High Tide in Tucson (23 page)

Sometimes the same formula is passed off as something more noble, because of higher production values and more imaginative criminals. The film
Silence of the Lambs
was one of the great critical successes of our time, and for that reason I felt obliged to see it, even though I hate feeling sick with fear and suspense, and
have never understood why I should pay for that sensation when it's easy enough to come by it for free. But I watched, on a friend's VCR; got up and left the room every time somebody's flesh was in danger, which was most of the movie; and afterward felt ripped off. It turns out, I'd rented the convincing illusion of helpless, attractive women being jeopardized, tortured, or dead, for no good reason I could think of after it was over. You may disagree. Obviously most people in the world do. But I'm uncomfortable with the huge popularity of that film. I know, now, I should have stuck with my instincts and skipped it. I felt the way many African Americans probably felt watching the old Star Trek plots in which, any time you saw an anonymous lieutenant in an Afro beaming down to Planet X with the landing party of white guys, you knew somebody was going to bite the dust on Planet X, and you knew who it was going to be. Anyone who complained about that kind of story line, at the time, probably would have seemed overly sensitive. When nobody else can see what's driving you crazy, it's easy to feel you're making it up. Even when you're not.

When I watch a film whose plot capitalizes on the vulnerability of women to torturers, maimers, rapists, and maniacs, I take it personally. I feel preyed upon. I don't enjoy sitting through another woman's misery, even if I keep telling myself that her big problems there are really all just ketchup. It still hurts to watch. For me, a recreation of simple violence has no recreational value. So why would I ever create an act of violence in a novel?

My answer has to do with the fact that I don't consider a novel to be a purely recreational vehicle. I think of it as an outlet for my despair, my delight, my considered opinions, and all the things that strike me as absolute and essential, worked out in words. When I wrote in my secret yellow notebook, it was not
for other people, and I still write for mostly the same private reasons. It's my principal way of becoming reassured I'm still alive: I have come through this many of my allotted days, watched the passing of life on earth, made something of it and nailed it to the page. Having written, I find I'm often willing to send it on, in case someone else also needs this kind of reassurance. Art is entertainment but it's also celebration, condolence, exploration, duty, and communion. The artistic consummation of a novel is created by the author and reader together, in an act of joint imagination, and that's not to be taken lightly.

One of the extremely valuable things to be done with the power of fiction is the connection of events with their consequences. And violence, above all else, is a thing with consequences. The difference between the violence in great novels like
War and Peace
or
Beloved
, and the contents of a Slice & Dice movie (or a Slice & Dice
book
; there are plenty of those) is the matter of context. Occasionally I make the error of seeing an adventure movie that I've been assured isn't violent, and inevitably, throughout the movie people are dying like flies. But like flies they don't have personalities, they are just
there
. They fall off of things or they get shot and they are gone, like the unfortunate lieutenant of color on Planet X. We never knew the guy so we don't feel a thing, and we don't have to sit through the funeral. If you had to sit through all the funerals, most TV shows would be seven hours long. But you don't.

See enough of this bang-you're-dead kind of thing and you'll start to go numb around the edges, I guarantee. On some level you will start to believe that a violent act has no consequences. Researchers in social psychology have known for decades that watching violence makes a person more likely to participate in violence. Many people in the entertainment industry would have
us believe otherwise, and so these studies are controversial, but they are mostly unequivocal. A review article written in 1991 by Wendy Wood, Frank Wong, and Gregory Chachere examined the body of research in this field, conducted in both laboratory and natural social settings, and they found that exposure to media violence significantly enhanced viewers' aggressive behavior. Hundreds of other psychologists stand in agreement. They suggest many different mechanisms for the causal link between watching and doing: increased physiological arousal; decreased inhibitions; instrumental learning and modeling of aggressive acts; and decreased sensitivity toward violent acts. It boils down to one thing: we learn about the world through our senses, like any other creature. Watch your mother make a hundred tortillas, and you know how to love, live with, and manufacture a tortilla. Watch a hundred violent deaths and that, too, is your familiar. That the deaths were all faked is apparently incidental to the hardware in our heads that brings us learning. A trick on the eye works a trick on the psyche as well, for although our brains know it is only ketchup, in our animal soul it registers as blood. Blood without consequence.

So it happened, one day in Florida, that a thirteen-year-old shot a man in the head because he took two slices of pizza when he was only offered one. It has happened a thousand times over, will happen again tomorrow, and I hardly wonder why. That child believed the scene would fade out after he shot the gun, and then the world would be new again.

