True Confessions

In 2007, during the events surrounding the funeral of my mother, Betty Speer Morgan, who was one of my heroes, my brother and I shared childhood stories, including one that our mother herself had told us not that long before. When we were children—he about six, I three—we had driven her nuts with endless sibling bickering, breaking things, and chasing each other around the house. One day, when one of us broke yet another china dish, she had had enough. She got so angry that she proceeded to throw the rest of her china, all of it, piece by piece, out the front door of the house. In the confessional mode, I then remembered that for three or four years after our family had moved to the small motel where we lived, and which we ran as a business, with both my brother and I renting rooms to soldiers and their families from Fort Chaffee, I had stolen money out of the cigar box that we used for a cash register— as much as a couple of dollars at a time to go to the movie or buy cokes. My brother was surprised and mildly shocked by this and expressed as much. Later, as we were driving past the place where the motel had stood, he asked if I had forgiven him for throwing me through the glass shower door. I told him that I hadn’t because I didn’t remember his doing it. “I did it three separate times,” he told me. “I felt guilty about it for years afterward.”

Almost all of us have things we feel guilty about, many of them more substantial than childhood misconduct. Serious literature explores human flaws and follies and people’s efforts to change, whether failing or successful. Because of that, confession is an inevitable part of both its methods and subjects. One of the more interesting aspects of literary confession is that it is less about guilt or shame than an effort to be truthful and engage the hearer on a personal level, or even to suggest humankind’s higher abilities.

One of the best-remembered passages in St. Augustine’s Confessions is not the account of his more dramatic youthful deceptions, cruelty, or “jungle of erotic adventures” but his and his teenaged friends’ seemingly innocuous theft of a basket of pears. He takes the pears home and forgets to even eat them. Speculating on it from a nonplatonic point of view, he sees this as an example of how the restlessness, misconduct, and sinfulness of humankind is ultimately an urge to be like God—in part to possess and control but finally also to be at peace. Rousseau’s highly influential two-volume Confessions, published during the French Enlightenment, is similarly honest and paradoxical. Rousseau readily admits to flaws and failures and prurient behavior, including being beaten as a child by his effective guardian Mlle. Lambercier and enjoying it so much that he desperately wants to be beaten by her again. Yet Rousseau feels that he and all of us are fundamentally good, with all our physical experiences and personal oddities. Because of his belief in the value and relevance of the subjective and the sensory, he is often seen as one of the inspirations for the Romantic movement. Thomas de Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, another contribution to Romantic literature, is less philosophically driven. It speaks of his slide into drug dependency as a homeless youth and the terrible symptoms in later life of full addiction, yet it is also filled with a contradictory appreciation for opium’s mind-altering “assuaging,” transcendent visions, and gift of the “hopes of youth,” no matter how delusional.

The poetry that interested me as a young reader was the confessional work of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell from the late 1950s and ’60s. Among the paradoxes in their poetry was that they and indeed many of the memorable poets of that generation spoke with a raw personal sublimity reminiscent of the Romantic classics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thoreau. The broad themes of true confession indeed come from the...