Material : Brendan Kerr
Authenticity and Inventing Others
In the previous installment of Material, I introduced the column with an autobiographical pep-talk. I told some “true stories” of events and lessons from my youth to exemplify the struggle ambitious writers face when learning to bravely recognize and pursue our “more difficult” stories. I encouraged all of us to dig past the causes and effects of life, past its sensational events, in order to find the problematic, fictionalizable pressures that thrust our actions and therefore our stories. In this second installment, by way of illustration, I’d like to step away from my own biography, but remain in the realm of memory and chronicle with a discussion of William Maxwell’s fictionalized memoir So Long, See You Tomorrow.
Especially in light of the self-dramatized sleuthing that has recently distorted memoir until it is no longer a literary mode, but a cult of psychological authenticity operating as bitter revolutionary attendant to the fading literary palace, it is of telling importance that early in his book, Maxwell breaks with Freud. On page five he declares that 
the events of the book took place in the pre-Freudian era and that therefore his murderer’s removal of one of his victim’s ears should not indicate symbolic meaning, but merely bring a shudder. Maxwell reconstructs scenes from his family’s painful past, especially scenes surrounding the premature death of his mother, before admitting that none of these stated memories can be trusted. For Maxwell there is no objective truth – conscious or subconscious – available in any recount of the past.
By dismissing the burdens of psychological and objective truths, Maxwell liberates himself from the false objectives of today’s non-literary memoir: catharsis and prefabricated redemptive wisdom. Instead, he hinges his entire book upon a single, unforgettably awkward moment narrated about one-third of the way through the text. On his first day at high school in the 1930s, shortly after his family moved from the small central Illinois town of Lincoln to Chicago, Maxwell saw – and ignored – a boy in the corridor who had, years earlier, been a passing childhood playmate. The boy, whom Maxwell calls Cletus Smith, had abruptly left Lincoln after his father gunned down the tenant farmer who lived next door, a man named Lloyd Wilson, and then killed himself.
After his acknowledgment of the centrality of his small but indelible cowardice, Maxwell abruptly shifts the focus of his book. No longer is the book an imaginative recount of his own and his family’s pasts; now he has set upon a hypothetical invention of the lives of his neighbors’ families during the months that preceded the shooting. It is here that today’s readers, steeped in the ethics of the cult of authenticity, may be shocked by Maxwell’s authorly audacity. How dare he, they cry, speculate about tragedy in others’ lives?
The shift (and, we come to find, the book as a whole) is motivated by shame. Why, in the moment that he and his old friend recognized each other in the school corridor, was young Maxwell unable to acknowledge him? Maxwell writes his memoir as a much older man who has been haunted by this small question his whole life, despite being aware of its futility: any gesture young Maxwell could have made would surely have made precious little difference to poor Cletus. It makes a difference to Maxwell, however, and he writes this book in order to reconcile his shame.
As if to presciently head off and debunk critics loyal to the non-literary thread of memoir that would infiltrate and become popular nearly seventy years later, Maxwell, after identifying the moment of import, does embark on a cursory probe through old newspapers, presumptively searching for a redemptive nugget. The newspaper writing he finds is, however, tetchy and riddled with hearsay. It is coy about the extra-marital affair that instigated the violence. It perhaps functions as a mild stimulus to Maxwell’s memory, but it is so unsatisfying that it – like the ruins of the Roman Forum – only fuels his urge to speculate and imagine, to fill in the gaps.
His shame appeased by neither memory nor research, Maxwell finds himself fixated on the image of Giacometti’s “Palace at 4 A.M.,” a sculpture that resides in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. I, myself, have spent hours staring at this famous piece and understand the power of its evocations, but initially Maxwell’s quasi-critical digression about a piece of art seems at best incongruous with the action of the narrative:
I always stand back and look at it – partly because it reminds me of my father’s new house in its unfinished state and partly because it is so beautiful. It is about thirty inches high and sufficiently well-known that I probably don’t need to describe it. But anyway, it is made of wood, and there are no solid walls, only thin uprights and horizontal beams. There is the suggestion of a classic pediment and of a tower. Flying around in a room at the top of the palace there is a queer-looking creature with the head of a monkey wrench. A bird? A cross between a male ballet dancer and a pterodactyl? Below it, in a kind of freestanding closet, the backbone of some animal. To the left, backed by three off-white parallelograms, what could be an imposing female figure or one of the more important pieces of a chess set. And, in about the position a basketball ring would occupy, a vertical, hollowed-out spatulate shape with a ball in front of it. It is all terribly spare and strange…
This description is immediately followed by some of the artist’s own commentary about the piece’s design and construction:
This object took shape little by little in the late summer of 1932; it revealed itself to me slowly, the various parts taking their exact form and their presecise place within the whole. By autumn it had attained such reality that its actual execution in space took no more than one day. It is related without any doubt to a period in my life that had come to an end a year before, when for six whole months hour after hour was spent in the company of a woman who, concentrating all life in herself, magically transformed my every moment. We used to construct a fantastic palace at night – days and nights had the same color, as if everything happened just before daybreak; throughout the whole time I never saw the sun – a very fragile palace of matchsticks. At the slightest false move a whole section of this tiny construction would collapse. We would always begin it over again. I don’t know why it came to be inhabited by a spinal column in a cage – the spinal column this woman sold me one of the very first nights I met her on the street – and by one of the skeleton birds that she saw the very night before the morning in which our life together collapsed – the skeleton birds which flutter with cries of joy at four o’clock in the morning very high above the pool of clear, green water where the extremely fine, white skeletons of fish float in the great unroofed hall. In the middle there rises the scaffolding of a tower, perhaps unfinished or, since its top has collapsed, perhaps also broken. On the other side there appeared the statue of a woman, in which I recognize my mother, just as she appears in my earliest memories. The mystery of her long, black dress touching the floor troubled me; it seemed to me like a part of her body, and aroused in me a feeling of fear and confusion…
Maxwell does not comment on this strangely affecting nugget of insight from Giacometti. He lets the final chord about an absent mother drone above the immediately resumed narrative. The passage stands as oddly alluring within the pages of the novel as the sculpture itself does among the white walls of the MOMA; it invites the same sort of grave imaginitve play in his readers as that on which Maxwell himself will presently embark.
