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Memoir: the whole truth and nothing but? — 72 Comments

1. There’s a magic in memoirs where truth and memory work together. It sounds like your friend had a remarkable life. Perhaps telling it slant was the only way it could be written.

2. Neo,

   In my own opinion, what you have done in your essay above is focus on the well-know idea of seeing through the arts. As we all know, a painting of a promenade is not a promenade, neither is a photograph of it. Likewise, a memoir is not a life or even an archival record of it. As you know, when seen through the eyes of an artist (or author in this case), the work is filtered no matter how indebted it might be to the original. Michelangelo’s human forms are no more “realistic” than Giacometti’s; Bertholt Brecht breaking the fourth wall makes his play no more real and no less of a play. Likewise, Balanchine extracts movements from the real world, attenuates them and refines them into something beyond simple reality. So, too Linda’s memoir.

   You, and we, the outsiders, become the critics and observers. Because of your inside knowledge you see into your friend’s memoir in a way that I/we never can. I offer that this doesn’t make her message better or worse (it may be so from your unique perspective which is not invalid), but it will be different for you and us and even for her as we approach it from our different points of view.

   To me the real issue is can we as reader/viewer/listener get more out of a work of art than, perhaps, the author/artist ever really intended? Can we do this perhaps even regardless of its “flaws”? That, to me, is what a masterpiece embodies at its highest level.

3. Perhaps it’s just Female Solipsism at work. Of course males are solipsists too, but there is plenty of evidence that women are far more so. Additionally one would need to be blind to not have noticed that in general women are far better at pinpointing and cataloguing the flaws of other individuals (male *and* female).

   Now there are probably sound reasons rooted in Evolutionary Biology for both of the above traits being amplified in females.

   So, attempting to cram one’s galumphing feet into Neo’s ballet shoes, there you have it: a Double Whammy.

4. I think that a memoir that tells the whole truth warts and all is best, but not everyone is up to doing that. We don’t like to admit our own faults. Your friend seems to at least also removed material that made others look bad so she is not condemning others while she is pretting herself up.

   It could also be that the publisher suggested the changes.

5. Mencken’s memoirs (Happy Days, Newspaper Days and Heathen Days) are a joy to read. He proudly includes the first newspaper article he wrote for the Baltimore Herald when he was just 18:

   “A horse, a buggy and several sets of harnesses, valued in all at about $250, were stolen last night form the stable of Howard Quinlan, near Kingsville. The county police are at work on the case, but so far no trace of either thieves or booty has been found.”

   Is there a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism who can write with such grace and clarity?

6. It’s been a while since I last read Speak Memory so my own memory is a bit cloudy. But I remember being frustrated at what Nabokov left out. Especially about his brother Sergey who was gay and ended up dying in a Nazi concentration camp.

7. I have read three memoirs of people I knew from childhood- two of my parents’ generation and one of my generation. In addition, one childhood friend combined a short biography of his mother with excerpts from her diary – which he found several decades after his mother’s death. Of those four memoirs/biographies, only one had some national sales impact.

   In addition, several years ago a family friend put online a biography of her father. I remember hearing her say, when she was in her 40s, about some problems she had with her father while growing up- she is 15 years older than I . Her biography of her father helped her come to terms with him. Her father was a grandfather figure for me when I was growing up- died when I was 15. He was a fascinating character of wide-ranging knowledge.

   I found it fascinating to learn of details I had not been aware of, which gave me some insight into some of their behaviors. No, they were not literary masterpieces. I wasn’t looking for well-turned phrases, but for interesting stories.

   I also found online the diary of someone who inadvertently added some interesting job-related material to some scandalous hometown gossip of a half century ago. Like Tom Lehrer said, “I better leave this out just to be on the safe side in My Hometown.”

   Regarding warts and all, I am reminded of the memoir of the father of childhood friends. He left out the warts on divorcing his wife of 20 years, which is just as well. Better to just say, ‘We divorced,” instead of getting into a he said-she said hassle. His children would not have appreciated he said-she said. While he was undoubtedly a high achiever, he was the most conceited of my parents’ peers- by far. From his memoir, I gained some insight into his conceit- from his childhood and also in reaction to an early career setback.

8. Matthew on April 18, 2020 at 6:56 pm said:
   I think that a memoir that tells the whole truth warts and all is best, but not everyone is up to doing that.

   The curious part of me agrees with Matthew. On the other hand, publishing an interesting memoir that does not do harm to basically good people (or to the memory of them) is probably better for humanity than a warts ‘n all expose.

9. I have written an autobiography. Well, an autobiography of a part of my life. The professional part, when I was a Foreign Service Officer. I left out a lot.

   I left out a lot not because it was unimportant, rather because in looking at what I was writing I came to the conclusion after describing the first two or three postings that what I was remembering would be of only passing interest to all but people who knew me — especially my children.

