Finding a Form (25 page)

Yet if my tooth aches, it is after all my ache, though you may be better informed than I of the swelling; if my heart is sore, that soreness is unique, though its heaviness does not even tremble the balance bar; if I am afraid, do not complacently say you share my fear and understand my state, for how can you know how I feel? isn’t that our unpleasant complaint? isn’t that how we reject so much sympathy—stale candy on a staler plate? since, to accomplish our death there are a thousand similar and similarly scientific ways, but inside that shutting down of the senses, there is a dread belonging to no one else even in the same sad medical shape; there is a large dread like an encountered rat, huge, as if fat as an idol, bearded like some ancient northern warrior, yet as indistinct in its corner, and as ineffectual as lint. We can’t make history out of that.

Knowing has two poles, and they are always poles apart: carnal knowing, the laying on of hands, the hanging of the fact by head or heels, the measurement of mass and motion, the calibration of brutal blows, the counting of supplies; and spiritual knowing, invisibly felt by the inside self, who is but a fought-over field of distraction, a stage where we recite the monotonous monologue that is our life, a knowing governed by internal tides, by intimations, motives, resolutions, by temptations, secrecy, shame, and pride.

Autobiography is a life writing its life. As if over? or as it proceeds? Biographies are sometimes written with the aid of the biographee,
and these few are therefore open-ended too, centrally incomplete, for death normally does the summing up, the bell tolls for the tale beneath whose telling the deceased shall be buried, with the faith that he or she shall rise again on publication day, all ancient acts only pages then, every trait an apt description, every quality of character an anecdote, the mind squeezed within a quip, and the hero’s, or heroine’s, history headed, not for heaven, but the shelf.

If we leap rapidly enough from one side of this insistence to its denial, from the belief that only I can know how I am to the view that only another can see me really, we can quickly persuade ourselves that neither self-knowledge nor any other kind is possible, and, so persuaded, sink dizzily to the floor. Of course, we might, by letting the two positions stretch out alongside each other and observing how these two kinds of information are of equal value and complementary, conclude that for a full account both the “in” and the “out” are needed. That was Spinoza’s solution. It is usually wise to do whatever Spinoza suggests.

How does autobiography begin? With memory. And the consequent division of the self into the-one-who-was and the-one-who-is. The-one-who-is has the advantage of having been the-one-who-was. Once. The-one-who-was is furthermore at the present self’s mercy, for it may not wish to remember that past, or it may wish the-one-who-was was other than the one it was, and consequently alter its description, since the-one-who-is is writing this history and has the upper hand. Every moment a bit of the self slides away toward its station in the past, where it will be remembered partially, if at all; with distortions, if at all; and then rendered even more incompletely, with graver omissions and twists to the plot by the play of the pen, so that its text will no doubt be subsequently and inaccurately read, systematically misinterpreted and put to use in yet another version, possibly by a biographer bent on revising the customary view of you, and surrounding his selected subject with himself, as Sartre surrounded Genet, as a suburb surrounds a town and slowly sucks its center out.

The autobiographer thinks he knows his subject, and doesn’t need to create a calendar of the kind the biographer feels obliged to compile, so she may boast she knows what her subject did on every day of his life beyond kindergarten and his first fistfight. He is likely to treat records with less respect than he should, and he will certainly not investigate himself as if he had committed a crime and ought to be caught and convicted; rather, he’ll be pleased he’s got his defense uttered early, because he understands that the biographer’s subjects all end in the pen. No, he will think of himself as having led a life so important it needs celebration, and as sufficiently skilled at rendering as to render it rightly. Certainly, he will not begin his task believing he has led a botched life and will now botch the botch. Unless, of course, there’s money in it, and people will pay to peer at his mistakes as they pay to enter the hermaphrodite’s tent at the fair—ladies to the left, please, then gents, thank you, there to the right, between the chaste screen of canvas. An honest autobiography is as amazing a miracle as a doubled sex, and every bit as big a freak of nature.

The autobiographer tends to do partials, to skip the dull parts and circle the pits of embarrassment. Autobiographers flush before examining their stools. Are there any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? to halo a sinner’s head? to puff an ego already inflated past safety? Who is smug enough to find amusement or an important human lesson in former follies? Or aspire to be an emblem for some benighted youngster to follow like the foolish follow the standard borne forward in a fight? To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster. Some, like Rousseau and Saint Augustine, capitalize on this fact and endeavor to hide deceit behind confession. Of course, as Freud has told us, they always confess to what their soul is convinced is the lesser crime.

