“The Need to Say It”

By Patricia Hampl

My Czech grandmother hated to see me with a book. She snatched it away if I sat still too long (dead to her), absorbed in my reading. "Bad for you," she would say, holding the loathsome thing behind her back, furious at my enchantment.

She kept her distance from the printed word of English, but she lavished attention on her lodge newspaper which came once a month, written in the quaint nineteenth-century Czech she and her generation had brought to America before the turn of the century. Like wedding cake saved from the feast, this language, over the years, had become a fossil, still recognizable but no longer something to be put in the mouth.

Did she read English? I'm not sure. I do know that she couldn't -- or didn't -- write it. That's where I came in.

My first commissioned work was to write letters for her. "You write for me, honey?" she would say, holding out a ballpoint she had been given at a grocery store promotion, clicking it like a castanet. My fee was cookies and milk, payable before, during, and after completion of the project.

I settled down at her kitchen table while she rooted around the drawer where she kept coupons and playing cards and bank calendars. Eventually she located a piece of stationery and a mismatched envelope. She laid the small, pastel sheet before me, smoothing it out; a floral motif was clotted across the top of the page and bled down one side. The paper was so insubstantial even ballpoint ink seeped through the other side.

"That's OK," she would say. "We only need one side."

True. In life she was a gifted gossip, unfurling an extended riff of chatter from a bare motif of rumor. But her writing style displayed a brevity that made Hemingway's prose look like nattering garrulity. She dictated her letters as if she were paying by the word.

"Dear Sister," she began, followed by a little time-buying cough and throat clearing. "We are all well here." Pause. "And hope you are well too." Longer pause, the steamy broth of inspiration heating up on her side of the table. Then, in a lurch, "Winter is hard so I don't get out much."

This was followed instantly by an unconquerable fit of envy: "Not like you in California." Then she came to a complete halt, perhaps demoralized by this evidence that you can't put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

She sat, she brooded, she stared out the window. She was locked in the perverse reticence of composition. She gazed at me, but I understood she did not see me. She was looking for her next thought. "Read what I wrote," she would finally say, having lost not only what she was looking for but what she already had pinned down. I went over the little trail of sentences that led to her dead end.

More silence, then a sigh. She gave up the ghost. "Put 'God bless you,'" she said. She reached across to see the lean rectangle of words on the paper. "Now leave some space," she said, "and put 'Love.'" I handed over the paper for her to sign.

She always asked if her signature looked nice. She wrote her one word -- Teresa -- with a flourish. For her, writing was painting, a visual art, not declarative but sensuous.

She sent her lean documents regularly to her only remaining sister who lived in Los Angeles, a place she had not visited. They had last seen each other as children in their village in Bohemia. But she never mentioned that or anything from that world. There was no taint of reminiscence in her prose.

Even at ten I was appalled by the minimalism of these letters. They enraged me. "Is that all you have to say?" I would ask her, a nasty edge to my voice.

It wasn't long before I began padding the text. Without telling her, I added an anecdote my father had told at dinner the night before, or I conducted this unknown reader through the heavy plot of my brother's attempt to make first string on the St. Thomas hockey team. I allowed myself a descriptive aria on the beauty of Minnesota winters (for the benefit of my California reader who might need some background material on the subject of ice hockey). A little of this, a little of that -- there was always something I could toss into my grandmother's meager soup to thicken it up.

Of course, the protagonist of the hockey tale was not "my brother." He was "my grandson." I departed from my own life without a regret and breezily inhabited my grandmother's. I complained about my hip joint, I bemoaned the rising cost of hamburger, I even touched on the loneliness of old age, and hinted at the inattention of my son's wife (that is, my own mother who was next door, oblivious to treachery).

In time, my grandmother gave in to the inevitable. Without ever discussing it, we understood that when she came looking for me, clicking her ballpoint, I was to write the letter, and her job was to keep the cookies coming. I abandoned her skimpy floral stationery which badly cramped my style, and thumped down on the table a stack of ruled 8 1/2 x 11.

"Just say something interesting," she would say. And I was off to the races.

I took over her life in prose. Somewhere along the line, though, she decided to take full possession of her sign-off. She asked me to show her how to write "Love" so she could add it to "Teresa" in her own hand. She practiced the new word many times on scratch paper before she allowed herself to commit it to the bottom of a letter.

But when she finally took the leap, I realized I had forgotten to tell her about the comma. On a single slanting line she had written: Love Teresa. The words didn't look like a closure, but a command.

