Republic of Memory

One night in February 1864, Walt Whitman, newspaper editor, vagabond and singer of the American self, then a nurse shocked by the violence and horror of a vast and bloody civil struggle, stood “unobserv’d in the darkness” by the roadside of a military camp on the Virginia front and watched units of the Union army marching past. “The mud was very deep. The men had their usual burdens, overcoats, knapsacks, guns and blankets,” he wrote first in his diary and then in an autobiographical account, “Specimen Days in America.” “Along and along they filed by me, with often a laugh, a song, a cheerful word, but never once a murmur [of complaint]. It may have been odd, but I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the American people en masse.”

The same might be said in response to this collection of autobiographical excerpts. You, the reader, sit there, perhaps in the darkness of night, and witness a parade of individuality flow past that, en masse, adds up to a remarkable democratic vision of the American nation. If those masses picked up the gun in the Civil War, over the long course of this nation’s history, they also picked up the pen with an alacrity, an energy, that now amazes. The urge to record oneself, to capture selves of every imaginable sort, selves that nowhere else on Earth would have been considered worth recording; to right wrongs; to etch in memory violence experienced in the most unbearable ways; to recall the injustice of beatings and lashings, of spiritual longing, of suicidal feelings, of unbearable depression, of lives nearly crushed by poverty, by slavery, the fact of being a woman: and all of this, almost to our own time, rendered with great emotion, much thoughtfulness, some humor but, like those Union soldiers, with “never once a murmur” of complaint. Perhaps the very act of writing about one’s life has been, for most of our history, satisfaction enough to forestall complaint, agency enough to take away a feeling of victimhood.

For those (myself included) who imagined the youthful autobiographical rush-hour of recent publishing seasons to be something unprecedented, think again. Jay Parini’s “The Norton Book of American Autobiography” is a bracing reminder that autobiography, as he says, has always been “the essential American genre”--and youth, it turns out, never stopped anyone from writing one. Though arguments have abounded over when the American novel or American poetry originated, this collection makes clear that autobiography was present at the creation.

Two centuries before Whitman watched those troops march past, Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan wife, wrote a wrenching account of an Indian attack on her settlement, of how she traveled with her native captors into “the vast and desolate wilderness” of present-day Massachusetts and of the death of her youngest child in captivity. “It is a solemn sight to see,” she recorded with a vividness that would be a hallmark of centuries of testimony to come, “so many Christians lying in their blood . . . like a company of sheep torn by wolves . . . by a company of hell hounds, roaring, singing, ranting and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out.” Amid rivers of blood and oceans of faith, Rowlandson, a woman, seized a distinctly Protestant form in which the individual offers testimony before God and so launched a popular form.

Had Norton published such a collection several decades ago, it might have begun not with Rowlandson in 1682 but with the minister Jonathan Edwards, who, Parini reminds us, was a “founding father in the realm of American spiritual autobiography” and could turn a striking phrase. (He speaks, for instance, of how as a youth he “left off secret prayer . . . and returned like a dog to his vomit, and went on in ways of sin.”) Ben Franklin’s path-breaking autobiographical work of self-invention and self-spin would have followed, and then the reader would have visited Thoreau on his pond, Mark Twain steaming the Mississippi, the cancer-ridden Ulysses S. Grant recalling the taking of Vicksburg so that his story would earn some money for the family he would soon leave to this world, and the depressive Henry Adams looking toward a terrifyingly “mechanical” new century, among others in a small pantheon of American autobiographers.

It is a testament to Parini’s good sense, but also to a changing America, that well-chosen excerpts from these works are framed within a richness of experience unimaginable not long ago. The range of autobiographies and autobiographers in this collection is nothing short of startling. In its early pages, we find wonderful passages not only from Edwards, Franklin, Richard Henry Dana, Thoreau, Whitman, Grant, Twain, Adams and Henry James but also from the Sauk leader Black Hawk, offering his own captivity story, a rapacious tale of how white settlers stripped his people of their lands. (“They made themselves out the injured party, and we the intruders! . . . [N]ow, we are as miserable as the hungry, howling wolf in the prairie!”) And don’t forget Elizabeth Ashbridge, who grew up “grieved at my not being a boy” and wrote a stirring account of her spiritual search for self that took her from indentured servitude through depression and despair into life as a Quaker preacher (and who managed to beat Robert Heinlein to the biblical phrase “a stranger in a strange land” by two centuries).

