Memoir

LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, MAINLY: MID-CENTURY MEMOIRS

CLARENCE DAY GREW UP on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, graduated from Yale in 1896, and went to work at the New York Stock Exchange, of which his father was a governor. He was forced to retire in 1903 because of crippling arthritis and subsequently juggled business interests with humorous writing and illustration, including such popular books as This Simian World and The Crow’s Nest. (His arthritis was so severe that he was able to write and draw only with the use of an elaborate pulley arrangement.) In 1929, he published God and My Father, a slim volume that humorously recounted his mother’s ultimately successful stratagems for bringing his father, more or less an agnostic, into the Episcopalian fold. The book had moderate success and good reviews. Late in 1932, Day wrote a sketch about the time his mother “was persuaded, by a beautifully dressed woman book-agent, to buy on installment a set of Memoirs of the French Court”; she hates them and tells Father they are a gift from her, but he is not convinced. Day sent the piece to Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker, who accepted it and wrote Day (in a move that proves the aptness of the title of Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Ross, Genius in Disguise), “We would like to get further pieces from you—anything, including things on your father. We would be very glad to run a little series on him if you saw fit, which is a very bright idea for an editor to have.” Showing his own swift recognition that he was onto something good, Day started submitting more short pieces to the magazine, and ended up publishing an impressive thirty-nine of them until his death in 1935, at the age of sixty-one. Many of the pieces were collected in a book titled Life with Father, which was a massive bestseller, ending up as the third-best-selling nonfiction book of 1935 and number nine the following year. A posthumous collection, Life with Mother, reached the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list in 1937. The public’s fascination with the Day family’s genteel 1880s doings continued when a Broadway version of Life with Father, by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, opened in 1939. It ran until 1947, by which time it had passed Tobacco Road as the longest-running nonmusical Broadway production in history, a record that still stands.

Day kicked off a remarkably popular and durable subgenre that set the pattern for memoirs by ordinary Americans (as opposed to celebrities, politicians, business leaders, and Notable Authors) for the next three decades. In their comic stance and their inclination to nostalgia and exaggeration, these books were descendants of Life on the Mississippi, but they had a warmhearted and (the authors hoped) heartwarming glow that would have raised Twain’s eyebrows, if not his ire. It sounds simplistic but may be correct to say that the main appeal of these books was the contrast they offered to grim world events—that is, the Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, the Cold War, and McCarthyism. On another level, they were narrative correlatives of what the British writer Godfrey Hodgson has termed “the liberal consensus”—the shared sense that the United States was the best place on earth, capable of overcoming any setbacks and fixing any flaws. Whatever the deeper explanation, they were united in their determination to look on the bright side of nearly everything. Consider: if Clarence Day were embarking on a memoir today, it would in all likelihood center on his battle with arthritis. In Life with Father and Life with Mother, he does not even mention the ailment.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a number of these books originated as articles in the same New Yorker magazine that had first published Day’s “Father” sketches, including Ruth McKenney’s series about the Manhattan adventures she shared with her eccentric sister, later collected as My Sister Eileen; Ludwig Bemelmans’s recollections of his youthful days working in a Manhattan hotel, published as Hotel Splendide; and Sally Benson’s lightly fictionalized tales of her childhood in St. Louis, collected as Meet Me in St. Louis. At least two things about these texts are worth noting. First, they did not go out in the world with a clear label of fiction or fact. In the case of Day, McKenney, and Bemelmans, the “I” of the story shared the author’s name and, apparently, many elements of his or her life, but beyond that, a reader had no grounds for making a judgment. In The New Yorker, the articles were considered “casuals”—the magazine’s name for relatively light, relatively short pieces—and were given no gloss in its pages other than a title at the beginning and the author’s name at the end. Humor pieces by Robert Benchley or S. J. Perelman were casuals; so were short stories by John Cheever or Irwin Shaw. And, in the magazine’s internal reference system, they were all labeled “fiction.” The second significant aspect of this form of writing was its capacity to resonate. The New Yorker articles became books, and then the books took on new forms: My Sister Eileen joined Life with Father on Broadway and later was turned into a Broadway musical, Wonderful Town; Meet Me in St. Louis, of course, became the classic movie musical with Judy Garland. In the decades ahead, the most successful of the light autobiographies would follow the same pattern and be adapted as plays, musicals, movies, and/or television series. In so doing, they lost much or all of their standing as factual documents and became stories, pure and simple. A Broadway audience watching Rosalind Russell as Ruth in Wonderful Town, or a movie audience watching William Powell as Father in Life with Father, would have no reason to view them as historical figures. They were literary characters, like Hamlet or Nathan Detroit.

