September 29, 2004
In Defense of Historically Inaccurate Fiction
When I was a child, I had a talent for “verbal embroidery.” Nobody ever called me a liar, understandably: they called me “creative,” addicted to “hyperbole.” But “whopper,” for me, never referred to a hamburger. When I was seven years old, I was charming my first grade teacher, Miss Smith (yes: that really was her name) about how my mother had given birth to a baby girl last week and how said child was now riding a bicycle and tossing bowls of chicken-noodle soup, not coincidentally aimed at my head, across the room.
I’m sure that Miss Smith and my mother profoundly enjoyed their phone call about our family’s “newest arrival.”
When I was twelve years old, I decided to take a creative-writing class at the local junior high school. Our first assignment was to write about a scarf, a dirty, boot-trodden affair of no determinate color that the teacher, a tight-belted She Devil named “Mrs. George,” tossed onto a seminar table. I wrote about the elegant tapestry designs in the scarf, its “mellifluous gold threads,” its crossthreaded patterns. Mrs. George was not pleased. Mrs. George was not impressed. “That’s not creative writing,” she said. “That’s an out-and-out distortion of the truth!”
After consultation with my parents, I never returned to the class.
It’s a habit that never left me, dramatizing the truth. Nowadays, though, I believe that my ends are wholly constructive, though some in favor of “unadulterated historical accuracy” (as if there were such a thing; all history is revisionist, in a sense) might disagree. At a certain point, the concept of biography entered my fictionalizing mind and has never deserted it. I became fascinated with Georgia O’Keeffe in her wizened, climbing-with-chows, New Mexico years, and the result was a collection of short stories, Ladder to the Moon: Short Stories and Novellas on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Life, which, rather than reproducing her biography literally on the page, seeks to realize her “hidden psychology” through the creation of emblematic scenes that represent these psychological states. It’s been an exciting foray for me into Georgia O’Keeffe’s mind, an opportunity to live inside her mind.
And there’s my novel on Diane Arbus, Autobiography of a Jawbone. Although I’ve been complimented for reproducing Arbus’s psychology accurately within the course of this novel, which travels from fictionalized/semi-fictionalized events in Arbus’ childhood (including a fixation on the dead Lindbergh baby, a fictionalization that arose quite naturally from Arbus’s professed fear of kidnappers) to her wildly publicized obsession with freaks and all manner of outcasts inhabiting New York City’s “underground world,” I’ve also been told that Arbus was an entirely repulsive person whose psychological “aberrations” should never be recorded.
Now, where’s the humanity in that?
Imagination can take us anywhere.
This brings to mind poignant childhood memories of my mother saying, all in one breath, that I "could lie without blinking an eye" and yet was "the most honest person" she'd ever known. Good writerly qualities, maybe.
***
I do hope your other novels follow in MARIE's formidable (and auspicious) footsteps and are picked up for publication soon.
Posted by: Season Harper-Fox on September 29, 2004 11:35 AMThanks, Season! I suspect that every writer has those qualities.
Posted by: Terri on September 29, 2004 01:37 PMPost a comment
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