The rise of the memoir PDF
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi THE RISE OF THE MEMOIR OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi The Rise of the Memoir ALEX ZWERDLING 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Alex Zwerdling 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939585 ISBN 978–0–19–875578–4 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi Acknowledgments Long before this project became a book, it was an institutional community as well as opportunity, enabled by the far-sighted National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Every academic year, between thirty and forty fellows are fortunate enough to find themselves in a setting and with a group of colleagues, most of them likely to be (but not to remain) strangers. Aside from giving these individ- uals the chance to concentrate single-mindedly on the particular work they plan to do in their year blessedly free of rival professional obligations and commit- ments, the Center offers an opening to any who discover or sense a new collective interest to pursue it not as solitary, goal-directed work but as an exploratory, informal, curiosity-driven shared enterprise, with or without an agenda or clearly defined goals, and entirely without obligations. In the year I spent there, such a group project emerged when about a dozen of us realized that we were interested in trying to understand our individual, perhaps idiosyncratic, reasons for being obsessed by a particular subject or approach that bordered on the compulsive. Just why did each of us feel such a private need to think and read and write about X, as though X had chosen us? The disquieting sense of an obsession seemed inde- pendent of our formal, impersonal training—our “field,” our expertise, our pub- lished work. Most of us had been taught to focus on the object of inquiry, not on our own investment in it. Out of this inchoate shared group uneasiness, an informal but for each partici- pant vital group inquiry began to take shape. Collectively, we needed to under- stand not what was important about our subject but why it seemed—was—so compelling to us. We were no longer “objective inquirers” but individual writers, each with private reasons for exploring why we felt our buried questions were so urgent. The starting point was often an uneasy personal experience or situation: a literary critic going through her second divorce trying to come to terms with Shakespeare’s categorical injunction (in the Sonnets) “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds”; an American anthropologist in Morocco asked by his “native informant” if he wants to sleep with one of the young women in the group; a black legal scholar shopping at Benetton on a Saturday afternoon before Christmas denied admission on the grounds that the store is closed, though there are plenty of white shoppers inside. The anxiety-provoking anecdote, the personal, private encounter confirm, challenge, complicate whatever “objective knowledge” we might claim to have. In such writing, the stilts come off your legs. The Olympian perspective vanishes; and the account becomes a private/public story—troubling, fraught, written for an unknown audience that might in the end prove hostile or indifferent. In that small community, my closest ties were to Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, and to Temma Kaplan. We needed each other’s support because we were working without a map—often uneasy, lacking the sense of entitlement classic OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi vi Acknowledgments professional training offers its practitioners as they use the skills they have mas- tered. But much as I treasured the support of the other members of this group and of the institution that sponsored us, what I came to value most only became a project undertaken more than a decade later: this book on the emergence of mem- oirs as a “private” alternative to classic autobiographies. The link between our study group and “The Rise of the Memoir” was the question of entitlement and legiti- macy. By what right do we appropriate stories involving other people as ours to tell? Who authorized us? Do we own them? Why is the compositional and publish- ing history of this form of life-writing so frequently discontinuous and conflicted, full of false starts and radical revisions? More often than not, I discovered, the answers to these questions were to be found in archives that preserved the stages of conception and composition: multiple drafts, correspondence, and other raw materials in the careers of the writers I had chosen; collections that offered glimpses of the writer in the process of composing, revising, rejecting, discarding, beginning again. My debts to these archives are acknowledged among the permissions. Collectively, they offered ways to see such works as anxious enterprises, perma- nently “in process,” open-ended, rather than as finished products. They allowed me to reconstruct the opportunities and the impediments each writer encountered in breaking silence. Equally indispensable were the responses of my first and later readers—friends, colleagues, skeptics, editors, memoir addicts. The most important of them was Michael André Bernstein, who read through everything I had written at a late stage in its composition and (as it turned out) in his own short life, training his laser intelligence on its weak links and less plausible connections. My debt to him is incalculable. Other colleagues at Berkeley—particularly Elizabeth Abel, Catherine Gallagher, Colleen Lye, and Scott Saul—helped me at later stages in its progress. “Colleagues” at other institutions—Martin Meisel and Paul Strohm at Columbia, Sandra Gilbert, Hermione Lee, Laura Marcus, and members of the University of London Modernism seminar, especially Rebecca Beasley—provided invaluable advice or helpful intervention and helped me to shape the book. Closer to home, Florence Elon read and responded to first and later drafts with unfailing critical support. My protracted negotiations with Oxford University Press have been compli- cated and might deserve a memoir of its own: readers’ reports that offered radically different, essentially incompatible suggestions for revision; an out of the blue change of editors (each with a different agenda); a contract that paradoxically expected or required no changes at all; and finally, the appointment of a new editor, Eleanor Collins, who arrived late upon the scene. In our negotiations, she pro- posed unanticipated but valuable additions likely to make the book more access- ible to its potential readers, for example, the descriptive, annotated “Suggestions for Further Reading” of works on the subject from a variety of perspectives: of writers with their own memoir projects in train, of readers interested in the various kinds of experience memoirs typically explore, or in the craft choices involved in writing them, or in more recent examples than my book (which is contained by the border between the twentieth and our present century) could explore. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi Acknowledgments vii My greatest debt is to Irene Yoon, an advanced doctoral student in Berkeley’s English Department. Initially, she took on the responsibility for editing and for- matting the manuscript for submission to a press, then more specifically to meet the requirements of OUP. More than a year later, after Oxford had accepted it for publication, she took over the protracted and complex negotiations with archives, literary estates, and special collections, in order to secure permission to quote from fugitive materials I had found there. In most cases, these were not the words of the author but of his or her interlocutors—agents, reviewers, editors, correspondents it was hard to locate, translators, friends who were present at the gleam-in-the-eye phase. Since their comments and responses were often recorded in unpublished letters, they could not simply be quoted without permission: fugitive pieces that nevertheless allowed me to reconstruct every stage in the conception and develop- ment of the published work, for example, the rich correspondence between Nabokov and Katharine White, his editor at The New Yorker, where most of the original versions of the chapters that later coalesced into Speak, Memory first appeared. Cumulatively, these early responses to a kind of narrative that was only gradually emerging as a form worth taking seriously suggest that the impediments were constant, and the contest between what was expected and allowed and what the memoirist was struggling to write was protracted, because the external voices saying, “No, not that way; this way” and the internal ones recording the writer’s confusion and absence of confidence cumulatively slowed down or interrupted the project. “The Rise of the Memoir” would have been a much thinner, more monologic book without Irene Yoon’s inspired detective work, and her empathetic understanding of what was at stake in trying to define and describe an experimental, emerging form of autobiographical narrative. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi Copyright Acknowledgments Quotations reprinted with the permission of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations; Faber and Faber Ltd.; Walter Minton and Putnam/Penguin Random House; The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf; Brian Swann; the White Literary LLC. Copyright © 1952–1999 by Maxine Hong Kingston. Originally from the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Copyright © by Véra Nabokov. Copyright ©1950, 1960, 1961, 1972, 2015 by Véra Nabokov, courtesy of the Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Vladimir Nabokov, courtesy of the Vladimir Nabokov Papers at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Copyright © 1943, 1944, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1959, 1966, 1969, 1972, 1973, 2015 by Vladimir Nabokov, courtesy of the Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders prior to pub- lication. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity.
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