Fat and Gristle
Fat and Gristle
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ShareThe tiny hole is, I believe, meant to suggest Burroughs’ exceedingly narrow and self-involved worldview. He is a remarkably self-centered writer, even for a memoirist; for example, he never even attempts to get under the skin of his brother, a minor figure in this story.
But the artful way in which he frames his narrow views is what makes this book, and a handful of other memoirs like it, so involving and, ultimately, so moving. If he were less self-obsessed, if he lived in the present or the future instead of in the past, and if he were not filled to the brim with old grudges and disappointments, he might be a better person, but he surely would not be a better writer.
There are many painterly passages in this book, such as, a few pages later, his account, at age five of temporarily losing his little playmate, Peter, on a street in Mexico. Burroughs and his mother and Peter’s mother “turned around and around on the sidewalk, like ballerinas from three different music boxes…” Perfect.
But then there are the other, rather more disappointing moments, like the one where Burroughs describes his desolate family life. He recounts, “I certainly offered to liven things up. More than once I suggested a family outing to Child’s toy store in Northampton or a swimming trip to Lake Wyola. But no. They were having too much fun staring at the empty fireplace.” “But no”? “They were having too much fun”? This is the voice of a sarcastic child, and a self-justifying and unimaginative one at that, someone who imagines himself to be the hero of his own petty tragedy.
There are other points in this story when the self-pity becomes almost too much to bear and transmutes into something deeply bitter, as when he recounts a family dinner when his father “got to the table first and ate all the meat and left me a pile of empty bones to pick at, to sustain myself with slivers of fat and gristle.”
Nonetheless, if this is what happened, it’s what happened, and Burroughs, like any memoirist, has the right and the duty to tell his story as he sees fit. And, it could be added, bitterness and self-pity, though for good reason not held in high repute, are legitimate emotions that all of us feel at one time or another, and thus fitting subjects for literature.
Does some of A Wolf at the Table seem a little exaggerated and excessively subjective? Sure. But when I was 11-years-old, I was old enough to intuit that my gassy old uncle Izzy hadn’t really been in the CIA, as he’d claimed. Similarly, I’ve encountered certain memoirs that I suspected from the beginning were fundamentally false. A Wolf at the Table doesn’t strike me that way.
What people sometimes forget is that novels can confabulate, too, in those passages in which the external world or historical events are represented as being real when, in fact, they are not. And so too can our friends, as they tell us self-dramatizing stories about their lives. Most of us, I believe, can distinguish the real from the fake; we don’t stop having conversations with our friends when we suspect they’re exaggerating, nor do we stop reading memoirs or novels if the narrative seems at times far-fetched. We learn, instead, to sniff out what is genuine and what is not.
This memoir seems to me a genuine accounting of the author’s past and his memories of it. More to the point, here and there it nearly matches in lumens of vividness our present sunlit instant, as in the ballerina image, or the way in which Burroughs describes his long-ago horror when he realized that all along he had been inadvertently pronouncing the word “Dad” as “Dead”.
There are a few moments of ugly and undigested hatred in Burroughs’ memoir, to be sure. But for every passage where we are left chewing, in effect, on “shreds of fat and gristle”, there are a dozen other passages that are, if not necessarily sustaining or enriching, at least satisfying examples of the art of the professional writer and rememberer.