Write about what you know. This instruction from grade school was the first bit of writing advice I was ever given. Terrific -- that was just what I wanted to do. But privately, in a recess of my personality I could not gain access to by wish or by will, I was afraid this advice was a lie, concocted and disseminated nationwide by English teachers. The real, the secret, commandment was Write about what matters.

But they couldn't tell you that, I sensed, because nothing someone like me had experienced in the environs of St. Luke's grade school in Saint Paul, Minnesota, mattered to anybody, and such a commandment would bring the whole creaking apparatus of assignments and spelling tests crashing down. I was never able to convince myself that anyone wanted to know what I had done on my summer vacation. They were just counting on my being vain enough to be flattered into telling. And they were right. But I resented it, I resented having nothing -- really -- to write about.

Maybe I wouldn't have fretted over the standard composition advice if I had valued my life in a simple way. Or rather, if I had valued the life around me. But literary types are born snobs, yearning for the social register of significance. And I was a literary kid from the get-go, falling into fairy tales, and later, enormous nineteenth-century novels, as if into vats of imported heavy cream where I was perfectly content to drown.

I felt, I believed, my own life (and anything that couched it) was just so much still water. You could drown there too, but to no purpose, anonymous as a gasp, flailing around without experiencing the luscious sinking that made life worthwhile -- which was literature. I wrote about princesses and angels. I filled in the silences left in familiar Bible stories, making up a travelogue about the flight into Egypt, fleshing out the domestic arrangements of Martha and Mary with a little dialogue: " 'Don't you expect me to do those dishes, Martha,' huffed Mary. 'The Lord's on my side.'"

Later, I wrote about lesbians (though I wasn't one) and a demented arsonist (though I was afraid to use the fireplace at home). The beat went on: I was writing about things that mattered. That is, things beyond me.

Later still, inevitably, I gave up, and wrote about my own life after all, first in poems, and then in a memoir whose main figure was my Czech grandmother. She who commanded love. What bothers me about this brief history of my literary attempts is that I ended up writing memoir (even the poems were routinely autobiographical) when that was the last thing I wanted to do. Wasn't it?

And as a subplot to this conundrum, how was it that I rattled on with stories and descriptions of "what I knew" in those letters I wrote for my grandmother in her kitchen, and yet it never dawned on me that this was limiting, that this was it.

Put another way: How did I come to believe that what I knew was also what mattered? And, more to the point for the future, is it what matters?

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow -- or kneel or get knocked down -- to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be. The recognition of one's genuine material seems to involve a fall from the phony grace of good intentions and elevated expectations. (I speak from experience, as memoirists are supposed to.)

A hush comes over the writing, an emotion akin to awe: So, something just beyond my own intelligence seemed to whisper when I began writing about my grandmother's garden which I couldn't imagine anyone caring about, it isn't a matter of whether you can go home again. You just do. Language, that most ghostly kind of travel, hands out the tickets. It never occurred to me, once given my ticket, to refuse it.

Yet, it wasn't the ticket I wanted. I didn't want to go home, I wanted to go -- elsewhere. I wanted to write novels. Fat ones. Later, thinner ones -- having moved from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf in my reading. But novels. About love and betrayal among grown-up modern men and women who, should have behaved better (I thought). An important subject (I believed). A subject not given its due by men writers (I attested).

Instead, I've written memoir. And, so far, precious little love and betrayal of the sort I aspired to. Would that I could say that it's because I never experienced any betrayal along the way to or from love. But the equation between life and art hasn't proved to be so simple.

Still, I begin to see the elegance of a mathematical law in this confusion of impulse and execution, of intention and finished product: The material I was determined to elude has claimed me, while the subjects I wished to enlist in my liberation have spurned me.

Shame seems to be an essential catalyst in the business. Item: When I started college at the University in Minneapolis, I lost no time dumping the Catholic world my family had so carefully given me in Saint Paul. In fact, that's why I went there: I understood many people had succeeded in losing their religion at the University. I didn't miss a beat turning down a scholarship at a Catholic college where I had been assured I would get more "individual attention." Who wanted individual attention? I wanted to be left alone to lose my soul.

For years, decades even, I considered it one solid accomplishment that I had escaped the nuns. Result: I spent the better part of five years writing a memoir about growing up Catholic, a book which took me for extended stays at several monasteries and Catholic shrines in Europe and America. The central character of the book: a contemplative nun, the very figure I was determined to dodge.

