The Art of the Memoir

‘We met at eight, we met at nine, I was on time, no you were late’
‘Ah yes, I remember it well’ (Gigi, Lerner & Loewe)
‘We dined aloneWe dined with friends’
‘A tenor sang/A baritone’
‘Ah yes, I remember it well’

It is often said that the past is another country or as the title of one wartime memoir puts it, the past is myself. The art of the memoir has been celebrated across the ages and in modern times the whole concept of memory, recollection and recall is bound up with issues surrounding increasing advanced old age in the general population and the attendant challenges and difficulties – we may all be living longer thanks to advances in medical sciences in the 20th century but we are surviving into an advanced old age which brings with it the danger of developing conditions which rob the mind of the very essence of humanity: memory and personality. If we are our memories, what is to become of us when recollection fails and the past plays tricks? A kind of sum of all we remember. As Shakespeare has it – “ I summon up remembrance of things past”.

The novelist, essayist, actor and chronicler of American political and cultural life Gore Vidal has turned to the memoir, like many before him, as a way of telling a story and as a summing up process. Like many artists and public figures down through the ages the act of sitting in the garden when day is done and ruminating on the life lived and the race run is as much a mental as physical one. The memoir as a literary device is different from that of the autobiography, which often has one eye on history and thus can be self-justifying at the expense of objective revelations. The memoir is almost entirely subjective and does not pretend an objectivity. The opening lines of Point to Point Navigation could stand as a working definition of a collected personal memory:

“As a writer and political activist, I have accumulated a number of cloudy trophies in my melancholy luggage. Some real, some imagined. Some acquired from life, such as it is, some from movies such as they are. Sometimes in time, where we are as well as were, it is not easy to tell the two apart. “

The beauty of the memoir as a literary form is that it can take many forms, encompass time, genre and style and stand the test of time whilst having a contemporary feel. Yet a memoir is not autobiography, although it can contain elements of it. A memoir does not have to justify or explain so much as give an impression – it is impressionism rather than portraiture. It often evokes time and place but is not bound by them. A memoir can start at the begiiniing and procees to the en vi a middle or it can start with the end. It is a most flexible of forms. I think therefore I am or perhaps I recollect therefore I am…