"memory's a funny thing."
The American poet John Yamrus has recently released two short memoirs Memory Lane (2018) and RMA (2019) through the small alternative Canadian press Epic Rites Press. On the surface, the books explore what it was like for Yamrus to grow up in a small, unnamed, impoverished Pennsylvanian coal mining town during the 1950s and 1960s.
According to Yamrus, the purpose behind the memoir is twofold. In the opening page Yamrus writes, “my sister told me one day i should write a memoir.” She once told him that he writes the way he talks and recently had “moved to Albuquerque and i think she just misses hearing me talk.”
In a Note to self in Part III, he is more explicit, “I’m writing this just to remember the people I knew as a kid. Like it or not- whether they knew it or not- they helped make me into whatever kind of man I am today…The people, the movies, the music, the streets…I want to get it all down and remember it…so I can take it in, digest it and put it behind me. I want to start looking ahead again.”
Yamrus certainly brings to life some important people from his past but his real purpose and his eventual accomplishment is far greater than this.
Within a page or two the reader will realise Memory Lane is not a conventional memoir. The multi-layered authorial asides, intrusions and digressions- often directly addressed to the reader, together with his revelatory “notes to self”- give the memoir a meta-fictional feel as Yamrus imaginatively reconstructs his past.
Yamrus admits to the reader early in the book, “This isn’t going to be a strict memoir in the traditional sense…not by any means. my brain’s not wired that way. this is gonna be more like jazz…like a conversation between instruments…each going off on its own journey…each feeding into and onto the whole, so that i may skip around a bit.”
This idea of improvisation is also furthered early on in RMA when the speaker steps back from his narrative to ironically digress on the word “digress”, “i’ve never taken a path that took me plain old straight ahead. that’s often caused me a lot of trouble, and certainly never made me a lot of money, but, like good jazz, or a conversation between old friends over drinks, my life has never gone from point A to point B and then to C…i’ve always tried to be open. and flexible.”
Later in Chapter III he executes a series of literary summersaults- moving from a graphic description of discovering his 45 year-old father dead in the child’s bed, to a return to the immediate present where Yamrus puts on a Lena Horne CD and begins to comment on the emotional appeal of great music and singers. In the subsequent Note to self he explains his method of composition to the reader:
“This memoir is going to be difficult to keep straight…for the reader as well as the writer…because memories aren’t linear (anyone who’s read Proust knows that)…memories are like leaves on a tree…and they fall at different times, at different speeds, in different ways…eventually, no matter how they fall, they end up covering the ground.)”
This creative act in revisiting memory made me recall in my recent rereading of Orwell’s early novels, what Fatty George Bowling had to say in Coming Up For Air (1938):
“The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past.”
Yamrus is not so much interested in accurately recounting the past but rather to expose the uncertainty and arbitrariness of memory and how experience can be eternally pliable in his hands and transformed into art.
In reconstructing his youth in Memory Lane Yamrus explores the notion of the fallibility of memory and uses meta-fictional devices to directly invite the reader to stand in his shoes and to participate with him in the creation of his story. Yamrus uses jovial banter reminiscent of the late American writer Kurt Vonnegut, to cajole and challenge his readers.
After ten pages or so of “trying to fill in the picture of the whole neighbourhood where we grew up and what it was like back then” he steps aside and quietly apologises to his readers, “eventually, this will start to make sense…or, maybe not…maybe it’ll be as confused and confusing to you as it still is to me, these sixty or so years after the fact.
“now, to pick up where i…”i”? “i”? did I say “i”? maybe i should say “we” because like it or not, we’re in this together, and if you stick with me long enough, maybe this will all make sense to the both of us.”
Part I of Memory Lane Yamrus is particularly clever at positioning the reader to enter the writer’s world of bluff, nuance and intimacy. He combines random thoughts and explanations, factual details, photographic evidence, personal recollections and anecdotes, philosophical observations, and all the time, as he takes us on a virtual walking tour of his neighbourhood.”
At times, it appears that the story of Yamrus’s youth plays a supporting role to the postmodern concept of his book: that memory is fickle and that reality is largely subjective and based on one’s social, economic, political perspectives. Yamrus often breaks from his narrative to return to the present to comment on how he and the world have changed and how he was unable to see the larger picture because of his limited view as a child. In assessing whether his family was “poor” when he was young, the mature Yamrus reflects on his naivety:
“i just didn’t have a sense of it until i had grown up and moved away and was able to look back on things and see them in a different light.
“things always have a way of looking different when you see them over your shoulder.”
In remembering his childhood heroes, the black boxers Tiger and Griffith, he concedes that one of the men later had “very public struggles with his sexual identity” and concludes “even though i don’t know his whole story, i’m sure he even had trouble way back in his prime, but it was a different world back then and things like that weren’t really talked about, or questioned, they just didn’t exist. at least not for us.”
Similarly, in discussing his Uncle Duke’s missing pointer finger on his right hand he acknowledges the gaps in his knowledge: “we were kids then and i don’t really know what the real story was, but that’s what we were told and we believed it.”
In contrast to what I have discussed above, consider the bare bones of what we learn about Yamrus’s youth in Memory Lane: Yamrus was born in a coal mining town in 1951. His grandfather and his father were both coal miners. The neighbourhood was Catholic. A vicious dog Tippy lived up the road. He and his friends played in war games in an alley and devised a ball field in the parking lot of the Catholic Church. He finds his dad dead sitting up in the boy’s bed. Across the alley lived a woman they called Black Mary. A Greek family lived around the corner and had a great big party every year.
These details are at best sketchy and limited in their understanding of context and self-knowledge. Yamrus layers his story with a variety of perspectives, both past and present, but he still can’t seem to get it whole. At best, he can only recall the past in a series of fragmented images- his father’s beautifully thrown curveball, the voices and songs of his long dead relatives, his father’s swagger: “I can still see him now in his baseball cap” …“like Gary Cooper in High Noon, slow and sure and deliberate” and his aunts and uncles “like old photographs…some, in black and white” others “in colour, like Polaroids…all cracked now, and fading away.”
The front cover designed by Julie Valin of The Word Boutique and the blurred title “Memory Lane” reinforces Yamrus’s notion of the unreliability of memory. The front cover resembles an old photo album and features a black & white photo of Yamrus as a young boy playing baseball in his driveway with his dad. The photo, together with others in the book provide Yamrus with an authentic starting point in which to launch his grander literary ambitions.
Despite the brevity and apparent simplicity of Memory Lane there is a dense, layered quality to the memoir which lends itself to multiple readings. Using his legendary conversational style and complex use of structure, Yamrus explores the interplay between memory, “truth” and Art in a brilliant but highly understated way.
Further Resources
