Reality Hunger (50 page)

And I shall essay to be.

The book is written in the first person, but that
I
is the most deceptive, tricky pronoun. There are two of us. I’m a chronicler of this character at the center who is, but in a necessary sense is not, me. He doesn’t have my retrospect or my leisure. He doesn’t know what’s around the next bend. He’s ignorant of consequences. He moves through the book in a state of innocence about the future, whereas of course I as the writer, from the time I begin writing the first paragraph, do know what the future holds. I know how the story is going to turn out.

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me.

Cinéma vérité
looks for performers in everyday life; without them, you really haven’t got footage. Some people have whatever quality it is that makes them interesting on film—a kind of self-confidence or self-assuredness mixed, perhaps, with a degree of vulnerability—and other people don’t have it, but as a filmmaker you know it when you see it. You have to sense that there’s something real behind the so-called performance.

Johnny Carson, asked to describe the difference between himself and Robert Redford, said, “I’m playing me.”

In
Essays of Elia
, Charles Lamb turned the reader’s attention to the persona, the unreliable mask of the “I,” not as an immutable fact of literature but as a tool of the essayist in particular, who, if he or she wants to get personal, must first choose what to conceal. These peculiarities—the theatrical reticence, the archaism, the nostalgia, the celebration of oddity for its own sake—are regular features of Lamb’s essays, and they helped to change the English (and American) idea of what an essay should be. Even when personal essayists don’t flaunt their power to mislead us, even when we no longer expect belle-lettrists to write old-fashioned prose, we still expect essays to deliver that same Elian tension between the personal and the truly private and to tell stories that are digressive and inconclusive. Most of all, we expect personal essayists to speak to us from behind a stylized version of themselves, rather than give us the whole man—as Montaigne or Lamb’s favorite devotional writers seem to do—or a more or less representative man
like the
Spectator
of Addison and Steele. Lamb wasn’t the only Romantic essayist who wrote this way. Hazlitt soon followed suit, and so did De Quincey and Hunt, but Lamb was the first. Ever since Elia, eccentricity has been the rule.

Autobiography can be naïvely understood as pure self-revelation or more cannily recognized as cleverly wrought subterfuge.

When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.

I’m not interested in myself per se. I’m interested in myself as theme carrier, as host.

A novelist friend, who can’t not write fiction but is flummoxed whenever he tries to write nonfiction directly about his own experience, read something I wrote and said he was impressed (alarmed?) by my willingness to say nearly anything about myself: “It’s all about you and yet somehow it’s not about you at all. How can that be?”