Mark Twain and Me

Around the corner from us is a business of whose offices we have made considerable use lately. There we have been able to print various forms to be signed, scanned, and forwarded to Toronto to promote our real estate capers. A few days ago I noticed that just inside their door they have several shelves of used books which are offered strictly on a bring one, take one, basis. Always looking to accumulate new books of interest, I made a special visit armed with three of my own. I picked out a two volume set of James Clavell’s Noble House, a tome I had read many years ago, but which seemed a likely holiday read, and, the autobiography of Mark Twain. I began with the Clavell book which, set in the post-war era in Hong Kong, had its historical merits. Alas, soon I found myself allergic to insipient mildew which had found its way into the pages, and had to give it up. I turned to see what Mr Twain had to say for himself and was delighted with his explanation of the method he used to write about his life.

As he grew older Mark Twain began seriously to range over and consider an exposition of what his life had been about. He made a variety of attempts to realize this project but would invariably give up after little time had passed. He began to recognize that the block that he hit each time was boredom. He was trying too hard and was being too linear. He saw that in fact over the years he had written various pieces about his life, but only as they had occurred to him for some particular reason. He was only able to write in a fashion agreeable and interesting to himself if the topic came to him, as it were, tangentially, rather than in some predetermined manner. Hitting upon this notion, he was then able to write, or more often dictate, stories about his history and experiences, that then formed the web of what came to be known as his autobiography. He was clear that these materials, specifically collated as “biography,” were not to be published during his lifetime. The version that I have acquired is the third attempt made (by different editors) to pull all of these disparate pieces into a comprehensive whole.

I was delighted with his explanation of his method as I recognized something of my own within it. Let me soothe you now by immediately declaring that I have no fantasy that a day will come when scholars will pour over my various oeuvres to tease out the threads and meanings of my life and times. No. However, the autobiographical impulse has been with me since I was quite young. In the Christmas break from my first year of university at Ottawa U, I was moved by the great books to which we had been introduced in our English course to begin to think of writing. And what did I know anything about? At twenty-three not much. But then there was my life to date. Of course such a project entailed writing about my family relations. Within a page or two I found myself delving into places that I would have to either whitewash or omit, leaving the story entirely pallid, or, I would perforce be exploring issues that perhaps were not “suitable” for a young religious sister, newly taken with vows. And so ended my early autobiographical career.

During my 17-year stint within the Therafields community I was wary of delving too close to my true thoughts and feelings, not especially of my past but more of the often strange and confusing present that I was living. Too much reality, T.S. Eliot reminded us, is difficult for humankind to handle. The corollary: too much truth could have its own dire consequences, as some of us were to discover. And so, better to keep that at a distance, even from oneself. In the early 1970s when the various publications were popping up within the community, writing was encouraged. When I would put pen to paper, however, I ran into blocks of the same nature that I had felt as a young nun. I could write a piece that would be acceptable to the editors but I knew that it would be all lies. Every sentence that would seem like a declaration of sorts would reverberate within me with all of its unspoken nuances of doubts and angers which I could never articulate without fear of confrontation, that terrible word de jour. And so I wrote nothing, not even to myself, and existed in a mental state of confused contradiction, viewed as not a particularly serious or interesting person.

In the early 1980s as I climbed out of that particular morass, I kept journals. Journal writing has a wonderfully freeing effect as one writes only for oneself. Dear Diary, one says. I will love you and tell you everything, all of the secret impulses of my heart and soul, the lovely and the nasty. I trust that you will keep all of this to yourself, because it is precisely that condition that allows me to tell you all. That and the fact that you/I are now secure enough to look at and feel pretty much everything that has been and that is now without condemnation or everlasting shame. It is a launch into that space that Socrates enjoined upon us: the examined life.

I have never been drawn to the writing of stories though I enjoy and learn much from them. Always my own writing circles about some aspect of my own interests or experiences. Several years ago Mark and I spent the Christmas breaks two years running in Guanajuato, a lovely city in the central mountains north of Mexico City. On both occasions I became entirely focused on writing out my memories of particular periods of my life. The first year I wrote a fifty page piece that I entitled, “My Own Personal Therafields.” In it I chronicled my history of entering, being with, and leaving that great experiment of a former era. The second winter I reviewed the history of my four year engagement with the Religious Hospitaliers of St Joseph, the order with which I spent my novitiate and a period of temporary vows.

I have always kept a journal during times of travel and have conserved these volumes along with an enormous bag of undigested photographs that may never find their way into order. In the past few years I have discovered the glories of the blog. This format has given me a space in which to write about either travels or about particular themes or issues that I am pursuing, with the added bonus of periodic feedback from others who read what I have to say out of interest or simple friendship. Within that genre I have written about my travels in Europe with my granddaughter, Emily; Mark’s and my time in Rome, Florence, Cairo, and along the Nile; some thoughts I have had about being a psychotherapist; my lengthy look at some aspects of the history of Therafields; last fall’s trip to Eastern Europe to visit and reflect upon sites of Nazi atrocities; and more recently, this particular blog which has no over-arching theme or purpose, other than to be a journal of happenings and musings as Mark and I spend three months of this arctic-like Toronto winter in the lap of warmth and beauty in Puerto Vallarta.

Seeing what Mr Twain had to say about writing his autobiography, I had the happy realization that I have been writing my own for quite some time. Bits and pieces, it is true, but nonetheless an ever-expanding whole that in some fashion reflects who I am and what my life has been about (to date, I hasten to add). My parents were reluctant to talk about themselves and their lives or about the histories of their families. As a result I know only the slices of themselves that they exposed publically or more privately within in our on-going family drama. Dad’s father, Charley Doyle was more forthcoming – telling me what he knew about the family’s origin and giving me a few stories of his own. I only wish now that I had spent more time with him collecting and recording his stories and encouraging him to tell more. If my own grandchildren when they are as ancient of days as I am now myself ever wonder about how my life was lived, they will have some sources to which to refer. That may never come to pass but nevertheless I enjoy and have enjoyed the processes of remembering and of musing about all the various strands and threads that find their ways into my mind.