IN DEFENSE OF MEMOIR -- ONE WRITER'S VOICE TO ONE READER'S EAR

Author: By Patricia Hampl

Date: SUNDAY, November 30, 1997

Page: G4

Section: Books

Fiction, too, likes to borrow the memoirist allure of the first-person voice. Think of ``Jane Eyre'' and that most arresting writer-to-reader salute: ``Reader, I married him.'' And who would care about Jay Gatsby's pursuit of his beloved airhead Daisy were it not for the pitch-perfect voice of Nick Carraway bringing us the story? ``Call me Ishmael,'' ``Moby-Dick'' begins, balancing the great saga on the fragile pedestal of a mysterious narrative voice. And more recently, in his masterful Czech picaresque novel, ``I Served the King of England,'' Bohumil Hrabal allows a provincial waiter to tell the painful history of his terrible century as if to a lonely customer dining solo.

Maybe a reader's love of memoir is less a lust for confession than a hankering for the intimacy of this first-person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately. More than a story, we want a voice speaking softly, urgently, in our ear. Which is to say, to our heart.

There was a time, during the Vietnam War, when Walt Whitman's what-I-assume-you-shall-assume voice was my most trusted literary companion. He claimed the personal voice for American poetry as Thoreau did for prose. I hung on Whitman, reading the great poems of ``Leaves of Grass'' like the abiding national scripture for a bad time. But in the tender and immediate prose of ``Specimen Days,'' Whitman's autobiographical account of his Civil War years as a nurse in Washington, I truly felt the pulse of the man. After ``Specimen Days,'' it was impossible to think of the memoir as a precious, privatized form. It was the way to observe a protagonist moving, as human beings must, through history.

Bad history makes good autobiography, it seems. And then, if it is courageous and true, autobiography turns itself back into history. The world behind the Iron Curtain, that now antique geographical designation, has given the age some of its most powerful memoirs. Vladimir Nabokov's ``Speak, Memory'' is not only an entrancing evocation of a lost world, fierce in its broken-hearted pride and sometimes wickedly funny; it is also a meditation on the nature of memory itself, the one possession left the homeless emigre.

``The World of Yesterday,'' Stefan Zweig's autobiography of his ``golden age of security'' in Vienna before the First World War and the anguished years leading up to the Second, provides a fascinating lens through which to see the profound changes between the late 19th century and the 20th. Zweig's evocation of his own fin de siecle is a perfect invitation to contemplate our own. For he, too, a century ago, had reason to think of his country as the unquestioned center of the world.

``Hope Against Hope'' and ``Hope Abandoned,'' two memoirs by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, stand as peerless acts of courage in the face of raw despotism -- more compelling to me even than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's magisterial ``Gulag.'' ``Hope Against Hope,'' in particular, is a breathtaking account of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin. It is also the story of a great love -- lost finally in one of the Stalinist camps of the 1930s where Osip Mandelstam perished.

Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel laureate, is best known as a poet, but his memoir, ``Native Realm,'' is another of those personal accounts that fixes indelibly a place and time (Poland before and after the Second World War). Like so many of these memoirists who meant to have ordinary (if quietly distinguished) lives, he does not see the memoir as an invitation to gaze into himself. ``I mistrust the probings into the subconscious that are so honored in our day,'' Milosz writes at the beginning of his memoir. His purpose, rather, is to be a witness to his time, fitting himself in not as an extraordinary figure, but as representative.

A generation -- and cultural shift -- later, ``Lost in Translation,'' Eva Hoffman's brilliant memoir of her own dislocation from a surprisingly paradisaical postwar Cracow childhood to the coolness of a Canadian and eventually American adulthood, has a very different feel to it. It is the memoir of a contemporary woman, full of the private information, sexual and otherwise, we have come to expect of a frankly recorded life. Hoffman combines some of the personal and psychological insights that Milosz avoids, while never losing touch with the powerful undercurrents of history and intellectual life that give such books their stamp of integrity.

Art Spiegelman, the author-artist of the incredible (no other adjective will do) comic-book memoirs ``Maus'' and ``Maus II,'' deserves a genre designation all his own. Many readers have heard about Spiegelman's books, which do indeed employ a comic-book format to tell the story of his attempt to learn about his mother and father's years as Jews on the run in wartime Poland and his own vexed and exasperated relationship with his father. But the experience of reading these books is far more gripping than the bizarre cuteness of the concept could ever suggest.

There is a whole subset of memoirs about mothers and fathers, in fact. For American writers, they often have to do with immigration or the implicit foreignness of a parent from another, older world. Two of my favorites are the recently republished ``Passage to Ararat,'' Michael J. Arlen's 1975 National Book Award-winning memoir about his journey to Armenia to find his father's world, and ``Fierce Attachments'' by Vivian Gornick, a spirited feud and passionate tribute to a rare mother-daughter relationship set in a real but somehow immigrant-mythic New York.

But I see I've left out more treasures than I've listed. The memoir is, after all, a mongrel form, open to all comers. The movie stars and the erstwhile junkies, the palimony plaintiffs and the poets -- they're all in there, writing their lives. ``Everybody has one of those babies in him,'' a famous novelist once remarked, dismissing the memoir. That may be a problem for the critics, but how could that be anything but good news for the reader, dear reader?