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Is There Such a Thing as Autobiographical Fiction by Alec Clayton
Lew Hamburg reviewing Imprudent Zeal for The Olympian in 2005 called it “a
tour de force of autobiographical fiction.”
I like that description but I could argue how autobiographical it is or if
it is, if that’s a good thing or not.
There must be millions of wannabe writers out there who have never taken a
writing class and have no experience in writing but who think their life
experiences are unique—which they may very well be—and they write their
stories either as autobiography or disguised as fiction. Like me, they tend
to be self-published. The point being that there’s a huge difference in
having a good story to tell and being able to tell it well.
There are also literary icons who sometimes walk a tightrope between fiction
and non-fiction who have written autobiography that is as engaging as the
best of fiction. A great example is Earnest Hemingway’s Paris is a Moveable
Feast. It’s non-fiction but when I bought a copy many years ago it was in
the fiction section of the bookstore. It differed from Hemingway’s novels
only in that it happened to be true. Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home
Again and Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place caused firestorms of protests from
people who grew up in the writers’ home towns because they recognized
themselves in fictitious characters.
Despite some of the greats like Hemingway and Wolfe and the hundreds of
other novelists who have drawn from their own life experiences, there’s
enough really bad autobiographical fiction to stigmatize the genre (if I may
call it a genre), and the stigmata has exploded now that we’ve entered the
age of print-on-demand / anybody-can-be-a-published-author. So I had mixed
feelings about Hamburg’s review of my novel. He did, however, say some
really nice things that I still treasure.
One of the major characters, Scully McDonald, is a recovered alcoholic who
founded a service organization in New York City that provided meals and
clothing and housing for poor people. Scully was based on an actual person
named Jack Scully who did, in fact, found an organization by that name. And
there was a guy who worked for him named Lane Felts whom Hamburg, who knew a
little of my personal history, took to be me. The chapter on EFE was not
fiction. Almost everything in that chapter happened just as written—only the
names were changed to protect the innocent. The only fictitious element in
that chapter was the relation between Lane and Scully’s daughter, McKenzie,
which was 100-percent a product of my imagination.
I made no bones about that chapter being autobiographical; I even said so in
the front section of the book. But that chapter is a tiny part of the book.
Everything else is either made up or is such a blending of pure fiction with
bits and pieces of people, places and events from my life that even I can’t
sort it out. And from what I know of other writers that is pretty much true
of every novelist. Even sci-fi and fantasy writers draw from their own
experiences.
Assuming similarities between my experiences and other writers, it may be
interesting to look at what’s true and what’s made-up in my novels.
Lane Felts was not based on an actual person, but he did things that I did.
He grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, studied art at the University of
Southern Mississippi, played drums in a country band and went to New York
and worked at Everything for Everybody. That’s me to a T. But Lane’s
relationship with Palmer Jackson is 100-percent imaginary. I’ve never known
anyone remotely like Palmer.
Within the small chapter on Everything for
Everybody, Scully McDonald’s actions and mannerisms are those of Jack
Scully. But everything about him from childhood until he started EFE is a
total invention. He was never a boxer, he didn’t go to Korea and witness his
best friend being blown up by a land mine, and he didn’t see his wife and
child killed in a freak accident. I made all of that up. Nor did he father a
child with a prostitute, and that prostitute did not hitch-hike from New
York to the West Coast and marry a soldier, and her daughter did not grow up
to become an art dealer in Seattle, visit New York in search of her father
and fall in love with Lane Felts. I made
all of that up.
Imprudent Zeal was my second novel. My first, Until the Dawn, was even less
autobiographical. There is not a single character or event in it based on
anyone I’ve ever known or anything I ever did. The settings, however, and
the cultural milieu are totally based first on my childhood in Tupelo,
Mississippi, and later on life in Manhattan in the mid-1970s. The character
Red Warner truly came to me almost whole with all his quirks in a moment’s
inspiration. There’s a scene with him fishing on the Mary Walker Bayou near
the Mississippi Gulf Coast (where my parents had a fishing camp when I was a
teenager). It’s a wild scene where he’s catching fish as fast as he can cast
out while speed rapping like Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. That
was the first scene I wrote. It came to me in a flash and I wrote it in one
sitting, having no idea how it would fit in the novel. Over time I re-wrote
it many times and moved it from the opening scene to near the end of the
book.
For other characters I took bits and pieces of people I knew. Travis was
named after my brother-in-law but was absolutely nothing like him. Both
Marybelle and Janet had physical characteristics borrowed from one of my
sisters, one of whom was a dancer like Janet, and there was a scene
involving a cruel practical joke played on Chuck on his wedding night that
was inspired by a story another of my brothers-in-law told me—a story that
I’m sure was pure fabrication even though he swore it was true. Maybe that
brother-in-law should have been a writer.
I set the story in Olympia, Washington, where I have lived since 1988. Marty
grew up in Olympia but left twice. First he did a hitch in the Navy and was
stationed on a ship in Norfolk, Virginia, as did I, and then he spent a year
or so in a communal household in Nashville, Tennessee—again, as did I.
There’s a reason these first three books were set in locales where I have
lived and a reason that the main characters were all about my age. Both were
to create a palpable sense of place and authenticity. Write what you know is
the old axiom. I made the main characters my age so it would be easier to
get facts right: getting the popular songs, books, movies at any given time
right and ditto for hair styles, fashions and automobiles.
