Dikkon Eberhart
 
             
                               Part One
 
   I’ve been writing a new novel, but very slowly.  I haven’t published a novel for years.  Considering the slowness with which I am writing this new novel, it won’t be published for years, either. Most likely, I'll publish more non-fiction first.

    My working title for the new novel is The Pirate Book.
 
   The protagonist of The Pirate Book is a present-day archivist who works at a 200-year-old seminary in Connecticut.  The novel is structured as a story-within-a-story.  Much of the action occurs among pirates in the late 17th century. 

   The story is kicked into action when the archivist finds an uncatalogued document hidden inside the binding of an antique, family memoir.  The family memoir is an item stored in the seminary’s archives.  The reason the memoir is stored in the seminary’s archives is that it recounts the history of a clan of 18th and 19th century missionaries, some of whom were graduates of the seminary many, many years before the present day. 

   The hidden document which the archivist finds is electrifying.  It is electrifying because it casts a different light—and an unwelcome light—on the history of the missionary clan.  It fundamentally re-characterizes the clan’s founding father. 

   As I said, I have not published a novel for years.  On the other hand, a non-fiction book of mine—which is a memoir—was published recently. 

   In this new book of mine, obviously I am looking backward in time, it being a memoir.  The book explores what happened during the first sixty years of my life, in order to establish a context for my introspection about how to anticipate my life’s remaining years. 

   My memoir is about how I got this way.

   That being so, it does not surprise me that I began to write The Pirate Book at approximately the same time as I set down the first sentences of my memoir. 

   The two books—one fiction, one memoir—are powered by the same urgencies.  The urgencies are, first, to uncover the truth of the past, and, second, to testify to the shadow which past truth casts upon the future. 
  
   My slowness at finishing The Pirate Book is due to the fact that, while I wrote both books concurrently for a short period of time, I needed to move back-and-forth between a fictional voice and my personal voice, at least to the extent that I allowed my personal voice to appear in my memoir. 

   Going back-and-forth was hard.  In the end, I shelved The Pirate Book and finished my memoir.   
 
   Some pirates buried their treasure.  One reason they sustain our interest, today, three hundred fifty years after their heyday, is their buried treasure. 

   It’s out there, even now, their treasure.  What Caribbean beachcomber kicking up sand has not imagined the sudden glint of a doubloon, exposed after all these years by the flipping action of his toe? 

   In another iteration of the same wonder, what archivist has not imagined the corner of a lost, uncatalogued letter appearing from behind the illustrated plate in an old book, rarely taken from the shelf? 

   In me, regarding that last fantasy, the novelist’s imagination leaps into play—what does that letter say?  Why was it hidden away?  Who hid it?  It must have been precious, that letter.  Was it alarming as well?  How does it affect the archivist—now, who reads it in our later day? 

   An archivist is a person who likes to read other people’s mail…but only at a comfortable distance in time. 

   Has the discovery of this letter compressed the 19th and the 21st centuries in some way, and how?  What change of present historical understanding comes from that compression?  Who among the characters of the novel, today, is hurt by the compression, and who is relieved?  Which new walls are built up, and which old walls are torn down? Is there a revelation at hand?  

   Letters from the past affect people, down to the bone.  The Pirate Book is about how the discovered letter affects both the missionary family and the archivist—and, this being fiction, about what happened next. 

   What of my memoir?  Is there a parallel?  Is there a blessing?  Partially to quote an earlier post under the GOD heading, "Is there Someone on the other shore who will leap to fill me in?"


 
                      Learn more in Part Two.


 By the way, just who are the people in the photographs?

                          I'll give you a hint.  

                          They're not pirates!

Dikkon Eberhart
 
   To a non-writer, it might seem that writing a memoir is easy.  You know what happened—just tell the truth.

   Here’s a passage from a good writer that is on point. 

   The passage is on page thirty of the novel Lila by Marilynne Robinson. The protagonist of the novel is a young woman who scarcely ever talks, whom the reader does not yet know well.  She is sitting, virtually silent, with an elderly minister in his kitchen, drinking coffee.  He has just told her an event about angels. 

   She said, “I liked that story.”

   He looked away from her and laughed.  “It is a story, isn’t it? I’ve never really thought of it that way. And I suppose the next time I tell it, it will be a better story.  Maybe a little less true.  I might not tell it again.  I hope I won’t.  You’re right not to talk.  It’s a sort of higher honesty, I think.  Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say. 

   Read that last sentence again--Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say.  

   Most people don’t suffer under the burden of being writers.  Truth in writing is more complicated than most people understand.  Once we writers start talking—writing—there’s no telling what we’ll say. 

   What we writers say is for the good of the story we are telling.  The good of the story we are telling becomes our motivation, which is paramount.  Truth notwithstanding.

   If the need of the story is for its protagonist to step off the porch and to trip over the cat, then that is what the protagonist does—even though the truth of the incident was that it was the bottom step of the inside staircase, and it was the dog.  

