I found him in Berlin. I watched him work—fearless before every single blank page. A quick idea, a suggestion—a tightrope walker, say—and the color was rolled and sliced, the painting set to dry. It was that easy.
Today the fog lifts slowly. I'll grab the train, walk 30th to 40th, meet with a student, then set off for my class. Three new young writers will be joining us this week. We'll talk diaries, Joan Didion, Chad the Minx, Dawn Powell, Judith Malina, Joyce Carol Oates. We'll wade through definitions. We'll preface Geoffrey Wolff.
And then we'll take our cameras, and we'll walk.
The worst part about teaching at Penn is the decision-making part. As in: I have to study my swollen, swaying, triple-stacked wall of memoirs and decide which few (only a few!) to put on the syllabus. Sure, we're reading all semester long—theory, excerpts, slices of things. But which memoirs will we read, cover to cover? Which books will my students carry forward, in their own libraries?
I have, just now, made at least one pairing decision:
House of Prayer No. 2 (Mark Richard) and
The Duke of Deception (Geoffrey Wolff). I cannot wait to read both these books again.
I could go on about this; I won't.
The Duke of Deception is one of the best memoirs I've ever read.
I speak as one whose shelves are overflowing with the form, as one who has attempted the beast more than a few times herself, as one who teaches this dastardly, presumptive first-person art, begging emerging writers to think harder about scenes, longer about story, more purposefully about what any of it means. Leave the right things in, take the right things out, be scrupulously honest without ever being dull, learn and let the reader learn with you, do not summarize your past, evoke it, avoid the scold and the didactic and the exhibitionism, be only yourself, grant your work the possibility of reach and stretch, write for the right reasons.... It's all here, all the lessons I've ever laid out, urged toward.
Duke is a father-son story. It's a forgiveness story. It's an adventure. It's a lesson. Geoffrey Wolff's father hardly ever told the truth, and he was a wreck, and he wrecked things, and he was a shameful disappointment, and he died ignoble, and yet every word in this breathtaking book is written from a place of love. Like this:
I was harder on my father after I had the goods on him than he had ever been on me. He had always had the goods on me. And he never made cruel use of them.
Like, also, this:
My father's vocabulary was a schoolboy's vocabulary because among us he was among schoolboys. He was a chameleon. He gave his clients what he thought they wanted: companies got his constipated management jargon, headmasters got piety, car salesmen got bank references, car mechanics got engineering lore. He was a lie, through and through. There was nothing to him but lies, and love.
No excuses. Read it.
Today in class, following our review of four student memoirs, we'll look ahead toward the literary profiles that the students will be writing as their final project. My instructions for the assignment are, as usual, simple enough (I include them below). Not quite as simple is shaping, with the students, standards of excellence, or measures against which such profiles might be judged. I loved, for example, Patti Smith's profile of Johnny Depp in a late 2010 issue of
Vanity Fair precisely because of the rugged, empathetic nature of her questions; Smith knows fame, she knows yearning, she knows loss, and she knows Depp, and by going beyond what she already knew (by asking the piercing personal and philosophical questions) she gave us an indelible, original portrait.
In Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself, the poet C.K. Williams brings psychological acuity and a poet's ability to parse to his intimate renderings of those who shaped his world. We know Williams's mother, for example, by what he tells us she withholds, and why. "When my father was undergoing his illnesses, his absentmindedness, his depressions, (my mother) somehow managed never quite to submit to them: although she sympathized with him, wished he were better, was, you could tell, a little offended without ever saying so by his not being better, she still never manifested what was happening as something that really possessed her; she always kept back that corner of her feelings that might have made her suffer too much."
In her introduction to
The Possessed, Elif Batuman yields a portrait of the "first Russian person I ever met" that (by choosing just the right scenes, the right snips of dialogue, the dead-on, tell-tale italics) gives us an immediate sense not just of a man's infuriating but perhaps endearing idiosyncratic tics, but of the effect those tics had on Batuman herself. "Toward the end of one (violin) lesson, for example, he told me that he had to leave ten minutes early—and then proceeded to spend
the entire ten minutes unraveling the tortuous logic of how his early departure wasn't actually depriving me of any violin instruction. 'Tell me, Elif,' he shouted, having worked himself up to an amazing degree. 'When you buy a dress, do you buy the dress that is most beautiful...or the dress that is made with the most cloth?'"
Oliver Sacks, especially in
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, makes effective use of clinical language and telling dialogue to bring his real-life characters to the page. Frederick Busch uses a novelist's touch—vivid, unexpected details, the lean of impression against the stacking of facts—to invigorate portraits of people like his father and Terrence des Pres. In
The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff juxtaposes known facts against purported ones to give us a man, his own father, who sought to deceive all on every topic save for the power and importance of love.
I'm going to be reading segments from those books to the students today. Additionally, I've asked them to read, on their own, Lynn Hirschberg's
New York Times Magazine profile of Lee Daniels, the so-smart, so-sensational, and (to use her word) audacious director/part producer of the Oscar-winning film "Precious" (among other things). The students have downloaded t
he Hirschberg story (in these waning days of being able to download NYT files, though, hey, I am a paper subscriber and will still have privileges) and, I hope, they've played the video o
We avoid landmines out here—so many of us (I'm guilty, too) do. Don't say things that might be said, don't help guide a friend toward a new understanding, don't disagree, don't attempt to back another away from an exaggeration or a misappropriation, don't ask for a righting of the balance, because, well, the possibility of a ruckus is just too much to bear. So that we are silent or we are passive; we let things slide. This, in time, leads to dissonance and distance. Another kind of fracture.
I was thinking about this while reading Geoffrey Wolff's remarkable
The Duke of Deception, his memoir about his fraught relationship with his father. I'll be writing more about this book in the days to come, but for now it's this page 10 moment that I share. It's the honesty of Wolff's friend that caught my eye. His willingness to state what he believed to be the truth. More than that: Wolff's willingness to listen.
Writing to a friend about this book, I said that I would not now for anything have had my father be other than what he was, except happier, and that most of the time he was happy enough, cheered on by imaginary successes. He gave me a great deal, and not merely life, and I didn't want to bellyache; I wanted, I told my friend, to thumb my nose on his behalf at everyone who had limited him. My friend was shrewd, though, and said that he didn't believe me, that I couldn't mean such a thing, that if I followed out its implications I would be led to a kind of ripe sentimentality, and to mere piety. Perhaps, he wrote me, you would not have wished him to life to himself, to life about being a Jew. Perhaps you would have him fool others but not so deeply trick himself. "In writing about a father," my friend wrote me about our fathers, "one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them decently is never clearly decided."
So I will try here to be exact....
By: Beth Kephart ,
on 1/24/2012
I love that you are combining photography with writing in your class. Have a great time
I love walking with a camera--I see things I wouldn't otherwise.
What a great picture and experience! :)