Probably the greatest New Yorker series in this vein was the work of a thirty-eight-year-old staff writer at the magazine at the time Day was publishing his sketches. In a stretch of thirteen weeks in the summer and early fall of 1933, James Thurber contributed eight casuals about his youthful exploits in Columbus, Ohio; they were collected later that year in the book My Life and Hard Times. The opening paragraph gave notice that Thurber was a compelling new voice, perhaps even a literary heir of Twain himself:

Benvenuto Cellini said that a man should be at least forty years old before he undertakes so fine an enterprise as that of setting down the story of his life. He also said that an autobiographer should have accomplished something of excellence. Nowadays nobody who has a typewriter pays any attention to the old master’s rules. I myself have accomplished nothing of excellence except a remarkable and, to some of my friends, unaccountable expertness in hitting empty ginger ale bottles with small rocks at a distance of thirty paces. Moreover, I am not yet forty years old. But the grim date moves toward me apace; my legs are beginning to go, things blur before my eyes, and the faces of the rosy-lipped maids I knew in my twenties are misty as dreams.

My Life and Hard Times was turned into a forgettable film with Jack Oakie, but there was no Broadway show. Alone among the books discussed in this section, it did not crack the bestseller list. It had too much irony and ambivalence, and not enough sentiment, for that sort of mass appeal. There is nothing warm or fuzzy in the book, not even in the chapter about the family Airedale, Muggs: “A big, burly, choleric dog, he always acted as if he thought I wasn’t one of the family. There was a slight advantage in being one of the family, for he didn’t bite the family as often as he bit strangers.”

The worse the news of the world got, the more people seemed to eat up this sort of stuff. The biggest bestseller of 1942—and one of the biggest of all time, with some 2,786,000 copies sold—was See Here, Private Hargrove, by Marion Hargrove, a lighthearted romp through basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia. (The journal Books praised it as “a contribution to the lighter side of war.”) The next year, in the rosy-hued-nostalgia tradition of Life with Father, came Mama’s Bank Account, author Kathryn Anderson McLean’s bestselling reminiscences of growing up in a Norwegian immigrant family in San Francisco in the 1910s. (The book was published under the pen name Kathryn Forbes.) Once more the material resonated: it was adapted into a play called I Remember Mama the following year—Marlon Brando made his Broadway debut playing the author’s brother, Nels—then a 1948 film starring Irene Dunne, then a long-running television series in the 1950s with Dick Van Patten as Nels, then a Broadway musical in 1979 starring Liv Ullmann.

Jostling with Mama’s Bank Account on the bestseller list was Roughly Speaking, by Louise Randall Pierson, who was born in 1890 to an upper-class family in Massachusetts. Her fortunes reversed twelve years later when her father died and left the family penniless. In adulthood, her fortunes just kept reversing, as she dealt with the death of one young son in a swimming-pool accident, bouts of infantile paralysis suffered by her other four children, divorce, and business failure and poverty in the Depression, before remarrying and rebounding at book’s end. Unaccountably, the tone is for the most part comic; writing in The New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman described the book as “a high-spirited autobiographical failure story written as though it were the most triumphant of success stories.” Five years later came Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, about their wacky misadventures growing up in the 1910s and 1920s as two of the twelve children of time-and-motion experts. In keeping with the cheerful demeanor of the genre, the authors did not mention that one of the dozen died of diphtheria at the age of six. The book spent forty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including twenty-two weeks in the number-one spot, and was made into a film with Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy in 1950 (and an ongoing series of remakes with Steve Martin half a century later).

A characteristic of these light memoirs was their pronounced distance from the quotidian world of the here and now. For all the ones just mentioned—even Hargrove’s, which takes place before Pearl Harbor but was published after—the distance was chronological, but in other cases it was a matter of geography. In 1938, Thurber’s friend and onetime New Yorker officemate E. B. White moved from New York City to a farm on the coast of Maine, where he raised geese, chickens, and sheep. He wrote about this modified Thoreauvian experiment in essays for Harper’s magazine, collected in 1942 in the book One Man’s Meat. White may have been living remotely, but the pressures of world events were never far from his mind or his pen. In his foreword, he seems almost embarrassed to be publishing such a book at such a time: “It seems a bit of effrontery, or unawareness. The author feels that the blurb on the jacket should say: ‘There isn’t time to read this book. Put it in your pocket, and when the moment arrives, throw it straight and hard.” Yet White did publish it, for he was, as he well knew, a writer to whom the very notion of “escape” was uncongenial; the foreground of the book may have been the country, but the subtext was the global crisis. Rose Feld, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, picked this up: “It is clear that beneath the deceptively gentle tenor of his writing lies a deep awareness of the dreadful things that are happening in the world and a stinging irritation with man’s reaction to them, his own, perhaps, included.” Another author escaped more completely into Maine, which may be why her memoir, also published in 1942, sold a lot more copies. In We Took to the Woods, Louise Dickinson Rich (a distant relative of Emily Dickinson) described her and her husband’s retreat to the backwoods of Maine, as opposed to the coast. The book was a modest bestseller, but more significant was the way it inspired scores of other Thoreauvian chronicles, paradoxically more alluring than ever now that the country was becoming seemingly one large suburb.

