In memory of me: an interview with Patricia Humpl.

"Don't get complicated, quit trying to figure out what you believe, just follow your instinct. I felt, in fact, I was following my instinct to wonder." Patricia Hampl writes this about her pilgrimages in Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life (North Point Press, 1992). This search, driven by her "instinct to wonder," gets expressed by Hampl in her writing.

A professor at the University of Minnesota, Hampl has shared numerous stories of her quest in memoirs, novels, poetry, and lectures, including A Romantic Education (Norton, 1981), I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (Norton, 1999), and her latest, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (Harcourt, 2006). Her search explores her faith as a Catholic and delves deeply into memory and imagination, taking Hampl's story and making it our own stories, too. She feeds our desire to understand what happens when we explore the vast landscape of the past and attempt to make meaning out of it and our relationship with God. Hampl taps into many of the great writers who have also made this attempt and been profoundly successful at making meaning out of it for themselves and for their readers.

Emily Dickinson opens Hampl's Virgin Time: "He has not lived who has not felt." We can't help but want to get swept up, again and again, in all that Hampl feels in her elegant, probing writing as we explore our own instincts to wonder.

Your early writing was poetry, and you then became an essayist and memoirist, Why the shift?

To complicate things still further, I also write short stories. I suppose it looks like a shift from the outside--to have published two collections of poems early on and after that mostly prose. But these genres are less decisive for a writer than the work that must be done.

The projects themselves drew me toward prose--the desire to write about the lingering life of immigration (in A Romantic Education) and the question of prayer in contemporary life (Virgin Time). These subjects required prose. But I've always approached narrative and even the essay in a pretty lyric way--for good or for ill. Poetry is still the core for me.

A major aspect of your work is exploring the relationship between memory and imagination, particularly in the genre of memoir. What is the difference between autobiography and memoir?

The dictionary has definitions we could use, but probably the rise of the memoir as a significant literary form in the past 25 years has given us a distinction between these two words that may be more to the point today. I think of an autobiography as the history of a life written over time, in fact, a life as a timeline.

The memoir has a narrative dynamic. It may not have a plot, but it has some kind of business to settle, some question to wrestle to the ground. The memoir is not the recitation of "what happened to me" but a search for the meaning of what happened. Maybe you can only write one autobiography, but you can--and writers do--write two or three, even more, memoirs. A memoir is probably more thematically driven. But of course the two words are often used interchangeably--no problem with that.

Still, it's interesting that the word American writers and readers--and publishers--have settled on for the kinds of contemporary books we're talking about is memoir, rather than autobiography. I like that because it suggests that the genre isn't about "self writing" but about memory--that fascinating faculty of mind that is the most intimate awareness of experience we possess but that also attaches us to the impersonal memoir of history.

Why do you think memoir has become the "it" genre of our time?

Do I think that? I'm not sure I do. I devour fiction, and I suppose I'll always feel the novel is the great long-distance test of the imagination and one of life's rare experiences of sustained paradise for the reader. Probably purgatory for the writer. And of course other forms of nonfiction have captured the reading public in our age.

But it's true that memoir has shouldered its way forward in the past two decades or so. It's taught in the universities, and it has designated shelves in bookstores. This wasn't so in 1981, when my first memoir came out.

Actually I hadn't even realized I had written something called a "memoir." I didn't know what it was. And I would have been unhappy to think I'd just written a book about myself--because that's what the word "memoir" would have meant to me. I would have thought a person should be very old, practically dead, to write a memoir, maybe a retired Army general or a faded Hollywood starlet with secrets to tell.

In fact, though, memoir has a long, if sometimes submerged, history in American literature. It keeps being discovered. When Alfred Kazin published his gorgeous memoir A Walker in the City (Harvest Books) shortly after the Second World War, it was met with great admiration but also bafflement.

One influential critic said it perversely refused to be a novel. The idea was it was so good it ought to be a novel--a "real" genre instead of a minor one. This sort of comment says more about the cultural assumptions of the reviewer than about the merit of the book. I always think it's comical when people try to beat the memoir with a stick as if it were a bad dog, bad dog--just for existing. A novel can be good or bad and no question about the genre comes into play. But a bad memoir seems to call the whole enterprise into question.

