Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (31 page)

For which I do not wish to blame him. Experience teaches us that we could have been these people, that there’s no gesture or choice they made that I couldn’t have made myself, under the right circumstances, without the luck or grace of some correcting perspective. In fact, I worked very hard, writing
Firebird
, to arrive at empathy. This is the great psychological magic act of memoir; the people you’ve known become your characters, and you cannot hate your characters — if you treat them as evil, one-dimensional, or even merely inscrutable, the form simply collapses into a narcissistic muddle. Thus, the work of trying to write a good book becomes, unexpectedly, an empathic adventure, a quest to try to see into the lives of others. Even if such a “seeing into” is by nature partial, an interpretive fiction, it’s what we have.

Thus, not only because I have also been married to an alcoholic in the face of whose illness I had to admit I was entirely powerless, but also because I have written a book that attempts to understand a bitterness, a human disaster — well, for those reasons I want my father to see my memoir as a gesture of compassion. Or at least as an opportunity to
know
his son, inside and out. In my experience, which is admittedly distorted by the sort of family in which I came of age, it is not usual for children to allow their parents to know them. It doesn’t feel safe to do so. If I were a father, I think I would want nothing more than to
know
my children, to see how they understood and experienced their lives, even if it discomfited me.

But that is what I would want, not necessarily what my father wants. And I must also face the possibility, I guess, that he knows me better now and doesn’t like what he knows.

The experience I report here is, I suppose, every memoirist’s nightmare: that we will lose people in our lives by writing about them. I have replaced an inauthentic relationship — the conversation we had before, with its many elisions — with an authentic silence. Is that better? I can’t honestly say that I am sure. My father plans to die, it seems, without talking to me; that is his form of taking power. Because I am an American writer, I don’t feel powerful, but I forget that to other people, especially those who don’t write, the ability to tell a story, to make language and publish it in a book, is, after all, to be an author; it confers author-ity. I have told the family story now, the author-ized version, and perhaps my father feels powerless to correct it.

It is also perfectly possible that my father dislikes my book for reasons entirely unknown to me. My late editor told me a wonderful story about a memoirist who was a scion of a famous family rife with mental illness and turmoil. She showed her manuscript to family members with the greatest trepidation, and indeed some of them
were
upset, but not because she’d chronicled breakdowns or divorces. The content of their complaints was more like, How dare you tell everyone that I put that underwear on the dog when I was five? Or, I do
not
have a dark mole on my chin.

When my partner Paul published a memoir about growing up in New Jersey, the most surprising letter he received was from a high school math teacher — not even
his
teacher, it turned out — who feared he’d given Paul math anxiety for life and was disturbed and saddened by this report of his own failing. But the passage in question, in Paul’s mind, is actually about the way that his fascination with composing liturgical music made him entirely lose interest in school, math included.

Moral: It is a strange and dire thing to be represented, and what the represented make of it is not in the representer’s power to control.

Given all this, I have asked myself why I had to write the book. It began with an odd memory — a wonderfully liberating experience of improvisational dance, in 1962, when my fourth-grade teacher in Tucson, Arizona, put Stravinsky’s
Firebird
Suite on our classroom phonograph and said to the class, “Now, children,
move
.” I danced with abandon, without self-consciousness, and my teacher loved it. Looking back at that bit of memory, I wondered about my education in the creative life, about the relationship between art and survival. And I began to think about other instances of performance in my childhood, and of the sense of joining my little limited and confused self to the larger world of what people make, the traditions of artistic creation in which, for me, there was a sense of safety, permission, and enlargement. That is surely the story of many gay boys of my generation (and of many other kids too, and of a number of generations): the freedom held out by the creative life becomes a refuge, and the sense of accomplishment one might gain there becomes a source of strength and solace. But of course I couldn’t tell that story without talking about why I
needed
strength and solace, and thus the waters of my book almost immediately darkened. What is it that art saves us
from
?

Like any life story, mine could be told from many perspectives; a different organizing principle (economic, spiritual, intellectual) would produce a very different story. I wanted to tell the tale through the lens of art (and, concomitantly, of sexual orientation and performance) because that is what I wished to understand better at that moment.

