Each Life that Touches Ours for Good: Memoirs to Savor
by Marilyn Green Faulkner
Each human life is a miracle of great complexity, containing love, death, drama and humor, wrenching moments of decision and periods of pleasure and suffering. I suppose we can never truly understand any other person, but through the power of language we can come close. My first experience with this phenomenon came as a young girl, when I read The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller. I will never forget it. Ms. Keller had the ability, not only to live a beautiful life, but also to describe the experience in a way that made me feel that I had lived it along with her. Since that encounter I have shared, through their autobiographies, the lives of everyone from Laurence Olivier to Victor Frankl, from Nien Cheng to Stan Freberg. (By the way, if you are a Stan Freberg fan write me. There aren’t many of us and we are all friends.) Occasionally I come across a memoir of such poetic power that I must take it off my non-fiction shelf and put it among my treasured works of literature. These three memoirs fall into that category.
This House of Sky, by Ivan Doig
“Art comes from craft,” says Ivan Doig, author of several novels about the American West. His memoir of life among the sheep herding families of Montana has been a consistent favorite for decades. Doig’s prose is so poetic that his life among the stubborn Scots of Montana’s high country becomes a lyrical ode to a uniquely American upbringing. The book opens with a devastating description of his mother’s death:
“Soon before daybreak on my sixth birthday, my mother’s breathing wheezed more raggedly than ever, then quieted. And then stopped. The remembering begins out of that new silence.”
In twenty-eight words Doig has given us a wealth of information, emotional and physical. We hear the rasp of the chronic asthmatic, see the terror in the eyes of her little boy, and know that his life will be defined in some way by this loss. Life begins and ends on this day, and we are part of it now. His description of himself as a “rewriter, rather than a writer,” sheds some light on Doig’s ability to evoke the landscape and language of his Montana home, along with the emotional turmoil of his wandering lifestyle.
Doig believes that the urge to tell stories, which began with pictures on cave walls, is a response to “the universal dark all around us.” Though his narratives are all set in the American West, he does not consider himself a regional writer. “To me,” he writes, “language – the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose – is the ultimate “region,” the true home, for a writer.If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it’d be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life.”
Ivan Doig succeeds in his quest, and you will enjoy the journey with him.
The Road from Corrain, by Jill Ker Conway
More sheep herding, this time in Australia, provides the setting for the remarkable life story of Jill Ker Conway. Raised on a sheep farm in the outback of Australia, Conway somehow managed to become a respected scholar and eventually the President of Smith College. This journey was made more difficult by the very low expectations for women in her upbringing. Describing herself in high school as a chubby, straight-haired, “ugly duckling,” she was even more embarrassed by her worst feature: her brain:
“There was more than my appearance to worry about. My family and school friends agreed that I was “brainy.” This was a bad thing to be in Australia. People distrusted intellectuals. Australians mocked anyone with “big ideas” and found them specially laughable in a woman. My mother herself was divided on the subject. One moment she would be congratulating me on my performance at school, and the next contradicting her approval by urging me not to become too interested in my studies. If I did, I would become a “bluestocking,” a comically dull and unfeminine person.I tried hard to develop the right aspirations, but I had no map of the future to guide me. Fretting about this.I remembered my father’s advice about what to do if one were ever to become lost in the bush. “Don’t panic and rush about,” he said. “Stay in the shade, and wait for the night sky. You’ll be able to see the Southern Cross, and you can navigate by that. I wished there were pointers for life’s journeys like the planets and constellations which could help pilot us along the surface of the earth.” (147-148)
Conway’s straightforward style brings us into her life story and offers us inspiration to accomplish our highest goals, as she has. The difficult decisions she faced along the way will be familiar to many who have navigated a similar course. Conway wrote a sequel to this popular book titled True North.
West with the Night, by Beryl MarkhamBy any standard, Beryl Markham’s life was remarkable. Born in England in 1902, she was raised in East Africa, spending her childhood playing with the native Murani children as her father turned a stretch of wilderness into a working farm. She fell in love with flying after being introduced to it by Denys Finch Hatton (made famous in the film Out of Africa) and worked as an aviator carrying mail and passengers from 1931-1936. She was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, and spent the last several years of her life as a horse breeder in Kenya. West with the Night, her memoir of her early life and her career as an aviator, was a tremendous success when it was published. Hemingway said of her, “she writes rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.” After Markham’s death a controversy arose about the authorship of her book, which may actually have been ghostwritten by her third husband, Raoul Shumacher. This matters very little to me. I love so many things about this book, from the hunting scenes of her youth to her musings on the African experience. Here is a wonderful description of the terrible solitude of her transatlantic flight:
“You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. Being alone in an airplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces and the hopes rooted in your mind – such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.” (283)
The climactic moment in the story of Helen Keller is her discovery that each object she touched had a name, and that this name could be communicated through the signs her teacher made in her hand. This was language, and through this new medium her teacher was able to explain to her that the processes of her brain had a name, “think,” and that the happy feelings in her heart toward others had a name, “love.” Of this realization Helen says, “The beautiful truth burst upon my mind – I felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.” (The Story of My Life, 39-40)
Each human life is a miracle, connected to other lives through the invisible lines of language. We cannot all be aviators, or scientists, or scholars. We may never understand what it is to be blind or shy or beautiful or brave, but we can spend a few moments in the lives of those who are and come away richer for the experience. Your life is a matter of great importance to a certain group of people. I hope that reading these memoirs will inspire you to put pen to paper and tell the story of your life. Though it may never reach the bestseller lists, your experiences and insights will have a greater impact on those you love than any of these.
Do you have a favorite autobiography? Write and share it with us at be*******@me**************.com.
This House of Sky, by Ivan Doig, was the August selection for the Best Books Club, a group for readers who love classic literature. Our September selection is Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. For a complete reading list log on to www.thebestbooksclub.com.
2002 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.