From “The Impulse Toward Autobiographical Fiction,” a 1963 lecture that is being published for the first time in the collection The Writer as Illusionist, edited and introduced by Alec Wilkinson, out next month from Godine.
An autobiographical novelist is the kind of man who would go to the funeral of somebody who had been like a father to him, and worry all through the one-hundred-and-third Psalm because he has absentmindedly worn brown shoes with a black suit. “As for man,” the minister says solemnly, “his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. / For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone. And the place thereof shall know it no more…” The novelist has heard him, all right. But were people staring at his shoes?
I don’t mean that he is a person too wrapped up in himself to be capable of feeling. He will hear what you are saying, and he will even be interested in it. And in you. But the finer shades of his interest are always for what goes on in his own mind. He is profoundly and faithfully, year in and year out, interested in himself—in his own psychological makeup, the drama of his own life, playing both the lead actor and the audience. This is not very attractive. But those qualities a person cannot help having there is no point in blaming him for. The autobiographical writer was born an egoist, and will pass out of life more interested in his own dying than in the grief of those at his deathbed. By rights he should die alone, but he probably won’t. We know that Marcel Proust didn’t. Or Samuel Butler. There will be somebody. Probably a faithful servant.
But let us consider those brown shoes. He cared enough about the dead man to get there. He didn’t go to the wrong place, or arrive just as the mourners were coming out of the church. Suppose we go back to the moment of his dressing, before breakfast that morning. Here a choice of interpretation is offered. Either you believe that absentmindedness is that and nothing more, or you are ready to believe that through absentminded behavior one betrays feelings ordinarily concealed from oneself and from other people. The novelist—from now on I will refer to him as George Holland—didn’t like funerals. He also didn’t like death—his own or anyone else’s. It is possible that the shoes are a protest.
The truth is that the autobiographical writer is nearly always subversive. Samuel Butler wrote The Way of All Flesh as an act of sabotage. If there was one thing that was dear to Victorian England it was its myopic view of family life. This was not dear to Butler. The French aristocracy that Proust described so lovingly and with such exhaustive detail is in the end exposed for what it really is: a society without moral standards, without intelligence, and without feeling—a sham.
Ordinarily one thinks of a subversive person as someone bent on changing things and bringing about a better world—at least, better to his way of thinking. But the autobiographical novelist is seldom interested in the future. He is enslaved by the past.
Every affliction seems to bring with it some compensating talent. The autobiographical writer, with his enslavement to the past, has an unusually retentive memory. Wolcott Gibbs speaks somewhere of having been at a party with James Thurber when they were both young men. Thurber was bored. He sat off in a corner the whole evening and didn’t talk to anybody or pay any attention to what was going on. Ten years later, to Gibbs’s astonishment, Thurber wrote a story in which that rather dull party was recorded down to the last merciless detail.
The train that Anna Karenina threw herself under the wheels of was not a real train—that is to say, not an actual train that Tolstoy remembered. I am not sure I could have stood it if it had been. Here is a real train, remembered by Nabokov from his childhood:
The door of the compartment was open and I could see the corridor window, where the wires—six thin black wires—were doing their best to slant up, to ascend skyward, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation, were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever been, and they would have to start all over again.
As writing, those telegraph poles could hardly be improved on. But there is something else that is not pure description. What could have been merely a visual impression has the quality of an emotional experience. Of a kind of disaster. Why? Why should this visual impression, which you and I and everybody who has ever gone on a train can recognize, have such a weight of sadness? Something must have happened to him, we say to ourselves, and this is just what the writer meant for us to think. While you are learning about the train journey you are also, half unconsciously, drawing some important conclusions about the man who is remembering it. He would not have described those telegraph wires with such sympathy, such empathy, if he himself had not, at some time between that actual journey and the moment when he sat down to write about it, had his own hopes struck down again and again, by periodic blows of fate. What all this adds up to is an impression that life has been all but too much for the writer, that his happiness has hung by a thread, that the thread has sometimes broken, that he knows what it means to turn one’s face to the wall.
