Memoir and the Voices of Literary Masters
In which I lay out my vision of voice in "My Own Private Waste Land"
The more I read about the craft of memoir, the more I encounter writers talking about voice. Voice, voice, voice - as if that is all there is to a memoir.
But I’m going to, singlehandedly, put a stop to that right here. Voice is only one part of any literary work. Hard-boiled detective novels have a voice, and they’re all a variation of that voice, stemming perhaps from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. You know the voice, the one from noir movies, the down-on-his-luck detective in his seedy office, always scraping for a buck, his voice gravelly from too much smoke and scotch and late night carousing.
Take a more recent memoir, such as Carmen Maria Machado’s fabulous In the Dream House, one of my comp titles as it and my own memoir deal with abusive situations in alternative lifestyle relationships. While she has a distinctive voice, what’s captivating about her book is the distance which it creates between the events and the telling with form - the short chapters all with similar kinds of titles, almost as if they are a series of notecards to revolve through while giving a speech. More than a single voice, she’s multi-vocal - she has a story-teller’s voice as well as an academic’s voice as well as the voice of one in a personal relationship.
The voice in my memoir contains multitudes (thank you, Walt). T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land is a tour de force on so many levels, a masterwork of world art - and it just so happens to be an analog for my life (both to my detriment and great good fortune - thanks be for the way out of the waste land!). But as a landmark poem in any regard, it’s that The Waste Land is poly-vocal. One of the working titles of the poem is He Do The Police in Difference Voices. There are simply so many voices in The Waste Land.
Mary Karr writes about finding her voice, struggling against the upper class writers she studied and the poets she admired. In chapter 14 Personal Run-Ins with Fake Voices) of The Art of Memoir, Karr writes about those poets, including Eliot:
Try to find a poet whose talent differed from mine more than Eliot—tight as a rolled umbrella, somebody once called him—or insurance executive Wallace Stevens or prim Miss Dickinson. It’d be hard. They’re poets known for experimental bents and hermetic symbolic systems that can forge intense psychlogical spaces in a reader’s head. Their voices also tend toward the reticent. In a similar vein was New York School wizard John Ashbery, a glib, easeful, prolific god whose cool stream of consciousness I worshiped (sic). My critical thesis on him topped a hundred pages—this on a poet who admits he’s indecipherable and cares not one whit if the reader gets him. This whole herd of poets—all but Dickinson classically educated—operates on elision and emotional reserve. (p. 131)
With a title like My Own Private Waste Land and the role of Eliot’s The Waste Land in my life, both as a subject matter that I studied intently for years and the application of it to my own life in hindsight, mapping it verse by verse onto my life as if it were a pattern to make a suit of clothes for me - would that it were not! -- is it any wonder that my own memoir is poly-vocal as well?
I play with voice like musicians play with melodies. I harmonize with my influences, borrow phrases and forms from the Masters. I use stream of consciousness a la Faulkner and Joyce. I use heightened diction a la Melville’s Ahab in Moby-Dick. I use the specter of the supernatural, a la Hawthorne and Elliosn’s Invisible Man. I use symbolism from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I allude to Huck Finn’s escape, his lighting out for the territories. Vardaman from As I Lay Dying makes an appearance. There is a parade of characters and voices a mile long in my memoir, not accidentally so.
This layering is like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, dropping track after track on top of each other until what you get is a whole original glittering object. No one work stands out, though T.S. Eliot’s influence, both in the structure and the use of lines from the poem as chapter titles resonates most clearly of all, by design.
Are you with me? Voice, then, in my work is about getting closer and further away from the events and is highly dependent on my quality of sight for those events. Some events I was able to see clearly, while others were distorted visions complicated by my disoriented sight caused by the influences of my partners’ mental illnesses that I was unaware of, like looking into a kaleidoscope upside down. You learn to walk on eggshells, and in so doing, you squint and flinch and twist this way and that to accommodate in order to get through the day to day fight of life.
The beginning of my book (Part 1 - The Burial of the Dead, and Part 2 - A Game of Chess) is the set up. Since I was separated from my family for so long, I didn’t have close relationships with my family members who died by suicide. Was I saddened at their deaths? Of course I was! Was my life upended - no, not exactly. They were distant from me and thus I was shielded from their effects, in some ways. And thus, my voice in part 1 is distant - recalling what I knew of them - burying the dead. But the mental illness is a major thread in my family and kept me looking over my shoulder for years.
“Back at my back I always hear . . .
fear in a handful of dust.”
Part 2 - A Game of Chess concerns my similarity to my brother, who was 10 years older than me. In some ways, I was pawn to his King. But as anyone knows, the Queen is the strongest piece on the chessboard. The King’s movements are limited and it’s his defeat that is the goal of the game. Pawns are sacrificed along the way, but they also become powerful forces of their own, slipping under the radar so to speak.
In short, the pawn is something like Ishmael in Moby-Dick. He alone survives to tell the tale.
I am the last male Hornbrook in my family’s story. So much is gone, so much death.
Death has undone so many.
So you agents out there - give my manuscript a read through and realize that the voices part of the plan, both distant and intimate, far and near, pastiches of snippets of literary allusions to the strikingly original, a combination of my reading and application of The Waste Land to my life’s story. (For those of you reading - send this newsletter to the agents in your life - a great new voice in the world of letters!)
I’m a day late in getting this post out - my apologies! As the weather grows colder and the holidays heat up, I find myself with so much more to do. The end of the year is coming quickly. Soon, winter solstice will arrive, the shortest day of the year, and then the days will lengthen and warmth will return to the earth.
For now, my friends, stay warm and enjoy yourself with friends and loved ones.
For me, well, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Let me know in the comments below what you think about “voice in memoir.” Is it the end all be all of the memoirs you know? Certainly some memoir thrive because of their voice. But I think the case for voice is overstated and that formal experimentation is also one of the great hallmarks of storytelling in memoir. Dear reader, what do you think?
If you haven’t shared my newsletter with others, please do. I am building platform for my memoir, My Own Private Waste Land, in a bid to seek traditional publication. It’s a sordid train wreck of a tale, a life thrown into a decade of disarray and dysfunction by other people’s mental illnesses. How I survived is anyone’s guess. Actually, it’s not a guess at all. It’s all in the book. If you’d like to read it, let me know and I will send you a beta read copy. You can send a private message to me at lee_hornbrook@yahoo.com.