Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid fish, the Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported when geological life was young; as though they had all remained together in time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow Castle, and repeat “how charming is divine philosophy!” He felt almost aggrieved to find Walcott so vigorously acting the part of Comus as to have flung the ganoid all the way off to Colorado and far back into the Lower Trenton limestone, making the Pteraspis as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by spawning an ancestry for him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of known organic life. A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone were the liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet historian dare to hazard even in secret an opinion about the value of Natural Selection by Minute Changes under Uniform Conditions, for he could know no more about it than most of his neighbors who knew nothing; but natural selection that did not select—evolution finished before it began—minute changes that refused to change anything during the whole geological record—survival of the highest order in a fauna which had no origin—uniformity under conditions which had disturbed everything else in creation—to an honest-meaning though ignorant student who needed to prove Natural Selection and not assume it, such sequence brought no peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form caused evolution in force; that chemical or mechanical energy had by natural selection and minute changes, under uniform conditions, converted itself into thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove—to him—that it had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a huge perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal that Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he asked what sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemed orthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on its own lines quite beyond mechanical explanation, had cropped up again. A little more, and he would be driven back on the old independence of species.

  What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like the theologist’s view on theology, for complexity was nothing to them; but to the historian who sought only the direction of thought and had begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867, the matter of direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily the door of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved. The active geologists had mostly become specialists dealing with complexities far too technical for an amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to serve for beginners, as they had served when new.

  So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of Lyell and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into half-a-dozen intermittent chills in recent geology and in the northern hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that the glaciation of the southern hemisphere could possibly be referred to a horizon more remote. Continents still rose wildly and wildly sank, though Professor Suess of Vienna had written an epoch-making work, showing that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans rose and sank. Lyell’s genial uniformity seemed genial still, for nothing had taken its place, though, in the interval, granite had grown young, nothing had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge overthrusts had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even to discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing that progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.

  Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or discuss the principles of any science; but the history of the mind concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body. In thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ignorance to a faith and degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobites without evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and had even plucked up courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord Kelvin forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of Physical Religion in the effort to force unification of the universe; they had protested with mild conviction that they could not state the geological record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus under their breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on the tips of their tongues.

  Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, super-sensual, electrolytic—who knew what?—defying science, if not denying known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a “larger synthesis” to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got into far too much trouble by following schools of theology in their efforts to enlarge their synthesis, that they should willingly repeat the process in science. For human purposes a point must always be soon reached where larger synthesis is suicide.

  Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that the change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of his thought, should delight in turning about and trying the opposite motion, as he delights in the spring which brings even to a tired and irritated statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every schoolboy knows that this sum of all knowledge never saved him from whipping; mere years help nothing; King and Hay and Adams could neither of them escape floundering through the corridors of chaos that opened as they passed to the end; but they could at least float with the stream if they only knew which way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh with the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged and unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it serve? A seeker of truth—or illusion—would be none the less restless, though a shark!

  AFTERWORD

  Many excellent memoirs fall outside the scope of this volume. Those published before 1917 appeared too early, and those published after 1992 appeared too late. Many, of course, are not American in setting; many are, by genre, more properly travel or nature writing, or strictly accounts of other people, or accounts of specific events or ordeals. Some few, like John Updike’s Self-Consciousness and Wilfred Sheed’s Frank and Maisie, lose flavor in excerpts. Some, like Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, are too expensive to reprint.

  Among the following are many personal favorites.

  Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

  Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease

  Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

  Mary Austin, Earth Horizon; Land of Little Rain

  Kim Barnes, In The Wilderness

  Judith Barrington, “Initiation”

  Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter’s Eye

  Elizabeth Bishop, “The Tinshop of Uncle Neddy”

  Louise Bogan, Journey Around My Room

  Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself

  John Malcolm Brinnen, Dear Heart, Dear Buddy; Dylan Thomas in America; Sextet

  Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage

  June Burn, Living High


  Franklin Burroughs, Billy Watson’s Croker Sack

  William de Buys, River of Traps

  Mary Cantwell, An American Girl

  Mary Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie

  Joan Colebrook, A House of Trees

  Chen Congwen, Recollections of West Hunan

  Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

  Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain

  Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere

  Edward Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh

  Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

  Peter Davison, Half Remembered

  Clarence Day, Life with Father

  Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness

  Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say

  Nicholas Delbanco, Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France

  Deborah Digges, Fugitive Spring

  Izak Dinesen, Out of Africa

  Ivan Doig, This House of Sky; Heart Earth

  Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

  Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels

  Katherine Dunham, A Touch of Innocence

  Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

  Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons

  Charles A. Eastman, Indian Boyhood

  Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces; A Match to the Heart

  Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place; A Woman’s Story

  A. B. Facey, A Fortunate Life

  Wendy W. Fairey, One of the Family

  Steve Fishman, A Bomb in the Brain

  Robert Fitzgerald, The Third Kind of Knowledge

  Ford Madox Ford, Your Mirror to My Times

  Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

  James Galvin, The Meadow

  George Garrett, “My Two One-Eyed Coaches”

