Memory, p.18
Memory, page 18
In the silence that fell between them he became aware of a variety of small sounds – the buzzing of an intrusive fly, the plash of water from the stream in the combe below, and finally the sound for which, without realising it, he had been straining his ears for minutes past – the faint whimper of hounds. It came for a moment only and was not repeated. Pettigrew was not surprised. Wherever they were running, he reflected, it was an even chance that it was uphill and through long heather or bracken. They would have little breath to spare to give tongue on a warm afternoon like this. It was, of course, a matter of complete indifference to him whether they were running, or in what direction; but he found himself none the less concentrating his attention upon a particular part of the skyline where the ground dipped to form a saddle between the Barrows and another, less prominent eminence. The latter point he recognised at once, in his mood of reawakened sensitivity to the past. It was called Bolter’s Tussock; and astonishingly enough, the absurd name evoked a thoroughly disagreeable sensation in his mind. Alone in that wide prospect of familiar friendly scenes the place stood for something vaguely but unquestionably sinister. Something had occurred there so unpleasant that he had long since buried the recollection of it deep in his subconscious mind. Painfully and perversely he struggled to disinter it. He was almost on the point of success when the present intruded upon the past, and temporarily blotted it out.
From LEONARD WOOLF, Sowing (1960)
This looking back at oneself through middle age, youth, childhood, infancy is a curious and puzzling business. Some of the things which one seems to remember from far, far back in infancy are not, I think, really remembered; they are family tales told so often about one that eventually one has the illusion of remembering them. Such I believe to be the story of how as an infant I fell into a stream near Oban which I heard so often that eventually it became part of my memory. What genuine glimpses one does get of oneself in very early childhood seem to show that the main outlines of one’s character are moulded in infancy and do not change between the ages of three and eighty-three. I am sure that my attitude to sin was the same when I lay in my pram as it is today when I sit tapping this out on the typewriter and, unless I become senile, will be the same when I lie on my death-bed. And in other ways when I can genuinely remember something of myself far off and long ago, I can recognize that self as essentially myself with the same little core of character exactly the same as exists in me today. I think that the first things which I can genuinely remember are connected with an illness which I had when I was about three. It was a very severe attack of scarlet fever which also affected my kidneys and in those days scarlet fever was a dangerous disease. I can remember incidents connected with the illness and I think they are genuine memories; they are so vivid that I can visualize them and myself in them.
The first is of a man coming into the room and applying leeches to my back. I insisted upon seeing the leeches and was fascinated by them. Twenty-five years later, one day in Ceylon during the rainy season, I was pushing my way through thick, wet grass in the jungle. I was wearing shorts and suddenly looking down I saw that my two bare knees were black with leeches. And suddenly I was back, a small boy of three, lying in bed in the bedroom high up in the Lexham Gardens house with the kindly man rather reluctantly showing me the leeches. I doubt whether in the intervening twenty-five years I had ever recalled the man with the leeches, but there in a flash the scene and the man and the leeches and my feelings were as vivid to me as the leeches on my knees, the gun in my hand, and the enveloping silence of the jungle.
When I look into the depths of my own mind (or should one say soul?) one of the characteristics which seems to me deepest and most persistent is a kind of fatalistic and half-amused resignation. I never worry, because I am saved by the feeling that in the end nothing matters, and I can watch with amusement and detachment the cruel, often undeserved but expected, blows which fate rains upon me. In another incident of my scarlet fever, which I think I do genuinely remember myself (though it became a family story), I seem to see this streak in my character already formed in the three-year-old child. At one moment my illness took a turn for the worse and I was, so it was said, upon the point of death. They called in Sir William Jenner, the Queen’s doctor and a descendant of the Jenner who invented inoculation. He was a kindly man and I was fascinated by the shape of his nose. He prescribed a draught of the most appalling taste. I drank it down, but on his second visit – presumably next day – I sat up in bed with a second dose in the glass in my hand unable to drink it despite all the urging of my mother and Sir William. At last I said to them – according to my mother, with considerable severity – ‘If you will all go out of the room, I will drink it.’ I do not really remember that, but I do vividly remember the sequel. I remember sitting up in bed alone and the resignation with which I drank the filthy stuff, and the doctor and my mother coming back into the room and praising me. Sir William sat down on my bed and said that I had been so good that I would be given what I wanted. What did I want? ‘A pigeon pie’, I said, ‘with the legs sticking out.’ ‘You cannot’, he explained and his explanation was not unexpected by me, ‘be given a pigeon pie with the legs sticking out just yet, but you will be given one as soon as you are quite well. But isn’t there something – not to eat – which you would like now?’ I remember looking carefully into his kindly old face and saying: ‘I should like to pull your nose.’ He said that I might, and gently, not disrespectfully, but as a kind of symbol or token, serious but also, I believe, deep down amused, I pulled Sir William Jenner’s nose.
