I am in the second or third draft of my own memoir, and have finally solved the problem of structure, I believe.

However, when you come across a memoir whose structure is sheer genius what can your jaw do but drop?

I have loved Cider with Rosie for well over a decade. Laurie Lee’s writing in patches is so exquisite, so perfect, it almost makes me want to cry with pleasure. He writes of his mother, of her invincible childlike gaiety and good nature, a kind, noble soul, betrayed and abandoned by the husband who was the love of her life, whose sudden death tilted her over into dementia, “Her flowers and songs, her unshaken fidelities, her attempts at order, her relapses into squalor, her near madness, her crying for light, her almost daily weeping for her dead child-daughter, her frisks and gaieties, her fits of screams, her love of man, her hysterical rages, her justice towards each of us children – all these rode my Mother and sat on her shoulders like a roosting of ravens and doves.”


Rilke writes to a young poet, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.” Lee’s childhood was provincial, disadvantaged, poor. There was no Eton-Oxford hothouse, no indication that he should or would become a writer. Yet become one he did. 


His childhood was lacking in the events which might provide a biographer’s chapters, unlike say Thomas Merton’s or Vladimir Nabokov’s, (two writers I’ve reviewed on this blog.) He therefore constructs his memoir as self-contained essays. “First Light,” setting the scene in his cottage in Gloucestershire, “First Names,” describing his family, and the characters of his village; “The Kitchen,” “Village School,” very mediocre at best, full of eccentric teachers; “Public Death, Private Murder,” of a murder of a bragging Kiwi, over which the entire village was complicit, and silent; Seasons, Relatives, Sex. 


All the staples of memoir–but irradiated and backlit by prose which, as Walter Pater says is true of all art, “aspires to the condition of poetry”. Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie’s burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted again… The old people in his village are “ – white-whiskered, gaitered, booted and bonneted, ancient-tongued last of their world, who thee’d and thou’d both man and beast, called young girls ‘damsels’, young boys ‘squires’, old men ‘masters’, the Squire himself ‘He’ and who remembered the Birdlip stagecoach, Kicker Harris the old coachman…”


I have read it a couple of times, and listened to it read by Laurie Lee himself a couple of times. I would highly recommend the audio version. What Laurie heard in his head as he wrote Cider was music, the music spoken with a soft Gloucestershire burr, and the listening to the roll of his sonorous cadences is a delightful and memorable experience. 


http://thegoodbooksblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/speak-memory-by-vladimir-nabokov.html
http://thegoodbooksblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/seven-storey-mountain-by-thomas-merton.html

Nabokov’s prose is so beautiful, that all one can do is sigh. My copy has vanished somewhere in my piles of books in the course of many moves, but when I find it, I will type some sentences out.

Nabokov wrote his book in English, of course, but he was trilingual (Russian, French and English) from an early age, and his English has the sort of contorted, pretzel-like strangeness one frequently finds in the (perfectly correct) English prose of the bi-lingual–I think of the prose of Sara Suleri and Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.

Nabokov describes, as one of his chapter titles puts it, a “Past Perfect,” a happy Russian boyhood, with books, and governesses, and wealth, and adoration, and time to pursue his many interests–butterflies, chess, books.

He was brilliant, and more importantly, blessed with a relatively easy-going temperament that enabled him to take the massive reverses of the Russian Revolution in his stride without bitterness, but with a philosophic, even amused, equanimity. That same essential stability of temperament enabled a happy and nourishing marriage amid all the vicissitudes of the emigre’s life.

If anything, being forced to produce literature to keep afloat sharpened the saw, but to his credit, did not blunt the oddness in him that gave him the courage to produce that most odd but stylistically and linguistically beautiful and heartbreaking book, “Lolita.”

A wonderful portrait of a vanished world! Full of sunlight and butterfly filled fields, and books and love!

And here, across the Atlantic is a similar childhood, Thomas Merton’s in The Seven Storey Mountain!
 http://wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com/2010/07/seven-storey-mountain-by-thomas-merton_16.html

For a decade or two, I preferred reading memoirs to fiction. The best are as well-written, and with as much craft. But they are “true”.

V.S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door is memorable. His father was a petty tyrant, schemer, dreamer, manipulator. He was inexcusably selfish. He plunged his family into poverty, while indulging himself in petty luxuries–oysters, clothes, lace, pianos.

He perpetually skirted financial disaster, and there was always “A Cab at the Door” as the title says, for yet another move under duress.

There are memorable vignettes. His father lolling in an armchair, legs splayed out, while his mother kneels before him, trying to get off his tight boots. His father eating oysters, while they watched. His father spending lavishly on himself, and niggardly on them.

The marriage, he memorably says, was ” a marriage of the rich and the poor.”

I remember reading that much later, Pritchett discovered that his father had another family, who were provided for in an even more niggardly manner. His half-sister has written a book about her childhood, farmed out to an old woman who would have her massage her nipples for hours at a time!! The Pritchetts had no idea of this family’s existence.

I conclude with an except from Thomas Lask’s New York Times Review, “Through it all, Mr. Pritchett’s mind and spirit grew, though it was squeezed and stifled in an environment hostile to art and learning. Irregularly educated and never in contact either through print or person with anything that could show him the possibilities of a life he desired, he had to live with his undisclosed and inchoate yearning. He did not know where to turn. He describes with painful recollection the humiliation he had to undergo as his father read with scorn a piece of schoolboy writing. He could not live at home, but there was so little independence in the family that he could not break away either. When he left at 20, he did it with subterfuge. He said he was going on a holiday to France, but he knew he would never return.

A novelist, short story writer, author of superb travel books, and also a critic, he has provided an engrossing document and a first-hand look at England in the first two decades of the century. It reads so quickly and is so engaging that the reader finds himself becoming unconsciously partisan, as impatient and restless as the young hero for the great day when he will be on his own.”