Getting sophisticated about carnal writing means selecting sensual data—items, odors, sounds—to recount details based on their psychological effects on a reader. A great detail feels particular in a way that argues for its truth. A reader can take it in. The best have extra poetic meaning. In some magic way, the detail from its singular position in a room can help to evoke the rest of the whole scene, the way Conroy doing pages on the yo-yo evokes his body kinesthetically in the instant.
The great writer trolls the world for totemic objects to place on a page. In every genre, it’s key.
Playwright and short-story genius Anton Chekhov could hypodermically inject an item so iconographic, so reverberant with meaning, that its presence almost recounts a whole character. In his seminal “Lady with a Dog,” a rake at a summer holiday resort seduces a pious young wife over a period of weeks, and afterward, as she sobs in bed, he cuts a slice of watermelon. The butchered fruit isn’t a symbolic stand-in for the ruined woman, but the coolness of his appetite for it as she sobs speaks volumes. When one of the first confessional poets, Robert Lowell, wants to describe the psychological state of his mother’s tense, aristocratic home, he claims her claw-foot furniture has “an on tiptoe air,” in the process making the cool Waspy atmosphere into a kind of character.
The first memoirist to lure me into her physical universe with that kind of exactitude may have been Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Standing before her church congregation on Easter, the child Angelou forgets her lines and feels caged inside a lavender taffeta dress she’d once thought was going to transform her into one of the “sweet little white girls who were everybody’s dream of what was right with the world.” That beloved white girl-ness—so at odds with the physical fact of herself—undercut any confidence she might have had. (Which partly comprises that inner enemy I’ll talk about more soon.) As she squirms and puffs, scrambling inside to remember, the hand-me-down dress’s silk rustles around her, sounding like “crepe paper on the back of hearses,” this wonderful sonic metaphor evocative of a time and place when horse-drawn hearses were draped in that rivery fabric. Almost every one of Angelou’s phrases in that initial scene possesses a kinesthetic element, so that we inhabit the girl’s body, which she wears with shame.
Beginning with the sunshine, Angelou puts us in a place and time only she can report on:
But Easter’s early morning sun had shown the dress to be a plain ugly cut-down from a white woman’s once-was-purple throwaway. It was old-lady-long too, but it didn’t hide my skinny legs, which had been greased with Blue Seal Vaseline and powdered with Arkansas red clay. The age-faded color made my skin look dirty.
Her hyphenated adjectives—once-was-purple, age-faded, old-lady-long—capture the peculiar language of southern complaint. (You no-tits-having was an actual invective hurled around my East Texas neighborhood.) The detail of her bony legs covered with Vaseline and clay—a southern black alternative to stockings I first learned of from her—is singular to her time. No detail is Brand X or generic. It all springs, as Keats once said of metaphor, like leaves from a tree.
And Angelou’s descriptions never flag as her soft-focus fantasy ends, so she’s transformed into a too-big girl with hair “a kinky mass,” also squinty eyes—“my daddy must’ve been a Chinaman.” She’s a girl “forced to eat pigs’ tails and snouts.” Further she has broad feet and “a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil”—the tooth space even conjuring a kid’s move of fitting a pencil there.
Think of all the dreadful carnal clichés Angelou might have chosen (other than nappy, which she does use once), and you twig to her talent for placing our bodies alive in a scene.
Strangely, readers “believe” what’s rendered with physical clarity. I once had a reader say, “I knew when you put in that old can of Babbo cleanser you were telling the God’s honest truth.” A guy I played a kissing game with in junior high was stunned that thirty years later, I evoked his red shirt with a tiny sea horse embroidered on front. “You’re some kinda witch if you remember that,” he said.
Again, in instants of hyperarousal, focus narrows; sense memories from these states may sometimes stay brighter in recollection than others. Anybody juiced on adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol—not unlike Angelou being scared in front of the church—registers sense impressions more intensely than in more typical time. Going back to the aforementioned kissing game, I can still distinctly feel myself inside the curved arms of the boy I’d so long had a crush on. Almost forty years later, I can still smell his Juicy Fruit gum. I put my hands up, almost to protect myself from standing too close, and my fingertips had the sea-horse outline imprinted on them.