   Lila is a novel.  Fiction is one thing; memoir is another.  I write memoir.  It’s harder. 

   For one thing, the people you write about in memoir are still alive, or they may be, and they have a right to privacy—which is true even if they’re dead.  For another, you yourself have a right to privacy, even when you seem deliberately to have opened yourself up to scrutiny. 

   But the main difficulty about your memoir is that your memoir is not about you.  Your memoir uses you to support its real subject.  Its real subject is your theme for writing. 

   What are you writing about?  Not you.  Frankly, no one is much interested in you except a few friends and relations.  It’s your theme that is of general interest—you hope.

   Let’s say your memoir’s theme is how pet ownership has opened up your life to greater awareness of God.  In that case, it really doesn’t matter if the accident was prompted by the porch and the cat or by the stairs and the dog.  Either is relevant to the theme.

   However, you know that it was the stairs and the dog, but you’re going to use the porch and the cat.

   That’s the truth trouble, right there. 

   Why do you use the porch and the cat?  You write that it was the porch and the cat because, later in your memoir, at the climax of your theme—when the awareness of God comes vividly upon you--that event actually did happen on the porch. 

   You decide you’ll use the porch and the cat for the accident so that your memoir, as a whole—rising as it does toward the God revelation—can occur on the porch, where it really did occur. 

   That’s the best way for the revelation scene to be literarily cohesive with the accident event.   

   Whew! 

   It’s not easy. 

   How do you balance? 

   Theme?  Truth? 

   Or do you serve each of these needs at the same time by using techniques of fiction, without stepping across the line into fiction? 

   Readers of your book want to be excited by your memoir, not because it is about you, but—because of the gift you have made to them of your theme—it is about them. 

   Yes, you are providing detail about your life and your events, but their attraction to your memoir is that you have allowed them to think about themselves in new ways.  Their lives and their events have been affirmed, or tested, or questioned, or balanced by what you have said about yours.   

   They are drawn into your memoir by this.  But they stay inside your book because of what you have revealed to them about them. 

   Each draft of your story perfects your story, while each draft is a little less true.  That’s because once you start to write your story, there’s no telling what you’ll say.    

Dikkon Eberhart 

​
   Memoir writing is dreaming backwards. 
 
   Eleven years ago, my father became one hundred years old.  When Dad turned one hundred, my wife and I had no grandchildren yet.  We hoped we might have grandchildren someday—after all, we had produced four children, so the prospect of grandchildren was bright.  However, whenever our grandchildren did come along, they would not be able to sit with this man, my father, the poet, who was one hundred years old.  Dad would be gone by then.  Our grandchildren could read his poetry, they could view him in pictures, but they would not be able to know him as I knew him. 
 
   So I sat down at my desk, and I began writing stories about my dad, and about my mom, and about how it all was.  In order to write these stories, I discovered, also I needed to write stories about Dad’s and Mom’s own parents, and about how it all was for them, too.  The more stories I wrote down, the more stories I remembered, and the more stories I remembered, the more dangerous this process became.  I was dreaming backwards, with emphasis on the word dreaming. 
 
   You see, I am a writing sort of a fellow.  In order to understand my life as I live it, I objectify it.  This is not a choice of mine; it’s the way I’m wired. My psyche places me outside my life, while I live my life fully.  From outside, I observe the themes of my life, upon which I mull.  And as I mull the themes, I order my memories so that they illustrate and they dramatize the themes.  It’s a circle—it’s what I mean by dreaming backwards. When we dream, we are both receiving something from our outside and creating something from our inside at the same time.  That’s why dreams fascinate, though they are not real. 
 
   As I wrote my stories down about my parents and about their parents, I was dreaming backwards.  My father, the poet, was called “Dreamy Dick” when he was a boy, and the apple does not fall far from the tree.

   Dreaming backwards is dangerous because it may fool the dreamer.  It may make the dreamer believe that the created story of the past is the past.  However, that is not so.  The past is ungraspable—it is past.  If you are writing a memoir, the people of the past are unable to tell you, now, if you are wrong in your memory.  The people of the past are unable to chide you when you order your memories for the purpose of dramatizing your themes…at their expense. 
 
   To the casual observer, writing a memoir probably seems easy enough.  After all, you know the stories—just write them down.  But memoir writing is a razor-edged endeavor.  The writer of a memoir has a responsibility which is weighty.   If the writer fails to balance precisely between self-enhancement and self-abnegation there is a danger of falling and of being cut.  A memoir—this is what I have concluded—a memoir should be a kind of prayer by which the writer expresses, highest among all things, humility. 
 
   As an example of my desire to live in a past which I did not possess myself, here’s a memory.  I loved my father partly because of the past he had lived in before me.  I could dream my way into his experiences when something of his experience touched mine; I was ten-years-old and a warrior. 
 