From VIRGINIA WOOLF, Moments of Being (published 1976)
Two days ago – Sunday 16th April 1939 to be precise – Nessa said that if I did not start writing my memoirs I should soon be too old …. There are several difficulties. In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember; in the second, the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written. As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways. But … without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself – or if not it will not matter – I begin: the first memory.
This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground – my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close; and can still see purple and red and blue, I think, against the black; they must have been anemones, I suppose. Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London. But it is more convenient artistically to suppose that we were going to St Ives, for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories. If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive ….
But of course there was one external reason for the intensity of this first impression: the impression of the waves and the acorn on the blind; the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow – it was due partly to the many months we spent in London. The change of nursery was a great change. And there was the long train journey; and the excitement. I remember the dark; the lights; the stir of the going up to bed.
But to fix my mind upon the nursery – it had a balcony; there was a partition, but it joined the balcony of my father’s and mother’s bedroom. My mother would come out onto her balcony in a white dressing gown. There were passion flowers growing on the wall; they were great starry blossoms, with purple streaks, and large green buds, part empty, part full.
If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers. I should make a picture that was globular; semi-transparent. I should make a picture of curved petals; of shells; of things that were semi-transparent; I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen would at the same time be heard; sounds would come through this petal or leaf – sounds indistinguishable from sights …. When I think of the early morning in bed I also hear the caw of rooks falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air; which holds it up; which prevents it from being sharp and distinct. The quality of the air above Talland House seemed to suspend sound, to let it sink down slowly, as if it were caught in a blue gummy veil. The rooks cawing is part of the waves breaking – one, two, one, two – and the splash as the wave drew back and then it gathered again, and I lay there half awake, half asleep, drawing in such ecstasy as I cannot describe.
The next memory – all these colour-and-sound memories hang together at St Ives – was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It was later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny; smelling so many smells at once; and all making a whole that even now makes me stop – as I stopped then going down to the beach; I stopped at the top to look down at the gardens. They were sunk beneath the road. The apples were on a level with one’s head. The gardens gave off a murmur of bees; the apples were red and gold; there were also pink flowers; and grey and silver leaves. The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. But again I cannot describe that rapture. It was rapture rather than ecstasy ….
At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories – what one has forgotten – come to the top ….
But the peculiarity of these two strong memories is that each was very simple. I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture. Perhaps this is characteristic of all childhood memories; perhaps it accounts for their strength. Later we add to feelings much that makes them more complex; and therefore less strong; or if not less strong, less isolated, less complete.
