Waiting for the Barbarians (43 page)

Winfrey’s—and, by extension, her audiences’—hunger for good stories at any price suggests, among other things, that the trauma-and-redemption memoir, with its strong narrative trajectory and straightforward themes, may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once-central position in literary culture. Indeed, shows like Winfrey’s, with their insistence on “real” emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than “dramatization without illumination.” If you can watch a real lonely suburban housewife yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary? More significant, the premium placed by these shows on the spontaneous expression of genuine and extreme emotions has justified setups that are all too obviously unreal—in a word, fictional. In a way, not only the spate of memoir hoaxes but the recent proliferation of what Yagoda calls “stuntlike” memoirs—narratives that result from highly improbable stimuli (“One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States”)—arise from a deeper confusion about where reality ends and where make-believe begins.

This awkward blurring of the real and the artificial both parallels and feeds off another significant confusion that characterizes contemporary life: that between private and public. The advent of cell phones has forced millions of people sitting in restaurants, reading on commuter trains, idling in waiting rooms, and attending the theater to become party to the most intimate details of other people’s lives—their breakups, the health of their portfolios, their psycho-therapeutic progress, their arguments with their bosses or boyfriends or parents. The advent of smartphones and other personal devices that enable us to talk to our friends, listen to our music, read our books, watch our movies, check our stock quotes and departure times, all while walking down a city street, literally allows us to create our own hermetic, private reality while passing through the (increasingly unnoticed) spaces of public life. It may be worth mentioning here that the word “idiot” comes from the Greek
idiotês
, from the word
idios
, “private”: an idiot is someone who acts in public as if they were still in private.

This experience of being constantly exposed to other people’s lives and life stories is matched only by the inexhaustible eagerness of people to tell their life stories—and not just on the phone. The Internet bears crucial witness to a factor that Yagoda mentions in his discussion of the explosion of memoirs in the seventeenth century, when changes in printing technology and paper production made publication possible on a greater scale than before: the way that advances in media and means of distribution can affect the evolution of the personal narrative. The greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet has occurred on the Internet; as soon as there was a cheap and convenient means to do so, people enthusiastically paid to disseminate their autobiographies, commentaries, opinions, and reviews, happily assuming the roles of both author and publisher.

So if we’re feeling assaulted or overwhelmed by a proliferation of
personal narratives, it’s because we are; but the greatest profusion of these life stories isn’t to be found in bookstores. If anything, it’s hard not to think that a lot of the outrage directed at writers and publishers lately represents a displacement of a large and genuinely new anxiety, about our ability to filter or control the plethora of unreliable narratives coming at us from all directions. In the street or in the blogosphere, there are no editors, no proofreaders, and no fact-checkers—the people at whom we can at least point an accusing finger when the old-fashioned kind of memoir betrays us.

Yagoda’s relentless and, it must be said, often amusing focus on the genre’s opportunistic low points obscures the fact that there are some very great memoirs. He devotes little space to masterpieces like
The Education of Henry Adams
, and merely mentions the titles of, but never discusses, Mary McCarthy’s
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
and Vladimir Nabokov’s sublime
Speak
,
Memory
—a choice he wants to justify on the ground that his approach is “historical” rather than “aesthetic.” This odd tactic—a general study of the novel that failed to celebrate the great ones would give us very little sense of why we read novels—betrays an underlying prejudice of his own. Yagoda seems suspicious of the idea that intimate revelations can have motivations other than exhibitionism or “commercial enterprise.”

And yet sometimes memoir may be the only way to cover a subject effectively. Fifteen years ago, I found myself unable to complete a study of contemporary gay culture that I’d contracted to write. The book was meant to be a more or less straightforward examination of the way in which the books, movies, and art that gay people were producing, and the way they partied, shopped, traveled, and dined, reflected gay identity. But the deeper I got into the subject, the harder I found it to isolate just what “gay identity” might be, not least because I and most of the other gay men I knew seemed to be
torn between the ostensibly straight identities and values we’d been brought up with (domesticity, stability, commitment, mortgages) and the “queer” habits and behaviors—in particular, the freewheeling, seemingly endless possibilities for unencumbered erotic encounters—made possible in enclaves that were exclusively gay. Because I didn’t want to suggest that I somehow stood outside those tensions and instabilities, I felt I had to write, in some part, about myself. This was the book that the reviewer introduced by alluding to “this confessional age.”

As for Freud’s charge that memoirs are flawed by mendacity, it may be that the culprit here is not really the memoir genre but simply memory itself. The most stimulating section of Yagoda’s book is one in which he considers, far too briefly and superficially, the vast scientific literature about memory and how it works. The gist is that a seemingly inborn desire on the part of
Homo sapiens
for coherent narratives, for meaning, often warps the way we remember things. The psychologist F.C. Bartlett, whom Yagoda quotes without discussing his work, once conducted an experiment in which people were told fables into which illogical or non sequitur elements had been introduced; when asked to repeat the tales, they omitted or smoothed over the anomalous bits. More recently, graduate students who were asked to recall what their anxiety level had been before an important examination consistently exaggerated that anxiety. As Yagoda puts it, “That little tale—‘I was really worried, but I passed’—would be memoir-worthy. The ‘truth’—‘I wasn’t that worried, and I passed’—would not.” In other words, we always manage to turn our memories into good stories—even if those stories aren’t quite true.