The simple, intense exposure of a vicious act, in film or in literature, is entirely different from a story that includes both the violence and its painful consequences. I can't even call these two things by the same name. Those who like to say there is nothing new under the sun will claim that TV is no more violent than
Shakespeare. But three average nights of prime-time TV contain as many acts of violence as all thirty-seven of Shakespeare's plays put together end to end—and quantity is only partly the point. More importantly, there is also a world of difference in the context. Think of all we learn of the world from poor Hamlet: the whole play is a chain of terrible consequences that fall one after another from the murder of his father. It's about bereavement, guilt, and unbearable loss. Hamlet “raised a sigh so piteous and profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.” That is a tragedy that has earned its place.

I find I'm prepared to commit an act of violence in the written word if, and only if, it meets two criteria: first, the act must be embedded in the story of its consequences. Second, the fictional violence must be connected with the authentic world. It matters to me, for example, that we citizens of the U.S. bought guns and dressed up an army that killed plain, earnest people in Nicaragua who were trying only to find peace and a kinder way of life. I wanted to bring that evil piece of history into a story, in a way that would make a reader feel sadness and dread but still keep reading, becoming convinced it was necessary to care. So I invented Hallie Noline, and caused her to die. I did it because this happened, not to imaginary Hallie but to thousands of real people. One of them was a hydroelectric engineer in his twenties from Portland, Oregon, named Ben Linder, whose family I dearly love, and whose death is permanently grieved;
Animal Dreams
is dedicated to his memory. I would write that story again, because people forget, and I want us to remember.

I'm sure
Silence of the Lambs
had its reasons, too. Possibly its creators, who are a vastly talented lot, were trying to evoke in us a hatred of psycho-killers. But I should have exercised my right to stay away, on the grounds that I was already pretty clear about
being no friend to psycho-killers. And the woman who wrote to tell me she closed the book on Hallie's death already knew enough, too. She did the right thing.

I will not argue for censorship, except from the grassroots up: my argument is for making choices about what we consume. The artist is blessed and cursed with a kind of power, but so are the reader and viewer. The story no longer belongs to the author once it's come to live in your head. By then, it's part of your life. So be careful what you let in the door, is my advice. It should not make you feel numb, or bored, or demeaned, or less than human. But I think it's all right if it makes you cry some, or feel understood, or long to eat sand for want of more, or even change your life a little. It's a story. That's what happens.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your facts. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

Whenever I am queried about my fiction, if people want to know something in particular they nearly always want to know the same thing: How much is autobiographical? Did it all really happen, in exactly that way? Was my childhood like that? Which character is me? Commonly people don't ask, they just assume. I get letters of sympathy for the loss of my sister (the heroine of one of my novels lost her sister) and my father (ditto, same novel). Since one of my characters adopted a Cherokee child, I get advice about cross-cultural adoptions. And so on.

My sister and parents are alive and well, thanks. I don't have
an adopted child. The mute waif named Turtle who appears in two of my novels is the polar opposite of my own Camille—a sunny, blonde child who spoke her first word at eight months and hasn't stopped talking since. At the time I invented Turtle, I had no child at all. Mine came later, and I didn't find her in a car, as happened in
The Bean Trees
. Mine was harder to produce. I never use my own family and friends as the basis of fictional characters, mainly because I would like them to remain my family and friends. And secondarily, because I believe the purpose of art is not to photocopy life but distill it, learn from it, improve on it, embroider tiny disjunct pieces of it into something insightful and entirely new. As Marc Chagall said, “Great art picks up where nature ends.”

I know, in real life, many fascinating people; every one of them has limits on what she or he can be talked into. Most, in fact, will ask for my recommendations on their love lives or vacation plans, then reliably do the opposite. When I'm writing a story, I can't mess around with that kind of free spirit. I need characters I can count on to do what I say—take on a foundling baby rather than call the police; fall in love with my self-effacing heroine rather than the sturdy, good-looking divorcee down the street; pursue a passion for cockfighting, then give it all up at a lover's request; die for honor; own up to guilt. What's more, they must do it all
convincingly
. That means they have to be carrying in their psyches all the right motives—the exact combination of past experiences that will lead them to their appointment with my contrived epiphany. Trying to graft a plot onto the real-life history of anyone I actually know, including myself, would be as fruitless as lashing a citrus branch onto the trunk of an apple tree. It would look improbable. It would wither and die. Better to plant a seed in the good dirt of imagination. Grow a whole story from scratch.

Most people readily acknowledge the difference between life and art. Why, then, do so many artists keep answering the same question again and again? No, none of those characters is me. It's not my life, I made it up. Yes,
all of it
! Strangers' assumptions about deaths in my family and the like, odd as this might seem, have caused us some genuine pain. How I wish my art could stand apart from us, carrying no more suggestions about my private life than the work of, say, a stonemason or a tree surgeon. I was raised to be polite, but sometimes I'm inclined to get cranky and bark about this: Give us writers a little credit, will you? We're not just keeping a diary here, we're inventing! Why can't you believe we're capable of making up a story from scratch? Of stringing together a long, elaborate
lie
, for heaven's sake?

