E S SAY

A LIE THAT TELLSTHE TRUTH

We met at nine ...We met at eight ...

Iwasontime ...No, you were late ...

Ah yes, Iremember it well.-Alan Jay Lerner,

A fromGigi

little over a year ago, mybrother-in-law introduced me to ayoung woman who had moved into hisneighborhood. She was a novelist, hesaid ("Not yet," she interjected, ''I'mworking on my first novel"), and I, hetold her, was a memoirist. I immediatelyfelt a need to exonerate myself. Whatwas this discomfort about? In part, nodoubt, guilt by association with liars:the James Frey scandal was still in thenews. But that can't be the whole of it.After all, there are impostors who writenovels as well. No, the question leadsme directly down the murky paths ofmemory that give the much abusedgenre its name.

When I was a boy, I had a father wholived on another continent, and an-other father-a stepfather, actually, butI thought of him as my father-withwhom I lived. Both were writers. Fromboth, in different ways, I received theidea of writing as a noble profession.

This vaguely aristocratic notion wasnot as foreign to the Marxist society Ilived in---Communist East Germany-

Joel Agee is the author of Twelve Yearsand, more recently, In the House of MyFear. At present he is working on a novel.

Memoir and the art of memoryBy Joel Agee

as American readers might suppose.When I was seventeen, I dropped outof high school and signed up as a brick-layer's apprentice. At the orientationmeeting, the master, addressing his stu-dents, said: "Masonry is a noble pro-fession." He meant that we would bebuilding homes, schools, and hospitals,not just making a living. But the vo-cation of writing, as I understood itfrom the examples of my two fathers

Another Year Another House, by Thrush Holmes.Courtesy Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, and Santa Monica, California

J

1

and from the hundreds of books in ourhouse, was one of constructing a fithabitation for the mind, and a beauti-ful one, if my talent allowed it; indeedfor the spirit as well as the mind, asthe two are denoted in German by thesingle word "Geist." So writing wasn'ta trade like other trades, because it wasnoble in a different sense that everyone,even the unread, acknowledged. Lit-erature mattered supremely.

I was still in school when I read anovella by my American father. Orrather: I cut classes from school andtook to the woods to read it. It wasabout a boy, roughly my age, who playedtruant from his parochial school onGood Friday, roaming the woods be-fore dawn in the company of some rudeclassmates instead of keeping a vigil forthe betrayed and crucified Jesus. Therewas a phrase near the beginning-"Thenight smelled like new milk"-that en-chanted me. I knew that delicious smell,because every few days I rode a bike toa farm where you could buy fresh, un-pasteurized milk that was sometimesstill warm from the cow, so that on theway home, in the winter, steam rosefrom the can. But that it was "new"milk, not "fresh," and that night in thewoods had a scent (which I knew butdid not know I knew till I read it), andthat milk could be said to have some-thing of night in its nature-all thissurprised and excited me as no writtenwords had done before.

My stepfather's writing did not in-spire me. This is, for me, a sad fact to

ESSAY 53

confess, because it must have causedhim deep sorrow. It wasn't due to lackof talent on his part; there is much inhis books that interests and moves metoday. He wrote novels about the Ger-man men and women who opposedthe Nazis and who kept alive, in thatdarkest of times, the dream of a betterGermany. But by the time I read hisbooks, in the mid-Fifties, that dreamhad become the myth of the state, andhis characters' most sincere thoughtswere unpleasantly echoed by the slo-gans and homilies of officialese. Histruth had become a lie, and he knew it,though he couldn't admit it to him-self. The expression of his mouth be-came bitter. He chain-smoked anddrank incessantly. Writing became avisible torment to him.

