Do we need to tell all in personal essays? Thoughts on the art of restraint—
I sat on a stool at the
Varanda Bar and Grill amid the Victorian glitter of The Partridge Inn feeling
quietly triumphant. In a few months my
first book, A Geometry of Lilies would be published. A collection of personal essays about my
family, it had been a long time coming, the first essay written some five years
earlier, and writing ‘five years’ gives the wrong impression. The book was in fact a culmination of a
lifetime of failed poems and stories and essays, the first true rendering of a
voice that had taken more than two decades to hear itself think. I had made it mine, and it was just about as
much of me as I—or anyone else—could stand.
Now, at last, it had made a book and the book was set for publication.
Many
times during this twenty-year gestation period I had almost given up. I suppose you could say that I gave up
daily. But one time in particular—after
having the manuscript just miss winning an award that would ensure
publication—I became very discouraged and decided that I had finally had
enough. This is it, I told myself. A lifetime of meditation at the writing desk
had come to naught. From now on, I
vowed, I will give my mornings to sleep, not words. I was already scheduled to go to The Sandhills Writer’s
Conference in Augusta. I would go,
endure the perfunctory encouragement, absorb the latest grim figures about the
chances of publication, and when it was over quit for good.
It
was while sitting at the bar in the Partridge Inn, beer in hand, contemplating
long mornings under the covers, that I first caught a glimpse of George
Garrett, the writer, jovial as usual, with friends. Later, I sat in on his session which was funny and delightful.
Writers submit manuscripts to magazine editors for publication and live
under an unwritten rule that they should submit to one magazine at a time, but
since publishers often hold manuscripts for months, occasionally years, it
usually takes more than a lifetime to publish this way. Garrett’s solution: submit to many
magazines, but change the name of the story each time. After all, he said with a wink, “no one
reads them.”
In
a private session over my manuscript, George heard my sad tale, encouraged me
to persevere, told me about Sam Pickering—the best stylist in America, he said,
and one of our most neglected writers—and, when the conference was over, gave
me an award.
Award
in hand, and George’s words still ringing in my ears, I decided to stick it
out. A few months later, I did find a
publisher for the book. I read galleys,
scrutinized proofs, filled out a marketing form, and had my picture taken. It was going to happen. So when the form for the next annual meeting
of the Sandhills Conference arrived, I decided to go. I wanted to say thanks. I
also wanted to gloat, I suppose. The
Partridge Inn is good for gloating. It
was once known as the Tennessee Williams Arms, and is the home of golfers
during the greatest of all golf championships, The Master’s. Warren G. Harding stayed here in 1923 and
played golf in those ebullient years of normalcy before the stock market crash,
gloating I am sure. The Partridge Inn
has a look appropriate for the proud. It is stately with a simple grandeur that
makes it a fitting place for one who, though worn and battered, has hacked a
way to a lifelong goal. Jack Nicklaus
probably sat at this bar, perhaps in this very stool, I thought, sipping my bourbon. Yes, I thought, setting my drink on a
napkin, glancing at the casual crowd
out on the Varanda, and smiling broadly, this room has celebrated many
successes.
I was, clearly, ready for a fall. It arrived in the form of a young couple
that sat beside me at the bar. I wish I
could remember them better. I don’t
even know their names. She was brunette
and cute, in her twenties, and he, probably a little older, was blond with a
scraggily beard. They came to the bar
every Friday to unwind and relax from a week of work before heading out to see
the Greenjackets, the local minor league team.
We talked about the Partridge, about Augusta, about the difference
between the city now and only a week before the when The Master’s was in town. Since we were in the Partridge, where pride comes naturally, they bragged on their
local ball team, telling me how much fun the Greenjackets were to watch. They were so friendly and kind that I
couldn’t resist gloating. I told them
about my book.
“Is
it a novel?” she asked.
“No,
personal essays.”
“About
your family?”
“Yes,”
I said, adding, “ mostly about my family now.”
There
was a pause here—a premonitory one I later decided. They glanced at each other.
Neither of them liked this idea of
a book about family.
“I
could never write about my family,” he said, taking a sip from his beer. “Too
much shit happened. I would have to say
too many negatives.”
“Oh,
it’s not like that,” I told him. “I don’t write anything negative about
anyone in the book, except myself.”
That’s
when he flattened me—with a word.. “I couldn’t do that,” he said, drinking down
the rest of his beer. “It would be
dishonest.”
Dishonest. I had never thought about that, and, in a
matter of minutes, while my new friends went onto another subject, I did a
quick mental inventory of each essay in my manuscript, checking for lies. Not lies that I had committed—there are none
that I know of in the book. But lies of
omission? There were plenty. A Geometry of Lilies is the account
of a dull life—a dullness that generates an extra measure of attention for the
ordinary and the overlooked which is the book’s true subject. No one in my household suffers from physical
or verbal abuse, or odd or debilitation diseases. Nor do we know the eviscerations of poverty or the vacuity of
great wealth, and we haven’t murdered each other—not yet. Our skeletons fit pretty neatly in our
closets,.
But
there are skeletons. We have had our
share of disappointments, embarrassments, and quarrels—few of which make it in
the book. I did write about my father’s
death—it is a disturbing coda at the end of the book—but he died quietly in a
hospital bed and his death was disturbing only to me and members of my
family. The one truly horrible event in
my life happened when I was a child—it was the suicide of my mother—and I try
to write about it in the book, but the essay is really about the fact that I
don’t, and apparently can’t, remember anything but bits an snatches of that
terrible time, so that the horrors of that essay are implied.
