Dickens

The Odd Woman and the City, by Vivian Gornick

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In this 2015 memoir, Gornick gives us a flâneur’s tour of New York City and of her own quirky take on life. She calls it a memoir, but to my mind it falls somewhere in the grey area between memoir and personal essay.

Author of memoirs such as Fierce Attachments and one of the best texts on writing memoir, The Situation and the Story, Gornick warns us up front that she has not only changed names but reordered certain events and used some composite characters and scenes. I have no problem with pseudonyms, but shy away from reordering and composites. To me, these take away from the truthfulness of memoir, which after all is supposed to be nonfiction. Once I start thinking of characters, scenes and timelines as not real, then the power of nonfiction seeps away like air from a balloon.

That said, I assume her thoughts and reactions are real, so I enjoyed the opportunity to spend time in her company as she walks the city streets, usually accompanied by her gay male friend Leonard (real? not real?). She says:

What we are, in fact, is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports.

Having spent a large part of my life in cities, despite or perhaps in addition to enjoying more rural settings, I appreciate her immediately setting aside the image of New York as the grand opportunity for a young male genius to prove himself. Instead she says, “Mine is the city of the melancholy Brits—Dickens, Gissing, Johnson, especially Johnson.”

She speaks of Samuel Johnson’s distrust of village life with its closed and insular society. “The meaning of the city was that it made the loneliness bearable.” Gornick calls herself an odd woman, one who finds herself on the margin of society. For her the city does more than heal loneliness; it gives her a chance to dream, to buy time to find her own way: eschewing acquisitions, turning away from the honey trap of romantic love. “I prize my hardened heart,” she says.

Her openness provides receptors where I can attach my own thoughts and experiences. When she speaks of Freud’s discovery that we are, throughout our lives, divided against ourselves and resistant to being cured, I’m reminded of the Jacqueline Rose essay I read a few weeks ago. When she mentions William James’s pronouncement that our inner lives are always in transition and that “our experience ‘lives in the transitions,’” I think of my classes where I encourage writers to explore the multiple emotions one character may experience moment to moment.

I enjoyed her literary games: Is your life Chekhovian or Shakespearian? Who would have written the story of this person: Edith Wharton or Henry James? I liked her references, such as when she discusses the relationship between Constance Woolson and Henry James, or when she speaks of an insight gained from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: “One is lonely for the absent idealized other, but in useful solitude I am there, keeping myself imaginative company, filling the room with proof of my own sentient being.”

I’m cherry-picking parts I especially liked. In between, there are many wonderful scenes and witty, revealing conversations, such as this one where she runs into a former lover.

“You used me!” he cried.
“Not nearly well enough,” I said.
“What was all that about anyway?” he asked wearily.
. . .
“I can’t do men,” I said.
“What the hell does that mean,” he said.
“I’m not sure.”
“When will you be sure?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what do you do in the meantime?”
“Take notes.”

If you are looking for fascinating company in your own useful solitude, try spending some time with Vivian Gornick. This brief and captivating book will set you thinking and reminiscing.

What memoir have you read recently that felt like a meeting with a longtime friend?

The Shape of a City, by Julien Gracq

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In the 1920s Gracq lived for a time in Nantes. However, being a child at boarding school, only let outside the grounds on vacations and Sundays, his perceptions of the city are fragmented and idiosyncratic.

I lived in the heart of a city that loomed large in my imagination, but which I did not know very well. I was aware of certain landmarks, and familiar with some itineraries, but its substance, and even its smells, never lost their exotic flavor; a city where all the views led only to ill-defined, unexplored, faraway vistas, a loose framework easily absorbed into fiction.

The mysteries of a city we do not know well leave room for the imagination. And the pictures formed by our imagination outlast anything we may learn later, as reflected in the quotation from Baudelaire that provides the book’s title: “The shape of a city, as we all know, changes more quickly than the mortal heart.”

One result of only learning about the city through Sunday afternoon school promenades, is that he understands the structure of the city to be a series of lines radiating out from his school, like a starburst, with no interconnecting lines between them. His mental map does not at all correspond to the two-dimensional paper map of Nantes. As a dedicated map-reader, I’ve long been interested in the interplay between our mental maps and the various other sorts available.

Even if we think we know a city well, it can still surprise us.

There is always that element of surprise when, walking down streets one expects to be ugly . . . we suddenly see them transfigured by a ray of sunshine – like a moment of fleeting happiness. But such a surprise caused by the most insignificant event or impression can also happen elsewhere . . . it could be an unexpected declivity in the road which invites, tempts one to continue in that direction, a very slight turn of a road’s axis which both veils and partially reveals a perspective, a tree leaning over the sidewalk from above the crest of an ancient wall, a pleasing harmony in the rhythm of buildings alternating with free spaces which suddenly catches the eye. Instances when we are overcome by a feeling of how wonderful it would be to linger there, sure that life has regained its normal pace and recovered its guideposts, and that the universe has found a way to renew us and confirm its promises with just one brief, smiling look.

