Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the essay “Truth in Personal Narrative” by Vivian Gornick (©2008 by University of Iowa Press). Passage B is adapted from the article “Fact and Fiction in A Moveable Feast” by Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin (©1984 by Hemingway Review).

Passage A by Vivian Gornick

Once, in Texas, I gave a reading from my memoir Fierce Attachments. No sooner had I finished speaking than a woman in the audience asked a question: “If I come to New York, can I take a walk with your mama?” I told her that, actually, she wouldn’t want to take a walk with my mother, it was the woman in the book she wanted to walk with. They were not exactly the same.

Shortly afterwards, I attended a party in New York where, an hour into the evening, one of the guests blurted out in a voice filled with disappointment, “Why, you’re nothing like the woman who wrote Fierce Attachments!” At the end of the evening she cocked her head at me and said, “Well, you’re something like her.” I understood perfectly. She had come expecting to have dinner with the narrator of the book, not with me; again, not exactly the same.

On both occasions, what was desired was the presence of two people who existed only between the pages of a book. In our actual persons, neither Mama nor I could give satisfaction. We ourselves were just a rough draft of the written characters. Moreover, these characters could not live independent of the story which had called them into life, as they existed for the sole purpose of serving that story. In the flesh, neither Mama nor I were serving anything but the unaesthetic spill of everyday thought and feeling that routinely floods us all, only a select part of which, in this case, invoked the principals in a tale of psychological embroilment that had as its protagonist neither me nor my mother but rather our “fierce attachment.”

At the heart of my memoir lay a revelation: I could not leave my mother because I had become my mother. This complicated insight was my bit of wisdom, the history I wanted badly to trace out. The context in which the book is set—our life in the Bronx in the 1950s, alternating with walks taken in Manhattan in the 1980s—was the situation; the story was the insight. What mattered most to me was not the literalness of the situation, but the emotional truth of the story. What actually happened is only raw material; what matters is what the memoirist makes of what happened.

Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. It is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or historical narrative. What is owed the reader is the ability to persuade that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the tale at hand.

Passage B by Jacqueline Tavenier-Courbin

The dividing line between fiction and autobiography is often a very fine and shaky one, and Ernest Hemingway’s autobiography of the artist as a young man is a case in point. As nearly all readers know, Hemingway’s fiction contains numerous autobiographical elements, and his protagonists are often conscious projections and explorations of the self. At the same time, Hemingway’s openly autobiographical writings, Green Hills of Africa and A Moveable Feast, are barely more autobiographical than his fiction, and, in many ways, just as fictional.

A Moveable Feast is particularly complex because Hemingway was clearly conscious that it would be his literary testament. Thus, in writing it, he dealt with issues which had been important to him and he settled old scores. Among the reasons which motivated his portrayal of self and others were the need to justify himself, for he felt that he had been unfairly portrayed by some of his contemporaries, the desire to present his own version of personal relationships as well as the desire to get back at people against whom he held a grudge, the need to relive his youth in an idealized fashion, and the wish to leave to the world a flattering self-portrait. Thus, A Moveable Feast could hardly be an objective portrayal of its author and his contemporaries, and the accuracy of the anecdotes becomes an issue that can never be entirely resolved.

While it is impossible to verify everything Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, one might conclude that he invented and lied relatively seldom about pure facts. When he did so, it was usually in order to reinforce the pattern he had created—i.e., a negative portrayal of literary competitors and an idealized self-portrayal. He clearly overlooked a great deal of material, distorted some, and generally selected the episodes so that they would show him as innocent, honest, dedicated, and thoroughly enjoying life. A Moveable Feast, in fact, appears as a fascinating composite of relative factual accuracy and clear dishonesty of intent.