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Woolfe and Nabokov: Breached Walls
As I continue to buck the memoir trend and focus instead on mining my personal experience to enrich my fiction, I can still appreciate the work of real masters. Here I compare and contrast Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”, “Reminiscences”, “Hyde Park Gate” and “Old Bloomsbury” with Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory”. When I think I can lay it out this evocatively and with these levels of power and grace, I may reconsider.
Stay tuned.
Vacuums only exist in the abstract and laboratories; they do not surround writers; they do not protect fragile human lives or psyches.
Much as anyone with a pen (or a keyboard) would like to throw up a force field to deflect the distractions of an unruly world, to wholly concentrate on the story, in reality that force field is porous and what oozes through can’t help but find its place on the page in one form or another. No story is hermetically sealed and that is even more the case for memoir.
Chaotic times breed memoir.
Primo Levi, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, and Elie Wiesel sat in the rubble and wrote, needing no walls because this world-shattering catastrophe was their story. But for others it was a backdrop and for some it was a very distant backdrop.