   I think my professional life was hard on the children. They moved often, not establishing the life-long friendships that kids do when they live in one or two places their entire life. I often regret having dragged them to nearly a dozen short-term assignments (two to four years each), all but one in tropical climes, all with difficult health concerns and foreign language schools. It was good — to my way of thinking — that they grew up bilingual, but that does not make up for the gypsy life they lived, the friends they had to leave after a few years, or the tropical diseases they suffered. At least they all have experience with Chloroquine, should they be touched by COVID-19 and need treatment.

   All of which is to say a biography is not, I discovered, a history of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It is a slide show that has been sorted a few times, had a few slides removed and a few probably altered, and perhaps even a few created out of unrelated images that have been merged through the fog of years. But I hope it will give my daughters some understanding of things they might have forgotten or remembered differently than I do.

   Some day I must finish it and give them copies. I don’t delude myself that it would have interest outside the family and perhaps a few close friends, so I won’t be sending it to a publisher. So now I have to find a way to publish it in a very limited run — perhaps 20 copies. A friend recommends Lulu, but I have not checked them out yet.

   All of which is to say I find the story of your friend’s biography interesting, Neo. By hiding her name and identity, of course, you heighten the interest. I, for one, would like to learn more about her and her life. And her familiarity with you, for sure, and the reasons you decided not to identify her. I suspect you’re building her sales, once we can identify her and her book!

   Very intriguing!

10. I forgot to say I loved both Nabokov’s and Updike’s books. They are both gifted writers with such a nice command of the language. And English was not Nabokov’s first — or even his second — language! And meanwhile he was a lepidopterist of international fame! What a mind!

11. As you can imagine, sometimes the most interesting part of a person’s story can also be regarded as the most sordid.
    Drugs, betrayal, adultery, mixed with generosity, loyalty and heroism.
    To make the contrast, which makes the story, you must admit the sin.
    And to describe the sin correctly would make some of it look desirable, else how to describe its appeal at the moment?
    And to admit engaging in it might be embarrassing to others who participated and would be identified without their permissoon.

12. I wrote a memoir that is about Medicine, specifically about surgery, called “War Stories; 50 Years in Medicine” that sells a few copies a week on Amazon. It takes a little knowledge of medicine and the jargon.

13. I’ll never attempt to write a memoir because no one would want to read it except perhaps my grandchildren.

14. Parker, give it to them.

15. “As you can imagine, sometimes the most interesting part of a person’s story can also be regarded as the most sordid.” [Edward Bonderenka @ 8:20 pm]

    Absolutely! That’s why dramas like soap operas jump from scheming to machination back to scheming among the various characters. Oh Phoebe Tyler, where are you when we need you?

16. “The story of my life,
    Begins and ends with you.
    Each page contains your name;
    The story’s still the truth….”

    The biography of one who loved.

17. T: Speaking of memoirs
    https://www.amazon.com/confessions-Phoebe-Tyler-Ruth-Warrick/dp/013167403X

18. But Parker, that’s precisely why you should write it.

    More broadly I had a silly but perhaps profound thought earlier this year:

    A relative sent me a typed up transcript of a tape recording another relative made of my Paternal Grandfather (1906-90) reminiscing about his childhood to early 30s. This recording was made ca. 1980. Now I learned some interesting things from this.

    But what really got me thinking was that this document came to me via a Google Drive link. As we all appreciate, there is less than zero concept of privacy where Big Tech is concerned. My late Grandfather’s reminiscences for better or for worse are now an infinitesimally small part of the Googleplex’s memories.

    Which MEANS: A small part of him is now effectively immortal for as long as our technological civilisation persists(*). On the day that Skynet becomes self-aware, it will know something about digging out fence post holes in Gippsland, Victoria and a few other things too.

    Parker, with all due respect to the agricultural dynasty you were either born to or have created: well within 500 years it will all have been blown to the wind and none of you will be a memory of a memory. This goes for all of us… except for the very rare cases I see on Twitter with blue check handles like Eduard Habsburg.

    A few words on a sheet of paper made into a paper plane thrown into the void isn’t great odds either… but Pascal would have jumped on the bet.

    Write something down.

    * Now *there* is the Devil in the Details.

19. A relative sent me a typed up transcript of a tape recording another relative made of my Paternal Grandfather (1906-90) reminiscing about his childhood to early 30s. This recording was made ca. 1980. Now I learned some interesting things from this.

    Absolutely. I wish I had talked more with my mother about her youth. She was born in 1898 and died in 2001, just before her 103rd birthday. She remembered the Titanic sinking. I took her to see the movie. She wrote letters to doughboys in WWI. My kids used to visit her and listen to her stories.

    Her father was 50 when she was born and died when she was 18 months. He could have served in the Civil War. He was 16 when it ended.

20. I have letters from my great great uncle to his wife in the Civil War. He was wounded in the last attack on Vicksburg on May 22, 1863 and died of his wounds on June 2.