When it's put that way, it dawns on me that this may be the snag—the part about lying. In the book-jacket photos I look like a decent girl, and decent girls don't lie. That social axiom runs deep, possibly deeper than any other. The first important moral value we teach our children, after “don't hit your sister,” is the difference between fantasy and truth. Trying to pass off one for the other is a punishable infraction, and a lesson that sticks for life. Whether or not we are perfectly honest in adulthood, we
should
be, and we know that on a visceral level. So visceral, in fact, a machine measuring heart rate and palm perspiration can fairly reliably detect a lie. We don't even have to think about it. Our hearts know.

So I suppose I should be relieved when people presume my stories are built around a wholesome veracity. They're saying, in effect, “You don't
look
like a sociopath.” And it's true, I'm not; I pay my taxes and don't litter. Track down any grade-school teacher who knew me in childhood and she'll swear I was a goodie two-shoes even back then.

But ask my mother, and she'll tell you I always had a little trouble with the boundaries of truth. As the aerospace engineers say, I pushed the envelope. As a small child I gave my family regular updates on the white horse wearing a hat that lived in the closet. When I was slightly older, family vacations offered me the delightful opportunity to hang out alone in campground restrooms, intimating to strangers that I came from a foreign country and didn't comprehend English, or plumbing. When I got old enough to use public transportation by myself, my sport was to entertain other passengers with melodramatic personal histories that occurred to me on the spot. I was a nineteen-year-old cello virtuoso running away from my dreadful seventy-year-old husband; or I had a brain tumor, and was determined to see every state in the union by Greyhound in the remaining two months of my life; or I was a French anthropologist working with a team that had just uncovered the real cradle of human origins in a surprising but as-yet-undisclosable location. Oh, how my fellow passengers' eyes would light up. People two rows ahead of me would put down their paperbacks, sling an elbow over the back of the seat, and ride all the rest of the way to Indianapolis backward, asking questions. I probably registered an increased heart rate and sweaty palms, but I couldn't stop myself. I strove for new heights in perjury, trying to see how absurd a yarn I could spin before some matron would finally frown at me over her specs and say, “Now really, dear.”

No one ever did. I concluded that people want pretty desperately to be entertained, especially on long bus rides through flat midwestern cornfields.

For me, it was more than a pastime. It was the fulfillment of my own longing to reach through the fences that circumscribed my young life, and taste other pastures. Through my tales I dis
covered not exactly myself but all the selves I might have been—the ones I feared, the ones I hoped for, and the ones I'd never know. None of them was me. Each of them was a beckoning path into the woods of what might have been.

Eventually I found a socially acceptable outlet for my depravity. Now I spend hours each day, year after year, sitting at my desk with a wicked smirk on my face, making up whopping, four-hundred-page lies. Oh, what a life.

I do want to state for the record that I no longer have any inclination toward real dishonesty; I don't bear false witness to strangers or to friends. And I check my facts obsessively when serving the journalist's or essayist's trade. So my mother isn't to blame—she did, evidently, teach me to know true from false. I gather I was just born with an excess of story, the way another poor child might come into this world with extra fingers on each hand. My imagination had more figment in it than my life could contain, so some of it leaked out here and there. As I've matured, I've learned to control the damage.

I don't believe I'm extraordinary on this account. Every one of us, I think, is born with an excess of story. Listen quietly to a group of toddlers at play: the lies will swarm around their heads, thick as a tribe of bright butterflies, flickering gracefully from one child to another, until they notice a grown-up has come into the room—and in a sudden rush of wings the lies will vanish into air.

A little bit sad, isn't it? If you look it up, you'll find lying was never registered as one of the seven deadly sins. (Pride—an anemic sin if you ask me—is on that list, and so is gluttony, and of all things, sloth. But not lying.) Yet, in the age of evidence and reason, it has gotten such a very bad name. When so many smart, lively people keep insisting to me that all my stories must be true,
I begin to suspect they can't quite get their minds around the notion of pure fabrication.

I want to tell them: Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still, then close your eyes, and tap the well. Find the lie you are longing to tell. It's in there. When you manage to wrestle that first one out, a whole flood may gush out behind it. Take them up in your hands, drink their clarity, write them down in a secret book. Tell them to your children behind the golden door of “Once upon a time.” Choose one chair at your dinner table, give it to a different family member each night, and declare it “the liar's seat.”

Or take a long bus trip through the cornfields. You may find a new career.