WHAT DO WE WRITE WHEN WE WRITE MEMOIR?

Since I’ll be on a panel with memoirists this weekend at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula, I’ve been trying to think ahead to possible issues. First of all, after reading the memoirs of the other people (all men), I can see that there are a great number of reasons for writing a memoir in the first place:

To preserve the past, especially for a family or for a cherished place which might be as specific as a town or as general as ranching. The importance here would be the recording of fact plus a feel for the experience: the details of family living, how things were done, the general values, the impact of the times.

To justify a life, whether it is large or small. Sometimes there are huge issues involved, like a war or the depression, and sometimes something much smaller, like a marriage or a career. The twentieth century is deeply influenced by industrialization and the desire to escape its consequences, including world war.

To explore a story, the narrative line of a person or group, like a tribe or a frontier town. Or even something like wheat or water use.

To unmask, maybe someone famous, or to resolve a mystery, maybe a murder. This leads towards the issues of what are called “prurient interest” or sensationalism or just “too much information.” These last issues remain unresolved because the ground shifts culturally. Things taken for granted in one place or time might be horrifying in another.

When people used to ask whether I was writing fiction or nonfiction (which was a very common question, one that people seemed to be comfortable with then -- before the line blurred so completely as it has now), I used to say that my choice was between telling the truth and calling it fiction, or telling a story and calling it fact. Sometimes reality is confusing, people are committed to their preconceptions, and there is really no way to know the real facts anyway.

Much of what I’ve done is the simple recording of family stories, a task made much easier by Bob’s habit of taking the two of us down to visit his folks every night after dinner. His parents were the age of my grandparents. They had come as youngsters to Browning, Montana, at a time when there were a dozen or so white people and the tribe was about half full-bloods and half mixed-bloods, with a pretty big component of what they called Cree but were really refugees from Riel’s Rebellion in the Red River Country. The line between the Montana Blackfeet and the Canadian Blackfoot Confederacy was much thinner then, almost a technicality. All these things created stories, which "the folks" told over and over.

Were they true? Dunno. Were they worth telling? I think so, though I might have made the wrong choices and I certainly didn’t tell them all. I figure I used about sixty per cent of the material I had about Bob, his family and the reservation. My emphasis was on the early years of Bob’s life. I spent very little time in this book on what I’ve come to call the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, the interlocking institutions and experts who control a very lively million-dollar enterprise in a way that makes the individual artists almost irrelevant except as gallery-fodder.

What I was really after was the kind of thing that I started thinking about when I was the interim minister in Kirkland, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. At that time the UU congregation was housed in a former funeral parlor at the top of a hill overlooking the lake to Seattle itself. It was a wonderful view and the building had a long porch across the front plus a generous set of rooms looking that way. One of them had a wood-burning stove and a kitchen.

Older women in the congregation complained that they couldn’t drive in the evening but all our meetings and classes were in the evening, because the younger people all worked. So I tried to think of a class for older women in the afternoon. We decided on a kind of mixture of teatime and genealogy. I bought a huge role of wide paper, cut us each an eight-foot piece (that’s how long our worktable was) and we got to work drawing our family trees. Each woman was expected to take one meeting to explain the patterns she found: early or late marriage, unexplained gaps, twins, miscarriages, marriage sequences (deaths, divorces), extra-legal relationships, secret relationships (later revealed, obviously) and so on. A simple thing like an age difference between bride and groom sometimes turned out to be very revealing.

Sometimes we wandered from our task. I found that the person explaining was often deeply absorbed in what she thought was enormously powerful, but the other women shrugged off all sorts of her tragedies as just what people must endure in ordinary life. I tried to keep the focus on patterns. One day the tea at hand was “passionfruit” -- we liked herbal teas. Though later we attributed the topic to the tea, in fact I think it was just the idea of it. The women began to tell the story of their first nights after the wedding. In those days one “saved oneself” so the incidents were wildly funny. But the “Chesil Beach” factor also entered in and we had to get out the tissue box.

We’d been together long enough to build trust and told things that one’s grown children probably didn’t know and never would. But they needed to be told to someone who would pay attention. A counselor once told me that human experience is never really “real” until it is witnessed by other humans, so maybe that’s what was happening. Mircea Eliade would call it “valorizing” which has a nice term suggestive of courage.

What I tried to do in my book about Bob Scriver was to describe the patterns. For instance, I think that the parents split the children between the two of them: Harold the older for the father and Robert the younger for the mother -- not exclusively but as the carriers of the family heritage. Harold would assume the store and Robert would be guided by his mother who loved music and didn’t want either of her children to go away.

That meant another pattern: that the dis-valuing of art as a career meant that Bob was educated in one media (music) before he embarked on a second (art). He was grown, middle-aged, before he began to take sculpture seriously and therefore came to it with a pre-existing structure and ability to focus. It was both an advantage and a limit. Sometimes he was bitter, but it was clear that he dearly loved music. After his worst stroke he admitted that his art ability was diminished but claimed that his understanding of music was still intact.

The reason for dis-valuing art created another pattern: the conviction that “artist fellers” (as Harold referred to them) were inherently different, genetically “bad seed,” and bound to drink, chippy, go broke, and lose control of their emotions. This family idea (probably common among quite a few white homestead types) meant that Bob was enormously concerned to “do the right thing” (he was a judge, active in the community organizations -- at least early -- and much invested in religion, though not Christianity) but because Harold appeared more conventional and was indeed a good businessman, his drinking and fighting were always considered “normal.” In fact, he was also prevented from doing what he really wanted to do, which was ranching, except on a small scale worked in around the all-mighty store.

When Bob divorced me, he fully expected me to drink, to hang around with bad people, to sink into economic failure, and to generally act like an “artist feller.” At some level I think that’s what he was divorcing, the possibility of himself being that way. So part of the reason for writing this book was to prove that I survived and went on to new horizons. His fourth marriage was to an alcoholic uneducated woman who could not survive without him. He reinstated the pattern while keeping it “hers” and not his own.

In a life a lot of things are “hidden in plain sight.” One purpose of a memoir might be to bring them to light, even if it’s too late to help the person who lived the life. Because maybe the real contribution is to the lives that come afterwards.


1964. Bob's beard was an early experiment which he abandoned because everyone said, "Hey, mister! Wanna buy a goose?" In other words, they thought he looked like a Hutterite.