Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Sounds like the beginning of something.

Why don’t you go to the prison beauty shop?

— CATHERINE HEARST TO HER DAUGHTER PATRICIA,

AFTER THE LATTER’S ARREST,

CONCERNING THE CONDITION OF HER HAIR

My greatest trouble is the present and the past, and I guess the future too.

— PATRICIA HEARST,

RESPONDING TO A SENTENCE COMPLETION TEST,

CA. THE SAME PERIOD

Fiction based on real events always risks appearing to be coy about its proximity to the actual, whether or not its author hews closely to the facts. Still, I thought in this case it might be of use to affirm that while many of the situations this novel depicts, and the people it portrays, are drawn from a well-documented episode in recent American history, I have disregarded the record whenever it’s served my purpose to do so. Among many adulterations, I have, strictly according to my own lights, emphasized, diminished, conflated, and omitted incidents and individuals; I have frequently invented characters and incidents altogether; and I have occasionally changed the chronology of events and consciously indulged in anachronisms. I have freely included invented documents, newspaper articles, and the like alongside genuine ones. I have, through my characters and narrators, offered opinions or hypotheses that are entirely spurious when placed outside the invented context of the novel. In short, I exercised the novelist’s right to avoid those things that did not interest me and to take imaginative liberties with those that did.

Accordingly, readers should note that while many of the characters in this book have counterparts in real life, their actions, thoughts, beliefs, personalities, and, certainly, legal and moral culpability as depicted here are, finally, the product of an author’s imagination.

A note on sources: Many, if not most, of the sources dealing directly with the SLA that I reviewed were written while the case was ongoing in one sense or another and attempt to present factual accounts from a journalistic perspective. While these accounts provided a vivid glimpse of the mid-1970s to aid my own shaky memory, they’ve suffered from the passage of time in all the usual ways. Facts have been superseded by newer and more influential facts. The authors frequently bring to their material oddly insistent personal agendas, at once both tangential to and entangled with the larger subject, that persuasively demonstrated to me the narcotic allure of the SLA/Tania story and the ways in which people relate certain public events to their private lives. Finally, it should perhaps go without saying that both the relevancy of such matters and our way of thinking about them have drastically changed since I started writing in the fall of 2000.

One book that I found indispensable was Vin McLellan and Paul Avery’s The Voices of Guns (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977). Equally valuable were the lengthy articles by David Kohn and Howard Weir that appeared in Rolling Stone in 1975-76. Shana Alexander’s Anyone’s Daughter (New York: Viking, 1979), though it often careens into the personal in the manner described above, provides a thoughtful and candidly bemused look at the “establishment” take on home-grown radicalism and its consequences. Robert Brainard Pearsall’s annotated compilation The Symbionese Liberation Army: Documents and Communications (Amsterdam: Rodolpi N.V, 1974) both collects those things and places them in welcome context. Patricia Campbell Hearst’s memoir, Every Secret Thing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), and the LAPD’s official report “The Symbionese Liberation Army in Los Angeles,” while both somewhat self-serving, offer information unavailable elsewhere. Another book that was of particular help was Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), an impressionistic look at the Japanese-American experience during and after World War II. Still other sources are acknowledged in passing within the novel.

As is my habit as a fiction writer, I conducted no fieldwork, archival research, or interviews toward the completion of this book. Seekers of documentary truth are gently encouraged to look elsewhere.

Among those on whose help, encouragement, advice, and support I relied I must acknowledge Ira Silverberg, Lorin Stein, Cary Goldstein, Bradford Morrow, Leon Friedman, Richard Wong, Gilbert Sorrentino, Sam Lipsyte, and especially my old friend and tutelary saint, Jonathan Lethem.

Of course many others provided aid and comfort to me during the writing of this book, and I hope I’ve managed to reciprocate when I could.

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Ultimately the man’s dissertation is published under the title Revolutionary Minstrels: White Appropriation of Black Oratory in Postwar American Radical Rhetoric.