In September 2005 the American poet Sharon Olds wrote an open letter to Laura Bush, explaining why she would rather not read at a literary dinner hosted by her during the National Book Festival. It’s an eloquent, wistful letter in which she admits being tempted by “the idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85Â 000 people”; nevertheless, she says: “I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you … What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the first lady who represents the administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting ‘extraordinary rendition’: flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.”
What makes this document powerful is, in part, its stylistic elegance, as it treads the fine line between political protest and the courtesy that any civilised human being owes to others, no matter how reprehensible their actions. Its effectiveness is enhanced, however, by the trust that a famously rigorous poet inspires; by the authority of one whose main pursuit is not money or fame but artistic integrity.
“I am a lie who always speaks the truth,” said Jean Cocteau, speaking of the writer’s craft. To go beyond mere facts, to record a true history that takes account of the unseen as well as the visible, Cocteau saw that the writer must create something that, on the face of it, is a fabrication.
This is what art does; this is what any narrative must take into account if it is to succeed. The artifice is there for all to see, but is not the criteria by which a writer is judged: what matters is whether we accept the truth that Cocteau’s “lie” reveals. If we do, authors can gain an authority that allows them to challenge dishonesty at the highest level — and, in doing so, remind us that the pen can be mightier than the sword.
A difficulty arises, however, when the author writes not about imagined worlds but about what seems to be fact — the recent boom in the memoir industry raises urgent questions about what we think of as art and what we see as truth. A non-fiction writer has to make a story that is both factually true and compelling, and sometimes “the facts” are sacrificed for the sake of a good yarn. We are all familiar with the plight of James Frey, whose A Million Little Pieces — supposedly a true account of his drug-addled life of crime — was hailed on Oprah as a book “like nothing you’ve ever read before”, only to be exposed a few months later, on the same show, as the deliberate deception of “millions of readers”.
More recently, Kathy O’Beirne’s bestselling autobiography, Don’t Ever Tell, has been in the news as seven of her siblings called a press conference to refute not only her claim that she was sexually abused by her father, but also her account of the brutal regime in a Magdalene laundry where she supposedly spent 14 years, having been incarcerated at the age of eight. “Our sister was not in a Magdalene laundry,” alleges Mary O’Beirne. “She was in St Anne’s childhood home, Kilmacud; St Loman’s psychiatric hospital, Mountjoy prison and Sherrard house for homeless people.” This is quite a catalogue of misery; evidently, something terrible happened to Kathy O’Beirne. She admits, in the opening pages of Don’t Ever Tell, that she had “great difficulty in recalling some of the worst experiences because for most of my life I had repressed the memories … There are still some events that I find it impossible to talk about.” Meanwhile, the family’s denials raise more questions than the book itself: why was this girl sent to a “childhood home”? What did she suffer as a child that doomed her to a life spent in institutions?
The jury is still out on Don’t Ever Tell, though Frey appears to have suffered the unenviable fate of becoming a bestselling non-fiction writer who is despised for his dishonesty (even after his public humiliation, his book is still in demand; current sales figures are close to four million). Whether or not the lies these and other writers are alleged to have told were attempts to tell a different kind of truth no one can say, but this isn’t what matters when it comes to judging a book. What matters is how we respond. We have become a society of lazy readers, easily satisfied and duped, and to that extent we get the authors we deserve. Yet, if we are to enjoy the privilege of living in a world where a poet can take a president’s wife to task, we must seek out writers who are committed to a truth that cannot be verified, other than by the authority that comes of a devotion to language itself, and to the hard discipline of the imagination. — Â