21. There’s a framing “slant” in Dickinson when she writes:

    There’s a certain Slant of light,
    Winter Afternoons –
    That oppresses, like the Heft
    Of Cathedral Tunes –

    Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
    We can find no scar,
    But internal difference –
    Where the Meanings, are –

    None may teach it – Any –
    ‘Tis the seal Despair –
    An imperial affliction
    Sent us of the Air –

    When it comes, the Landscape listens –
    Shadows – hold their breath –
    When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
    On the look of Death –

22. People who have known me and my life, have said i should write a memoir..
    its been a long strange trip… the grateful dead were right on that one..
    from club kids, and living on the street, bronx science, super risque places, gone girl relationship in itself is enough, famous people in and out, a failed life… whats not to like if your not the one living it…

23. I’ve written a sort-of-memoir which is probably less interesting than it would be if I included various details of my personal life which involve other people. So be it. I feel very strongly that I do not have the right to make public the private lives of people who not only have not consented but would certainly not consent if asked. I don’t think anyone in the world would be pleased to have an ex-lover/spouse tell his/her side of the story with no opportunity to tell his own. Even ordinary, not particularly dramatic family relationships: nobody wants, for instance, his siblings to tell the world about his little quirks or embarrassments.

    I remember being completely disgusted by Erica Jong’s casual revealing of crude facts about her ex-husband in Fear of Flying (“fiction”–yeah right). I don’t think I ever finished that damn book. I would never write one of these tell-all memoirs, like those of, for instance, Mary Karr. I recommend her The Liar’s Club as a brilliantly written and powerful account of a pretty messed-up childhood. But I’m doubtful as to whether she should have written it.

    So, knowing nothing at all about the case Neo is discussing, I lean toward thinking the writer may have done the right thing, if she was of similar mind to me.

24. Wrote a memoir. Never published and won’t be published. Not really of interest to anyone except my family. Tried to describe the string of luck that took me from a small Colorado mountain town to Naval aviator, airline pilot, and part time rock climber. I entitled it “Sea Stories, Hangar Flying, and Other Tall Tales.” But in writing it, I realized that it was also about the luck I had to meet and marry a woman who would tolerate a life of a husband often gone while she kept the home fires burning. It has a lot of flying and mountain climbing stories, but it’s also a tribute to her and the life we made together.

    I disguised the names of characters I encountered along the way that I clashed with or despised. Just didn’t want to defame anyone directly. They have their side of the story.

    Glad to see that others have written memoirs. It’s a bit of an ego thing, but it’s also history and may well be of interest to future generations.

25. AesopSpouse’s dad gave a series of interviews to one of the (adult) grandchildren, who typed them up and made a present to each of us of a good sized book.
    Dad was a fighter pilot in three wars, so he had quite a number of stories to tell, but a lot of them were just family memories.

    Give your memoirs to your children while you still remember what you did.

    Artfldgr – best sellers have been made out of “fictional” bios with less interesting backgrounds than yours!

26. Seems you have a crush for aesop.;-)

27. Just this morning we listened to a radio interview with my wife’s father, Teo Hlavac, one of the political prisoners of the Czechoslovak commies. A nice 30 minutes covering much of his interesting life.

    “… Mary Karr. I recommend her The Liar’s Club as a brilliantly written and powerful account of a pretty messed-up childhood. But I’m doubtful as to whether she should have written it. ”

    If I told the truth about my life, it would hurt a few folk, plus show my own (far too many) sins – or else, in skipping the interesting & sexy parts, it would be boring. Except to the family. Which is reason enough to write it – except not quite enough reason over reading others’ blogs & commenting.

    I thought Neo should write a series of books – Watching Trump Diary – 2016; and merely collect her blog published stories on Trump for each year 2016, ’17, ’18, ’19. She hasn’t chosen to do that, as far as I know, tho I still think it’s a good idea that would sell a lot, especially if they came out before June / July 2020 for the Nov ’20 election.

    For me, another person’s ideas seem more relevant than just the details of their lives. So I like reading blogs more than memoirs or bios. Tho short selections of particular times can be very interesting, like “Hero of the Empire” on young Winston Churchill in the S. African Boer war.

    So much I’d like to read. But I don’t like reading books on Kindle for PC; rather read blogs or play games. (Sorry Mike K; tho your med stories sound interesting enough to buy as book gift for doctor son & his doctor wife.) Despite retirement, still not enough time to do all, read all, play all I want. Now with even less fun time when there’s so much constantly new Wuhan virus stuff coming out. Which reminds me …

28. You and your readers would be doing yourself a favor by picking up Mike K’s book. I wish he’d write another.

    Nabakov puts my heart in a blender. What a writer.

29. Andre Dubus III wrote a memoir called Townie (which I like very much). I heard him speak about it and he addressed the question of how much of another person’s story to tell. The example he gave, a real one that he said he had to think about for this book, is that his brother had a sexual relationship with one of his teachers, when the brother was in high school. Andre wondered whether it was wrong to disclose this. He decided that what happened inside the brother’s room was not his (Andre’s) story to tell, but that the moans Andre heard from the hall were fair game, since those sounds were something he experienced directly.

    I am curious about why Mac thinks Karr maybe shouldn’t have published. I think she had the permission of her mom and her sister to tell those stories.

