Through NEGROLAND Margo Jefferson elevates the memoir form, and leaves me grateful, again

It was Margo Jefferson, the great cultural critic, who first put my name in the New York Times. In a review of another's book, in a closing paragraph, she made mention of something I'd penned in solitude and put forward with innocence and didn't even understand as well as she seemed to.

She looked up and saw me, and I, discovering her snatch of words quite by accident, never felt such gratitude.

When I read earlier this year that Margo had written a memoir called Negroland, I wanted it at once, bought it when I could, and put it on the top of a pile called (in my mind), "the books you'll be allowed to read once you have completed your tour of duty with all known responsibilities."

Yesterday I was done with all known (until next week) responsibilities. I picked up Negroland. I read.

And oh my, oh now: this. Like H is for Hawk, like M Train, like My Life as a Foreign Country, Negroland is the kind of book that elevates not just its readers but the capital M Memoir itself. It's personal—and otherwise. It's I, You, We. It's inquiry, declaration, admission, confusion—the story of the impossible ideals, hurtful expectations, pleasant privileges, and chaotic undertows that have been all bound up with being a member of the black elite. It's a book by an esteemed critic who was "taught to distinguish (her)self through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off" and who then (but always judiciously, always for a higher purpose) allows us in.

In a book of anecdote, history, cultural expose, and yearning, we encounter, on almost every page paragraphs as searing as this:

Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly, and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren't looking.

 And this:

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you. That's your first education. Then comes the second. Call it your social and intellectual change. The world outside you gets reconfigured, and inside too. Patterns deviate and fracture. Hierarchies disperse. Now you can imagine yourself as central. It feels grand. But don't stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths.

This year, when my beautiful son goes into bookstores he goes straight (his mother's child) to the memoir shelves. He, like me, views memoir as one of the best chances we have of broadening our vision, breaking down our walls, stepping out of our recklessly limited world view.

I have been taught by Margo Jefferson with her gorgeous Negroland. I have seen a little further. I have hurt a little more. I have been made grateful for both the seeing and the hurting.

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an interview about memoir and the city in Arrive magazine (the one with Patti Smith on the cover!)

Patti Smith is on the cover of the current issue of Arrive magazine (the Amtrak magazine). That's really enough, by any measure. She's gorgeously photographed—silvers and blues.

Tucked inside that edition is an interview with me about Love and about memoir. Greg Weber and I had the nicest conversation many weeks ago. Reading these words today brings all of that back to me.

I'm grateful. I'm so grateful that I think I'll ride Amtrak every day now, for months.

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My review of Patti Smith's M Train, on New York Journal of Books (Churched! I tell you. Churched!)

Yesterday, on Huffington Post, I wrote about the importance of structure in memoir. How, indeed, considered structure makes memoir memoir. If we don't care about how the true story gets told, if we don't think broadly, innovatively, wisely about structure, we're only writing autobiography. Telling our story because it's interesting to us, because we feel like talking.

Patti Smith understands structure.

Indeed: How much did I love Patti Smith's utterly humble and humbling new memoir, M Train?

TOOMUCHTOSAYTOOMUCHTOWRITETOOMUCHTOOMUCHTHATMUCH.

This is a star who moves quietly through this world, sitting at coffee shops, remembering and thinking. Never drops a name. Never boasts a moment. She is, and she takes us with her.

My thoughts on M Train, in New York Journal of Books, here.

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Because people don't see you or see what you're doing doesn't mean you don't exist (Patti Smith)

I am in the midst of a most emotional summer, and I'm just letting that be. Not building walls around my feelings. Not afraid to sit and reel.

This afternoon I've been reading Patti Smith's new memoir, M Train, due out in a few months. I will tell you right now that this book is fierce beauty if ever there was fierce beauty. This book is cloud sweep, glistened web, vast and aching, a room in which to cry. I can't say more than that for awhile now. Just. Oh, my goodness. This book.

I stopped in the midst of my reading to return to an interview Smith did with Rolling Stone magazine in 1996, a few short years after Smith's beloved husband, Fred, passed away from heart failure. The interviewer has been speaking of how Smith "literally disappeared during the 1980s." Smith has talked about the greatness of that period, how the couple traveled America, lived in cheap hotels, loved. He would study flying. She would write poems and stories the world wouldn't see for years.

Now the interviewer asks Smith about the transition from that period of rock and roll stardom to "almost complete anonymity." Smith's response, in part:

Because people don't see you or see what you're doing doesn't mean you don't exist. When Robert [Mapplethorpe] and I spent the end of the '60s in Brooklyn [NY] working on our art and poetry, no one knew who we were. Nobody knew our names. But we worked like demons. And no one really cared about Fred and I during the '80s. But our self-concept had to come from the work we were doing, from our communication, not from outside sources.