Of course, physical details, however convincing, actually prove zip in terms of truth. Surely I misremember all kinds of stuff. Maybe the boy I kissed was chewing Bazooka Joe or Dubble Bubble, say. But I think in this case the specific memory—even if wrong—is permissible, because readers understand the flaws of memory and allow for them.
Noncarnal people may have to stretch to become memorable describers. We all start off sketching a character lightly—hair and eyes and weight like a driver’s license—and a less thoughtful writer may fail to sully the page with that person’s physical presence again, as if such a generic memory blurt makes an eternal impression. (As a kid, I was so revved up and anxious and hyper-vigilant that I studied people as if with a magnifying glass. Stimuli others barely register can still come across very loud to me.)
A haunting sense of place should ripple off any good memoir once the cover’s closed, and you may reopen the front again as you would a gate to another land. Anybody with crisp recall can get half decent at describing stuff with practice. Hilary Mantel explains her own confidence in her memories as growing from their vivid physicality: “Though my early memories are patchy, I think they are not, or not entirely confabulation, and I believe this because of their overwhelming sensory power; they come complete, not like the groping, generalized formulations of the subjects fooled by the photograph. As I say ‘I tasted,’ I taste, and as I say ‘I heard,’ I hear; I am not talking about a Proustian moment, but a Proustian cine-film.”
As they do for Mantel, the sharpest memories often give me the spooky sense of looking out from former eyeholes at a landscape decades-since gone. The old self comes back, the former face. When that transformation happens inside me, it’s almost like I only have to set down what I see.
Compare two master writers—one in a noncarnal instant, the other in a carnal one. A passage from Robert Graves’s 1929 Good-Bye to All That—while good as prose—tells more than shows us his psychic state after World War I: “I was still mentally and nervously organized for war. Shells used to come bursting on my bed at night, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed. . . . I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping.”*
Don’t mistake my view of Graves: he’s an extremely carnal writer, and his scenes of trench warfare clench at a reader’s bowels. But here the sentences have the quality more of a semantic memory than an episodic one—memory told more than memory lived. There is not a single scene but several condensed into phrases. He tells you he’s sick but doesn’t occupy the sick body. The only sense memory—large but not dwelled on above—is that of shells bursting in bed. Because they are plural, the faces are less vivid to us. (Again, he saw plenty of ghosts in singular form—I’m only making a point.)
Compare this to the physical detail of Michael Herr’s own “bad flash” in Dispatches (1977), which he likens to an old acid trip.
Certain rock and roll would come in mixed with rapid fire and men screaming. Sitting over a steak in Saigon once I made nasty meat connections, rot and burning from the winter before in Hue. Worst of all, you’d see people walking around whom you’d watched die in aid stations and helicopters. The boy
with the huge Adam’s apple and the wire-rimmed glasses sitting by himself at a table on the Continental terrace had seemed much more nonchalant as a dead marine two weeks before.
Herr at first nearly faints, then does a double take and notes that the dead boy is not a ghost. The flashback seems triggered by smell, with “nasty meat connections” and “rot and burning.”
Unlike Graves’s plural flashbacks of “lost friends,” Herr sees a particular ghost marine “with the huge Adam’s apple and the wire-rimmed glasses.” Herr goes on to describe his stress reaction in a way we as readers can enter: “My breath was gummed up in my throat and my face was cold and white, shake shake shake.” (That wry shake shake shake is some of the rock-and-roll-speak that fuels the voice’s engine in Dispatches and steers the reader away from pity, which he adroitly deflects with lyrics and dark humor.)
