TWO YEARS AFTER I became paraplegic in the wake of spinal cancer, I was living with severe pain down my back and legs—the steady result of surgical scarring and radiation burns. When drugs proved all but useless, I underwent training in self-hypnosis at Duke Medical Center in the hope of some degree of relief. Soon after I completed that eventually unsuccessful training, my mind began to yield (as if in reward for the difficulties of the past) great stretches of memory.
It was memory that returned to me an array of figures from my early life—parents, aunts, cousins, and teachers who’d guided me into manhood with selfless care. The reality of the memories soon compelled me to begin recording them, and that work gave me more pleasure than any of my prior efforts. So in 1989 I published the resulting volume, Clear Pictures. It spans the years from my birth, as the Great Depression sank to its nadir, through my father’s death in 1954 when I was twenty-one. Once I’d launched those memories, I was free to write a stretch of fiction, poetry, and plays.
But when I’d advanced a considerable distance into the inevitable wheelchair life, I began to feel that an account of my experiences in the brutality of cancer treatment might be of interest to others moving through such a maze. In 1994 then, I published a second memoir called A Whole New Life. It covered three years—from the discovery of a spinal-cord malignancy in 1984 to the failed first attempt to remove that tumor, a disastrous resort to radiation, then further surgeries and a slow return to rewarding life, though a life that left my legs paralyzed and my days dependent on live-in assistants. The writing of A Whole New Life was hardly a pleasure; but like most forms of narrative, it brought its own relief. Better perhaps, it found me able to describe an ongoing life that—oddly—was often enjoyable and certainly more productive than before.
This third volume—Ardent Spirits—recalls an especially rich time, from the autumn of 1955 till the early summer of 1961. Comprised in that era were three years of study at Oxford—a stretch that included my first chance at both sustained writing and rewarding love. And that time was followed by three years of financially strapped teaching back at Duke and the completion of my first novel, A Long and Happy Life, to substantial benefits.
Ardent Spirits is the most detailed of the three memoirs, likely because the first is built from the distant memories of childhood and the second recalls a chasm of pain and fear, one which could only be crossed on a narrow bridge with few handholds. By contrast, Ardent Spirits means to convey a succession of moments which combined, through six years, in producing intense stretches of the rarest human privilege—prolonged joy. That privilege came from a series of outright gifts, given me by a line of friends and lovers whose generosity is honored in both the title of this book and the substance of these memories.
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It’s usually with the arrival of a fitting title that I begin to know what I’m writing about and how to proceed. The phrase ardent spirits arrived one evening in October 2004 when I’d been in a group of lucky writers who were guided through Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, after the paying tourists were gone. As we were led through the surprisingly few rooms in that sensible dwelling, we’d reached Jefferson’s bedroom and were hearing of him and his slave Sally Hemings when full dark waylaid us. In an instant we learned how little modern light that most famous American home has to offer; and I promptly sensed Monticello as a human dwelling, not a tourist site. Our well-informed guide suggested that members of the group join hands for safety as he led us through other pitch-black rooms out onto one of the pavilions that Jefferson extended from the front side of the house.
There, under a clear autumn sky, he concluded our visit by telling us of Jefferson’s near-bankrupting love of French wines. Finally the guide said that, over and above the Burgundies and Bordeaux which stocked the retired president’s cellar, “Mr. Jefferson kept very few ardent spirits, only for those few friends who required them.” As we scattered, I paused to ask the guide what he meant by ardent spirits. Despite my Southern childhood, the phrase had eluded me. On the spot, I learned that they were, simply, hard liquor—homemade spirits for those Virginia and Carolina squires who declined (or scorned) Mr. Jefferson’s fancifications from the grand French vineyards.
Back home a few days later, the phrase rang on in my head as I continued thinking of a book I meant to begin soon—this memoir of high adult happiness. Soon I knew that Ardent Spirits would be my title. By the word spirits, I’d intend the intimates who’d lent such usable heat to the years I’d describe—years which would seldom again be matched for such gifts in my life.
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As I began the writing, I knew that I meant to preserve above all the most striking of those impressions. But I’d kept no journals of the first three years in England. So I moved on through a first draft of Part One by relying entirely on unwritten memories that were five decades old. It was only when I’d finished a draft that it occurred to me to ask the Duke Library for copies of the letters I’d written home in those years—a typed page-and-a-half every Sunday. Mother had saved them all; and when I discovered them at her death in 1965, I added them to the papers the university had requested and then barely thought of them again.
There are, to be sure, events and feelings you don’t include in letters to your mother. Yet apart from what I’d already recorded in Part One, there was little in those letters by way of fresh news from the past—a couple of dates I’d misremembered and a steady reminder (in the midst of so much pleasure) of how homesick I’d often been for the remains of my inmost family. The details of Part One then are owing almost entirely to the enduring goodness of those three years in my memory. Only long after thinking I’d completed it did I discover, buried in a drawer, a fragmentary calendar of my first term at Oxford. I’ve used it to supply a few minor details—the name of the college physician, for instance.
Part Two begins with three years of apprentice teaching back at Duke, by a very raw apprentice indeed; and it proceeds more rapidly than Part One—first, because my memories were less complex; and second, because my life at the time was a great deal less eventful than my time in Europe. Generally I was either in the classroom, teaching my students to write brief essays and conferring with them in my office about their results; or I was at home alone, slowly teaching myself to write a first novel, one set in a landscape much like the country woods where I was living in a small house-trailer. My personal memories of the time are surprisingly few—I was doing so little that proved memorable.
