by Mara Naselli
Minds cannot help but make meaning, even with only a suggestion of direction. When I taught manuscript editing, to put the mechanics of the work in perspective, I would write out a line of taspyograpgucal noasihfsnesnse theat qwe kcgan reasdsdo to illustrate the point. Your eye, reading the jumble above, found the letters to make the words. We make corrections and connections without thinking about them. We bend the contours of a line. We want order, not confusion, and will bring it into shape if we can.
This hunger for order applies to memory as much as it applies to reading. We know memory is plastic—it can even be invented. What interests me are the choices that occur someplace between consciousness and unconsciousness—our grasping letters that make sense and eliding the others so that the coherence of our interpretations and blindnesses are preserved. But what would a more careful reading look like? How do we allow a memory or fact to break into our consciousness and disrupt our domestic intellectual and emotional order?
On April 18, 1939, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa urged her to write her memoirs, before her memory might fail her. Woolf was ready for a diversion—she had been working on a biography of the painter Robert Fry, puzzling out the difficulties of writing about another human being outside of the events of his or her life. Who was I then? she asks, turning the question onto herself. For the next year and a half, she wrote her recollections, conjuring the dead and their vanished Victorian world. “A Sketch of the Past” was edited by Jeanne Schulkind and published posthumously in 1976.
Which is to say these writings are, for all intents and purposes, works in progress, and to read them is a bit like editing them, interpreting and weighting the content, discerning a shape that might give contours to the genius they contain. To read Woolf’s draft of a memoir is to sit with her at her writing desk, after she has gone for a walk, read Chaucer, made notes on Robert Fry, written instructions to the housekeeper, or heard the drone of German planes overhead. She settles in, and we watch her wade into the past. Woolf’s writing is not simply recollection, rather her encounter makes the convergence of past and present an altogether new thing—waters not yet crossed.