Anyone who writes a memoir doesn’t need psychology experiments to tell him that memories can be partial, or self-serving, or faulty. A few years ago, I was on a plane coming home from Australia, where I’d been interviewing Holocaust survivors for a book I was
working on, a personal narrative rather different from my first book: an account of my search to find out exactly what happened to my mother’s uncle and his family, who were Polish Jews, during World War II. As I interviewed survivors from the same small town where my great-uncle had not survived, I asked not only about my relatives and what might have happened to them but about the tiniest details of life before, during, and after the war: what they ate for breakfast, who their middle school teachers were, how and where they spent their school holidays.

Both the mad ambition and the poignant inadequacy of those interviews—and perhaps of the whole project of reconstituting the past, anyone’s past, from memory—came home to me on the long flight home. I was sitting next to my brother Matt, a photographer, who was shooting portraits of the survivors we were interviewing, and about halfway through the flight some kids toward the back of the plane—a high school choir, I think it was—began singing a 1970s pop song in unison. Matt turned to me with an amused expression. “Remember we sang that in choir?” he asked.

I looked at him in astonishment. “Choir? You weren’t even in the choir,” I said to him. I’d been the president of the choir, and I knew what I was talking about.

Now it was his turn to be astonished. “Daniel,” he said. “I stood
next
to you on the risers during concerts!”

Matt was talking about a shared history from 1978—a comparatively recent past. The people we’d just spent ten days with, struggling to find the keys that would spring the locks of their rusted recollections, had been talking about things that had happened sixty, seventy, even eighty years before. I thought about this, and burst out laughing. Then I went home and wrote the book.

—The New Yorker
, January 25, 2010

“
EVEN THE YOUNGEST
of us will know, in fifty years’ time,” Kenneth Tynan wrote a little over fifty years ago, “exactly what we mean by ‘a very Noël Coward sort of person.’ ” Tynan himself was just twenty-six when he made this confident pronouncement, and although it’s likely that “a very Noël Coward sort of person” doesn’t signify a great deal to most twenty-six-year-olds today, perhaps some of them—and certainly most people twice their age—would know precisely what kind of person Tynan was talking about. Witty and amusing, with an epigram on his lips, a cocktail in one perfectly manicured hand, and a lighted cigarette in the other, this person would be impeccably and elegantly dressed, and would always manage to be just as impeccably, and perhaps a trifle theatrically, posed whenever he appeared in public.

He would, in fact, look just like the striking Cecil Beaton portrait of Coward that appears on the cover of Barry Day’s rich new collection,
The Letters of Noël Coward
: an image of “the Master” in dramatic profile, natty in a perfectly cut suit, holding a cigarette aloof
from his lips as if he were just about to pronounce, or maybe had just pronounced, one of the bons mots for which he and his plays were so famous. It’s an image that sums up what most people during the twentieth century thought urbane sophistication looked like. And yet to those who know Coward’s life and work well, the amused and amusing persona that he perfected in the 1920s, when he first became famous, was just part of the story—“a nice façade to sit behind,” as Coward wrote of a character based on Somerset Maugham in his 1935 play
Point Valaine
, “but a trifle bleak.”

Coward himself never succumbed to that bleakness. Although he would come to be known for being (as someone says in his 1930 classic
Private Lives
) “jagged with sophistication,” the key to his phenomenal productivity and equally phenomenal emotional stability throughout his life may well have been that he managed to retain the stolid values of the decidedly unsophisticated, lower-middle-class suburb where he was born at (as his given name suggests) Christmastime 1899, the second son of a piano-salesman father and a strong-willed mother who liked to reminisce about her family’s once-grander circumstances. Pragmatic, hardworking, admirably without illusions about either his strengths or his defects, generous, unabashedly sentimental and patriotic, he was that rarity among people who achieve dazzling success very early on in life (as he did at the age of twenty-four, with his smash-hit cocaine-addiction melodrama
The Vortex
): someone who managed to withstand, for the most part, the powerful aura of his own public persona.

Hence although Day’s meticulous and artfully structured edition of the
Letters
will inevitably be read by those eager to be dazzled by refractions of the jagged sophistication of Coward’s busy social life (“I had a tremendous party given for me last night and it was rather fun. George Gershwin played and we all carried on like one o’clock”), its greatest significance may well lie in the extent to which its content
demonstrates the qualities—unanticipated, perhaps, by those searching here for “a very Noël Coward sort of person”—of humaneness, tenderness, and a kind of Edwardian sentimentality that, as I argued in a review of the 2002 Broadway revival of
Private Lives
,
^*
both underlie and give emotional texture to the surface cleverness in so much of his work. Coward himself understood the way in which, just below the dazzlingly urbane repartee, there lurked the Teddington native’s unerring sense for what ordinary people were interested in: “I know all about my facility for writing adroit swift dialogue and hitting unimportant but popular nails on the head,” he wrote to T.E. Lawrence, one of his many illustrious correspondents, in 1931. Indeed, among the greatest pleasures of this collection are those moments when we get to see the scion of Teddington intersect with that “very Noël Coward sort of person.” Take, for instance, this 1954 letter to the Lunts about a production of his new musical version of
Lady Windermere’s Fan
:

Coward very rarely confused himself with “Coward.”

Day’s edition of the
Letters
will add nothing new to the ample record of Coward’s life and work, both of which can be known in tremendous detail at this point: apart from no fewer than three volumes of autobiography and an excellent biography by Sheridan Morley, there are by now memoirs by friends and former lovers, his shrewd and funny
Diaries
, edited by Morley together with Coward’s longtime lover, Graham Payn, and numerous editions of the plays and
songs. (No less than seven of these books were the handiwork of Day himself.) But it is particularly interesting to see the life unfold through the letters, which are inevitably more spontaneous, and written with less of an eye on posterity, than the entries in the
Diaries
, and are certainly less craftily premeditated than the published autobiographies.