It was when he was younger and Iwas a child that he represented to methe noble idea of the writer. It hadnothing to do with the words he wrote,or with his political faith. Nor was it aperformance. I was sometimes allowedto read in his study, but I was not to dis-turb his concentration under any cir-cumstances. This was his work-thatquintessentially adult activity. Natu-rally, I was curious about the differencebetween that and my own occasionalwriting, which was always for fun andto show off later, to him and my moth-er, the poem or fantasy I had written.It was hard to tell what the differencewas, since he wrote in German, a for-eign language to me at the time. Hewrote by hand, as I did, but in a mi-nuscule gothic script, crossing out manywords and filling his wastebasket withrejected drafts. For long periods, hedidn't write at all but sat with his faceslightly raised and his eyes open, as iflistening, or waiting. Sometimes he ap-peared to be smiling. At other times helooked worried, or frowned intensely.

When his texts were ready, he dic-tated them to a fast-typing secretary.Sometimes he dictated texts withoutdrafting them first, but these were news-paper articles or letters, not the seriouswriting called "literature."

It amazes me that I am old enoughnow, and perhaps foreign enough, to re-member a time and a place whenpeople still used that word without anironic or apologetic smile and withoutgrandiosity either. Not long ago, whenI proposed to my agent that she cham-

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007

pion a book of mine as a work of liter-ature instead of trying to present it asa "Sixties memoir," she told me, witha rueful laugh, that in publishing circles

nowadays the "L" word is

B the kiss of death.

y the time I came to America,at the age of twenty, and had droppedin and out of college a couple of times,I became convinced that if I didn't suc-ceed at writing, I would end my days asa failure. I worked at my stories and po-ems, honing and polishing and, like mystepfather, crossing out much of what Ihad written. For years, my wastebasketheld all the proof of my labor; therewere no finished manuscripts. But I har-bored ambitions that matched my self-doubt. For instance, I had a notion,ever since I had seen Goethe's Faust,Part One performed in Berlin, thatsomeday I would write a novel on thetheme of the philosopher who made apact with Mephistopheles, the devil'semissary.No matter that Thomas Mannhad already done it. Times had changedsince then. The new Faust would weara new countenance and seek a newknowledge. Who would have guessedthat instead of inventing that story Iwould live it?

A chemical substance, lysergic aciddiethylamide, became my Mephis-topheles, proffering beauty beyond allimagination, and proffering, above all-because I wanted it above all-knowledge of first things, which, I wasconvinced, could not be attained byaccepting the hearsay of either philoso-phers or prophets, but only by directexperience. In exchange I would forfeitmy common humanity, rnv ordinari-ness. I was deeply ashamed of being or-dinary. It seemed a wager worth mak-ing. Not that I knew I was making awager, but that's what it was.

LSD promised entry, as well, to theterrifying realm into which my youngerbrother was being drawn by a mentalillness for which there appeared to beno cure. Maybe I could walk in there,clear-eyed and unafraid, take him bythe hand, and show him the way out.Or, if that was not possible-but thiswould have been the darkest, least con-scious of motives, and I suspect it onlynow, and can't be sure of it-maybe, bythe magic of acid, we could trade places:I would be mad, and he could live out

the life of a writer. For he was prodi-giously gifted, especially as a playwright,and I was guilty of undeserved goodfortune and needed absolution.

I wasn't able to save my brother. Hedied by his own hand at the age oftwenty-seven. And I, Doctor Faustus,who had given up writing to conductraids on the unthinkable, found my-self compelled to think myself God thecreator, an impotent god at the hub ofan endlessly suffering, deathless, andinfinite universe that was at the sametime myself-etemal damnation, eter-nal perdition-until, locked up in aprison cell in East London with a thug-gish Englishman who demanded myattention at all hours of the day, I wasgently deposited on the shores of san-ity, miraculously unscathed, as my bless-

edly ordinary, always pro-

A .visional, everyday self.

fter the nightmare was over, Ithought: "You must write about this.You will never find better material."But I couldn't write about it. Thethought of revealing to anyone what Ihad gone through terrified me. I wouldbe the laughingstock of the neighbor-hood, and, with any success, of thecity, the nation, the world. These fearswere aftershocks of the disaster, ofcourse, but they were also clear warn-ing signs to desist.

