Good Prose (8 page)

Self-exploration, including confession, almost always involves other people. Some of them are bound to be offended by an honest memoir. But the good and honest memoir is neither revenge nor self-justification, neither self-celebration nor self-abnegation. It is a record of learning. Memoirs, by definition, look backward. They are one response to Kierkegaard’s dilemma that life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward. Memoirs survey a past with the benefit of the knowledge that experience has yielded. With
The Education of Henry Adams
, Henry Adams created the perfect title. Every memoir worth reading could be called
The Education of the Author
. The “I” has been somewhere and it now knows something that it didn’t, and that is a thing of value for writer and reader alike.

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Here are some basic rules of good behavior for the memoirist:

Stick to the facts
. The words sit there in all innocent simplicity, as if sticking to the facts were no more complicated than stopping at a red light. But the facts are often at issue in memoir, and in a way that goes far beyond the fraudulent memoirs that from time to time scandalize the publishing business.

In an author’s note to his memoir,
Lost in the Meritocracy
, Walter Kirn says, “There are, I suspect, a number of inaccuracies, but no deliberate deceptions.” Most memoirists, struggling for accuracy, would endorse this rough code of conduct: faithfulness to fact defined as faithfulness to one’s own memories. Of course, this does not entirely resolve the issue.

Like the act of remembering, the act of writing your own story inevitably distorts, if only by creating form where disorder reigns. To make sense of your life or a portion of it is to tell a story, and story often stands at odds with the ferment in which
you have lived. That’s one point of a story: to replace confusion with sense. The impulse of memoir is itself a fictive impulse.

What is true in macrocosm is true in microcosm. At the level of moment-by-moment rendering of the past, the factual becomes all the more problematic. One can see the problem enacted, in a brilliant form, in Frank Conroy’s memoir,
Stop-Time
, a modern landmark in the genre. When the book appeared, in 1967, it became the literary equivalent of breaking news. The original dust jacket bore just two blurbs—one from William Styron and one from Norman Mailer, two of the most respected American novelists of the day.
Stop-Time
is an account of growing up rich and poor. (Conroy’s mother was divorced from her well-off husband and took up with a drifter.) It was far from the first memoir about childhood, but it had a freshness and immediacy that made it seem like something new. The book served as a rebuke to the conventional sentiment that a writer ought to have achieved something in the world before presuming to write a memoir. To people who felt that way, young Conroy (and his young followers) said implicitly,
You are holding my achievement in your hands
.

An intensity of detail distinguishes
Stop-Time
, as one can see in any number of passages. Here is a scene set in a hardscrabble shack in a failed real estate development in inland Florida:

You don’t have to read more than those few sentences to realize that you are in the company of a good writer, and when you read a succession of such sentences your appreciation is confirmed. You also may find yourself thinking about the nature of memory. When he wrote the book, Conroy was thirty, recalling events two decades past with a precision that we know the mind provides only on rare occasions. That blanket of green flies has the insistence of a memory, but did Mrs. Rawlings throw the water on that day or another, did the water land in the spot where the light spilled from the window, were the flies out that evening or on some afternoon? Does a reader care? The particulars are inconsequential, and yet it is the particulars that help to persuade us of the reality of the experience. More simply, they provide much of the pleasure of the book.

Many moments in
Stop-Time
must have been remembered in just this way, at once remembered and reimagined. These are memories that happen as they are being written. They are not fraudulent. They are completely unlike the made-up events of hoax memoir, but they are not reliably factual either.

Memoirists operate on a continuum between recollection and dramatization. Once one decides to re-create scenes, a line has been crossed and some invention necessarily follows. “Imaginative memoir” might be a good name for Conroy’s book and the subgenre it represents. Even if most memoirs are not as fully imaginative as his, none that strive to dramatize moments in the past can be wholly faithful to knowable fact.

Clearly, the rules for reporting and remembering have to be different. For remembering, they simply have to be looser. How much looser depends on the writer and the writer’s material. Some writers in some situations are strict constructionists. For example, Geoffrey Wolff in
The Duke of Deception
, an admirable, scrupulous, and extremely entertaining book. The book’s two central characters are the author and his father, a confidence man, or, as Wolff calls him in the first chapter, “a bullshit artist.” It must have been obvious to Wolff that some readers were going to wonder:
Like father, like son?
Factual accuracy is usually an implicit issue in nonfiction, but Wolff makes it explicit.
The Duke of Deception
is a reported memoir. Wolff interviewed other people, including his mother, and he makes those interviews part of his story, complicating and sometimes contradicting his own memory. He lets the reader see how he knows what he says he knows. He is also unusually restrained in his use of dialogue.

Many memoirists quote pages of talk that was uttered decades back, dialogue they can’t possibly have remembered exactly. Memoirists do this so often as to leave a reader with only two options: to stop reading most memoirs, or to accept remembered dialogue as artistically licensed in this genre, as a convention of the form, like a papier-mâché sky at the back of a stage or the propensity of characters in an opera to break into song.

In her classic growing-up memoir,
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
, Mary McCarthy talks about this very problem and sets out an unusually clear and thorough set of rules for writing engagingly in the present while being faithful to the past. “Quotation marks,” she tells us, “indicate that a conversation to this general effect took place, but I do not vouch for the exact words
or the exact order of the speeches.” She reflects on the memoirist’s dilemma, particularly if the memoirist happens also to be a novelist. “Many a time, in the course of doing these memoirs, I have wished that I were writing fiction. The temptation to invent has been very strong, particularly where recollection is hazy and I remember the substance of an event but not the details—the color of a dress, the pattern of a carpet, the placing of a picture.” But she resisted.

