Authors: Michael Chabon
Brother, you’re thinking. All this nattering on about golems and wishes and lies, and in the end the point comes down to one of your own kind, stick to your own kind. But that isn’t the point. I don’t know what the point is. All I know is that one sunny afternoon, not long after we met, I found myself in Jerusalem with Ayelet, at Yad Vashem, the Israeli national museum of the Shoah, or Holocaust, and my heart was broken. I came out into the sunshine and burst into tears and just stood there, crying, and the weight of the thing I carried, that tablet compounded of wishes and lies, that five-thousand-year burden of mothers and fathers and the wondrous, bitter story of their lives, almost knocked me down.
Our next stop before coming home was, of all places, Prague. Duly we made our way down to the ghetto, or what’s left of it, and trooped around the old Jewish cemetery, with its snaggled headstones lying like teeth in a jawbone. That’s where they buried old Rabbi Judah, and his grave is now a kind of pilgrimage site, strewn with memorial stones and penciled notes and withered flowers.
I knelt down beside the grave there, and in a patch of dirt I formed the hasty outline of a man. Where his mouth would be I opened a hole, and worked the clay tablet down into it. Then I took Ayelet’s hand in mine and walked away.
I haven’t received another one since, though I’m still looking out for it in the mail. I’m still listening to my father, too, and wishing as he wished—as we all wish, Jews and non-Jews alike—to be part of something ancient and honorable and greater than myself. And, naturally, I’m still telling lies.
POSTSCRIPT, AUGUST 2007
The preceding is the text of a talk that I delivered publicly several times over the course of 2003–04. Its subject is the interrelationship between truth and lies, memory and invention, history and story, memoir and fiction, the sources of narrative and the storytelling impulse; the inevitable fate of liars to be swallowed up or crushed by their lies; and the risks inherent both in discounting the power of outright fiction to reveal the truths of a life, and in taking at face value the fictions that writers of memoir present as fact. The matter struck me (some three years before the exposures of J. T. Leroy and James Frey) as valid and important but hardly novel or surprising, and rather than deal with it in a straightforward expository manner, for my talk I elected to put on a kind of demonstration. Instead of just making commonplace assertions like “writers of fiction are professional liars” or “there is a kinship between lies and stories,” I wanted to try to show an audience just how tangled the interrelationship can be. I was hoping, mostly, that it might be more fun that way, for audiences and for me.
So I crafted a narrative in the form of a memoir, one constructed partly from the materials of my actual biography—my having lived in Flushing in 1968, grown up in Columbia, Maryland with a father given to the cultivation of what Freud called “family romance,” loved a book called
Strangely Enough!
by C. B. Colby,
married a woman (my first wife) who was not Jewish—and partly from pure invention. This is, of course, a technique common both to liars and writers of fiction: to give credibility to invented details by blending them with factual ones.
This talk was written to be performed, and in writing and performing it I was always conscious of my audience. It has often been observed that the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things. In fiction and in stage magic, one result of this deception, if it works, is the experience of pleasure in the audience at the verisimilitude of the effect. In both cases the pleasure is possible—indeed, it depends entirely—on the audience’s knowing perfectly well that it is being fooled, on its avid willingness to be fooled, to participate in creating the illusion of reality. This, of course, is the essential difference between fiction and lies. There is a contract between the writer of fiction and the readers he or she lies to, as there is between a magician and the audience he hoodwinks; they are in it together. They are helping each other to bring a story to apparent life or an edible orange to grow from the branch of a clockwork tree.
It was never, in giving this talk, my hope to make people actually believe that I had, for example, once known a Holocaust survivor who passed himself off as a writer, but who then turned out to be a different writer who was passing himself off as a Holocaust survivor who had himself been a writer, with all of the progress of this ever-widening gyre of lies marked and measured by the growth of a clay homunculus to prodigious size. The possibility that somebody would believe or even half believe the semipreposterous tale never occurred to me; but making
somebody believe it wasn’t even remotely the point. The point was to try to tangle and disentangle and tangle again the lines of truth and fiction before the audience’s very eyes, so to speak, and let them feel (or so I hoped) the excitement that comes from handling the raw materials of golem-craft, of bringing inanimate facts of clay, through imagination and invention, to a fabulous kind of life.
