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PARTISAN REVIEW
about memory. He is one who "lives in two time zones at once, there–
fore existing in neither. . . .The suggestion of deception is deeply
inscribed in the verb." One would not temporize a weakling, Aciman
suggested; temporizing is the strategy for victory of the less strong-it is
about the habit of waiting out the giant and the condition of living in
abeyance. A psychological temporizer, Aciman says, "fends off the pre–
sent all his life"; like Proust
(l~ell1emIJrance
of
Things Past
was a central
meditation of this conference) he is one who "looks back to a time when
all he did was look forward in time."
The point, of course, and there is a deep point in Aciman's beautiful
essay on memoir, is to find ways
to
craft around sorrow, pain, and loss,
to "escape the tyranny of the day-to-day"; to cope with the "unman–
ageable intensity of the present" in which "the narrator gains a liquid
and unsteady foothold" on the future through examination of the past.
Aciman describes looking at a group of sunbathers on a grassy bank on
98th Street in New York, where he lived after graduate school, and
thinking this was a "beach day in Alexandria." At this moment he real–
ized that the only way he could live in his present observation of the
individuals on the grassy bank-to make friends with them and to par–
take of their experience-was to carry them back
to
the Egypt of his
childhood. All experience, he said, must have an Egyptian analog
because, for him, Alexandria was the Capital of Memory. (When you
boil an egg and mix up its yolk with something else, and place it back
in the egg this process is called deviling, he noted. "Egypt is the egg
upon which] devil memory.") Aciman is a superb essayist with a play–
ful, muscular, and poetic adroitness.
IN A WORLD IN WHICH
"heroic adaptations" of the truth are necessary
to be a political figure in contemporary life-to meet the "gestalt of the
gigabyte"-are true selves, authentic selves, possible?
In
the next major
segment of the conference, three writers looked at the questions of
invention and memory, and the possible necessity of prevarication and
grandiosity in contemporary life.
In
a paper about "Who am I this
time?" Jay Martin examined the "fictionalized biographical" tech–
niques of Edmund Morris, the author of
Dutch
(a memoir of Ronald
Reagan), and Bill Turque, the author of
Inventing AI Gore,
as exam–
ples of ways in which the biographer's work and the politician's inven–
tion of self are actua Ily overla ppi ng, non-contrad ictory era frs.
As Morris wrote about his own technique,
