Messy, dangerous, preoccupied and preoccupying—memoir concentrates and quickens life. It saturates. It sings. I’m just writing about me, the memoirist says, but me is such the wily thing, and without the heroics of structure and the discipline of theme, the me on the page becomes just one thing, then the next. That me may be scene, but she won’t be story. That me may be sugar, but she won’t be cake.

We research our lives by unlocking the attic trunk, by reading the chalky captions in scrapbooks, by asking questions. We learn to write memoir by reading memoir: Dorothy Allison and her two or three things. Nick Flynn and his suck city. Helen Macdonald and her looking for goshawks which is like looking for grace. Elisabeth Tova Bailey and the noise in the munch of her snail. Reading good poems always helps—take a line of witness from Carolyn Forché and press it hard upon your heart, then ride the thermals with Mary Oliver’s wild geese—and if you want an indelible lesson in the symphonics of voice, I recommend a solid afternoon or three with the novelists Lisa Halliday, Tommy Orange, Chloe Aridjis and Michael Ondaatje. Also: others.

But let’s not overlook letters as a means of instruction—the good letters, the crafted ones. Why not buy the collected Virginia Woolfs and watch her work a daily detail into a work of art? Why not take a lesson on the shaped life and the sound of mourning from F. Scott Fitzgerald? Why not (for the purposes of this instant) buckle in with Newell Convers Wyeth—one of the most famous illustrators of all American time and the animating force behind such Scribner’s Illustrated Classics as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Boy’s King Arthur, Robinson Crusoe and Rip Van Winkle? Why not read his collected correspondence (The Wyeths: The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901 – 1945, as curated by Betsy Wyeth) and take note of the smoke signals he puffed up to future generations who wish to speak compellingly, and tellingly, from the heart.

Because N.C. Wyeth wasn’t just a remarkable image maker (who cannot hear, when turning the pages of his version of Treasure Island, the terrible tapping of Blind Pew’s cane?). He was as well a remarkable teacher of painting, a student of the world, a friend to the famous (F. Scott and Zelda would dazzle up the drive, stay for a while, drink), and a father of five wildly talented children, the youngest of which became Betsy’s husband, Andrew. N.C. Wyeth was determined to pass his wisdom on, to stamp his life upon a page.

Wyeth wrote the bulk of his letters to his mother, with whom he shared a deep melancholy streak and upon whom he greatly depended. It was, in fact, N.C. Wyeth’s mother who had, after sharing her son’s art with an expert in Boston, supported his artistic ambitions. She had encouraged him to move from their home in Needham, Massachusetts, so that he might join the elite clan of students taking instruction on illustration from Howard Pyle in Wilmington and Chadds Ford. Now she waited for, and most diligently answered, his inky musings. If N.C.’s early letters are filled with the accounting of his days—the how and the where and the cost of things—they also indicate an extraordinary storyteller’s gift. Time and again, Wyeth evokes his days, which is not the same as reporting on them. He turns real life into a vital literary echo, which is to say that he writes like a fledgling memoirist.

He’s twenty here. He’s been to visit Pyle’s home with his fellow artists in training:

Dear Mama,

We saw through the high windows a sight which impressed me much. There was Mr. Pyle reading, his face of great character intently bent on a book, and flocked around the rest of the table were five of his children reading or drawing and on one side Mrs. Pyle with the youngest child in her lap and at her feet a cat and dog lay asleep.

Chadds Ford, November 3, 1902

Memoirists are, at their core, skilled storytellers, and N.C. quickly acquired the skills. Here he is, out with a fellow student, walking the Brandywine meadows. The two are seeing what they can see. Now they are rushed by a bull. The entire letter is a joy to read—a lesson in precision and economy, in electrifying action, in managing the pacing on the page.

Dear Mama,

On our travels we came upon a huge oak overhanging the river, with a black woods forming a background, when in the profound silence of evening a large white (snowy white) crane from the bank as silent as death slowly disappearing from sight. We finally got up and started for home across the pasture, which was soggy and wet, when we suddenly heard a roar and thudding of hoofs, and what should we see but a huge bull making for us not 20 yds. away.

Chadds Ford, July 16, 1903

N.C. did not just write to his mother, of course. He wrote to his father and to his brothers. Later in life, he’d write to his business associates and, perhaps most heartbreakingly, as we’ll later see, to his grown children. In this letter, to his brother Nat, N.C. identifies a core tenet of true memoir making—the requirement that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to the moment and to each other.

