First come the current events' secrets, with titles like, "Secret Notebooks of a Presidency" and "The Secret Stories of Miss France".
Seven years later, Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, told some of their secret stories, with lyrical ferocity, in his one-act play "The Toilet".
To approach his free-standing piece Untitled (c.1954) in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is to be transfixed by a flood of memories, allusions, secret stories and deep feelings.
In the hands of an erudite and witty bookworm – Anne Fadiman, say – the revelation of these secret stories could have proved eminently entertaining without leaving the reader feeling as if he has watched a neighbour undress.
The story "Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother's Side" demonstrates his new mastery of contemporary realism, recounting, in sharp, staccato takes, the efforts of a writer (named Nathan, no less) to piece together the secret stories of his own family's past.
They're appealing in the same way those "wise old person who knows the secret" stories that turn up in so many fantasy-adventure movies today are appealing, and they have the same shortcoming, which is that in life there never is just one secret, and there never is just one cause.
