THE HONEST MAN

I once wrote: I was the coward in that story, and I knew it while it was happening.

That was some years back. People wrote to me about the sentence. A few of them said it took nerve to put down. I believed it when I typed it and I believe it now, and that is what is wrong with it. It is true in every part and it still does a job.

Look at what the sentence does. It picks the charge. Cowardice is interior and it has no plaintiff. Nobody stands in that line except me, and I am standing badly. There were other charges on the table. I took the one I liked, said it first, said it in a voice that sounded like nerve, and after that the harder charge would have looked like piling on.

The second half is where the money is. And I knew it while it was happening. I understood myself. The understanding got taken as payment. Whoever I had been a coward toward received nothing, because the business was settled between me and the reader.

Every fact was true. The innocence was editorial.

I have been admitting things for years. Appetite, nerve failure, the small daily dishonesties a man performs to keep his afternoon pleasant. Readers call it candor. Most of the time it is the selection of an opening.

I did not lie about what happened. I lied about where the story began.

Take the paragraph as a unit of moral proportion. In the pieces people admire, my conduct gets a clause. My trouble about my conduct gets the page. A reader keeps track without meaning to, and he keeps track by the inch. Four pages of a man in distress against one line of a man behaving badly will produce a verdict, and it will come from people who think they have only been moved. Nothing was falsified. The paragraphs were distributed.

Other people in my writing have a function. They come in, they do the one thing the piece needs from them, and they go out again without a motive. My motives get texture. I am divided. I am pulled in directions worth several sentences. The other party is the one who did the thing. This is the oldest trick in the trade and it works because it cannot be seen. Nobody notices that a real person has been given no interior life. They only notice that he acted.

When a man goes first, he says what he is guilty of, and the room accepts his terms.

Then there is when. I have never published an admission that could still cost me anything. I told myself the timing was accidental. The timing was the composition. You wait until the account has gone cold, pay it in full, and let people watch you pay. They will praise you for settling a debt that nobody was collecting. Honesty performed after the hazard has passed is theater with fine reviews and no ticket price.

I notice that the sentence about the ticket price is a good one. Noticing has never stopped me before.

The eloquence is the part that does the damage. A lie is fragile. Somebody remembers otherwise, produces a letter, contradicts the record, and the lie comes apart in public. A well-built paragraph has no such exposure. It does not hide the truth from a reader. It teaches him how to misread it, and he is glad to be taught, because a good sentence feels like a gift and no one audits a gift. Style is the best authority available to a man with a bad case. I learned that early. I have never used it against myself on any occasion when it mattered.

Shame converts. That is the discovery that made me the kind of writer I am. A man who says the worst thing about himself first, and says it with craft, gets reclassified by the audience. He stops being a man who did something. He becomes a man who understands what he did, and understanding is treated as better conduct. I have appeared at my own hearing as witness, counsel, editor, and defendant, and I have been complimented on the fairness of the proceedings.

There is a vanity in this that I want on the record. It is the vanity of looking merciless toward yourself. A man who calls himself a coward in print has used the hardest available word, in his own hand, at his own hour, in his own phrasing. He looks unsparing. He has spared himself everything that counted, since he kept the evidence, the order, and the last line. Severity toward yourself is the cheapest severity there is and it buys an amount of trust that would embarrass you if you thought about it.

I would like to tell you I have caught the habit and put it down. What I can tell you is that I have described it well, which is the move I just finished prosecuting.

Some of my failures have never appeared in anything I published. I know which ones they are. They are the ones that would not convert. There is no interesting interior difficulty in them and no sentence to be made from them and I come off small and dull. They failed the standard I apply to material. The standard is aesthetic. I have been representing it as courage for a long time.

None of this page is exempt. A man can be scrupulous about the evidence and still be the one deciding what counts as evidence. I have no way of stepping outside my own selection. What I have is the observation, and the wish that you admire it.

You are reading a document prepared by the accused. He chose the exhibits, the order, the emphasis, and the hour of filing. He has told you so, which improves his standing and costs him nothing, and he knew that before he started the paragraph.

The first sentence here was mine. So is this one.