Imagined Truths: Myths from a Draft-Dodging Poet

Richard Lemm has taught creative writing and literature at the University of Prince Edward Island since 1988. He is the author of six poetry collections, a short fiction collection, and a biography of Milton Acorn, Canada’s People’s Poet. A past-president of The League of Canadian Poets and past co-chair of Access Copyright, he has served on juries for The Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the CBC Radio Literary Competition, and the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

Introduction

“Your father, after the war, was a whiz at the pinball machines,” my grandmother said, with a delight in his skill that jarred with her subsequent condemnation of his prodigal habit. “Wasting his mustering-out pay on those contraptions.”

This contradiction left me harboring with equal care two images of my father, two judgments. This was an early initiation into the power of ambiguities embodied in the people who matter most to us—the ambivalence that is endemic, even essential, in the construction of our memories and our memory’s reconstruction of their identities.

I was still in my mother Gloria’s womb when she and my father, Harvey, parted ways. I was told about this separation early on by my maternal grandmother, Aileen. No doubt she felt she had to provide me with a history to explain why I was being raised by her and her second husband, Harry, why my mother was shut away in the loony bin, otherwise known as Northern State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, and why I should not reverently mourn the loss of my father, a war hero, for sure, but sullied, pitiable, fallen from grace.

There was my father, an ace at pinball machines. A man of flashy skill in the eyes of a boy dazzled by men who could make those pinball bells ring and clang and lights blink and glow. Then there was my profligate father, blowing the money he’d earned as a soldier, money he’d risked his life for, money that should have helped me and my mother. What were the facts, what was the truth? What had been altered by imagination, which often alters the facts for the sake of conveying the truth in more fascinating, successful, and profound ways? And what was, unreliably, fanciful?

I keep in mind Coleridge’s distinction, in Biographia Literaria, between Imagination and Fancy. Fancy is casual and superficial, compared with imagination. “Always the ape,” he wrote, fancy is “too often the adulterator and counterfeiter of memory.” Imagination is “vital” and transformative. I had read the Classics Illustrated comic version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and, long before studying Coleridge in university, was enthralled by the revelatory power of imagination. Yet one person’s imagination is another’s fancy.

As Canadian poet Earle Birney famously wrote in “The Bear on the Delhi Road,” “It is not easy to free / myth from reality.” Liberating reality from myth can be equally challenging. As with a culture’s history—an inevitable blend of fabricated myth and empirical fact—one’s personal history is often a conflation of fact and lore.

Memory is not only selective, it’s highly imaginative. And revisionist. Or an amazing liar, fabulist, con artist, spin doctor. A haunter and a healer. At the personal as well as societal levels, history is what we choose to remember about the past in order to make sense of and justify our lives. More precisely, history is what we both consciously and unconsciously choose, the two processes woven together in a mnemonic double helix. Our memories contain what we consider to be evidence about the past.

As an inveterate storyteller from an early age, I had drawn on that imaginative memory to tell tales about my family and ancestors from elementary school onward. I know now, and was somewhat aware then, that I liberally mixed fact and lore into the brew of my family mythology to intoxicate my listeners.

When, in my last year of high school, I became intensely interested in reading about history, American and otherwise, my keenness did not extend to my family’s past. If history was worthwhile, it was to be found in the bestselling masterwork The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in Tolstoy and Dickens, in James Michener’s Hawaii, and other gripping historical novels. I cared deeply about what I was discovering of the externalized past—of American and British history and literature, ancient Greece and China, African-Americans, the Russian Revolution, early cinema, the evolution of blues and jazz—that kind of past. But I was in flight from my personal past, from the ancestors who were more present and influential within my psyche, my identity, than Aristotle, Sappho, Lao Tzu, Emma Goldman, and Duke Ellington. I had no interest in reading about the history of German-Americans and how it might relate to my paternal ancestry, let alone the local history of Grays Harbor County on the Washington coast where my great-grandmother was matriarch of a logging camp and my grandmother and mother were born.

There was also a complacency, an emotional and intellectual laziness, in the way I consciously dealt with my past: content to recycle and embellish my treasure trove of remembered and imagined tales without the kind of investigation that might validate, while correcting, the mythology. In recent years, I have taught life writing classes and workshops on the art and craft of memoir, biography, and the personal essay. I urge my students to learn everything they can about their family, their ancestry. I strongly suggest that they save all documentation and significant artifacts, even if the stuff appears to have little or no value now, for they will likely be grateful in later years. I am preaching what I did not practice.

It’s a truism that many people become more interested in their ancestral past as they age and confront their mortality, finding meaning and solace in placing their lives within an enduring legacy. My interest, especially in my Dutch-German ancestry, might also have been fueled by residing for years in Canada’s ethnic “mosaic,” as opposed to the American “melting pot.” I was permanently settled in Atlantic Canada, where the ancestors-and-heritage game is played more avidly—where people commonly ask, “Who’s your father?” and “Who’s your mother?”—than in my first Canadian home of British Columbia. And perhaps my sense of self and lineage needed to balance the abundant awareness of my maternal heritage and mythology with that of my father’s line of descent. After all, I had grown up surrounded by my mother’s people in Seattle and on the Washington coast, and on my father’s side I had only Grandma Rosie Lemm, an occasional and largely mysterious presence.

If fact had been altered by imagination during my youth, now imagined truths were being revised by archival facts, and I was reimagining my family myths. This process had lagged decades behind my research into American history, my deconstruction and re-envisioning of national and cultural mythology. In the 1990s, a half-century after my birth, I began to research and learn more about my paternal family history, and the two processes melded together.

Over the years I’ve heard and read assertions that America periodically needs an external enemy to further the economic and political goals of various factions, to underpin its foundational myths, and to shape transformations of its identity. I’m tempted to see this too: a nation fostered by violent conquest and expansion, by genocide and slavery, still intermittently needing an enemy and war or threat of war, not only for geopolitical advantage and domestic political gain, but also to sustain its self-image and citizens’ investment in the ongoing project of American exceptionalism.

But America, as with any society, also needs internal enemies. Two decades after 9/11, there is a welcome diminution or hiatus of that need for an external adversary, with the exception of hostility to “illegal” immigrants from Latin America. However, the conjuring and demonization of internal enemies is as intense as when I came politically of age in the 1960s. And arguably more severe and dangerous. In the 1960s, I was among the “left-wing” and “anti-war” people viewed as internal enemies by many Americans. During the Vietnam War, draft dodgers and deserters who moved to Canada were seen as traitors by some of their ex-fellow citizens. But that faded away. Almost entirely. At my 2016 high school reunion in Seattle, a classmate objected to my presence in a group photo: “I served in the army, Rich, and I don’t like what you did.” Flabbergasted, I almost left, but was bolstered by friends, including Vietnam vets.

In any family and any society, imagined truths come into conflict. Our personal and cultural histories are a continuous negotiation of clashing myths, as we engage in an unending act of conscious manipulation of fact and imagination. Of myth-making. History is the story an individual or nation tells itself, in an ongoing process of reinvention, and that story is one of imagined truths.