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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 Markham
By 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 bestbooks@meridianmagazine.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.
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