Truth, truthfulness and authenticity

When Michelle and I first planned this event, I thought I would talk about Mark as I knew him. But our friendship and our political beliefs were so entwined that I could not talk of one without the other. He was, as most of us know, outspoken and courageous in the expression of his beliefs, which were often dissenting. Today is not an occasion to discuss them

I therefore decided instead to make some brief comments about truth in narrative as it bears on A Season of Death. I hope you’ll forgive me for being a bit philosophical. I can’t help it: I’m a philosopher. But I’ll try to be brief. Michelle is the person you must hear.

Mark began to write what became A Season of Death in hospital on the day he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Michelle will tell you the story of it. It is sufficient for me to say that he entrusted the preparation of the manuscript for its publication to her and me. Later I’ll read from it. So will Michelle. We have only one copy the book. We will share it. Others will arrive soon.

After working on the manuscript for almost a year, the existence of the book as a physical object is precious to us; to hold it in our hands a joy. We thank Foong Ling, fully from our hearts.

On the title page of the last draft of the manuscript I wrote: ‘One day, Melila (Mark and Michelle’s daughter) will read this book, and she will ask her mother, “Is it true. Was he really like that? Were you really like that? Was your love for him and his for you, as he depicted it?” I intended to speak those words to Mark. It didn’t happen. He died sooner than anyone expected.

I didn’t intend to raise the question of truth and, implicitly, of truthfulness with Mark because I didn’t believe some of what he had written. I wanted to draw his attention to passages in which he expressed scepticism about the very possibility of truth in biographical or autobiographical narrative. You will be familiar with the observation that if you ask seven people to tell what someone they know is like, you will get seven different stories.

Undeniable that is generally true, but it is also true that after initial disagreement they might, perhaps after long discussion, agree on what they believe the person is really like. That, however, is not why people make that observation, especially at writer’s festivals. They make it to express a radical form of scepticism.

Peter Gay says in his biography of Freud that Freud wrote to Stefan Zweig saying, “whoever turns biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to embellishments, and even to dissembling his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had”. Readers of Freud will know that’s not him at his subtle best.

But the statement that “biographical truth is not to be had” can be developed in two different ways. The first accepts that there is truth to be had but emphasises the difficulty of getting it for reasons that are well known and that focus, for the most part, on our humanly deep inclination to believe what we want to, rather than what is true.

Human beings cannot take much reality, observed TS Eliot. Perhaps Freud thought that narrative could never overcome our strikingly insouciant readiness to live a lie - that only psychotherapy informed by depth psychology could do it. Development of the second reading of Freud’s claim that “biographical truth is not to be had” takes us to a more radical place – indeed, to a conceptual domain of a different kind. The first is psychological.

The second might be called metaphysical. It claims that there is nothing in this world that counts as what someone is really like, and that it would therefore be foolish for Melila to ask what her father, Mark Baker, was really like. The first says you can try for truth, but you probably won’t get it; the second says there is nothing to try for, and that even if people agree about what a person is really like, it cannot be because critical, reflective agreement has converged on what he is really like.

Mark was sometimes given to professing this second, more radical kind of scepticism.  I say “professing” because it is, of course, at bottom a form of nihilism, and no one who knew Mark - profoundly idealistic, committed to justice, in love with the world – could think of him as nihilistic.

But writers are sometimes attracted to words that are, as we put, with justifiably deflationary intent, “mere words - just talk”.  When he lived his dying, Mark resisted what he believed to be false consolation, knowing that natural - almost irresistible - though it is, to seek it is a betrayal of one’s humanity.

Had I told him, even at that time, that I had just read a biography whose untruthfulness was apparent to all but its author and subject, he might have responded by asking “And, Rai, what do you think, truth comes to in this domain of writing?” But if his health had permitted me the opportunity to explain what I had written on the title page of the manuscript and why I thought it important to tell him, I am certain he would have looked me in the eyes, fully appreciating the gravity of what was at issue and said, in effect, “I know Melila will ask this. I will do all I can to enable Michelle to reply truthfully, ‘Yes’.” That certainty gave Michelle and me the confidence to alter some passages in order to attenuate as much as possible any radically sceptical resonances.