30. One of the most interesting memoirs I’ve read is ‘Father, Son, & Co’ by long-time IBM CEO Tom Watson Jr. Quite different from the “here’s how brilliant I was’ tone that afflicts many business & political autobiographies. A lot of it is about his difficult relationship with his father, the company’s founder. A lot of humorous passages, like the college friend who was too lazy to feed his dog, so he bought the animal a meal ticket at the college cafeteria. Highly recommended, I reviewed it here.

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/22836.html

31. Mac: It seems we are in agreement.

32. Sarah,

    “I am curious about why Mac thinks Karr maybe shouldn’t have published. I think she had the permission of her mom and her sister to tell those stories.”

    The “maybe” is important. But it’s for the reasons I mentioned. Having the permission of her mother and sister certainly makes a difference. Her father had no say, of course, being dead, but as her view of him is pretty admiring, I guess he wouldn’t have minded.

33. I recommend her The Liar’s Club as a brilliantly written and powerful account of a pretty messed-up childhood. But I’m doubtful as to whether she should have written it.

    Unless the author is an assiduous diarist, there is going to be a great deal of salient information missing before the telling begins. And even when the author is a diarist, you can get an Alison Bechdel, where everything is interpreted through the distorting lens of the author’s adult dysfunction. (Bechdel got uniformly positive reviews; the one negative review published was written by her sister-in-law, who said Bechdel had betrayed family confidences and projected her own dissatisfaction on other members of the family who simply had not and did not feel it. Bechdel’s brother said for attribution that he’d been mulling over writing a reply to his sister’s work).

    And we do not see ourselves as others do at any age, especially when we are young. Nor, when we are young, do we have a good handle on our place in the scheme of things. It distorts our emotional life in the here-and-now, and thus our memory of that life.

    All of that makes family pathography a genre of very dubious validity. And, of course, there is the problem with detraction.

34. All very true, AD.

    For the non-Catholics here: in Catholic moral theology, “detraction” has a specific meaning: “the unjust damaging of another’s good name by the revelation of some fault or crime of which that other is really guilty or at any rate is seriously believed to be guilty by the defamer.” It’s a sin, a potentially mortal (i.e. can send you to hell) sin, depending on the seriousness of what’s revealed.

    “Unless the author is an assiduous diarist, there is going to be a great deal of salient information missing before the telling begins.”

    I had serious doubts as to the accuracy of much of the detail in Mary Karr’s book. I suppose it’s possible that a grown woman would be able to reproduce, word-for-word, adult conversations overheard when she was six. But I’m dubious.

    I had never heard of Allison Bechdel. Just as well.

35. Neo should write a memoir about being a changer and starting this blog. I’d be fascinated to read it, and so would a lot of people.

36. I wonder if there are any non-political memoirs of everyday life in the period immediately after WWII. That short period before universal TV and the ascendancy of Rock & Roll, and the eventual and ultimate reign of the god of Appetite.

    What I am ijnterested in then, is not the trials of the marginalized, nor the conceits of the privileged, nor in a social history per se: but in the subjective impressions and interests of the everyday, nonpathological and non neurotic part of tbe American population during that period.

    Of course most writing involves themes of conflict, of heroes and villains, and a triumph of the holy weak over the evil strong and competent, or of the supposed wave of the future against the forces of reaction and complacency.

    As I read history, that period is just another period of conflict. Labor versus management; progressive educators against elitist or rote competency; sexual liberation versus repression and obsolete moralizing; and self centered middle class spread over and versus the natural world and cosmic justice.

    But there are some unintentional hints in old movies and the like, which peek through the criticisms and indicate that there was a kind of psychological peace and optimism abroad the land which is not only despised but seen as worthy of abolition, nowadays.

    The period does seem kind of boring to me. But I wonder what it would have been like to live a middle class life in an environment where half the population was not permanently at war with you , and seeking your ultimate destruction in the name of normalizing their own psychological dysfunctions.

    Only someone who was alive then would know the truth. Was it a tedious hypocritical world of persecuted progressives and writers, unspeakable boredom, and repressed desires? Or was there something to be said for ball games, liveable cities, innocent fun, and the daily humdrum?

    Well, even if there were a society someplace, where all were well adjusted, and the members universally happy and independent, that society itself would be condemned for not immersing itself and all within it, in the shared pain of the “human condition”

    The desire of misery to spread itself in the name of compassion and justice seems to know no limit, and to be taken as the norm and natural order of things.

37. DNW,

    I was born 18 years after the end of the war, so I’m about a generation behind the one you are curious about, but I grew up around those people. Mine was an urban upbringing, I’m sure things were different in rural areas and the exploding suburbs, but much was probably the same.

    You’re right that there was more of a pervasive sense of cohesion. We were Americans and proud of it. Even though most all the adults in my neighborhood were immigrants, or children of immigrants patriotism was so common one didn’t really think about it much.

    Two big differences that don’t get much attention; living square footage was much less then in homes and apartments and everyone was tinkering all the time. Kids sharing bedrooms was very common. Two bathrooms was a rarity in homes. My sister and I slept in an attic; shared a bike, roller and ice skates. Few kids had a bat and ball, or basketball. You’d get 5, 10 kids together and pool sports equipment to get what you needed for a game. I don’t recall ever even noticing those things. It was completely normal.