"I could disguise it," I thought."Make it a novel. The Faust novel youalways wanted to write." But every fic-tional disguise I could think of merelydrove home the realization that thestory I had lived was itself a novel, al-ready written and perfectly plotted in apreverbal language of feeling and mem-ory, needing only to be set in words. Orcould I tell it in the third person, aboutsomeone other than myself? It wasn'tpossible: the pronoun "I" would not bereplaced by any other. And it wasn'tjust anyone's "I," it was mine. The sub-ject of this novel-in both senses ofthe word "subject"-was my self. Idared not write it.

Then one day, as I was readingRobert Lowell's autobiographical LifeStudies, I came across a sentence de-scribing the poet as an eight-year-old:"Whenever a girl came near me, mywhole person cringed like a spongewrung dry by a clenching fist." Thesentence performed itself in my body,

transporting me with thrilling imme-diacy to an encounter in the carpetedlobby of a hotel in St. Petersburg, whichat the time I was remembering-1948-was still called Leningrad. I waseight years old. A little girl in a sailorsuit passed me with her parents as Ipassed her with mine. I cringed, shestuck out her tongue-impossible tosay which came first. I looked up fromLowell's book and felt a gust of reliefand excitement: why not write aboutmy twelve years in East Germany, be-ginning with my arrival at the age ofeight? It would be a preamble, an etude,the story of the time before the

shipwreck, when I was still

I trimming my sails.

made a surprising discovery in thecourse of writing that book. I learnedthat to remember is, at least in part, toimagine, and that the act of transpos-ing memory into written words is acreative act that transforms the mem-ory itself. This troubled me at first, be-cause I had only recently obligatedmyself to a documentarist ethos un-der the oddly mixed influence of An-dre Breton's diatribes against fictionand my father's demand, at the begin-ning of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,that the artist suspend or destroy imag-ination so as to perceive "the cruel ra-diance of what is." But "is" becomes"was" in the blink of an eye, and mem-ories are shadows. To recapture theradiance that had cast those shadows,I had no recourse except to imagine ahost of possible and probable details,reluctantly at first and then with in-creasing confidence and freedom.

Today, for that reason, I find it dif-ficult to disentangle the memories Ihad before writing Twelve Years fromthose I created by writing it. Was itmemory or imagination, for instance,that, in the first paragraph, dressed aGerman harbor pilot in a black rain-coat and, in the last one, endowed akleptomaniacal friend with "a blacktrenchcoat he has recently stolen"?The neat aesthetic bracketing certainlylooks suspicious, but I know I didn'tcreate that effect on purpose, and itcertainly feels as if I remember blackcoats on both occasions-but I'm notsure. On the other hand, in a scene Ibelieve I invented in order to depictthe dismay of East Germany's intel-

lectual elite as they learned of an im-minent ban on nude bathing, thereare several details that ring so true inan intimate, deja vu sort of way that Iam half inclined to assume the scenewas taken from memory after all.

When Twelve Years was finished andapproaching publication, I learned thatit was going to be called a memoir. Theword had a plushy, haute-bourgeoisaura. Wasn't this the kind of thingprime ministers wrote? Also, the termwould saddle the book with one ofthose catchpenny subtitles. "Can't wecall it a novel?" I asked my editor. Hesaid it wasn't a novel: novels are worksof fiction. "But it isn't really non-fictioneither," I said. And I began to explain."Then you'll have to write a dis-claimer," he said.

My disclaimer for Twelve Years takesup half a page. The first sentence is:"Everything in this book is true, butnot everything is precisely factual."One reviewer, Robert Coles, found thisline of apology strange:

Why the distinction between truth andfactuality? Mr. Agee is not a journalist,has no intention of documenting thefacts of a given newsstory.He isrelyingupon a kind of witness-his memory,as it has been shaped by a moral intel-ligence.Ought we now askour childrento keep tape recordershandy, lest in fu-ture years they stumble into the terribletrap of "fiction" as they try to recall aconversation or a moment of action?Subjectivity and imagination have yetto be declaredenemiesofwhat is"true."