A Season of Death is a love story - of love for Michelle and Melila and, differently, his parents, Yossl and Genia. It’s also a story of grief. In much of my work, I have drawn attention to how fundamental to the very concepts that define the inner life - the life of the heart and of the soul - is the distinction between their real and their counterfeit forms.

The examples of central importance to Mark’s book are those of real love and real grief as they must be distinguished from infatuation, from needy self-interested attachment, and from maudlin self-pity, for example. The effort to attend to the independent reality of another person is essential to them all. That is one reason why truth is a need of the soul.

Mark writes: “That’s what Melila will be. An archaeologist, forever digging deeper and deeper into the hole inside her in the hope of finding what lies at the bottom of it. Or will her mother and siblings and my grandchildren be able to uncover forgotten memories? I imagine them sitting around a table or on a holiday, laughing about a story that concerns me. They take it in turns filling in the gaps.”

I wrote what I did on the title page of the manuscript because I wanted to tell Mark that he must do all he can to ensure that when Melila has read A Season of Death, yet  continues digging, the book will help her to distinguish the fantasies she as placed in that hole - the many beliefs she placed in it wishing they were true but which were not - from what is true. Only then will it be balm for her pain because it is genuine food for her soul. She must have no doubt, therefore, that there is truth to be found, and that if she finds it, she will find her father.

Recently, I watched a restored version of the film Romulus, My Father at The Melbourne Film Festival.  Between me and my life as I have lived it there stands a memoir, a long biographical essay on my mother and a film. This can be unnerving in only the way that fear of a loss of contact with reality can be.

Michelle will read A Season Death many times in the coming years. I’m pretty sure she will be unnerved just as I have been. She will then need to trust that the book can anchor her to the truth of her life when she was young, in love, married and gave birth to their miracle baby.

In one of the most important passages in A Season of Death, Mark writes:

As I stare into the wilderness of knowing and not knowing my future in the home that Michelle has made for me and Melila, my focus is on injecting as much of ‘me’ as I can into the people I love. All that matters is staring into the sum-total of my life and reconciling myself to its blessings and flaws. Now is not the time to belatedly try to fit in all the things I always wanted to do, as if in the eleventh hour you can define who you are and the life you have lived.

My struggle now is to get out of bed and to play with Melila, or to see my grandchildren and walk down the street with them. I barely recognise my disfigured body. I have shaved my hair, lost my muscle weight, lightened my olive skin.

Who am I?

It leaves me wondering about the question posed

by Reb Zusia. Have I been Mark Baker? Truthfully,

authentically myself? True to myself?

I don’t even know how to construct a narrative of

my life outside of the bits and pieces of my years.

Obviously, you can’t try to be authentically yourself if you believe there is no such thing as who you really are, or if you don’t care that you are living a lie. Martin Buber, the great Jewish religious philosopher, tells us why this matters. I had planned to read the following quotation to Mark:

In an essay tittle Guilt and Guilt Feeling, Buber tells of a woman who had evaded her guilt and appeared to flourish socially. Yet, he says, “the price paid for the annihilation of the sting was the final annihilation of the chance to become the being that this created person was destined to become through her highest disposition”.  Later, speaking of the conditions under which a person’s essence can thrive, he writes: “Essence — by this I mean that for which a person is peculiarly intended, what he is called to become”.

That, of course, has a religious ring to it. Mark had an ear for it so he would not have minded. But the idea that one is under an ethical imperative to live one’s life with clarity and lucidity about its meanings is as old as Socrates. He said at his trial, under sentence of death, that an unexamined life is not worthy of a human being.

Elsewhere I have written, as a gloss on the Socratic maxim, that our humanity is not something given to us once and for all, as membership of the species is. Rather it is something to which we are called upon to rise and that will never end, not even if we were to live a thousand years. I believe that was what Mark was struggling for when he wrote what I quoted earlier and achieved when he died.

This article is a reprint of the speech given at Melbourne Jewish Book Week.