Authors: William H. Gass
Nowhere would one find the blend better blended than in autobiography.
The novel sprang from the letter, the diary, the report of a journey; it felt itself alive in the form of every record of private life. Subjectivity was soon everybody’s subject.
I do not think it should be assumed that history, which had always focused its attention upon wars and revolution, politics and money, strife of every sort (while neglecting most everything that mattered in the evolution of human consciousness, such as the discovery of the syllogism, the creation of the diatonic scale with its inventive notation, or three-legged perspective, to be for centuries the painter’s stool), had found its final relevance with the inward turn of its narrative, for it now celebrated the most commonplace and cliché-ridden awareness and handled the irrelevant with commercial hands and a pious tongue, as if it were selling silk.
Our present stage is divinely dialectical, for we are witnessing now the return of the significant self. Prince—not a reigning prince, of course—Madonna, not a saintly mother, to be sure—stars of stadium, gym, arena, and screen, constellate our consciousness as history becomes a comic book, and autobiography the confessions of celluloid whores and boorish noisemakers whose tabloid lives are presented for our titillation by ghosts still undeservedly alive.
If we think about composing our autobiography in any case, where do we turn but to our journals and diaries, our appointment books, our social calendars? We certainly ask for the return of our letters and review all our interviews to see if we said what we said, if we said it when they say we said it, and whose tape we may have soiled with our indiscretions.
But what are these things that serve as the sources for so much autobiography? There are differences between diaries, journals, and notebooks, just as there are differences between chronicles and memoirs and travelogues and testimonies, between half-a-life and slice-of-life and whole-loaf lives, and these differences should be observed, not in order to be docile to genres, to limit types, or to anally oppose any mixing of forms (which will take place in any
case), but in order that the mind may keep itself clean of confusion, since, to enjoy a redolently blended stew, we are not required to forget the dissimilarity between carrots and onions, or, when composing our apologia, the differences between diaries and letters and notes to the maid.
The diary demands to be entered day by day, and it is improper to put down for Tuesday a date who closed your dreary eyes on Saturday. Its pages are as circumscribed as the hours are, and its spaces should be filled with facts, with jots, with jogs to the memory. Diary style is staccato, wirelesslike. “No call from Jill in three days. My god! have I lost her?” “Saw Parker again. He’s still the same. Glad we’re divorced.” “Finished Proust finally. Champagne.” And you are already disobedient to the demands of the form if you guiltily fill in skipped days as if you hadn’t skipped them.
The journal still follows the march of the calendar, but its sweep is broader, more circumspect and meditative. Facts diminish in importance and are replaced by emotions, musings, thoughts. If your journal is full of data, it means you have no inner life. And it asks for sentences, although they need not be polished. “I was annoyed with myself today for hanging about the phone, hoping for a call from Jill, who hasn’t rung up in three days. She said she would call me, but was she being truthful? Dare I call her, though she expressly forbade it? I don’t want to lose a customer who spends money the way she does.” “Parker came into the shop, what gall! and ordered a dozen roses! I couldn’t believe it! I know he wants me to think he’s got another woman. God, he looked gaunt as a fallen soufflé. I think I’m happy we’re no longer together. He never bought roses for me. What a bastard!” “Today was a big day, a memorable day, because today I closed the cover on Proust, I really read the last line, and ‘time’ had the final word, no surprise there. I feel now a great emptiness, some sort of symbolic let-down, as if a soufflé had fallen.” You may revise what you have already written in your journal, but if you revise a passage prior to its entry, you are already beginning to fabricate.
Virginia Woolf’s
Diaries
are therefore misnamed. We can see, in her case, as in that of Gide’s, the tyranny of the journal, when, like a diary, it wants to have its day-to-day say, and we are led to imagine its keeper asking from life only something worth writing about, living through the light for the sake of a few evening words, and worrying whether her senses will be sensitive, her thoughts worthwhile, and a few fine phrases turned during yet another entry.
