A Tissue of Lies? Could there be a more persuasively apt title for a memoir? Particularly if the rememberer of his past is referring not so much to his own lies but to those of others, and, if I may immodestly boast, I have gone mano a mano with some of the truly great liars of our time. But then I was a novelist in an era when the line between fiction and fact pretty much broke down as, in coldest blood, the “novelist” felt free to make up things for actual people to do on the page. I have also been engaged in politics, theater, and movies, three worlds where no one is ever on oath—until indicted, of course—in which case he who takes the fall gets to write the definitive tissue of lies, often more than once, like the incomparable R. M. Nixon.
I am writing this on August 26, 1994—glumly, avoiding a tempting lie of convenience; since I usually like to keep the present in the present tense, I wanted to note that today, after the hottest summer ever in southern Italy, the heat wave broke. But it was not today but yesterday that the weather changed. From our house here in Ravello, on a cliff above the Gulf of Salerno, there was a lightning storm to the west and another to the east, and a sudden gale that has filled the house with dried leaves.
I am now cool for the first time in two months and able to contemplate what I’ve been writing for the last two years, a description of the first thirty-nine years of my life as viewed from twenty-nine years later. I have just noted in this Tissue—no, no! this record of eternal truths and verities, as William Faulkner so famously and typically put it—that last summer the heat broke on August 21, five days earlier than this year.
The room where I work is a white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum. At the moment: metallic-gray sea and a white haze that obscures our ever more hostile sun. Robert Frost thought that between fire and ice the world would end in ice. Plainly, it is going to be fire this time around.
The room is a mess since Carmela, who looks after the house, has not come to work. She is young and we have always known that we would lose her to marriage, but now it looks as if gravity will get her first. She has fallen, yet again, off her bicycle.
On the long chestnut-wood table where I write, the collected works of Hazlitt. I wanted to write about him two years ago. But did not. The Spirit of the Age, 1825 has a reproachful look. Several volumes of Mark Twain are piled on a nearby table. I am about to write a preface to his anti-imperial writings. Also—shall I or shall I not?—review the first-person narrations of the two principal “spin masters” in the last presidential election? He told lies for Clinton; she for Bush. Then they got married. Is there a moral? Next to their Joint Tissue, a bowl of green figs just in from the garden. There is either too much of everything here or nothing at all. Almonds have just come and gone. Since a Norwegian writer and his new wife are due to arrive this evening, Carmela has just rung up to say that she will be coming this afternoon, ready to dust with martyr’s smile.
I have always been curious to know where writers are physically situated when they write memoirs. Their placement in works of the imagination is less interesting because the true geography of a novel is all in the mind. But a memoir is set off by a thousand associations, often by objects in a given room. So—opposite me there is a large gray tufa-stone fireplace with elaborate green-yellow-blue tiles. On a console to its right, a photograph of Tennessee Williams with Maria St. Just. She died a few months ago, and her daughter has been staying here. Tennessee looks away from Maria, who looks at him. This was long ago. In Key West.
On the other side of the fireplace, a photograph of me with the president who did us the most harm, Harry S Truman—more on him later. Truman has come to Poughkeepsie to speak for me in my race for Congress. It is the year 1960. I gaze fawningly upon him while, all about us, the flower of Tammany Hall stare straight ahead. Then a photograph of me, welcoming Jack Kennedy to Dutchess County. He has just been nominated for president. We are both very young, to state the obvious.
By the door, two framed documents: my honorary citizenship of Ravello and my honorary citizenship of Los Angeles, the one and the other of my—home?—towns. A week ago, in the gardens of the Villa Cimbrone, just above our place, the town had planned an homage to the films that I have written. Characteristically, they began with Bob Roberts, a film in which I only act. Since the writer-star-director Tim Robbins and his friend Susan Sarandon were staying with us, it ended up as an homage to Tim, which was just as well, though Italy’s latest minister of culture, Vittorio Sgarbi, a colorful art historian and television “personality,” was still able to continue his long public debate with me on who makes the movies. This is a subject which everyone knows all about except those of us who have actually made a film.
Recently, a television interviewer quoted me as having said, “I seem to have met everyone, but I know no one.” Grinning like a tiger in anticipation of antelope, she leaned forward, gently salivating, eager to hear a tragic sigh, see a tear of self-pity. Plainly, due to my high and solitary place in the world—am I not the Living Buddha (or is that Richard Gere?)—and to my cold nature and to my refusal to conform to warm mature family values, I am doomed to be the eternal outsider, the black sheep among those great good white flocks of folks who graze contentedly in the amber fields of the Republic.
I told her briskly that I had never wanted to meet most of the people that I had met and the fact that I never got to know most of them took dedication and steadfastness on my part. By choice and luck, my life has been spent reading other people’s books and making sentences for my own. More to the point, if you have known one person you have known them all. Of course, I am not so sure that I have known even one person well, but, as the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know.
A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked. I’ve taken the memoir route on the ground that even an idling memory is apt to get right what matters most. I used to say, proudly, that I would never write a memoir, since “I am not my own subject.” Now I’m not so sure. After all, one’s recollected life is just about all that’s left at the end of the day when the work is done and gone, property now of others.
I may not have known well any of the characters in this drama, but I was certainly more interested in my view of them than I was in any view of myself, unlike so many diarists, memoirists, and self-invented fabulists. Yet, reading their records, true or false, my own memory is stirred in a nonsequential way, which explains why I’m not going to start at the traditional beginning: I was born . . . In fact, I give away “Rosebud” in the next few pages, unlike Citizen Kane, where revelation comes at the end. I also record daily life so that it can trigger memory, in the hope that the resulting narratives, impressions, sentences should make a pattern not visible to me now.
Title: Palimpsest. For years I’ve used this obscure word incorrectly. Worse, I’ve always mispronounced it, not sounding the second s. I had thought that the word was applicable only to architecture, like the wall of San Marco at Venice with its fragments of bas-reliefs, bits of porphyry, shards of ceramic, all set in plaster to form a palimpsest.
I have just now looked up the earliest meaning of palimpsest. It is even more apt than I thought: “Paper, parchment, etc., prepared for writing on and wiping out again, like a slate” and “a parchment, etc., which has been written upon twice; the original writing having been rubbed out.” This is pretty much what my kind of writer does anyway. Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought, erasing some but not all of the original while writing something new over the first layer of text. Finally, in a memoir, there are many rubbings-out and puttings-in or, as I once observed to Dwight Macdonald, who had found me disappointingly conventional on some point, “I have nothing to say, only to add.”
These memories were recorded during 1993 and 1994 and completed—or abandoned—in March of 1995. I go back and forth between the present (now already past) to people and places that I knew long ago, duly noting along the way a number of familiar selves, some more real than others.
Palimpsest: discrete archeological layers of a life to be excavated like the different levels of old Troy, where, at some point beneath those cities upon cities, one hopes to find Achilles and his beloved Patroclus, and all that wrath with which our world began.