    Regarding tinkering; mothers cooked and planned meals. Monday’s roast leftovers were Thursday’s stew. Ripped clothes were stitched or patched. When knees wore completely threw pants were converted to shorts. On a Saturday when the weather was nice every other home had a man’s head under the raised hood of a car, working on something. Brakes, oil, timing, plugs, tire rotations… all done at home all the time. If the toaster broke it was repaired. Nobody was ever more than 2 blocks from a tiny shop that tested radio and TV tubes and sold new ones. Kids learned to build their own radios. We made our own kites from newspaper. Home economics was truly home economics. Every home got at least one daily newspaper, and it was read by most of the members of the household.

    I’m not citing these things as economic indicators, but to show how much more things were done communally. Parents were never involved with children’s games. Kids roamed the streets, finding things to do together. Adults got together on weekends and played cards, or charades. Adults belonged to clubs, church groups; Elks, Rotary, Moose, Lions, Shriners… I remember my parents getting dressed up once or twice a month to go dancing on a Friday or Saturday night. Live bands were everywhere and all adults could dance actual dances with actual, coordinated steps. Adults never wore jeans (dungarees) unless for a specific work task. Men never wore short pants or gym shoes.

    Daytime television was a vast wasteland; game shows, soaps… but symphonies, opera and ballet were not uncommon on weekend, evening broadcasts. Boxing was big and the whole world stopped when championship bouts were televised.

38. Also, ethnic slurs were common and abundant. Most of the time they were said convivially and taken in friendship. If used belligerently fists would fly, but it was all in the intent, not in the words themselves.

    Even us kids on the schoolyard called each other ethnic slurs, “Mic,” “Dago,” “Polack,” “Spic,” “Kraut,” “Bohack”… That’s how we referred to our friends, based on their heritage and how they referred to us. There was a popular series of joke books; individual books with jokes for each ethnicity. We kids knew all the jokes and told them constantly. It was a true melting pot. I think the few kids with WASPy surnames felt left out!

39. In Kindergarten or 1st grade we had to speak about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I imagine 100% of the girls chose either Teacher, Nurse or Mommy. I imagine 100% of the boys chose Fireman, Policeman, Astronaut or Baseball/Football/Basketball player.

40. Movie theaters were everywhere and movies rarely stuck around for more than a week. Double features were common. My sister and I had four theaters within 1 1/2 miles of our home, one only 2 blocks away.

    Chicago did not have “blue laws,” but they were very common across the country. One couldn’t buy alcohol or implements of work on Sunday; tools, needles, thread… Stores closed early and most weren’t open at all on Sunday.

41. “I suppose it’s possible that a grown woman would be able to reproduce, word-for-word, adult conversations overheard when she was six. But I’m dubious.” – Mac

    Some of you may be familiar with a little book popular in the seventies, “The Education of Little Tree.” It was lauded along the lines of an Oprah Book Club selection, the epitome of heart-string-pulling memoirs, the wisdom of Native American grandparents transmitted by their grandson, who they raised in his childhood years. Very much esteemed by the New Age crowd.

    When I read it, I was struck (as Mac said) by the way a six to nine year old child remembered, and reproduced, very adult conversations including detailed concepts of ideology and society.
    Some I chalked down to the writer filtering vaguely remembered conversations through his own adult prism. But, I wondered why any child that age would even pay enough attention to a conversation like that to remember any of it (none of my five would, at that age, I am quite sure).

    Of course, it didn’t happen that way at all. The author was busted — the memoir was total fiction — and just like that, all of its acolytes turned their backs.
    But then I wondered: if the “wisdom” was good enough gather praise in the first place, why would it matter if it wasn’t “authentic” — was it only the source that gave it meaning?

    Now, we know that it is indeed the source, not the words, that matter; see Ray’s story here, and we could cite many others.
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/04/18/late-start-today/#comment-2490696

42. Fake memoirs, fake biographies, fake histories.
    As long as they serve the Left’s agenda, they are okay.
    This is a review of Grabar’s book debunking Howard Zinn’s “history” — I would say my friends who adored the pre-debunked “Little Tree” were all Zinn’s fault, but we were out of school before he published.
    More probably, Zinn’s book became popular because of them.

    https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/04/a-radical-pseudo-historian-meets-his-match/

    BTW, the reason the Left turned against Little Tree’s author was not that he just made it all up (they are usually fine with that), but that he had been, in earlier years, a very well-known true (not fake) white supremacist leader.

    Makes you wonder if he had repented and actually now subscribed to what he wrote in the “memoir,” or just knew it would pull their chains, kind of like Sokal’s hoax.

43. “Tell the whole truth and nothing but” — memoirists probably should not tell everything, but what they do tell ought to be true.

    Historians and researchers definitely should stick with the “nothing but” part.