Carnal memories don’t have to be traumatic, of course. Simple ones stick because of repetition. A neurologist friend took his college-age daughter to a new chain restaurant spun off from the one they’d visited every Saturday for a pumpkin muffin when she was a toddler. At the new place, my friend foisted a piece of his pumpkin muffin on his daughter without mentioning the old connection. From first bite, her eyes filled. She was remembering. She described every detail of the old place and how they’d go to the botanical garden after. “But it can’t be right,” she said, “because this place just opened.”
You know in Robocop when Peter Weller gets molded into some kind of metal suit with computer eyes and clenchy, strongman hands? An excellent carnal writer fashions not a robot, but what feels like a breathing, tasting avatar the reader can climb inside, thus wearing the writer’s hands and standing inside her shoes. The reader gets zipped into your skin.
7 | How to Choose a Detail
Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.
James Wood, How Fiction Works
As a kid, one way I handled my own family crisis was to pick on a littler kid next door, Mickey Heinz. Yes, I was picked on, but I also did picking on back—part of the economy of misery handed down from older to younger on the block. While writing Liars’ Club, I interrogated my memory, coming up with four possible details to give a reader.
1.A bunch of us dared him to take his pants off in his closet with a neighbor girl right before we knew his mama was coming home from a dash to the store.
2.I made him eat something nasty in a sandwich—mud or dogshit, I can’t recall which.
3.I used to ask him to play hide-and-seek and then just go home while he looked all afternoon.
4.I got him to smoke Nestle’s Quik rolled up in toilet paper, which blistered his tongue.
Number 1 would almost require a whole scene. It’d take too long to tell. Plus the memory is mostly semantic—an idea rather than concrete images. I didn’t trust it. The story could have been neighborhood legend. I had no physical visuals from the story.
Number 2 also sounds like something I may have just heard. Making somebody eat something awful in my neighborhood was a common trick—maybe it wasn’t this kid at all.
Number 3 isn’t as dramatic as any of the other scenes.
But number 4, with the fake cigarette, is like nothing I’ve heard elsewhere. It led to a string of physical details: i.e., one dad across the street rolled his own smokes on a red-plastic-and-tin roller. We snitched it from a kitchen drawer, along with the Quik from a cabinet.
Those concrete images made me trust my memory of the whole scene as mine, not just something I heard about. And the carnality of the burned tongue is something anybody who’s ever sipped scalding coffee can practically feel. There’s an intimate “truth” that helps the reader enter the scene—small and particular. I also remembered he showed his mother the blistered tongue, and that we as a neighborhood listened to his spanking in the bathroom after, which was also very specific—“a hairbrush on his blubbery little ass.” That image shows our perverse, collective glee at somebody else’s pain. Plus overhearing other families’ dramas forms a big part of that memoir; what worried children often worry about is not seen but overheard.
8 | Hucksters, the Deluded, and Big Fat Liars
I saw prophets tearing their false beards
I saw frauds joining sects of flagellants
executioners in sheep’s clothing
who fled the people’s wrath
playing shepherd’s pipes
Zbigniew Herbert, “What I Saw”
Maybe deceit in memoir irks me so badly because some years back I endorsed one of the biggest literary frauds in recent memory. Fake Holocaust survivor Binjamin Wilkomirski’s childhood recollection of Auschwitz, Fragments, carries praise and my name on the British edition circa 1996. But Bruno Dösseker (Wilkomirski’s birth certificate name) not only spent the war comfortably in Switzerland; he wasn’t even Jewish. He began faxing his therapist “memories”—sometimes ten or twelve pages at a time as they came to him, but the therapist knew his client couldn’t really discern between reality and fantasy. “If he’d called the piece Fragments from a Therapy he would’ve been fine,” the shrink said in Philip Gourevitch’s New Yorker exposé “The Memory Thief.”
Now the book’s falsehoods seem so glaring. Wilkomirski would’ve had to be Superman or made of rubber to endure what he alleges—one of the most unrelentingly brutal journeys ever set in ink. He claimed that at age three he hung by his teeth from a guard’s bicep. No such jaw strength exists outside the circus, plus the guard would have to be holding his arm upside down, bicep to the ground, while supporting the iron-jawed toddler. Riding on a conveyor belt headed for the ovens under naked corpses, he feels two disembodied hands appear, rescuing him from the incinerator in the last second. All of this he bounces up from, charging at the next Nazi he sees like a rabid Chihuahua.