A combination of Roughly Speaking and We Took to the Woods, and the most successful of all these books, was the very funny The Egg and I (1945), by Betty MacDonald. In the late 1920s, MacDonald, a teenage bride, moved with her husband, Bob, to a remote section of Washington’s Olympic Mountain region, where they raised chickens and inhabited a dilapidated ranch lacking any and all modern conveniences. Their nearest neighbors were a family—a couple with fifteen children—she called the Kettles. MacDonald’s description of Mrs. Kettle in The Egg and I gives a good sense of her comedy, which springs from well-observed detail, skillful use of simile, and disinclination to euphemize: “Mrs. Kettle had pretty light brown hair . . . clear blue eyes, a creamy skin . . . a straight delicate nose . . . and a small rounded chin. From this dainty pretty head cascaded a series of busts and stomachs which made her look like a cooky jar shaped like a woman. Her whole front was dirty and spotted and she wiped her hands continually on one or the other of her stomachs. She had also a disconcerting habit of reaching up under her dress and adjusting something in the vicinity of her navel. . . . ‘I itch—so I scratch—so what!’ was Mrs. Kettle’s motto.”

The Egg and I was a mammoth success: it sold more than two million copies and was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years (including forty-two weeks at number one), and was eventually translated into more than thirty different languages. The book became a film in 1947, with Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert playing Bob and Betty, and the first television comedy serial in 1951. Marjorie Main and Percy Kil bride were so striking as Ma and Pa Kettle in the film that the characters were spun off into their own movie, with the setting transposed from rural Washington to Appalachia, and after that came seven more, including two that chronicled their trips to Paris and Hawaii. The success of the films prompted what may have been the first libel suit provoked by a memoir—and what remains, along with the Turcotte family’s action against Augusten Burroughs, one of the surprisingly small number of such suits. In 1951, a man named Albert Bishop and his six sons, two daughters, and one daughter-in-law sued MacDonald and her publishers, claiming that, as the models for the Kettle family, they had been subjected to shame, ridicule, and humiliation. (Mrs. Bishop was deceased.) In her defense, MacDonald essentially testified that the book was fiction: that the characters were products of her imagination, loosely based on a variety of different people. The defense also introduced evidence that the Bishop family had tried to profit from the fame The Egg and I had brought them, including testimony that Albert Bishop’s son Walter had arranged for his father to appear onstage at a local dance hall with chickens under his arm, introducing him as “Pa Kettle.” The jury decided in MacDonald’s favor.

The Egg and I ends with the good news that Bob has located and made arrangements to purchase another chicken farm, closer to civilization. A contemporary reader would gather that this new place is where Betty MacDonald could now be found. A contemporary reader would gather wrong. In fact, MacDonald and Bob had divorced more than a decade earlier, in 1931. In the divorce proceedings, she alleged that Bob “struck and kicked plaintiff on a number of occasions and threatened to shoot plaintiff and children.” She was granted a divorce, after which (but before writing The Egg and I) she scraped through the Depression as a single mother of two young daughters; in 1938, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent six months in a sanatorium. That she would look back past those happenings, sit down at her desk, and write what The New York Times rightly called “an astoundingly light-hearted book” was, well, astounding.²⁵

But people need to put a bright face on things, and they responded to MacDonald because she did it so well. As a reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle remarked, “Betty writes for ‘folks,’ for the happy, confident majority who respond readily to a gallant facing of trouble.”

MacDonald dedicated The Egg and I to “my sister Mary who has always believed that I can do anything she puts her mind to.” In 1949, that sister, Mary Bard, dedicated her own memoir, The Doctor Wears Three Faces, to “my sister Betty, who egged me on.” Here is a description of Mary Bard’s book:

In an entertaining account, she describes her courtship and marriage to a young doctor; she soon learns the drawbacks of being a doctor’s wife which include constant disruptions, automatic membership in a group of doctors’ wives known as the “Neglected Ones,” and a woeful lack of drama in her first pregnancy; she focuses on the domestic details of being a harried but earnest wife and mother.

