What makes this book a memoir?  Willa Cather’s signature appears on the front cover, and I believe she would approve of this appropriation of her life and work–because it is true to her, something she would have cared about fiercely. Like a documentary slide show, each page reveals biographical material and many sections include direct quotes from Cather’s poetic prose.  Here the reader finds place after place, literal and metaphorical, from Cather’s life and travels.

Cather did not write a memoir as such (unlike her contemporaries Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow); instead, she wrote highly autobiographical fiction and some personal essays.  The visitor to Red Cloud, Nebraska, today can tour the places that form the backbone of many of her tales–the Opera House, the childhood home, the train station, various churches, and numerous other homes.  Since the best passages of her books come straight from her own experience of rapture, when they are placed side by side along with photographs, the reader can feel some of the bliss Cather knew as she allowed her own spirit to roam over the land, back into the geologic ages and beyond, into the future.

The effect of such a “memoir,” one which Cather wrote only as pure description, challenges all writers to select every word, every image, with love (hate might be an inspiration, too, I suppose).  We need to splash our souls on the page while continuing to discipline our minds.  Cather loved deeply, fiercely, protectively.  She wanted, like Virgil, to be the first to bring the muse into her country.  She fulfilled this longing.

As a result, those who love and understand her work are constantly forming pictures of her and of the places she described.  Bernice Slote and Lucia Woods are the skillful handmaidens.  Cather herself was the genius.

I have returned to this book often over the last thirty years, and every time I discover a new way to enter the words and the landscape.  In my heart I hear one of Cather’s favorite words, “Splendid!”

A New Earth is not a memoir, although the author drops personal fragments into the narrative from time to time.  Hence, I will not review the book, but I want to reflect on the implications of some of Tolle’s theories about the ego for the telling of personal stories.

The memoir is all about “me, myself, and I, ” a fact that can only be avoided by adopting the third person, something Henry Adams did in The Education of Henry Adams, a classic memoir, and one of my favorites.  A few other writers have followed his example, describing themselves as though they are outside watching a life unfold instead of inside experiencing it.  In the hands of writers less graceful than Adams, this device can easily seem contrived, and while it avoids the arrogance of the “I,” it may also evade the intimacy of the deepest self-revelation.

Eckhart Tolle, like many other spiritual writers, talks about the ego as a false self.  Applying his ideas to the process of writing memoir, one might decide not to write a memoir at all for fear of retarding the process of spiritual growth from the nonessential into the essential self.  For Tolle, the ego is an illusion:  “What you usually refer to when you say ‘I’ is not who you are” (45).  The ego identifies itself through what Tolle calls form–external roles, titles, things.

Celebrity memoirs, almost by definition, focus on the external world and the rise from humble origins to fame.  They may be full of obstacles overcome and may reveal weaknesses such as addictions, but unless they are unusually reflective, they remain focused on the self that disappears when the footlights fade.

The book that taught me most about the essential self was not a memoir but a novel, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark.  This story, published in 1918, chronicles the rare narrative of the artist as a young woman.  The first half of the book is all about the dim beginnings of the birth of the essential self–the hints from childhood, the passion for life itself, the strong pulsing rhythm in the veins.  As her desire to be an artist emerges, the young protagonist, Thea Kronberg, knows she needs to leave her home, find a teacher, and test her talent in the great wide world.

She eventually becomes a famous opera singer through this route, but she only becomes a great one after travelling to the cliff dwellings of the Anazazi, the Ancient Ones of the Southwest.  There, amid another culture’s ruins, she senses her connection to all other artists and to the essence of her own self.  Cather tells us, “Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she herself seemed older.  She had never been alone for so long before, or thought so much.  Nothing had ever engrossed her so deeply as the daily contemplation of that line of pale-yellow houses tucked into the wrinkle of the cliff.  Moonstone and Chicago had become vague.  Here everything was simple and definite, as things had been in childhood.  Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab.  And here she must throw this lumber away.  The things that were really hers separated themselves from the rest.  Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer.  She felt united and strong.”

This passage, these words of epiphany among the cliff dwellings, have lived in my heart for over thirty years since I first read them.  Eckhart Tolle may explain what the ego is and why it needs to die.  But Willa Cather made me feel it.  Her words, almost a century old now, echo with the ring of truth.  This is the kind of truth I seek in memoir.  This is the kind of wisdom I crave for my life and writing.