Some part of me I stifled knew it was false, but I still got behind the book. Why? Was I just cowed by its resounding international endorsement? More driving, I think now, was the guilt I’d suffer if it were true, and I denied a camp survivor his witnessing. I just didn’t let myself trust my instincts.
I was in good company. Wilkomirski would go on to win the Prix de Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris and a National Jewish Book Award in NYC, where he beat out Elie Wiesel and Alfred Kazin. Also blurbing the book alongside me was biographer and investigative journalist Gitta Sereny, who attended the Nuremberg trials and wrote perhaps the definitive bio of Albert Speer.
Today, Wilkomirski cleaves unswerving to his story, unbudged by physical evidence. If the guy was attempting to defraud us, Gourevitch claimed, he did the worst job in history, for clues abounded. Wilkomirski sounds more deranged than like a conscious fake.
In one of my most depressing exercises in public naïveté, I’ve handed out to classes two unidentified chapters from two Holocaust memoirs—one Primo Levi’s agonizingly true Survival at Auschwitz, one Wilkomirski’s. The proven fabricator gets the vast majority of votes for veracity every time.
Here are the reasons my very smart (some Ivy-educated) grad students give for taking all this in as true.
1.He’s not trying to make himself seem like a hero. (I’d disagree: he’s making himself seem like a victim, which translates into survivor, which translates into hero.)
2.Why would he lie about this? (He seems to believe his lies, according to his shrink and Gourevitch, who interviewed him.)
3.The writing has an immediacy; its first-person present tense makes it seem as if he’s reliving it, more than Levi’s more formally written piece with its emotional circumspection.
4.Lack of exposition or rhetoric shows lack of thoughtfulness and, therefore, a lack of artificiality or deceit.
5.The writing is more conversational than Levi’s—
informality equals truth to many students.
6.It’s fragmentary, like traumatic memory or a movie flashback.
7.He puts in dialogue. Whereas Levi, the real survivor, is more sparing with dialogue, Wilkomirski has long conversations.
8.Levi uses too many proper names—how could he recall them all? (I assume he’s smart, or maybe he looked some up.)
9.Levi sounds too upper-crust or smart, which makes students see him as posed; they find the informality of Wilkomirski’s writing winning. (They also have this complaint with lefty Orwell—he sounds too highbrow!)
10.What if it’s true, and we don’t believe him?
In 2008, of eighteen students, only three found Levi the more plausible; in 2012, of twenty-one students, three again found Levi more plausible. Which means to me that reasonable judgment is still losing ground.
In cheating the public, hucksters cheat themselves out of their real stories. James Frey must’ve fought to get sober before A Million Little Pieces; just not in the ways he alleged. No doubt he suffered like hell, but he somehow deluded himself that his real misery wasn’t bad enough—or maybe his real character wasn’t macho enough, or nice enough to warrant scrutiny. But any addict’s overhaul is a nightmare. Surely his true story would’ve been worth a read.
Truth is less set in stone now, more mutable. We know better than ever that people lie like crazy. They probably lied a lot before, too, but now cameras and a watchdog media seem way more adroit at catching out their lies. With the web, we’ve got more people trying to track down the adulterer or photograph the drunk celebrity who’s fallen off the wagon.
We also often believe all manner of horse dookey based on prevailing winds—family denial systems stay impregnable based on that tendency. Or we’re swept up in a tale we want to believe. Millions of perfectly bright readers get drawn in and duped by bullshit stories. I fell for Lillian Hellman’s self-aggrandizing tales in Pentimento, until Mary McCarthy—known as a rigorous truth seeker—told Dick Cavett’s television audience, “Every word out of her mouth is a lie, including and and the.” Nothing protects us against practiced liars and hucksters; nothing ever will.