Editor’s Corner
December 5, 2008
Pulling stories from history
By
Constance Hale
It’s a cliché of narrative nonfiction, isn’t it? The cache of letters tied with a ribbon, the trunk of mementos in the attic. As with most clichés, this one exists for a reason. Such discoveries can crack open a mysterious past, providing priceless fodder for any writer trying to make history come alive. From penned letters come unvarnished voices; from contemporary news clippings come critical facts; and from a faded photograph come the sculptural details of a forgotten face.
The power of the cliché was driven home to me when, as I interviewed my stepmother for a book on my grandfather, she told me about a file box in the basement. In it were photos of my grandfather with his artillery on the Bataan Peninsula, a news clip describing the Bataan Death March, letters from escaped prisoners, and nine POW postcards sent to my grandmother before her husband died in a Japanese hospital. On them he checked answers in multiple-choice statements (“My condition is (x) Excellent”), but signed off in an expansive script that made him slightly less of an enigma.
In reading “From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family’s Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre,” we at the Digest were reminded anew of the peculiar literary power of letters. Countless articles, documentaries, and even an “oral-history drama” have been written about the tragedy of Jonestown since November 18, 1978, when 918 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones drank poison-laced Kool-Aid in Guyana. But the letters of Phyllis Chaikin’s family, which the author judiciously uses to frame and fill his piece, brought freshness to this familiar story.
What dialogue is to news narratives, letters are to history—and to personal history. In 1999, V. S. Naipaul wove letters between himself, his father, and his sister into an autobiographical sketch in The New Yorker. Leonardo Sciascia used the letters of Aldo Moro to craft L’affaire Moro, about the 1978 kidnapping of Italy’s former prime minister by the Red Brigades. The narrative is a dazzling reading of the letters Moro sent from the undisclosed site in which he was held until his execution.
Then, of course, there are collections of letters, which may lack a narrative arc, but not narrative power. They can range from E.B. White’s records of his farm and his various foibles to Sylvia Plath’s ardent Letters Home. The recently published letters of poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Words in Air) spin a sort of twin biography.
The use of letters and other such intimate primary sources will be the subject of at least one session at the next Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, whose theme is “Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times.” Speakers at the three-day gathering (March 20-22) include Jon Lee Anderson, Gwen Ifill, Adam Hochschild, Mara Schiavocampo, and yours truly, among many others. Registration begins Dec. 4.