Free Good Prose by Tracy Kidder Page A

after the war has ended, aimless and assaulted by memories of his experience, lamenting his failure to save a dying comrade. The scene of the death is grotesque—a monsoon-soaked field that has been used as an outdoor toilet by the villagersnearby, “a field of shit.” The wounded soldier drowns in the mud and excrement in the middle of the night. Bowker wants to talk to someone about what happened, but he trusts no one to understand. He imagines saying that he could have won the Silver Star had he saved his friend, but it becomes plain he is masking his guilt, and the story he really wants to tell is about the complicity he feels in the man’s death. Taken as it stands, the piece would be a fully realized short story. It is soon obvious, however, that it is not meant to be taken as it stands, because O’Brien undercuts (and enlarges) it, in a subsequent piece called “Notes.” He writes: “… I want to make it clear Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to [the dead soldier]. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.” The author says, “It was hard stuff for me to write.” And having been shown the ways in which the author has tried to avoid writing it, the reader is invited to feel the shame that he, Tim O’Brien—a living man, not confined to a printed page—presumably does feel.
    Or maybe not. One could argue reasonably that if the book is fiction, then anything in it might be invented. The playwright has stepped onstage but he’s still part of the play. We can presume to have no idea what he is really like. But at that level of contrivance the essential effort of the work would be dissipated; the reader wouldn’t “feel what I felt.” The device, not the emotion, would become the subject. The book as a whole resists such a reading. It seems to want to tell the truth about a real Tim O’Brien in a real war. We are left with the strange sense that the “work of fiction” is the true memoir, not true as to “feeling”alone, but also true as to fact. Or to the facts as O’Brien knows them.
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    The desire to tell the truth haunts the serious memoirist, and so it should. But there is a step beyond truth. For the writer, the ultimate reward of memoir may be to produce a work in which the facts are preserved but the experience is transformed.
    In
A Fortunate Man
, a meditation on the working life of an English country doctor, John Berger writes: “Perhaps this is the true attraction of autobiography: all the events over which you had no control are at last subject to your decision.” Writers in all genres are attracted to the promise of control over past events—if by “control” one means creating form or finding patterns in a life or a mind or the world, and, in the case of memoir, finding a road through the wilderness of one’s past.
    Some memories cry out for this kind of control, as in the case of a young man with a painful past who had a powerful story to tell, but was uncertain about whether to tell it. His name is Pacifique. * He grew up in an African country beset by civil war. His parents—farmers and herders—were virtually illiterate and yet they valued education, and Pacifique managed to attend grade school, often in peril from trigger-happy soldiers. He did well. His test scores were among the country’s highest and earned him a secondary school education. Then, at nineteen, through a series of improbable accidents and charitable acts, he was broughtto the United States, where he spent a year at the private secondary school Deerfield Academy.
    English was still strange to him when he arrived. (He was fluent in French as well as in his native language.) He had never read a great novel or poem, but as a child he had conceived a fondness for the kinds of stories that elders had traditionally told—mixtures of fact and fiction that the elders always claimed