In Samuel Butler’s notebooks there is an entry referring to Ernest Pontifex, the hero of The Way of All Flesh, who was modeled on Butler himself. “It cost me a great deal to make Ernest play Beethoven and Mendelssohn. . . . As a matter of fact, he played only the music of Handel and of the early Italian and old English composers.” This is, of course, absurd; the non-musical reader couldn’t care less what Ernest played. But it is interesting that Butler was reluctant to depart from the facts, and that when he did, it troubled him afterward. It troubles George Holland, too, and it troubles him a good deal more, for the simple reason that he has read Freud and Butler had not. This is not to say that George Holland has swallowed Freud lock, stock, and barrel. And when he resorts to psychology to explain a character, he does his best to avoid jargon, and to keep from sitting down complacently in the analyst’s chair. What he owes to Freud is the realization that no detail of what happens to us is trivial, because at any moment, through the play of association, it may become central to our whole experience, the combination that unlocks the safe and hands over the mystery. Far from being a poor storyteller, life is so full of exquisite detail, of plot, of suspense, of ideas, of architectural structure, of everything that makes a successful novel, that to do anything but reproduce it to the best of one’s ability is to be lacking in literary intelligence. Or so George Holland believes. This is an extreme position, of course. What he says when you back him into a corner is that the writer should know what cannot be improved upon, especially when it is handed to him on a platter.
There are, however, certain disadvantages that come from working so directly from life. There are the laws regarding libel and invasion of privacy. There are social pressures—what the society of any given time thinks it is suitable for a writer to write about. Here, of course, society and the artist part company. There are also personal checks, moral scruples, the fear of inflicting harm on living people. Sometimes the writer and the reader draw apart because the writer is looking with satisfaction at himself, and the reader, catching him at it, is amused or embarrassed for him. And with drama that is to such a considerable extent inward, the writer has to take into consideration the reader’s instinctive requirements, what is and what is not worth being a witness to. Because the reader has, after all, a novel going on inside him, night and day, and turns his attention from it only in the expectation of something more interesting, more instructive, more profound, or more entertaining.
Why then is so much contemporary fiction autobiographical? What’s wrong with Pride and Prejudice? The answer is nothing. It is perfect, or as near as one can expect a novel to be. But fiction shows a tendency not to want to repeat itself, and so a triumph by one writer makes others turn toward something still undone. Skills are lost or go out of fashion. In exchange for those accomplishments that he has either been unable to master or turned his back on, what does the autobiographical writer bring to contemporary fiction?
The novelist has traditionally thought of himself as holding a mirror up to life. The autobiographical novelist holds a mirror up to the mirror. If not for the distance between the two mirrors, you would have a blank, a vacuum. The distance is everything. The two mirrors do not exclude life but include more of it than before. Those Dutch painters who specialized in interiors often included a mirror in order to show the part of the room that was outside the frame. They also kept so firmly in mind what was outside of the picture that though you see through the window only a small view of a street or a garden, you know what the rest is like. If you see through a doorway into the next room, you know that room.
When the autobiographical writer does not have a didactic purpose, he has some other purposes, which the reader becomes gradually aware of. He is trying to free himself from something that plagues him. Or he has a secret that he must talk about and not talk about. Or he hates his father. Or he has committed a crime. Or perhaps the criminal impulse is unconscious and yet he blames himself for it as if it were something actually done. As a child he was angry with his mother—so angry that he wished she were dead. She dies, of natural causes, and he blames himself as remorsefully as if he had held a pillow over her face until she stopped breathing. Very often, the autobiographical novelist is partly a poet, and feels an impulse to share with the poet not only his language but his subject matter.
He is also an innovator. He wants to give a greater place in the technique of the novel to memory. He wants to give objects the status of characters. He wants to describe sensations not hitherto pinned down. He wants to describe the double life that goes on in everyone between the past and the present. He wants to convey the interest of the mind in its own self. This often dismaying, often boring, never-ending interior monologue can be bent on self-deception, but it can also be focused on a slow painful discovery of truth. The autobiographical novelist is a kind of explorer, making his way through a country that is never going to be very well mapped. Therefore you have a choice: between reading him and going through the experience yourself.