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People

  Ellen Glasgow, The Woman Within

  Albert Goldbarth, A Sympathy of Souls

  Marita Golden, Migrations of the Heart

  Ray Gonzales, Memory Fever

  Maxim Gorky, My Childhood; My Apprenticeships; My Universities

  Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant

  John Graves, Good-bye to a River

  Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That

  Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

  Henry Green, Pack My Bag

  Graham Greene, A Sort of Life; Ways of Escape

  Doris Grumbach, Coming into the End Zone; Extra Innings

  Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise

  Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved; Their Ancient Glitt’ring Eyes; Life Work

  Edward T. Hall, An Anthropology of Everyday Life

  Patricia Hampl, A Romantic Education; Virgin Time

  Curtis Harnack, We Have All Gone Away; The Attic

  Moss Hart, Act One

  Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century

  Samuel Heilman, The Gate Behind the Wall

  Lillian Hellman, Pentimento; An Unfinished Woman

  Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

  Michael Herr, Dispatches

  Edward Hoagland, Walking the Dead Diamond River; The Tugman’s Passage; Balancing Act

  Garrett Hongo, Volcano

  Paul Horgan, Tracings: A Book of Partial Portraits

  W. H. Hudson, Faraway and Long Ago; The Purple Land

  Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

  John Hull, Touching the Rock

  Charlayne Hunter-Gault, In My Place

  Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika

  Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

  Henry James, A Small Boy and Others; Notes of a Son and Brother

  James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way

  Teresa Jordan, Riding the White Horse Home

  Alice Kaplan, French Lessons

  Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

  Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

  Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City

  Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

  Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

  Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

  James Kilgo, Deep Enough for Ivorybills

  David Lavender, One Man’s West

  T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; The Reawakening

  Harry Levin, Memories of the Moderns

  Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

  C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

  Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light

  Robert MacNeil, Wordstruck

  William Manchester, “Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All”

  Robert Mason, Chickenhawk

  Hilary Masters, Last Stands

  Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy

  Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water

  William Maxwell, Ancestors

  David McKain, Spellbound

  Jean McKay, Gone to Grass

  Rollie McKenna, Rollie McKenna: A Life in Photography

  Tim McLaurin, Keeper of the Moon

  Ved Mehta, Vedi; Face to Face; Up at Oxford; Daddyji; Mamaji

  James Merrill, A Different Person

  Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

  John Hanson Mitchell, Living at the End of Time

  Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon

  Susan Mitchell, “Dreaming in Public”

  N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; The Names

  Paul Monette, On Becoming a Man

  Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush

  Edwin Muir, An Autobiography

  John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; Travels in Alaska

  Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat; Proud Shoes

  Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

  V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Center; The Enigma of Arrival

  Richard K. Nelson, The Island Within

  Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines

  Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

  Gayle Pemberton, The Hottest Water in Chicago

  Brendan Phibbs, The Other Side of Time

  Mary Helen Ponce, Hoyt Street

  Gene Stratton Porter, Moths of the Limberlost

  Dennis Puleston, Blue Water Vagabond

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

  Richard Rhodes, A Hole in the World

  Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

  Mari Sandoz, Old Jules

  Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words

  Evelyn Scott, Escapade

  Mary Lee Settle, “London—1944”

  Anton Shammas, Arabesques

  Wilfred Sheed, Frank and Maisie; My Life as a Fan; People Will Always Be Kind; In Love with Daylight

  Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth

  Annick Smith, Homestead

  Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream

  William Jay Smith, Army Brat

  Wole Soyinka, Ake

  Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae

  Art Spiegelman, Maus

  Brent Staples, Parallel Time

  Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

  Don Talayesva, Sun Chief

  Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science

  Flora Lewis Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford

  Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Cape Cod; The Maine Woods

  Susan Allen Toth, Blooming: A Small Town Girlhood; Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East

  Katharine Trevelyan, Through Mine Own Eyes

  Calvin Trillin, Remembering Denny

  Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey

  Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

  John Updike, Self-Consciousness

  Gloria Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength

  David Foster Wallace, “The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems”

  Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow

  Eudora Welty, One Wri
ter’s Beginnings

  Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

  Bailey White, Mama Makes Up Her Mind

  E. B. White, “Once More to the Lake”

  Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

  William Carlos Williams, Autobiography

  Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist

  Kimberley Wozencraft, Notes from the Country Club

  For an intelligent consideration of classic American memoirs, read Herbert A. Leibowitz’s Fabricating Lives.

  Readers might especially enjoy certain selections among the above list from around the world: Edwin Muir’s An Autobiography, Sartre’s The Words, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Chen Congwen’s Recollections of West Hunan, Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco, Dinesen’s Out of Africa, Gorky’s trilogy beginning with My Childhood, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain, Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Flora Lewis Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.

  A.D.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Don Asher: “Shoot the Piano Player” by Don Asher. Copyright© 1981 by Don Asher. “Shoot the Piano Player” originally appeared in Harper’s magazine.

  Beacon Press: Excerpt from Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. Copyright © 1955, 1983 by James Baldwin. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.

  Contemporary Books: Excerpt from Growing Up by Russell Baker. Copyright © 1982 by Russell Baker. Used with permission of Congdon & Weed, Inc., and Contemporary Books, Inc., Chicago.

  Harry Crews: Excerpt from A Childhood by Harry Crews. Copyright © 1978 by Harry Crews. Published in 1978 by Harper & Row. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.

  Columbia University Press: Excerpt from Left Handed by Walter and Ruth Dyk. Copyright © 1980 by Columbia University Press.