The reader may be glad to know that the realities of wheelchair life have made a deep plowing through my voluminous papers impossible; and with the exception of a very few investigations undertaken by a helpful friend, I didn’t want to rely on research assistance. What’s here then, throughout, is literally a memoir. And despite the recent scientific assaults on our faith in the accuracy of memory, I can say that if I didn’t feel that what’s recorded is reliable, I wouldn’t have offered it. I’m now past seventy-five, and I share with my contemporaries a loss of short-term memory that’s forest-fire in its sweep, but the distant memories grow even more crystalline in their clarity and depth. Only yesterday, as my young dentist picked sharply at my teeth, I was flooded by a sudden wash of visually precise memories of my dentist’s tragically gifted father—a man whom I’d known well forty years ago, whose impressive efforts at fiction writing were swamped by alcohol. Trapped in the dentist’s chair, I could still have given a police detective the details from which an accurate portrait could have been drawn, years after my friend’s early death.
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As a writer, I’m even more grateful than others might be for such a change in the quality of memory in the face of age. In fact, though I was a vain enough man in my early and midmanhood, I’ve long since ceased to regret the downward pull of years. That glacial action has proved literally painless; and now if I pause at the mirror for anything more than a shave or a combing, I answer my frequent Who’s that? with a settled Well, it’s me. And me is who I’ve been since about the age of four or five, the earliest time of sustained self-consciousness.
If I roll away, discard my momentary visual confusion, and ask myself How old do I feel?, the answer is seventeen or eighteen (however comic such an answer may seem for anyone but my calendar contemporaries). Most days, despite the pain that goes on serving me loyally after numerous gougings and burnings, I sense myself as a mainly cheerful young man poised on the edge of independence and increasingly aware of the strengths, weaknesses, and secrets that I hope will follow me as faithfully as any good dog to the end of my life.
But does my sense of continuity mean that I remember in reliable detail the events, thoughts, and emotions of the man I actually was in North Carolina, the British Isles, continental Europe, and elsewhere some five decades ago? Anyone who’s known me for most of my life can confirm that I’ve been essentially the same mind in a sequence of bodies as separate as those on any extended strip of movie film (and no one is alive who’s known me all my life). However, recent studies of human recollection suggest to some scholars that what we mean by memory may frequently be fresh creation.
To simplify drastically what I know of their work, a number of scholars assert that, in an effort to recover the past, we take a few strands of accurate memory, then interweave them with imagined strands into a detailed visual narrative—a good part of which (if we could check that narrative against a film of our entire lives) would never have occurred in the exterior world. In light of such a theory, we are as much artists in the production of “memory” as when we shut our eyes in sleep and produce the poems which our species has long called dreams.
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Such a theory of memory has some occasional groundings in fact, groundings that should make us profoundly suspicious of potentially accusatory memories. If we’re the creators of our memories, then those inventions have often been a calamitous source of tragic consequences. Any sworn testimony from a witness in a court case may well be at the mercy of creative memory. And many appalling results of the recovered-memory movement of the 1970s and ’80s arose from such unexamined views of memory—occurrences like the false accusations of employees in children’s care centers or adult children’s “recovered,” but often inhumanly false, memories of sexual abuse at the hands of close relations. Such fantasies have often been encouraged as reliable memories by doctrinaire therapists and have sometimes resulted in prison sentences and ruined lives for innocent fathers, mothers, kin, teachers, and devoted caretakers. The documentary films made by Ofra Bikel, several of which have aired on PBS’s Frontline, are meticulous and frightening accounts of such fantasies and their overwhelming power in the hands of the cruelest, most self-deluded, and most easily panicked among us.
My two parental families, though, are proof that what we call memories may often be astonishingly faithful to history—and accurate through the length of long lives, even in kinsmen who’ve never transcribed so much as a single memory. It’s easy enough to believe that a family may preserve group memories that it’s shared, in identical form through decades of family reunions, say. But kinsmen have occasionally saddened or delighted me with detailed accounts of awful or hilarious events to which we’ve each been witnesses, though we may have kept those details from one another for many years.
For that reason then, and many more, I’m not inclined to agree with anyone’s claim that memory is largely re-creation. Most friends with whom I share an experience in the distant past tend to affirm that my recall of the experience matches their own, give or take a small point. And a surprised affirmation occurs so often that I’m compelled to wonder whether the chief distinguishing trait of a serious writer of narrative may not be a brain wired with unusual powers of faithful memory. It’s by no means a distinction imagined solely by me, as I’ll detail below.
My insistence in this matter comes at a time when several of the most successful memoirs of recent years have been exposed as outright inventions. In the light of ensuing public concern, while I can hardly claim that all the memories recorded here are unerring, I can assert my confidence that they bear a high resemblance to actual happenings in my life and in many lives near me. And that achievement is by no means a personal virtue—only a phenomenon of birth like the color of my eyes and a craftsman’s skill, honed by long polishing.
Three final details are worth noting—when I’ve attributed remarks to friends or others, I’ve attempted to preserve the content and characteristic rhythm of their speech; but the presence of quotation marks is not a guarantee of verbatim record. And in the case of a few friends and others, I’ve changed names. To the best of my knowledge, nonetheless, no lies have been told; surely none was intended—especially in matters involving sex.