In My Back Pocket

[Exegesis]

Writing style is primarily determined by how we perceive the truth, and secondly by what we do with it once we’ve registered it. The quest for truth, in other words, informs on almost every choice a writer can make. This, however, could be said of any writer, nonfiction or otherwise.

As a writer of nonfiction, there are more specific necessities that must be attended to, which also contribute to your apparent “style”. Primarily among them is the writer’s relationship with the subject matter. By “relationship” I mean things like perspective, viewpoint, bias, agenda, cultural leanings, as well as how thoroughly the piece was researched and the nature of the research. A good example of this is Gay Talese’s Frank Sinatra Has A Cold. Talese, denied an interview with the man himself, still achieved a powerful portrayal anecdotally, arguably even better than a straight interview would have been – we will never know. On top of that, reading Joel Agee’s The Lie That Tells The Truth, juxtaposed with Walt Harrington’s The Writer’s Choice, was what really highlighted just what a conflicted modality nonfiction is.

Say you wrote in your memoir of an event in your childhood, and then “fact-checked” it years later through a family member, and realised that the two memories of the same event didn’t correlate, who should I as the reader believe? My take on it is: you are the writer of a very personal memoir, so I am prepared to take your word for things if you are happy with that version of the “truth”. In other words, if your family member wants to write a memoir, and he or she has enough ability as a writer to convey it, then I will happily read his or her other, conflicting memoir and marvel at the differences, large or small. This doesn’t negate either version to me. You are writing about your life; you are recounting events of your life, as they seem to you. Someone else’s “correct” version is immaterial, because that knowledge had no bearing upon your emotional state or decision-making at the time.

The focus of the memoir, as it seems to me, is not the actual events themselves, but their effect on the writer in the narrative, but also in the “present” (at the time of writing). So the perception may be flawed… what of it? I would expect it to be. To put it another way, I am deeply suspicious of any person who claims to have 20/20 hindsight. It is a single person’s viewpoint. If there are errors then that is all a part of a distinct vision. I wouldn’t want any unique intimacy to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. The internal impression is all.

On the other hand, we have the biography. David Marr’s account of Tony Abbott’s formative life has little specific or personal link to Abbott himself. He is representing him to us as a figure of responsibility, with the questions fixed in our minds: can we trust this man? Will he be a responsible PM? Is he a rabid Christian? Is he really a mysogynist? Is he an idealist or a power-broker? Which of these is worse? What we know and think of Abbott is being challenged by the man we see in Marr’s representation of him. David Marr’s approach, and therefore his style must be much more factual and thorough. Any inconsistencies must be ironed out with thorough research. It is because he is responsible for how someone else is perceived, and Marr takes that responsibility very seriously. While I listened to Marr speak, I couldn’t help but feel respect and admiration for a man who has so wholeheartedly dedicated himself to mastering his craft. In spite of that, however, throughout his sessions I felt a little lost. I think it was partially because I struggled with the third person as a device in nonfiction. Taking the observer out of the equation seems a bit of an abdication of trust. Suffice it to say that I couldn’t cleave to what he was teaching me – it was too far down the road of the journalist or biographer and seemed restricted to external impressions.

In short, though these two forms of creative nonfiction are placed on the same shelf in the bookstore, they couldn’t be more different. One is a personal account which has little accountability but to oneself, the other is a public exhibition, almost like a sculpture, which must find its supreme truth in details.

When I struck on the idea of covering the Greycliffe disaster I thought that I would be embarking on a depiction of life in 1927 in Sydney, on the forces that pushed Alex Inglis on to the ferry being in part responsible for his survival. I was hoping to write a circular mini-biography that would be almost fable-like. I downloaded and installed software to record audio through Skype. I interviewed Alex’s daughter, Georgie, and I carefully transcribed the interview, making sure that no word was out of place. In this period, I palpably felt the weight of my responsibility to Georgie, in not mucking up the memory of her father, to Alex himself, who clearly was a terrific guy, and foremost to David Marr and Walt Harrington, who had made it so abundantly clear what our responsibilities as nonfiction writers are.

I hoped the ordeal in Sydney Harbour would transform Alex from a self-doubting, “upstart wannabe” into the well-rounded and humble individual he became. What I found, however, was nothing like a fable. The experience did not change him. No matter how much we want real life to be like a stage play, it just ain’t so. It was about half way through my interview with Georgie that I realised that there was no story. No matter how much I wished for the prosaic intertwining of narrative and character, it just didn’t fit the way I had hoped. I was stumped. In spite of how much work I had already done, I was considering dropping the project altogether.

Then came Linda Jaivin’s last session on The Monkey and the Dragon. That Jaivin’s editor had to insist on a first-person account seemed incredible to me. I couldn’t believe that she had almost completely left herself out of the narrative in the original draft. I realised that my piece, like Jaivin’s, might still work as a combination of both memoir and biography. Like Jaivin, I would have to inject myself into the proceedings in order for it to resonate. Unlike Jaivin, however, I wasn’t actually present – so what could I do?