    The article on Zinn linked to another well-known case of deliberate academic fraud, which was debunked even by sympathetic researchers because he made the mistake of pretending to use data-driven statistics, and the numbers could be checked.

    Even then, the author lost no leftists cachet (although he did lose his job), and his work is still held out as “fake but accurate.”

    https://mises.org/wire/what-fake-history-guns-can-teach-us

    12/07/2018Chris Calton
    In 2000, Emory University history professor Michael Bellesiles published the book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. The central argument of the book was that the culture of American gun ownership does not date back to the colonial era and, instead, emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century when technological advances made firearms more affordable.

    Among the academic left, the book was wildly popular. Scholars gave glowing reviews of the book, and Columbia University awarded Billesiles one of the most coveted prizes in the history profession:
    …
    But even amidst the ideological bias that plagues academia, there are still many scholars who value honesty and good scholarship more than politically appealing arguments. Even before the book was published, several historians were questioning the data upon which Bellesiles’s argument was made,
    …
    As praise turned to criticism, more historians began to look into his research. Bellesiles was now on the defensive, not just from people like the NRA, whose enmity only enhanced his academic celebreté, but now from sympathetic academics who would have liked nothing more than for his argument to be true. So Bellesiles started offering excuses for the problems critics kept discovering. …
    Finally, Emory University hired a committee to investigate their rising star. Confirming what critics had already said, the investigating scholars were unable to duplicate his data tables, and they found significant evidence of ethical violations, including the outright fabrication of data. …He also disingenuously quoted historical figures, including George Washington, that so egregiously took statements out of historical context that nobody was willing to argue as having been unintentional.

    In short, Bellesiles had committed fraud. Columbia University rescinded the Bancroft Prize (the only time that has been done to date), and under the mounting criticism, Bellesiles resigned his position at Emory University.

    The lessons about academia from this story are mixed. On the one hand, as many people quickly point out, it is encouraging to note that there are still many legitimate scholars who, even though they may agree with Bellesiles’s political positions, were willing to bring scholarly fraud to light. This is, of course, exactly how academia should operate.

    However, the initial praise of the book still indicates the problems of academia’s political biases. It would be one thing if historians simply praised a book whose data and methods were not carefully scrutinized — something that is, frankly, unavoidable in book reviews, as such levels of scrutiny cannot realistically be conducted by every reviewer for every book. But even after the scandal was exposed, some of the reviewers who praised him indicated that their disappointment in his dishonesty was political. Roger Lane, who gave the book high praise in his review for the Journal of American History, said after the scandal that he “betrayed the cause.”
    …
    The question, then, is how this kind of dishonesty is supported by the confirmation bias of left-liberal academics. The Bellesiles case genuinely does demonstrate that there are honest scholars, as do the pranksters responsible for the “grievance studies” scandals, in which they are publishing hoax papers in order to expose the ability to get intellectually vapid research published by appealing to current political trends. But these academics, who are clearly trying to combat the very environment that allowed Bellesiles work to be published in the first place, are being treated as pariahs. Bellesiles is considered as an outlier – an embarrassment to the profession, but potentially less because of his fraud, per se, and more because he conducted his dishonesty so blatantly that he couldn’t avoid exposure. The academic trends since Arming America was published give some indication for optimism, such as the “grievance studies” professors and the legitimate critics of Bellesiles, but they also demonstrate just how far academia has fallen (or, alternatively, how bad it has always been) in the name of fashionable political agendas.

44. Rufus T. Firefly:

    I was not allowed to leave the house in jeans while I lived at home.

    And both men and women got dressed really nicely every day, unless they were out in the country doing something like fishing, or playing a sport. To play tennis, we had to wear tennis whites even at the city public courts.

    See this.

45. Even then, the author lost no leftists cachet (although he did lose his job), and his work is still held out as “fake but accurate.”

    He was fired from his job and his book was forgotten in embarrassment.

46. I’ve read some memoirs by women, one was Rebecca Harding Davis, the mother of Richard Harding Davis: Bits O’ Gossip, of which the author says she was trying to leave the story of the time in which she lived. it’s pretty good – a very different take on the early years of the country.
    From the opening chapter: “My easy-going generation did not push the world’s work on very far perhaps; we did not discover wireless telegraphy, nor radium. But neither did we die of nerve prostration.
    Certain things were close and real to us then, as children, which to boys and girls now are misty legends. What do they care for the Revolution or the Indian wars ?
    But then, the smoke of the battles of Monmouth and Yorktown was still in the air. The old Indian forts were still standing in the streets. It was part of your religion to hate the British. It was your own grandfather who, when he was ten years old, had gone into the swamp, killed the huge beast that had threatened the settlement, and so won the proud title of Panther Jim. He showed you the very sword which he had carried at Valley Forge. It was your own grandmother who had danced with Lafayette, and who hinted that ” Lady Washington ” had an ugly
    habit of loudly scolding her husband and of boxing Nelly Custis’s ears, which was hardly befitting a gentlewoman.
    These things made you feel that you had rocked the cradle of the new-born nation with your own hand. It was your duty to hate the British.”

