Memoirs

I have just finished reading two books, each of which are, in their own ways, memoirs. They are very different from each other.

The first was Richard Halliburton's "The Glorious Adventure", published in 1927, being the story of the young post-college Halliburton determining to follow the route of Odysseus, starting and ending in Ithaca. A student of the classics, Halliburton travels with few possessions, but for his many translations of "The Odyssey", all annotated. His style is breezy and appealing, as he visits some very primitive locals (primitive compared to how they are in 2005), in Greece, Italy, Turkey and North Africa. He starts with a friend, who needs to cut his trip short, but finds others (male and female, old and young) as he wends his way from improbable adventure to adventure.

It is hard to tell what is the truth, and what is exaggeration. But exaggeration there must be, as even Halliburton the narrator implies in his conversation with Calypso (real name: Fifi. Age: about 65) near the end of the book: "At twenty six, I hadn't an especially crimson record to confess. However I wasn't going to disappoint her by admitting it. Fifi never listened to a more profligate autobiography than the one I made up and related to her on the porch of Calypso's cave. Of course she was far too sophisticated to believe me entirely."

Very different is a much newer book, "A Walk Toward Oregon", published when the author, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. was 85. (He died last year at 89.)

My guess is that Josephy was planning on a multi-volume memoir, but that time caught him short. His first 40 years take up, perhaps, 80% of the book, and his many accomplishments of the last half are handled much more matter-of-factly. What makes the first part of the book so good is that, in addition, to detailing his life to you, he paints a very clear portrait of the United States in the period 1920 through 1960. His style of writing is, perhaps not as breezy as Halliburton's, but equally appealing and accomplished.

Josephy was a man of many accomplishments. A long time editor of Time Magazine of the American Heritage, a New York Herald Tribune reporter, and the author of many volumes on the history of American Indians, Josephy, born in 1915, started out with a life of privilege (his mother was a Knopf of the publishing family), but his father's poultry business fell apart in the Depression, forcing him to leave Harvard after his second year, never to return. For a while, he lived in Hollywood, working with an uncle, who was an MGM screenwriter. For a while, he was down and out. He traveled to and from California; he went on a long road trip with a friend to Mexico. He interviewed Trotsky there. He became active in liberal Democratic politics.

He tells the story of privilege, of poverty, of ethnicity, and of history. And he tells it remarkably well. (Even the final few chapters, where everything seems so rushed, are fascinating; the difference here is that they primarily tell the Josephy story, while the earlier book tells the story of an entire country.)

And, as Halliburton seems prone to exaggeration as poetic license, you feel that Josephy is staying very close to the truth. His first marriage fell apart, and he does not tell that story: "..seemed too personal and melodramatic to pour it all out in a book for others to read about". That quote is from page 230.

On the same page, he introduces the woman to whom he will be married for the rest of his life (almost 60 years). She was probably one of the reasons that his first marriage disintegrated, although he obviously does not want to say so. Yet, he cannot tell a lie. He does not say that he met Betty (that's her name) after his marriage to Roz ended. He says: ".....at about the same time as the end of my marriage, some friends introduced me to......."

For this reason, I conclude that Josephy's book, in addition to being enjoyable and very interesting, is completely honest.