IT'S OFTEN EASY TO REMEMBER, AND PAINFULLY HARD TO FORGET

Author: By Margot Livesey

Date: SUNDAY, March 8, 1998

Page: E2

Section: Books

Several times in the course of our lunch, Tiny searched for something he wanted to tell me. ``What was his name?'' he would say good-humoredly, putting his hand to his forehead. ``No, I can't remember.'' He had, however, no trouble in regaling me with his experiences as a prisoner of war in Greece. Kept in a camp outside a small town, he and the other British POWs clubbed together to give the mayor's daughter a parachute as an early wedding present so she could use the silk for her dress.

The jocularity of Tiny's forgetfulness and the clarity of his reminiscences are equally striking, but it is the former that intrigues me most. For the last couple of years I have been writing a novel about a woman who loses part of her memory, a discrete chunk, like a suitcase, and as a result I find myself constantly scrutinizing the workings of memory and her less-valued cousin, forgetfulness. As Tiny presses his hand to his forehead, I can almost see him searching the folds and valleys of the cortex as once he searched the school corridors for tardy pupils; they're somewhere, those lost names and missing dates, even if he can't produce them at this exact moment.

Later, sitting on the train back to London watching the dark fields flash by, it occurs to me that Tiny's pattern of memory, bypassing more recent events for earlier ones, is widely echoed in contemporary British fiction. If a novel is a mirror being carried down a road, then the best novelists have always had an uncanny gift for knowing what mirrors we want to look into. In Britain, on the eve of the millennium, this has led to a spate of wonderful novels set during the First and Second World wars.

Tiny's account of being a POW could easily have come from Louis de Bernieres's ``Corelli's Mandolin.'' Set during the Second World War on the Greek island of Cephallonia, the novel owes much of its success to de Bernieres's ability to rewrite history as a love triangle. The brilliant and beautiful Pelagia, daughter of the island's doctor, finds herself torn between an illiterate Greek fisherman, who succumbs to the worst excesses of communism, and Captain Corelli, an Italian musician and reluctant enemy. But the most eloquent relationship in the novel is the entirely unspoken one between Carlo, a soldier, and the captain; surely Tiny would be pleased when, in the best classical tradition, Carlo lays down his life for his beloved.

I don't know what brought de Bernieres to his material, but the novelist Pat Barker described to an interviewer how as a small girl, watching her grandfather dress, she would sometimes be allowed to touch his bayonet wound. Years later this memory became one of the points of departure for her fierce and startling First World War trilogy. ``Regeneration,'' the first volume, is based on the poet Siegfried Sassoon's refusal to continue serving as an officer and his subsequent treatment by the psychiatrist William Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh. Many of Rivers's patients do not overtly remember the traumas that have brought them to his care -- that is, they cannot give a verbal account -- but their continued suffering makes clear the extent to which memory remains lodged, beyond speech, somewhere in the body or the brain.

That memory is central both to fiction and life seems indisputable; the actual workings, however, in spite of copious research, have so far remained elusive. (A recent article in The New York Times magazine suggests this may be about to change.) In ``Memory's Ghost,'' Philip J. Hilts presents the remarkable case of Henry M., a young man whose hippocampus was removed in an effort to cure his epilepsy, and who, as a result, lost all save the smallest shards of short-term memory. Henry could still read and write, and his IQ remained the same, but his life began anew every minute. ``What am I supposed to do now?'' he would ask his mother each morning, and by a process of elimination they would figure out that he should sit down to breakfast. In spite of losing almost everything, Henry did not lose his sense of humor: ``Are you stiff?'' a researcher asked after a long drive. ``Nope,'' said Henry, ``I haven't had a drop.'' Nor -- and it's hard to know if this is the worst of his situation or a saving grace -- did he lose the sense that something vast and crucial was missing from his life.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Russian psychologist A. R. Luria offers in ``The Mind of a Mnemonist'' a fascinating portrait of a man with a limitless memory. The mnemonist in some ways turns out to be almost as gravely handicapped as Henry. He fails to recognize people because he remembers them exactly as they were the last time he saw them, and the synesthesia that is the source of his remarkable abilities (he converts sounds to images) often makes it hard for him to follow a simple sentence. On one occasion, when the mnemonist actually seemed to forget something, he offered the following explanation, ``I put the image of the pencil near a fence . . . but what happened was that the image fused with that of the fence and I walked right on past without noticing it. The same thing happened with the word egg. I had put it up against a white wall and it blended with the background.'' For the mnemonist the task is to forget, and he works at this as diligently as the rest of us do the opposite.

In one of my earliest memories, Tiny and I are outside my first home, in the Highlands of Scotland, trying to start his car. After a half-dozen curses and as many revolutions to the crank, the engine fires and we climb in to take a spin. As we turn onto the main road, the 19th-century drove road on the far side of the valley is visible, a scar on the landscape, and if we continued for a few miles to the west we would come to the Roman fort.

I used to think memory was nothing if not explication -- I remember, therefore I am -- but the road and the fort are simply there, willy-nilly. And Tiny, ruined, tottering, measuring his blood sugar half a dozen times a day, is still his inimitable self, a cluster of attitudes, reactions, manners, and habits that persist, irrespective of what remains or of what has slipped away. ``Come again soon, lass,'' he says when I get up to leave. ``I may not be around much longer.''