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Posted on Sat, Oct. 31, 2009 10:15 PM
Review | ‘In Rooms of Memory’ by Hilary Masters
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In the title essay of Hilary Masters’ new collection, “In Rooms of Memory,” a chance encounter with “The Walls of Jericho” by Paul I. Wellman reminds Masters of his childhood trips from Kansas City to Topeka.
“It is always a hot and dusty excursion,” he writes, “and my grandmother sits in the passenger seat, fanning herself with a program from last night’s Democratic Party meeting, where she had been one of the principal speakers. Yes, I remember all that, and I remember the moment as if it were yesterday, as the saying goes.”
The 19 essays move from the general thread of some distant memory to the specific time itself. He handles these memories in the present tense, crafting scenes and inquiries into the past, spurred by his 1887 edition of “Robinson Crusoe,” an old photograph of his father — the writer Edgar Lee Masters — or the pressing of his 94-year-old mother’s memories of her own youth.
Masters’ parents lived in New York City when he was a child. His grandparents raised him in Kansas City, and his mother would visit infrequently. When his mother returned, she would regale the family with stories of her adventures in order to prove her worth to them. As Masters visits her, in her old age, she continues to tell him wild concoctions of saving a Jewish family from Hitler in World War II Poland.
“She sits in her wheelchair now, isolated by much more than her great age — an aged Penelope, redoing memory to set things right and even the score. Justice will be hers if not freedom.
“ ‘So, you got them out,’ I say.
“ ‘Yes.’ She laughs, again, at how clever she was. ‘I got them out.’ ”
Masters tell his own stories, of course, though less fanciful. In “Going to Cuba,” he waits to steal away with a married woman while her husband lies in critical condition after a car wreck. He reconstructs the woman’s dialogue with a fiction writer’s flair and in her character creates a peculiar and fascinating portrait.
“He would take me downtown to the finest stores,” she tells the 23-year-old Masters of her dying husband. “Take me and buy me wonderful clothes. … Then, at home, he has me go into the bedroom and put everything on, and then he would come into the bedroom. He would rip all these new, beautiful clothes off me. Tear them off. Everything. Sometimes he would use scissors and cut them off. Everything. Cut them to ribbons.”
Yet memory cannot be trusted. As Masters enters old age, he faces the potential deterioration of his own mind — an illness that has plagued both sides of his family. Before his father was born, his grandfather killed himself. His mother suffers from dementia. But in these captivating essays, Masters, like his mother, continues to tell the stories of his past, real or imagined, as if he continues to live them today.
Toward the end of the collection, he writes about his mother again in a passage that could also apply to all writers of memoir or personal essay:
“As recounted elsewhere,” he writes, “my mother, in her later years, would review and edit her own historical narrative, giving herself leading roles and reducing another’s lines — even to changing the truth of a character — all to bolster her sense of herself. For her, the old days were made even better by her deft manipulation of memory in which, alas, she ultimately became lost.
“But weren’t some of those old days really good?”
HEAR THE AUTHOR
Hilary Masters will read from his work at 8 p.m. Friday at the Writers Place, 3607 Pennsylvania. On Saturday, he will lead a master class in memoir writing. Call the Writers Place for more information: 816-753-1090.
Hilary Masters will read from his work at 8 p.m. Friday at the Writers Place, 3607 Pennsylvania. On Saturday, he will lead a master class in memoir writing. Call the Writers Place for more information: 816-753-1090.
In Rooms of Memory, by Hilary Masters (260 pages; University of Nebraska Press; $24.95)
Zac Gall is a graduate student in creative writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Posted on Sat, Oct. 31, 2009 10:15 PM
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