Where the Truth Lies

Writers of personal narrative--that is, of memoirs and essays--are often accused by readers who meet them of not sufficiently resembling their own narrators. This happened a lot to George Orwell. The persona that he created in countless books and essays--that of Orwell the involuntary truth speaker, an essence of democratic decency--was something genuine that he pulled from himself to serve his writer’s need to be witness to the politics of his time; yet it was hardly his ordinary, everyday self. Orwell was a man often at the mercy of his own mean insecurities. In life he could act and sound ugly (revisionist biographies now have him not only a sexist and an obsessed anti-communist but possibly an informer as well). Readers who met him at dinner could be disconcerted.

It’s a problem for everyone who writes this kind of nonfiction: being both yourself and not yourself on the page. In 1972, I went to Egypt, under contract, to write a book about middle-class Cairenes. The Egyptians were warm, nervous, volatile. It had always been my style as a journalist to “be myself”--that is, to speak freely and provocatively and make a story out of the response I got--and I knew that here in Cairo I had, as well, to act naturally. But my full-blown, unmediated self--at the time I was on the barricades for radical feminism every minute that I was conscious--put most Egyptians off rather quickly. To do my work, I’d have to put a lid on it.

Soon enough, I found that if I responded to this instead of to that, kept habitual judgment to myself, asked fewer leading questions, remained absorbed when bored or restless, I was able to get on quite well. More than quite well. As I brought myself steadily under greater control, I felt myself seeing and hearing differently. I started enjoying the difference, even cultivating it.

Then an astonishing thing happened. The difference became an identity inside of which I began to live. In time, this identity became my instrument of illumination: It told the story of Egypt I wanted to tell. A few months after the book was published, a woman at a dinner party said accusingly to me, “You’re nothing like the woman in the book!” Later in the evening she said, “I take that back .... You’re something like her.” But the discrepancy disturbed her. She clearly had wanted to have dinner with the narrator of the book she had read, not with me.

Yet no one stopped reading Orwell because he’d been a disappointment in the flesh. Actually, he was even more a joy on the page if you had met him. There, his voice came through as one richly in service to an intelligence that was consistently clarifying and reliable. The reliability made the Orwell narrator trustworthy. The trustworthiness was irresistible.

Now, here’s a distinction worth making between the fictional narrator and the nonfictional narrator. The fictional narrator can be and often famously is unreliable; from “The Good Soldier” to “Remains of the Day,” the unreliable narrator in a novel serves a writer’s deeper intention. The ignorance or cunning or self-deception of such a narrator is often key to the larger tale’s being told. But this conceit will never work in nonfiction. Duplicate that unreliable narrator in a memoir and you have literary disaster. The nonfiction narrator has many of the rights and responsibilities of the fictional one but does not have the right to be unreliable. To the contrary, it must always persuade the reader that--to the best of its ability--it is speaking truth.

Speaking truth, of course, is sometimes a tricky affair, having more to do with what a memoirist intends than with what he or she actually says. Take Thomas De Quincey, one of the most neurotic narrators in English literature. In “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” he purports to tell us the real, true story of how he came to be addicted to opium. The prose is thrilling, and for the longest time we do not question anything De Quincey tells us. Yet much that is described begins to seem puzzling, not adequately explained or accounted for. We soon realize that the narrator is not coming clean. We can see what he himself cannot bear to look at directly. At the same time, De Quincey shows us the consequence of what he has lived through with such power that, reading between the lines, we are moved by the narrator’s inability to stare down his own terrible anxieties. The sheer cleverness of the account of his downfall--the self-deluded explanation for why he remained so long in the gutter--bears intimately on this very incapacity. What is important is that De Quincey lets us see--clearly and unmistakably--what he himself cannot. He falls in with prostitutes, thieves, traveling strangers whom he might describe variously as pathetic, suspicious, treacherous; but clearly these people are often mothering him, furthering his adventure, ensuring survival. We never feel that he is lying to us. It is this that makes him--in a large, rueful, touching way--a reliable reporter. We cannot forgive the nonfiction narrators who, in lying to themselves, also lie to us. Those are the narrators we declare unreliable and theirs the memoirs we judge untrustworthy.

I remember once teaching Lillian Hellman’s “An Unfinished Woman” at a small state university. My students were intelligent and responsive, but they hadn’t a clue as to who or what Hellman was (or Dashiell Hammett or the Cold War, for that matter). They came to the book with no opinions, preconceived or otherwise. And they didn’t like it. As Hellman is a skillful writer with a compelling sense of narrative, I was surprised and asked why. The narrator didn’t inspire confidence, they said. Essentially, they didn’t believe her. What do you mean? I asked. Do you think she’s making things up? No, they replied, but they didn’t think things had happened the way she was telling it. Why? I pursued. “She always comes out looking good,” one blurted out. “It’s as if she wrote it to let you know she’s better than the people around her,” said another. “Yeah,” they all chorused.

In other words, the writing had struck them as self-serving. Self-serving is the kiss of death. Once a piece of writing feels self-serving, the whole project is under suspicion. This was what had made Hellman an untrustworthy reporter to her young readers. It was doubly startling for me to reread “An Unfinished Woman” through their eyes. I remember being as enraptured as everyone else when the book appeared. “Ruthlessly honest,” we all thought, agreeing with the adoring reviews. Now, 20 years later, I saw what the students saw, and I no longer found it honest: That’s what you call a middle-brow success, at one with its moment but unable to stand the test of time. The students were right. She was not reliable. Edmund Gosse was reliable, Orwell was reliable, on occasion even Colette was reliable, but Hellman was not. Mary McCarthy had been wrong to accuse Hellman of lying. It hadn’t mattered where she put the ifs, ands and buts (that is, whether she was idealizing her life or not). It mattered a great deal, though, that she seemed to be speaking in service to nothing larger than her own small self.

Which leads us to the real obligation of the nonfiction narrator: She or he must be speaking about something, something beyond one’s own small self. In fact, one’s own small self is never the subject: It is always--and only--the means of engagement with a subject beyond the self. A perfect example of a writer who understands the principle very well--and who succeeds and fails admirably at it--is Joan Didion.

For Didion, ordinary everyday anxiety is an organizing principle. Out of it she has created a depressed quivering persona that serves her talent wonderfully and has achieved some of the finest essays in American literature. In her novels the anxiety is always in danger of becoming the story rather than serving the story--and there, in my opinion, she fails dismally. But in the essays, in which a subject beyond the self must be intersected--migraine headache, the Black Panthers, California and the American Dream--Didion’s gorgeous nerves are, more often than not, brought under brilliant control. It is in this form that her existential nervousness is developed with such artistry that insight transforms--and literature is made--through the naked use of the writer’s emotional disability.

The history of the nonfiction narrator is long indeed, reaching back at least to classical Greece and Rome in the West (Seneca and Plutarch) and to 10th century Japan in the East (Lady Murasaki’s “Tale of Genji,” Sei Shonagon’s “Pillow Book”). The more one reads of memoir and essay, the more easily one sees what a major contribution this narrator has made to the literature of the world. As the centuries have worn on, and the very idea of the self has undergone profound change--from whole to fragmented, familiar to alien, real to surreal--the reliable narrator in nonfiction has kept pace, reinventing itself with a strength and a resourcefulness that are quite remarkable.