The Case of the "Dead" Brother

Once I heard a poet read a poem about his brother who had died a tragic death. The audience was deeply moved. Afterward, some people came up and asked him more about his brother. “I don’t have a brother,” he said, somewhat airily. “Do you assume my poem is about some factual truth?” I was offended. Others were, too. WHY we were is the interesting question.When what we write appears to be truth, is it okay to lie? This is an issue that merits some looking into. And has been—most recently for me at a panel discussion by Rainier Writing Workshop faculty members Sherry Simpson, Mary Clearman Blew, Dinah Lenney, and Scott Nadelson, on “Why Genre Matters.” I didn’t have a chance to say anything in the open discussion, so I’ll take a crack at it now. If you want more background and pertinent references, you should read Dinah Lenney’s great blog at http://college.usc.edu/thegamut/2012/02/hurroo-hurroo/.The discussion, nay, the vehement arguments, about where written “truth” may give way to fiction certainly didn’t begin with what we call “creative nonfiction.” The truth is “messy, incoherent, aimless, boring, absurd,” wrote Janet Malcolm in The Crime of Sheila McGough, later comparing accurate narratives to a shapeless housecoat. “The truth does not make a good story; that’s why we have art.”Journalist John D’Agata obviously agreed, inventing a category he calls “essayist” rather than journalist, to describe his unfortunate blend of fact and fiction. And of course James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces “fooled” Oprah and lured over 3.5 million readers.I first think of Hawthorne’s Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, where he compares the “romance” (writing that may depict events that can’t actually happen) to the “novel” (writing that must remain true to what could happen).” Here’s Hawthorne:WHEN A WRITER calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation.Hawthorne’s thinking seems to underlie the current argument for messing with the truth: A nonfiction piece claims to have actually happened. Fiction can go anywhere. But both might—and sometimes do—claim the right of a “romance” –to go anywhere, based on the “truth of the human heart” rule.My thoughts. Hang with me here. I’m going somewhere with this:1. Humans began to make miraculous intellectual progress at the beginning of The Enlightenment. What happened was that we began to want to verify facts. The scientific method was born. For something to be “true,” it must be subjected to a test: it must hold true through trial after trial under equal conditions. It must be verifiable. Truth is true under all conditions, or it is not true. What we got from this, as a human race, is what I will call purchase. We got a foothold, someplace to stand so that we could see what the next level of thinking might be.2. The intellect is important not only for our intellectual life, but for our spiritual life. We have used it to build scaffolding which has enabled us to see and understand subtle spiritual truths.3. Caveat: There is no such thing as truth and when we look closely, we know it. All is a swirling mass. All is mystery. We invent what we call truth as a way to live within the swirling mass. And sure enough, “truth” does allow us to do that.4.I would like that poem to have been about a real brother. I would like when someone tells me something in a poem or an essay that claims to be fact, that it is fact. If I can trust that, a barrier is removed between me and the voice of the poem. I feel the poem on a more human level. It was you. It is your words.5. I see something of the “language” poets’ point of view in that dead-brother-poet’s response. Language poets ask me to be entranced, arrested, amused, intellectually stimulated, almost exclusively by the play of words on the page. That poet who wrote about his “brother” had us feeling sad, touched by his death. But the poem turned out to be only the poet’s game. If the poem had been ABOUT how one invents a brother, and why, and what that means to the speaker, that would be another thing.6. Tell me the truth or the world will fall apart. Tell me what you say is a story, or frame it so that I know it’s a story, and I’ll willingly suspend my disbelief. I’ll love doing that, and may be changed by it as much as if it were your true story. Deceive me and you’ve violated the basic human contract: we’ll find ourselves living in the hell fires of, for example, this particular political season.  

Getting Educated, or, Carrying the Gunny-sack

I’ve been thinking about my higher education in light of reading Mary Clearman Blew’s wonderful memoir, This is Not the Ivy League, (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2011). Blew is of my generation. She grew up on a farm in Montana, graduated from a one-room schoolhouse, and “escaped,” as she says, and pushed her way through graduate school, against the pressures of the ‘50s—inherited from our parents—to be a conventional housewife. There I am, like Blew, with all that stuff in my head: “Get dinner on the table every night at six,” “Be the quiet domestic support behind your man,” “Ambition for a wife and mother is a slightly unsavory word.” Not that I said this to myself, or that anyone said it to me, as they did to Blew, but it was in the air. I was the oldest, carrying a gunny-sack of invented responsibility. (Look up gunny-sack if you’re too young for that word.) But I had a burning desire, not invented by me but as much a part of me as my arms and legs. As it was for Blew.Desire for what? It felt like a desire to get out, as Blew put it. Get out of invisibility, get out of role-playing, get out from under my father’s domination of my mind, get out of what felt like prison and was really my mother’s generation’s prison, not mine. It feels to me as I look back, as if I were the possessor of a deep underground river that pushed up around rocks and tree roots, coming up whenever there was a crack in the surface. It was like a poem, you might say. There was no exact paraphrase for it. It was impossible to articulate, but words could surround it so that the outline of it might be felt. The more words, the better.I think I will write more about my education. I have an essay in my memoir, Driving with Dvořák, called  “I Am Sick of School,” where I get a start on that. I think I will next pick up at the end of high school and write, as Mary Blew does, primarily of college and graduate school. I hadn’t thought much about that time, since then, (it seems like yesterday), but her book turns me back to it—the hours bent over the books when the children were sleeping, the strain of trying to be a good mother and a good student, of watching my marriage deteriorate as the gap between what I wanted and what my husband wanted widened, of watching the gap widen between who I came to see I was and who he was. I should not have married so early, but the needs that that implies, for a while, trumped the other. Or, I thought they were compatible. Sometimes they are, but when you’re seventeen, it’s not bloody likely.There was one afternoon. I stood by the window of my graduate student office at the University of Arkansas, way up on the top floor of Kimpel Hall. It was a Sunday. I had my stacks of books and notes. I had remarried and my new husband was looking after the children while I was devoting the entire day to study. It was a gorgeous fall day as only the Ozarks can be gorgeous. I could see across the campus from there—bright red leaves, yellow falling leaves, blue sky, blue haze of hills in the distance. What, oh what, was I doing? Why, oh why, was I leaving my children with their stepfather on a beautiful, precious weekend day, and cloistering myself with this dusty language, language, language, once-twice-three times removed from the perfect, vibrant, tangible world? I had no answer. I cried a bit and went back to my books.It was that underground river. Trying now to speak of it in other words, I think I would call it my longing to use myself, to find and use all there is of me, heart and mind. to use every part my parents were unable to use in themselves. To leave nothing stunted in me. A grand wish. At worst, it can turn into a fierce solipsistic trajectory. At best—can’t it widen both heart and mind to include everyone and everything? At best, it is the Bodhisattva vow, to postpone entering Nirvana until all beings are saved.P.S. Speaking of memoir, I just returned from listening to a panel discussion by Rainier Writing Workshop faculty members Sherry Simpson, Mary Clearman Blew, Dinah Lenney, and Scott Nadelson, on “Why Genre Matters.” I didn’t have a chance to say anything in the open discussion, so I will take my turn by blogging about this next week.