Book review: Hold Still
Sally Mann's memoir is one of the best books I've read. You should read it, too.
Read time: about 15 minutes. This week: Sally Mann’s Hold Still is the second of my book review series. The first review appeared in February. Every quarter, I’ll review a book, alternating an old book and new release. This review is of an old book. A long post, longer than any other. Sorry it’s a day late.
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Mann, Sally. Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015. 482 pages. ISBN: 978-0-316-24776-4 $32.00
This book got me with the cover photograph — the author, probably bouncing on a trampoline, is suspended against a cloudy sky, her arms raised in joy and eyes cast downward. The photograph drew me into a memoir by a photographer, who devotes a good portion of her tale on the picture taker, her father Robert S. Munger.
Sally Mann lives in Lexington, Virginia, about 150 miles north of where I live, so the backdrop of the American South is familiar, though many North Carolinians would hesitate to equate a North Carolina outlook with Virginia’s — if, indeed, an “outlook” would even be something that could be characterized. To not a few North Carolinians, Virginia feeds upon its pride — some might say haughtiness — of being prime among the states and piously reverential of its past — perhaps especially of its Confederate past.
“How many Virginians does it take to change a lightbulb?” Four. One to change the lightbulb, one to mix the drinks, and two to reminisce about how great the the old light bulb was.
By her own admission, Mann is a romantic, maybe even wistful, Virginian so she might laugh at the lightbulb joke. Perhaps she’s even told it. Her reverence for the South runs throughout the book — and especially for Boxerwood, the farm and land where she lives with her husband Larry and their children when they were young. But hers is not a simple story of nostalgia or a glistening (and very white and upper crusty) view of some gone-with-the-wind era of Tara upon a hill. She weaves a complex picture of her home, and she is aware of her standing in her story as a white woman brought up in the South. Her story is remarkable and “could provide the grist for a dozen novels,” as one cover blurb put it. It is remarkably told, too.
This is evident from the first pages of the book, which itself is a companion to the William E. Massey, Sr. Lecture in American Studies that Mann delivered in 2011. Her topic was “If Memory Serves.” In 2008, years before the event, she was gob-smacked to be invited to deliver a Massey Lecture, prompting her to rush to her calendar, where she “searched in vain for a conflict.” The problem: she didn’t even have a calendar page that far ahead. “No way I could reasonably decline,” she recalled, despite her qualms about taking on the task.
But she knew what she wanted to talk about. Mann had become well known and had acquired “the irritating label ‘controversial’” in the early 1990s, when her book Immediate Family appeared. The title explains the subjects of the photographs she shared, many of which were of her young children “going about their lives, sometimes without clothing.” The nakedness shocked some, who were quite shrill in their criticism and quickly and viciously condemned the work. She thought that she may have “to justify my family pictures” at the Harvard gathering for the Massey Lectures. But, she writes, “I hoped I could also focus on the work that came afterward, deeply personal explorations of the landscape of the American South, the nature of mortality (and the mortality of nature), intimate depictions of my husband, and the indelible marks that slavery left on the world surrounding me.”
A memoir with four parts. No, maybe five.
Mann divides her memoir into four parts: “Family Ties: The Importance of Place,” “My Mother: Memory of a Memory Past,” “Gee-Gee: The Matter of Race,” and “My Father: Against the Current of Desire.” I think three of them are particularly important and revealing. The part devoted to her mother is much shorter than the others, consisting of three chapters, and I skip over that part in what follows. That is probably an error on my part, but also a reason to pick up the book and read it for yourself.
It may be a mere coincidence or maybe a common longing, but the pleasures and rootedness of a place resonate with me, and I think many readers. Sally Mann was born “in the austere brick home of Stonewall Jackson himself, which was then the local hospital” of Lexington, Virginia. She may even have slept in Jackson’s bureau drawer. For Mann, whose family would count among its industrious magnates if not aristocrats, the South runs deep. Stonewall Jackson’s gravity still pulls the imagination, even though Mann and her family long rejected the racist society they dwelt in. The book follows an almost chronological course with the loops of time repeated in her accounts of each part.
The first part unfolds Mann’s childhood and youth, which I suppose most would call unbridled, and Mann would likely agree. Her parents decided to pack her off to school in Vermont — to Putney School where her much older brothers already were. “Really, what choice did they have but to send me away to school? … Even I knew, on some level, that I needed to get out of the high school world whose horizon stopped at cheerleader tryouts and drag races on the bypass.” But Mann knew after getting to Putney that her experience in Lexington was unique, if also a little bit like what her classmates would later see on The Dukes of Hazzard. “No one would have known, as I did, what a whomping a four-on-the-floor GTO could give a Barracuda in the quarter-mile on the bypass.”
In her first week at Putney, she asked Mr. Caldwell, her history teacher, “what a Jew was.” She had other limits of experience that dogged her at Putney, no doubt, but the school opened up a world to her.
The real “importance of place” happens back near Lexington, in Rockbridge County, Virginia, where Sally and Larry Mann, married for three years, returned in 1973. There, the roots of her childhood grew deeper, as presence always makes happen; and Mann’s story overlaps with earlier stories of the place, knotting her time with earlier histories and magnifying the place and the present. Across time, roots grow more deeply, fed by new springs of life.