That quotation comes from a volume I consider myself fortunate to possess: Through a Woman’s I: An Annotated Bibliography of American Women’s Autobiographical Writings, 1946-1976, by Patricia K. Addis. It is, obviously, a reference work, consisting of citations and summaries of 2,217 books, but I read it cover to cover. One of the things I discovered in doing so was that this cheerful autobiographical subgenre I have been describing was by and large the province of women. (Male writers—including Alexander King, Robert Paul Smith, and Jack Douglas—participated as well, but were decidedly in the minority.) Addis lists autobiographies by the Eleanor Roosevelts, Marian Andersons, and Joan Crawfords, to be sure—as well as by a stunning number of nuns—but to judge from her descriptions, the prevailing model of women’s autobiography, at least through the mid-1960s, was MacDonald’s and/or Bard’s. The MacDonald template was an account of removing oneself to a remote location, usually in the company of a husband and sometimes children, and managing to survive with one’s sense of humor intact, despite big and little obstacles. In many cases the remote location was abroad: Addis lists scores of books about the authors’ far-flung marriages to archaeologists (Throw Me a Bone, by Eleanor Lothrop, 1948), entomologists, journalists, ambassadors, prospectors, anthropologists, and explorers. The Bard model, meanwhile, treated the ups and downs of middle-class Caucasian family life in the postwar suburbs. I started to mark these books with a penciled “N” in the margin, to stand for “normative,” but stopped about a hundred pages or so in: there were just too many.

Addis lists hundreds of such books. They were put out by reputable publishing houses, but with one or two exceptions—like Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957), about family life in Larchmont, New York, which spent fifty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including thirteen weeks at number one, and was made into a movie (with Doris Day and David Niven) and a television series—they are completely forgotten today. Her summaries, however, a striking number of which include the word “delightful,” leave you feeling you have learned all you need to. Here are just a few:

Virginia Pearson, Everything but Elephants, 1947. “The wife of a medical doctor, she spends the first two years of her married life in an oil camp in the jungles of Colombia; her consuming interest in new people and places eases her adjustment to tropical, rather basic housekeeping; she enjoys traveling and being of assistance to her husband, learning cultural tolerance and understanding.”

Valentine Teal, It Was Not What I Expected, 1948. “Having followed her grandmother’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s exhortations on motherhood, she presents an entertaining account of rearing a large family with zest and by instinct; she describes the inevitable collection of pets, her children’s eccentric eating habits, her work as a Cub Scout leader, and her relaxed housekeeping.”

Dorothy Graffe Van Doren, The Country Wife, 1950. “A writer and prominent professor’s wife, she tells of her summers on the family’s Connecticut farm, from spring packing rituals to gardening, to traditional July Fourth celebrations, to the enjoyment of weekend guests; during sabbati cals, they remain in the country, savoring New England winters; she emphasizes the warm moments of close family life.”

Olive Barber, The Lady and the Lumberjack, 1952. “A schoolteacher on vacation, she succumbs to the ‘concentrated wooing’ of an Oregon logger; married life broadens her respect for differing kinds of knowledge and of people; at home on a ‘floathouse,’ she learns logging slang and develops a deep affection for loggers.”

Martha Ruth Rebentisch, The Healing Woods, 1952. “After three years in a tuberculosis sanatorium, she seeks a cure by living ‘a simple life’ in the open in the Adirondacks accompanied by an old guide; her first return to the village reveals profound alterations in her perspective and behavior; the wilderness teaches her the joy of nature, fortitude, and self-reliance, while improving her health.” (Rebentisch later wrote two sequels.)

Shirley Jackson (yes, the author of the dark short story “The Lottery”—this template was apparently irresistible even to the otherwise gloomy and pessimistic), Life Among the Savages, 1953. “In a delightfully wry examination of family life, the noted writer describes the eccentricities of her ramshackle Vermont home, the inevitable fraying caused by living ‘in the society of small children,’ the saga of household helpers; her renditions of family conversations are marvelously disjointed, comprehensible only to the participants.”

Barbara C. Hooton, “as indiscreetly confided to Patrick Dennis,” Guestward Ho!, 1956. “A New Yorker, she is transplanted to New Mexico in 1953 when her husband buys a dude ranch; her gloomy predictions based on their inexperience and her lack of enthusiasm give way to a reality of learning through trial and error; she presents humorous anecdotes about ‘the servant problem’ and various guests; she later rejects an opportunity to return to New York in order to remain in New Mexico.”

