essay
LA TROBE UNIVERSITY ESSAY
MEMORY: EEL OR CRYSTAL?
Extracts from Tiger's Eye: A Memoir
Inga Clendinnen
WHY DO WE WANT TO REMEMBER childhood at all? For most of our adult years it seems a remote and empty time -- the time before we turned into whatever and whoever we turned out to be. A few years further on, parents and siblings ignored for decades fill our dreams, along with forgotten cats and cousins and neighbourhood dogs. Childhood becomes our surest homeland: the time when we were unequivocally, sometimes rapturously, ourselves, unmarked by compromise and disappointment, undulled by drab maturity.
Most of the moments and places inhabiting my childhood memory are bathed not in Nabokovian gold but in the sepia melancholy of old photographs. I know this is the effect conventionally attached to such photographs, but in my case the melancholy is not, I think, a present imposition, but what I felt at the time. The shouts of my brothers playing cricket at Geelong's Queen's Park or ducking each other in the Barwon River seemed separated from me even as I was chasing the tennis balls, or dangling from the old landing stage with two metres of brown water and the slimy corpses of drowned sheep moving silently beneath me (I couldn't swim).
What I felt, had I known the word, was alienated. I knew I was in the picture but I also knew that was what it was: a picture. When we went down to the old ice house and shouted against the cliffs to hear the echo, the early clamour would recede to a single, quivering note, very pure, very distant. That was the sound I listened for, the sound which thrilled me, which matched my view of things, which seemed to me to comprehend the essence of existence.
While often melancholy, I was not at all unhappy. I doubt that phrases like ' a happy childhood', 'an unhappy childhood', mean much, unless there is deliberate abuse, beyond what they suggest about adult sentimentality. A child can suffer misery of a purity unknown in adult life, but that is a separate issue. I can remember being consciously happy on two occasions: once riding with Herbie and the baker back to school at lunchtime, and once, stretched on the back lawn, buffalo grass prickling my thighs, listening to the bees in the apple trees, gazing into the vanishing blue of a February sky, and languorously milking the chilled juice of an orange into my mouth. And thinking, as the juice trickled down my throat, 'Here, now, I am completely, utterly happy.'
Of course there were bad times. The worst ones no-one else in the household would have much noticed, like the sick helplessness of being labelled a liar. As a child I was a desperate, doomed liar when cornered. Now I am, on the whole, remarkably truthful, lying only with the finest calculation. I don't intend to suffer that humiliation again. I was always vulnerable to the Word. While I had to learn that sticks and stones could break your bones, I always knew that names could finish you for good. When you are a child, everyone feels free to call you names. And every name matters, because the world is your sole, unforgiving mirror.
What was reliably best about childhood -- what I miss now it is gone, what being in hospital gave back to me -- was its spaciousness: the multiplicity of sensations to be extracted from the infinitudes of time inhabiting every day, the infinitude of spaces in even a modest house. In the oblong tent under the table, shielded by the tablecloth curtain and the palisade of familiar legs, at once in society and out of it; under the ironing board, hearing the hiss of the iron on sprinkled sheets, breathing the hot moist air with its inexplicable whiff of new bread; resting my chin on the edge of the mottled slab of marble where my mother mixed scones out of lard and flour, salt and water with a magician's aplomb. Crouched beside the sewing machine I confronted slavery long before I knew the term, as the black man built into my mother's Singer plunged and lunged in submission to her rocking foot. Squatting in the sawdust desert in the slatted light of under-the-house, a striped tea-towel on my head, I was in Arabia. A different tea-towel, and it was Africa.
Time was always there to be played with: made to vanish in sea dramas staged with press-ganged harlequin bugs, leaves and a bucket of water; prolonged by deliberately aimless wanderings; or stopped altogether through long afternoons, with even the kitten asleep.
Ours was a small house with six people in it, but my memories are of being alone: my mother in her bedroom, door shut, taking her interminable afternoon rest, my brothers out somewhere, everyone out somewhere -- just me and the boundless fifteen by fifty metres of our block. In the silent hall in the late afternoon, watching the dust motes dancing and the coloured lozenges from the leadlighted front door trembling on the wall, or drifting out to the beehive by the lemon tree to see the bees come home, I was pervaded with a luxurious sense of the evanescence -- not knowing the word, but perfectly familiar with its sense -- of all these arrangements: houses, families, people, creatures, things.