Mann reveals some of the overlaps with photography. “Our Farm — And the Photographs I Took There,” chapter six, recounts the purchase and the rediscovery of her family’s farm after her parents death, but more importantly, the chapter places the land itself into a great sweep of history. When she was in her twenties, she discovered “some 7,500” glass-plated negatives at Washington and Lee University that Michael Miley made in the 1860s. Some of the photographs she had taken on the farm echoed Miley’s photographs taken a century before, pictures taken at the same places, linking strands of history and place with silver nitrate on plates.
The farm and the pictures Mann took there formed the basis for her work published in Immediate Family, pictures of which “cannot be understood without the context of the farm and the cabin on the river — the intrinsic timelessness of the place and the privacy it afforded us.” The work sealed Mann’s place in her own artistic history and gave her a lot of grief, too, which she lays out in the book.
To me, the book has three poles, each tugging Mann and giving her story a shape. “Place” is perhaps the strongest of them, but “Gee-Gee” — Virginia Cornelia Carter — and Mann’s father, Robert S. Munger, MD, have similar power.
Gee-Gee raised Sally Mann. “Down here, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal form of love was exchanged between them,” she writes. “This reflects one side of the fundamental paradox of the South: that a white elite, determined to segregate the two races in public, based their stunningly intimate domestic arrangements on an erasure of that segregation in private.” The section of the book engages “the matter of race” not only in terms of the familial relationship she had with Gee-Gee, but quickly broadens to explore her “very real and emotionally complicated person.” Gee-Gee’s life is a remarkable one, too, I’d say. She worked unceasingly. Gee-Gee had six children, each of whom she was able to send to boarding schools and to college. Such things were invisible to Mann as a child, and may have been to her parents as well. “What were any of us thinking?” Mann asks. “Why did we never ask the questions? That’s the mystery of it — our blindness and our silence.”
Gee-Gee is most fully caressed in the memoir, but others provide a broader picture: Hamoo, Smothers, and a boy whom Mann called “The Kid on the Road” (“you know, Ernestine’s nephew”).
Mann first grappled with the South’s slavery curse not in the presence of her childhood Rockbridge County, but far north in Vermont, at Putney School, when she was assign William Faulkner’s “The Bear” in English class. “This racist legacy of slavery was said by Faulkner to be a curse on the entire South, white and black, the wounds of African Americans mirrored in our guilty white souls,” she writes in “Who Wants to Talk About Slavery?” — chapter sixteen and the last in the third part of the book. “Reading ‘The Bear’ under my tented covers, way past Putney’s ‘lights out’ hour, I began to understand that he was right.” The chapter expands to include Mann’s photography and unfolds how inequality plays out in situations as outwardly simple and yet highly fraught as photograph sittings. Through this kind of story, Mann unveils the artistry of photography: how it succeeds and how it transforms. This is among the strongest chapters in the book.
Part four of the book, which seems to slide to an ending that explores death and mortality, is called “My Father: Against the Current of Desire.” Like the topic of race and slavery in the South, this part of the book seeks a balance, a maybe perilous understanding that I think remains elusive, just out of reach. The title of the part suggests the tension: desire beckons, but duty requires swimming against its pull.
Robert Sylvester Munger, II, struggled with the current that tugged him to art and ideas, even though he felt compelled and obliged to swim against that current toward a career in medicine. In her memoir, his daughter Sally Mann struggles to find the man, the “him-ness of him.” That essence eludes her, but she loved him, and feels that despite the fogginess of expression and memory he loved her — it is, for her, “a calcified fact.” The only two appendices in the book are letters from her father, added to provide a fuller picture of a father-daughter relationship. They are both worth puzzling through.
Robert Munger was an extraordinary man. That much is apparent as Mann tells his story, which is prefaced by family history going back to pre-Civil War times and the pressures that families exert even through generations. Looming throughout Robert Munger’s life is a fascination with death, perhaps struck deeply into him when his father died during his second year at Choate. That fascination grows in importance in the story of her father and spills into the Mann’s own artistic confrontations with and considerations of death.
Chapter twenty, “World Traveler, Interesting Gent,” recounts his father’s adventure in a trip around the world, which Robert Munger accomplished with a budget of $1,460. He began the year’s travels in July 1938, when Europe was fumbling toward another war. Robert Munger apparently didn’t notice. Of the looming conflict, his letters include “[b]arely a word, save a remark on the good manners of the smartly dressed soldiers, and his aesthetic irritation at the ubiquitous posters of Hitler’s ‘rather expressionless and certainly plain features.’” Instead, the art and the images of death in museums overshadowed growing violence in Germany, with its real death and real murders. I found the chapter fascinating, as Mann redraws her father’s travels and journals into a revealing picture of the man, though she never achieves a hold of the him-ness of him. It is not her fault; it is the subject: a cipher of sorts. I got the feeling that Mann sought to enliven memory of her father — a kind of reassurance hoped for by all children, perhaps — but never felt completely sure of a grasp, even though his journals of the trip are livelier than his later writings.
Memory is hungry.