Magicians have different ways of acknowledging, while performing their tricks, that they are tricks. That’s part of the fun. They tell the audience that they are going to be fooled, and they challenge the audience to spot the mechanism, to see through the deception. Or they guarantee that all the marvels the audience is about to see are verifiable feats of magic, and insist, deadpan, that the lady has in fact been sawed in two. Or they pile it on, using grandiose language, hyperbolic and preposterous claims about the provenance and genuineness of the tricks in their repertoire. All of these are ways of engaging the audience to maintain and participate in the deception.
Beginning with its dubious title, and throughout the talk, I engaged in the fiction writer’s versions of these magical strategies. I repeatedly—to the point of absurdity—insisted on the truth of everything that I was saying, no matter how ridiculous, impossible, unlikely, or strange. Indeed it was usually at the most unbelievable moments in the story that I made such assertions. I also employed the common magician’s device of asking the audience to assent to a premise that I had not bothered to demonstrate or prove, telling them, for instance, that some of them might remember the case of my fictitious liar, Joseph Adler, from reading about it in the newspaper. Once I even took from my pocket a small chunk of brown brick I had found in the parking lot outside the lecture hall, brandished it, and claimed
that it was the lost toe of the Golem of Flushing; but afterward I lost it and never repeated this particular flourish.
Furthermore I employed a number of nonverbal cues in the course of the performance to signal my intentions to the audience. As a friend who attended my talk in Seattle wrote to me, “Pursuing all this on the page really leaves out a huge part of the performance—your timing, your facial expressions, your body language. It’s funny, but those are the elements I remember most.”
My sense, in giving the talk all over the country to diverse audiences of literate, intelligent, engaged people, was that the talk was taken exactly in the spirit in which I intended it. They understood that it was not a “real” memoir but an avowedly fictional one, right up to the very last word, and I think that almost everyone understood the literary arguments in the service of which the fictional memoir had been offered. I make this assertion on the basis of the audience reaction as I perceived it during the course of the talks, and on the comments that people made to me afterward. A typical remark was something like “That part about writing the story about Sherlock Holmes and Captain Nemo was true, though, right?” or “I know the part about you living on Vashon Island is true!” When people said things like this, I would laugh and say something like “Are you saying you didn’t believe the rest of it? I’m outraged!” or “What do you mean
that
part was true?” I was teasing them, in a very obvious way. There was so much about the talk and my style of delivering it that was obvious, sometimes I worried I was hamming it up too much.
Nonetheless, there were people who did not seem to catch on entirely. There is no denying that. I believe that there were not very many such people. But there were a few who came up to me
after the talk was over, and asked me about Joseph Adler, or the location of the candy store that I had said my uncle had owned in Harlem, or even about my claims of having seen golems. I will confess that, at first, I felt a mild sense of exhilaration when this occurred. If you made a man out of clay, and it really did get up and walk around, you would probably feel the same way—at first. But shortly thereafter you would begin to feel uneasy, and that is what I came to feel when somebody—and of course it really didn’t happen very often—asked me about Joseph Adler.
I’d had a similar experience with
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
To my surprise, I discovered that there were readers who came away from the novel believing that Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier had really existed, that they had really created a character known as the Escapist back in the ’40s, and that somewhere out there you would be able to find and purchase old Escapist comic books and perhaps even original artwork drawn by Joe Kavalier. These people wrote me letters and emails asking me how they could obtain such things. I confess that I tended to view people like this as having a certain amount of the sucker in them. I was not looking for suckers. God knows I was not trying to sucker anybody. But the suckers are out there, and they will get suckered whether you want them to or not.
