Frequently I am swept with waves of soft feelings, not hard feelings, toward the people in my life -- the women, the children, the men, family, friends, colleagues, lovers. Sometimes I get so caught up in story telling that my life feels like a movie, i.e., imaginary. Made-up characters acting in an invented plot.
One of my favorite novels, Passage to India by E.M. Forster, is the perfect illustration of the relationship between fact and fiction and how the truth in many matters is ultimately unknowable. The key scene in that book concerns an English woman and an Indian man inside a cave, and what did or did not happen in there. It's a powerful story about forbidden attractions, the consequences of interracial relationships in racist societies, and how "truth” depends on who is doing the telling.
One reason for my melancholy as a writer is that I am feeling sorry for those about whom I write. It's always possible I could unwittingly do them damage, by invading their privacy, or conveying an inappropriate sense of entitlement to elements of their stories that they alone own.
In fact, I should say as clearly as possible that I know these musings of mine are mine alone. No one represented here should be construed to be responsible except me. When it comes to family members, since so many of my kids are great writers, whatever imbalance in our story-telling urge now sits in my favor, the natural order of things dictates they should have many years after I fall silent to set the record straight -- as they see it.
That would please me, I think, if my closest people told their stories of us in whatever form they choose, without regard to what they think I might think of those versions of truth. If it feels like truth to them, that will be good enough for me.
The story telling I try to do here is my attempt to give back, in real time, what better people have given to me. What I have left now are words, and these words are for those I love — especially those who have struggled to love me in return.
(This is from 19 years ago in July 2006.)
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David, your tender essay reminds me of a conversation I had yesterday with friend about the book “Patrimony” a true story about Philip Roth’s fault-finding father’s dying days. Because of a serious illness, one day his naked father shat all that over himself in the bathroom, requiring Philip to clean up the splattered mess, something Roth described in graphic detail. And his crying father asked him not not to tell anyone about the episode, something his son promised not to do. Só after his father died, Roth, who like Nora Ephron, believed “everything is copy,” wrote about the episode in “Patrimony,” saying about all of the shit, some of which landed on his son’s toothbrush, “That was my patrimony; there was my patrimony…the shit.”
It was hard for me to read this widely-praised piece of non-fiction, which painted his father in a less less favorable light, while also making it clear that love existed between the two difficult men. And I thought, as an essay writer, I would never do that. I don’t believe that “everything is copy,” and that you owe a certain amount of respect to those who raised you in the best way they knew how. in Roth’s case, patrimony, what he inherited from his father’s death, was more than all that excrement. Yes, Herman Roth was a difficult man, but he deserved better than his son’s depiction of him in “Patrimony.”