    And a couple by Adele Rogers St. John who was a reporter from the early 19teens into the 50s, covering early Hollywood, Huey Long, the Lindberg kidnapping & trial (since she grew up in courtrooms accompanying her father the model for Perry Mason, she really had opinions on that) and the womens movement – one thing she cried when pitted against a clubwoman in debate “why are we just going down into the gutter with the men?”

    None of them are good with dates, they’re all more stream of story telling, but good reads with stuff I’ve never seen elsewhere.

47. When you see a crowd, when you see a line that’s not distanced, when you see a supermarket that’s too crowded — anything — you can report it right away so we can [send armed agents] there to fix the problem. And now, it’s as simple as taking a photo. All you’ve got to do is take the photo and put the location with it and bang, send a photo like this and we will make sure that enforcement comes right away. Text the photo to 311-692 and action will ensue. – Blasio

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    Not like i didn’t say we were so close to the 1930s it would not take much…
    Freedom of assembly and other constitutional rights have been tested
    Freedom of religion has been tested too..
    oh, and scape goats? the one unprotected class that is born evil – check…

    The comments from some of these politicos are scarier than most people may realize…

48. DNW,
    Re: your comment at 6:20pm. Shakespeare addressed this question long ago.
    ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’
    I read that as a freshman in college and it has been my motto ever since. It got me safely through some pretty wild times and I passed it on to my children.
    The idea that we must be decadent to have fun is seriously destructive.

49. Now for something completely different.
    This is not about a memoir, but a non fiction book about which I had personal knowledge concerning the personalities and events.
    A few decades ago I was very well acquainted with a person who killed their spouse. It was a planned and premeditated murder, for gain, no mitigating circumstances, etc. Very cold blooded.
    A few years later a famous true crime writer wrote a book about it. ‘Pleased’ is not quite the right word, but I was pleased to see that everything in the book that I had personal knowledge of (and there was a lot) was accurate. In this day and age when narrative seems to trump truth, it was reassuring to see an author who deals primarily with ‘sordid sensationalism’ get the story so right.
    BTW, ‘X’ is out of prison and remarried for the fourth (we think – could be #5!) time…

50. BTW, ‘X’ is out of prison and remarried for the fourth (we think – could be #5!) time…

    Courts meddle a great deal but don’t protect us very much.

    The banes of American life are the media, higher education, the local school apparat, the social work apparat, local land-use planning, the legal system, and Congress. Everything else seems to work fairly well.

51. Molly Brown,

    Yikes! Is X’s spouse aware of what happened to X’s Ex?

52. Yikes! Is X’s spouse aware of what happened to X’s Ex?

    There’s a class of women who are attracted to rough trade.

53. Art Deco:

    I believe Molly Brown purposely avoided telling us if X is a woman or a man, so we can’t draw the conclusion you did without making a leap of faith.

54. Molly Brown, I was slightly acquainted with a woman who killed her two children, daughters about 5 and 7. She made an unconvincing attempt at suicide, then called her husband’s sister to tell her she had killed the girls. He was out ocean fishing at the time this occurred. My SO knew her quite well and that couple were part of a Marine aviator circle in Orange County CA. The husband had done a lot of the flying for the movie “Top Gun.”

    She pleaded insanity and got a few years in prison. They divorced, of course, but a couple of years after she got out of prison, he remarried her. All the friends could not understand it and most of the guys he knew distanced themselves. They moved to the northwest soon after.

    Hard to understand his thinking.

55. so we can’t draw the conclusion you did without making a leap of faith.

    93% of the prison population is male. The term ‘leap of faith’ does not mean what you fancy it means.

56. Thanks for the link, neo.

    “… fireflies were the best of the best. No argument here.

    I had no idea “spud” was played outside of Chicago. Also, one of the commenters mentioned “running bases.” I also thought that was a regional phenomenon. It was great for city sidewalks as the concrete was naturally segmented into “bases,” had a natural basepath (if you stepped off the concrete when running you were out) and we could easily count off the requisite distance between bases.

57. Art Deco:

    A statistic to your rescue? More like your unfounded assumption obfuscated. Oops on you.

58. Statistics to the rescue? More like an unfounded assumption revealed. Oops on you.

    The term ‘unfounded’ doesn’t mean what you fancy it means.

59. Cou0le of decades ago, I wrote a bunch of short stories. Showed them to a friend who was familiar with the backdrop I used for some of them. Said i was “mining a hidden vein.” in some of them. Same vein, I should say. Looked them over and didn’t see it. So, maybe memoirs tell what we aren’t interested in people knowing.

60. Speaking of Nabokov’s great autobiographical work, here is the opening sentence…

    “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged – the same house, the same people – and then realized that he did not exist at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”
    Speak, Memory

61. Neo: If you like Ingmar Bergman, I highly recommend his autobiography the Magic Lantern. It’s been a while since I’ve read it but my recollection was that it was fearless in its admonitions even when they reflected poorly on himself. I was astonished by his honesty and it was an interesting book besides.

