My second (and final?) contribution to this year’s #ReadIndies is an autobiography that was sent to me by CB Editions – Flickerbook (1997) by Leila Berg. It was a very canny choice of reiew book to send, given my recent interest in memoirs and novels told in fragments – I’ve repeated the titles often, but the Big Three from the past couple of years are Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Flickerbook very much follows in the same mould – being told in fragmented paragraphs, sometimes following on from each other for a bit before taking a new direction, sometimes calling back to an earlier paragraph, and sometimes building up a portrait from a series of stray impressions. The title, Flickerbook, refers to what I have always called a ‘flipbook’ – where you draw gradually changing illustrations on every page of a notebook, so that they form a sort of animation when you flick through them. It’s a great comparison for this sort of approach to a book.
Berg starts the autobiography in 1921, when she was four years old – ‘I am the Bridesmaid. I stand on the table.’ are the first two lines. It is clearly her earliest memory – and the autobiography continues from there until the moment war breaks out in 1939, when Berg is in her early 20s.
Particularly in the early sections of the book, Berg is writing impressionistically – trying to echo the imprecise ways in which a child begins to understand the world. Or, rather, the very precise way that they latch onto small details, building up their place in the world by observing, interrogating, and assuming the things and people they see in front of them. In these early years of Flickerbook, Berg particularly concentrates on what makes her Jewish family distinct from many of the other families in their area of Manchester. She is constantly dividing into us and them, trying to make sense of the world. ‘Christian girls don’t wear knickers. Knickers are Jewish,’ she decides. Or ‘Christians say Granny. Or they say Nan. They don’y say Bobbie. And Christians say Grandad. I have heard Ronnie talking.’ Her only way of comprehending her own experience is by homogenising the ‘other side’. The same is true of her understanding of herself as female – particularly the restrictions placed on her that boys don’t have to observe.
In these early sections, Berg re-assumes a naivety that was long behind her. It leads to passages like this (and that interruption about the wickets gives you a sense of the way the fragmentation works):
Mr and Mrs Cohen came and had tea, and I saw a smudge on the white tablecloth. I thought it was a flea, and I was afraid Mr and Mrs Cohen had seen it, because you mustn’t see them.
I don’t really understand how fleas are smudges and not thick. Can people be smudges?
Wickets are the lines boys chalk on the wall when they play cricket. There is a good wall round the corner in Hilton Street. Bails is the bar they chalk on top.
I think that is what ghosts are. People smudges.
As the years go by, Berg grows less naive and more knowledgable. We see her join the anti-fascists, consider politics, reject various futures and explore others. Boys become more interesting (and more confusing), and she steadily goes from flirtation to infatuation to a sort of cool detachment:
I have had ten offers of marriage in as many weeks. How conventional and idiotic the Communist Party is. I sleep with a boy, and immediately he asks me to marry him. Supposing I said yes. Where would we be?
A thread I particularly enjoyed was the cinema. Berg often goes, and references many films and actors that she has been to see – throwing us into the experience of a teenage girl in the early 20th century with authenticity. Yes, this is a portrait of a time and place and a memoir of being Jewish in an era of rising antisemitism – but it’s also an account of being a young girl who is captivated by the fictional characters and matinee idols dominating the cultural conversation of the day.
The only reason I don’t love Flickerbook as much as I love the other fragmentary memoirs I’ve read does, actually, go to that question of authenticity. Yes, it is all Berg’s experiences. But she was 80 when the book was published. I don’t know if she kept diaries that helped her put it together or relied on her memories, but either way it felt continually like she was putting on the costumes of the past. Of course, anybody writing an autobiography is looking back – but Flickerbook is told in an eternal present. The voice is a child’s for the period of childhood; the voice is teenage, then young adult. So it felt a bit jarring to know, all the time, that the voice was ventriloquy. For instance, an anecdote about an ‘Invisible Mender’ being surprisingly visible would be funny is told in retrospect, but feels a bit awkwardly fey when spoken as though for the first time with the pen of an octogenarian.
This qualm meant Flickerbook kept me at a bit of a disbelieving distance. I found it fascinating, well-written, eye-opening about a period of history in an environment and for a type of person whom the history books have glossed over. I didn’t feel any genuine immediacy. If the same technique had been done in the past tense, without affecting the voices of different eras of her youth, I think Flickerbook would have been both less experimental and more successful. It’s still a very good read, and I’m sure many readers would wholeheartedly disagree with my views on how it could be better, but for me it fell a little short of brilliance.
