Tell Me True

by Patricia Hampl

  Because I believe every American place is the habitat of memory, I believe every American place can have an ecology of hope.

  In its false representations, Los Angeles is preferentially the shrouded city of “treacherous unbrightness,” in Faulkner’s bleak phrase: the city that always cheats on its lovers, that is always painted in the colors of smog, the city always seen from a height, from a freeway overpass, from a seat in a descending jetliner, the hapless observer always going under, down to a carcinogenic sea. That imagined place continues to frame issues of place in Los Angeles and the public policies intended to resolve them. Today, mythic Los Angeles—that monstrous and forgetful city—is slowly succumbing to the moral imaginations of many new interpreters who meld history, personal essay, and the techniques of the memoir to tell a refigured story of the city that contains more about us and what we find familiar and what we yearn for. And it’s not Chinatown. This is the form of public speech that the contemplation of my private life has led me to, and I am not alone in this enterprise, which is nothing less than the reimagining of Los Angeles, a task all of its residents have been unwillingly drafted for.

  Other memoirists acknowledge that they write to preserve and commemorate or to indict and condemn or to discover and then reveal the reasons for their scars or to school the troubled in the art of self-healing or simply to echo the epilogue of Moby Dick, taken from the Book of Job: And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. I am bent in another direction—toward works of the imagination that can be picked up (as a tool might be) for immediate use in the labor of making a sustainable city. We all live on land we’ve wounded by our being here. Yet we must be here or be nowhere and have nothing with which to make our lives together. How should one act knowing that making a home requires this? How should I regard my neighbors, complicit with me in making our place? It’s possible to answer with fury or neglect. It’s possible to be so assured of privilege that contempt for a place like mine is the only answer. It’s possible to be so rootless that these questions are merely ironic.

  The stories we will tell each other in the process of making Los Angeles more ordinary will inevitably be partial. But the best of those stories will resist the subordination of the everyday. We can give in to a malign tradition of forgetfulness or benefit from a shared process of truth and reconciliation. The stories we will share in the process, I believe, will redeem us.

  1 This essay expands on a presentation made at Loyola Marymount University of Los Angeles in February 2006, a few days after James Frey acknowledged the fictionalizing in his best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, which included fabricated details about his criminal record, drug use, and drug rehabilitation experiences.

  2 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 6.

  3 Quoted in the documentary Los Angeles Now, produced and directed by Phillip Rodriguez (2004).

  4 American philosopher Josiah Royce coined the phrase “beloved community” in The Problem of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1913). He wrote, “Since the office of religion is to aim towards the creation on earth of the Beloved Community, the future task of religion is the task of inventing and applying the arts which shall win men over to unity, and which shall overcome their original hatefulness by the gracious love, not of mere individuals, but of communities” (p. 430).

  5 Or, to put it another way, I am seeking an epistemology of everyday life that can include Los Angeles as an instance.

  6 Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

  7 Barry Lopez, “A Scary Abundance of Water,” Los Angeles Weekly, January 9, 2002.

  8 Paul Wilkes, “A Sense of Sacred,” America, April 8, 2000.

  9 Mark Ravizza, “Polluted Protagonists and the Enduring Appeal of the Catholic Imagination,” Explore (Spring 2002).

  10 Kevin and Marilyn Ryan, eds., Why I Am a Catholic (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998).

  Acknowledgments

  This collection of essays emerged from a spirited series of public readings and panel discussions we organized, held during the winter and spring of 2007 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The series was called “Who’s Got the Story—Memoir as History/History as Memoir,” and it remains available on line at www.whosgotthestory.umn.edu.

  We are most grateful to the University of Minnesota community and its many interrelated constituencies that made possible the original series and provided support for the essays here. In particular, we wish to acknowledge major funding from the University’s McKnight Arts and Humanities Endowment, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the College of Liberal Arts Scholarly Events Fund. Without their substantial contributions and encouragement, our ambition would have been much diminished.

  The generous co-sponsorship of a wide array of departments and programs at the University of Minnesota demonstrates the broadly based interest in questions of narrative truth in history and literature. We are grateful to our colleagues across campus for their support and wish to salute with thanks the departments, programs and units that helped the project: American Studies; English; Creative Writing; History; Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum; Austrian Studies; Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Ally Programs Office; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; German and European Studies; Global Studies; Holocaust and Genocide Studies; Immigration History Research Center; Jewish Studies; Journalism and Mass Communications; the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance; and the Office of University Women.