Then there’s Harriet Jacobs, an African American escapee from slavery who wrote of the terrors of love among slaves and of the implacability of jealous masters (“He sprang upon me like a tiger, and gave me a stunning blow”); and the New England poet Lucy Larcom, who entered the mills when she was 11 and whose charming memories of childhood nonetheless reflect the quiet violence of a woman’s life deformed; and the youthful Italian immigrant and laborer Pascal D’Angelo, describing how he turned his home in a railroad car into a classroom (“When I did learn a word and had discovered its meaning I would write it in big letters on the moldy walls of the box car. And soon I had my first lesson in English all around me continually before my eyes”); and the Korean immigrant Mary Paik Lee, whose calm prose captured her greeting on her first day in an American school by children singing “Ching Chong, Chinaman” and miming the chopping off of her head; and all this without even mentioning the work of better-known outsiders like Frederick Douglass, Emma Goldman or James Baldwin.

These texts from ex-slaves, women, immigrants, former child laborers and radical activists are, so many years later, so fresh, so alive with the wonders of self-expression and self-invention, that they frame the canonical texts of American autobiography in new ways. For instance, in his searing memoir of collapse “The Crack-Up” (which Parini calls “a centerpiece of American autobiographical writing”), F. Scott Fitzgerald compares his state in a not especially complimentary way to “the laughing stoicism which has enabled the American Negro to endure the intolerable conditions of his existence.” In the context of the autobiographical writings of Jacobs, Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Baldwin and Malcolm X, how differently will ring a famous white writer’s thought that only when you’ve sunk lower than you imagined possible have you reached the everyday level of “the American Negro.”

Parini’s editorial sense opens up radically new ways of considering the autobiographical form. His selections make an unimpeachable case for autobiography as this country’s one true democratic form of writing and for the almost unbearable richness of that democratic impulse. His collection is also a reminder that democratic America was never the same as American democracy; for much of what can be experienced in this large volume is a history of the journeys, struggles and spirit of the disenfranchised who refused to let their lives be dismissed.

If the collection weakens toward its end, one reason may be that the urge to autobiography whether as self-creation or as a form of resistance once implied an engagement with a larger world. The act of writing one’s life was an assertion of the will to take one’s history but also history itself in one’s own hands. It was a statement of democratic hope. This seems less so now. America’s writerly voices may be no less strong today, but in the autobiographical voice there is, it seems to me, a weakening, and attenuating connection between self and world. You can feel the desperation lurking in the youthful memoirs of the present, a drawing of a line of complaint in the sand of historylessness--here, at my life, and no further. Autobiography has become the self’s defense against the meaninglessness of society, the hopelessness of a larger history. The journey--whether spiritual or literal--is now truncated. It stops at the boundaries of the family, of adolescence, of victimhood. It refuses the larger world. If Mary Rowlandson takes us into the American autobiographical wilderness of this book, Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of “Prozac Nation,” leads us out, chewing over “inadequate” parenting, divorce, drugs and youthful fatigue, with the plaint, “How on earth are we ever going to run the world and behave like responsible adults when we’re all just so tired?”

In his introduction, Parini speaks of “a sense of vertigo” in editing this book, and surely the pure tonnage of American autobiography could overwhelm anyone. On the other hand, everyone will undoubtedly find something missing. For me, the most startling individual absence is Philip Roth, who’s done more to play with this form than anyone in our time. (If only Parini had chosen the passage in “The Facts” in which Roth’s fictional character Zuckerman launches a critique of Roth’s account of his own life!) The most startling general absence, four entries on the Civil War aside, is the wartime memoir (or even Cold War ones). That they are missing in action is a particular shame for the weak final section of the book. In recent times, there have been two vast torrents of autobiography: the first, amply represented here, is a coming-of-age autobiography of dysfunction (familial or personal); the second has been the vast outpouring of war memoirs from the veterans of the Vietnam era, both the soldiers (what, after all, of the superb body of work produced by Tim O’Brien?) and the anti-warriors at home (the work of Todd Gitlin, Margo Adler or James Carroll, to name just three, would have been a valuable addition).

The historian Bernard Bailyn has pointed out in the introductory volume to “The Peopling of British North America” that we tend to read America’s central role in modern history back into its earliest moments. But North America, he writes, was (for all but the Native American, obviously) “the exotic far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan European culture system,” dedicated like many borderlands to violence as a way of life and populated by the flotsam and jetsam that Europe threw off. Guns, cults and torture in the wilderness would not be too crude or grim a summary of the matter. (And it is striking that the most uplifting excerpt in the first half of this volume comes from Helen Keller, a woman immersed in darkness.) The wonder was that in this peripheral land, a host of previously peripheral, often violated selves rose up and demanded notice, insisted upon the centrality of their own experiences.

And it is indeed a wonder to rediscover now, at a time when democracy seems to have increasingly little to do with ordinary life, the profoundly democratic aspect of the American autobiographical voice. This collection, inconceivable not long ago, gives “diversity” a good name. There is no better evidence of how enriched we’ve been. Special thanks must be offered to Jay Parini--and to Norton--for allowing this singing of the American body eclectic.