Topical Guide 294
Mark Dorset
Privacy
Secrecy
Fiction, Autobiographical: Its Secrets, Its Motives
Family: Escaping
“CLOSE YOUR EYES, Herb,” said Lorna, “and I’ll tell you about our future. . . . Six months have passed. We’ve been married for four. . . . You and I are still living on the third floor, and we have to whisper when we talk in bed at night. . . . My mother and father celebrate our six-month anniversary by opening a bottle of champagne. . . . He says something sentimental. We all shed some tears. We eat dinner. We sit in the parlor. The clock ticks. My father nods in his chair. You and I go upstairs. We slip into bed. We are very quiet. In the dark, I whisper in your ear, ‘Herb, let’s get out of here.’ ”
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 8
My Home Is Far Away: Although I set out to do a complete job on my family, I colored it and, even worse, diluted it through a fear of embarrassing my fonder relatives, also a distaste for throwing away my own privacy.
A writer, for purposes of future collecting of material, needs personal privacy and disguises. Since telling the truth is merely a version of events anyway and nobody else’s “truth,” the essential thing is to convey similar effects, similar emotions and in my own case arrive at artistic truth by artistic means, instead of handicapping myself by withholding some facts and enlarging or distorting others. Better to fictionalize all—more pleasure and more freedom. Deciding this, I believe I can achieve much more interesting and worthwhile effects. Dance Night was completely fiction as I was working on it. Yet it is more autobiographical (with facts translated into their own value emotionally and structurally) than any autobiography I can imagine.
To write about one’s childhood is comparatively simple. One’s life has a natural defining frame. One knows who one is; in childish egotism, one supposes people have a relationship only with oneself. But after the age of twenty, the frame is uncertain, change is hard to pin down, one is less and less sure of who one is, and other egos with their court of adherents invade one’s privacy with theirs. One’s freedom is inhibited by their natural insistence on themselves; also, the professional writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and has become almost nothing. The true autobiography of this egotist is exposed in all its intimate foliage in his work.
If the secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
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[more to come on Tuesday, July 12, 2022]
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.