Our own time in America, I think, is one of great personal frustration in the face of crushing political and social problems in a mass imperial society. The first-person voice is such a frail instrument--and yet it also feels authentic, as other forms of speech do not. The memoir provides a chance for this voice not only to tell a tale but to reflect on it, to write about the world, not just the self--but from a singular point of view. I think this accounts for part of its appeal. The whole mind, not just "a story," is invited to participate in the writing of the book. And this in turn invites the reader. Or it can.

Your collection of essays I Could Tell You Stories explores remembrance as it has been expressed by the great writers such as Czeslaw Milosz and St. Augustine. Your essay on Augustine is a foreword for a new edition of The Confessions. What do you find most inspiring about Augustine?

Augustine is the grandfather of us all--all memoirists, but also all people who attempt to ponder the self in relation to the mystery of existence and spirit. It's heartening to find a figure from the deep past--he wrote his book in 397!--who affirms the same enterprise we are embarked on. One of the touching things about Augustine's Confessions is that he wrote them over 10 years after his conversion.

He wasn't a settled and smug convert. He didn't have all the answers--though God knows he wrote enough to expound on just about everything. He was still trying to figure out how he and his memory fit into the much bigger picture of salvation but also how his life fit into history and the mystery of existence. He questioned God as intimately as lob, only Augustine was a real person, as we are, not a created character in a book. There's the pulse of memoir--and why telling the truth is so crucial in autobiographical writing.

Speaking of truth-telling, we saw James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces (Knopf Publishing Group), get more than criticized for the lies that were uncovered in his best-selling memoir. What is your take on this controversy?

Well, James Frey deceived his readers knowingly, and his publisher was entirely complicit and cynical in the whole sorry business. They got caught and much batting of eyelashes ensued, much invoking of "literary conventions" and so on. But A Million Little Pieces isn't really a memoir. It's a chronicle, a work of documentation, much closer to journalism--where, by the way, I've made my living.

It was the claim of nonfiction for Frey's book that enraged readers and rightly made them feel betrayed. He looked pretty miserable, even as his royalties piled up, sitting there on Oprah's couch as she bashed him about the ears to re-establish her own bona tides with her audience.

While Frey and his publishers had to be held accountable, what struck me was the peculiar relish his downfall occasioned. It seemed to have more to do with the greater frustrations of a public hog-tied by being lied to daily and far more callously by a president and an administration and having no will to call them to order for these disfigurations of the truth and of our national identity. If you can't stop the lies that have overtaken the culture about the war, about torture done in our name and denied, about the reason we are at war, and about the manipulative uses of our fear of terror--if no one can be brought to heel for all this lying, then someone who has lied and been caught red-handed is a delicious dish to feed upon.

The pious glee in catching him was weird without some kind of impulse outside that book, which I couldn't (truth be told) manage to finish for the sheer tedium of it. His lies were simply deceptions, callous and pathetic. They have nothing to do with the complications that do arise in the creation of a narrative about the past. I'm interested in how a writer who is committed to the truth finds it to be elusive in the very intimacy and depth of memory. The relation of memory and imagination is not the relation of lying and truth-telling.

When you write about the inner workings of your mind when thinking and creating story out of your personal experience, do you worry at all about how others who were also part of that experience will respond when they read it and discover that it's different from what they remember? Do you experience personal controversies among your family and friends over your memoirs and their "accuracy"?

I've written an essay about just this: Other People's Secrets." Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that when a writer is born into the family, it's the end of the family. He meant any kind of writer. There is something appalling about being written about--I know, I've been on the receiving end. It doesn't even have to be something negative or hurtful. There is something terribly intrusive about the necessary detachment that allows a writer to make declarative statements about another person, and this is especially dismaying in intimate relationships. My parents endured my writing with astonishing grace and even had the generosity of heart to pretend to be proud of me. It's a mystery. I would have sued.

How does your writing connect to your spiritual life?