The “wives” of the title were an amalgamation of my three wives. Maria was
my first wife, only much more devious and manipulative. She was a liar and
she was unfaithful, not a nice person at all. My first wife was not like
that—well, maybe a little, but then I was no saint either. Marty’s second
wife, Marigold, was even more manipulative, and so was my actual second
wife. Marigold underwent a huge change of personality after she and Marty
moved from Nashville to Olympia. She changed her name to Selena and became
an entirely different and much better person. Marigold was a flighty airhead
hippie-dippy chick who followed a religious charlatan; Selena was a mother
and a leader of the community who became the epitome of a PFLAG mom after
their son came out as gay. The whole hippie scene in Nashville was like the
year I spent there in 1970-71, and the Pride marches and other such events
in Olympia and Seattle were just like the actual events except for the
shooting. Selena was a combination of my third wife, Gabi, and Caroline
Wagner, an activist friend who was one of the bravest and most loving people
I’ve ever known.
At the time I was reading, for the second time, a book by Larry Brown—dubbed the kind of grit lit by Barry Hannah (both Brown and Hannah died too young). Brown writes about wonderfully nasty and eccentric Southern characters, and I thought: why the hell don’t I write about more people like that? I certainly knew enough of them growing up in Mississippi. Once before I had invented a really fun redneck eccentric in Red Warner, and I decided it was time for another; and thus Earl Ray “Pop” Lawrence was born, a central character in The Backside of Nowhere. Pop was like every redneck I’d ever known all rolled together with a dash of Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. For contrast, I gave him a son who was much more sophisticated, a son who clashed with his father, left home and became a movie star. Suddenly, to a greater degree than ever before, I was creating purely imaginative fiction, and I was having a blast with it. I even decided to create an imaginary town. I created the town of Freedom, Mississippi. I placed it in what is really the location of (or close to) Back Bay Biloxi, and I made up an entire history of the town beginning with a bunch of freed slaves and former white sharecroppers and Civil War deserters who founded the little town in the bayous shortly after the war. I even drew a map of the town so I’d know, for example, exactly how far it is from the Lawrence house to the high school and Little Don’s Diner and what you’d drive by on the way. No more autobiographical fiction.
My next book is a sequel to The Backside of Nowhere with many of the same
characters and a few new ones. They’re older now, and nothing in the new one
is based on memories or people I’ve known.
So, I go back and force between drawing on memory and drawing on
imagination. I suspect this combination of memory and imagination, which
Hamburg called autobiographical fiction, is pretty much what nearly every
writer does. I hope they all have as much fun with it as I do.
copyright © Alec Clayton 2012 |
Hamburg
wrote: “This book is the great circus train wreck that was America from the
1950s to the 1990s. It moves not only in time, but also in space, from the
Deep South to New York City and Seattle. This landscape is populated by
artists, art gallery owners, possible saints and a prostitute redeemed by
the love of a good man. Now there’s a bit of gender role reversal.
Characters are straight, gay and bisexual. Sex, drugs and the last taboo,
creativity loom large in the tale. If this book had a soundtrack, it would
be rock and roll played on a calliope.”
I
wanted Red Warner to have some distinguishing characteristics; I decided to
give him a missing finger, cut off at the first knuckle. Once I did that I
realized that… oh crap, now I have to explain how he lost the finger, and
that eventually became a major plot point in a story and the dramatic climax
to the story.
For
truly autobiographical fiction you have to go to my third novel, The Wives
of Marty Winters. Of all the characters I’ve ever written, Marty is probably
the most like me. But I was careful not to make him into any kind of hero.
If I was going to have an avatar in one of my books, I wouldn’t want people
to think I was idealizing myself. Robert Heinlein and Pat Conroy both do
that and in each case it ruins otherwise excellent books. So, suspecting
that readers who knew me might recognize me in Marty, I actually exaggerated
in him some of my worst qualities. I made him something of a pushover.
After
Wives, I decided that I was—to a much greater degree than I felt comfortable
with—just telling my own stories with a few imaginative episodes thrown in.
That’s what John Irving does in nearly all of his books, and although I
dearly loved many of his books, especially The World According to Garp and A
Prayer for Owen Meany and Cider House Rules, I reached a point in reading
Irving that I got tired of reading about the same characters: wrestlers and
writers and bears and flatulent dogs, and I didn’t want to end up doing the
same things with my books.
But
then I went back to bits of personal memory in my next book, Reunion at the
Wetside. Like Freedom, Mississippi; Wetside, Washington is a fictitious
town. It’s a combination of parts of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I grew
up, with bits of Olympia and Tacoma, Washington thrown in. It’s located
approximately halfway between Seattle and Portland. It sits between the
forks of two rivers, neither of which exist in the real world. As with
Freedom, I drew a map. This time a much more detailed map, and printed it in
the book. To create the map I copied a Google map of my home town and
changed it. There’s a section of the town called The Old Neighborhood that
is an exact replica of the neighborhood where I grew up, and I could tell
you who lived in every one of those houses. In the book they are Jim Bright
and Alex Martin and Ophelia and the Delk boys and Bubba and Nancy, etc.,
etc. etc. None of the adult characters in Reunion are based on real people,
but they reminisce a lot about their childhood, and all of the characters as
teenagers are based on different people—or sometimes combinations of traits
from one and another—that I knew when I
was
growing up. I can’t seem to resist the temptation to elaborate on remembered
stories from my youth.