Short Takes on Long Tomes #2: Memoirs that Spill the Beans
The book cover for Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers
A case can be made that the most fascinating (and perversely trustworthy) memoirs are those composed by the superannuated. The reasons are self-evident: when most of one's colleagues and close family have already died (and with one foot in the grave one’s self), the temptation to suppress some unflattering anecdote, or (much more tempting) pay back one's living enemies with well-aimed barbs, fall away. Likewise, looming mortality often induces a sober reckoning of one's own shortcomings; a final summing up stripped of the usual strutting pretense.
Three memoirs I recently enjoyed, all by women, all of them octogenarians, exemplify this phenomenon.
Mary J. MacLeod, a retired British nurse, had one of those unexpected publishing successes with two memoirs about her life as a "country nurse" on a remote Scottish isle. Charming and anecdotal, they were a sort of "All Creatures Great and Small," except with patients that were able to speak. But their success spawned a third book, The Country Nurse Remembers (Arcade, 337 pp.), a memoir of her childhood. And it's a much darker, bleaker, and (to me) more fascinating document.
Ms. MacLeod's formative years occurred during the Second World War, and book gives a detailed, child's-eye view of how the war affected a small English village. No buzz bombs, though her school was invaded by child refugees exiled from London for safety. The occasional witnessing of a thrilling aerial duel in the skies above the nearby seacoast. Long hours pulling wagons through village lanes, collecting scrap metal.
But, dominating the book (as she dominated young Mary's life), a stepmother so chillingly evil she might have stepped from the pages of the Brothers Grimm.
It's a very British sort of evil. No physical brutality to speak of. But a regimentation so repressive—Mary forced to sit silently for hours in rigidly prescribed positions, sent to bed (even as a teenager) directly after supper, never spoken to except when being ordered about—that even now, seventy years later, Mary's anguish is palpable. And when she finally escapes to nursing school, what might seem another rigidly proscribed existence comes—to both Mary and the reader—as a relief (though her stepmother still demands that Mary spend her one day off back home, cleaning). An exorcism of a book, lancing a wound that festered for a lifetime.
A book by another Mary is an entirely different animal. Written in gleeful collaboration with theater critic Jesse Green and published after her death, Shy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 480 pp.), the sarcastically titled memoir of Mary Rodgers, daughter of celebrated composer Richard Rodgers, demonstrates just how shockingly candid a completely unmuzzled memoir can be. From lacerating takes on her remote, notoriously womanizing father and chilly, impossible-to-please mother, to hilariously frank portraits of the many celebrities of stage and screen she rubbed shoulders with in her long life, Mary always tells it like it was. A book to be greedily, guiltily devoured.
I've only recently discovered the writing of Diana Athill. A longtime distinguished editor of some of the 20th centuries greatest literature, she herself authored a novel and a celebrated series of memoirs; Stet, An Editor's Life (Granta, 250 pp.) is the final volume. Written in the wonderfully polished prose one would expect, it contains lovingly crafted warts-and-all portraits of such luminaries as Brian Moore and V. S. Naipaul. And makes it clear that Jean Rhys's late masterpiece, "The Wide Sargasso Sea" was more or less extracted from the clutches of its author's impossible self-destructive lifestyle by her fond, exasperated, heroically intervening editor.
PD Quaver