I think of certain details--my mother applying red nail polish by a Minnesota lake on an August afternoon, my father turning the ignition of his Ford on a February morning, his knuckle bruised from work in the greenhouse--little things that grab me by the neck and won't let go. I write my way through them and then of course wonder why they strike me as world-shattering events, which in turn causes me to write yet more to figure that out. I suppose this tendency to turn things over in language is, somehow or other, a spiritual act. Kafka famously said, "Writing is prayer." But then, he was Kafka. I think of writing as labor. But I do like to work.

You have made both metaphorical pilgrimages into the land of memory and actual pilgrimages to places like Assisi and Lourdes, and have written about it in Virgin Time. How do you associate these two levels of pilgrimage to one another, and what have these sojourns revealed to you about your faith?

Our most ancient metaphor is "Life is a journey." That's a cliche of course. But it has earned its status as a cliche by being a truth so resonant we can't resist using it. Pilgrimage is at the basis of the three great religions of the West that share a cultural root--and that fight often to the death over that bit of evergreen life.

Part of pilgrimage is an apparently innate instinct to honor this metaphor with the body--that's why the hadj is one of the pillars of Islam.

That's why in our tradition, we can speak in every Mass of "the pilgrim church on earth." I've always thought there was a penitential quality to that phrase--the church is a pilgrim in the sense that pilgrims go on the road to do penance and to seek wisdom and guidance. It's the humility implicit in the penitential aspect of pilgrimage (not guilt, mind you--humility) that offers a measure of liberation from our usual modern miseries--self-doubt, self-loathing, self-everything. Take the self on the road and let it go.

On prayer: silence, surrender, song

Some people speak of prayer as a need to surrender. All that swooning of the mystics, giving over to the Divine Lover. Bernini's St. Teresa in her ecstasy, still scandalizing the rationalists with the orgasmic joy of her prayer. But surrender doesn't say it--and even in silence, how I need a thing said. What is that impulse that has always been there, refusing logic and requiring song?

It must be the instinct for praise. A ferocious appetite for humility which we intuit is a proper recognition of our truth: We are not simply made, but embraced. Sing a new song to the Lord, for he has made you. Made you to sing. Surrender--surrender even your voice, enter this silence. And become song.

I have always had a powerful sense of something pulsing which I could not name but also could not deny: a dynamic existence beyond me, yet in me. Spirit it is called--and why not? The invisible essence that is everywhere, including within ourselves. It is the glorious impersonality of existence which throbs with the reality of this dream we call our life. It goes where it wills.

This rich experience of life is not personal, though it is interior. It is an aspect of what we know to be the Divine, to be God--who was called in Hebrew, the first language of our tradition, Yahweh. That is, Our Integrity. I wished to find this Integrity. That is why I took to the pilgrimage trails, why I came here to this silent place near the Lost Coast. On the hunt for Our Integrity.

I lived with It as a child. It was not happiness: I have no idea what a happy childhood is--or an unhappy one. As a child, I often felt an oddity inhabit me. It was related to silence, but it was not, as people sometimes speak of religion, a comfort. I was not aware of requiring comfort. This sensation of oddity was pleasure, a spreading delight. I lie on the bed in the flowery room my father has papered for me, and I am enfolded in the booming heart of the world as the chipped blue roller makes its morning, and everything is mixed up, and I can hear my mother saying I'm sleeping my life away and I smile.

Is that a happy childhood--the unfettered experience of the strangeness of existence, the pleasure of being caught up in the arms of creation? I stood under the cathedral elms on Linwood Avenue and looked at my arm: Why an arm, why a nose? Why this life? It was as if my personality were lodged just slightly askew in my body, and in the inevitable wriggle I made to settle them in correct register, I came upon these epiphanies of strangeness. And experienced this sensation of strangeness as pleasure.

Nothing could be taken for granted, nothing was automatic. Yet everything--from my arm that bent in the middle with its small knob of elbow, to the elm's great umbrella of leaves on their splinted branches above me--everything, everything existed, outside me and inside me. These two facts came together, like cymbals crashing on a downbeat: They hushed me, they gave me that first exquisite taste of silence which was also a draught of awe. Call it surrender. But I always understood it to be song.

--Excerpt from Virgin Time by Patricia Hampl. [c] 1992. Reprinted with permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

An interview with Patricia Hampl

This interview was conducted by MAUREEN ABOOD, chief communications officer for the Claretians.