Tell Me True

by Patricia Hampl

  Was I lying then?

  A novel, as the history of the genre from Madame de LaFayette through Defoe, Fielding, Dickens, and Dostoevsky makes abundantly clear, wants to pass for something it is not; it claims to be a history and, as such, narrates events as though they did in fact happen. A memoir, on the other hand, narrates them to read like fiction, which is to say, as though they may never have happened at all. Each borrows the conventions of the other. One tells things as though they were facts, the other as though they were not. A bad memoir may turn out to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A good novel, like life, sometimes does not.

  The distinction between the two is far, far more disquieting than might appear. If writing a memoir is a way of purging the mind of mnemonic deadweight, can lying about these memories or inventing surrogate memories help at all? Does lying actually facilitate such a release, or does it, as should make sense, stand in its way? Or does writing open up a parallel universe into which, one by one, we try to move all of our cherished belongings, the way immigrants, having settled in America, invite, one by one, each of their siblings?

  Or 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, a way of returning or of rehearsing such a return, the way some of us would like nothing better than to seek out an old flame, provided the reunion remain a fantasy? Is our life incomplete, incoherent, unless it is given an aesthetic finish? Does a literary sensibility foster the very homesickness that a memoir hopes to redeem? Or does being literary entail the possibility of lying so that, once our lies are embedded in the chronicle of our life, there is no way to remove them, the way it is impossible to remove alloy once a coin is minted or a piece of chewing gum once you’ve ground it into the pavement?

  Friends and readers familiar with the 1990 version of our last seder were stunned to find me taking this farewell night walk by myself in the 1995 version. What had happened to my brother, and why was he not with me on that walk? And, come to think of it, why was he entirely absent from the book? What kind of a memoir was this if you can remove one character, tamper with others, and—who knows—invent many others?

  Removing my brother from the evening walk turned out to be embarrassingly easy—almost as though getting rid of him had been a lifelong fantasy. Some last-minute alterations had to be made to accommodate the late-night dialogue with my brother to a silent monologue without him. These changes turned out to be unforeseeably propitious, as happens so frequently when we lose a few pages and are forced to rewrite them from scratch only to find that we’ve managed to say things we would never have thought of saying, and may have been longing to say but couldn’t, precisely because the things we had the good fortune to lose had stood in the way. The long elegiac sentences at the very end of Out of Egypt, which reviewers quote, were, in fact, written with one purpose only: to smooth out the ridges left by my brother’s disappearance, to elegize him away.

  And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never buy soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.

  This is not me speaking. It is my brother.

  The last sentence, in its original form in Out of Egypt, voiced an altogether different sentiment. I had never loved Egypt. Nor had I loved Alexandria, not its odors, not its beaches or its people. In fact, as originally written, this sentence ended with the rather anticlimactic but far more paradoxical words: “I suddenly caught myself longing for a city I never knew I hated.” But, by another irony, this statement was not in keeping with the sunny and ebullient portrayal of Alexandria I had adopted throughout the book. My brother loved Alexandria; I hated it.

  One of my very first readers immediately sensed this disparity between the word “hate” and the city I seemed to love so much and asked me to...reconsider. In light of my affectionate, at times rapturous descriptions of Alexandrian life, wouldn’t, perhaps, the word “love” have made more sense?

  No one could have been more right. Without a second’s doubt, I crossed out the verb “hate” and in its place put down the verb “love.” From hating Alexandria, I now loved it. Easy.

  That I was able to settle the matter so blithely, almost by flipping a coin, and go from one extreme to the other means either that I nursed ambivalent feelings for the city or that I could not decide who exactly the speaker was at that very instant: my brother or I. But even if it were my brother’s voice speaking through mine, my writing about Alexandria in such fond, sensual precision, and with such a yearning to recapture this or that moment, or to revisit this or that site, may have been an undisclosed desire on my part to be like him, to feel as he did, to stop being the person I was, and, if I could convince others that I had, to come to believe it myself.

  But there is another confession in store. The night walk on Rue Delta on our last night in Egypt, with or without my brother, never did occur. Everyone stayed home that night, morose and worried as ever, saying farewell to the occasional guests who came by and who, despite our repeated pleas, showed up again on the following morning.

  My last walk with my brother in Egypt was simply a fiction. As for the moment when, with or without him, I look out to the sea and promise to remember this very evening on its anniversary in the years to come, it too was a fiction. But this fiction grounded me in a way the truth could never have done. This, to use Aristotle’s word, is how I should have felt had I taken a last, momentous walk that night.

