It’s about two memories of mine.
One is from decades ago, about a phone call from Monique Serpette Transue, my man Jacques’s mother, confessing that her mother had pushed her into having the infant J baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, weeping that she had done something awful to J’s soul (fiercely anti-clerical, Monique was startlingly ignorant of the beliefs and practices of the church she didn’t adhere to). Or so I recalled the event in a 2022 posting.
The other is from reports in 2016 and 2025 of a 1970 visit to the linguistics program at what was then the University College of North Wales in Bangor, which had several members with the same, characteristically Welsh, name.
As I write here every few weeks, memory is fragile and undependable; from the beginning, in which our very perceptions are selective and skewed, influenced by expectation and experience, and then through years of fragmentation and loss and further skewings and extraneous intrusions from a host of sources; our memories are not only fragile, but also pliable. If we tell the same story every time — hardly anyone does — that’s because we’re producing a memorized performance (and it’s probably inaccurate). If we’re dead certain that we have the facts right, we’re almost surely getting them wrong. The literature is immense, and sobering.
So: two examples, with reflections on them.
About J’s baptism. Here I dive into the longest, most complex, most passionate, and strangest posting I have ever written (“Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!”, from 4/20/22) — with a title from Gilbert & Sullivan, it begins and ends with Puck from Midsummer Night’s Dream, and embraces everything from the problem of evil to effusions of great joy. The Monique story is in the middle of it, and it spins off a riff on the retelling of memories as performances.
From the huge posting:
… what do we really know about my exchange with Monique? Grant me the memory that there was an actual phone call from Monique to me in which she wept about J’s baptism in the Roman Catholic Church. How much would you be willing to bet on the accuracy of any of the other details I wrote [in an account] just above? Me, I wouldn’t wager a penny, and it was my goddam story in the first place.
The thing is, I’m pretty sure I’ve told you (parts of) this story at least once before, and I wrote something different. Different details, different significance of the exchange in its context, different emotional values for me. I haven’t gone back to check what I said before, because that isn’t important. I don’t pretend to be reporting hard fact, only a bit of fact (as I recall it — remember that stuff about memory …) as it applies in the current context, and even then, I’m crafting it for my audience.
Because I’m giving a performance for you, much like the performances I used to give in public lectures, including those in lecture courses. Yes, folded into the thing, there’s real scholarship, there are real research findings, in linguistics and in gender & sexuality studies and sometimes more. Yes, there’s a genuine attempt on my part to tell a bit of my autobiography truly. But I’m also giving you a performance, and I’m entirely aware of that.
… When I was still able to play the piano, I loved the Schubert dances; I had a book of Ländler for solo piano, attractive pieces that come with the barest outline on the page. You were expected to riff on what Schubert gave you. The word — probably apocryphal — was that Schubert himself never played anything twice the same way, and that his performances often elaborated extensively on what was in his score. I did my best to emulate the master.
I approach my autobiographical stories in much the same spirit. There’s some core stuff that I hope I get right (though my memory is as fallible as anybody’s), and then I riff. The story of Monique and the Secret Baptism will never be the same way twice, and neither will the stories of my sexual exploits, and neither will the stories I’m soon about to tell you about how Mendelssohn, and Shakespeare (and, eventually, [Henry] Purcell and [Jeremiah] Clarke) came to me.
Twice to Bangor. The visit was in 1972, but remembered in two recent postings.
— from 8/7/16 “Ianto Jones”:
As for Jones, it’s an English and Welsh patronymic, from Jon / John (so equivalent to Johnson), especially. common in Wales and south central England; it’s the stereotypical Welsh family name. (At one point the University College of North Wales — now the University of Wales, Bangor — had a small linguistics program, including three members all named Robert Jones.)
(You’re probably wondering about the stereotypical Welsh personal name. That would be David, Dafydd in Welsh, Englished as the mocking name Taffy: “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief”.)
My 2025 memory says it was the Welsh language program and that the various Robert Joneses included Robert Owen Jones OBE (who ended up down south, in Cardiff). And, I think, Bob Jones and Bobby Jones. And maybe a fourth.
Significantly, I mentioned the stereotypical Welsh personal name David / Davy / Dafydd / Dai — so implanting the idea of David Jones being the perfectly Welsh male name in English.
— from 4/25/25 “Foxes, camels, and Jeff the Tongue”:
David Jones is a gigantically common name for men in Wales and for men of Welsh extraction elsewhere. The University College of North Wales in Bangor once had four faculty named David Jones in its Welsh language and linguistics program; one was called David Owen Jones, one Davy Jones, and I don’t remember the other two — hey, this is from 1972, give me a break.
I fell into the memory trap I’d set up for myself. Between 2016 and 2025, David supplanted Robert in my memory. The theme of many men with the same name in one department remained, and the story was still entertaining, but the anecdote I had concocted was significantly less accurate. It had drifted.
But now I’ve compared the two accounts, and sorted things out. Maybe it’s not the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but it’s roughly true, and still a good story.
November 4, 2025 at 5:37 pm |
I did what you hinted at: went to the “Oh Joy” posting, and was reminded of something that you surely did not mean to remind me of: a question I’ve had for some years about “He Is An Englishman.” Gilbert and Sullivan are known to have based some of their plots on current events and personalities; “Pinafore” itself was based on the anomaly that William Henry Smith (1825–1891, see Wikipedia) was a bookseller and long-time landlubber but was made First Lord of the Admiralty. So I imagine that around 1878, at the time of composing Pinafore, some famous person was in fact tempted to “belong to other nations” and not be an Englishman any more. But no expert has been able to tell me who. Perhaps your myriad-minded readers know!
November 4, 2025 at 6:43 pm |
Yes yes yes! It’s such a striking image, really unexpected as an expression of the idea that the singer is intensely proud of being English, cannot imagine himself in any other country. I wondered, some 65 years ago, was some celebrated Englishman offered a noble title and fiefdom elsewhere?
Let’s see if any of my sharp and well-informed readers has an idea.
November 5, 2025 at 7:13 am |
It never occurred to me that the line might be a reference to current events; I’ve always assumed that it was a deliberately silly joke, given that, by being born to English parents in England, Ralph didn’t really have much of a choice.
November 7, 2025 at 3:06 am |
It seems to me that many people are ascribed a ‘good memory’ when all they have done is relate a story confidently or fluently, or with lots of details. However, these features do not prove the accuracy of the story. Nonetheless, often accuracy doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does. And sometimes a story can have elements that need to be accurate and other elements that do not.
November 7, 2025 at 6:50 am |
Often, when my brother and I recall shared events from our earlier lives, we have somewhat different memories of them. He tends to assume that my version is the more accurate one, but I have no reason to suppose that I’m more likely to be remembering “right” than he is.
November 8, 2025 at 9:41 am |
Look at the “History is hard, let’s go shopping” section of my “Oh joy, oh rapture” posting. Some conclusions from my having access, years ago, to a study of family histories, in which the same set of people were interviewed at intervals over some years about the same life events. Yielding enormous numbers of divergences, some small, but many huge.