Item: I was ashamed (though I didn't know it, couldn't have called it shame) that my Czech grandmother couldn't write English, that she was who she was at all. An immigrant is a quaint antecedent at a distance; mine was too close for the comfort of my literary ambition. The shame was real, disloyal, mean. Result: She came and got me, and became the heroine of my first memoir. She wrote it first: Love Teresa. And I did, finally.

Subject matter is only half the story. It may be possible to trace the lines leading to and from a writer's life and art in an attempt to reveal why someone writes about this and not about that. But form is a tougher nut: Why a memoir, why not a novel?

I still puzzle over the reason I write books that deny me the pleasure of changing point of view, for instance. And admiring the straight spine of plot that gives the novel its grand carriage, why have I consorted with a flabby genre with the habit of dithering aimlessly, fingering its pressed flowers from the recumbent swoon of reminiscence?

The memoir comes in for a lot of heat. It is accused of being a notorious bore, of betraying the beady mind of a grudge-bearer. Even the name -- memoir -- sounds lightweight, a designer genre with too much cheesy pastel between the lines. Invoking memoir is even a standard way of dismissing a bad novel: It's merely autobiographical.

For a while, I took refuge in the belief that at least memoir had the decency to make a fair contract with the reader. The prose promised no more and no less than it paid out: my mother, my father, my childhood, my perception of it all. No overreaching omniscient narrators here. I grabbed the notion of honesty and hung on.

Then, a couple of years ago, a friend (a novelist, of course) ruined things. She had just read aloud from a novel she was working on. The reading was a hit, and everyone, including me, crowded around to praise her. The car ride to the family cabin which opened the book was especially strong; I could smell the pine needles, I told her. "Oh good," she said, a little shy, "that was our drive every year when I was a girl."

"Did you ever think of writing it as a memoir?" I said. It was an idle question, but it caught her off-guard.

"Oh no, I wouldn't write it as a memoir," she said, obviously repelled. "I want to tell the truth."

She looked embarrassed for an instant. It was purely social embarrassment, though; she was startled by her unvarnished candor in the face of the memoirist before her. She quickly recovered her novelist self, and looked right at me, her keen dark eyes holding their judgment: She wanted to tell the truth of her life -- and memoir, she saw, doesn't encourage the truth.

She was not troubled by memory's habit of embracing the imagination. Long before, she had put her faith in the revelation of detail, not the accumulation of fact. Neither one of us was looking for a way to make literature a spreadsheet. The truth she felt memoir denied her was not the public truth of history or scholarship or journalism.

She mistrusted memoir because it would not allow her to speak her soul's truth. Paradoxically, memoir allowed less intimacy than fiction. Writing directly from her life did not provide fiction's freedom to tell the truth derived from family secrets, from intensely personal events, from the burnt but still blooming core of the self. Memoir was left to explore the trivial -- or to falsify the real. Or perhaps, its lowest sin: To make a mean little case against the past (aka, mother and father). I brooded on all that. I brood still.

Yet I wrote -- I write -- memoir. I had come to accept the inevitable tango of memory and imagination. I even looked forward to their inescapable encounter. It became one of the sharper pleasures of writing memoir: How uncanny to go back in memory to a house from which time has stolen all the furniture, and to find the one remembered chair, and write it so large, so deep, that it furnishes the entire vacant room. The past comes streaming back on words, and delivers the goods it had absconded with.

For all of that deep pleasure of retrieval, memoir is not about the past. As I understand it, memoir is not a matter of nostalgia. Its double root is in despair and protest (which, it first, seem no more kissing cousins than memory and imagination).

The despair comes from the recognition, impersonal but experienced as intensely intimate, that all things die. Not only individual, ordinary lives (all of them, of course, all of us), but whole civilizations, rafts of accomplishments, gestures, moments. Even the proper rage and horror at gigantic evil get eroded over time into conventional pieties. Nothing lasts, not even the solemn oath to remember.

The mind never gets over this betrayal of experience. In its dismay, memory allies itself with the larger political and social sensibility around it, the consciousness that makes people A People, a nation. This is the consciousness that causes the oppressed to take final refuge in culture, the consciousness that makes them willing to die -- and kill -- for a culture.

Out of the dread of ruin and disintegration emerges a protest which becomes history when it is written from the choral voice of a nation, and memoir when it is written from a personal voice. The dry twigs left of a vanished life, whatever its fullness once was, are rubbed together until they catch fire. Until they make something. Until they make a story.

