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PARTISAN REVIEW
even mad, certainly abrasive; but the real point is that they are apparently
of a different substance from the smooth, reasonable and sane people who
have been inspired by them, and who do not like to remember temporary
submersions in lunacy. Often, reading histories there are events which
stick out, do not make enough sense, and one may deduce the existence
of some lunatic, male or female, who was equipped with the fiery stuff of
inspiration - but was quickly forgotten, since always and at all times the
past gets tidied up and made safer. "A rough beast" is usually the real
begetter of events. There would have been no "communist party"
In
Southern Rhodesia without such an inspirational character.
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Telling the truth or not telling it, and how much, is a lesser problem
than the one of shifting perspectives, for you see your life differently at
different stages, like climbing a mountain while the landscape changes
with every turn in the path. Had I written this when I was thirty, it
would have been a pretty combative document. In my forties, a wail of
despair and guilt: oh my God, how could I have done this or that? Now I
look at that child, that girl, that young woman, with a more and more
detached curiosity. Old people may be observed peering into their pasts,
Why?
-
they are asking themselves.
How did that happen?
I try to see my
past selves as someone else might, and then put myself back inside one of
them, and am at once submerged in a hot struggle of emotion, justified by
thoughts and ideas I now judge wrong.
Besides, the landscape itself is a tricky thing. As you start to write at
once the question begins to insist: Why do you remember this and not
that? Why do you remember in every detail a whole week, month, more,
of a long ago year, but then complete dark, a blank?
How do you know that
what you remember is more important that what you don't?
Suppose there is no landscape at all? This can happen. I sat next to a
man at dinner who said he could never write an autobiography because
he didn't remember anything. What, nothing? Only a little scene here
and there. Like, so he said, those small washes and blobs of colour that
stained glass windows lay on the dark of a stone floor in a cathedral. It is
hard for me to imagine such a darkening of the past. Once even to try
would have plunged me into frightful insecurity, as if memory were Self,
Identity - and I am sure that isn't so. Now I can imagine myself arriving
in some country with the past wiped clean out of my mind: I would do
all right. It is after all only what we did when we were born, without
memories, or so it seems to the adult: then we have to create our lives,
create memory.
"Besides" - said this dinner companion - who seemed perfectly
whole and present, despite his insufficient hold on his past, "the little