And also of their tenacity. There was an antiquated wind-up record player inside the hall cabinet, its one dusty record permanently on the spindle waiting to be cranked into life. I may have been forbidden to touch it. I know I approached it with beating heart. I would wind the handle, lower the needle, and a voice would come spindling out, a voice too old and frail to be male or female, but still ineffably human. It would sing: 'Carry me back to old Virginney, there's where the cotton and the corn and 'tatoes grow', the voice quivering, the sound attenuating, almost vanishing, but always, barely, audible, and I thought the voice had somehow been trapped back there in long-ago Virginney, a slave voice mourning in that alien place, and that I was briefly liberating it from the black bakelite to mourn and tremble in the afternoon stillness of a hall of a suburban house in Australia.
A childhood caught in a clutter of memory-snapshots. Did I do what any halfway respectable historian would do and consult my alternative source, my surviving sibling, to see how far our memories match? Three years older than I, he had been from my first awareness my enemy, reasonably enough, being the supplanted knee-baby. Now we are friends, the only people alive in the world who know how it was with us once.
But I did not question him. Private memories are both the products and the possessions of the private self. My brother's memories, like his experiences within our family household, are his. They will be quite unlike mine.
Besides, it would only make trouble. We are notoriously dismissive of other people's recollections, and ferocious in defence of our own. Friendships, marriages, families, whole societies have foundered on contended accounts of the past. The repertoire of shared stories families trade in has been fixed in the telling: converted into social currency, drained of their private meanings. Private memories are best kept private. Memories-become-anecdotes kill the moment quite as effectively as do photographs. Salman Rushdie has one of his protagonists say:
I told you the truth...Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.
He is right on all counts. For all my training in scepticism, I cannot repudiate my memories, or even much refine them: mine, like yours, are simply there, as indubitable, as particular, as our feet.
And my brother could not know my dominant childhood mood, which was a most voluptuous melancholy. Despite the appearance of drift, I was never the least bored, because there was also, every day and always, my main and compelling activity: spying on my mother...
MIRAGES
IN THE COURSE OF MY childhood-retrieving exercise I was troubled, first, by the unreality of the person invoked as 'me', and then by my implicit claim I still was that person merely grown larger. Am I that person? Is my consciousness really continuous? To put it more elaborately: it may not only be a question of whether I state my memories truthfully (sometimes), or whether I remember accurately (I do and I don't), but whether the 'I' is sufficiently continuous to claim possession of those early memories at all.
The self, the sense of self and the way memory works all change through time. Psychologists say that after the age of about seven, children remember in narratives, just as adults do, but before that they remember in snapshots, vivid visual moments with little to connect them. That seems true for me. I know that when I wrote my first memory-story about Herbie and the baker I found I needed to write in the third person, to reflect the conscious process of retrieval I had to go through to piece the vivid fragments together.
Then come the invisible transformations wrought by accumulating experience, and the development of a conscious narrative of the self -- which again will change through time. Christopher Isherwood raised the point years ago, reflecting on the relationship between the older, bleaker Christopher and the naive young man setting out on his first journey abroad thirty years before:
And now before I slip back into the convention of calling this young man 'I', let me consider him as a separate being, a stranger almost...For, of course, he is almost a stranger to me. I have revised his opinions, changed his accent and his mannerisms, unlearnt or exaggerated his prejudices and his habits. We still share the same skeleton, but its outer covering has altered so much that I doubt if he would recognise me on the street. We have in common the label of our name, and a continuity of consciousness; there has been no break in sequence of daily statements that I am I. But what I am has refashioned itself throughout the days and years, until now almost all that remains constant is the mere awareness of being conscious...
The Christopher who sat in that taxi is, practically speaking, dead; he only remains reflected in the fading memories of us who knew him...I can only reconstruct him from his remembered acts and words and from the writings he has left us...In a sense he is my father, and in another sense my son...