   Dad had been a naval officer during World War II.  His principle responsibility was training young gunners on navy bombers the necessary marksmanship, with their .50-caliber double-barrel machine guns, to survive strafing attacks by Japanese Zeros, and to shoot the Zeros down instead.  After the war was won, Dad kept his target kites. 
 
   Choose any summer day, when I was ten.  Maybe on that day we’d take Dad’s elegant old cabin cruiser out onto the ocean in Maine, and we’d go to Pond Island, along with a swarm of smaller craft, some fifty of our closest friends and us. We’d have a boatload of clams, lobsters, and cod fish, also corn, potatoes, salads, pies.  (I’d be especially proud if I’d caught the cod the day before while drop-lining near Saddleback Ledge.)  The hour would be early, still cool, with a light air from the south, no fog.  I’d handle the anchor at the island, following Dad’s directions.  Several trips would be needed in the launch to ferry all our equipment to the shore. 
 
   Then, on the south side of the island, we’d dig a deep clambake pit in the sand, line it with stones, fill it with drift wood, and set a bonfire ablaze to heat the rocks.  We kids would fill a dingy with fresh rockweed, torn from its roots below tide line.  When the fire burned down to glowing coals, we’d layer the pit with the seaweed—instantly bright green on the seething rocks, and popping—and we’d toss on the food, layering it with seaweed and topping the whole bake with a thicker, final layer of seaweed.  Finally, we’d cover everything with an old sail and bank the sand up around the sail’s edges to hold in the heat. 
 
   Then, finally, there’d be nothing to do but to wait while the bake baked, to stroll, to run, to explore, to lie in the strengthening sun, to philosophize vigorously—or meanderingly, as the mood suited.  Perry and Craig would lead us all in singing The Sinking of the Titanic, and we would all take a delicious, ghoulish pleasure in the line “husbands and wives, little children lost their lives….”  Beer and wine for the grown-ups; orange Nehi for us kids. 
 
   Then it would be early afternoon, and the breeze would have come up.  It would be a good, strong, summer sou’wester—good sailing weather…kite sailing. 
 
   Dad and I would rig a kite.  It was an act of shared and minute technical specificity that I adored since it was so uncharacteristic of my father; Dad was not a tool guy.  But kites, I realized at age ten, were really poems, and therefore they deserved his intensity of attention to their every nuance.  Sometimes Dad would agree to fly the huge 10-foot-high kite, but usually it would be one of the 6s or the 8s, which are plenty big enough when you are yourself about four-and-a-half feet high. 
 
   Dad and I would work for half an hour, threading the lines, re-screwing a thimble, guying the rudder straighter.  Then it would be time, and I’d carry the kite sixty or seventy feet downwind along the beach, carefully playing out the four lines it took to control these monsters, while Dad made final adjustments to his reels and his control arms and his harness.  He’d attach the controls to his chest, a “front pack” of great drums of line controlled by hurdy-gurdy handles, with arms that stuck out two-and-a-half feet from each shoulder, through which the lines ran before heading for the kite.  Distance was controlled by grinding the drums with the handles; yaw and lift and plane were controlled by the rudder, which in turn was controlled by shifting one’s shoulders backwards and forwards, thus pulling the rudder one way or the other. 
 
   It was my job to hold the kite upright, buffeted by its weightiness in the wind, and to await Dad’s command to thrust it into the sky.  Before I thrust the kite into the air, knowing the fun we were about to have, I would stare at the silhouette of a Zero that was painted on the kite with the big red target circles over the gas tanks in its wings.  So that was where to hit ‘em!  And especially I would stare at the carefully stitched .50-caliber bullet holes in the kite that riddled those very wings.  How close I was then, dreaming backwards, in that numinous moment, to the howl of the bullets themselves!
 
   “Go!”
 
   As hard as I could, I’d launch the kite up into the wind.  In a second the kite would catch the wind and zoom high. In my mind, the stream of bullets would follow it, and the thudding of the guns would buffet me, and the hot brass would rain all around. 
 
   In a steady wind, Dad could fly the kite up to three hundred feet, make it hover there for the longest time, and then make it dive straight down into the sea—straight down into the sea!—only to pull back on his controls at the very last instant so that the kite tore through the top of a wave and rose again, streaming shining droplets from its wings and from its lines, like some raptor on a string!  
 
    This was jam at a clambake. 
 
   The past was mythic.  My father was mythic.  I was mythic—and ten. 
 
   I dreamed backwards of the Golden Time—when lived the Old Ones, who fleeted among the ancient trees, and knew. 
 
​

​Dikkon Eberhart

   ​​Birthday number 100. Dad was pleased. Lots of people came to see him.

   I thought, I’d better write down my life with him now—how it was. Before we forget.

​   Tyndale House Publishers bought what I wrote, and its editors made a book of my writing, a memoir. We needed a title. They found a good one. The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told--eye catching. Everyone was happy.