Sally Mann’s father committed suicide. He took long-expired Seconal tablets before brain cancer had completely debilitated him. Her account of the event shows its logic, or at least her father’s logic. I can’t help but think that experiencing the distance of a father’s death in that manner must intensify a hunger of memory.
An unparted part
It would be possible to say that Hold Still has a part five that brings together much of what preceded it but that also stands apart. Robert Munger’s fascination with death hovered over part four and forms a sort of prelude to Sally Mann’s own meditations on death. In effect, this last part is a echo of Robert Munger’s fascinations, an inheritance of sorts that Mann uses her art to explore.
Place figures prominently. She photographs Civil War battlefields, a form of bearing witness of the cataclysms of battle and the persistent change that shed blood makes upon soil. From her own home, she witnesses a killing of a man who had escaped arrest. He was shot and died under a thicket of trees. “Death had left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in my front yard. Never again would I look out of my kitchen window at that lone cedar on the prow of hickory forest in the same way as I had before.” She visits the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility, known as the “Body Farm.” It’s a place where human bodies are allowed to decay and decompose in various environments; researchers meticulously study their progress.
Now as I write this, I realize that my words are likely to elicit revulsion. The close of the book rests in such close proximity to death that you might want to close the covers. But Mann manages to offer a meditation in her direct and descriptive narrative. Her pictures in the Body Farm section, I have to admit, drew my attention too forcibly, and I found that I had to cover them up with my hand as I read.
Remember, though, she promised in the first pages of the book to consider “the nature of mortality (and the mortality of nature).”
“The treachery of the photograph”
Hold Still is “a memoir with photographs,” and it’s good to emphasize the qualification that’s implicit in the title. The book includes photographs — many of them. That they appear on the pages is probably the most obvious way to interpret the phrase “with photographs,” but I think Mann also plays with the words of the book’s title. Photographs might be offered as proof, lending a veracity to the prose. “Photographs furnish evidence,” Susan Sontag wrote, “Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.”
Evidence is not the same as truth or rich experience.
Photographs do offer evidence for the memoirist to work with, but memory stands apart. Hold Still is a memory first gathered, and then — very separately — illustrated with photographs. They do not naturally mix, though they do complement each other, somehow.
Mann explores the relationship of photographs and experience, truth, and memory. Cy Twombly, sculptor and painter and photographer, stands out as a guide, an artistic companion, and even a hero in Mann’s memory. He, too, was captivated by Rockbridge County and split his time between Lexington, Virginia, and Italy. “I hardly have any pictures of him,” Mann writes, although he gave me this one that Robert Rauschenberg made of him at Black Mountain College, and showed me where he wanted it placed on my desk.” The picture appears in the book. “I am convinced that the reason I can remember him so clearly and in such detail is because I have so few pictures of him.” She continues and likens memory to rocks in a stream: “impediments … around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can.”
To set her rich memory of Twombly into high relief, she contrasts memories of her father: “Because of the many pictures I have of my father, he eludes me completely…. [H]e does not exist in three dimensions, or with associated smells or timbre of voice. He exists as a series of pictures.”
She writes at one point: “It isn’t death that stole my father from me; it’s the photographs.”
Mann is a gifted writer and storyteller. I try to avoid using long quotations, but her treatment of the fragile and shifting relationship of photography and memory — really the foundation of her memoir — is exceptionally well crafted. I offer it here as an example of her writing and her thought. It is an enticement, I guess, to read the rest of the book. She recounts the story of opening long neglected boxes of letters, papers, photographs, and other artifacts that had waited for decades in her attic.
So, before I scissored the ancestral boxes, I opened my own to check my erratic remembrance against the artifacts they held, and in doing so encountered the malignant twin to imperfect memory: the treachery of the photograph. As far back as 1901 Émile Zola telegraphed the threat of this relatively new medium, remarking that you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it. What Zola perhaps also knew or intuited was that once photographed, whatever you have “really seen” would never be seen by the eye of memory again. It would forever be cut from the continuum of being, a mere sliver, a slight, translucent paring from the fat life of time; elegiac, one-dimensional, immediately assuming the amber quality of nostalgia: an instantaneous memento mori. Photograph would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my “remembering,” I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.
That paragraph comes close to ending the book’s brief prologue. The rest of the memoir, true to the genre, unpacks the “boxes that would barely hold a twelve-pack” and harvests Sally Mann’s memory.
Hold Still is a rich and rewarding story of lives and places, told by an artist and a photographer. It’s definitely worth a close read, and anyone particularly interested in Mann’s photography will find it very valuable.
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Tags: sally mann, photography, book review, memoir, american south, fathers, art, race, slavery
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Sally Mann’s home page. “Sally Mann.” Accessed April 12, 2023. https://www.sallymann.com.
Mann’s art that many consider essential to American photography, and a controversial work. Mann, Sally. Immediate Family. 1st ed. New York: Aperture, 1992. (Alibris)
Harvard University, American Studies. “The Massey Lecture Series.” Accessed April 12, 2023. https://americanstudies.fas.harvard.edu/news-events/massey-lecture-series/.
This is excellent. Going to take a day or so to take in. Thank you.