Cake or Death (5 page)

Then as an adult, out of blasted hope, Helga takes her beautiful little son to meet the mother she has not seen since childhood. Mum ignores the child, fortunate boy, but makes a peace offering. She has handfuls of expensive jewellery, which Helga realizes instantly were stolen from Jewish and Romany women stripped as they entered the gas chamber. The reunion goes downhill from there, and later Helga visits her mother in a German old folks’ home, where everyone knows she was a Nazi torturer partly because she still behaves like one. At this point, it’s actually funny, because the staff and other patients show a saintly patience toward the hideously insane old woman who serves as a relic of an era for which Germans (and everyone else, I suppose) can’t forgive themselves. It made me think better of Germans.

American Pain Memoir, Subset: Evil Mother writers aren’t like Helga Schneider. They don’t take any crap.
They take notes. An American writer would have smothered that woman with a pillow in 1967. Pain Memoirs, Subset: War, are often very fine, because the pattern in the carpet is of the individual as well as the mass. One of the greatest war memoirs is Roman Frister’s
The Cap: The Price of a Life
, in which he explains the selfish human desire to survive, to the point of stealing a fellow prisoner’s cap in Auschwitz to replace the one stolen by the
kapo
who has just sodomized him. The
kapo
has taken the cap of his latest victim, knowing that all prisoners without caps are automatically shot. The next morning, Frister watches the capless man shot to death at roll call.

Frister writes his memoir as he travels to a court where Wilhelm Kunde, the Nazi, is tried and sentenced. When he sees Kunde—the terrifying man who split the boy’s beautiful mother’s skull open with his pistol, in front of the child, her body falling to the polished wooden floor with a thud that Frister can still remember—he is numb and indifferent.

Kunde looks like a little old man in a suit too big for him, a tiny human doll. He is convicted and sentenced to seven years.

Frister thinks morality cannot be judged by one standard. It varies according to circumstance. He is right, but I notice that I have yet to meet anyone who has read Frister’s great book. And that is the point of the memoir, to study uncomfortable questions like that, things otherwise left unsaid. Readers aren’t happy with Frister’s shrug, so to speak. Very few Second World War memoirs—and I swam in them for years, out of a moral
sense possibly, but more likely out of morbid fascination—are like this, like a broken arm. Frister offers his jagged limb; readers would prefer a nicely healed straight arm.

Thanks to the Americans, there are a great many war memoirs, by soldiers, by little girls whose skin was burned off by napalm from the Dow “Better Living Through Chemicals” people, and by war photographers like Don McCullin who can’t shake their guilt.

There’s a man named Andrew Neil who used to edit fine papers bought by Rupert Murdoch and inevitably bring them down to a low sour standard that would make the good journalists who used to staff them weep. This isn’t necessarily to denigrate Neil, who stole the journalistic notion of “Treat light things seriously and serious things lightly” from the
New Musical Express
staffed by Julie Burchill et al., and made newspapers interesting again. Worse, but interesting.

But I hate Andrew Neil because he fired McCullin, one of the finest news photographers who ever lived. McCullin’s picture of a Biafran child, a boy, stooped over with such a look of hurt in his eyes, sits in McCullin’s own Pain Memoir on a shelf behind me as I write this. I’ve seen the picture twice, once as a child and once for the purposes of this book. I suppose we’ll call it Pain Memoir, Subset: Photos of Misery. Neil’s autobiography, on the other hand, is fairly disposable. He’s a dodgy man famous for his deeply strange hair. I shan’t recommend his book.

This brings us to Pain Memoir, Subset: I Am Deeply Strange. These are written by people who travel the foreign galaxies of suffering, always aware at some level
of the madness of their self-inflicted torture. Marya Hornbacher’s bulimia memoir,
Wasted
, in which she neared death at 50 pounds and thus now knows she will die young, is informative. I do wonder, though, how a teenager who eats so much and vomits undigested food so frequently and lavishly that she repeatedly bursts the pipes of her parents’ home … well, wouldn’t anyone reading this book out of fellow feeling—a similar pipe-cracker—be beyond the help of literature?

Emily Colas’s memoir of obsessive-compulsive disorder is a masterpiece. There isn’t a word in it about the agony of existence, because Colas won’t give herself the comfort. It’s a comedy. A hideous comedy, true. Colas’s misfortune was to marry a man who could cope with her fear that he might be putting cyanide in her food. As an enabler, he was excellent, but her description of the process they’d both go through so that she could safely brush her teeth takes three pages. It starts with the purchase of six toothbrushes and goes on to a packaging-leak test. Her title for the book?
Just Checking
.

As in the writing of David Sedaris, who had Tourette’s and also OCD to an extraordinary degree but in later life managed to sublimate his jitters with cigarettes, even moving to Paris where he could smoke everywhere, anywhere, there’s no analysis beyond an implied “Don’t be like me. I was odder than fuck and it was unpleasant for those around me.” Sedaris’s mother, rather than putting him in hospital, made a joke of it. She took his condition as a given. This carpet has no pattern, Colas and Sedaris are saying, and I admire them for it.

The Pain Memoir, Subset: Abusive Husband, is huge. It’s all entirely convincing and wrenching to read, but it has not made the police smarter or more determined to protect women and tiny children from the fists and knives of men. It may be the only Pain Memoir that has done no far-reaching good. Nevertheless, read them if your husband gets out of line. Keep a Running-Away Account at the bank. That’s all I will say.