  Indeed, one of the very, very first things I did when I returned to Egypt thirty years later was to head out to Rue Delta to revisit my grandmother’s home. On Rue Delta, it kept coming back to me that I hadn’t forgotten the slightest thing, which was disappointing but equally comforting. After so many years, I was unable to get lost. I had forgotten nothing. Nothing surprised me. Even the fact that nothing surprised me failed to surprise me. Indeed, I could have stayed home in New York and written about this visit the way I’d written my memoir: at my desk, in front of my computer screen on the Upper West Side. All I kept thinking on returning to Alexandria was that I’ve read Proust, I’ve studied, taught and written about memory, written from memory, I know all the ins and outs of time and of prememory, postmemory, paramemory, of place visited, unvisited, revisited, and yet, as I look at these familiar buildings, this street, these people, and realize I am failing to feel anything but numbness, all I can think of is they’re already in my book. Writing about them had made them so familiar, that it was as if I’d never been away. Writing about Alexandria, the capital of memory, had robbed memory of its luster.

  On Rue Delta, the way to the sea seemed already paved for me. I began walking down a street that had not changed in thirty years. Even its odors, rising as they once did from street level to my bedroom three flights up, were not strange enough, while the odor of falafel brought to mind a falafel hole-in-the-wall on Broadway and 104th that had frequently made me think of the tiny summertime establishments in Alexandria, whose falafel now, ironically, smelled less authentic in Egypt than the falafel on Broadway.

  I had only to look at the way Rue Delta led to the shore and I instantly remembered writing the scene about my brother and how he and I had walked there on our last night in Egypt. All I remembered was not what had happened here decades ago but simply the fiction I�
��d written. I remembered something I knew was a lie. We had stopped here, purchased something to eat, and then crossed the coast road and heaved ourselves up to sit on that exact same spot on a stone wall along the seafront, watching the Mediterranean by night with its constellation of fishing boats glimmering on the horizon. I could see my brother as he was then and as he is now, gazing at the wild procession of Egyptian children waving their Ramadan lanterns along the sand banks, disappearing behind a jetty, reappearing farther off along the shore. I tried to remind myself that he was no longer present in the final version of this very scene, that I’d removed him from it and that I’d sat overlooking the sea by myself. But however I tried to reason with the memory of that first version, he kept popping back on Rue Delta, as though his image, like a Freudian screen memory, or like an afterimage, a shadow memory, no matter how many times I suppressed it, were a truth that it was pointless, even dishonest, to dismiss, even though I knew I had never been on that walk with or without him.

  Today, when I try to visualize Rue Delta by night, the only picture that comes to mind is the one with my brother. He is wearing shorts, a sweater slung around his neck, and is headed to the seafront, already savoring the sandwich he is planning to buy at a corner shop called the Falafel Pasha. I have no other memories of Rue Delta. Even the memory of my return visit has begun to fade. 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.

  D. J. WALDIE

  Public Policy / Private Lives

  • • •

  WITH AN EXCERPT FROM

  Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

  FROM Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

  In 1949, three developers bought 3,500 acres of Southern California farmland. They planned to build something that was not exactly a city.

  In 1950, before the work of roughing the foundations and pouring concrete began, the three men hired a young photographer with a single-engine plane to document their achievement from the air.

  The photographer flew when the foundations of the first houses were poured. He flew again, when the framing was done and later, when the roofers were nearly finished. He flew over the shell of the shopping center that explains this and many other California suburbs.

  The three developers were pleased with the results. The black-and-white photographs show immense abstractions on ground the color of the full moon.

  Some of the photographs appeared in Fortune and other magazines. The developers bound enlargements in a handsome presentation book. I have several pages from one of the copies.

  The photographs celebrate house frames precise as cells in a hive and stucco walls fragile as an unearthed bone. Seen from above, the grid is beautiful and terrible.

  My father’s kindness was as pure and indifferent as a certain kind of saint’s.

  My father did not have a passion for his giving; it came from him, perhaps after much spiritual calculation, as a product might come from a conveyer belt.

  The houses in this suburb were built the same way. As many as a hundred a day were begun between 1950 and 1952, more than five hundred a week. No two floor plans were built next to each other; no neighbor had to stare into his reflection across the street.

  Teams of men built the houses.

  Some men poured concrete into the ranks of foundations from mixing trucks waiting in a mile-long line. Other men threw down floors nailed with pneumatic hammers, tilted up the framing, and scaled the rafters with cedar shingles lifted by conveyer belts from the beds of specially built trucks.

  You are mistaken if you consider this a criticism, either of my father or the houses.

  • • •

  Public Policy / Private Lives

  I am a memoirist—a somewhat disreputable calling, given the elastic way in which some memoirists have recently treated the facts in their stories. Admissions of fictionalizing rightly cause general suspicion of the kind of writing for which I’m best known.1 Worse, I am a memoirist of the everyday—a suburban memoirist!—and I half wish that I could substitute dysfunctions in place of the commonplace way the light falls through the parkway trees of Lakewood, my nondescript Southern California neighborhood, or the flatness of its landscape, or the smallness of its mass-produced houses.

