Curtis Harnack

The death of an uncle and the necessity of closing the century-old Iowa farmhouse brings the author to the crowded attic of his childhood home, where he encounters letters, diaries, journals, newspapers, church bulletins, photographs, and other memorabilia. This provides new insight into some family members' lives, but the author also confronts a stranger--his younger self--in letters written to those at home when he began his journeys to elsewhere. The preface states: "One writes a memoir to discover what recollection of a time or particular events might reveal, seeking to make the personal into something universal to which unknown readers might relate." Of this book, a sequel to We Have All Gone Away, composer and writer Ned Rorem said: "Curtis Harnack is Iowa's Willa Cather."

Winner of the Ruth Suckow Award, the Library of Congress Center for the Book.

I must call attention to this moving, brilliant memoir. It is one of the best autobiographies written in the last two decades. Harnack tells us in his preface that “writing autobiography often exorcises a lot of ghosts. You come to grips with things bothering or fascinating you, investigate nagging questions, lay to rest certain wrong notions, or stumble upon new information.” The deceptive, plain style is representative. Harnack recognizes that he is dealing with the deep questions of epistemology, memory, exploration of then and now, but he also recognizes that he must keep things down to earth.

Every chapter contains scenes which demonstrate the strangeness of daily experiences, the oddity of ordinary life. And when Harnack arrives at the point of origins--the house in which he lived his early years--he understands that although he remembers ”the oak dining chairs clustered around the table or the handpainted china in the glass-front cupboard,” he cannot truly see them as he once did. They assume a kind of magical presence. There is confusion “at the center” of life. He later states: “With the world all too full of the ordinary, I liked the leaping off point into the different and inexplicable, where strangeness and wonder and life really was.” Rereading his letters from the period of World War II, he admits that he cannot understand them. Despite his attempt to capture his other self, he remains in darkness. “For proper evaluation of everything no doubt months would be needed, not these few reckless days of tidying up a century of family life.”

Perhaps one of the significant passages in this memoir--or anti-memoir?-- is this one; “any truth can wear many disguises and some truths are more true than others. Like a series of Russian dolls, there’s always one smaller and different inside--and seemingly no end to it.” Although Harnack bravely attempts to reconstruct the past, he sees the futility of his project. He is a ghost confronting other ghostly presences. Thus his memoir becomes a haunted document--and this very fact attacks our longing to know our beginnings, our desire to search our “mental attics.”
Irving Malin in Contemporary Literature