The Book of Life: A Compendium of the Best Autobiographical and Memoir Writing. Edited by Eve Claxton Hardcover - 2005

Excerpt

BEGINNINGS

AGES 0-12

'My autobiography, however, is without any
artifice; nor is it intended to instruct anyone;
but, being merely a story, recounts my life,
not tumultuous events. Like the lives of Sulla,
of Caius Caesar, and even of Augustus, who,
there is no doubt, wrote accounts of their
careers and deeds, urged by the examples
of the ancients, so, in a manner by no means
new or originating with myself, do I set
forth my account.'

GIROLAMO CARDANO,
THE BOOK OF MY LIFE, 1576

ST AUGUSTINE

For at that time I knew how to suck, to be satisfied when comfortable, and to cry when in pain - nothing beyond.

Afterwards I began to laugh - at first in sleep, then in waking. For this I have heard mentioned of myself, and I believe it (though I cannot remember it), for we see the same in other infants. And now little by little I realised where I was, and wished to tell my wishes to those who might satisfy them, but I could not! For my wants were within me, while they were without, and could not by any faculty of theirs enter into my soul. So I cast about limbs and voice, making the few and feeble signs I could, like, though indeed not much like, unto what I wished; and when I was not satisfied - either not being understood or because it would have been injurious to me - I grew indignant that my elders were not subject unto me, and that those on whom I had no claim did not wait on me, and avenged myself on them by tears. That infants are such I have been able to learn by watching them; and they, though unknowing, have better shown me that I was such a one than my nurses who knew it.

And, behold, my infancy died long ago, and I live.

THE CONFESSIONS OF ST AUGUSTINE, 397-400

ARIEL DORFMAN

I was a baby; a pad upon which any stranger could scrawl a signature. A passive little bastard, shipwrecked, no ticket back, not even sure that a smile, a scream, my only weapons, could help me to the surface. And then Spanish slid to the rescue, in my mother's first cry, and soon in her murmurs and lullabies and in my father's deep voice of protection and in his jokes and in the hum of love that would soon envelop me from an extended family. Maybe that was my first exile: I had not asked to be born, had not chosen anything, not my face, not the face of my parents, not this extreme sensitivity that has always boiled out of me, not the early rash on my skin, not my remote asthma, not my nearby country, not my unpronounceable name. But Spanish was there at the beginning of my body or perhaps where my body ended and the world began, coaxing that body into life as only a lover can, convincing me slowly, sound by sound, that life was worth living, that together we could tame the fiends of the outer bounds and bend them to our will. That everything can be named and therefore, in theory, at least in desire, the world belongs to us. That if we cannot own the world, nobody can stop us from imagining everything in it, everything it can be, everything it ever was.

HEADING SOUTH, LOOKING NORTH: A BILINGUAL JOURNEY, 1998

HARRIET MARTINEAU

My first recollections are of some infantile impressions which were in abeyance for a long course of years, and then revived in an inexplicable way, as by a flash of lightning over a far horizon in the night. There is no doubt of the genuineness of the remembrance, as the facts could not have been told me by anyone else. I remember standing on the threshold of a cottage, holding fast by the doorpost, and putting my foot down, in repeated attempts to reach the ground. Having accomplished the step, I toddled (I remember the uncertain feeling) to a tree before the door, and tried to clasp and get around it; but the rough bark hurt my hands.

HARRIET MARTINEAU'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1877

HANNAH LYNCH

The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town to nurse's cottage. I shut my eyes, and I am back in the little parlour with its spindle chairs, an old-fashioned piano with green silk front, its pink-flowered wallpaper and the two wonderful black-and-white dogs on the mantelpiece ...