  Could anyone—why would anyone—make up so much ordinariness? What use would it have?

  Los Angeles is often cast as an extraordinary place—so lacking the ordinary that it almost ceases to exist. At the end of the movie Chinatown, at the end of all the false leads about water and power that clueless private eye Jake Gittes has doggedly run down, when Jake’s partner pulls him back from the sight of Evelyn Mulwray’s bullet-shattered face and the Chinese faces of the gawking bystanders crowd into the frame, and the meaning of Los Angeles is summed up with the line: Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown...in the end, Los Angeles is Chinatown, and nothing beyond Chinatown. The story of the city has dwindled to a conclusion we are powerless to affect, like a landscape watched in the rearview mirror of a car fleeing a crime scene. Robert Towne’s fable of murder, greed, incest, and hydraulics insists that all of us in Los Angeles are only along for the ride in a city full of ugly enigmas.

  Seen from the shadows of a black-and-white film or imprisoned in the glare of its celebrity culture, Los Angeles looks like a collection of absences: the absence of serious architecture, of urban intensity, of a center, of authenticity, and often, just the absence of New York. Finally, we are absent from the city, too, wrapped in our own reveries of another Los Angeles that is more adequate to the demands of desire. As the cultural critic Norman Klein has made clear, projecting our own absence onto the blank and indifferent landscape of the city necessarily makes Los Angeles a place of substitution and forgetting. Klein calls this problem “erasure,” and he locates it within a larger critique of modernism in its relation to the subordination, displacement, and substitution of memories.

  You and I can recite this city’s defeated, substituted recollections about itself like a catechism lesson: an elderly John Huston stole the water of the Owens Valley in 1934 (just as Chinatown proved, although that isn’t the way it happened). And a cartoon Dr. Doom shut down the beloved trolley lines to make way for freeways (just as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? showed, although that isn’t exactly true, either). Because we’ve seen True Confessions and L.A. Confidential, Lost Highway and Blade Runner, we have a sick certainty that we know what kind of dystopia Los Angeles is.

  The sunny narratives of Los Angelenos were made for the freeway’s fluidity, but that’s mostly gone now in gridlock and gas prices, and now our stories are trapped in brown neighborhoods on the city’s working-class flatlands, or broken down on cul-de-sac streets among mini-malls that all look alike with signs written in characters that are meaningful only to the neighborhood. But for the gridlock, a lot of us would be just passing through Los Angeles—where some are perpetual tourists and never citizens—on our way to newer and brighter suburbs in Montana or Las Vegas or to some internal exile of the spirit within the gates of a guarded subdivision or behind a security sign that promises “immediate armed response.”

  Because of this city’s Catholic past, its capture in the Mexican War and later fears of Mexican irredentism, its primal dread of race mixing, its speculative cycles of economic boom and bust, and the seductive power of its extravagant sales pitch, Los Angeles is perpetually shadowed by its noir double: the city of unmet desires, the city of willful amnesia, the disillusioned city that naïvely buys its own illusions, the city embodied in Phyllis Dietrichson’s house in Double Indemnity: sunny and phony on the outside and shuttered and menacing on the inside—a place for plotting murder.

  We hunger for stories in Los Angeles. In a city of amnesiacs, there are only a few narrative arcs that shadow our daily lives:

  • The story of Los Angeles is an
elegy for a place of former perfection...a perfect place, once upon a time...and that time was just before your new next-door neighbor arrived. That’s our history of regret.

  • Or the story of Los Angeles is merely a perversion, in which every booster cliché conceals a menace: the city’s balmy climate is actually lousy (tornadoes today and drought tomorrow) and the indulgent landscape is really lethal (when it isn’t burning with wildfires or shaking with earthquakes, it’s crawling with mountain lions with a taste for suburban white meat). In its contempt for its subject—in its conviction that we’re just along for the ride—that storyline is our pornography.

  • Or the story of Los Angeles is just a spectacle. “The splendors and miseries of Los Angeles,” Reyner Banham says, “the graces and grotesqueries, appear to me as unrepeatable as they are unprecedented.”2 If Los Angeles is the great exception—a city without a heritage or legacy—then its story may be glamorous, but it’s just another lurid burlesque, best witnessed while slightly intoxicated.

  • Or the story of Los Angeles is a blank, or as Pico Iyer says, a “space waiting to be claimed by whatever dream or destiny you wanted to throw at it.”3 That’s our daydream of the city of the future, a restless landscape twitching with big ideas about building the next utopia on the demolished premises of the last one. What’s broken in each convulsion isn’t just ground; it’s the thread of memory. And it’s these broken threads that make too many of us homeless here, even if we have a house.