Memoir and Modernism's Mantle - "The Waste Land"
In which I discuss the challenge of combining my memoir with Eliot's masterpiece.
In some ways, I didn’t have a choice but to use T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to structure my memoir.
I didn’t set out to write a memoir, until I did.
I didn’t know that I was writing a memoir, until I was.
I didn’t realize that I was writing a memoir, until it was too late.
My writing was about my brother, hippie turned Assemblies of God preacher struck with 13-years of major depressive disorder, actively suicidal for years. The similarities between us were legendary, though he was 10 years older than me. So I looked over my shoulder for mental illness for as long as he was sick, and for a considerable amount of years after he died.
One year, when I turned 52, that was the year I became older than my brother. But it was also the year that my life exploded into a thousand streaking meteors - the death of a galaxy, the rebirth of a new star.
I studied The Waste Land in college with Professor Louis Owens, the handsome part-Cherokee man who would become my mentor, in a sense. He was a Steinbeck expert and a Native American novelist. He taught a course called “waste land literature,” teaching novels that were influenced by The Waste Land. I took a variation of that course three times. But he also taught The Waste Land in Major American Writers (Americans and Brits have fought over Eliot’s lineage for years) and in classes on Modernism, my chosen field of study in graduate school. I got The Waste Land in classes with other teachers as well, most notably during my Master’s degree at UNM in Hugh Witemeyer’s class, in which we read the big 5 modernists: Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Wolff. Pound’s Cantos, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, these works were not for the faint of heart. Sadly, Professor Witemeyer died this year, May 2022.
When I started writing about my brother, I had been teaching steadily as an adjunct for 13 years. I had been out of grad school for 16 years, out of English graduate study for 20 years. The Waste Land was not in the forefront of my mind. But Eliot was never far from me. I’ve sold most of my books but I always kept the small copy of Eliot’s Selected Poems with my scribbled annotations in it from my undergraduate years.
I wanted to get my brother’s psychiatric records to see if there was anything in there that could be gleaned about what he went through. I am not a psychologist, though with as much time as I have spent in psychologist’s offices mostly in a support role for my partners, I should have earned a degree. It hasn’t done much good. My brother and I grew apart through the years, partly because of his church leanings and partly because of his illness. So I didn’t have a lot to go on regarding his illness. But his records can only be accessed by next of kin and his two daughters with whom I don’t have a relationship have the rights to release those records or not.
I wrote to my brother’s psychiatrist, to a few of his friends, people who had known him through the church. He was much beloved, and the intensity of his study was pointed out more than once. He was also much missed.
At some point, I realized I was writing about our similarities, about the dysfunctions in my own life, wondering what led him down the road he ended up on. It’s as if we were the same - one turned inward and one turned inside out. He experienced a deep depression on the inside, while my life was bombarded with mental illness of my loved ones from the outside.
I don’t recall what led me to look at The Waste Land after all those years. But certain phrases started ringing true when comparing my life with my brother’s - “I do not find / The Hanged Man. Fear Death by Water.”; Tiresias, the blind seer who experienced being both man and woman; the whirlpool; “Those are pearls that were his eyes”; “The Fire Sermon”'; “A Game of Chess”; the fisher king myth; the modern day drought and the drought and decayed lands in Eliot’s poem; “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.” - The comparisons ran deep, far more than mere coincidence.
Perhaps that serves to point out the greatness of Eliot’s poem, that with his specific phrasings and voices, the image and music of his words, he has captured something so universal and general at the same time that it can be applied to . . . a life such as mine. But that I had studied the poem so intently for years with an expert in Modernism, that that Professor also committed suicide, the Professor who had reminded me in life so much of my own brother - how does one explain that?
Modernism is often an experiment with form. In trying to find the best way to tell my own story, I experimented greatly in draft form in my writing. I wrote sections as screenplay, as blank verse, as lyric poetry, as internet chat - a kind of voice. I borrowed rhythms from Eliot’s other poems to accentuate my own story. My memoir is part pastiche of/part homage to Eliot. It’s collage and always deeply referential, and reverential. I also allude heavily to other Modernist works and authors - Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck in particular.
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr comments about Modernism in chapter 9 about Interiority.
“One mark of capital-M Modernism is writers commenting self-reflexively on the fact that they’re writing, as when a theater character breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the audience. In a conflict such as Crews’s, the process of telling a story in a way solves the psyche’s core problem—in this, there’s a poetic marriage of form and content. The medium is the message.”
All my life was working toward The Waste Land, for better or ill. If I tell my story straight, it’s just another fucked up life. Combined with the metaphorical implications of The Waste Land, and all the cultural connections to it - literarily, mythologically, thematically, sociologically - my story makes more sense.
To me, the connection between my memoir and The Waste Land is as natural as breathing, autonomic. I don’t think about it. It’s there in every page and in each scene.
This may seem like a long-winded defense of my use of The Waste Land in writing my memoir. Rather than a defense, or an excuse, I see it as a way to understand that my memoir, just like my life, doesn’t make as much sense without reading it through The Waste Land.
As always, thank you for your support. I’m seeking traditional publication for my memoir. By supporting this newsletter, subscribing to build my audience platform, or buying a subscription, you will help me to continue my efforts of seeking an agent and publisher, all for the price of one coffee per month. If you are unable to subscribe, please do so for free.
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Let me know what you think in the comments below. Are you a fan of The Waste Land? Are you ready to read more selections from my memoir?
Thank you for reading. The fall weather has been chilly, but bright, sunny, and mostly dry here in the Pacific Northwest, which means beautiful views of glacier-covered mountains both east and west and Mount Rainier hovering in the distance as if floating in the sky. I hope your own fall season is as scenic and filled with warmth and love indoors.
Enjoy this change of seasons.
As for me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Hi Lee! Forgive me, but I will continue to suggest that you write some short stories that are at least tangentially based on your real-life experiences, both as a way of “building a platform” for the memoir, and also as a method of seeing said experiences through a fresh lens. Nothing to lose, right?
Absolutely David. Thanks for the comment. I’ve been kicking around some extracted stand alone creative nonfiction stories. But I’ve just recently, no doubt due to the influence of Story Club, started thinking of some of those stories in fictional ways. I’m excited about those thought ramblings. You’ll be among the first to see what I come up with. Hope all is well in your world.