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Popular Culture Review
That said, then it becomes clear that throughout the journey we seek
what he seeks, and like Moody, our search is not restricted to a week-long event;
rather, we (like him) circulate within several particular cultural moments; we (like
him) circulate around ideas of Patrimony and divorce and family and the roles we
play in the ideal family; like him we recognize place, placement and terrain to
supply a theory of origin; like him we ask and re-ask what it means to be an
American and what does America mean or stand for or look like toward the end
of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries; we (like him) seek answers to questions
raised about ancestors (real and imagined) and their stories (real and imagined)
and the impact those stories have on our lives (real and imagined). Moody
suggests the questions and we grapple with them individually.
Toward the end of his autobiography, Moody writes:
When I started this book, I told myself I would conceal nothing.
All of myself, so far as it was illustrative, would be material.
Eccentric habits (an almost total avoidance of telephones, a
tendency to eat the same meals over and over), grand
mediocrities, malfeasances, failures (I couldn’t make it in book
publishing, I was turned down at every doctoral program I ever
applied to, I was fired from most of my jobs, I was completely
inept at Little League, I never became competent in a single
musical instrument), all these would be in bounds, so far as the
rules of this adventure were constructed.
The only
requirements for admittance to this canon were that tales of my
life had to be interesting, relevant, and subjectible to style.
Why this feeling, then, that I have left something out? (293).
“I have felt,” he adds, “there were things I wasn’t getting down.” And then for a
number of pages he muses on (and plays with) the idea of “things left out.” For
example, “My work, . . . and all that business about a movie that was made of a
certain book by me, etc., is left out” (293). As in the opening pages, Moody’s
pages contain a list of “things left out” which range from the mundane to the
serious, leading finally to a harrowing moment of self-disclosure: his sister’s
death and what it meant to him.15
Why is this here? Why, as we turn the final pages of the work, does
Moody stop to inform us of his project; shouldn’t this have been forecasted to us
earlier in the text? Perhaps it is an act of restoration: in this single last act, he
restores to the memoir all that he says it lacks; with this swipe of the hand, that
feeling of “something left out” has been erased and placed in its proper place and
taken its space (as limited as it is) among the many words already “spoken.” Or
perhaps it is as Moody suggests, “Maybe it’s simply the case that concealment is
essential to identity” (298).