With the notebook we break out of chronology. Entries do not require dates. I can put anything in I like, even other people’s thoughts. The notebook is a workshop, a tabletop, a file. In one of mine you will find titles for essays I hope one day to write: “The Soufflé as a Symbol of Fragile Expectation.” Rilke’s
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
are misnamed, for the language is far too polished, the episodes are too artfully arranged, the perceptions are too poetically profound, and there is not nearly enough mess; however, if his fictive
Notebooks
really resemble journals, Henry James’s
Notebooks
are the real thing: a place to plot novels, to ponder problems, to consider strategies and plan attacks.
All three—diary, journal, notebook,—are predicated on privacy. They are not meant to be read by anyone else, for here one is emotionally naked and in formal disarray. Unlike the letter, they have no addressee; they do not expect publication; and therefore, presumably, they are more truthful. However, if I already have my eye on history; if I know, when I’m gone, my jottings will be looked over, wondered at, commented on; I may begin to plant redemptive items, rearrange pages, slant stories, plot small revenges, revise, lie, and look good. Then, like Shakespearean soliloquies, they are spoken to the world.
None of these three—diary, journal, notebook—is an autobiography, although the character of each one is
autobiographical
. A memoir is usually the recollection of another place or personality, and its primary focus is outward bound: on the sudden appearance of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Ithaca, New York, for instance, or how Caesar said, “You too?” before he fell, or what it was like to go to bed with Gabriele D’Annunzio. Even when the main attention of
the memoir is focused inward, the scope of the memory tends to be limited (how I felt at the first fainting of the queen) and not wide enough to take in a life. Lewis Thomas takes the seventy-year life with which he assumes autobiography concerns itself, and first removes the twenty-five in which he was asleep, and then subtracts from the waking hours all the empty and idle ones, to reach a remainder of four thousand days. By discounting blurred memories, self-serving reconstitutions, and other fudges, his count comes down a good deal more. The indelible moments left will most likely be found to occupy thirty-minute bursts. Such bits, he says, are the proper subject of the memoir.
What gets left out? that I read the papers. What gets left out? that I ate potatoes. What gets left out? that I saved my snot for several years. What gets left out? my second attempt to circumcise myself. What gets left out? the shops in which I purchased shoes, my fear of the red eyes of rabbits. What gets left out? what demeans me; what does not distinguish me from anyone else: bowel movements, movie favorites, bottles of scotch. What is saved? what makes me unique; no, what makes me universal; what serves my reputation; what does not embarrass the scrutinizing, the recollecting, self.
And if we make a collection of such memories, they will remain like unstrung beads, because an autobiography has to rely on what cannot be and is not remembered, as well as on what is: I was born; I had whooping cough before I was three; my parents came to Sunnydale from Syracuse in an old Ford sedan. Edward Hoagland’s piece “Learning to Eat Soup” captures this feature perfectly, composed as it is of paragraphs made mostly of memories: balloons into which the past has been breathed:
My first overtly sexual memory is of me on my knees in the hallway outside our fifth-grade classroom cleaning the floor, and Lucie Smith in a white blouse and black skirt standing above me, watching me.
My first memory is of being on a train which derailed in a
rainstorm in Dakota one night when I was two—and of hearing, as we rode in a hay wagon toward the distant weak lights of a little station, that a boy my age had just choked to death from breathing mud. But maybe my first real memory emerged when my father was dying. I was thirty-five and I dreamed so incredibly vividly of being dandled and rocked and hugged by him, being only a few months old, giggling helplessly and happily.
A good deal of what we remember is remembered from paintings and plays and books, and sometimes, as above, these are themselves memories, and sometimes they are memories of books or plays or paintings … whose subject is the self.
Testimonies, too, have powerful impersonal intentions. They do not simply wish to say: I was there, I saw enormities, now let me entertain you with my anguished account of them: of how I suffered, how I survived, remembered, yet went on; no—no—for they, those witnesses, were there for all of us, were we, standing in that slow-moving naked line, holding our dead baby across our chest to hide the breasts, never staring at others in the row, mumbling a prayer in a vacant way—yes—this is our numb mind, mankind’s misery, no single soul should bear it, not even Jesus, though it’s said he tried.