Those words were written in 1981.Much has happened since then. Anarmy of truth tellers has conqueredlarge numbers of the dwindling faith-ful who still read books. Confession,in print and on TV, is fast becomingthe primary public mode in whichhuman interiority speaks and isheard. The self-avowed lies of fictionare no longer in fashion. Everyone iswriting memoirs. Subjectivity andimagination, it seems, are slipping theborder into the non-fiction columns,where they live as quasi-illegal aliens,poorly housed among the facts,

performing thankless but

I necessary labors.

n point of fact, some of theirlabors-the ones performed gratu-itously and unbidden, without our

ESSAY 55

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knowing-are less menial than onemight suppose. The simplest acts ofremembering, in daily life, are accom-plished to a very great extent by theimagination; or, to put it more blunt-ly, what we think we remember islargely made up. According to DanielGilbert, professor of psychology at Har-vard University, a great number of ex-periments in laboratory and field set-tings have "left most scientistsconvinced of two things. First, the actof remembering involves 'filling in' de-tails that were not actually stored; andsecond, we generally cannot tell whenwe are doing this because filling inhappens quickly and unconsciously."

I was recently given a startlingdemonstration of this when I rereadsomething I had written with the mostearnest intention of sticking to the facts.

I have for several years been keepinga journal in which I record momentswhen the mind, seemingly awake inbroad daylight, becomes aware of itsdream-weaving activity. Some worryor obsession will rise to consciousnessand, seen through as the mind-madething that it is, evaporate like a mirage.Sometimes this shift results in a blissfulstate of carefree and effortless presencethat may last for seconds or an hour bythe clock's measure but has no dura-tion in subjective experience. At oth-er times, instead of dissolving the day-dream, the attention follows it in a kindof aesthetic rapture. The mind is lucidand dreaming at the same time. Theseexperiences, too, I describe in writing.The descriptions are not literary efforts.The truth of the matter is all that mat-ters: how this particular awakening hap-pened, what was the sequence of events.

On July 6,1999, I described in thisjournal how, sitting on my bed, I hadremembered, or thought I remembered,a phrase by Meister Eckhart: "}ederAugenblick ist eine neue Geburt"-Everymoment is a new birth. Had he reallysaid that? "Augenblick" suggested see-ing (the word, meaning "moment,"translates literally as "eye-glance").Was seeing an act?

"At that moment," I wrote, "abunched part of the sheet took on theappearance of a dramatically shapediceberg. It wasn't a hallucination. Thatis, I never lost sight of the sheets andthe bed, never forgot where I was. Butthe iceberg became part of a larger

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007

landscape that reminded me of CasparDavid Friedrich's painting of a shipsinking among ice floes. It was thatreal, that magnificent. This happenedyesterday morning, I still rememberthe sight clearly." There follows alengthy description of the spectacularview as it took shape before my eyes,followed by an attempt to explain myawed sense, after a ringing telephonedispelled the vision, of having partak-en "in an order of spontaneous cre-ativity and intelligence to which or-dinarily I have only a primitive,rudimentary connection."

Three months later, on October 18,I recalled that experience but forgotthat I had already described it. Confi-dent of my powers of recollection, Ibegan as follows:

"Several weeks ago, an astonishingexperience looking at a patch ofbunched and crumpled sheets on mybed. I was thinking of Blake and thecentral role he gives the imagination- .the contempt he had for convention-al perception-which was probablywhat led me to look at those folds dif-ferently. I noticed colors, first of all-shades of blue and gray in the whitethat reminded me of Cezanne's table-cloths. But the bulges and dips in thesheet recalled Chinese landscapes ... "And so on. No mention of Friedrich'sice floes or Meister Eckhart. The entryends like this: "In a deliberate act of re-gression, I pretended these were tallmountains, deep gorges, and, like achild, walked two fingers into this ter-rain, with adventurous emotion. Don'trecall how I moved out of that state. Ibelieve it was a decision."