Necessary words for those of us who are still waiting for that big (or small) break, for those of us whose time seems to have come and gone, for those of us deliberately stepping off the trammeled path to think for a bit, to reconceive.

Necessary words.

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In today's Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, I'm talking about photographs in memoir.

Several weeks ago, I tore most of my memoirs off the shelf to research an idea I had about those who use photographs to amplify their memoirs. Dorothy Allison, Patti Smith, Michael Ondaatje, David Carr, Orhan Pamuk, Calvin Trillin—the list is long, and it made me happy to sit for a while and work the details out.

That essay runs today in the Wall Street Journal blog, Speakeasy. Many thanks to Beth Parker at Gotham for helping me find its right home.

This essay, on photographs, is part of a series of essays I've lately been writing about the memoir form. Today, in the The Millions, for example, I write about the conversational in memoir. Last week, I wrote in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the students I love.

Thank you, Beth Parker of Gotham, for finding a home for me at Speakeasy, and thank you Speakeasy.

More of my thoughts on the memoir form can be found on this dedicated Handling page.

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on meeting Patti Smith, ever so briefly, at Bryn Mawr College

Last evening, at Bryn Mawr College, the multi-media legend Patti Smith was given the 2013 Katharine Hepburn Medal at an absolutely beautifully orchestrated event.

And oh, did she make us cry. From her heart, without prepared words, she spoke directly to us from the stage above about Little Women, Jo March, and a certain season when Patti was twenty-two years old and Katharine Hepburn herself came shopping at Scribner's, where Patti was working. Ms. Hepburn had tied an overlarge man's hat to her head with a green ribbon. She asked for help in locating books. While Patti escorted her down the aisles, Ms. Hepburn would note that Spencer (Tracy) would have loved this book or that, giving Patti (she said, so eloquently, so flawlessly) permission years later to shop for her own husband, even after he had passed on.

Sometimes people really are who they are on the page, and I have never doubted that Patti Smith is the Patti Smith of Just Kids, a book I loved so much (for its integrity, its soulfulness, its ungreen love, its sentences) that I forfeited meetings with writers at a certain Orlando, FL, event so that I could stay in my hotel room and read it. Woolgathering, too, reveals the Patti Smith we met last night.

Patti Smith has, she herself has said, always sought to lessen the distance between herself and her audience. She does. She did. Taking on the obvious questions from passersby during the cocktail and dessert hours, allowing us to exclaim over her, noticing us.

"I like your dress," she said, as I stood near, photographing my friend, Elizabeth Mosier, second photo down, above.

I very rarely like my own clothes. I will always love this dress.

Oh, and in case you are wondering? That bit of graffiti up there does in fact belong to me. I try to stay in the background, whenever I can. But sometimes you just have to tell someone how much you love them.

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Woolgathering/Patti Smith: Reflections

What are we to make of Woolgathering, this hand-sized book by the legend Patti Smith? First published in 1992 as a Hanuman Book and described by its author (years later, upon its re-release) as absolutely true. The book, legendary singer/writer tells us, was such that in its writing Smith was drawn from her "strange torpor." Here she is, looking back:

In 1991 I lived on the outskirts of Detroit with my husband and two children in an old stone house set by a canal that emptied into Lake Saint Clair. Ivy and morning glory climbed the deteriorating walls. A profusion of grapevines and wild roses draped the balcony, where doves nested in their tangles.... I truly loved my family and our home, yet that spring I experienced a terrible and inexpressible melancholy. I would sit for hours, when my chores were done and the children at school, beneath the willows, lost in thought. That was the atmosphere of my life as I began to compose Woolgathering.

There are photographs in this slight book—many of clouds, many of childhood places. There are concentrated memories, phantoms, distillations intensely personal and inescapably vivid. Some of the passages begin like the beginnings of psalms, or songs, while others break toward a private vocabulary.

Here is a line:

Exclamation! Questions of origin, scope.

Here is a scene, a codex, a rebus:

How happy we are as children. How the light is dimmed by the voice of reason. We wander through life—a setting without a stone. Until one day we take a turn and there it lies on the ground before us, a drop of faceted blood, more real than a ghost, glowing. If we stir it may disappear. If we fail to act nothing will be reclaimed. There is a way in this little riddle. To utter one's own prayer. In what manner it doesn't matter. For when it is over that person shall possess the only jewel worth keeping. The only grain worth giving away.

