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Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
at GCSU |
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TELLING THE
TRUTH THAT MATTERS
(On Art, Writing, and Creative Nonfiction)
By: Mimi
Schwartz |
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When creative nonfiction writers
tell a story more than one way, readers get suspicious. “Well, which is
true?” they ask, as if you’ve betrayed nonfiction and “creative” really means
fiction. Not so if you are Edouard
Manet, I decided at the In the first painting, dark, impressionistic
and chaotic, a cluster of scruffy men, some in sombreros, fire in a field or
forest half-lit by gun smoke. In the second, the gun smoke is gone, its color
reappearing in distant clouds while, in the foreground, soldiers in gray
uniforms with white belts take aim on a clear day. In the third painting, the gun smoke
returns, weaving like a scarf around the necks of three men being executed.
Now the setting is a stadium. Now clarity replaces chaos. Now peasants, in
mid-canvas, lean over the rim of the stadium’s wall, as witnesses, and behind
them a cemetery sits high in the background. The people who packed this exhibit seemed unconcerned
by discrepancy. They were absorbing each painting as a total experience,
letting one sink in before the next one took over. I would have done the same if I hadn’t been
thinking about truth telling in creative nonfiction and its relationship to the
accuracy of small details. Does it matter, for example, if you can’t remember
your second grade teacher’s dress (even as you imagine it red. Or was it
blue)? That became a topic of lengthy debate on one panel about ethical
dilemmas at the 2007 Nonfiction Now Writers’ Conference, held in Yet at the MOMA, looking up at Manet’s
three canvases, “Which is true?” seemed beside the point. Each version felt authentic, persuasive,
and true—even as the angle of vision kept shifting, along with the soldiers’
outfits, the lighting, the place of execution, and who was watching. What mattered was the emotional power
created, successively, by an artist whose concern for this major political event
of his day was, in Manet’s words, more for “expressing the temporal moment
than recording a historically accurate depiction of it.” His sense of that
moment shifted over time (the paintings were done over several years), and so
the colors, movement, light, and what was in the foreground and background
also shifted. Had it not, I would have been looking at two drafts of a final
rendering, not three moments of one true story revisited. YES, we say to our Manets, giving
permission, even demanding, the alchemy of imagination and fact to recreate
history visually, as art. YES we also say to our poets, fiction writers, and
playwrights, although the more distant the history, the easier we grant “poetic”
license. Shakespeare gets a pass when his Macbeth differs from its
source, The Hollingshead Chronicle; but Michael Frayn’s Even poets may be challenged on accuracy.
The fact checker of The New Yorker gave Stephen Dunn a hard time about
his poem “Economics and the Origin of Words” when he couldn’t verify the details
about English burial practices that he found on the Internet: …One
out of thirty coffins, though, had
scratch marks on the inside; they'd
been burying people alive. It
made good sense to
put a string around those limp wrists, lead
it up through coffin and ground and
tie it to a bell. Someone then had
to sit in the graveyard all night -- a
good job, you'd think, for the Middle Ages equivalent
of a retiree. Thus
he worked "the graveyard shift," and
a few people actually were "saved by
the bell," or became "dead ringers." But
in fact the jobs went to terrified boys, quick
to shovel when that bell clanged. The poem was
published, but in the American Poetry Review. The
most tentative YES is given to creative nonfiction writers, trying to carve
out the turf between journalism and fiction by combining reportage with
storytelling techniques. Even personal history can set off a firestorm, as
Vivian Gornick discovered at a talk she gave at Creative
nonfiction writers, I want to argue, need the same freedom to discover “the
Truth that matters.” They too must move beyond an over-allegiance to
reportage that blocks the imagination from finding the essential truths. To
do that, they may shift, like Manet, what’s in the foreground and the
background—and recolor the light of the day. And they may revisit the same
landscape more than once, looking, as Manet did, for new discoveries. Our best writers find them, as Scott
Russell Sanders shows in two essays involving his childhood and his father.