And I wanted to tell the story of my life in order, once again, to take control of it, to shape some comprehensible element of cause and effect, because the instability and complexity of experience mean that this sense of pattern is always slipping away from us. Memoir is a way of reclaiming, at least temporarily, the sense of shapeliness in a life. And it would be disingenuous to deny that there is not some element too, of if not revenge then at least a personal version of setting the record straight. I can’t change what happened, but I can tell my side of it, can’t I? Tell it with every resource at my disposal, to make it feel real. Did anyone looking at the child me ever think, Oh, that boy’s going to write this story? Like that wonderful moment in Sharon Olds’s poem “I Go Back to 1933,” when the speaker imagines intervening in her parents’ relationship before her own birth, warning them off — and then says no, do what you are going to do, and I will write about it.

And one hopes, always, that telling a story out of one’s own life becomes useful, that others might see themselves reflected there, in an enlarging and clarifying glass, or at least one that helps them to examine the particular character of their own experience. (Talking to a group of queer kids in Minneapolis on the
Firebird
book tour, young people either homeless or at risk of being on the streets, I felt this so acutely. These kids had been so damaged, so nearly thrown away by the schools and by their parents that most of them couldn’t actually read the book, but we could talk about it. And in that conversation I felt such power, for them and for me: I had been a kid who’d come close to being discarded for my sexual difference, and now I was an adult, a working, reasonably happy, thriving adult, who had lived to say so.)

If the reader hears guilt in this attempt at self-justification, she’s right. After all, I have wounded an old man, who plans to die without forgiving me; I have made a rupture; I’ve shone light into dark places and thus brought shame upon my family; I have told the truth, which may indeed set you free, but not without the price of betrayal. You cannot sing your ancestors’ songs as they intended them to be sung, as they would have phrased them themselves. If you choose to sing them at all, you will betray your forebears, because you will never understand them as they’d wish to be understood.

This “betrayal” is life giving; it is a condition of truth telling; it is a condition of actual aliveness, which requires emotional honesty with oneself — Without that, what on earth is this life? The alternative is silence, a frozen politeness, a fake life. I suppose that being emotionally honest with oneself doesn’t necessitate writing a book about it — but for me it has always been the written word that enters where speech cannot, that shapes what would otherwise remain oppressively inchoate. Did I need to publish that book while my father was still alive? I seem to have needed to do so, perhaps simply because of the hungry child in me who wanted to be
seen
.

And, like any artist, when I’ve made something I believe to be beautiful, what is one to do with it but give it to someone?

If there is a meaning to be taken from this, it is that art cannot be counted on to mend the rifts within or Without. Its work is to take us to the brink of clarity. Joy Williams writes, “The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.” Clarity, whether we’d ever have wished for it or not, is a genuine thing. And any instance of the genuine, no matter how discomfiting, and though it may not seem like it at all, is something to be grateful for.

I am used to it, my father’s silence, and his silence is a burning in which I reside. In my worst moments I think, Well, now I have no parents. Then I think, I never did. Then I think, Yes, I did, there were moments of affirmation, there were lessons in beauty and making, there were instances of instruction in which I was shown those things that have sustained my life. Both are true. There’s the rub, the caught in between–ness of it. I don’t care anymore what my father thinks, and I am to some degree crippled by his response. I don’t want his presence or his absence. I am proud of my book, and I wouldn’t change a word of it. I wish I’d never written it. No, I don’t. Yes, I do. No, I don’t.

Brian Doyle

 

BRIAN DOYLE
is the editor of
Portland Magazine
at the University of Portland, in Oregon — the best university magazine in America, according to
Newsweek
, and “the best spiritual magazine in the country” according to Annie Dillard. Boyle is the author of five collections of essays, two nonfiction books (including
The Grail
, about a year in an Oregon vineyard), and a new collection of “proems” called
Epiphanies & Elegies
. His books have three times been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, and his essays have appeared in
The Atlantic
,
Harper’s
, and
Orion
, and in newspapers around the world. His essays have also been reprinted in four
Best American Essays
anthologies. He is contributing essayist to
The Age
newspaper and
Eureka Street
magazine in Australia.

 

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped. Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, as if they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise
, wrote John the Apostle,
and the elements shall melt with a fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up
.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

There is no fear in love
, wrote John,
but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath torment
.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

Their passing away was thought an affliction, and their going forth from us utter destruction
, says the Book of Wisdom,
but they are in peace. They shall shine, and shall dart about as sparks through stubble
.