"Is lying about one's life precisely what memoirs are all about, a way of giving one's life a shape and a logic, a coherence it wouldn't have except on paper ... ?"
--André Aciman
I've only known, personally -- to my knowledge -- one guy who ever wrote a memoir -- that "Merry Prankster" childhood buddy I wrote about a year or so ago. In writing about his childhood -- the period of his life when I was around to keep an eye on him -- he never lied, as far as I can tell. (Unless grossly under-reporting the importance I played in his early life is a lie of omission.)
I've always viewed memoirs as a subspecies of history -- the history of one's own life. I've assumed a memoir relates the truth so far as the author's memory makes possible, aided by whatever written materials and interviews with others are available. Readers can rely on a memoir, as on a history, to determine what actually happened. But in an essay, "Rue Delta," in his 2011 collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, André Aciman argues otherwise.
In Aciman's memoir, Out of Egypt, he tells how, when he was 14, his Jewish family was expelled from Egypt, uprooting him from the Alexandria in which he had been born and raised. He tells how on his last night, he left his family's Passover celebration and walked alone to the Corniche, staring out at the Mediterranean and enjoying one last time the sights and smells of Alexandria. It's a moving description of the uprooting of a young boy, as it was obviously intended to be.
Aciman notes, however, that knowledgeable readers realized that the chapter in question had been published in a magazine five years earlier. In that magazine article, he had been accompanied on his walk by his younger brother. In "Rue Delta," he observes that he himself hated going for walks.
It was my younger brother, by far the more daring and enterprising of us two, who was more likely to have come up with the idea of taking such a walk on our last night in Egypt. ... My brother had a bold impish side to him. People used to say that he loved things, and that he knew how to go after them. ... I was never sure I loved anything, much less how to go after it. I envied him.
Why the change in the memoir? Aciman tells us that after the magazine article, his brother teased him about his rampant nostalgia, and so Aciman decided his brother had to go.
Removing my brother from the evening walk turned out to be embarrassingly easy -- almost as though getting rid of him had been a lifelong phantasy.
In the published book, Out of Egypt, Aciman admitted in a postscript that he had "revised" the earlier story to eliminate his brother.
In "Rue Delta," he further admits that his lyrical passage in Out of Egypt, lamenting his departure from Alexandria, actually described his brother's feelings. Aciman had never liked Alexandria himself. He felt he had been reared in a second-rate imitation of Europe. He could hardly wait leave and to move to the real thing.
But wait, there's more. He then confesses that his motivation for eliminating his brother -- whatever it was -- is actually beside the point. The very walk itself along the Corniche was totally fictional -- he never walked along the coast road his final night, either alone or with his brother. But -- he claims -- it was a fiction that expressed a truth.
This, to use Aristotle's word, is how I should have felt had I taken a last, momentous walk that night.
By the time he returned as a tourist to Alexandria, decades later, he "remembered" vividly the original scene he had made up and written, the scene of his brother and himself sitting on a stone wall, looking out at the Mediterranean. He could picture his brother, wearing shorts and carrying a sweater, as they walked along the shore road together.
And now? Now when he tries to remember rue Delta, that part of Alexandria where his family lived, he remembers his much later visit as a tourist, that visit when he recalled the fictional story of the last walk that he and his brother took along the Corniche. But even that memory is fading.
What I certainly can't remember is the real rue Delta, the rue Delta as I envisioned it before writing Out of Egypt. That rue Delta is forever lost.
As I mentioned in my last post, Aciman is an expert on the writings of Proust. I've never read anyone who describes so vividly the tricks memory plays on us, and the tricks we play on our memories.
Psychologists tell us that every time we remember an event, we "download" it into our conscious minds, savor it, make unintentional changes to it, and "upload" the revised memory again to our long-term memory, erasing the original. Over a lifetime, those tiny changes add up, leading us at times to be amazed and/or embarrassed by the discrepancy between what we feel we vividly remember and documentary evidence to the contrary. Aciman embraces these re-workings of memory. He not only embraces them, but admits that, in his writings, they are sometimes intentional.
Many writers would argue that a memoir is a work of art -- like a novel --rather than a strictly scientific account of factual occurrences. They will admit that they shuffle facts around a bit, to make the story more coherent, as Aciman describes in his opening quotation above. But Aciman carries the process one step further -- describing events that represent emotions that he never himself actually felt. Describing emotions that would merely seem to have been appropriate under the circumstances, emotions that are now -- despite his knowledge of their falsity -- the only ones he can "remember" experiencing.
He's candid, if a bit unnerving. I think I'll re-read portions of my friend's memoir.
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