MEMORIES FADE AWAY (which may be why I prefer Looking Ahead.)

A few years ago I started to write a memoir. I mused about how my mother’s world was shrinking. The older she got, the less she seemed to connect to the world around her. It was a literary device to get me started remembering growing up with a demanding mother and an imperious father. I was never sure exactly what I was writing, but as I remembered, small details started to crystallize. But there never seemed to be much more than fragments.

When I think of memoirs I think of Frank McCord and his superb “Angela’s Ashes.” I marvel at how clearly he seemed able to remember, not only events in his rough-and-tumble childhood, but conversations which he rendered up verbatim. I think too of Philip Roth whose memories of growing up in Newark are inextricably bound to his own growing up, and are woven into many of his novels. Of course there are memoirs based on diaries and journals. I always wonder how these diarists knew that one day the world would want to know where they had been and what they had done.

For me it was difficult. I abandoned the manuscript, a disorganized tangle of memories and childhood trauma. It was all bits and pieces – snatches drawn randomly from here and there. Not enough for a real memoir. For example: I remembered that my father spanked me using a hairbrush. I remember the admonition that “I never want you to do that again.” Do what? That’s the problem. To this day I can’t for the life of me remember why I was punished. Not one event pops into my memory.

Today there are friends who insist that I write, if not a memoir, at least a compilation of memories about the hundreds of people I have met and interviewed. “You must have hundreds of stories to tell,” is what they say. After I wrote one of these blog pieces which included a very brief story about Kingsley Amis, I was urged to tell more. Frankly there isn’t a lot to tell.

I watched a superb rendering of Clementine Churchill by Vanessa Redgrave on TVs dramatization of ‘The Gathering Storm.” I remembered meeting and interviewing her sister Lynn and before that, their father Michael. I should be brimming over with memories. Right? Wrong!

I was in New York circa 1975 and Lynn was on a list of celebrities to interview on my half hour TV interview show. She had achieved popularity for her portrayal of the overweight underachiever in “Georgie Girl,”

I remember very little about the interview, except that we talked about her father and about her sister. Vanessa was, at that time, in one of her many and varied stages of political and social activism. She was all over the political map. Lynn smiled and said she was nothing like her sister. It also happened that she was married to an old friend of mine so I remember that part better than the interview.

My wife and I had been great friends of Lynn’s husband and his former wife. I phoned him. It was, I thought, a phone call for “old times.” He had “gone Hollywood.” Barely polite on the phone, he patronizingly offered to have a couple of tickets for me left at the box office. I was stunned. I had hoped we would get together and remember old times. He would have none of it. He had “graduated” to the Big Time. I already had tickets to see Lynn in Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” which starred Lynn and as her mother, the dreadfully miscast Ruth Gordon.

I remembered interviewing the father. Michael Redgrave was one of the great ones. His film performance in “The Browning Version,” assured him a place in the pantheon of British theatre. I was at CBC News at the time and I was assigned to interview him. “Look out,’ they told me, “He’s an awful interview. It’s like pulling teeth. Good luck!”

I was determined to “find a way in” to his memories of himself. (There have been celebrities who have almost seemed to dare me to try to make them speak – like Richard Pryor – but that is another story.)

I did a bit of research. I found the way I though, to untie the Gordian Knot. I sat down with Redgrave, he looking stern and unreachable, and said: “I didn’t know that you would rather have been a poet.” Hs seemed startled. Then he smiled and began talking, and talking, and talking. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I knew I had found the window in. Of course, he asked me “How did you know that??” (I remember a well-known Canadian interviewer who “dined out” on stories about how people marveled at his ability to get all kinds of inside info.) I never paraded my small skill.

So, you tell me, “There must be a book there.” I don’t think so. Unless, and I suspect it, that the great memoir writers, and biographers, use a lot of research and a lot more imagination, to conjure up their memories. I wish readers would tell me about their memories. A blog is supposed to be where ideas are shared. Maybe I should be using “Face Book.”