors. The extroverts learn French so well by this method that it frightens me.
This is what teaching is like, too, knowing that you are teaching better than you yourself ever learned, that you can get more from your students than you were ever capable of giving. Teaching, if it succeeds, is dealing with the fact that some of those hams will be better than you are.
• • •
Lady of the Lake
An autobiography, says the critic Philippe Lejeune in a now classic essay on the subject, is a retrospective account of a person’s life, written in the first person, in which that person tries to make sense of his or her life. The autobiographer makes a pact with the reader, usually stated explicitly in the first pages of the book, to tell the truth. Whether it’s really possible to tell the truth about oneself is a separate issue. What counts in an autobiography, according to Lejeune’s theory, is a commitment to honesty.1
As the author of a memoir called French Lessons, published fifteen years ago, I can say in hindsight that this commitment to telling the truth about oneself is both the most exciting and the most elusive aspect of autobiographical writing. Writing about yourself is a high-wire balancing act between revelation and a need to set bounds, to respect your own need for privacy and the right to privacy of others. If you achieve what the genre of autobiography asks of you, you may be giving away too much. That’s the trouble with memoir. If I had realized this when I wrote French Lessons—if, for example, I could have anticipated how disturbing it would be to meet total strangers who felt that they knew me—I might never have written it. I’m glad I did, glad I didn’t anticipate the sense of alienation that memoir publishing (as opposed to memoir writing) brings with it. For my memoir project, I wanted to take on two genres, memoir and history, and put them in a dynamic relationship with one another. Since I’m a historian of memoir (as well as a memoirist), I find it compelling to think about exactly what a memoir writer won’t or can’t say.
Some unfinished business of my own set me on the journey to write specifically about Brenda Ueland, a memoirist close to home. In French Lessons I had written about one aspect of myself: the self who wanted to escape into another language, who wanted to leave home. And a self who, in the course of studying the history of France, was drawn to national secrets.
A memoir can never achieve a total truthfulness, in part because you the author have to decide which part of yourself to narrate. Selves, as Brenda Ueland understood, are multiform creatures. In my imagination there has always been another, unwritten self—not the person who lives in France but the one always drawn back home, to Minnesota. And there, in the mental world of that self, resides Brenda Ueland, the Minnesota icon, a kind of mental placeholder for another, potential memoir, which might have been my “Minnesota Lessons.” And this Brenda Ueland happened to be a memoir writer of renown, as well as a person who liked to think about what it means to write and what it means to tell the truth.
My memories of Ueland led me to do the same kind of work I have always done on French topics: to go to the archives, to study the way she worked, and to look at what she decided to leave in and leave
out of her own “tell all” writing. To play the historian to her confessional prose. History and memoir, much like biography and autobiography, are sibling rivals: each wants the upper hand in storytelling. Brenda Ueland liked to say that doing research was just a way of avoiding one’s true feelings. What a perfect foil for the academic writer that I am! Oversized emotion, bragging, and extreme subjectivity can also be avoidance tactics—they were often hers. In writing about her, I hoped to figure something out about each of us.
Brenda Ueland is someone I can conjure easily: an ancient woman with a gnarled face and white hair walking very fast around Lake Harriet. I must have seen her making her way around that Minneapolis lake a thousand times, hunched over, a funny cap pulled down over her forehead. Today people still go on about her—the eccentric feminist who played tennis in the nude, the legendary writer, the old Norwegian troll who climbed Pike’s Peak in her eighties. Connie, my friend who grew up on the other side of Lake Harriet, visited the writer at the end of her life and got me to read her books. From reading them and talking about her, I’ve made Brenda Ueland part of the landscape I visit in my imagination every day, the landscape of my childhood.
We were children in the 1960s. In those days, the park board hadn’t gentrified the area around Lake Harriet, and the plant life grew at will. The walking paths were muddy and unkempt. Wild branches from the skinny trees growing along the shoreline stuck straight out over the water. Connie and I used them as our balance beams. We knew that if we fell, the water would only come up to our ankles or knees—water so clear you could see the minnows and the sand at the bottom. No pollution, no milfoil weeds then.
The three lakes in the southern part of Minneapolis are so close they almost touch. When I was a student, I could walk from home to school in a little over an hour if I followed the boulevards around them. That was my universe. Lake Harriet was my home lake, the lake I liked to swim across. After Harriet came Lake Calhoun, a flat mirror, except on windy days when the waves looked like impressionist brush strokes. This may be why, when I was a child, I thought all impressionist reproductions were scenes of Minneapolis. Finally came Lake of the Isles, the only man-made lake, too muddy and weedy for swimming but civilized and austere, with two islands in it and mansions on the manicured grass slopes that surround it on every side. If you lived in that world and even thought about being a writer, the first thing you wanted to write about was the beauty of those lakes.
Brenda Ueland was born on Lake Calhoun in 1891 and spent the last years of her life in a house perched just beyond Lake Harriet, in the neighborhood called Linden Hills. She was the fourth child in a family of four brothers and three sisters. Her father, a Norwegian immigrant who had begun his working life as a day laborer, attended night law school and rose to prominence as a judge and legal counsel. Her mother, an important public figure in her own right, was the founder of the Minnesota League of Women Voters. Although conversations in her home were lively and progressive, and the atmosphere warm, young Brenda suffered from her busy mother’s absence.
