What rankles me lately, though, is a sweeping tendency to deny even the possibility of truth. During a campus sexual harassment investigation, my department chair said, “There’s her version and his version—there is no truth.” Which infuriated me: someone either assaulted the woman in question, or not. It was binary.
Sure, there are major mistakes of interpretation. Two cops beating a black man claim he was reaching for a weapon in his pants. A video shows the victim groping, but it’s for an asthma inhaler.
In an off-kilter paradox, our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit on the page. Or maybe our appetite for the fantastic—fed by Ironman and Gravity and a phalanx of vampire- and zombie-based blockbusters—has eroded all public standards of plausibility, even among perfectly smart people. (Okay, there are some dumb bunnies. Walking out of The Last Temptation of Christ, a friend overheard someone say, “I didn’t know Jesus was so short.”) Our desire for spectacle has led many story-concocting “memoirists” into jacking up their tales, believing that the story with the most gunshots will win the biggest audience.
But it’s the busted liars who talk most volubly about the fuzzy line between nonfiction and fiction. Their anything-goes message has come to dominate the airwaves around memoir.
Reading that scammer James Frey got on a plane with a bullet hole through his cheek, I deduced that—even pre-9/11—airport security frowned on boarding the gunshot-wounded. And when he alleged that his rehab made him suffer a root canal without a non-consciousness-altering numbing agent, sober people the world over knew the torture session was fake. The bullet hole and unnumbed tooth were absolute tip-offs. Surely other readers, had they paused even for a second to consider the unlikelihood of those reports, would have dubbed the guy a bullshitter.
What I’m guessing: many just shrugged past it, because we’ve all chosen to accept that the line between fiction and nonfiction is too subtle for us to discern. That’s what Frey argued on TV, vigorously. He had no reluctance to speak for all memoirists, claiming self-righteously to both Oprah and Larry King that his form of shameless “embellishment” was customary for all memoir, since the genre’s so “new” (are you listening St. Augustine?). His self-righteous defense and total lack of apology might have tipped us off that we were dealing with a practiced dissembler.
Of course, there was no way for any of us to deduce what he flat-out lied about. He transformed his frat boy’s DUI with its $733 bail and few hours sipping coffee in an Ohio police station into a month-long jail sentence—the result of this roostering desperado’s fistfight with cops and all manner of trumped-up charges. His college-educated girlfriend became a crack whore since puberty. And he claimed “I stand by my book” partly because the lies occupied only eighteen pages, or 5 percent of it—“within the realm of what’s appropriate in memoir.”
To follow his reasoning, an event manufactured from whole cloth is the moral equivalent of another memoirist blurring identity to disguise someone or misremembering a date.
This isn’t quite true. The line between memory and fact is blurry, between interpretation and fact. There are inadvertent mistakes of those kinds out the wazoo. But Frey didn’t “misremember” and actually believe he had a bullet wound. He didn’t really believe he was incarcerated for a stretch, when he never served a day. He set out to fool people.
So did Greg Mortenson, the skunk-posing-as-saint builder of Afghan schools in Three Cups of Tea. He didn’t hallucinate that he’d been kidnapped by Taliban when, in fact, he’d been hosted in some kind people’s homes. He cooked up events to mold his public image into that of the noble, forgiving survivor of brutal treatment. Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit details how Mortenson went on to drain massive sums from his charity for personal use, renting private jets for book-selling junkets and buying his own books at retail to stay on best-seller lists. He was forced by the Montana attorney general to repay $1,000,000 to settle the allegations. Yet as recently as January 2014, I saw Mortenson use the same smarmy, indeterminate nonconfession that once came out of James Frey’s mouth: “I made some mistakes.”
I’m not trying to make lie-sniffing bloodhounds out of memoir fans, nor to silence would-be memoirists who give up the art, fearing their minds aren’t as steadfast as computer files and video footage. I don’t yearn for some golden age of objective truth when the fact police patrolled dialogue in memoir, demanding it be excised unless the writer had recorded backup. But the popular, scoffing presumption that memory’s solely concocted by self-serving fantasy and everyone’s trying to scudge has perhaps helped to bog down our collective moral machinery.
Our reigning suspicion has extended the practiced liars’ motives to everyone, including the well-intentioned truth seeker. In so doing, we’ve let a small cadre of schemers take over. Disgraced con men have helped to author the dominant notion that a thinking person can’t possibly discern between a probable truth and a hyperembellished swindle. Based on their antics, we’ve begun to abandon all judgment, thinking instead, Oh, who knows, anything’s possible, everybody lies anyway.
