She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever, even dreaming a limestone tower into existence, getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible gentility, or casting conjecture in a pretty light.
I joined facebook a few years ago, and as a person might, I looked to see if I could find anyone I used to know. I did stumble over a few without making any effort to contact them because, in the end, it felt like there was a reason why we didn't know each other anymore. There was one friend, however, that I regretted losing touch with, and after much searching and eventually finding her daughter, I got in touch with Delight. We talked on the phone and chatted through facebook and eventually got together, face to face. What was strange was that, in answer to the questions, "So what's new? What have you been doing with yourself for the past 15 years?", it was a struggle for me to come up with much more than, "Well, we have one more daughter than when we last spoke and now we live in Cambridge". It's not that I haven't done anything in those years, I don't consider myself bored or boring in my everyday life, but my story does lack grand events (and insofar as that means my story lacks tragedy, I am not ungrateful for it). Sure, I was able to sketch a big picture of a life of happiness and routine, throwing in a few brags about how great my girls are, sharing some frustrations and minor setbacks, but since I was talking to someone who already knows me, I felt like she still knew me, as the "me" hadn't really changed. In the end, my dull story felt like not so much a failure of memory as a failure of memoir.
The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence.
In The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields presents Daisy Goodwill Flett as an ordinary person who, as a classic unreliable narrator, tells her life story, flipping from first person to third person omniscient perspectives, witnessing and describing even her own birth, and carefully choosing which stories to include and which long stretches of years to omit. The storytelling is clever: I would be sucked into the narrative, "believing" what I was being told, but Shields repeatedly tells the reader that Daisy can't be trusted:
Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. Which is why you want to take Daisy's representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt.
Childhood is a good example of my own failure with memoir. Like most of my later life, my childhood was unremarkable (which again simply reveals a lack of tragedy), but I don't recall it fondly. If I stop and try to remember being a kid, I can conjure some happy and playful memories, but it's the resentments that can come unbidden. When my brothers and I are together, we can fall into a rut of unhappy memories, reminiscing bitterly, and it's not like we were abused or anything-- this is just how we've framed our early lives, and maybe the point is that even the stories I tell myself, about myself, should be taken with a grain of salt.
You might like to guess that Daisy has no gaiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her story as well as inside.
Imagine living outside your own story! Of course our lives contain more than the story we're willing to share, more than the truth that we're willing to admit to ourselves, but in the end, what is truth? My husband has a dozen biographies of Elvis Presley, has read dozens more, and I wonder if anyone has been written about more extensively-- there are books on Elvis' career and love life and drug use and family, written by friends and lovers and dispassionate "truth-seekers", his every public word and action, along with many private, have been catalogued and parsed and psychoanalysed, and even if he had written an autobiography, would any of us know the "truth" of his existence? Would Elvis himself? The omissions and reactions and fallacies in The Stone Diaries demonstrate that even Daisy herself can't get at the truth of her own existence. I read an edition of this book that includes the "family photos" and I thought that the picture included of Daisy's parents is genius. After describing her mother, Mercy, as a doughy mountain of flesh, the picture of her looks like a fairly average sized person, maybe a size twelve. Does Daisy imagine that her father adores his wife's generous rolls of flesh because it is she, not necessarily he, who needs to create a soft and matronly presence to disappear into? It's these sorts of details that make The Stone Diaries a technical marvel.
On genealogy: Victoria doesn't believe these earnest amateurs are looking for links to royalty or to creative genius; all they want is for their ancestors to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded (but severely occluded) lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection.
And so we are left with the paradox of not being able to adequately know our own truths, let alone share them with others, and we leave behind generations of descendants who will never glimpse beyond the bare facts of us that they might one day discover. Two more stories: When he was a teenager, my older brother hitch-hiked from PEI, where he was staying with our maternal grandparents, to Nova Scotia to visit our paternal grandparents. This was an unexpected visit and they were uncomfortable to find him at their door (my younger brother and I agree that neither of us would have assumed that any of our grandparents would have wanted us to drop in on them, but good on Ken for trying). While there, Ken asked our grandfather, who had served in WW II for five years, what he remembered of the war. Grampie got upset and angry and had nothing to say on the subject. By contrast, my mother-in-law's father's cousin, Fred Topham, was given the Victoria Cross for bravery during the war, and we've taken the girls to the Canadian War Museum to see it on display; they have even done school projects on him because there is much written about Topham. In the end, which of these ancestors will my girls even "know"? Is an "official" version of the events of someone's life more instructive than an angry old man rebuffing his grandson?
The Stone Diaries is like a scrapbook: it contains letters and recipes, reminiscences from different perspectives, conjectures and made up stories. Taken together, they make up a life, but in the end, we are instructed to take it all with a grain of salt. I think it's the technical feat of this book that earned it a Pulitzer Prize. The book I read came from the local library, and annoyingly, someone had started underlining every word that refers to stone and every word that refers to plants and gardening. Happily the underlining vandal gave up halfway through the book, but it left me with an eye for the language that I was supposed to be watching out for (and I hope the happy underliner read through to the end where the dying Daisy feels herself turning to stone). So while I can appreciate the mastery that Carol Shields displayed in writing this book, I lacked a connection with Daisy. She compares unfavourably, as a reading experience, to Hagar in The Stone Angel, and so I have to stick to four stars, acknowledging as I do that all of my ratings are filtered through my own history and sentiments; through me.
