110
PARTISAN REVIEW
years later, became paralyzed by fear and unable to answer Hanna.
Shortly afterwards, O'Casey left Ireland never
to
return.
ror me, the only good thing about this painful and shameful experi–
ence was that
J
have never ceased to remember
it.
According to
Friedrich Nietzsche's Law: "My memory says I did this. My pride says
I did not. My memory yields."
In
my case it was my pride that yielded, not my memory.
As 1 came to write my memoirs, and found myself relating this expe–
rience in much more detail than I have recorded it here, I felt-possibly
wrongly-that I was immune
to
the operation of Nietzsche's Law.
It
rema ins theoretica
II
y possi ble tha t there were other even more sha mefu I
transactions in my life which I have come to forget, in accordance with
Nietzsche's Law. But I don't in fact believe that this is the case.
If
there
was anything on which my memory could have yielded, it would surely
have been this one. There were other things of which I have been
ashamed in the course of my long and varied life, and I have set these
things down also in my autobiography. But the little fire in the bedroom,
and my incapacity to speak, was by far the most shaming experience of
my life. And so my inability to forget it is, as it were, the main backing
for the currency of my memoir.
Let me just add a coda, about another fire. Years after the Hanna
episode, I found myself in the Congo representing the United Nations.
With the approva l of the then Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, I
was engaged in attempting to end the secession of Katanga from the
Congo. When things began
to
go wrong with that attempt, Dag Ham–
marskjold began covering his tracks. The UN Secretariat put out a story,
under his direction, that the UN had never attempted to end the seces–
sion. We had just been trying
to
put out a fire in a garage. When that
story reached me, and its implications sank in, I decided I could not live
with that lie.l would resign from UN service, and my own country's ser–
vice, in order to be able to tell the true story. So I did resign and then
told the story.
It
seems that between the real fire in Aunt Hanna's house and the
false fire in Katanga I must have been doing some growing up.
In
conclusion, let me reaffirm that I accept the relatively low place in
the canon of historiographical evidence that Theo Moody assigns to
memoirs. I would only claim that, as memoirs go, my own one is not
too bad. I thank you.
Jeffrey Meyers:
Geoffrey Hartman, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of
English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, and Project