The power of memory and imagination that weave through this portrait of Nantes—a hybrid of memoir, reflections, and travel writing—shows Proust’s influence on Gracq. Here, though, the author is less concerned with the social mores and peoples’ foibles than with the place itself.

His descriptions of various parts of the city are beautiful and evocative, yet somehow wearying. They are mostly unconnected to bits of reverie or even memory beyond the fact of being there as a child. Thus, it’s a bit like seeing someone else’s vacation slides. If I had been to Nantes before, I would have been able to summon my own memories and thoughts, but I haven’t so after a while the descriptions ceased to engage me.

I’m far more interested in his thoughts, such as his meditation on the borderline areas between city and country.

This is perhaps why I am more sensitive than others to the existence of all kinds of boundaries along which the urban fabric tends to fray and unravel, areas neither within nor outside of city limits . . . once we start imagining there is just one step from boundary to frontier . . . Adrift on shreds of inhospitable land, slowly conquered by silence and mired in a sort of catalepsy, I could feel from afar the immense, haunting presence of the city, like that of a giant beast holed up in its lair whose respiration was the only sign of life. In almost every town where I have lived since then, whenever I went for a walk, my steps would automatically direct me toward some point of departure into the country.

With references to Rimbaud, Dickens, and Hugo among others, there is much of interest here even though some parts sag. Readers of his other work, such as The Opposing Shore, know to expect beautiful writing, a slower pace, and an intelligent and well-read companion who challenges us to dig deep into ourselves and our own experiences.

One reviewer said that this book is “a model for how to write about one’s home place[.] … It should be required reading for anyone setting out to describe their home place.”

How would you describe your home city?

All the Devils Are Here, by David Seabrook

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This is a strange book. Seabrook creates a portrait of Kent, though not the popular “Garden of England” image and not the sort of portrait you’d expect. It is a form sometimes called a psycho-geography or an odd sort of travel memoir, where we are drawn into his mind, the odd things that interest him, the associations they carry with them. It’s like listening to a chatty passenger in the seat next to you whose inescapable monologue takes you to unexpected places, places you perhaps would never go, sometimes leaving you floundering as you try to figure out how he got from here to there.

Seabrook explores a number of coastal towns, down on their luck now that the boom for such seaside resorts has passed. Margate became England’s first bathing resort in the early eighteenth century with other fishing villages following suit. That time is over now, and Seabrook is drawn to the seamier side of what remains.

Margate is where Eliot wrote “The Wasteland” after World War I as he recuperated from a nervous breakdown. Seabrook says “Margate plays a deeper game” than putting up a blue plaque to mark the connection. He describes the poem as being unlike “a war poem in the accepted sense of the words,” instead “highlighting what was lost by describing what was left.”

This is a good description of the book as a whole. In Rochester and Chatham, Seabrook draws a tenuous link between the painter Richard Dadd who murdered his father and the last, unfinished novel of Charles Dickens. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps is of course our first association with Broadstairs but Seabrook also introduces us to a pre-World War II fascist network based at Naldera, the holiday home built for Lord Curzon whose daughter married Sir Oswald Mosley. “We still don’t know what’s buried there,” he says.

A later section find him in Deal, where he unearths anecdotes about disgraced English comedians, Robin Maugham (jealous nephew of William), the Stripper murders, and tales of several gay writers, actors and athletes.

I was drawn to the book because the summary on the back cover reminded me of W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, a fascinating book of a walking tour in Suffolk where places and people bring scraps of history, literature, art, and philosophy to the author’s mind. We learn little about the author himself except through his choice of material and meditations stimulated by them.

Both are first person monologues, both are journeys into a singular mind, one that is on the verge of a nervous breakdown—explicit in Sebald, implied in Seabrook. Both are assemblages of tesserae that resist forming a recognisable mosaic, pushing the reader to explore their own imagination and ability to find connections.

I found Sebald’s fragments far more interesting, but what is intriguing here is the way Seabrook’s bits and pieces lead you ever deeper into seedy and shocking stories. You’d think starting with a murder, the book could only go up, but you’d be wrong. We learn almost nothing about the author except his note early on that his fiancé has just died of cancer, yet we know him intimately from the juddering rhythms of his mind, the peculiar trail of associations that he follows. And still he surprises us.

Some people love this book; some hate it. If you are curious about the peculiar way one mind can work or about what goes on beyond the pretty postcards of Kentish oast houses, check out this book. But I warn you: abandon all preconceptions you who enter here.

Have you read a book that baffled you but you couldn’t stop thinking about it?