This is at once completely persuasive, and rather too disquieting to live with. (It is also, you will agree, marvellously well put.) As I tap it out, I realise that it was this passage, read years ago, not then comprehended but never forgotten, which has led me into my present fix of trying to reconstruct something of the thoughts and anxieties of the smaller creature with whom I share a name, a vague continuity of awareness, some memories -- and possibly very little else.
Reconstructed childhoods easily become works of dramatic art. Elie Wiesel, engulfed by the Holocaust in adolescence, remembers his childhood as 'a sunny and mysterious place where beggars were princes in disguise, and fools were wise men freed from their constraints'. The tragic surprise that history had in store for him, the terrible parabola of his life thereafter, the plunge into the abyss, required that his life-narrative have a magically happy beginning, an infinity of promise.
My moderately sunny and quite unthreatened childhood held no beggars, no fools, no wise men and no princes either, in disguise or out of it. On the contrary: everyone, child or adult, appeared to me remarkably fluid, inhabiting their various social roles with dismaying lightness of being.
The two great twentieth century hunt-masters of memory, Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov, have very different notions regarding the nature of their quarry and how to catch it. For Nabokov memory is an act of will. He believes he holds the delectable images and sensations of his childhood -- the slur of snow under a sleigh, the exact shades of Russia's taffeta winter skies, the sound of his mother's silken skirts, the citrus fragrance of her skin -- stored in the inviolable crystal of his mind, where they will be safe forever, provided he does not let the dust of the vulgar seep in. But we have to wonder: was it the total eclipse of the imperial Russian past which sets the people of his childhood glowing like icons in amber? Madame Nabokov fades once the Revolution whisks away her glorious setting. Neither we nor her son quite recognise the scented creature of his youth in the quiet old lady living among her relics in a dusty Paris room.
Proust is an ardent materialist. For him the past is stored in some material object, to be miraculously liberated (their liberation usually being attended by an effusion of joy) through an involuntary association generated by a providential sensation --the taste of a madeleine dunked in herb tea, the scent of a cheap chiffon scarf.
Scents deny the passage of time, the extinction of the past. The photographs Claude Levi-Strauss took on his Brazilian expedition had little to say to him fifty years later, but he had only to open his old notebooks and release the ghost of the creosote he used to protect his canteens from termites, and presto! the miracle: 'Almost undetectable after more than half a century, this trace instantly brings back to me the savannas and forests of Central Brazil, inseparably bound with other smells -- human, animal, and vegetable -- as well as with sounds and colours.'
However firmly rejected by experts and artists, the folk notion of the sludge of daily memory resting quietly until stirred into life by some accidental stimulus is often vindicated by experience. The surge of blood into my father's brain in the last year of his life tossed him back into the churned battlefields of France, as if the explosion in his head had effected an equivalent explosion in memory so that what had been decently buried for decades was brought writhing, horribly, to the surface. After the transplant my own mind, agitated by the leaking of chemicals into the brain, tossed up living fragments of my own deep memory which I did not even recognise as mine, until they began their parade behind my eyelids.
The stimulus need not be dramatic. Proust was right about that. The insidious intrusion might come with no more than a nudge -- the ghost of a tune, the trace of a scent. One ordinary evening a friend dining with us excused himself to go to the bathroom. He returned dazed and slightly panicky: for no good reason, washing his hands in a Kew bathroom, the cup of the Now had fractured and he had been catapulted back into the China he had left a decade before. A shaking experience, quite enough to trick a man into superstitious reverence for unappeased spirits. Yet not remarkable after all. We found the culprit sitting in the soap dish -- a tablet of Flower and Bee sandalwood soap, imported from China, and holding within it his own younger, more hopeful self. So perhaps we are layers, after all. Perhaps, nothing is ever lost.
For me, as I think for most of us who do not solicit memory for aesthetic or voluptuous or dramatic ends but who yearn after the trout-gleam of truth, memory is less a crystal than an eel, wily, evasive, as hard to hold as any truly vital thing. It might come stealthily, a slow, irresistible leak from the crammed past snaking its way into the featureless present, but once liberated it is irrepressible. But while I have always known it to be slippery (historians make a living from mistrusting it), it was only when the unnatural solitude of illness made memory my full-time companion that I came to appreciate the depths of its character defects -- its unreliability, its affront at being questioned, its rage at being impugned, its incorrigible complacency even when caught out.