How naive of me to suppose that Icould track down a past moment ofreverie and precisely recover it inwords. I find it impossible to deter-mine which of these two records is themore accurate one, because together

they constitute all the mern-

I ory that is left of the event.

t took me twenty years to writemy second book. When I began it, I as-sumed I would complete it in two orthree years. Since it was already writ-ten in memory, all I needed to do, Istill was convinced, was translate itinto language.

But something other than memoryclaimed my attention from the be-

ginning. I don't know what to call it,because, not being a memory, it has nocontent. It could be described as a ver-tical dimension, a sense of the heightand depth of experience. And the wayit is felt, it stands perpendicular to thehorizontal plane of time. Perhaps theright name for it is "I." I have oftenwondered at the regal appearance ofthis little word-as tall and uprightas any royal "We"-like an an-nouncement, inscribed in written us-age of the English tongue, that Every-man is, in his true "I," a King, andEverywoman a Queen, Everychild, forthat matter, a royal personage; andthis long before revolutions attempt-ed the bloody enforcement of thistruth as a political program.

Writing my memories gave time theappearance of a river. It flowed onwardand forward, broad and unhurried. Thatwas because the story started at mid-stream, when my character, Joel, some-times also called "I," was in his twen-ties. Where was he going? He had noidea, but I did. He was going on adownward spiral toward the discoveryof the true "I," about which no story canbe told, because it is the witnessingmirror of life, forever unaltered by thescenes that pass through it. Downwardbecause, in the topography of the soul,that is where the hell realms are. Evenin hell, one can find the jewel withoutprice. On the way there, he would passthrough relationships, places, adven-tures, ordeals, all grist for the story-telling mill. But he would arrive at hisdestination in a region to which mem-ory could have no access.

To achieve this descent in the writ-ing, I would need a guide. He presentedhimself as a Mephistophelian spirit,half trickster, half sage, who was athome with the unspeakable and knewhow to talk about it as well. He calledhimself my Counterpoint. From timeto time he took over the narration.Together we discoursed about the ques-tions that concerned Joel, and alsomyself, the narrator who was writingthe book, sitting at his desk in Brook-lyn. But was this narrator myself? Ofcourse not. He, too, was a fictive "I."

Fictive, as well, was the motive Igave him: to release the ghosts of pastterrors--my own and my brother's-bywriting his way into the house of hisfear. I experienced no fear while writ-

ing the book, but I needed my nar-rator to feel some trepidation. I gavehim the anxieties I had had ten yearsearlier, when I had been unable toapproach this material. There wereother inventions as well. When askedwhat parts of the book are nor strict-ly, factually, "true," I say that's mysecret. I should add that I contriveonly probabilities. There are im-probable events in the book, but theywere written by life. Can I be sure

of that? Yes, to the best of

D' my recollection.

espite the lesson in taxonomy Ihad received with Twelve Years, I wasconvinced that In the House of My Fearcould not and should not be publishedas a memoir. My publisher didn't agree.So I enumerated my reasons:

First, the book simply wasn't a mem-oir, because it didn't confine itself to thereports of memory, and because it wovefacts and inventions together in an im-provised form that was governed byaesthetic considerations alone. Sec-ond, because memoirs are invariablythought of as "memoirs of ... ", minewould perforce be a "memoir of theSixties"-misleadingly, since in mybook that particular carnival, alongwith the world in which it was per-formed, disappears in the magic the-ater of a mind lost in self-referentialdelusion. Third, by 2004, when thebook was approaching publication, thememoir had become a subliterary genre,the publishing equivalent of daytimeTV. But my strongest, most anxiouslyheld objection was that the "non-fiction" rubric, to which memoirs areautomatically relegated, would exilemy book from the precincts of literatureand reduce it to a kind of gossipy en-tertainment with subsidiary value as asource of counsel or information aboutdrugs or mental illness.

On the other hand, how could I callit a novel? It was a story about realpeople and actual events. Yet it wasn'ta "non-fiction nove]." Maybe "truenovel" was a viable term.

