“We All Have a Story”: A Memoirist on Memoirs

Ellen Gilbert

Describing a memoir as the creating of a story that “must expand and accrue like an Alice Munro short story, a Hank Williams song, a poem by Langston Hughes, or a novel by Willa Cather,” writer Nicholas Dawidoff, this year’s Anschutz Distingished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton, recently spoke about the art of memoir-writing at the James. M. Stewart ’32 Theater. He called his talk “Next to Love is the Desire for Love: The Search for Meaning in American Memoir,” taking a line from a Wallace Stevens poem.

Mr. Dawidoff, who lives in New York City, recently completed his own memoir, The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball, described by his publisher, Pantheon Books, as “a completely unusual coming-of-age story about growing up in New Haven with a fiercely principled single mother, an absent and dangerous father, and a burgeoning love of baseball.” It is due out in May. Mr. Dawidoff is not new to the genre: in 2002 he published Fly Swatter: A Portrait of an Exceptional Character, a remembrance of his grandfather, the late Harvard economist, Alexander Gerschenkron, which was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Besides being a distinguished academic, his grandfather had the distinction of being propositioned by Marlene Dietrich on an airplane.

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, Mr. Dawidoff’s book about the American baseball player (“the brainiest guy in baseball,” who graduated magna cum laude from Princeton), was a bestseller.

Recalling his grandfather’s passion for rereading Anna Karenina (he would return to page one as soon he’d finished it), Mr. Dawidoff suggested that it doesn’t matter whether a book is about a “great true character” or a fictional one, as long as the necessarily flawed hero has a full complement of human traits. “Wrinkles, optimism, the smell of witch hazel, an obsession with the IRS, a ‘whites only’ sign in a store, R.C. Cola, and what happens to a parent who recognizes that she has a favorite among her children” have all been used as touchstones in memoirs, he observed. Citing Norman Maclean (author of A River Runs Through It), he added that “anything can become interesting in the hands of a beautiful writer.”

“Grail of Pure Objectivity”

Mr. Dawidoff, who has also been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy, said that he believed that fact-checking is a good thing, particularly in light of “recent shams and charlatans.” The “more truth in a memoir the better,” he added, noting that although writers may imply that they are giving you “the whole story,” it is, more often than not, an idiosyncratic representation, due to the “vagaries of memory.” Recalling Ian Frazier’s Family, which began when Mr. Frazier tried to make sense out of the artifacts that remained after his parents died, Mr. Dawidoff, whose father suffered from severe mental illness, spoke of memoir-writing as an effort to try “to understand people we love,” and to create “meaning that will defeat death.”

The recipient of the Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship is appointed annually by the Princeton University Program in American Studies. The fellowship is designed to enable a leading scholar or practitioner in American arts, letters, politics, or commerce to come to Princeton for one semester to engage in campus life and teach one multidisciplinary seminar course for upper-division undergraduates. In Mr. Dawidoff’s case, the course is called “Americans at Work and Play.”

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