My heroes in the fields of memoir and journalism don’t find the line so indeterminate. Hilary Mantel still shoots for undiluted reality: “I have an investment in accuracy. I would never say, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s history now.’” And David Carr outlined this once-simple standard in “Journalist Dancing on the Edge of Truth,” where he indicts shamed New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer for making up quotes from Bob Dylan: “Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it. I once lost a job I dearly wanted because I had misspelled the name of the publisher of the publication I was about to go to work for. Not very smart, but I learned a brutal lesson that stayed with me.” (New York Times, August 19, 2012)
However often the airwaves wind up clotted with false memories and misidentified criminal culprits and folks dithering about what they recall, I still think a screw has come loose in our culture around notions of truth, a word you almost can’t set down without quotes around it anymore. Sometimes it strikes me that even when we know something’s true, it’s almost rude to say so, as if claiming a truth at all—what? threatens someone else’s experience? Most of all, no one wants to sound like some self-satisfied proselytizer everybody can pounce on and debunk.
The American religion—so far as there is one anymore—seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he’ll never be found wrong.
It is odd that I’ve never seen a televised minute about the simple rules of veracity the nonfiction writers I know seem to cleave to, murdering themselves in revision after revision trying to meet it.
This overlooks the reality—am I the only person left alive to believe this?—that most memoirists know the past can be a swamp. Nonetheless, most are trying to find footing on more solid ground. Some memories—often the best and worst—burn inside us for lifetimes, florid, unforgettable, demanding to be set down.
9 | Interiority and Inner Enemy—Private Agonies Read Deeper Than External Whammies
It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Carnality may determine whether a memoir’s any good, but interiority—that kingdom the camera never captures—makes a book rereadable. By rereadable, translate: great. Your connection to most authors usually rests (Nabokov and a few others aside) in how you may identify with them. Mainly, the better memoirist organizes a life story around that aforementioned inner enemy—a psychic struggle against herself that works like a threa
d or plot engine.
Interiority moves us through the magic realms of time and truth, hope and fantasy, memory, feelings, ideas, worries. Emotions you can’t show carnally are told. Whenever a writer gets reflective about how she feels or complains or celebrates or plots or judges, she moves inside herself to where things matter and mean.
Early on in a childhood tale, an author may render consciousness awakening—that enduring, often-trivial first memory, through which a narrator blinks into being. Nabokov made such a moment so singular, its machinery almost speaks to or sparks my own such arrival, as if he described something I, too, had felt but never been able to articulate: “I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.” As you watch the narrator feel around the edges of consciousness for its “slippery hold”—probing for what really went down—you enter a singular set of psychic perceptions. But craving that “hold” or permanence in what’s past is Nabokov’s inner enemy.
Even a writer with gargantuan external enemies must face off with himself over a book’s course. Otherwise, why write in first person at all?
The split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book’s thrust or through line—some journey toward the self’s overhaul by book’s end. However random or episodic a book seems, a blazing psychic struggle holds it together, either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling forward. Often the inner enemy dovetails with the writer’s own emotional investment in the work at hand. Why is she driven to tell the tale? Usually it’s to go back and recover some lost aspect of the past so it can be integrated into current identity.
Frank Conroy’s inner enemy is his inability to maintain balance and control in the chaotic world of his feckless family without either disassociation or rebelling in self-destructive ways. Stop-Time shows the power of spacing out to protect a kid in pain. That inner blankness or emptiness provides the place where Conroy—a professional jazz pianist when I knew him—could shape “music” or form out of his environment’s painful disorder. He enacts how a deprived kid survives, not just suffers, and it’s through disassociation—a consciousness leaving time and place.
For an hour or more I lay motionless in a self-induced trance, my eyes open but seldom moving. . . . In this state my ears seemed rather far away. I was burrowed somewhere deep in my skull.
And the undercurrent of the book is the aimless boredom of childhood. Since kids lack power and agency over much, they must embrace empty time. Conroy does it with bitterness.
My philosophy, at age eleven, was skepticism. Like most children I was antisentimental and quick to hear false notes. I waited, more than anything else, waited for something momentous to happen. Keeping a firm grip on reality was of immense importance. My vision had to be clear so that when “it” happened I would know. . . . (A spectacularly unsuccessful philosophy since nothing ever happened.)
As his reckless parents and lackluster teachers failed to protect him, he gradually “slipped into the state of being in trouble.” The book opens with him as an adult driving drunk at a hundred miles per hour from London to his home in the suburbs. His outlaw streak, which we grow to love him for, also endangers him.
For Harry Crews, his fatherless state somehow cuts him off from forging a solid self. He started the book “because I’ve never been certain of who I am.” He’s a man stripped of identity, which he can only reclaim by reabsorbing his lost home place, partly through memories of the father who grew there and then died before Crews could be born. The book’s stated emotional quest is to gather and utter old stories to fill in blanks in the writer with his old man’s past and peoples. Otherwise, Crews might have to move through life as an undefined shapeshifter, a kind of poppet for other people’s influences. He describes himself as a guy who goes from mask to mask, “slipping into and out of identities as easily as people slip in and out of their clothes.” Even the voice we find so distinctive, he claims, is actually malleable as putty: as a reporter, listening to recorded interviews with film stars or truckers after the fact, his “own voice will invariably become indistinguishable from the voice of the person with whom I’m talking by the third or fourth tape. Some natural mimic in me picks up whatever verbal tics or mannerisms it gets close to.”
