Memoiries, Memoiries

The memoir, as a literary form, may be several hundred years old, but it remains a favorite of contemporary writers. Perhaps that’s because of the nature of the memoir and the stormy times we inhabit. Unlike autobiographers and diarists, who are concerned primarily with their own lives as subject matter, memoirists usually describe their observations of or roles within historical events, cultural movements, or social interactions both great and small. Two recent memoirs from Rice alums aptly demonstrate this range.

The first is The Way It Was: A World War II Memoir (1stBooks Library, 2001) by Jim Hargrove ’43. Hargrove’s education at Rice and his fledgling marriage were interrupted by World War II, and like most young men of the time, he was called to military service. Hargrove did not fight on the front lines—as he puts it, “This is not a hero’s story. It is simply the story of one soldier’s war.” He started out in an antiaircraft unit but, because of his linguistic skills, was soon transferred to military intelligence, where he helped translate interrogations of prisoners of war.

Most memoirs of war concern battle and the conditions surrounding it. Hargrove’s book, instead, is a look at what was happening behind the scenes in the U.S. and in various locales where he was stationed in Europe. Some of this includes the minutiae of life in and travel through formerly occupied territory and the rough-and-ready accommodations that Hargrove’s unit often put up with. Along the way are a few interrogations, but Hargrove focuses principally on his surroundings and the people he met and dealt with—military and civilian alike—as his unit followed the front into the heart of Germany.

Joyce Pounds Hardy ’67 has written a memoir Surviving Aunt Ruth (1stBooks Library, 2002) at the other end of the spectrum. While it may not be set amid a major historical conflict like World War II, it is a tale no less tumultuous. Subtitled Vignettes of a Caregiver’s Struggles or How to Keep Laughing When You Want to Cry, it is the story of how Hardy cared for her sole-surviving aunt during the woman’s declining years. “Everyone has an Aunt Ruth,” Hardy writes. “Everyone at some point in his life will become his brother’s keeper—either out of love or duty or both, and if you’re lucky the love outlasts the duty.”

Certainly Hardy had to face the duty first. “The Aunt Ruth of my childhood had become old and crotchety, strange and unpredictable, not at all the happy, fun-loving aunt of my memories.” Some of Aunt Ruth’s erratic behavior is embarrassing for Hardy, such as when she leans out of car windows to curse other drivers. But there is a lot of funny stuff in these pages. For example, Aunt Ruth would loudly proclaim to just about anybody that Hardy was the first woman president of Rice University and had become the governor of Texas. “She had left out a few important words,” Hardy writes, “like the first woman president in seventy-five years of Rice’s ALUMNI ASSOCIATION, and a governor on Rice University’s BOARD OF GOVERNORS, not the State of Texas.”

There is a lot of poignancy too. “She tested my faith, my sense of humor, and every survival skill I knew, plus every prayer I could muster,” Hardy writes. “In the end with laughter as my strongest ally, I discovered that love is more powerful than pride and much more satisfying.”

—Christopher Dow