I spoke with a German friend aboutthis. He was surprised by the quandaryin which I had been put by two Eng-lish words, "fiction" and "non-fiction."He knew their meaning, but he won-dered how a work of literature could bedefined by such categories.

"Is Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheitnon-fiction?" he asked.

"Yes, because it's an autobiograph-ical work," I said.

"But it's a novel," he said."In Germany, yes, but here it's a

. "mernotr."And all the time I thought Ger-

mans were rigid."Only then did I realize what he was

getting at: Goethe's full title, Fictionand Truth from My Life, revealed theartifice of the dichotomy. How couldanyone separate imagination from truthin an honest attempt to give a narrativeaccount of a life?And yet the categoriesinto which written works of this na-ture are pressed, not only in Americabut throughout the English-speakingworld, insist on just such a division.

The German book market (I speakof Germany because I am familiar withthat country's culture, but similararrangements are made elsewhere inEurope) divides books into two differ-ent categories, Belletristik and Sacli-bii.cher. Belletristik means belles lettresand comprises all works of literary art,including poetry, irrespective of merit.Sachbii.cher is a term for which no Eng-lish equivalent exists, but if there wereone, it would be something like "about-books." There are, of course, about-books that qualify as literature, andthere are countless novels that don't, sothis arrangement is not fully adequate.But for the discussion of autobio-graphical writing, it encourages usefuldistinctions. Edmund Hillary's mem-oir of climbing Mount Everest is anabout-book. Maxim Gorky's My Child-hood is a work of literature.

I first read Gorky's wonderful bookin Germany, where it is commonly re-ferred to as a novel. Novels are not bydefinition works of fiction. CordeliaEdvardson's Burned Child Seeks the Fire,for instance, published here as a Holo-caust memoir, appeared in Germany(and earlier in Sweden, where it wasfirst published) as a novel. That wasmeant to signify not that the contentsof the book were invented but that itsauthor was an artist who had shapedher materials asnovelists do.

All these deliberations founderedagainst the fiat of the marketplace,which my publisher delivered to mewith a courteous firmness that wouldbrook no argument. Presented as fie-

ESSAY 57

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tion, my amphibious book risked re-jection by at least one of the majorbook chains. Under cover of "mem-oir," it would pass. Reluctantly, I agreedto subtitle it "A Memoir." But I cameto regret that decision.

A few months ago, through the"Google Alerts" program, I was di-rected to a notice from MSN Shop-ping. There was a picture of the cov-er of In the House of My Fear and,beneath it, under "Product details":

Subject: Substance Abuse & Ad-dictions-General

Pages: 00416Dewey: BSubject: Mental IllnessFor curiosity's sake, I searched MSN

Shopping for the title of JonathanLethem's The Fortress of Solitude, acharming novel that could be crudelydescribed as a semi-autobiographicalcoming-of-age story involving a friend-ship between a white and a black boy,set in Brooklyn in the 1970s. Under"Product details," it said:

Subject: LiteraryFrom the purgatorial gloom of "non-

fiction," this looks like a glimpse ofheaven. But it's not in my nature to re-pine for long, and besides, I can claimthat heaven for myself. And it would bepeevish of me not to take pleasurein this small miracle: that in a sub-basement of the literary enterprise,among Dewey decimals and ISBNs, the"L" word is granted the dignity of itsname, and is not asked to answer toany demands for social or commercialutility; that it stands unqualified, as if tosay: if you want to know the subject of

a literary work, open the

B book and read it.

ut what is this fabled, unname-able beast? "Literature," according toVladimir Nabokov, "was born not theday when a boy crying wolf, wolf camerunning out of the Neanderthal valleywith a big gray wolf at his heels: liter-ature was born on the day when a boycame crying wolf, wolf and there wasno wolf behind him." That is a novel-ist's definition, and it is still too narrow.It does not take account of the boywho was chased by a wolf and wenton to tell stories about it. Also, itequates the skill of invention, or plot-ting, with the much rarer faculty ofimagination. True to the facts or whol-

·58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007

ly invented, unless the story conjuresout of the darkness some magic be-yond the familiar frights of a wolf'sfangs and a boy's racing heart, it willnot enchant and will not be literature.The word for this magic is "art," andpart of its nature is that it escapes de-finition: whatever you say it is, it isn't.Yet it makes itself known by a qualityof inexhaustible newness-not "nov-elty," which is a product of fashion,but the surprise of the unforeseen.