On the signing line after the first public reading I did from my novel
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,
which presents among other deceptions an entirely fictitious, entirely Jewish modern-day city of Sitka, Alaska, an apparently intelligent and literate woman approached me to say that she had been to Sitka on a cruise and was astonished to learn now that she had somehow missed seeing all of those Jews up there. She didn’t remember any of the tall buildings either. She was not challenging me on my facts, and she was not joking. She was simply wonderstruck by
her own failure to have seen all of that from the deck of her cruise ship. Listening to me read the first chapter of my novel—fully advertised as such by me in my opening remarks—was enough to make her doubt her own recollections, to accept my sophisticated lie over the crude but veracious fragments of her own memory.
I felt that Trickster flush of surprise, triumph, satisfaction:
Sucker!
It made me giddy; it also made me feel a little ill. I didn’t know how to disabuse her, or whether I ought to do so at all. On the one hand, I had indeed been trying, at the most fundamental level, to deceive her, along with every reader the novel would ever find, into the most passionate and foolish belief. But at the same time I was also trying, always, with no greater hope or ambition, to tell her the truth, a truth: to convey my understanding of, my own bit of information on, the nature of Jews and Alaska and Life. It is along the knife-narrow borderland between those two kingdoms, between the Empire of Lies and the Republic of Truth, more than along any other frontier on the map of existence, that Trickster makes his wandering way, and either comes to grief or finds his supper, his treasure, his fate.
“Maybe next time you’re there,” I told the lady before I signed my name across the title page of another pack of lies. “Check it out.”
Although it was written too late to be included in the hardcover edition of
Maps and Legends,
the essay is included here as a coda, with the author’s compliments.
The Danger of the Cape
When I was a boy, I had a religious-school teacher named Mr. Spector, whose job was to confront us with the peril we presented to ourselves. Jewish Ethics was the name of the class. We must have been eight or nine.
Mr. Spector used a workbook to guide the discussion; every Sunday, we began by reading a kind of modern parable or cautionary tale and then contended with a series of imponderable questions. One day, for example, we discussed the temptations of shoplifting; another class was devoted to all the harm to oneself and to others that could be caused by the telling of lies. Mr. Spector was a gently acerbic young man with a black beard and black roentgen-ray eyes. He seemed to take our moral failings for granted and, perhaps as a result, favored lively argument over reproach or condemnation. I enjoyed our discussions, while remaining perfectly aloof at my core from the issues they raised. I was, at the time, an awful liar, and quite a few times had stolen chewing gum and baseball cards from the neighborhood Wawa. None of that seemed to have anything to do with Mr. Spector or the cases we studied in Jewish Ethics. All nine-year-olds are sophists and hypocrites; I found it no more difficult than any other kid to withhold my own conduct from consideration in passing measured judgment on the human race.
The one time I felt my soul to be in danger was the Sunday Mr. Spector raised the ethical problem of escapism, particularly as it was experienced in the form of comic books. That day, we started off with a fine story about a boy who loved Superman so much that he tied a red towel around his neck, climbed up to the roof of his house, and, with a cry of “Up, up, and away,” leaped to his death. There was known to have been such a boy, Mr. Spector informed us—at least one verifiable boy, so enraptured and so betrayed by the false dream of Superman that it killed him.
The explicit lesson of the story was that what was found between the covers of a comic book was fantasy, and “fantasy” meant pretty lies, the consumption of which failed to prepare you for what lay outside those covers. Fantasy rendered you unfit to face “reality” and its hard pavement. Fantasy betrayed you and thus, by implication, your wishes, your dreams and longings, everything you carried around inside your head that only you and Superman and Elliot S! Maggin
*
could understand—all these would betray you, too. There were ancillary arguments to be made as well, about the culpability of those who produced such fare, sold it to minors, or permitted their children to bring it into the house.