Speaking of Nabokov

language, syntax and figures of speech, appropriateness, age of voice
At the beginning of this excerpt from Speak, Memory, Nabokov sets the reader into the bedroom and emotion of his boyhood days. He tells us we're in the bedroom, but even beyond that, he lets his images speak for themselves.

"...if it disclosed a watery pallor one better not open them at all and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle" he writes of his windows' shutters (423).

From the idea of nasty day as a nasty child he moves into the mental landscape of exuberance and dappled sunlight; the exuberance he felt while outdoors chasing butterflies.

Throughout this excerpt Nabokov meanders back and forth between his childhood memories and the recent present or the present. Although reading about Nabokov-the-child is interesting because I get to see a lifestyle quite different from my own, it is his adult intrigues and activities that hold me. His voice as an adult is a trustworthy one because he has built up a whole lifetime of entomology, and his stories show that. I feel like I can read this for information, come away from the piece and share my new knowledge with others and know its legit. It is literary nonfiction at its best for this reason.

This ability to entertain and inform is crucial for anyone writing a non-fiction memoir. I think of writers like Augusten Burroughs, whom I've loved, or David Eggers, whose work I hate, and whatever factual, informative stuff I might have taken from their books has been lost on me, since I didn't really think they were ever really telling a whole truth in any of their stories. Through his mentally stimulating crafting of his lifetime, Nabokov gives us fact along with emotion.

"'Natural selection', in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of 'the struggle for life' when a protective device was carried to the point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation," he writes of the ways in which butterflies, moths and caterpillars disguised or changed themselves as needed. " I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art," he writes (425).

His love for art, nature and the craft of his own work shine in this passage, and it is his refined voice that allows for this. Were he to have written of his butterflies and knowledge from the child's viewpoint, we'd never get these insights, nor the detailed knowledge he's shared.

What is lost, of course, is the wonder and first-time innocence of a child out catching bugs for the first time. We don't get much of that sense of not-knowing here, but my guess is that even as a child Nabokov was a rather stoic, although quick and clever, boy. "Losing" this works for me, though, because I have my own sense of wonder and innocent understanding of what it was to chase bugs. What he's given me connects art with the natural world, and that wasn't something I had as a child, nor an adult really, until starting grad school. And even though my memoir doesn't take place in outdoor landscapes or focus much on place and environment, I've learned how to play with emotion in my word choice, sentence structure and composition enough so that I feel like I can relate my own "innocence" at the time of my stroke to the things going on in my voice when I write from the persona I write from.


In Eggers' and Burroghs, we get lots of emotion, lots of clever wit, but who knows how much "truth" we get.

McCourt's uncluttered life

The first time I read Angela's Ashes I was going through a severe case of Irelust (I wanted to go to Ireland real bad). My introduction to the brogue and the lifestyle and all of that seems to have come from something beyond this book, but I can't remember what now. A boyfriend, I think, whose family was Irish? Maybe. At any rate, despite the troubles or Troubles, I feel in love with the idea of Ireland, the harsh realness of place that McCourt conjured up for me. Today, I read the book as an adult and think that it wouldn't be at all fun to live that lifestyle-- not that I thought it would be fun when I was younger, but I was more charmed by the exoticism of the whole thing--but I feel so in line with what McCourt notes was an "uncluttered life" in the snipped in our class readings.

I've always been a traveler, restless and full of wanderlust. But I've also lived a real comfortable life, full of all the amenities McCourt never had. My troubles, and thus the stuff of a memoir (who wants to read a memoir about a happy, perfect life?) didn't start til I had brain surgery, but they've given me something to write about. When I could force myself away from the clutter of travel plans and an exciting social life and work to do so. left Chicago last year because I wanted to do just that, get away from the clutter (and excitement) of a life that pulled me from my writing, and when I look back at the stuff I've written (for my memoir) today, I can't believe how cluttered it is sometimes. I think that comes from not really being sure how to tell the story.