The Holocaust ate lives like a fat boy on holiday.
It is healthy, even desirable, to mix genres in order to escape the confinements of outworn conventions, or to break molds in order to create new shapes; but to introduce fiction into history on purpose (as opposed to being inadvertently mistaken) can only be to circumvent its aim, the truth, either because one wants to lie, or now thinks lying doesn’t matter and carelessness is a new virtue, or because one scorns scrupulosity as a wasted effort, a futile concern, since everything is inherently corrupt, or because an enlivened life will sell better than a straightforward one, so let’s have a little decoration, or because “What is truth?” is only a sardonic rhetorical question which regularly precedes the ritual washing of hands.
I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are and then having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world. Anyone honestly happy with himself is a fool. (It is not a good idea to be terminally miserable about yourself either.) But an autobiography does not become a fiction just because fabrications will inevitably creep in, or because motives are never pure, or because memory will genuinely fade. It does not become a fiction simply because events or attitudes are deliberately omitted, or maliciously slanted, or blatantly fabricated, because fiction is always honest and does not intend to deceive. It announces itself: I am a fiction; do not rely on my accuracy, not because I am untrustworthy, but because I am engaged not in replication but in construction. There will be those who will try to glamorize their shoddy products by pretending they are true, and then, when they fail to pass even the briefest inspection, like the movies
JFK
and
Malcolm X
, dodge that responsibility by lamely speaking of “art.” Fiction and history are different disciplines, and neither grants licenses to incompetents, opportunists, or mountebanks.
Next, in our travel across this map, we encounter the autobiography disguised as a fiction, presumably to prevent libel suits; for if the disguise cannot be seen through, what is the point of it as autobiography? and if it can, what is the purpose of the disguise? Conrad Aiken, possibly for the sake of objectivity, probably to injure only those who knew the code, put
Ushant
in the third person. Whether confessed to or not, many novels are autobiographies in disguise—so it is often asserted—and the chief advantage of this strategy, apart from the fact that the novelist need only remember what springs most readily to mind and can avoid all the sufferings of scholarship, the burdens of fairness, the goal of truth, is that the narrator of a novel can whine and grumble and play the fool without automatically tarnishing his author’s own character, which would otherwise be revealed to be spiteful, small-town, banal, and cheap.
In his
Memoirs
, Juan Goytisolo occasionally shifts into the second
person, the almost accusatory “you,” in order that he may be more lyrical, more deeply involved, while at the same time escaping the cell of himself to peer into the local hells, the personal nightmares, of others. (The italics in this excerpt are Goytisolo’s.)
You can now evoke the time at the beginning of the sixties, when you interviewed for
L’Express
one of the political prisoners freed by Franco thanks to the international campaign for amnesty. Twenty and a bit years in the Burgos jail, with no horizon beyond the distant square of sky and the close, too close walls of his cell. After getting out, problems of adapting his vision to intervening spaces: dizziness, sickness, headaches behind the eyes. An even worse lack of adaptation to the new reality not assimilated in his subconscious. During the first months in prison, he had dreamt regularly of open spaces: his house, the village, people and places he knew as a free man. Then, surreptitiously, this ozone layer had rarefied until it disappeared: he stopped recalling the world outside the prison when he slept. If he dreamt about his mother, his mother was in prison. If he imagined his village, it was a village behind bars. The prison had penetrated his inner being and allowed him no escape whatsoever. The girls he had known in his youth, heroines of his nocturnal libido, always performed in a prison setting. The military tribunal’s punishment thus won after many years an absolute victory: not only a prison for the body, but likewise for mind, imagination, and fantasy
.
The destructive power of reality over his dreams still haunted him retrospectively after sixteen months of free movement. The new girlfriends he went to bed with were invariably prisoners in the murky, elusive world of his nightmares. The prisons where he had rotted—bars, walls, courtyards, warders—maintained a cruel force. A hermetic, unassailable camp with no possibility of escape, his inner world remained anchored in prison
. [
Forbidden Territory: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo, 1931–1956
, translated by Peter Bush, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989; pp. 69–70.]