She could see the lake from her bedroom, and throughout her long and varied career as a writer, the sentences she wrote about the landscape of Minneapolis are among her most beautiful. She had a lyrical gift that reminds me of Fitzgerald—her effortlessly lovely sentences give the impression that she wrote as she breathed. The lakes were the medium for all her senses, especially hearing:
And sometimes at night we did hear unutterably sad cries, sad lost cries for help: screech owls. And in spring there were loons calling. And on the other side of Lake Calhoun, a mile and a half away, there were train tracks. On summer nights when the lake was still or there was a slight breeze from the north, we could hear for a long time that incredibly beautiful, soft roar of a train, coming from far away.
Trains for people in the middle west, she explained, were like ships for people on the coast—they meant “travel, escape, leaving home, sadness, freedom, adventure....They come from the wild plains of Dakota and Montana, and they go on and on and across the world, and you get on one and perhaps you never come back.”
Brenda went by train to college in New York and returned home in 1913 to start work in the newspaper business. In 1915, she left by train for New York again and stayed there for fifteen years. She worked for magazines, lived a bohemian existence in Greenwich Village, took lovers, married and divorced, gave birth to a daughter, Gabrielle, and made a modest living as a freelance writer. After her mother died in 1930, she came home to Minneapolis to her father’s house. At the end of his life, when the weather was good, they walked together:
We walked slowly way around the lake. I think it was spring, for I seem to smell that day and remember that we stepped around soft muddy places occasionally, as though there was still some frost being thawed from the ground. We went to the outlet on the far side, and beyond that to the path that leaves the road and follows the lake along a thicket. Then back.
Walking around the lakes was her ideal setting not only for conversation, but for contemplation. She was convinced that, unless she walked long hours every day, her thinking became something petty and dull. Her brain needed good outdoor air. This was a hard principal to stick to in Minnesota, but winter didn’t stop her, or so she bragged in a diary entry from 1936, when she was already forty-four:
This noon I went around Lake Harriet and two miles farther. It is more than 18 below zero. But I am warm. I wear as always my burglar suit, and under it two layers of wool underwear, and two layers of truck driver’s mittens under horsehide, a Norwegian cap with a visor. I am warm in this cold, though the air is a sword in the lungs. It is very beautiful. The sun is a blare of gold in the pure blue sky and everything is so still, golden, pallidly golden. No one is out except an occasional snow plow or milk truck. The drivers stare at me, smiling through their closed-in glass cabs. Two dogs come out barking at me, but overjoyed to have a human being out and walking, and they frolic around me, their joy overcoming their hostility and their barking indignation.
Even when she was a very old woman, there is something young about her writing, as though she’s still a teenager, figuring herself out. The passage above, along with other diary entries, formed the backbone of her 1938 memoir, which she called Me, a pioneering book, one of the first in an autobiographical tradition, now so central to American writing, that gives value to everyday experience. Ueland wants to account for her relationships, to describe her working life, her endless quest for discipline and for understanding the world. Me shows her lyrical gifts, her penchant for bragging, her self-absorption, and, in the end, a knowledge of her own shortcomings that endears her to the reader.
Brenda Ueland’s complaints about the business of writing surface in the part of Me devoted to the late 1930s. This was still the golden age of the short story, when magazines like Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, each with over a million subscribers, published new stories every week. In the thick of the Depression, without enough money for books, people bought magazines. Stars like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make $3,600 from the sale of a single story, and $1,500 wasn’t an unusual fee for a lesser-known writer—the equivalent of $12,000 today. You could make enough from selling stories to support yourself over the long haul of working on a novel.
Ueland had had a good run of success in this thriving magazine world: a stint as an editor at Liberty magazine in New York, a dozen or more articles published in Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post. Then suddenly, it seemed, the stories she wanted to write weren’t marketable. She began to teach a class in writing at a branch of the Minneapolis YWCA. And she began writing about her experience in the class, in light of her own disappointing rejections. Most of her students had no writing experience, and the less they had written, or so it seemed to her, the better, the fresher their stories seemed to be. This was a revelation. She described one student, Mrs. B, who had done a great deal of writing and revising, and who
se prose was dull and mechanical. “Stock prose,” Ueland called it, and from Mrs. B’s story, she derived a maxim: “The more you wish to describe a Universal the more minutely and truthfully you must describe a Particular.” Don’t try to make it sound smooth, she advised. Write “with exquisite and completely detached exactness and truthfulness. Look at the person and just say what you see, even if it sounds like a catalogue.”
Ueland might have been talking about herself. She had made a name, and a living, writing personal essays about women. Her articles had titles like “Fat or Thin Women” and “Dressmakers, Clients and Husbands.” Her nonfiction opinion pieces already had hints of the uncompromising quality that would become her trademark, but she wasn’t having fun with them. She complained in Me of driven perfectionism, of polishing her magazine submissions fifty times. Much of her fiction was conventional, with artificial society settings, girls fighting with their parents or falling in and out of love. There’s also an anorexic tone to much of her magazine writing on diet and weight, a disgust for the female body and a drive for self-abnegation that would surface through her life, aftereffects of an overweight childhood.
But there are also a few wonderful stories, such as her 1927 “I Mean Marriage Is Terrible!” published in the Delineator, where a bohemian expatriate with literary pretensions pities her college friend who has decided to marry and settle down. The expatriate wastes her time posing as an avant-garde writer in Paris, only to return home to discover that her boring married friend has written two powerful novels and sold one of them to the movies. The story, narrated in the first person, may be a thinly veiled send-up of Brenda’s rivalry with her older sister, Anne, a writer who settled into a conventional bourgeois life with her doctor husband in Connecticut. It’s a hilarious spoof on artistic pretensions that brings out Brenda’s impatience with frauds and her ability to mock herself.
Tell Me True Page 10
