The Australian-born, London-based writer Clive James found acclaim throughout the English-speaking world during his life, as a writer, television presenter, raconteur, literary celebrity, poet, reviewer, even actor, as long as you omit the United States. This exception, noted Ian Shircore, was especially clear with James’ memoir.
The secret of the continuing popularity of Unreliable Memoirs is its child’s-eye view of the complexity and ambiguity of so much that happens to us as we grow towards adulthood. But the title itself wrecked its chances in America, where the New York Times and others piled in to argue, with po-faced gravity, that any memoir that was unreliable was simply not worth having.
Shircore wrote those words after a conversation with James—describing how the failure of a book that contains wit and wordplay and misdirection might reveal a little about American culture.
“That was enough to finish it off in the US,” Clive told me. “I had three publishers there in as many years. America’s got a world to dominate. It can’t waste time fooling around with writers who say: ‘What I’m telling you here might not be true.’
Although this claim might appear straightforward, it is worth noticing that James’ always plants his tongue firmly in his cheek—which is perhaps a bit troublesome when you arrive in the land of literalism.
My mind floated back to these words during a conversation this week, a conversation that seemed to follow a line of inquiry that I’ve both come to expect but not quite come to understand. These moments arrive whenever someone mentions something that I’ve written and I discover that I’m at a distance from my own words. Not necessarily disowning the words, not necessarily aghast at my former self, not necessarily of a different opinion, but simply at a distance—much like seeing a childhood picture from an event that I don’t remember.
Although I am always grateful and appreciative whenever my writing is examined with care, how I should proceed, in these moments, isn’t exactly clear. Describing my own words as distant, as unknown even to me, comes across—I’ve discovered—as either incomprehensible or crazed. Writers are forever stuck between childhood and adolescence, and just want the adults to take them seriously, even when they don’t apply the same standard to themselves.
I do always strive to be faithful to my perceptions, to articulate with accuracy my emotions and opinions and conclusions exactly as they arise, yet I know that these are fluctuating, ephemeral sensations, that what I believe in this moment won’t match what I believe in the next moment. This makes writing, even polemical and passionate writing, akin to lines in a journal, where the posture that’s captured appears to dissolve when you turn the page. Accurate, ideally, for a specific moment in time, but not necessarily a permanent reflection of the writer.
This wouldn’t be controversial or even worth mentioning if the subject were conversation. Only the most tedious among us expect a seamless consistency in every spoken sentence. Changing your mind, tacking along a different line, adjusting your conclusion, even temporarily embracing a posture that you don’t believe—these are understood traits in the spoken word, part of a lively and impassioned and intriguing conversation, and almost always expected within an argument.
Perhaps there’s a distinction with writing. Perhaps the perception of permanence that some people feel with writing creates this distinction. Perhaps writing feels so arduous because the act, for some people, resembles carving into stone tablets. What’s placed on the page must last. It must count. It is irrevocable, conclusive, which means that it must be perfect. If you’re going to write a page, as goes this mentality, you want it to resemble a timeless photograph, one that’s forever in style and never embarrassing, rather than one of those old pictures that exhibits an awkwardness that you’d rather forget. And of course this is an impossible and ridiculous standard—noticing that you’re a different person at the bottom of a paragraph doesn’t imply that the top of the paragraph reveals a mistake.
Yet I would want to push the point further. There’s more to artful, literary writing than merely revealing those transformations of character. The sensibility in a line isn’t required to meet the standards of evidence in a courtroom. If the goal is a literary line, half-truths are worthwhile, as are partial-truths and quarter-truths, and there’s nothing wrong with the playfulness of oblique truths and useful lies. Besides, if you do happen to know what you believe, there’s no reason to write or read the page. A writer who knows exactly what they believe and who remains consistent and resolute and who delivers sentences that are preplanned and prepackaged delivers sentences that are pretty much equivalent to what’s called propaganda.
One of the most quoted lines in American literature—quoted enough, in fact, that many people don’t recall the source—comes from Walt Whitman, and stresses this most literary of points:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
You might discover that you’re one person with your family, another person with your colleagues, a third person with your friends, and, on some occasions, when the timing is just right, a transformation in your character so profound occurs that it makes the entire day feel vertiginous. All of these selves are still, of course, you, however difficult it might be to shape a single person from the mixture. And once you’re aware that your angriest and happiest self are equally you, you’ll feel a bit cubist: you’ll be a person who always has at least one more side. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that all of these selves are a little bit true and a little bit not.
If that nudges close to your experience of life, then you’ll be perfectly content with literature that’s oblique, that explores behavior from an angle, that prefers to dance alongside a point rather than state it directly—because you’ll find that dance to be absolutely necessary to comprehend the confusions and contradictions of life. It will require, moreover, a few literary paradoxes to confront the paradoxes of the world, such as the fact that dishonest irony only expresses a lie if you’re tediously literal.
I don’t always write what I believe. What I do, however, is always attempt to inhabit a sensibility that feels accurate for the particular moment, whether that’s straightforward, oblique, or completely unknown even to me. The artfulness, at least in my mind, in delicacy, misdirection, subtlety, in the presentation of an incomplete picture, is in exploring that sensibility. Because every person contains multitudes, and because every group contains an infinite number of those multitudes, I just might write some lines that feel distant. And, if I’m lucky, my old writing will always feel a little sour, uncomfortable, even distasteful, because that means that I’ve continued to change as a person. The alternative, to feel that my past work reflects my current state, seems like it would reflect a stultified, withering life.
I understand what you're talking about. I submit stories to magazines, and to me, the self who sends them off is like a star in the sky, because by the time the editors read my work and judge it, I'm not the person who wrote the piece anymore. That person is me, but an outdated version of myself. Worse still, some of my older work I want to either throw away or overhaul, because otherwise it doesn't reflect how I think or write now, in the present. Writing in this sense gets a bit sisyphean, and it makes me feel a little crazy. As for how I think, that too is a trail of snakeskins I leave behind me. The process of me becoming 'the definitive me' will never finish.
This is an absolutely fabulous essay. A beautiful expression of the shifting sensibilities of a writer. Or even, a writer's search for truth (or some version of it).
Where do you stand on the issue of unreliable anecdotal writing? Is misdirection and shrewdly-applied exaggeration worth elevating a story? Or is it narrative sin?