I do not remember my mother's coming or going. Memory begins to work from the moment nurse put me on a pair of unsteady legs. There were chairs placed for me to clutch, and I was coaxingly bidden to toddle along, 'over to mamma'. It was very exciting. First one chair had to be reached, then another fallen over, till a third tumbled me at my mother's feet. I burst into a passion of tears, not because of the fall, but from terror at finding myself so near my mother. Nurse gathered me into her arms and began to coo over me, and here the picture fades from my mind.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHILD, 1899

THOMAS CARLYLE

My earliest [memory] of all is a mad passion of rage at my elder Brother John (on a visit to us likely from his grandfather's); in which my father too figures though dimly, as a kind of cheerful comforter and soother. I had broken my little brown stool, by madly throwing it at my brother; and felt for perhaps the first time, the united pangs of Loss and of Remorse. I was perhaps hardly more than two years old; but can get no one to fix the date for me, though all is still quite legible for myself, with many of its [features] ... Backwards beyond all, are dim ruddy images, of deeper and deeper brown shade into the dark beginnings of being.

REMINISCENES, 1881

HENRY JAMES

Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as with ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous hobbledehoy. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch its pure breath, at our infantile Albany, as the very air of long summer afternoons - occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a country town, tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose familiar remarks and 'criticism of life' were handed down, as well as of dim family ramifications and local allusions Ñ mystifications always - that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums, tasting above all of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a softly-sighing widowed grandmother, Catherine Barber by birth, whose attitude was a resigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed an hospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless.

A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS, 1913

SHERWIN B. NULAND

My father does not actually appear in my earliest memory of him. But the threat of his furious anger looms over the series of moments even as they are recalled.

It is in the form of single still images that I remember him from those early years. Each picture is preserved as though a camera had caught a series of lifetime's memories in individual blinks of an eye. Sometimes, an image is followed by a brief cinematic flow of film, but rarely more. And always a distinct emotion or mood is brought back to my mind when the pictures appear.

It is mid-afternoon and I have just spied Daddy's pocket watch and chain on a small table alongside the living-room couch. The sight of the inexpensive silvery timepiece attached to a flat strand of worn and tarnished links is particularly attractive because its imperious owner has recently scolded me for daring to play with it. I pick up the entire clump of watch and chain. In the next remembered picture, I have made my way to the electric outlet on the nearest wall, and I am staring at it, as though trying to make a decision. Stabilizing myself on chubby knees, I stuff several links of the chain into one of the outlet's parallel slits.

With a sudden roaring wallop, a colossal burst of sparks and energy blasts up out of the wall as a paralyzing vibratory surge of electricity courses through every part of me and lifts my helpless body momentarily off the floor. Hearing my shrieking wail, terrified Momma flies out of some other room, screaming, no doubt certain that I have been killed. She gathers me up and I submerge myself into her softness. We are both weeping. She croons a gentle, familiar reassurance, but I am hysterical.

The pervasive feeling hovering over these horrifying images is not the sudden fright, but a sense of foreboding: something more is yet to come, and in its own way it will be as threatening as the terror I have just survived ...

The truth is not to be known. The only certainty is that the remembered sequence of images from that terrifying afternoon almost seventy years ago is inseparable from the dread of my father's coming rage; it is inseparable from the sense that Momma and I cowered in anticipation of its outburst just as we would cower in the torrential force of my father's wrath when it finally came.

Looking back on my earliest remembered years, I see my parents far less as a couple than as the sources of two quite disparate emotions Ñ emotions of golden safety with one and sporadic danger with the other. They originated from Momma, who lived only for me, and Daddy, who never quite understood how to be my father.

LOST IN AMERICA: A JOURNEY WITH MY FATHER, 2003

CHARLES CHAPLIN

One of my early recollections was that each night before Mother went to the theater, Sydney and I were lovingly tucked up in a comfortable bed and left in the care of the housemaid. In my world of three and a half years, all things were possible; if Sydney, who was four years older than I, could perform legerdemain and swallow a coin and make it come out through the back of his head, I could do the same; so I swallowed a halfpenny and Mother was obliged to send for a doctor.

Every night, after she came home from the theater, it was her custom to leave delicacies on the table for Sydney and me to find in the morning - a slice of Neapolitan cake or candies - with the understanding that we were not to make a noise in the morning, as she usually slept late.