Who, then, speaking of literature,has the organ of perception, the re-ceptive talent, to experience the mag-ic? The reader, of course-the goodreader. Here, definition is possible,which is why Nabokov does so muchbetter with this than he did with histrope of the boy who cried wolf. "Thegood reader," he says, "is one who hasimagination, memory, a dictionary,and some artistic sense."

I like the "some." It is a moderate re-quirement that can be met by many,provided their minds are not warped bytoo much and the wrong kind of

schooling. But that is a sub-

I ject for another essay.

just bought a biography of theFrench writer and aviation pioneerAntoine de Saint-Exupery, the authorof The Little Prince. I remember himmore for his Wind, Sand and Stars, abook that set me on fire with the de-sire to write when I first read it at theage of sixteen. In the store, I searchedthe biography's index hoping to findconfirmation of a story my stepfather,Bodo Uhse, had told me about how, inhis role as political commissar on theRepublican side of the Spanish CivilWar, he had interrogated a presumedfascist adventurer whose plane hadbeen shot down, and who turned outto be Saint-Exupery. It seems possiblenow, even probable, that Bodo in-dulged in "creative non-fiction" to en-tertain me, and to make me admirehim. It certainly was a colorful story.Should I regret that I retold it in mysecond book? And did I remember itrightly-that is, as he told it-falsethough it probably was? I trust that noharm has been done to any significanttruth. Do I mind that he (possibly,probably) told me a falsehood in thefirst place? Not at all; this news fillsme with fresh affection for him.

As to my other father, James Agee,I have long suspected that he departedhere and there from his militant pro-gram of absolute facticity in Let Us NowPraise Famous Men, especially in anepisode titled "At the Forks," where hemeets three people who, he says, "wereof a kind not safely to be described in anaccount claiming to be unimaginativeor trustworthy," because, he explains,"they had too much and too outlandishbeauty not to be legendary," and whomhe then proceeds to describe with aplasticity and immediacy and all butsupernatural acuity of optic calibrationthat I find difficult to believe as"unimaginative" reproductions of mem-ory, and quite possible to conceive of asdazzling effects of poetic legerdemain.Here is what I think he did: frustratedby the erasures of memory, especially bythe cliches it makes of even familiar,beloved faces, he took physiognomiccues from two, perhaps three of Walk-er Evans's portrait photographs at thebeginning of the book, disguising them(as he had to in order to keep his cov-er) by subtracting from them all ambi-guity of expression and amplifying andidealizing the hints and withholdings ofscorn, hurt, pride, and terror that sug-gest themselves in their features.

That, of course, is my imagining, andI have no proof of it, and only slim ev-idence. But reading the story eitherway-as a fiction cunningly disguised indocumentary garb or as the heroic featof documentation that it purports tobe-what I find impossible to questionis these demigods' ferocious claim toexistence in my consciousness, where Iam sure, barring brain damage or theravages of senility, they will reign ontheir porch for the rest of my life.

Am I making a plea for liars, then?No, only for artists, and in particular,here, for those who make art of theirpersonal lives and memories. Obvi-ously, there are facts that should not bejuggled or modified with impunity. Butthe beguilements of art are lies of a dif-ferent kind. The ordinary liar betraysour trust, his counterfeit truth leaves uspoorer. The artist-magician-s-even onewho works in the service of a lie-s-can-not help but enrich us with value. Thatis the meaning of Cocteau's charmingstatement: "I am a lie that always tellsthe truth." Art is generous. The liarsteals truth; the artist creates it. •