  Ami Berger, as communications manager for the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, provided essential counsel for the original series, and Deb Lawton designed the striking poster. We are grateful as well to Karen A. Bencke, software and web development coordinator at the College of Liberal Arts Office of Information and to Zach Taylor for web design. The series was taped for video archive by Richard Stachow, video photographer in CLA TV Production.

  Community support from Paulette Warren and the Loft Literary Center was a great benefit and provided another reminder of the cultural vibrancy of the Twin Cities, as did support from the Minnesota Historical Society.

  Special thanks to panel moderators, Professor Madelon Sprengnether (English and Creative Writing) and Regents Professor Sara Evans (History) for their deft management of the public forums, and to Cheri Register for her thoughtful reflections, even though the panel itself was snowed out.

  We are grateful to Professor Ann Waltner, director of the University’s Institute for Advanced Study, and Susannah Smith, the Institute’s managing director, for their generous and inventive collaboration and steadfast encouragement. Jeanne Kilde offered valuable counsel on grant applications. Karen Kinoshita, also from the Institute for Advanced Study, was our angel of organization, working magic with complicated travel and scheduling arrangements. We are grateful as well to Borealis Books and the anthology’s editor, Ann Regan, for her energetic involvement in the project and her meticulous response to the essays, and to Will Powers, design and production manager, for bringing the collection together so attractively.

  Marly Rusoff of Rusoff and Associates Literary Agency offered sage advice and was unfailingly gracious and encouraging. And on the home front we happily acknowledge the patience and solidarity over long months of our husbands, Terrence Williams and Lary May.

  Matt Becker joined us first as an indispensable assistant to the original series and later as a full member of our editorial team. The three of us worked together for over a year on matters small and sweeping. It is impossible to imagine this book without his enormous contribution. We gladly and gratefully acknowledge that our single greatest debt is to him.

  Contributors

  ANDRÉ ACIMAN is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir (1994); False Papers: Essays on Ex
ile and Memory (2000); and the novel Call Me by Your Name (2007). He has also coauthored and edited The Proust Project (2004) and Letters of Transit (1999). Born in Alexandria, he lived in Italy and France. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at Princeton University and Bard College; he is currently the chair of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Doctoral Program in Comparative Literature and the director of its Writers’ Institute. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, New Republic, and Paris Review, as well as in several volumes of The Best American Essays.

  MATT BECKER is an assistant editor and the rights and permissions manager at Wayne State University Press. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, where he earned his Ph.D. in American studies. His dissertation, “The Edge of Darkness: Youth Culture Since the 1960s,” explores the relationship between civic disengagement among young people and their embrace of gothic popular culture over the past forty-five years. He has published in The Velvet Light Trap and elsewhere. He helped organize the conference series on memoir and history from which this collection of essays developed.

  JUNE CROSS is an associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She brings thirty years of experience—earned as reporter, correspondent, and producer in positions at PBS and CBS—to the craft of documentary filmmaking. Secret Daughter, her autobiographical documentary, aired on Frontline in 1996 and won both a duPont-Columbia Journalism Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism and an Emmy for Outstanding Cultural Programming; she later published a memoir by the same title. She was an executive producer for This Far by Faith, a six-part PBS series on the African American religious experience, and her most recent documentary follows the struggle of a New Orleans family over two years as they rebuild their lives.

  CARLOS EIRE was one of fourteen thousand unaccompanied Cuban children airlifted to the United States in the early 1960s. After living for three and a half years in a succession of foster homes, he and his brother were finally reunited with their mother in Chicago in 1965. His father was never allowed to leave Cuba. He taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining the faculty of Yale University in 1996, where he is now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies. He has published several books on late medieval and early modern Europe; his memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2003), won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2003 and has been translated into several languages.

  HELEN EPSTEIN is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, including Children of the Holocaust (1979) and Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History (1997), a memoir and social history of two hundred years of Central European Jewish life. Those, and her biography Joe Papp: An American Life (1994), were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She was the first tenured woman professor in New York University’s journalism department and for two decades freelanced for the Sunday New York Times and other national publications, writing profiles of cultural figures such as art historian Meyer Schapiro and musicians Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, and Yo Yo Ma. A full list of her publications is available at www.helenepstein.com.

  SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN is the author of Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990; National Book Award finalist, 1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993; Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, 1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996; Pulitzer Prize finalist, 1997); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000; National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction, 2001); Who She Was: A Son’s Search for His Mother’s Life (2005); and Letters to a Young Journalist (2006). Formerly a staff reporter for the New York Times, Freedman writes the paper’s “On Education” column. He has contributed to numerous other publications, including the Jerusalem Post, USA Today, New York, Rolling Stone, Salon, and BeliefNet. A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman was named the nation’s outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists.

  PATRICIA HAMPL’s books include the memoirs A Romantic Education (1981) and Virgin Time (1992), two poetry collections, and Spillville (1987), a prose meditation on Antonin Dvorˇák in Iowa. I Could Tell You Stories (1999), her book of essays about memory, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (2000). Her recent books, Blue Arabesque (2006) and The Florist’s Daughter (2007), were both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Bush Foundations and National Endowment for the Arts. She was a 1995 Fulbright Fellow to the Czech Republic. In 1990 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She is Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota and serves on the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program.

  FENTON JOHNSON was born ninth of nine children into a Kentucky whiskey-making family with a strong storytelling tradition. He is the author of two novels, Crossing the River (1989) and Scissors, Paper, Rock (1993), as well as Geography of the Heart: A Memoir (1996; Lambda Literary Award, 1996, and American Library Association Stonewall Book Award, 1997) and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks (2003; Kentucky Literary Award and Lambda Literary Award, 2004). Johnson has written for Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and many literary quarterlies, and he contributes occasional commentaries to National Public Radio. He has received numerous literary awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction. He serves on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. Additional information is available at www.fentonjohnson.com.

  ALICE KAPLAN is the Lehrman Professor of Romance Studies and a professor of literature and history at Duke University. A native Minnesotan, she received her Ph.D. in French from Yale University in 1981. She is the author of several books on twentieth-century French literature and cultural history, including Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (1986) and French Lessons (1993), an autobiographical account of her passion for the French language. The Collaborator (2000) was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and American Library Association and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in history in 2000. The Interpreter (2005) was awarded the 2006 Henry Adams Prize by the Society for History in the Federal Government. Kaplan is also a literary translator, most notably of Roger Grenier. Her latest translation is Evelyne Bloch-Dano’s Madame Proust (2007), a biography of Proust’s mother.

  ANNETTE KOBAK, born in London of a Czechoslovak father and English mother, studied modern languages at Cambridge University and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Her first book, Isabelle (1988), about the short, dramatic life of nineteenth-century traveler Isabelle Eberhardt, was published in several languages and made into a BBC2 film in the series Great Journeys. She also translated Isabelle’s only novel, Vagabond, from the French. Her book Joe’s War: My Father Decoded (2004), described as a “super-eclectic mix of travelogue, oral testimony, autobiography and historical documents” and widely reviewed in America and the United Kingdom, was chosen as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. She has reviewed fiction, biography, memoir, and travel writing for the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement, and she presented the series The Art of Travel on BBC Radio 4. Annette lives in London, where she is currently Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Kingston University.

  MICHAEL PATRICK MACDONALD is the author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie (1999) and of E
aster Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion (2006). He has won an American Book Award, a New England Literary Lights Award, and the Myers Outstanding Book Award. In addition, MacDonald has been a guest columnist for the Boston Globe’s Op-Ed page.

  As an activist, he focused his efforts in the 1990s on cross-cultural coalition building to reduce violence. He founded Boston’s successful gun buyback program (1992–97), which took 2,900 working firearms off the streets. He also started the South Boston Vigil Group (1996), which gave a public voice to that neighborhood’s survivors of violence and the drug trade.

  He has received residencies at Blue Mountain Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Artist Residency Program; he was granted a Bellagio Center Fellowship through the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at Northeastern University in Boston.

  ELAINE TYLER MAY, Regents Professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota, received her Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of California–Los Angeles. She is president-elect of the Organization of American Historians, and she served as president of the American Studies Association in 1995–96. She has taught at Princeton University, Harvard University, and University College, Dublin, Ireland. Her publications include Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (1980); Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (3rd ed., 2008); Pushing the Limits: American Women, 1940–1961 (1996); and Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (1997). She is also coauthor of a college-level textbook, Created Equal: A History of the United States (3rd ed., 2008). She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and several journals and has been featured on National Public Radio and public television and in several documentaries.