A candid admission of the frailty of memory can certainly be overdone, but it can establish a bona fide with the reader, and perhaps achieve something more than that, by naming, at least, what cannot be re-created. Mary Karr, in her memoir
Lit
, describes a domestic quarrel in some detail, but then remarks that its aftermath, a reconciliation, is irretrievable: “If we talked about the night before, I don’t recall it, which isn’t fair to either of us, for it doesn’t show our reasoned selves paring away at our scared ones.… The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.”

For some writers there comes a moment when the “truth” of experience seems not just out of reach but somehow at odds with the facts, or when the facts seem simply insufficient. Maybe that is the time to forsake memoir and write a novel. Something like this seems to have happened to one prominent memoirist, Tim O’Brien, but with the unusual result that the facts refused to be ignored.

Perhaps no contemporary has better demonstrated the tension between memory and memoir than O’Brien, most of whose writing life has been informed by the harrowing year he spent as
an infantryman in Vietnam. Soon after the experience, in 1975, he published his memoir of the war,
If I Die in a Combat Zone
. Critics honored the book for its immediacy and its honesty. None expressed any doubt as to its authenticity, but it seems to have left O’Brien himself unsatisfied.

Years later he published
The Things They Carried
, which drew on the same experience but which he described as a “work of fiction.” If you were an appreciative reader of the first book, then
The Things They Carried
, though equally if not more powerful, was oddly disconcerting. The book seemed to insist that
it
, not the memoir, was the true story of O’Brien’s war. “I want you to feel what I felt,” O’Brien writes. “I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” This can be understood in a perfectly straightforward way: only by heightening reality could O’Brien communicate the true dimensions of his own emotions. But things get more convoluted than that. This is a “work of fiction” that insists on its own veracity. To start, O’Brien refers to himself by his own name, and as the book’s dedication reveals, he also uses the real names of the men he served with. (Their names had been changed in his memoir.) And after more than one scene, he disowns what he has just written, stepping back to say: No, that wasn’t the way it was. Here’s the way it really was.

Take for instance the chapter “Speaking of Courage,” which tells the story of a soldier named Norman Bowker. We see Bowker after the war has ended, aimless and assaulted by memories of his experience, lamenting his failure to save a dying comrade. The scene of the death is grotesque—a monsoon-soaked field that has been used as an outdoor toilet by the villagers
nearby, “a field of shit.” The wounded soldier drowns in the mud and excrement in the middle of the night. Bowker wants to talk to someone about what happened, but he trusts no one to understand. He imagines saying that he could have won the Silver Star had he saved his friend, but it becomes plain he is masking his guilt, and the story he really wants to tell is about the complicity he feels in the man’s death. Taken as it stands, the piece would be a fully realized short story. It is soon obvious, however, that it is not meant to be taken as it stands, because O’Brien undercuts (and enlarges) it, in a subsequent piece called “Notes.” He writes: “… I want to make it clear Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to [the dead soldier]. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.” The author says, “It was hard stuff for me to write.” And having been shown the ways in which the author has tried to avoid writing it, the reader is invited to feel the shame that he, Tim O’Brien—a living man, not confined to a printed page—presumably does feel.

Or maybe not. One could argue reasonably that if the book is fiction, then anything in it might be invented. The playwright has stepped onstage but he’s still part of the play. We can presume to have no idea what he is really like. But at that level of contrivance the essential effort of the work would be dissipated; the reader wouldn’t “feel what I felt.” The device, not the emotion, would become the subject. The book as a whole resists such a reading. It seems to want to tell the truth about a real Tim O’Brien in a real war. We are left with the strange sense that the “work of fiction” is the true memoir, not true as to “feeling”
alone, but also true as to fact. Or to the facts as O’Brien knows them.

•

The desire to tell the truth haunts the serious memoirist, and so it should. But there is a step beyond truth. For the writer, the ultimate reward of memoir may be to produce a work in which the facts are preserved but the experience is transformed.

In
A Fortunate Man
, a meditation on the working life of an English country doctor, John Berger writes: “Perhaps this is the true attraction of autobiography: all the events over which you had no control are at last subject to your decision.” Writers in all genres are attracted to the promise of control over past events—if by “control” one means creating form or finding patterns in a life or a mind or the world, and, in the case of memoir, finding a road through the wilderness of one’s past.

Some memories cry out for this kind of control, as in the case of a young man with a painful past who had a powerful story to tell, but was uncertain about whether to tell it. His name is Pacifique.
*
He grew up in an African country beset by civil war. His parents—farmers and herders—were virtually illiterate and yet they valued education, and Pacifique managed to attend grade school, often in peril from trigger-happy soldiers. He did well. His test scores were among the country’s highest and earned him a secondary school education. Then, at nineteen, through a series of improbable accidents and charitable acts, he was brought
to the United States, where he spent a year at the private secondary school Deerfield Academy.

English was still strange to him when he arrived. (He was fluent in French as well as in his native language.) He had never read a great novel or poem, but as a child he had conceived a fondness for the kinds of stories that elders had traditionally told—mixtures of fact and fiction that the elders always claimed were true, with complicated structures leading invariably to a moral.