Mother was a soubrette on the variety stage, a mignonne in her late twenties, with fair complexion, violet-blue eyes and long light-brown hair that she could sit upon. Sydney and I adored our mother. Though she was not an exceptional beauty, we thought her divine-looking. Those who knew her told me in later years that she was dainty and attractive and had compelling charm. She took pride in dressing us up for Sunday excursions, Sydney in an Eton suit with long trousers and me in a blue velvet one with blue gloves to match. Such occasions were orgies of smugness, as we ambled along the Kennington Road.

London was sedate in those days. The tempo was sedate; even the horse-drawn tramcars along Westminster Bridge Road went at a sedate pace and turned sedately on a revolving table at the terminal near the bridge. In Mother's prosperous days we also lived in Westminster Bridge Road. Its atmosphere was gay and friendly with attractive shops, restaurants and music halls. The fruit shop on the corner facing the Bridge was a galaxy of color, with its neatly arranged pyramids of oranges, apples, pears and bananas outside, in contrast to the solemn gray Houses of Parliament directly across the river.

This was the London of my childhood, of my moods and awakenings: memories of Lambeth in the spring - of trivial incidents and things - of riding with Mother on the top of a horse-bus trying to touch passing lilac trees - of the many-colored bus tickets, orange, blue, pink and green, that bestrewed the pavement where the trams and buses stopped - of rubicund flower girls at the corner of Westminster Bridge, making gay boutonnières, their adroit fingers manipulating tinsel and quivering fern - of the humid odor of freshly watered roses that affected me with a vague sadness - of melancholy Sundays and pale-faced parents and their children escorting toy windmills and colored balloons over Westminster Bridge - and the maternal penny steamers that softly lowered their funnels as they glided under it. From such trivia I believe my soul was born.

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1964

CZESLAW MILOSZ

My first awareness came with war. Peeping out from under my grandmother's cloak, I discovered horror: the bellow of cattle being driven off, the panic, the dust-laden air, the rumbling and flashing on a darkened horizon. The Germans were arriving in Lithuania and the Czarist army was retreating, accompanied by hordes of refugees.

A scene from that summer of 1914 is still very clear in my memory: bright sunshine, a lawn, myself sitting on a bench with a young Cossack whom I like a lot. He is slim-waisted and black-haired. On strips, crisscrossed over his chest, there are cartridges. He twists a bullet out and empties the powder grains onto the bench. Then a tragedy occurs. I was very attached to a little white lamb. Now the Cossacks are running him into the green grass, heading him off ... My desperate cry, the inability to bear irrevocable unhappiness, was my first protest against necessity.

NATIVE REALM: A SEARCH FOR SELF-DEFINITION, 1958

MRS SCOTT, JP

My first clear recollection is of the time when I was about three years of age, when we lived near a hollow where a little girl had been maltreated and killed by a gang of youths. Mother told me I was not to go down to the hollow, because it was not safe for little girls. I remember getting something to drag behind me and asking one or two more children to venture with me, and going down to the hollow to see if anything really did happen to you. Although it is so long ago, I can still feel the thrill of marching down and seeing for myself. This I suppose was the beginning of my habit of testing things for myself and not taking facts and opinions ready-made.

'A FELT HAT WORKER', 1931

PAUL BOWLES

Kneeling on a chair and clutching the gilded top rung of its back, I stared at the objects on the shelves of the cabinet. To the left of the gold clock was an old pewter tankard. When I had looked at it for a while, I said the word 'mug' aloud. It looked like my own silver mug at home, from which I drank my milk. 'Mug,' I said again, and the word sounded so strange that I continued to say it, again and again, until I found myself losing touch with its meaning. This astonished me; it also gave me a vague feeling of unease. How could 'mug' not mean mug?

The room was very quiet. I was alone in that part of the house. Suddenly the gold clock chimed four times. As soon as the last stroke was stilled, I realised that something important was happening. I was four years old, the clock had struck four, and 'mug' meant mug. Therefore I was I, I was there, and it was that precise moment and no other. A satisfying new experience, to be able to say all this with certainty.