From SAMUEL BECKETT, Happy Days (1961)
What now? [Pause.] What now, Willie? [Long pause.] There is my story of course, when all else fails. [Pause.] A life. [Smile.] A long life. [Smile off.] Beginning in the womb, where life used to begin, Mildred has memories, she will have memories, of the womb, before she dies, the mother’s womb. [Pause.] She is now four or five already and has recently been given a big waxen dolly. [Pause.] Fully clothed, complete outfit. [Pause.] Shoes, socks, undies, complete set, frilly frock, gloves. [Pause.] White mesh. [Pause.] A little white straw hat with a chin elastic. [Pause.] Pearly necklace. [Pause.] A little picture-book with legends in real print to go under her arm when she takes her walk. [Pause.] China blue eyes that open and shut. [Pause. Narrative.] The sun was not well up when Milly rose, descended the steep … [pause.] … slipped on her nightgown, descended all alone the steep wooden stairs, backwards on all fours, though she had been forbidden to do so, entered the … [pause] … tiptoed down the silent passage, entered the nursery and began to undress Dolly. [Pause.] Crept under the table and began to undress Dolly. [Pause.] Scolding her … the while. [Pause.] Suddenly a mouse – [Long pause.] Gently, Winnie. [Long pause. Calling.] Willie! [Pause. Louder.] Willie! [Pause. Mild reproach.] I sometimes find your attitude a little strange, Willie, all this time, it is not like you to be wantonly cruel. [Pause.] Strange? [Pause.] No. [Smile.] Not here. [Smile broader.] Not now. [Smile off.] And yet … [Suddenly anxious.] I do hope nothing is amiss. [Eyes right, loud.] Is all well, dear? (Pause. Eyes front. To herself.] God grant he did not go in head foremost! [Eyes right, loud.] You’re not stuck, Willie? [Pause. Do.] You’re not jammed, Willie? [Eyes front, distressed.] Perhaps he is crying out for help all this time and I do not hear him! [Pause.] I do of course hear cries. [Pause.] But they are in my head surely. [Pause.] Is it possible that … [Pause. With finality.] No no, my head was always full of cries. [Pause.] Faint confused cries. [Pause.] They come. [Pause.] Then go. [Pause.] As on a wind. [Pause.] That is what I find so wonderful. [Pause.] They cease. [Pause.] Ah yes, great mercies, great mercies.
From VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory (1967)
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! I may be inordinately fond of my earliest impressions, but then I have reason to be grateful to them. They led the way to a veritable Eden of visual and tactile sensations. One night, during a trip abroad, in the fall of 1903, I recall kneeling on my (flattish) pillow at the window of a sleeping car (probably on the long-extinct Mediterranean Train de Luxe, the one whose six cars had the lower part of their body painted in umber and the panels in cream) and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth. I had probably managed to undo and push up the tight tooled blind at the head of my berth, and my heels were cold, but I still kept kneeling and peering. Nothing is sweeter or stranger than to ponder those first thrills. They belong to the harmonious world of a perfect childhood and, as such, possess a naturally plastic form in one’s memory, which can be set down with hardly any effort; it is only starting with the recollections of one’s adolescence that Mnemosyne begins to get choosy and crabbed. I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known. Genius disappeared when everything had been stored, just as it does with those other, more specialised child prodigies – pretty, curly-headed youngsters waving batons or taming enormous pianos, who eventually turn into second-rate musicians with sad eyes and obscure ailments and something vaguely misshapen about their eunuchoid hind quarters. But even so, the individual mystery remains to tantalize the memoirist. Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.
To fix correctly, in terms of time, some of my childhood recollections, I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when they tackle the fragments of a saga. But in other cases there is no dearth of data. I see myself, for instance, clambering over wet black rocks at the seaside while Miss Norcott, a languid and melancholy governess, who thinks I am following her, strolls away along the curved beach with Sergey, my younger brother. I am wearing a toy bracelet. As I crawl over those rocks, I keep repeating, in a kind of zestful, copious, and deeply gratifying incantation, the English word ‘childhood,’ which sounds mysterious and new, and becomes stranger and stranger as it gets mixed up in my small, overstocked, hectic mind, with Robin Hood and Little Red Riding Hood, and the brown hoods of old hunch-backed fairies. There are dimples in the rocks, full of tepid seawater, and my magic muttering accompanies certain spells I am weaving over the tiny sapphire pools.
From PENELOPE LIVELY, Going Back (1975)
Remembering is like that. There’s what you know happened, and what you think happened. And then there’s the business that what you know happened isn’t always what you remember. Things are fudged by time; years fuse together. The things that should matter – the stepping-stones that marked the way, the decisions that made one thing happen rather than another – they get forgotten. You are left with islands in a confused and layered landscape, like the random protrusions after a heavy snowfall, the telegraph pole and hump of farm machinery and buried wall. There is time past, and time to come, and time that is continuous, in the head for ever.
From ANTHONY POWELL, Infants of the Spring (1976)
After the park and the street the interior of the building seemed very silent. A long beam of sunlight, in which small particles of dust swam about, all at once slanted through an upper window on the staircase, and struck the opaque glass panels of the door. On several occasions recently I had been conscious of approaching the brink of some discovery: an awareness that nearly became manifest and then withdrew. Now the truth came flooding in with the dust-infested sunlight. There was no doubt about it. I was me.
From WILLIAM MAXWELL, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)
I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