In the first, “Under the Influence,” Sanders shines a harsh light on his
father’s drinking and its effect on his family. In the second, “Reasons of
the Body,” he recreates, with empathy and nostalgia, their good relationship
playing basketball during those same years. Here’s the opening of “Under the
Influence”: My father drank. He drank as a
gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles
food—compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not
because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living. That is how the
story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling and
forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer. The story continues for my
brother, my sister, my mother, and me, and will continue so long as memory
holds. In the perennial present of memory, I
slip into the garage or barn to see my father tipping back the flat green
bottles of wine, the brown cylinders of whiskey, the cans of beer disguised
in paper bags. His Adam’s apple bobs, the liquid gurgles, he wipes the
sandy-haired back of a hand over his lips, and then, his bloodshot gaze
bumping into me, he stashes the bottle or can inside his jacket… and we both
pretend the moment has not occurred. In Sanders’ second essay, the father who guzzled “flat green bottles” is now coaching basketball in a driveway outside the garage:
… He had taught me how to dribble, how to time my jump, how to follow
through on my shots. To begin with, I could barely heave the ball to the
basket, and he would applaud if I so much as banged the rim. I banged away,
year by year, my bones lengthening, muscles thickening. I shuffled over the
concrete to the jazz of bird song and the opera of thunderstorms…. [And then]
There came a day when I realized that I could out-leap him, out-hustle and
outshoot him. I began to notice his terrible breathing, terrible because I
had not realized he could run short of air. I had not realized that he could
run short of anything. When he bent
over and grabbed his knees, huffing, “You’re too much for me,” I felt at once
triumphant and dismayed. Alcoholism, like Manet’s gun smoke, practically disappears in this essay. It recedes from foreground to background, being mentioned only once in half of one sentence that begins: “In his sober hours and years, which are the hours and years I measure him by…” And yet this father-son account—set in the same time period and in almost the same place—feels as authentic and true as the first. Such shifts in details, mood, and angle of
vision are how we challenge the easy labels we are prone to stick on the
past, particularly on family members—the mean father, the bitchy sister, the
sweet grandmother—and make new inroads into understanding our past. I have my
students read Sanders’ two essays to show them that they can write about the
same people in the same time frame without getting emotionally stuck in one
worn groove of memory. Manet’s three paintings were also shaped by the factual information available. In early news reports, no one knew who did the firing or where, and the mood of chaos is reflected in the dim light of confusion. Later, as reports came from more sources—newspapers, letters, drawings, and diaries—there was more to work with. New details led to new imaginings that led to a new insight of the moment. We are all relearning
our stories, if we are open to that and refuse the Johnny-one-note
impulse of storytelling. I’m thinking of my mother when I say that, the last
of my parents’ generation to know family stories about life in “What was it like as a child?” I’d ask. “Did I tell you how I fell off my bicycle and broke my nose?” “What was it like
fleeing “Did I tell you about the time the Gestapo came at night for the man upstairs?” I got to know the answer before I asked the question. She never wanted to go beyond that, never wanted one memory to contradict the next—or worse, lead to an unexpected one. It was too dangerous. Who knew what might surface? No matter what new information arrived, I suspect that my mother would tell the execution of Maximillian the same way every time. That
is why, when I tried to retrieve my family’s past while researching my book, Good
Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village, I turned to
strangers: thirty or so of my father’s former neighbors remembering one
little German village before, during, and after Nazi times. The same images appeared— the burning
synagogue, the rescued Torah, linzertorte, the black swastika, the white
cross. And the same echoes of memory: “We all got along…Decent people…Terrible
times…“What could they do?...What could we do?” –but the foreground and
background of story kept shifting. Sometimes a piece of story disappeared
only to resurface three interviews later, or not. Sometimes facts
contradicted each other. And sometimes part of one story broke off,
scattering into different stories that, collectively, would coalesce again
many memories later. As a story gatherer, not a journalist or an historian, I
liked that. I liked how the waters of truth muddied with each telling—and its
mix of chaos and clarity. I wanted to capture that mix, and also the way one
story bumped against another, challenging and informing what I knew or didn’t
know until fact, myth, and memory merged into something to hold onto. Usually
an inner urge makes us revisit the same story, to get it right, yet again.