Guestward Ho! is a fitting place to stop, because of its coauthor, whose real name was Edward Everett Tanner III, who truly and completely absorbed the ethos of mid-century autobiography, and who was certainly the greatest faux-memoirist of all time. In 1952, he ghostwrote My Ring-side Seat in Moscow, the autobiography of Nicholas Nyaradi, a former Hungarian minister of finance. But he was just getting started. Three years later (after publishing a couple of novels under the name “Virginia Rowans”), he wrote a novel in the form of light autobiography—a man reminiscing about his thirty-year relationship with an eccentric but life-affirming aunt. Seemingly unable or unwilling ever to affix his own name to anything he wrote—a habit of secrecy or double-mindedness that probably was connected with his for-the-most-part-hidden bisexuality—Tanner chose “Patrick Dennis”: Patrick being the full form of his own longtime nickname, Pat, and Dennis being (he would later claim, according to his biographer, Eric Myers) a surname he chose from the phone book. He gave the narrator/main character the same name as well, leading most casual readers to assume that the book actually was an autobiography. Auntie Mame was a huge hit, spending 112 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and becoming a play and then a movie with Rosalind Russell, and a decade later a Broadway musical, Mame, with Angela Lans bury. (For her performance in Mame, as well as in the films My Sister Eileen, Wonderful Town, and Roughly Speaking, Russell would have to be considered the queen of stage and screen autobiography.)

After collaborating with his friend Barbara Hooton on Guestward Ho! (which became a TV series in 1960), Tanner continued to publish novels as Virginia Rowans and Patrick Dennis, but he couldn’t leave memoir alone. Little Me: The Intimate Memoirs of That Great Star of Stage, Screen and Television, Belle Poitrine, as told to Patrick Dennis, was published in 1961; Tanner succinctly described it to a friend as the “phony autobiography of a rotten movie star.” Little Me became a camp classic (as well as a Broadway musical with Sid Caesar); it was followed three years later by First Lady, by Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, as told to Patrick Dennis, the fictional autobiography of the fictional wife of a fictional president.

As for his own autobiography, Edward Tanner never wrote it.

THE EVIDENCE OF THESE BOOKS NOTWITHSTANDING, some Americans continued to lead unhappy, frustrated, or even tragic lives. But that was not reflected in published autobiographies. The vibrant tradition of African-American memoir, which had been kicked off by the slave narrative, dwindled in the early to middle twentieth century. Louis Kaplan offers a shockingly small list of thirty-four autobiographies by “Negroes” in the period 1900-1945 (an almost 40 percent decrease from the number published in 1850-1899). The majority of such books in this period told the stories of black leaders, prominent writers, athletes, and (female) entertainers: James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ethel Waters, Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday. A book that deserves special mention is Richard Wright’s Black Boy. It was a great commercial and critical success when it was published in 1945. But it was not the autobiography Wright intended. The book, as published, ends with nineteen-year-old Richard leaving the Jim Crow South for Chicago, “with a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront men without fear or shame, that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.” In fact, Wright composed those hopeful words only after the Book-of-the-Month Club had put forth as a condition for accepting the book the elimination of the final six chapters, which showed that northern and southern racism differed only in certain particulars, not in force or in the devastating effects on victims. The complete book was not published until 1977, under its original title, American Hunger.

A very different sort of memoir, one in which the Book-of-the-Month Club would have had to make zero changes, was Ruby Berkley Goodwin’s It’s Good to Be Black (1953), about growing up in the 1920s in De Quoin, Illinois. Goodwin, described by contemporary press reports as working in the public relations field, starts the book this way:

Until I once argued with a psychology teacher, I didn’t know that all Negro children grow up with a sense of frustration and insecurity. Moreover, I still feel that this statement, along with such kindred observations as “all colored people can sing and dance,” must be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

The philosophy behind this remark, however, I have since found implied in most books about Negroes. Whether the authors are black or white, they are equally guilty of representing us either as objects of pity or objects of contempt, and I have learned to resent this implication much as I earlier resented the flat remark of the psychology teacher.

As a result I have felt impelled to write of life as I have lived it. I sincerely believe the lives of many Negro children follow the same pattern as did mine. We have probably been overlooked by writers because it is much easier to dramatize the brutal and the sordid than the commonplace.

One can hardly begrudge Goodwin her belief that her contented childhood was as normal as anyone else’s. And some of the things her strong and wise father (whose pet name for her is “Reuben”) tells her in the last pages of the book, when the specter of racial prejudice, violence, and hatred appears for the first time, are prescient, as is his language: “I look at some of our folks. They want to be white so bad they can taste it. They think ’cause they’re light brown or yellow, they’re better than dark people. They ain’t. They ain’t as good. We’re the only people I know who are proud of being black—well, someday when you’re a little bigger you’ll understand. We ought to be proud of being black, Reuben. Black is powerful.”