Omissions? Well, I had left much out. Was I trying to paint a rosy but untrue
picture of my family? Was the book dishonest?
“Let’s go to the ballgame,” my new
friend said. I had become preoccupied,
and he probably thought that he had said the wrong thing. “We’ll show you the most beautiful sight in
town. Our treat.”
So we paid our bill and
headed for the ballpark in one of those tiny foreign cars, with his wife in the
back seat, her knees to her chin.
At
the end of September in 1796, Mary Lamb—the sister of the essayist Charles
Lamb—murdered her mother with a knife seized from the kitchen table. Mary Lamb was, by all accounts, a quiet and
pleasant young woman who earned money for the family by taking in needle-work. She was intelligent and bookish having, as
Lamb later wrote, “tumbled down early, by accident or design, into a spacious
closet of Good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and
browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.” The quarrel that led to her mother’s death
arose while a young serving girl was setting the table for dinner. Who knows what triggered the fight? It had been a hard year for the Lamb family. Always poor, they had been forced by
circumstances to move to a place on Little Queen Street in London. The father, suffering from premature
senility, had become like a child, and the mother who did not seem to
understand her talented and sensitive children, had become a virtual
invalid.
In
an inexplicable fury, Mary attacked the servant girl with one of the table
knives, and when her mother interceded, Mary stabbed her mother and began
throwing other knives about the room, wounding her father in the process. All of
this happened quickly because Charles, who was just in another room,
heard the commotion, but arrived too late.
By the time he could wrestle the knife from his sister’s hand, their
mother was dead.
Mary never went to
trial. She was sent, instead, to an
asylum—the “mad-house,” Lamb called it—and diagnosed as insane. Later she was released into the custody of
her brother, Charles, who—against the urges of members of his family and much
to his credit—took care of her for the rest of his life. Mary was schizophrenic and periodically,
when her bouts with insanity would return, she would have to be restrained—sometimes
with a straightjacket. According to
Alfred Ainger, Lamb’s biographer, the
attacks were “attended with forewarnings’ so that brother and sister had time
to take the necessary precautions and head for the hospital. In Ainger’s book, one of Lamb’s friends
tells the story of the Charles and Mary “walking hand in hand across the fields
to the old asylum, both bathed in tears” (32).
“I was at hand only time
enough to snatch the knife from her grasp,” Lamb wrote in a letter to his
school friend, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The murder happened in a rush—as these events usually do—and Lamb
did not actually see it, but he did see the aftermath, an image of chaos that
no doubt haunted him for the rest of his life.
We can imagine what he surveyed
about him as he struggled to hold his sister’s wrists in his hands: his father
wounded and whimpering in the corner, and the servant girl hysterical, knives
and dishes and silverware scattered everywhere, his mother dead and bleeding on
the floor. His whole world
shattered. Lamb later became famous for
writing original and beautiful essays.
He wrote often of his family—under the thin disguise of
pseudonyms—especially his father and sister.
But never once, in all of his published writings did he mention the
events of that September day in 1796.
What is the truth to an
essayist? My new friends took me to an
Augusta Greenjackets baseball game.
Though a minor league team, the Greenjackets have a long history they
told me, going back to the early days of professional baseball. Ty Cobb started with the team in 1904 and by
the end of the 1905 season had a 326 batting average with 134 hits and 40
stolen bases. When Warren G. Harding
came to Augusta, his wife came along, but while he played golf, she went to the
ball game, to watch the Greenjackets play.
We
sat in the bleachers—got some beer and pop corn—and settled back as players
took the field, but my head was still spinning with thoughts about my
book. Are essayists responsible for the
distortions created by all that they leave out of a book? Nothing but the truth—okay, we might grudgingly concede that as an obligation,
but the whole truth? What is the whole truth?
Looking back on that night,
I must admit I remember the players as they waited in the on deck circle
knocking mud form their cleats with the bat—we sat so close and they were all
so young, just boys, really. I remember
the thick yellow glow of the lights on the field, and beyond the home run fence
in center field the lovely sight of the old moon—a fat pumpkin—rising over all.
But I don’t know who the Greenjackets played, or the score, or any big
plays. What most spectators would
consider important about that night is left out. My mind was elsewhere, on my obligations, my story.
And
what was the truth about that night? A
couple took me to a ballgame with the
moon rising over center field. I don’t
remember the name of the couple, who won, who the Greenjackets played, or the
name of a single player on the field, but that is not important for what that
night meant to me. For me there is no such thing as the whole truth, because
truth is always tied to a thought that is larger than its fact—that subsumes
and absorbs the facts. The truth that night was an offhand comment that stung at
first but later brought a revelation and a rising moon that made the night
luminous in the mind many years later.
Like that moon rising over an illuminated field, truth is brilliant, but
partial, ascendant in its own glow. All
else—all the other facts—are irrelevant darkness.
Writers
like Lamb and me use private events to write about public themes. We may be the “groundwork” of the book—the fodder that fattens it—but we are
not its subject. The irony is that most
essayists talk on and on, drawing on events and revealing much about
themselves, but—and this is the essential point—it is not their own lives to
which they must be true.