McCourt says that the child's voice is "innocent," it can also be messy. Think of a 4 year old and how he tells a story. There's lots of "and then.. and then's" because their train of thought sort of peters off and reroutes itself sometimes. McCourt has managed to stay away from that here, and I wonder if part of his ability to nail the voice and mood so crystal clearly also comes from his writing at 66, after retiring, and after a life-time of telling the stories. He'd had plenty of practice in adopting the persona of young Frank, so he could write with some clarity, and leaving his job gave him time to write without the clutter of work and other papers.

What this does--this perfectly clear telling of the story, from the viewpoint of a child-- for me, is tell the story in a way I can understand while creating two different characters. There's the Frank/teller, who sounds smart and contemplative, and then there's the Frank/kid, who I don't feel like I see quite as well as I see Malachy. I see him of course, but he somehow seems less than childlike to me. It's weird, and I've only just begun to think about what that does for me as a reader. Because present tense is used, I feel a sense of currency in the reading, which might also be what makes me see Frank as less-than child, since I can't separate him in my head as an adult now? I know.. that kind of contradicts the idea of two Franks, but it muddles me all up to think about it. So much for an uncluttered mind as I read!

Greatness and Freedom- Dinesen's Africa

Although I've commented in my class post about Dinesen's language and the way her surroundings influence her style, I'm always stuck by the feelings of freedom that must have existed for her in Africa. I can imagine that as a woman at the turn of the century it was difficult for her to feel much freedom in her daily life. That she could "escape" to Africa and find it there is clear in her writing, not just in what she says about the place, but the very places and atmospheres she chooses to write about.

"Everything you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility. The chief feature of the landscape, and your life in it, was the air... In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame, burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects.. in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart "(347).

Dinesen's passage about the way the air moved around her not only lifts me up to her level of appreciation for something so mundane as the air, but it undulates in pace and rhythm in much the same way a breeze blows a leaf down a dirt road. She may be talking about the atmosphere here, but as she shares these observations with the reader, she's also throwing out the contradictory nature of the place. Her air is a flaming candle at the same time it is running water, and the very juxtaposition of these things is as juxtaposed as her landscape and existence in it. Here she is, a landed woman, a member of society; White. But she's out on safari, she's engaging with her help and the natives. She's perhaps thought of as dainty and maybe even helpless at home, but here, in the "wilds" of Africa, she's got her own power, her own lifestyle.

Africa itself, as we see it through her eyes is as much a wild place as a calm one; as much a hot, dry land as a it is a sky full of vivid blues and violets.

I'm revising a piece about my childhood home for my thesis right now, and what I'm noticing is the contradictions and juxtapositions of the land and my perceptions of it. Many see a huge expanse of land as openness, possibility; growing up I felt hemmed in and confined by all that nothingness. One of Dinesen's brilliant moves is using these things to really put me there in her land, and this is something I'm trying to work with on my piece too. I want readers to feel the appreciation I have, now as an adult, for the openness, but I also want them to recognize just how limiting that can also feel. I don't get a sense of limits in Dinesen's writing, not the kind I struggled with, but the kind that came with being so different and removed from a "normal" society.

Enchanting myself away from the normal - Angelou post

Before I applied to grad school I spent the summer reading MFA reading lists for schools across the country. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was on several lists, so I read it. The book has stuck with me for its vivid imagery and uniquely light way of speaking to dark subjects. Angelou's ability to write with the innocence and wonder of a small child carries this book, and even though I sometimes wonder if she's really a trustable narrator- because her style of storytelling IS so vivid-- I feel satisfied that I am getting an accurate portrayal of Marguerite's life. So in reading our lecture notes, I wasn't surprised to learn that Angelou's magic carpet is sherry, a deck of cards and secluded room. As writers we have to do whatever it takes to get us out of the ordinary into a place where language sings and the common description/definition of things falls away. Because of this, I think Caged Bird is a timeless story, one that speaks to a certain period of Americana, but at its heart can show anyone how to live and move beyond one's world. Even if that world was a war-torn Parisian cafe and the writer was Hemingway, or a crummy, dumpy house and the writer was Augusten Burroughs, writers have the unique ability to take a moment and move beyond it to speak a larger truth.

So, in moving away from the 2010 Caribou cafe in which I sit now, let's go to Nebraska, circa 1989. This might be hard for some of you to read.. sorry. It's just what came to me.