Dear brother Nat,

You look at things of life in about the same way I do. Don’t by any means ever affect sentiment, but where you find yourself thinking sentimental thoughts never be ashamed of it, as often is the case. Never be afraid to express them openly and frankly; you’ll never regret it. Your beginning to express your inner thoughts is exceedingly promising …

Wilmington, December 14, 1903

Memoirists play with, feel thwarted by, are both diminished and expanded by the elasticity of time. Time traveling gives memoir both its power and its heft, and N.C. Wyeth intuited that. Here he is, writing again to Nat, after returning from months spent living and drawing out west:

Dear Nat,

I have come to the conclusion that I shall never be satisfied—my mind is ever bent on the life other than that in which I am living. When in the trackless wilds of the plains I was thinking of home, of you, of all my home people. But when I got back I dreamed of the “Indian,” the “Puncher” and their homes, their country. And so it is—now, ever restless, uneasy. But I will control myself.

Wilmington, January 22, 1905

Every memoirist is, in some way, homesick. Besotted with the now-unreachable childhood or crumpled by a perceived lack of true home or writing away from where one once lived or writing toward where one lives now. In his letters, N.C. reveals the oceanic power of memory in him, his need to endlessly return, in his mind, to his roots. He feeds his art, as memoirists do, with yearning. Another letter to another brother:

Dear old Stimson,

The very thing that lies deepest in my thoughts about this music I cannot express, but it is all about home…. If I’m painting and want to express an emotional thought, mystery, great spaces, profound skies, silence of the like, I fly to my dream-thoughts of home and there I find a bottomless well of inspiration—a longing that grows stronger and deeper every day.

Chadds Ford, February 11, 1909

Memoirists are well served by writing about how they think they write—by trying to put their own process into words so that they may analyze it, amplify it, improve. Here is N.C. doing precisely that in a letter to his mother:

Dear Mama,

I have often likened my letters to one of these toys you wind up and set on the floor—sometimes it will go in a true circle, but mostly it will whirl around once and the second time it will smash into a chair leg, turn upside down and go like hell, spinning out its strength, making a great racket by doing nothing. So it is, I get wound up, smash into a subject, make a whole lot of noise and say nothing.

Chadds Ford, April 23, 1909

One of the daunting aspects of memoir, for many, is the idea that the entire life must be rendered on the page, start to finish, no exceptions. But that, of course, is the very opposite of what memoir is. Memoir is, in fact, about attaching great meaning to the most intimate and cleverly identified details. N.C. Wyeth understood that. Another brother:

Dear old Ed,

I don’t know how to account for it, but do you know, those trifling matters … occupy a large and important place among the thoughts dear to me. I can connect and associate more poetry, more drama, more mystery, with these simple little matters that occur spontaneously, than with happenings obviously important and weighty. 

Chadds Ford, September 13, 1911

Every true memoirist is, in the end, a teacher—the words on the page teaching others how to put words on the page. N.C.’s children benefitted, of course, from their nearly idyllic childhood landscape, from N.C.’s unstinting (if sometimes overbearing) attention, from N.C.’s determination to teach everything he could, to pass it on. Here he is, praising a letter his oldest child, Henriette, had written home from a trip she had taken overseas. She’s married by now to Peter Hurd, an artist N.C. Wyeth helped train. She has two children—one has been left in Chadds Ford with a nanny and the other is with N.C. in Maine. She is seeing the world for the rest of them. Seeing the world, in part, for him.

My dear Henriette,

Your magnificent letter to Ann, from Florence, just arrived this morning. You can’t imagine what a deep pleasure and satisfaction you have given us all, and as I read your vivid and sensitive account to the entire family (gathered about the long table at lunch), the tension grew to unbearable proportions. How much you are extracting from the experience!

Port Clyde, ME, August 19, 1936

Memoirists submit to forces larger than themselves. They allow themselves to experience the overwhelm of overwhelm, and then to write it down. Here is N.C. writing to his youngest daughter, Ann.

My dear Ann,

The smell of the ocean depths was almost overcoming; one could almost call it a stench, so avid and strong it was of kelp, rockweed, clams, fish, lobsters and a thousand unknown animals of the sea. It was a different, more intense smell than I had ever experienced before. I felt that I were being allowed a more intimate sensing of the sea’s odor, a very private one, like the heavy musk from its armpits, so to speak.