Looked at this way, the truth memoir has to offer is not neatly opposite from fiction's truth. Its methods and habits are different, and it is perhaps a more perverse genre than the novel: It seems to be about an individual self, but it is revealed as a minion of memory which belongs not only to the personal world but to the public realm. As such, the greatest memoirs tend to be allergic to mere confession and mistrustful of revenge, though these are two of the genre's natural impulses.

This refusal of memoir to display successfully raw confession or revenge is not, I'm sure, evidence of its inability to sustain personal truth. In fact, I like the mongrel nature of the genre that combines traits of fiction and of the essay, and lets just about anybody into the club. I'm content to sit on the same bench with aging movie stars, with wistful sons of powerful men who seem to know they'll never amount to much even though they've kicked their cocaine habit, with absurd daughters trying to get back at sleazy fathers.

The memoir is not just a rest home for sensitive souls. Poets purveying acute angles of vision are there next to successful plaintiffs in palimony suits, and people whose fate has drawn them to Patagonia or away from Romania.

It's a quirk of the memoir that its narrator can never be its hero. Once again, it seems that memoir prefers the cooler, more neutral, term. The narrator is the protagonist -- not the hero.

I'm used to being a protagonist by now, though that was not my original intention. No doubt, I'd write a very unconvincing heroine. I wonder if I'd even know how.

Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mirrors, like certain cunning sleight-of-hand routines. All the while I've been trying to grasp the reason I have written what I have in the manner I have; I've been working those mirrors for all they're worth.

Off to the side the whole time, in my lateral sight, has been a single snapshot which I'm convinced possesses the complete explanation. How like a memoirist to believe a solo image, fluttering in the dark, is the rare butterfly that will, at last, complete the collection.

But I am a memoirist, so I'm off with my net: I'm in the sixth grade (blue serge uniform jumper, white blouse with Peter Pan collar). I'm still sitting in the second-to-last desk, in the row next to the windows. In a few months I will be moved forward, seat by seat, at my own troubled request until it is finally discerned that I need glasses.

But right now, I am still in that blessed outer region far from the blackboard and Sister's desk, still in the slight slur of undiagnosed myopia. And Mike Maloney who doesn't love me (he likes me, he has said, making that distinction for me for the first time) sits behind me. We're pals. He is whispering something funny at the back of my head. That's gone forever.

Then Sister asks a question. I'd give a lot to know now what that question was. It's gone forever too, and I'm having a much harder time letting it go. Because I know the answer to this question. It's a really tough question and I just know nobody else in that class has the answer.

I've heard people talk about their hearts being in their throats, but I feel this extraordinary sensation -- my mind or my brain or whatever is me is in my throat. I'm throbbing with the answer to that question, and my arm shoots up. It's waving crazily. I look like a drowning person grasping for help. But really I'm a bird, mighty with song. Sister has to call on me. I'll die if I can't crow out the answer. I reach to her, way from the back, my mad hand jumping.

She scans the room, doesn't see me, and turns to the board with her chalk. And provides the answer herself, just doles it out like medicine we all should take. And goes on with the lesson.

The throbbing in my throat actually hurts. My soul thuds inside me. Tears squint in my eyes from the raw denial I've been dealt. I'm aware, somewhere, that this whole thing is odd. But the main thing is, it's real. And I've got the answer and I've still got the wild need to say it.

I look out the window. We're on the third floor, and I see, below on the far playground, the other sixth-grade class at recess. I think I can make out Tommy Schwartz in his faded cords and plaid shirt and Sheila Phalen, wearing exactly what I am wearing. She is my best friend, we walk to school together; he is a basketball star, I adore him. Sheila alone knows this.

What are they doing together? I will never know. But his head is bent slightly toward her. A new kind of misery enters me.

They're far away, I can barely make them out. Maybe it's not Tommy after all. But I've already pasted dreamy smiles on their faces. I squint, but that only blurs things. I have no desire to turn and talk to Mike Maloney who is right there behind me, and who likes me.

No. I want to communicate with those little indistinct figures way off there, who may or may not be Tommy and Sheila, who may or may not be pressing the first valentine of love and betrayal into my palm, who may not even care that I have the answer. But I can't get rid of the ache in my throat which I know is my brain. I'll burst if I can't give my answer, that's all I know for sure.