Yet it is surely significant that of the few memoirs by an “ordinary” African-American to be published in that period, it was overwhelmingly sanguine, not least in its title. The few reviewers who took note of the book seemed relieved. The New York Times called it “a fine, warm-hearted memoir,” and Kirkus Reviews, “a personal narrative which substitutes dignity for sensationalism, a quiet strength for the more embittered and embattled attack against discrimination.” I am still searching for the sen sationalistic, embittered, and embattled memoirs against which Goodwin’s book is contrasted.²⁶

Autobiographies by the poor or working class, such a well-populated genre in Victorian Britain and America, had carried on through the 1920s and 1930s, but almost exclusively in narratives by tramps and hoboes, which provided an opportunity for picaresque adventures and sometimes lurid revelations. Examples from the 1920s include You Can’t Win, by Jack Black (later named by William Burroughs as a strong influence); Poorhouse Sweeney: Life in a County Poorhouse, by Ed Sweeney; and The Main Stem, by William Edge. George Orwell’s first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), was a half-autobiographical, half-journalistic account of his time as a plongeur in a Paris restaurant and a tramp in England. Sister of the Road (1935) was presented as the autobiography of a female hobo known as Box-Car Bertha Thompson, but in fact Bertha sprang from the imagination of Dr. Ben Reitman, well known as an anarchist, Emma Goldman’s lover, and a vociferous advocate for hoboes’ rights. (In 1972, Martin Scorsese adapted the book into one of his first films, Boxcar Bertha.) Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935), a first-person, present-tense account of life on the margins, was published as a novel, but its selling point was its air of authenticity; The Saturday Review felt that “there can be no question but that the author is telling a true tale.” And in the preface to the English edition, Kromer said as much: “Save for four or five incidents, it is strictly autobiographical.”

Two years later came John Worby’s The Other Half: The Autobiography of a Tramp and Mark Benney’s Angels in Undress, about the author’s upbringing in the London demimonde, career as a burglar, and incarceration. Benney’s book got excellent reviews both in England, where it had the title Low Company, and the United States. But some American critics, still stinging from the Joan Lowell affair and struck by the high literary quality of the book, were skeptical about its provenance. The New York Times commented, “The question of authenticity arises because ‘Angels in Undress’ seems too good to be true,” and the Herald Tribune, “One must turn continually to the publisher’s assurance that it is not a literary hoax.” The opportunity for publicity was not lost. The London publisher, Peter Davies, wired his American counterpart, Bennett Cerf: BENNEY IS 100 PERCENT AUTHOR OF LOW COMPANY WELLS SQUIRE HUXLEY BERTRAND RUSSELL ETC HAVE MET HIM I AM POSTING PARTS OF ORIGINAL MSS WRITTEN IN PRISON BACONIAN THEORY IS ALL BUNK. Cerf reproduced the telegram in advertisements for the book. Benney, whose real name was subsequently revealed to be Henry Ernest Degras, went on to publish six more books, including a 1966 memoir, Almost a Gentleman.

World War II terminated the flow of low-life autobiographies; in the six and a half decades since, it has not resumed. However, in the period from the war through the early 1960s, a few noncheerful memoirs did manage to see their way into print. Allow me to present a few more summaries from Patricia Addis’s book Through a Woman’s I.

Eunice Walterman, Don’t Call Me Dad, 1950. “Married and the mother of twins, she is shocked to discover in 1943 that she was an adopted child; obsessed by the search for her biological parents, she has an emotional reunion with her mother but is rebuffed by her wealthy, powerful father, Roosevelt’s envoy to the Vatican; she suffers threats and intimidation but does achieve grim satisfaction in a melodramatic confrontation with him; her suit to establish his paternity is unsuccessful in what she argues is a miscarriage of justice.”

Mary Payne, I Cured My Cancer, 1954. “She tells of her overwhelming fear when a tumor is diagnosed as cancer in 1941; her firm determination to be cured carries her through years of treatment and leads to her equally firm determination to become an X-ray technician to help others like herself.”

Eloise Davenport, I Can’t Forget, 1960. “Reluctant, but persuaded to enter a mental health clinic, she gradually reveals the marital stress and personality traits leading to her breakdown; engaging in mutually supportive discussions with other patients, she tries to heed doctors’ advice to express her feelings more freely, but she is indignant when psychiatrists ignore her physical pain and illness; ultimately she finds she must recover from the negative effects of poor clinic treatment.”