In his macho-named book Blood and Grits, he confesses the shame of trying to be a literary man when he comes from illiterate sharecroppers: “Everything I had written had been out of a fear and loathing for what I was and who I was. It was all out of an effort to pretend otherwise.”
This seems the place to mention that we later find out that Crews’s mother remarried while Crews was still a baby, and so till age six, the man he called “daddy” was a violent drunk uncle who terrorized the family. Before Crews was even conceived, the father he mourns lost one testicle to the clap, while working on a dredging crew in the Florida swamps. He caught it from “a flat-faced Seminole girl whose name he never knew and who grunted like a sow and smelled like something shot in the woods.”
This unflattering portrait of the unflattering act helps describe the hard place we’re in—a universe full of loud pigs and shot things you have to take whiffs of while walking around. It’s a world told in muscular language and jam-packed with action of the grittiest sort.
But that lost world is also one where people hang tough together, and Crews sounds—above all else—so lonely and disconnected. That sense of unassailable community would seem to him like food to a starving man. Crews never seems to have had a pal like his daddy’s on the dredging crew, a guy who took the old man to have one testicle lopped off. Before that, the friend engages the old man in a grim banter that binds them.
The rhythmic stroke of the dredge’s engine came counterpoint to my daddy’s shaky voice as he told Cecil what was wrong.
When Cecil finally did speak, he said, “I hope it was good boy. I sho do.”
“What was good?”
“That Indian. You got the clap.”
But daddy had already known. He had thought of little else since it had become almost impossible for him to give water because of the fire that started in his stomach and felt like it burned through raw flesh every time he had to water off. He had thought of the chickee where he had lain under the palm roof being eaten alive by mosquitoes.
Because such stories are Crews’s patrimony, the sole bonds that tether him to the planet, the carnal reality of the place and his daddy’s suffering body have an immediacy we have to buy into.
For the sake of his own manhood, we sense, Papa Crews embodies the butch, hypertrophied male, and all of Crews’s tough acts—from joining the marines and brawling and working as a carny to getting massive skull tattoos—seem to grow from the author’s longing to live up to the mythic, über-mensch patriarch only met in photos and stories. “His is the gun that is always drawn; his is the head that is turned back under the whiskey bottle.” That always is a kind of plaintive cry. Forgive me for getting all Freudian here, but for the father with one testicle to have a gun that is always drawn does sound like a son’s own desperate wish for a macho old man.
One mark of capital-M Modernism is writers commenting self-reflexively on the fact that they’re writing, as when a theater character breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the audience. In a conflict such as Crews’s, the process of telling a story in a way solves the psyche’s core problem—in this, there’s a poetic marriage of form and content. The medium is the message. Again, we hear Mantel in Giving Up the Ghost wrestling with her ability to incorporate her experience of the supernatural in a time when she’d be adjudged mad for the belief:
So now I come to write a memoir. I tell myself, just say how you came to sell a house with a ghost in it. But this story can only be told once, and I need to get it right. Why does the act of writing generate so much anxiety? Margaret Atwood says, “The written word is so much li
ke evidence—like something that can be used against you.” I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong.
Unless you confess your own emotional stakes in a project, why should a reader have any? A writer sets personal reasons for the text at hand, and her struggling psyche fuels the tale. Here’s me in my first book, trying to explain how what I didn’t know about my past haunted me:
When the truth would be unbearable, the mind often just blanks it out. But the ghost of the event may stay in your head. Then, like a smudge of a bad word wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. . . . The night’s major consequences for me were internal. The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not Rightness.
In Night, concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel perhaps suffers as much from his own guilt about how he treated his dying father as he does from the depredations the Nazis inflict. While the sick old man in his death throes calls the author’s name, the young man stays away, begrudging his father those agonized cries, which eventually draw the blows of the SS: “I shall never forgive myself. His last word had been my name. A summons. I had not responded.” Yes, the camp and its tortures overwhelm Wiesel, but this internal conflict deepens the story. So it’s odd to me that in later editions of the book, Wiesel cut the passage, claiming it was “Too personal, too private, perhaps . . .”
The need to rout out my own inner demons is why I always start off fumbling through my own recollections. Only later, after several drafts do I engage in “research” by visiting old haunts and passing my manuscript around. The memories I’ve gnawed on and rehearsed are the ones most key to what’s eating me up, and only those can help me to find a book’s shape.