Woolgathering is a book of parts. It is a prayer set into motion. It is a return to child awe, a vindication of at least some part of adult responsibilities to make sense of things, to cohere. What do our minds do when we let them roam and wonder? Something perhaps, like this. Let Patti Smith lead the way.

Thanks to my friend Elizabeth Mosier, I will be seeing Patti Smith this coming Thursday evening at Bryn Mawr College. Elizabeth knows what a huge Patti Smith fan I am (I could not stop raving about Just Kids, for example (a book featured prominently in my forthcoming Handling the Truth), or about Smith's interview with Johnny Depp in the pages of Vanity Fair). She knows how proud I was of her piece about Smith in her alum magazine, here. And she knows that, even if I cannot find just the right cocktail dress to wear (because I end up looking so lousy in all of them), I will stand proudly at her side on Thursday, when the Main Line welcomes Patti to town.

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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what do you desire?

I stopped at The Strand while making my way to a client the other day.  It was a long walk and bitter cold.  I wanted warmth.  I needed books. 

Patti Smith's Woolgathering was on a front table, signed.  It was mine in an instant, and today, while on the train to Penn, I read.  Patti gave the class its first exercise of the day, which began with her words below: 

Blowing upon it, candles, a star ... What does one desire.  A partner.  A freewheeling moon.  Or perhaps to hear again as one heard as a child.  A music—curious, optimistic, as plain and elusive as the call of the reel permeating a summer night.  Expanding squares of laughter and delight.  Everyone dancing, just dancing.  

In three to four sentences only, write what you desire, I said. 

Oh, how they broke my heart.  Oh, how I wanted to be their age again.  So many years of doing still laid out before them.

I have a wonderful class.

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On Berlin, Re-reading, and Book of Clouds

David Bowman has an interesting and timely back-page essay in The New York Times Book Review this weekend.  It's called "Read It Again, Sam," and it celebrates books fine enough to be read again.  Patti Smith reports on her plan to read again An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.  Stephen King professes to having read Lord of the Flies eight or nine times.  Bharati Mukherjee reveals that she re-read all of Louise May Alcott at least a half-dozen times at the tender age of 9.

And you?

Earlier this week, while on a plane home from London, I reached for Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis), a book I'd read at once upon its release in 2009.  It's just the right size for an eight-hour flight (with a nap tucked somewhere in between), and I'd wanted to re-read it because I craved the surreal mood it had engendered within me—the fog, the mist, the strange; I craved the Berlin at the book's heart.  How had Aridjis achieved her effects?  I would examine this.  I would study it.

I had remembered Clouds as a lyric of a book, and indeed extraordinarily beautiful images float throughout. But what was also fascinating to me, upon my second review, is that Aridjis is not tricking her reader with language here; she is never overreaching.  Indeed, some of her oddest moments and most surreal, memorable constructions are rendered with thoroughly uncluttered, even straightforward prose—a glorious effect that I had not deconstructed my first time through.  So caught up was I in the mood of her Berlin—in the underground worlds, in the residues of a sinister past—that I failed to see that passages like this one, describing an abandoned bowling alley beneath the streets, had been meticulously and not (until the very end) metaphorically put forth.  Aridjis gives us the facts.  She lets us do with them what we will. 

After traversing several dark, damp rooms, plowing ever deeper into the labyrinth, though it was hard to tell how many doorways we'd actually crossed, we arrived at the so-called Gestapo bowling alley, a rectangular room, somewhat larger than the others as far as I could tell.  Our guide asked us to fan out so that everyone could see and directed his flashlight at different spots.  I stepped out from behind a girl with pigtails and began to look around.  It was a pretty chilling sight.  Everything, it seemed, was just the way it had been left decades ago.  At the center of the room lay a metal contraption, about eight feet long, an obsolete machine once used for spitting out wooden bowling balls, and with its rusty corners and thin bars, it looked, at least from afar, like a medieval instrument of torture, like those racks to which victims were bound by their hands and feet and then stretched.

I would not have known this about Clouds had I not read the book a second time.  I would have carried with me a false idea about Aridjis method—a first-blush idea, not a studied one.  I loved the book even more the second time I read it through.  I loved it, though, for somewhat different reasons.

Always, in perpetuity, Clouds will be a signifier for me—a book that in large part sent me to Berlin this past summer, a trip that subsequently led to my own work on a new (and very different) book set in that city for the beautiful Tamra Tuller of Philomel.  Without Clouds, I would not have taken that trip, in other words.  Without Clouds, I would not now be sitting here, surrounded by books and films about Berlin's past.  This was a book that had deserved a second reading.  Most good books do.

