Detroit memoir

Paul Clemens came to campus today to talk about his book Made in Detroit: A South of 8-Mile Memoir. Clemens writes about growing up as a white, working-class, ethnic, Catholic on Detroit's east side. The book starts out with a story in which the 16-year-old Clemens is awakened by his mother so that he can chase after his father, who is chasing after the guys who just shot out the windows of the family car. I've only read the first chapter (just picked up the book yesterday), so I'll say more about the text when I finish, but let me relate some early impressions.

Today Clemens suggested the worst thing a writer can do is try to make himself look good. He cited quips from both Orwell and Eliot that said the best autobiographical writing gives you the sense that the writer's a bit of a dirtball. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

Aristotelian notions of ethos run directly counter to this suggestion. Clemens argued for a counter-intuitive, self-deprecating version of ethos, a dirtball ethos even, one where cred comes from crud. Clemens establishes ethos via *identity markers* moreso than knowledge, diction and other linguistic features, or even experience. For Clemens, being Catholic and being white both give him a kind of insight into Detroit. Clemens wears his Catholicism as a marker certifying his non-wasp essence. He spoke about going off to university elsewhere in the state and feeling less connection to white protestants there than he did to his African-American neighbors. His sense of humor, his values and attitues, his counter-intuitive sense of self.

Similarly, he calls his first chapter "Right to Go Left," a reference to the "Michigan left turn," that classic feature of Detroit streets which requires drivers who reach busy intersections who wish to head to the left to make a right-hand turn followed by a U-Turn on the intersecting road. Right to go left. Running to stand still. That counter-intuition, for Clemens, represents Detroit (driving the streets making Michigan lefts), Catholicism (kneeling, going to St. Jude's--the patron of lost causes), his humor (non-pc), his ethos (flaws, warts, etc.). Even his whiteness, ironically, marks his Detroit identity and Detroit ethos, as a minority within city limits where he grew up.

More later, when I finish the book. Incidentally, the other book I'm in the middle of is another Detroit memoir, Erma Henderson's Down through the Years, by a prominent former member of the Detroit City Council. A Comp. 106 student profiled Henderson in an early paper this term and then lent me the book after our discussion of her paper. More on E.H.'s very different version of Detroit working-class ethos later, too.