I don’t really count Pain Memoir, Subset: Sexual Disorders, as real Pain Memoirs. Sex to me is a category in itself, partly because most good memoirs are written only after writers achieve a mastery over their material, a real understanding of what went wrong and precisely who was responsible. The pattern isn’t in the carpet; it’s painted on their reading glasses. And even the most sexually driven people cannot seem to successfully put into words why they’d go out looking to be gang-raped. The American writer Daphne Merkin is the only human who has ever explained why some people like to be spanked. One. Writer. Explains. That’s a terrible success rate.

And frankly, no one’s interested in why some people favour scatology. It’s bad enough that they do, no one wants to wade through the incidents; there may be faint curiosity about what it tastes like but you’re not going to pay for a book to find out. The materials are always close to hand if you wish to experiment. Only the childhood roots of the disorder are interesting. But no shit-fancier is ever clever enough to explain that one.

I must apologize, therefore, for the number of scatological references in this essay. Me, who won’t even
tolerate conversation on the subject, not even in daily life, and yet I dwell on it, as do Pain Memoirs. Kathryn Harrison wrote about her affair with her father, but what I remember of that book is her father’s new wife pounding wheezing young Kathryn’s back to free her lungs of mucus, even as she knew that Kathryn was sleeping with her husband/Kathryn’s dad. She probably pounded hard.

Disgust plays a huge part in the Pain Memoir. People reveal their greatest hurts and shame. Sweat, shit, blood, all the excretions of the body stand for a greater pain. After all, we are tiny hairless animals. We don’t look like much compared to the warriors of the animal kingdom. We are without beauty. Unclothed and bald, we understand, as animals do not, that we have been born and will inevitably die while suffering unspeakable hurts. This is why I don’t find any subset of the Pain Memoir disgusting, although writing about scatology appalls me. The body isn’t the problem. It’s a manifestation of the mind and the mind is where the joy and the pain truly reside.

The Pain Memoir doesn’t have a Mind subset. Mind is the essence of the genre. A memoir full of lies, as long as it is exposed, is actually an interesting subset. It should probably be classified within the I Am Deeply Strange subset.

There’s a memoir inside you. Where would you put it?

Hotels matter. Much more than the revelations of the flight, or the uncertainty of meals, or the traditional sights and the unexpected horrors, or even the rituals of shopping that are as familiar to me as eating, the hotel either shatters or makes whole the holiday. This attitude was imprinted young. If by accident you were ever lucky enough to spend a night in a halfway decent hotel on one of those appalling cross-country vacations-on-the-cheap you took with your entire family while being carsick for 5,000 miles,
you too would have fallen in love with hotels and all their comforts.

Naturally, your idea of comfort is different if you are a hick child raised by eccentric Calvinists from Boonieville. Look, this is not a bad thing to be. Life ever after is always more interesting and pleasurable, at some level, than your childhood was.

Wow, the hotel has elevators. With buttons.
Dibs I get to press them
, every child sings out. (What is it with kids and buttons that light up and beep? Does nothing for me now. Most irritating modern sound: Trucks backing up. Beeping is a wise invention, no doubt, at the cost of annoying everyone who isn’t about to be run over.)

A hotel has guests, all of them of interest to me. I come from a family that, as a matter of principle, didn’t even hire babysitters. I shudder to think which principle that was. Was it that the sitters would meet us or we’d meet them? One of us would come out of it badly. So guests were fascinating to me, as were ice machines and coin-in-the-slot bed vibrators and shower curtains with chrome holes and rings, and the magic of clean linen and tidy rooms each afternoon. Hotels were heaven to me as soon as I stepped into my first one, and this has not changed, and never will.

I don’t know if this is rare or not, but I take a picture of every hotel room I stay in (not when I’m working because that would be insane; work is work). I take a picture because I find art in the individuality of a bed. All beds are different. And I do it because it helps me to
fall asleep; forever after, in the photo and in my mind, that bed will be there, even with God knows who sleeping in it, even as I lie sleepless in my bed at home. I wonder if you’ll someday be able to Google Earth your hotel room bed.

The bed is always the centrepiece of the photo but the huge stack of purchased goods in brightly coloured paper shopping bags is a recurring theme. I will also photograph the bathroom if distinctive in any way. In France, this is not always the case, thanks to white tiling, so sometimes I photograph the bathroom to freeze my hardship in time. Ah, I vomited in the sink that night. Of course there was little left over after I had spewed used escargots over my husband’s leg. He stood there helplessly holding what seemed a good idea at the time: a small bread plate. It was 3 a.m. It is always 3 a.m.

In Italy, the hotel room is always brown in many aspects. In France, the curtains look like a Hermes scarf. One must fight for
placards
(closets) and I cannot see how anyone other than a backpacker could live in a civilized manner with the tiny-wardrobe-in-the-corner rooms I have been shown. It’s certainly possible to pave the entire room with open suitcases, but in France you drink, and therefore you stumble.

Which brings us to the mystery of travel to begin with. You have stuff at home, and you pack a selection of stuff to take on vacation and further sift stuff for whatever minor side trips you attempt, until you are left with what by definition must be the essentials of life. But the shoes are wrong and where is my makeup and take my word for
it, go nowhere without a flannel nightie; at some point you will freeze your ass and wish you had packed it.