Is this the greatest memoirist of the 20th century?
When the artist Joe Brainard was in the midst of composing his fragmented memoir I Remember, in 1969, he wrote to a friend: 'I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel that I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me.' The grand claim was a good indicator of the book that was to come: ambitious yet playful, even childlike; self-disavowing as well as self-involved; perhaps, most of all, unabashedly honest.
I Remember became Brainard's most celebrated written work. It is being reissued here in the UK by Daunt Books with a new introduction by Olivia Laing; in the US it has long been a cult favourite emblematising the 1960s New York School, of which Brainard was a key figure alongside poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. The book comprises a non-sequential list of distinct memories, each beginning with the words 'I remember'. These memories encompass things, people, moments in time, urban myths, products, celebrities and dreams. They range from the very brief – 'I remember pony tails', 'I remember liver' – to short paragraphs elaborating on anecdotes – 'I remember a story my mother telling of an old lady who had a china cabinet…' – or fantasies – 'I remember daydreams of a doctor who (on the sly) was experimenting with a drug that would turn you into a real stud.'
At first their effect is disorienting immersion, but the fragments gradually become like coordinates. A mid-century American childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, comes into view, which modulates into adolescence and, occasionally, adulthood. As the memories hop between eras in Brainard's life, their grammar also sloshes between the past and the present, often with an evocative childishness, recording the way things can feel given or eternal: 'I remember chicken noodle soup when you are sick.' His list loops back to topics and repeats certain melodic phrasings. Its construction suggests both intuition and fine composition, and reminds you that Brainard was principally a painter and collage artist.
I Remember sees the world in pieces, and these pieces themselves show a prevailing attraction to bits and details: 'little balls of ink', 'a blue glass mirror storefront in Tulsa with one piece missing.' Such fragments also propel the book's many sexual fantasies – 'I remember navels. Torso muscles. Hands. Arms with large veins.'; 'small areas of flesh', 'An orgy of fabric and flesh and friction (close-ups of details).'
But Brainard's attraction to the glimpses and pieces that make up his book is not solely or simply erotic; not just a fetishisation of his own life. What carries the text is his sensitivity to the way that so much can be contained in the tiny and particular, and contrarily how whole worlds can be reduced to mnemonics. Memories are sometimes simply songs, sayings, or products, placed in Perspex-like quote marks: 'I remember 'The Tennessee Waltz.'', 'I remember 'Suave' hair cream.', 'I remember 'Queer as a three dollar bill.'' Brainard uses these quote marks artfully to suggest how a word or a thing is also a phenomenon: 'I remember a big Sunday lunch, a light Sunday night dinner, and in the morning – 'school.''
Among the songs and things and events – 'cinnamon toothpicks', 'shaking big hands' – runs a thread of negatives: memories of absences or lacks. 'I remember gift shops we didn't stop at,' Brainard writes. 'I remember not looking at crippled people.' 'I remember not allowing myself to start on the candy until the feature started.' And then there are Brainard's many frustrations, his unsuccessful efforts to imagine or understand things: 'I remember trying to realise how big the world is.' 'I remember trying to visualise my mother and father actually f------.' These kinds of absences, deprivations, and efforts shape us, informing our desires, imaginations, and senses of self. Brainard's form has the revelatory effect of showing how these absences can harden into potently present facts, sitting in our memory alongside what is real or realised, and becoming just as formative.
Brainard hit on a brilliant device with his simple phrase. As the late Paul Auster observed in a reissue introduction in 2013, you can hardly read the book without having your own memories stirred. But Auster also notes that, despite having read the work several times, he finds it ironically hard to remember. It's true that while the form and certain memories are indelible, the way the book strikes you upon each reading is liable to change entirely.
This is a function of Brainard's compacted form, which gives us only the memory, without interpretation, adornment, or association. Each is unburdened and capacious; as available to new meaning and feeling as one of the rocks Brainard remembers collecting, the ones 'you pick up and once inside wonder why.' It's a relentlessly specific time-capsule of a book, which bizarrely, movingly, seems to slip the confines of time.
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