In another post, I explained my organization of the course material in three life phases or “chapters,” and suggested some of the books from which we will be reading excerpts.
I am speaking this evening at a “kick-off” event for prospective students; so I thought I should converge on a (probably) final list of the seven core books we will be looking at in the seven-week course, when it begins October 19.
Here they are, in order (I think):
This is a short story originally published in Esquire.
Maclean, who wrote A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories as well as Young Men and Fire, considered “Retrievers” a “moral and artistic failure.” But after the success of River, on which the Brad Pitt film was based, Maclean decided to publish it anyway.
I can find no fault with a story that, in fewer than ten pages, summarizes the writer’s childhood and an entire family’s emotional life by focusing on something as humble as a duck-hunting dog.
To me, for personal reasons, “Retrievers” is the most powerful piece we will read in the course.
This is an inevitable selection for a class of older Bostonians living on and around Beacon Hill. You can throw in the fact that Beacon Hill Seminars has held classes in the Church of the Advent on Brimmer Street in Boston, a one-minute walk from Morison’s ancestral home at 44 Brimmer.
Ancestral in Morison’s case refers not to his father’s family, but to his mother’s. She was an Eliot, as in two Harvard presidents, T. S. Eliot, and others too numerous to list here. The name Eliot means Boston-Cambridge intellectual. And so Samuel Eliot Morison, a Harvard historian known as Admiral Morison for his nautical prowess and knowledge, focused the first chapter of his memoir not on Dad’s family but on Mom’s.
Here, he seems to say, is who I am. If doubts about the Admiral’s identity linger while reading One Boy’s Boston, you can flip to the photos in the center of this short, charming memoir. Side by side are photographs of Morison and his Eliot grandfather, seated in the same pose in the same chair in the same library 64 years apart. Raised in his grandfather’s house, Morison literally lived there to the end of his days—and inherited the old man’s books in the bargain.
A statue on the Commonwealth Avenue mall (pictured) commemorates the Admiral.
The first two weeks of the course will focus on the first “chapter” of life, which I refer to as The Gift. Maclean and Morison were born into very different circumstances, the “givens” of their early lives.
There comes a point in our history, however, when life begins to call to us, and so I refer to the second chapter in many memoirs as The Call. Dominica Ruta’s searing memoir of growing up with a drug-addicted single mother bridges Gift and Call. We will read two sections from With or Without You, one about the circumstances of Ruta’s birth and the other about the moment when she first intuited what life was asking from her.
Ruta’s is another Boston-area story, only different than Morison’s. Her home was in the inland working town of Danvers, and her mother’s slovenly house stood beside a stinking tidal river. Moreover, the visitors in that house were not the bluest of blue bloods but drug dealers, boyfriends, husbands, ex-husbands, none of them very propah.
Here is a review I wrote about With or Without You.
Domenica Ruta’s call was artistic; Dorothy Day’s call was religious. A single mother and Catholic convert, Day was unhappy with the Catholic Church, which she felt served the rich and powerful. (This was the late 1920s.)
After the Depression was in full sway, Day took part in a march in Washington; and on her last day in the Capital, she prayed for a fresh sense of vocation at the National Cathedral. When she returned home, she found Peter Maurin on her doorstep. Maurin was an itinerant preacher who admired Day as a writer. He urged her to start what amounted to a movement with him.
That May Dorothy Day and coworkers published the first edition of the Catholic Worker, a newspaper determined to show working people that the Catholic Church had a message for them too. Subsequently, with Maurin’s support, Day opened the first Catholic Worker “house of hospitality” in New York City. What amounted to a soup-kitchen-cum-homeless-shelter spawned a movement.
Today there are more than 200 Catholic Worker communities around the world. Personal note: I am a Catholic convert and Dorothy Day is one of my biggest heroes.
I heard Bob Smith speak a few years ago. His is a great story that speaks to another part of me, the wannabe actor (long retired from the stage). We will use his memoir to bridge the second and third “chapters” of the course, the Call and the Return.
Smith’s only sibling, his sister Carolyn, was “not right.” Her mental disability was a terrible strain on Smith and his parents, as he recalls it in the book. In fact, a comment from his grandmother made Smith feel responsible for his sister’s condition.
His parents wanted Smith to be a priest, but instead he became a backstage hand at the American Shakespeare Festival in his hometown of Stratford, Connecticut. This originally volunteer gig turned into an occupation and gave the author a strong sense of vocation. He eventually worked on national tours, including one in which he assisted Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion of Oz who, as a person, was no day at the beach.
Eventually, Smith’s calling evolved and he developed a second career reading Shakespeare with senior citizen groups. One day, forty years after his sister had been institutionalized, he returned to see her in her group home. The encounter, as recalled in Hamlet’s Dresser, is as moving as it is surprising.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American whose parents emigrated from Haiti when she was a child, leaving her in the custody of her father’s brother.
The author came to love both of her “fathers,” especially after she finally followed her parents to New York City. Danticat’s memoir is an exceptionally loving family memoir by today’s standards.
The majority of family memoirs published by big New York houses seem to involve alcohol, sex abuse, extreme poverty, violence, or some combination of the above. The primary form of dysfunction in Brother is not interpersonal but political. Danticat’s story plays out against the tumultuous, often violent history of modern-day Haiti, with its various Docs and Papa Docs and brutal street gangs run by corrupt politicians.
We will read the chapter in which Danticat returns to Haiti as a young woman and confronts, as many memoirists eventually do, her complicated past.
This is one of the best new books I’ve read this year.
Macdonald is an academic at Cambridge University who, as her memoir begins, has just lost her beloved father. To manage her grief, Macdonald comes up with a novel remedy. She buys a hawk, which she names Mabel, and trains her to fly.
It turns out that hawking was a childhood passion for Macdonald; and that her father had a similar skyward obsession in his youth, spotting and plotting the military planes that flew overhead during World War II.
In one of many moving passages in H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald attends her father’s memorial service; gives a eulogy for him; and in doing so understands some things about Dad that she never considered before.
Here is a review I wrote about H is for Hawk.
And Also
Over the course of seven weeks, I will also be bringing material from other memoirs into the course. Some I am considering are:
St. Augustine, The Confessions (written 397–400)
U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885)
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul (1897)
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955)
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (1961)
Henri Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak (1988)
Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club (1995)
Tony Hendra, Father Joe (2004)
Tim Guest, My Life in Orange (2004)
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle (2005)
Calvin Trillin, About Alice (2006)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
The overall list of twenty books is by no means definitive or canonical. These are twenty books that just plain interest me.
That’s how it works, after all. I teach the course, I get to choose the memoirs.
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