Janice Fielding, The Bitter Truth of It, 1963. “This is a highly emotional, bitter account of the years following a hysterectomy, performed on her without medical necessity and without her informed consent; she feels that the physical mutilation leads to her mental unbalance and resents the attitudes of doctors.”

No question, they sound like memoirs that would fit right in today. But there was no place for them in the established publishing industry at the time, and they appeared in print only because their authors paid all costs. Walterman’s book was self-published, and those of Payne, Davenport, and Fielding (a pseudonym) were put out by Carlton Press, Exposition Press, and Vantage Press: so-called vanity, or subsidy, publishers. However, there were limits to the kinds of authors whose money even these outfits would take. The president and founder of Exposition, Edward Uhlan, commented in his 1956 memoir, The Rogue of Publishers Row, “One type of book comes to my office with unfailing regularity, that of the homosexual trying to explain why he is what he is and seeking approval as a member of society.” Even a vanity publisher has to draw the line somewhere, says Uhlan: “He must learn that vice taints him as much as it taints the author—more, perhaps, for while the poor wretch of a writer may be writing under psychopathic compulsion, the publisher is furthering his ends for one purpose—to make money.” Reading that, one understands why Edward Tanner/Patrick Dennis never chronicled his own life.

Another outlet for stories that fell outside the consensus could be found on the newsstand rather than in the bookstore. Bernarr Macfadden, a famous and eccentric health nut and the founder, editor, and publisher of Physical Culture magazine, started True Story magazine in 1919. Under the credo “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction,” the cover of the first issue featured such titles as “A Wife Who Awoke in Time,” “My Battle with John Barleycorn,” “An Ex-Convict’s Climb to Millions,” and “How I Learned to Hate My Parents.” The magazine was a huge success. By the mid-twenties it had a circulation of two million and had spawned the first of many imitators, which bore the Rousseauesque and slightly redundant title True Confessions. The True Story formula consisted of first-person accounts, written in an untutored but clear style, of sin and redemption. The sin, usually carnal, was described in some detail; but the actual consummation nearly always seemed to take place between paragraphs, and it was invariably dressed up in a moral lesson. One typical narrator warned, “Let nobody be stirred up by the glamor of a certain part of my experience to attempt a similar adventure. What I went through of mental anguish can be neither described nor imagined.”

Moreover, none of the protagonists was really evil; they were usually lower-class girls who were bewitched by some socialite’s irresistible charms. Most of them could say, as one did, “In reviewing my life I cannot detect a single instance in which my misfortune was the result of my own misdoing.” The confession magazines offered no-fault thrills; their pathos was sentimental in the sense of being wholly unearned.

Macfadden manipulated the formula masterfully. He knew the illusion of authenticity was essential, so instead of hiring what he called “art artists” to illustrate the stories, he used staged photographs—featuring such models as the then-unknown Fredric March, Jean Arthur, and Norma Shearer—and he made every contributor sign an affidavit stating that his or her story was indeed true. But there were some doubters. Oswald Garrison Villard wrote in The Atlantic in 1926, “Veracious personal experiences are written by small groups of industrious workers who are paid from two to six cents or more a word. Hence most of the sad wives and disillusioned flappers whose touching narratives appear every month are in reality mature gentlemen residing in Harlem or Greenwich Village.” In 1927, after a piece called “The Revealing Kiss” used the names of eight actual residents of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and they sued Macfadden for half a million dollars, he found himself somewhat sheepishly allowing that maybe every story wasn’t all that true.

A group of magazines that emerged after World War II—Argosy, True, Male, Stag, True Action, and others—offered a men’s counterpart to the confession magazine, mixing dubious exposés and soft-core porn with first-person narratives of derring-do. The novelist Bruce Jay Friedman, who worked at several of these publications in the 1950s and 1960s, described their staples as “stories about people who had been nibbled half to death by ferocious little animals. The titles were terrifying cries of anguish. ‘A Grysbok Sucked My Bones’; ‘Give Me Back My Leg’; they seemed to have even more power when couched in the present continuous tense. ‘A Boar Is Grabbing My Brain.’ ” The most popular tales were about World War II:

Our staple became the verifiably true story of some fellow who had survived a Japanese “rat cage,” made a record-breaking Death Trek through Borneo, raided Schveinfurt, or helped to storm the Remagen Bridge. . . . There were, however, just so many Borneo death trekkers to be gotten hold of. . . . It was at this point that there arose the notion of simply making up “true” stories and providing them with full documentation. . . . Once we had made our little “adjustment,” we began with great verve to make up entirely new bombing raids, indeed, to create new World War II battles, ones that had turned the tide against the Axis and brought Hitler to his knees.

