Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid fish, the Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported when geological life was young; as though they had all remained together in time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow Castle, and repeat “how charming is divine philosophy!” He felt almost aggrieved to find Walcott so vigorously acting the part of Comus as to have flung the ganoid all the way off to Colorado and far back into the Lower Trenton limestone, making the Pteraspis as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by spawning an ancestry for him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of known organic life. A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone were the liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet historian dare to hazard even in secret an opinion about the value of Natural Selection by Minute Changes under Uniform Conditions, for he could know no more about it than most of his neighbors who knew nothing; but natural selection that did not select—evolution finished before it began—minute changes that refused to change anything during the whole geological record—survival of the highest order in a fauna which had no origin—uniformity under conditions which had disturbed everything else in creation—to an honest-meaning though ignorant student who needed to prove Natural Selection and not assume it, such sequence brought no peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form caused evolution in force; that chemical or mechanical energy had by natural selection and minute changes, under uniform conditions, converted itself into thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove—to him—that it had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a huge perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal that Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he asked what sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemed orthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on its own lines quite beyond mechanical explanation, had cropped up again. A little more, and he would be driven back on the old independence of species.
What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like the theologist’s view on theology, for complexity was nothing to them; but to the historian who sought only the direction of thought and had begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867, the matter of direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily the door of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved. The active geologists had mostly become specialists dealing with complexities far too technical for an amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to serve for beginners, as they had served when new.
So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of Lyell and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into half-a-dozen intermittent chills in recent geology and in the northern hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that the glaciation of the southern hemisphere could possibly be referred to a horizon more remote. Continents still rose wildly and wildly sank, though Professor Suess of Vienna had written an epoch-making work, showing that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans rose and sank. Lyell’s genial uniformity seemed genial still, for nothing had taken its place, though, in the interval, granite had grown young, nothing had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge overthrusts had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even to discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing that progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.
Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or discuss the principles of any science; but the history of the mind concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body. In thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ignorance to a faith and degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobites without evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and had even plucked up courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord Kelvin forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of Physical Religion in the effort to force unification of the universe; they had protested with mild conviction that they could not state the geological record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus under their breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on the tips of their tongues.
Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, super-sensual, electrolytic—who knew what?—defying science, if not denying known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a “larger synthesis” to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got into far too much trouble by following schools of theology in their efforts to enlarge their synthesis, that they should willingly repeat the process in science. For human purposes a point must always be soon reached where larger synthesis is suicide.
Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that the change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of his thought, should delight in turning about and trying the opposite motion, as he delights in the spring which brings even to a tired and irritated statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every schoolboy knows that this sum of all knowledge never saved him from whipping; mere years help nothing; King and Hay and Adams could neither of them escape floundering through the corridors of chaos that opened as they passed to the end; but they could at least float with the stream if they only knew which way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh with the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged and unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it serve? A seeker of truth—or illusion—would be none the less restless, though a shark!
AFTERWORD
Many excellent memoirs fall outside the scope of this volume. Those published before 1917 appeared too early, and those published after 1992 appeared too late. Many, of course, are not American in setting; many are, by genre, more properly travel or nature writing, or strictly accounts of other people, or accounts of specific events or ordeals. Some few, like John Updike’s Self-Consciousness and Wilfred Sheed’s Frank and Maisie, lose flavor in excerpts. Some, like Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, are too expensive to reprint.
Among the following are many personal favorites.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Mary Austin, Earth Horizon; Land of Little Rain
Kim Barnes, In The Wilderness
Judith Barrington, “Initiation”
Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter’s Eye
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Tinshop of Uncle Neddy”
Louise Bogan, Journey Around My Room
Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself
John Malcolm Brinnen, Dear Heart, Dear Buddy; Dylan Thomas in America; Sextet
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage
June Burn, Living High
Franklin Burroughs, Billy Watson’s Croker Sack
William de Buys, River of Traps
Mary Cantwell, An American Girl
Mary Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie
Joan Colebrook, A House of Trees
Chen Congwen, Recollections of West Hunan
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain
Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere
Edward Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh
Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast
Peter Davison, Half Remembered
Clarence Day, Life with Father
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say
Nicholas Delbanco, Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France
Deborah Digges, Fugitive Spring
Izak Dinesen, Out of Africa
Ivan Doig, This House of Sky; Heart Earth
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels
Katherine Dunham, A Touch of Innocence
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals
Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons
Charles A. Eastman, Indian Boyhood
Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces; A Match to the Heart
A. B. Facey, A Fortunate Life
Wendy W. Fairey, One of the Family
Steve Fishman, A Bomb in the Brain
Robert Fitzgerald, The Third Kind of Knowledge
Ford Madox Ford, Your Mirror to My Times
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
James Galvin, The Meadow
George Garrett, “My Two One-Eyed Coaches”
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People
Ellen Glasgow, The Woman Within
Albert Goldbarth, A Sympathy of Souls
Marita Golden, Migrations of the Heart
Ray Gonzales, Memory Fever
Maxim Gorky, My Childhood; My Apprenticeships; My Universities
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
John Graves, Good-bye to a River
Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That
Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
Henry Green, Pack My Bag
Graham Greene, A Sort of Life; Ways of Escape
Doris Grumbach, Coming into the End Zone; Extra Innings
Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise
Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved; Their Ancient Glitt’ring Eyes; Life Work
Edward T. Hall, An Anthropology of Everyday Life
Patricia Hampl, A Romantic Education; Virgin Time
Curtis Harnack, We Have All Gone Away; The Attic
Moss Hart, Act One
Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century
Samuel Heilman, The Gate Behind the Wall
Lillian Hellman, Pentimento; An Unfinished Woman
Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
Michael Herr, Dispatches
Edward Hoagland, Walking the Dead Diamond River; The Tugman’s Passage; Balancing Act
Garrett Hongo, Volcano
Paul Horgan, Tracings: A Book of Partial Portraits
W. H. Hudson, Faraway and Long Ago; The Purple Land
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea
John Hull, Touching the Rock
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, In My Place
Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Henry James, A Small Boy and Others; Notes of a Son and Brother
James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way
Teresa Jordan, Riding the White Horse Home
Alice Kaplan, French Lessons
Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City
Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
James Kilgo, Deep Enough for Ivorybills
David Lavender, One Man’s West
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; The Reawakening
Harry Levin, Memories of the Moderns
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light
Robert MacNeil, Wordstruck
William Manchester, “Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All”
Robert Mason, Chickenhawk
Hilary Masters, Last Stands
Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy
Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water
William Maxwell, Ancestors
David McKain, Spellbound
Jean McKay, Gone to Grass
Rollie McKenna, Rollie McKenna: A Life in Photography
Tim McLaurin, Keeper of the Moon
Ved Mehta, Vedi; Face to Face; Up at Oxford; Daddyji; Mamaji
James Merrill, A Different Person
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
John Hanson Mitchell, Living at the End of Time
Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon
Susan Mitchell, “Dreaming in Public”
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; The Names
Paul Monette, On Becoming a Man
Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush
Edwin Muir, An Autobiography
John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; Travels in Alaska
Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat; Proud Shoes
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Center; The Enigma of Arrival
Richard K. Nelson, The Island Within
Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines
Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
Gayle Pemberton, The Hottest Water in Chicago
Brendan Phibbs, The Other Side of Time
Mary Helen Ponce, Hoyt Street
Gene Stratton Porter, Moths of the Limberlost
Dennis Puleston, Blue Water Vagabond
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek
Richard Rhodes, A Hole in the World
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words
Evelyn Scott, Escapade
Mary Lee Settle, “London—1944”
Anton Shammas, Arabesques
Wilfred Sheed, Frank and Maisie; My Life as a Fan; People Will Always Be Kind; In Love with Daylight
Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth
Annick Smith, Homestead
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
William Jay Smith, Army Brat
Wole Soyinka, Ake
Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Brent Staples, Parallel Time
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Don Talayesva, Sun Chief
Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science
Flora Lewis Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Cape Cod; The Maine Woods
Susan Allen Toth, Blooming: A Small Town Girlhood; Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East
Katharine Trevelyan, Through Mine Own Eyes
Calvin Trillin, Remembering Denny
Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography
John Updike, Self-Consciousness
Gloria Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength
David Foster Wallace, “The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems”
Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow
Eudora Welty, One Wri
ter’s Beginnings
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
Bailey White, Mama Makes Up Her Mind
E. B. White, “Once More to the Lake”
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge
William Carlos Williams, Autobiography
Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist
Kimberley Wozencraft, Notes from the Country Club
For an intelligent consideration of classic American memoirs, read Herbert A. Leibowitz’s Fabricating Lives.
Readers might especially enjoy certain selections among the above list from around the world: Edwin Muir’s An Autobiography, Sartre’s The Words, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Chen Congwen’s Recollections of West Hunan, Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco, Dinesen’s Out of Africa, Gorky’s trilogy beginning with My Childhood, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain, Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Flora Lewis Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.
A.D.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Don Asher: “Shoot the Piano Player” by Don Asher. Copyright© 1981 by Don Asher. “Shoot the Piano Player” originally appeared in Harper’s magazine.
Beacon Press: Excerpt from Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. Copyright © 1955, 1983 by James Baldwin. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Contemporary Books: Excerpt from Growing Up by Russell Baker. Copyright © 1982 by Russell Baker. Used with permission of Congdon & Weed, Inc., and Contemporary Books, Inc., Chicago.
Harry Crews: Excerpt from A Childhood by Harry Crews. Copyright © 1978 by Harry Crews. Published in 1978 by Harper & Row. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.
Columbia University Press: Excerpt from Left Handed by Walter and Ruth Dyk. Copyright © 1980 by Columbia University Press.