It was about then that I realised that my ferry trip would have to do. I could use the class exercise written about place as the introduction. I would stand on the bow of the ferry and reflect. Gone was Alex’s early life. Gone the two eccentric aunts who paid for his schooling. Gone his later years. My personal reflections on the nature of mortality and how our society tries to cope with loss would have to be balanced by a specific account of that tiny part of his life. I tried to write through and into that, but nothing worked. The event itself, juxtaposed with my own life was the only way the piece would work. But what did my life have to offer? It’s true I have suffered loss, but nothing on the scale of the Greycliffe disaster. It all ended sounding rather trite in the face of those devastating events. My own story felt trivial, transgressing without adding to Alex’s story.

Listening to Jaivin speaking about, “the importance of history and context”(22.4.13), I decided to play with tense. At this point I was writing purely in the past tense, as seemed appropriate for Alex’s narrative. That meant that the events happening in present day could be first-person present. The leap from that, however, to third-person past tense seemed too great. There was no resonant connection. It seemed too formal. What if I was to be recounting events from the prow of the ferry in my own mind? Had I not actually done that on the day anyway? I realised that I had allowed myself to get caught up in my own literary forms. Changing Alex’s account into a third-person present account allowed the story to flow more evenly, as well as allowing a return back to “myself” at the end, even though I had as yet no clue how it would resolve.

Then came the night that can only be characterised as “worst case scenario”. Of course it wasn’t really, but that was how it seemed at the time. A one year old with a broken arm, and no one and nothing to blame but myself. It took me a few days to recover, and once I had, I knew I had my story. We participants in this mechanised society all contribute in some way, either by compliance or omission, to industrial disasters. And as far as industrial disasters go, the Greycliffe was the worst type; in which passengers, blithely innocent of the powerful forces at work around them, get caught in the cogs. Marlowe’s broken arm was not entirely fitting, except that incredible pain was brought about by an act of complete randomness, to the point of meaninglessness. The whole piece took on another shade of meaning, which begged the question: how do we function as a society, knowing that we live on the brink of utterly random acts of violence, be they human or natural in origin? It seemed to work that the two events were dissimilar – from the industrial to the personal – helping to sharpen the focus on what they did have in common. Thinking it was not the same as writing it, however, and for a time this remained a concept only.

Also, it must be noted, I felt that I was attempting a kind of alchemy. Somehow, in writing about things without apparent meaning, I would manage to derive a positive outcome. This is a powerful incentive, but it did also lead me astray. For that event alone, no matter how significant to me, could not compare with the events of Alex’s life. My experience, I was to find, was just a rickety bridge into Alex’s world, but there was no way back.

We submitted our pieces for peer review, and I was pleased to find that my piece was well received by all, almost to the point that it didn’t get much of a mention. However there was one part that was never free from criticism: the ending. In the first peer review it was requested that I alter the end, or even cut the last lines. I was aware that something was missing, but couldn’t agree that this was the solution. I came up with something that was a change from the original ending, and was surprised to hear outrage from my fellows. “What have you done to the ending?” they cried. I went back to the drawing board and completely erased the last three sentences. I agonised over it night after night.

I felt perhaps I had been trying too hard to close the loop, to bring it back home to a place that was essentially unsupportable. The two experiences were too dissimilar to bring them together into an exact accounting with one another. However, having read The Lyric Stance by Mark Tredinnick, it seemed there was a world living within the mode of creative nonfiction that I hadn’t considered. It seemed to me that he was asking writers to “make facts sing”. This felt right, and so I let myself do something I never normally do. I loosened my grip, and allowed my mind to wander back to my thoughts on the day on the ferry.

The poetry felt galling at first, presumptuous, indecent, not to mention pretentious. But it felt right. I hovered over the sentence I had hit upon for a few days, ready at any moment to delete it and write something else, but in the end I let it stay. In the end, it lifted the piece out of its own problems and placed it somewhere less grounded and more esoteric. Was that not my original thought, anyway? Where was the problem in admitting that? I had spent much effort to not be high-minded, so maybe I had earned the right to kick free of the earth in the last moments of the piece?

Is it truthful, though? As far as I could see, it being a part-memoir, I had been scathingly truthful about my own negligent deeds as a parent, and could attest to the truth of my own doings. However, there is the matter of the juxtaposition of the two worlds, the two events. Here, I relied on the original meaning of the word “essay”, “to try”, as Fiona helpfully pointed out to me in class. The beauty of this is: that the attempt is being made, and is more significant in its failures than it’s successes. I decided that if I should fail, I should fail grandly.

My “style” probably hasn’t changed because my method of approach hasn’t, but I have learned that those places where we can fly must be earned, like an actor earning a pause. I don’t like to use lyricism with impunity, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep a handful of the stuff in my back pocket.