62. Neo: If you like Ingmar Bergman, I highly recommend his autobiography the Magic Lantern. It’s been a while since I’ve read it but my recollection was that it was fearless in its admonitions even when they reflected poorly on himself. I was astonished by his honesty and it was an interesting book besides.

63. Bob Kantor on April 20, 2020 at 4:25 pm said:
    Speaking of Nabokov’s great autobiographical work, here is the opening sentence…

    “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness…”
    * * *
    I found this to be quite interesting, because the foundation of Latter-day Saint theology is that our existence is a brief spot of darkness between two eternities of Light.

64. Mike K,
    What a tragedy. I can’t help thinking in cases where parents kill children that there must be serious mental illness going on.
    ‘X’ is a woman and a textbook sociopath. Years before the murder my mother asked me to explain something X had said that didn’t add up and I told her; ‘She lies about everything. She lies when she doesn’t have to. She couldn’t tell the truth about a trip to the grocery store.’
    The book is ‘Heart Full Of Lies’ by Ann Rule.

65. Thanks, Molly – I was guessing the killer was a woman, despite knowing the stats about how many more men commit crimes.

    Somebody asked about early post-WW II life. Powerline has a post on such a book: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/04/when-the-going-was-good-2.php

    “When the going was good”. Cap guns, Westerns, early TV shows. Seems like just what was asked for about the normal, good, 50s life. So many middle class folk rapidly increasing their material well-being. America’s “golden age”.

    Some Russian (Tolstoy?) said that all happy families are similarly happy, but the broken families are broken in their own distinct ways. My broken family certainly was. My stepsister told lies & exaggerations constantly. But only a few years ago found out that her birth certificate father was not her bio-father, who was an Native American Indian. Her grandkids have special blood conditions only seen by those with Indian blood. Her mother died in 1988 (8 months after my dad died) and her surviving aunt wasn’t ever going to tell her that truth. Sue actually does look like a small chubby Indian grandmother, sort of like the Pocahontas grandmother.

    I’ve been trying to create a happy, unbroken family, but feel my kids are much weaker than I was. More like snowflakes. Too untested, too lazy. Of course, I’m also not perfect, nor a perfect father. But I’ve chosen to not lie about things (tho I still try to avoid mentioning some inconvenient but relevant truths at times). I know the kids sometimes lie to us parents.

    Now I’m wondering if the normal Chinese folk will look back on the 1990-2019 three decades of explosive growth, and hope, and optimism, and think life was great. They’re likely to start the biggest recession in their adult lives for all who became adults after the Cultural Revolution ended (1966-1976). Plus the Century of Humiliation.

    See How China Sees the World
    https://outline.com/JyMnhc

66. The book is ‘Heart Full Of Lies’ by Ann Rule.

    I see she served 11 years for pumping a bullet into the brain of her sleeping husband. Another example, in case you needed one, of the girls’ discount. As always, the courts meddle a great deal, but don’t protect us very much.

67. Art Deco:

    Your 93% stat about male incarceration proved to be an unhelpful fact for your assumption that X was a male, after all that, Molly’s “X” murderer or memoir was a woman.

68. Just google’d Liysa Northon and found this, https://medium.com/journal-of-precipitation/lets-remember-when-the-seattle-weekly-embarrassingly-tried-to-take-down-true-crime-writer-ann-4ee1d2f7c19f

    Talk about journalistic malfeasance!

69. “But I’ve chosen to not lie about things (tho I still try to avoid mentioning some inconvenient but relevant truths at times).” – Tom

    Telling “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” doesn’t mean introducing irrelevant or unnecessary facts into the discussion.

    What some people, a lot of the media, and dishonest prosecutors so often do — leaving out very necessary and totally relevant facts — is tantamount to lying.

70. Rufus,
    I heard she was trying to start some kind of ‘battered woman’ foundation or something from prison and she had reeled this guy in with it. I wonder if they are still married? I’m sure he’s regretting it by now.
    I have so many stories that illustrate how crazy this woman is. She continued to cause pain and grief to Chris Northon’s parents after her conviction by accusing them of child molestation in order to deny them custody of her child with Chris. She had done the same thing to her prior husband* during their divorce. Suffice to say that she leaves a trail of disaster every where she goes. It’s telling that when the news of the murder broke, none of us that knew her had the slightest doubt about her guilt. Not one of us said; There must be some mistake, I can’t believe Liysa could do a thing like that.’ Not one. In fact, one person who worked very closely with her and her prior husband said to me; ‘I knew she was crazy, but I didn’t think she was THAT crazy!’
    *One of the nicest guys on the planet. He ended up raising both his son with Liysa AND Liysa’s son with Chris. He felt the best thing he could do for them was to bring the brothers up together.
    Neo,
    My apologies for highjacking the thread.

71. Molly – that was a fascinating account – it’s interesting to get the POV of someone who actually knows “the rest of the story” — and such a generous act of her prior husband to raise the two boys. I hope that turned out well (or as well as could be expected).

72. Double thanks, Molly. “Not THAT crazy” is so often relevant.

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