Nonfiction Accuracy

In rocker/artist/poet Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a memoir of her relationship with the artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, she recalls her being home with her father in New Jersey the night that Robert Kennedy was assassinated:

We sat together on the couch watching the primary returns. I was filled with pride as RFK delivered his victory speech. We watched him leave the podium, and my father winked at me, taking pleasure in the promise of our young candidate and my own enthusiasm. For a few innocent moments, I truly believed that everything would be all right. We watched him file through the jubilant crowd, shaking hands and emanating hope with that classic Kennedy smile. Then he fell. We saw his wife kneeling by his side.
Senator Kennedy was dead.
“Daddy, Daddy,” I sobbed, burying my face in his shoulder.
My father put his arm around me. He didn’t say a thing. I guess he had already seen it all. But it seemed to me that the world outside was unraveling, and, increasingly, my own world as well. (70)

This is quite moving. But it can’t have happened, at least not as described. I happened to have seen Kennedy’s victory speech on TV the early morning following the California primary, 5 June 1968. I was also with my parents, in Wichita, Kansas, though they had long been in bed when I got home from a night out about 1:30 a.m. and turned on the TV. I had followed Kennedy’s campaign that spring and was curious as to the California outcome. He began his speech a little about midnight, California time (2:00 a.m. Wichita time, 3:00 a.m. New Jersey time). At 12:15 (Pacific time), he heads off the platform, disappears from view of the TV cameras. There is general milling around in the ballroom of the hotel, then a chant of “Kennedy! Kennedy! Rah! Rah! Rah!” starts up, but withers as word apparently begins to spread of his being shot, shock spreads, and finally someone comes to the podium to push the crowd back and ask for a doctor. (All of the speech can be seen here, intercut with still photos, audio, and video recorded of the shooting, but broadcast not live.)

So here’s what I would question about Smith’s account:

- That she watched the speech with her father. It would have been 3:00 a.m. in New Jersey, a time I can’t imagine a 50-something working father sitting up watching election returns on a Tuesday night (though I do give it some plausibility in that he apparently was a Kennedy supporter).

- “Then he fell” was something they could not have seen because it was not on live TV.

- “We saw his wife kneeling by his side” also was something not seen on live TV.

- And finally (a minor point), Kennedy wasn’t dead; he would die in a hospital later that morning.

I don’t raise this flawed chronicle as criticism of Smith’s memoir. Indeed, I find it engaging and generally well written. But it is an interesting example of the ongoing debate among literary nonfiction (or creative nonfiction, or whatever) writers about just how accurate a writer has to be in relating personal experience before nonfiction crosses the line into fiction. Personally, I side with those who allow some latitude in the handling of plot, character, setting, dialogue, etc. — as long as it is true to the essence of the experience.

First, literary nonfiction is not journalism (though there is a subgenre, literary journalism, which does require more adherence to facts, quotes, chronology, etc.); it is a reflection of experience on the writer’s part, not reportage, and the point of that reflection — what the writer wants to communicate about their experience — should be what drives the inclusion or exclusion of “facts,” the accuracy of dialogue, the compression of characters, the plotting of events. Smith is portraying a moment in her experience whose point is summarized in the last sentence of the excerpt above: “But it seemed to me that the world outside was unraveling, and, increasingly, my own world as well.” The RFK assassination was — in her experience — a metaphor for her own life at the moment.

Second, essayists and memoirists (unlike journalists or historians) write from memory, and memory is at best shaky. Both at the time of an experience, and certainly over time, our memory is guided by selective emphasis, based on all that has gone before and all that has come after. Was it me who took the broom from my mother (as I recall) or my sister (as she recalls)? There was audio and video taken in the hotel kitchen after Kennedy’s assassination (though I think only after the shots), and there is a still photo of Ethel beside her dying husband on the floor (though I could be wrong about that; I’m relying on my memory), her arms outstretched, begging for help, much more dramatic as a still photo than live video. And these images — audio, video, photos which were broadcast and printed over the week following the assassination — could certainly have become compressed in Smith’s memory of the event, as could her father’s reassurance, which might well have happened the following day.

I do give Smith leeway in this instance, though I raise the example because I also find it right near if not on the line between acceptable and unacceptable variance of the “truth” in literary nonfiction. Reading this passage early in her memoir about an experience that I had contemporaneously experienced, did for me put much of the rest that followed at least under some question. Are there other experiences related in the memoir that go beyond “the essence of experience”? That’s the question that must follow, and why this issue will no doubt continue to be debated in nonfiction circles for the indefinite future.