Port Clyde, ME, September 3, 1936

Time is the color and brush of memoir. Time, which cannot be managed. Time, which cannot be stopped. Time, which cannot be reversed. Over and again, N.C.’s letters remind us that time is the buckling subject of every memoirist’s prose.

Dear Henriette,

Many years of utter submission to the impacts of life weaken the power to stop, or even the desire to cushion, the emotional force of experiences. And particularly now, just at my time of life when the faculties of the spirit are most at work, when (to all men who have turned sixty) the time left seems so scant and so precious. 

Chadds Ford, January 21, 1943

I’ve presented but a few of the instructions in memoir that N.C. Wyeth yields in his correspondence—a highlight reel. But perhaps the most important lesson comes from a letter that did not make its way into Betsy Wyeth’s collection—a letter I found in 2017, when my husband and I traveled west toward Henriette’s adult home, in San Patricio, New Mexico. We were there because of my obsession with Henriette. Because I’d wanted to convert her life into a novel, or a poem. Because I’d identified with her deeply, seen in myself the choices she’d had to make—independence vs love, responsibilities vs art, caring for another vs being cared for. The Hurd-Wyeth estate in San Patricio is a “placito-centered rancho” with bougainvillea spills, a cow bell like a lantern, elevated stone guardians, running fountains, a thick-trunked tree. It has cool interior rooms, a glass “orangery,” and a backyard through which the narrow river runs. Hurd’s hat hangs from a post by the door, his coat, a rope of chile peppers. Henriette’s pots hang in the kitchen, her coffee mugs, a wooden spoon. A cat sleeps in the outdoor shade, and across the courtyard, past a low stone wall, near the rough wilderness of a rose bush, is Henriette’s studio, the place where she stretched her canvas toward her adopted landscape.

Over those 3,000-some acres Michael Hurd, Henriette’s last child, keeps watch. He has a mop of misbehaving hair and wide cheeks and dark expressive eyes infinitely capable of many moods. Having preserved the land his mother learned to love, Michael daily drives his truck along the dusty roads and paints and offers his hospitality to those who visit there.

He also oversees the art gallery he and his mother built, where some traces of N.C.’s work can still be found, along with Henriette’s and Michael’s. Beneath that gallery there is a basement, and there, alongside scrapbooks and postcards and artifacts, are many original N.C. Wyeth letters. Some can be found in Betsy Wyeth’s collection. Some cannot.

To hold N.C.’s letters in one’s hand is to hold artifacts that are gorgeously formed, conflicting and conflicted. To read them out of order is to read his life new, and as I held those letters in that basement on that day, as I sorted through, as my husband, standing behind me in the hush and awe, took rapid photographs, I suddenly found myself balancing on my palm the words N.C. had written to Henriette when she was pregnant with Michael. N.C. would die tragically, his car struck by a train, before Michael would be born. Michael would never know the famous illustrator, never watch him work, never hold a letter that began, Dear Michael. But N.C., in this letter of July 25, 1945, is acknowledging the “astonishing announcement” of Henriette’s pregnancy, the miracle of it, the hope, the adventure, the desire N.C. has to send his oldest daughter a congratulating gift, to do something for the unborn grandson.

Hours after I read those words, after I imagined the weight of it all on Henriette’s heart—the gift her father wanted to give, the gift he never gave—my husband and I sat beneath Henriette’s stars, on the patio of one of the homes she’d built there on her rancho, talking with Michael. We seemed, to me, to be the only people alive at the very edge of the world, the stars dinging in, the woke birds calling, big animals in the hills. It was late before I finally told Michael about the letter that we’d found. He leaned toward me, seemed genuinely surprised, and so I told the story again. There was a letter that his grandfather wrote. A letter expressing excitement for the promise of Michael’s birth.

Michael shook his head. Another star pinged.

So that this is the final memoir lesson embedded in the letters that N.C. Wyeth wrote: We cannot speak when we are gone unless we speak when we’re alive. We cannot remain the presence we once were if our stories and our words vanish with us. When we write memoir we are writing for ourselves and writing for later. Generation to generation. Stranger to stranger. Hope to heart.

Note: All letters cited appear in The Wyeths by N.C. Wyeth: The Intimate Correspondence of N.C. Wyeth 1901-1945, edited by Betsy James Wyeth (Gambit, Boston: 1971). This essay is a much-distilled version of a talk given at the Brandywine River Museum of Art during the 2019 N.C. Wyeth New Perspectives Exhibit.