In the HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts (which I recommend), Fonda speaks of the last time her mother was brought on a home visit from the mental hospital. Jane and her brother Peter were upstairs playing jacks, and Jane told her brother, “You go downstairs, and I’ll let you win. I’m staying up here.” A day or two later, her mother committed suicide and she never saw her again. Soon after that, her father remarried to a much younger woman, and Jane and her brother were sent to boarding school. The documentary is fascinating for what it suggests about the extraordinary amount of work it takes to rebuild an inadequately parented self. I was also interested in the way memory works and how we learn of Fonda’s life in scenes that resonate with her down through the years.
In my online Lyric Essay course (which I am offering again this summer, starting July 10th), we read Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Village.” Here is an excerpt from the class:
Poet Elizabeth Bishop's biography informs her prose piece "In the Village." ("In the Village" was published as a short story in the New Yorker, but it draws heavily on her lived experience.) You can read about Bishop's life here. Her mother, Gertrude, suffered from mental illness from the time of the death of Bishop's father, and she lived in an institution starting when Bishop was five until Gertrude's death when her daughter was a young woman. Bishop begins this piece with an extended metaphor about a scream her mother let out when Elizabeth was a child, a scream the narrator feels continued to hang over their village for years after.
As you read the story, examine how the mysterious, otherworldly quality of life and memory can enter a piece of prose by way of descriptive language and unusual metaphors and similes. Bishop recreates the emotional aura of this period of her childhood by way of her memory of specific scenes and images. She also recreates the child's experience of the time using beautiful, lyrical language. I'm always fascinated by how this can work in writing-- writers show us how much children notice and absorb, even if they don't have language for it at the time. As adults, we can go back and recreate the emotional texture of a childhood scene using language that we now have access to, and often we enter into those scenes by way of memories of specific objects or bits of dialogue or behavior.
Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from the piece:
In the blacksmith’s shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things, and there are black and glistening piles of dust in each corner. A tub of night-black water stands by the forge. The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons and follow each other like bloody little moons to drown in the black water, hissing, protesting.
It is remarkable to think about all the child absorbs who later becomes the woman who writes this.
I was able to visit Bishop’s childhood home in Nova Scotia in 2009, staying there for several days with a friend for a writing residency, and toward the end of the day, a somber energy descended on the house, which I couldn’t help but imagine was Gertrude and her sadness, or maybe Elizabeth’s. Whether this was my imagination or not, the power of Bishop’s narrative hangs in the air there.
Writing exercise: Is there a resonant scene, image, or bit of dialogue that stays with you from childhood that you can fill out now that you have adult language and perspective? Write a page on that memory.
Summer classes:
There is still time to register for either Memoir in Collage with Megan Baxter (which only has a few spots left!) or Lyric Essay with me. Both courses were originally designed for Creative Nonfiction and have been very well received by students. We’d love to have you join us!