Earlier this week, while there were some interesting—and interestingly broad—reactions to the excerpts from the forthcoming/arriving book The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal printed in Harper’s (see here and here by KR Writer’s Workshop’s own Dinty Moore and here at Salon and here at The New Yorker), I was reading in a parallel vein the Paris Review interview of W. H. Auden from 1974. The interview opens on an interesting note:
INTERVIEWER: You’ve insisted we do this conversation without a tape recorder. Why?
AUDEN: Because I think if there’s anything worth retaining, the reporter ought to be able to remember it.
The interviewer, we imagine from this remark by Auden, will reconstruct the conversation—at least, given my poor transcription skills, it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine anyone taking steno quick enough to catch everything, though there are moments, like the following, when the improvisation, the ad libitum of the talk comes through:
INTERVIEWER: Have you ever finished a book you’ve hated?
AUDEN: No, I’ve skipped…actually I did, once. I read the whole of Mein Kampf because it was necessary to know what he thought. But it was not a pleasure.
It’s the interruption, the pause, the ellipsis…perhaps reconstructed from a strong recollection, but a different kind of information—information about rhythm, about tone—than the facts, the typical province of notes, and so evidence of…what exactly? A great memory? Good notes? The elegance or the boldness of the interviewer’s reconception of the conversation, in substance, verbiage, and gesture?
The same questions are raised in the first of the excerpts at Harper’s:
JIM FINGAL: Hi, John. I’m the intern who’s been assigned to fact-check your article. I was hoping you could clarify how you determined that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you’re using says thirty-one.
JOHN D’AGATA: Hi, Jim. I think maybe there’s some sort of miscommunication, because the “article,” as you call it, is fine. It shouldn’t need a fact-checker. I have taken some liberties in the essay here and there, but none of them are harmful. I’m not sure it’s going to be worth your time to fact-check this.
FINGAL: I hear you. But I think it’s just policy to fact-check all the nonfiction pieces the magazine publishes. So could you help me out with that number?
D’AGATA: All right. Well, from what I can remember, I got that number by counting up the number of strip clubs that were listed in the local yellow pages. However, since that issue of the phone book was long gone by the time I started writing this, I found that porn article that I gave the magazine so that they could check up on my estimate.
FINGAL: I guess that’s where the discrepancy is, because the number that’s mentioned in the article is different from the number you’re using in your piece.
D’AGATA: Well, I guess that’s because the rhythm of “thirty-four” works better in that sentence than the rhythm of “thirty-one,” so I changed it.
D’Agata takes three different positions in his exchanges over the question of the number of strip clubs in Vegas. First, he suggests that the fact-checking is somehow contraindicated by his liberal approach to the assignment—or as Hannah Goldfield writes in The New Yorker, the assumption that “that one must choose facts or beauty”—only to offer two contradictory positions. Did he count the clubs in a document he couldn’t find only to be constrained by a substitute, or did he make a conscious choice for rhythm? Did he remember correctly only to have to abandon his previous determination in the face of a fact from another source? Or did he choose a number for the pleasure, for the sound of it?
*
I’m interested in this particular moment because it seems here, in offering these two defenses with wildly different bases, D’Agata swings rapidly between two of the poles of the “lyric essay,” the form D’Agata helped create.
The Seneca Review, where D’Agata is an editor for the lyric essay, describes the form this way [emphasis mine]:
The recent burgeoning of creative nonfiction and the personal essay has yielded a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem. These “poetic essays” or “essayistic poems” give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.
The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.
The lyric essay does not expound. It may merely mention. As Helen Vendler says of the lyric poem, “It depends on gaps. . . . It is suggestive rather than exhaustive.” It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. Generally it is short, concise and punchy like a prose poem. But it may meander, making use of other genres when they serve its purpose: recombinant, it samples the techniques of fiction, drama, journalism, song, and film.
It would seem that, in responding to Fingal about the number of strip clubs, D’Agata offers an essayist’s defense—pointing to a source, however absent, pointing to memory—before turning to justify the number based on music, which would seem the poet’s defense, the “lyric” art of the “lyric essay.”
But is that poetry?
*
Niels Bohr is supposed to have said, “The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.” My teachers and, later, my colleagues seemed to press a similar point—that one should lie if it makes a better story. I’ll admit, that I, too, have used this tactic in workshops when I wanted a student to feel the muscle and movement of story, as opposed to narrative’s accounting. Who will care, we might say, if your childhood lunchbox was red instead of yellow, as it appears in your poem? Who will know?
But this license seems to me a tactic and, finally, a last resort rather than an early one—which may explain why I’m not teaching at Iowa.
I’ve been careful in my own work, especially in my ongoing project to memorialize the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement. Because I’m a white Southern man often writing about black men and women who are known to history because they were murdered by white Southern men—because I’m writing about men and women whose lives become visible to history precisely at the moment a racist community tries to erase them—I’ve come to believe that to take license, for whatever reason, replicates the power dynamic of the murder, with a white man establishing dominion over the life of the martyr. What I want instead is to help inscribe the life others sought to erase in a refusal of that erasure and its racial politics.
Still, I’ve made mistakes. I transcribed the name of a town incorrectly in a poem I submitted to The Southern Review, and Jessica Faust and Cara Blue Adams and Jeanne Leiby caught the error. I’ve written, in some cases, thinking I had the whole story, only to discover later new and significant elements: when I first wrote about the murder of Willie Edwards, Jr., in 1957, I knew that the murderers were well known to the authorities, that they had been tried, unsuccessfully, twenty years later—but I didn’t know that two of them had confessed or that the widow of one of those men sought out Edwards’ family to apologize to them. I had to discover these things later on, and the discoveries led to new poems that, in some ways, revise my earlier work, while leaving the record of my mistake. And this process has pushed my work in new ways, so that now it’s also about what I’d call “the fact of memory”—the seeming sureness of recollection that is nevertheless molten and mercurial.
*
We do make mistakes, all of us. But there is still, I think, something beautiful and reverent (and, too, beautiful in its reverence) in the correction.
I am reminded, in this regard, of Philip Levine’s “Magpiety,” which includes this startling, revealing, beautiful, responsible turn, with which I leave you (with apologies for the formatting, which isn’t working properly, so please visit the poem in its entirety):
People
expect you, and yet
you remain, still leaning forward
into the grasses
that if you could hear them
would tell you
all you need to know about
the life ahead.• • •
Out of a sense of modesty
or to avoid the truth
I’ve been writing in the second
person, but in truth
it was I, not you, who pulled
the green Ford
over to the side of the road
and decided to get
up that last hill to look
back at the valley
he’d come to call home.
I can’t believe
that man, only thirty-two,
less than half
my age, could be the person
fashioning these lines.
***
Postscript: More at Brevity blog.
