Topical Guide 24
Mark Dorset
Memoirs, Memories, Inventions, Memoirs with Inventions, Sawdust
Whenever I visited, she would quiz me about the exploits of these Leroys, and I had gotten them all down pretty well, but there were gaps in my understanding of what I repeated for her, enough gaps so that the Leroy history as Great-grandmother presented it seemed to me a perilously leaky affair that was likely to sink if the weather got at all rough. Often, when I was reciting for her, I employed a narrative analogue to a widely used technique for keeping afloat a clamboat with a soft bottom, a boat that leaks more or less all the time. One takes the boat out to the clam flats and there crawls under the hull and pokes sawdust into any visible gaps and, for good measure, gives the whole bottom a good coating. Then one drinks a few beers or digs a few clams while the sawdust floats into the cracks and swells with water, stopping, or at least slowing, the leaks. This is not a permanent solution, of course, merely a stop-gap measure, but some boats have been kept afloat this way for years. The hull provides the form, the sawdust the substance, and the result is an artful deception: the illusion of a solid hull, an illusion so substantial that the boat floats. Sometimes, when I was reciting for Great-grandmother, I threw quite a lot of sawdust into the gaps, but she rarely seemed to notice, or if she did, she didn’t seem to mind.
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?”
Imagine, please, an island, a small one, not in some pellucid subtropical sea, but in a gray bay, shallow, often cold, and on that island imagine an old hotel, Small’s Hotel, where an aging dreamer, Peter Leroy, lives with his beautiful wife, Albertine Gaudet. Albertine runs the hotel, with Peter as her assistant, but Peter spends a part of every day in a room at the top of the hotel, writing The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, his life’s story. If you could look over his shoulder while he was at work, you’d probably find that he was re-writing an episode from his past, altering it, embellishing it, or recreating it, because he finds that when he reminisces he’s as interested in the possibilities as he is in the facts, and also because memory, like an old radio receiver, picks up a lot of static.
from Kraft’s introduction to many of his public readings
When Peter began reissuing his memoirs on his own after they had gone out of print, he began calling them “memoirs with inventions,” thereby making a direct acknowledgment that there was a great deal of sawdust in his accounts of his past life.
This is obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: I see static as the source of unintentional deviations from fact in a memoir and sawdust, or “sawdusting,” as the introduction of intentional deviations, the introduction of art.
No art without transformation.
Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph
[more to come on Tuesday, June 15, 2021]
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