Memory pertaining to our earliest years is deceptive.
I vividly
recall an evening in my paternal grandparents' parlour, where my parents and I
lived until I was nearly four, watching Cilla Black perform Alfie and You're
My World. I see the scene, long before I started school and saw other kids,
as clearly as if yesterday: the grey sofa my legs dangled from, chintz curtains
at the side window behind the TV, my mother's mauve button-front dress, my
father's rolled white shirt sleeves and the clean but natural scent of his
armpits. The pierced tin flagon of Double Diamond beer they shared in two dimpled
half-pint tankard glasses, each occupying in an armchair by the coal fire. The
late 1950s pastel oblong patterned wallpaper behind which my grandparents watched
their own TV in their adjacent living room. I see Cilla's face on the black and
white screen, hear her piercing tones, her heart wrenching words. Did grownups
really feel what she sang of? It's the music that cements the scene. Yet history
shows those two records not being released until the two years following our
move across town to our own house, me in my first years at school.
Scholars argue that early childhood memories are the stuff of fluffy fiction, technically impossible, our cerebral formation at such early development. Cherished flash backs from POV's of prams and cots are false, formed from fragmented tales overheard from elders, jumbled with glimpses of other events featuring the same people or places (sometimes even dreams mistaken for reality).
Yet beyond infancy we encounter the same. I distinctly see a pre-pubescent night with my father in our front room, my mother out working, he and I enjoying a satirical new TV show, That's Life! Its main presenter, a little known blonde called Esther Ransome, triggered an alien twinkle in my father's eye. Her quirky offsiders included wry-faced veteran comic Cyril Fletcher. I feel the rarity of this pleasant evening at home with my father, usually the one working nights rather than my mother (both had these passing second jobs in various licensed venues) in the comparative luxury of our front room, normally reserved for visitors or special occasions. The sense of reluctantly touching and sitting on the good furniture, as Esther and Cyril chatted and mused. Yet records show That's Life! not starting until two years after my parents' divorce: our house sold, me hopping between my mother and stepfather's first make do abodes and my grandparents' house, where my father again lived for the five or so years before his second marriage.
Such memories feel so authentic, solid and dependable. History confirms that scholars can be wrong in the absence of future knowledge, records inaccurate from human error. The temptation to trust instinct over academic theory is often irresistible.
But to my ultimate point on all this as a writer of many memoir-style prose pieces, from full-length to novelette to short story to vignette:
Once upon a year, long before we had Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and its many competitor platforms who have collectively forever reshaped publishing ... to submit one of my (and many modern classic authors from Jean Rhys to whoever) stories to a publisher, it was considered neither 'Fiction' nor 'Non-fiction', as is increasingly becoming a standard submission criterion on almost all traditional literary platforms. Rather, it was in that long past age, a piece of 'Literary Prose'.
Jean Rhys' short stories and novels, for which she received an OBE, are mostly written first person and indeed draw from various periods of her real life, but they are unmistakably 'fictionalised' – fictionalised far beyond changing names of characters based on real people. Her anthologies include first person stories recalling episodes of her real life narrated by all kinds of tellers who couldn't possibly be her: from pre-toddlers who could have no cerebral recall of the events they describe around them, to ghosts visiting places their living counterparts lived in – but they're all really Jean Rhys drawing from her own life.
And Rhys was no minority in the age of great 'Modernist'/'Stream of Consciousness' authors.
It was in that bygone age a 'thing' to categorise one's prose: 'Autobiographical Fiction'. Yet on examining the vast majority of today's online Submission Guidelines (endless of them sit on the platform 'Submittable' https://www.submittable.com/ )one invariably encounters requirement to place such work in 'Non-fiction' or 'Fiction'. How, if we're to show any measure of integrity?
A quick Google search will confirm the vigorous assertion from all self-proclaimed 'authorities' on the topic that: Memoir = Non-Fiction. Yet if you reread my first paragraphs in this piece you'll recall that so many of the 'memories' forming the basis of such prose are more often than not entirely imaginary, or at least halfway so.This odd logic defies the assumption of online submission platforms representing signs of 'progress' (a progressive approach to traditional ways). Rather, it demonstrates a wide scale shrinkage of the 'progressive' publishing scene's definitive creative ability to think outside the square – as in 'the abstract nature of art'. Writing is our art, yet we are required to take a less and less abstract framing in this way. Pigeonholing has become more the order of the day than ever before.
Such is the dichotomy I frequently notice myself pondering and which increasingly deters me from submitting any first-person POV literary prose.
I feel compelled to conclude with a link to this insightful and blood pressure raising 13-year-old Guardian piece on this thorny subject, by Laura Dietz, which reads like the death knoll of writerly flexibility:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/sep/14/therunningwithscissorslink
You can Google a hundred more like it written since, confirming the cut and dried anti-creative trajectory of 'progressive publishing'.