But sometimes, as with Max Apple, the catalyst can be external and have good
results. A short essay about his grandfather in The New York Times
Magazine led to a movie studio requesting a screenplay, which led
to a book-length memoir. All three were called “Roommates,” all were about
his grandfather who lived with Max when Max was a child, and later a grad
student at the The first, a 1,200-word essay, “was
the purest form,” says Apple. “My grandfather had died a few years before and
I was filled with longing for him.” The second, the screenplay, was a
fictionalized version of the story, Apple found out after signing the movie contract. For the studio wanted Max, the
writer, to become Max, the doctor—and his grandfather, an Orthodox Jew to his
core, to become a Gentile. The screenplay took four years and was the hardest
to write. Partly, says Apple, because of the form: “Screenwriting isn’t made
for writers. Words don’t matter as much as tone set by music and images, so
what makes literature “literature” is not there.” But mostly, the challenge was “to take the
passion of the essay about my grandpa, turn him into someone else’s grandpa,
and still feel the same about him.” To his surprise, Apple liked the movie
despite the fictionalized parts, because Peter Falk who played his
grandfather “had instinctively captured the essence of the man I loved.”
There on the screen, evidently, Max saw the Truth that mattered. The memoir Roommates came last, “the
quickest book I ever wrote because it was all there, buried.” The scenes he
had no room for in the movie or short essay—especially involving his wife and
children—found their home. The opening chapter, for Apple, gave him the
greatest pleasure: the courtship with his wife at the university: “It was so
wonderful to have Debbie again, not the Debbie who was sick for so many
years, but the Debbie who was lively, funny, wonderful. I wanted the kids to
have that, their mother before the doctors, the nurses, and all the
sadness.” In the movie, she didn’t
have MS; she was killed in a car crash. The studio insisted because they
wanted to move the narrative along. But, unlike in Gornick’s Fierce
Attachments, that involved more than condensing facts; it meant making
them up. There was no public flack about the movie
“Roommates,” because there were no nonfiction expectations as with “A
Beautiful Mind,” a movie about
the mathematical genius, John Nash. Many came to the movie assuming it
was biography and felt betrayed by the movie’s poetic license. Schizophrenics
don’t actually see their delusions. The Nobel Prize ceremony in Carol Spindel in her essay “When Ambiguity
Becomes Deception: The Ethics of Memoir” talks about the issue of accuracy versus
truth—and how, in memoir, ambiguity just won’t go away: first, because what
the “I” remembers may differ from what others remember; second, because of
the needs of craft: to select and shape events so that they are not merely a
string of and-then-this-happened events. To achieve that, some writers compress time
and make composite characters; others oppose that. The question for writers
of repute is not intent, Spindel writes. “We all agree about truth but some
are more wedded to accuracy than others.” The best solution, she argues, is “spelling
out the compact” to let readers know what you are doing, the way Ruth Reichl
does in her introduction to Tender at
the Bone: This book is absolutely in the family
tradition. Everything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual. In
some cases I have compressed events; in others I have made two people into
one. I have occasionally embroidered. I learned early that the most important
thing in life is a good story. I’ve found,
personally, that what Spindel calls “truth in literary labeling” is usually
enough to keep the reader’s trust. As a reader, I had no problems with Kathy
Davidson’s composites in 36 Views of In each of Manet’s three paintings, one man is not shooting his gun. He wears a sombrero in one painting, a soldier’s cap in the others. He has a moustache twice, once not. But always he stands apart, holding his rifle as if he not ready or not willing to fire. Initially, I left him out of this essay, thinking Too much description! and Not that important! Then, after restudying the three paintings several times, I realized he was central to each version, so I added the phrase “one man looking away” to paragraph two. Now I realize that this man must end this essay. He has moved to the foreground of my story because he represents the struggle of creative nonfiction writers to decide what we may and may not leave out—if we want to write true to the experience. When I write fiction, there’s more leeway because I make up the world. I own the whole story. But I don’t own Manet’s art, which I’ve made central to this nonfiction essay. And the man who stands apart, the one I initially thought inconsequential, is central to Manet. I have the obligation to make room for him, to make him my own, if my intent is to “get to the bottom of the experience” as Gornick says, and be a writer that honors the marriage of ‘creative’ and ‘nonfiction.’ The coupling of these words is the big draw and the big challenge of the genre: to leave the messiness of real life in everything and then deal with it, no matter how many ways we tell one story. |
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