The burlap bag is heavy in dad's hand-- I can tell becuase the muscles in his tanned forearm are shifted out a little, and with each wriggle and bulge of the bag I see that muscle tighten and pulse as he steps forward. I'm not sure where the bag came from, but he probably had it out in the dusty shop. When he came to the house with it an hour ago, I grabbed it from him and watched it puff the scent of dirt and tractor grease, surprised at its presence in his hand.

"Marcella, where did Touca have her kittens? Can you find them?"
Dad refered to me as his "right hand man," and becuase I had yet to start school and mom was gone all day, I spent my days with him in the shop. He was my best friend, and at five years old, I was all sugared compliance and quick eagerness.
"Yeah yeah, she had them in the old pig barn, over behind the saddles. You know, where you keep the old hay bales? Only one of them has been up and walking but--"
"They're sick, Marcella. All the cats around here always get distemper. It's not good to have sick kitties, it is?"

Was dad actually telling me he was going to take my kitties to the vet? This was unheard of. The feral cats mothered batches of babies the way I collected toads and slugs in the summer-- often and a fierce protectiveness, and dad had no use for the multitudes of wild cats that teemed around the farm propoerty. I couldn't believe he was going to make sure this group got the attention they needed to clean up the boogers that constantly plauged their eyes, and I didn't want him to stuff them in a bag, but if that was what it took to get them there safely, then so be it.

"No, it's not." I said, agreeing that sick kitties were bad. I couldn't play with them, what with their snotty faces, and most of the time, they lived for a while then died any way. If dad was going to get them some help, maybe I'd actually get to tame one, feel its soft down fur and nuzzle it in the way my friends with indoor cats got to. "I can help you get them if you want."

Dad had nodded me toward the pig barn, and we'd gone in to find the kitties. The old shed hadn't been used for hogs in years, but in the dust-mote shades of shadow and light that filtered in through the cracked and broken boards you could always smell some combination of amonia, straw, mash, pig shit and mold. I loved the old buildings on our farm, but I never played in this one becuase it was so old and fally-downy. The containment corrals had mostly fallen down, but next to the building and the one fence still standing, and old well and water tank still bobbed mossy water in and over its lipped surface.

"Ok, Marcella, I see them. You can go back to the house now."
I wasn't sure why dad was sending me to the house alone-- I figured we'd load up the kitties then take them to the vet together.
"You don't need my help here? But I can--"
"No, no, go in and.. get me some.. twine or something. To, uh, tie the bag? Please?"

The tall grass that had grown up around the pig barn knicked my legs as I ran through it, trying to get to the house and back in time to help dad. I don't know why I can still remember the way that grass and the weeds felt as they slapped against my bare legs, but I know that I'll never forget the scent of that pig barn, or the way dad's arms looked as he walked around the water tank, carrying that bag, arm muscles bulging. By the time I had found and hauled the spool of twine back to dad, he was outside again, moving around the water tan, dipping the bag in it. I stood and watched as he dipped the wriggling bag in the water, holding it under longer and longer each time, then letting it drop. I knew then, as a child knows a bad thing when she sees it, that something was wrong with this picture, that my kittens were sick and that dad was drowning them. I knew then that yes, maybe those kittens were beyond saving with the vet's medicines. I knew that even pulling them up was probably not going to save them. But what I witnessed was wrong in a particular way that only the executioners of bad men can probably know. My dad had drowned my kittens to put them out of their misery, and to end his own discomfort with their presence, but those things alone were not exactly what was so wrong with the scene. What was wrong was that he had lied to me, that my dad had lied to me, or at the least, misled me as to what he was doing with the kittens and why he needed my help. I eventually grew up and got hogs to show for 4-H and housed them in that pig shed. They drank water that came from that tank; I "got over" what I saw that dad and how bad I felt for the mewling bag of sopping kittens who had their eyes cleansed in the most unholy of baptisms, and I left the farm. That memory doesn't come to me often, but when my last cat died, it did. When my dog ate poison and died, it came to me then, too. There is something beautiful and innocent about a life lived among the cycles and organic moments of life and death on a farm, but I wonder if it only when we keep them masked and containted that we are able to accept them.