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Celebrating the National Book Critics Circle Award Nominees

I never read nearly as much as I'd like to read—my multiple worlds are perpetually colliding, fracturing time. But I was so gratified to learn that, on this year's list of NBCC nominees, many of the books I'd loved best and celebrated here, on my blog, are being equally celebrated by the judges.  In Autobiography, there's Patti Smith's remarkable Just Kids, Darin Strauss's deeply moving Half a Life, and the thoughtful, provocative Hiroshima in the Morning, by my much-loved friend, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  In Criticism, there's Elif Batuman's The Possessed and Ander Monson's Vanishing Point.  I'd put all five books on my Penn syllabus months ago, and here they are—proven, lifted, upheld.

A huge congratulations to them all, and, especially, to my dear friend, Reiko.  I've linked to my own reflections about these books here, should you be interested in how they affected me early on.

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The Depp-Smith Conversation (to die for)

I am powerless when it comes to intelligent conversation—utterly done in when two learned, well-lived, curious people go back and forth, talking craft, talking wanting (this need I have for real conversation renders me pretty useless at most cocktail parties, I confess, an utter bore).  Conversation is what we get in the January 2011 issue of Vanity Fair—Patti Smith (and you know that I loved her memoir) interviewing Johnny Depp (who needs to say more?).

Look at how far afield from the traditional celebrity interview this goes. Look at what Hollywood mashing with Rock and Roll can be:

Smith:  When you spouted a few lines of poetry to Samantha Morton, who played Elizabeth Barry in the movie—that was my introduction to Wilmot's work, to his poetry.  And I noticed in Alice, when the Hatter recites, "Jabberwocky," that you have a gift for giving us the full measure of a poet's work. It is really quite difficult. Could you imagine doing a recording of works of poetry?

Depp:  I don't know.  It's daunting, because you don't know exactly... I mean, you can decipher the intent, and you can kind of swim around in the guts of it, but you just don't know how the poet would have wanted it read.

Smith:  Yes, but that's no different than Glenn Gould having to anticipate how Bach would want his work played.  I thought the Hatter's reading of "Jabberwocky" was luminous.  Yesterday you read me a poem written by the Elephant Man.  I didn't know he wrote poetry.  The poem you recited was heartbreaking.  How did you come to find it?

Depp:  I made an appointment at the hospital where they had his remains....

 

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Just Kids/Patti Smith: Reflections

I couldn't stop reading Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir.  I was supposed to be doing other things—was in the land of mouse ears and Grumpy, among writers and teachers, in a hotel nestled around this cloud-reflecting lagoon.  But Patti Smith writes poetry, she tells a story, she searches for truth, and Just Kids is so full of the surprising line, the arresting scene.  It's full of Patti Smith herself, a rock and roller with a vulnerable heart, a scorcher of a performer who nonetheless craves the sacred companionship of books.

Just Kids is advertised primarily as the story of Smith's relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and that it is.  But it is also the story of Smith's ascension through art—the years she spent choosing between buying a cheap meal and an old imprint, between being an artist or a writer, between being Mapplethorpe's lover and his best friend.  She tells us about the conversations that generate ideas among artists and friends, about coincidences that set a life on its path, about the clothes she wore and the mis-impressions she couldn't correct, about a kind of love that is bigger than any definition the world might want to latch onto it.  She yields an entire era to us, and though her writing is all sinew, strength, and honesty, she does not once betray her friends, does not invite us to imagine privacies that should remain beyond the veil.

This is, then, a revelation of a book, an exemplar.  I could quote from every line.  I'll simply give you the beginning:

When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River.  I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge.  The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle.  A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.

You don't assess writing like that.  You honor it. The National Book Award Nonfiction Panel got this one just right.

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Taking Patti Smith and Adam Foulds for a Ride

Because Lilian Nattel is a very brilliant author and reader, I trust her, and when she sang the praises of Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze back in late June, I knew I'd be reading the book sooner than later.  And when the dear and deep and perpetually risk-taking Elizabeth Hand wrote (long before the National Book Award list had been unveiled) that I absolutely had to read Just Kids by Patti Smith (she'd reviewed it for the Washington Post), I said, All right, Liz.  I will.

Yesterday, released for the afternoon from client work, I headed to the Chester County Book & Music Company, which is another version of paradise on earth.  We're talking an indie book store here that feels a city block deep, and those who work there stack their favorite reads up and down end shelves.  I get lost there, and I don't mind one bit. 

This afternoon, I board a plane.  Smith's coming with me.  So is Foulds.

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