If one looked in certain quite specific niches of mainstream publishers’ lists, unhappy memoirs were visible: for example, the inspirational account of the illness or death of the author’s child. John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, recounting his son’s death from a brain tumor at the age of seventeen, was a bestseller when it was published in 1949 and continues to be read and assigned today. Marie Killilea’s Karen (1952) was about her daughter’s cerebral palsy; Harriet Hentz Houser’s Hentz (1955), about her son, whom an accident rendered quadriplegic; and Katherine Fryer’s prescient Kathy (1956), about her daughter’s struggles with what initially was misdiagnosed as anorexia nervosa but turned out to be a thyroid condition. The comic novelist Peter De Vries’s one sober book was a fictional version of his daughter’s death from leukemia, The Blood of the Lamb (1961).

Two staples of today’s memoirs are mental illness and addiction. In the postwar decades, such tales could be published only under strict conditions. One was fictionalization, as in The Snake Pit, by Mary Jane Ward, about her own experience of being institutionalized in an asylum, which was a bestseller in 1946 and a film with Olivia de Havilland two years later. Another was the use of a pseudonym, as in The Final Face of Eve, published in 1958 by the woman whose experiences inspired the previous year’s film about multiple personality, The Three Faces of Eve (in subsequent decades she wrote two more books under her own name, Chris Costner-Sizemore), and The Fantastic Lodge: The Autobiography of a Girl Drug Addict (1961), by “Janet Clark.” Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) and Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) met both criteria: slightly fictionalized accounts of the authors’ experiences of mental illness, they were credited, respectively, to “Victoria Lucas” and “Hannah Green.” (After Plath’s suicide, The Bell Jar was issued under her own name.)

There was one other way such stories could be published: if they were written by celebrities. Not big-time celebrities: a tarnished image would cost them too much. No, these were tales of excess, debasement, and sometimes redemption by B-listers who were just barely on the public radar. These authors revived the tradition of Laetitia Pilkington and Charlotte Clarke—the “scandalous memoirists” of the eighteenth century—and laid the groundwork for the misery memoirs of today. Kicking things off was a minor Chicago jazz musician, born Milton Mesirow, who had adopted a new name—Mezz Mezzrow—and had become such an enthusiastic user and purveyor of marijuana that for a time “mezz” was street slang for the drug. Mezzrow’s other claim to fame was his embrace of African-American culture, so fervent that he decided, as he explained in his drug-infused and jive-inflected 1946 autobiography, Really the Blues, to “turn myself black.” He was to a striking extent successful. His ghostwriter, Bernard Wolfe, subsequently wrote: “Mezzrow, after his long years in and under Harlem, did truly think his lips had developed fuller contours, his hair had thickened and burred, his skin had darkened. It was not, as he saw it, a case of trans culturation. He felt he had scrubbed himself clean, inside and out, of every last trace of his origins in the Jewish slums of Chicago, pulped himself back to raw human material, deposited that nameless jelly in the pure Negro mold, and pressed himself into the opposite of his birthright, a pure Black.” Mezzrow convinced other people as well: when he was arrested for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, he was sent to the black cell block of the segregated prison, and when he was drafted in 1942, his draft card listed his race as “Negro.”

One of the most talked-about books of 1953 was A House Is Not a Home, by the longtime New York City madam Polly Adler. In I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1954), coauthored with Gerold Frank and Mike Connolly, Lillian Roth, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl and early-talkies Hollywood in génue, told the story of her descent into alcoholism and her redemption via Alcoholics Anonymous and conversion to Catholicism.²⁷ Adler and Roth had several commonalities: Jewish heritage, movie adaptations (Adler was played by Shelley Winters, Roth by Susan Hayward, who was nominated for an Academy Award), and book sales of well over two million copies, almost all of them in the relatively new format of mass-market paperback. In Fear Strikes Out (1954), an unextraordinary baseball player named Jim Piersall (Anthony Perkins in the film) told the story of what was then called a nervous breakdown and would now be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. The one A-lister in this group was the singer Billie Holiday, whose Lady Sings the Blues (1956)—embarked on, its ghostwriter, William Dufty, told the writer Julia Blackburn, “to cash in on the confessional book vogue”—tells of the many hard things she had packed into forty-one years: her out-of-wedlock birth, rapes at a young age, time working as a prostitute, alcoholism and heroin addiction, and relationships with many abusive men. The following year came Gypsy: A Memoir, by the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, which told the story of her borderline abusive stage mother. The book inspired the 1959 Broadway musical, which was made into a film in 1962 starring, of course, Rosalind Russell.