`What Happened is Becoming Literature'

I stayed up too late rereading Henry Green’s slender, enigmatic Pack My Bag, a favorite among memoirs. Green was in his mid-thirties and had already published three novels when he wrote it on the eve of World War II, a convergence he makes plain from its memorable start:

"I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905, three years after one war and nine before another, too late for both. But not too late for the war which seems to be coming upon us now and that is a reason to put down what comes to mind before one is killed."

Green is not writing a documentary; he is writing sentences. Ours is the age of the memoir, but only in the most debased sense if we can love sentences like Green’s. Confession and inspiration, the rusty staples of contemporary memoir-writing, are strictly absent from Green’s. Asked to name the qualities he most valued in a memoir, James Merrill told an interviewer:

“I haven’t read that many memoirs. One that I love is First Childhood by Lord Berners. Very casual and entertaining. At the other end of the spectrum I would put Proust: his patience with the reader, his willingness to be long-winded, to explain, his trust in language. What I most value in any book if it comes to that, is style, elegance, pacing, an observer’s eye. If you have those, your life can be dull but your book will be enthralling.”

There it is. When it comes to books, life is not enough, whether saintly or salacious. Only in a culture of exalted selfhood could anyone think otherwise. Merrill dismisses the conventional memoir formula -- “exciting life” = “exciting book” – the one assumed by rappers, sports stars and captains of industry, and reminds us that the least we expect of a book, even a memoir, is that it be well written. In his poem "For Proust," Merrill wrote: "What happened is becoming literature."

These are the memoirists I value: Darwin, Baudelaire, Berlioz, Herzen, Ruskin, Henry James, Nabokov, Walter Benjamin – and Green. Only two Americans on the list and Nabokov was a transplant. Otherwise, I think of eccentric proto-memoirists like Thoreau and Proust, who don’t conform to the genre. Aren’t The Dream Songs a memoir in the most important sense? Green, who might have thought so, writes:

"We who must die soon, or so it seems to me, should chase our memories back, standing, when they are found, enough apart not to be too near what they once meant. Like the huntsman, on a hill and when he blows his horn, like him some way away from us."