How often, in one’s second childhood, does one turn back to the first. Nostalgia and grief, self-pity and old scores, then compete to set the stage and energize each scene. Why is it so exciting to say,
now that everyone knows it anyway, “I was born … I was born … I was born?” “I pooped in my pants, I was betrayed, I made straight A’s.” The chroniclers of childhood are most always desperate determinists. Here their characters were formed; because of this wound or that blow, some present weakness can be explained. And how often does that modestly self-serving volume wear its author out, or he becomes bored with his own past and forswears his later years. Sometimes, too, Fate cuts the cord, and the autobiographer dies in his bed of love, still high in the saddle of the self.

Since it is considered unwise to wait to write your life till you’re entombed and beginning to show your bones, you may choose to do it ahead of time, as Joyce Maynard did, writing her chronicle of growing up in the sixties,
Looking Back
, at age eighteen. Why not? our criminals are mostly kids; kids constitute the largest chunk of our silliest, most easily swayed customers; and much of our culture is created for, controlled, and consumed by thirteen-year-olds. Willie Morris, having reached at thirty-two what the jacket flap calls “mid-passage,” paints, in
North Toward Home
, his cannot-be-called-precocious picture of the South.

Many lives are so empty of interest that their subjects must first perform some feat like sailing alone around the world or climbing a hazardous peak in order to elevate themselves above mere existence, and then, having created a life, to write about it. As if Satan were to recall his defiance of God, his ejection from Heaven, his yearlong fall through the ether, and even his hot landing in a lake of fire for our edification. Still, he didn’t do it just to make the News. Some choose to write of themselves merely as cavers or baseball players or actors or mountaineers, or create the biography of a business. Lives of crime are plentiful, as well as those of daring-dodaddies from the Old West. Others linger, like Boswells, at the edge of events, so that later they can say: “I was there, and there I saw King Lear go mad; I can tell you of a king who cursed, who cried, who called for his fool, who sat slowly down and sadly sighed.…” Nevertheless, by accident sometimes you will find yourself in an important midst, Saigon falling around your person
like a tower of blocks, or, as fortune smiles, find that you have undertaken for the state some tasks that turned out more wellish than sickly; then an account of them, of how it felt to have grappled with Grendel, or smelled the Augean stables before Hercules swept them, or had the blood of an assassinated president sprayed over your shirt as you rode in his cavalcade; yes, then an account might be of value to future travelers who might not wish to go that way.

We have well before us the apparently noble example of Bernal Díaz, who was a foot soldier in Cortés’s army. Annoyed by the incompetence of earlier authors, who spoke the truth “neither in the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end,” he wrote his own
True History of the Conquest of New Spain
, and prefaced his honestly unpretentious work with this simple statement:

We believe him because what he writes “rings true,” but also because, like Cephalus in Plato’s
Republic
, he is now nearly free of the world and its ambitions, of the body and its desires. Almost equally wonderful is the account by Apsley Cherry-Garrard of Scott’s last Antarctic expedition in
The Worst Journey in the World
, or James Hamilton-Paterson’s luminous description of life on a deserted Philippine island,
Playing with Water
.

Nonetheless, these aren’t autobiographies yet, for they’re not full; and no one wants to wade through your parents just to get to the South Face, or read about your marriage in order to enjoy your jungle escapades; furthermore, many of these memories are so completely about a few things seen or endured or somehow accomplished that they are little different from the excited jabber of the journalist who has stumbled on a camp of murderous thugs (you’ve
seen the film) or stood in the square where the martyrs were made, and whose account consequently cannot be called by that uncle-sounding name of Auto, for where is the “I,” old “I,” sweet “I,” the “I”? Though the so-called new journalism, which Capote and Mailer practiced for a while, made even reporters into pronouns, disgracing the profession.

Of course, there are a few minds whose every move is momentous, and a few whose character is so complex, complete, and elevated, that we wish to know how? and why? and a few whose talent is so extraordinary, their sensibilities so widely and warmly and richly developed, that we think (naively, oh so naively) that they must have bounced out of bed like a tumbler, cooked morning eggs as if hatted like a chef, and leaped to their work with the grace of a dancer. We think them gods, or Wittgensteins. Just because their off-rhymes did not smell like something spoiled.

But he has a lifeful of private knowledge, our autobiographer. He knows of acts, small and large, that only he witnessed, only he remembers; she recalls a taste from an ancient swallow, or a scent that her lover loved but only she remembers, or a feeling on seeing her first egg cracked or baby beaten; yes, surely Lincoln recollects the rain on the roof when he signed the Proclamation; and don’t you remember when you were a burgeoning boy whacking off in the barn before the boredom of the sheep—how the straw stuck to your sweater, and a mysterious damp darkened the bowl of your knees? Yet of just what use are these sensations to a real biographer, whose interest is in the way you lived solely because of its possible bearing on what you did? And whose interest in what you did exists principally because of the perplexities to which it led?

Between ego and object we teeter-totter. When the autobiographer says, “I saw,” he intends the report of his perception to modify his ego, not merely occupy his eye; he is the prophet who is proud he has talked to God, not the witness who is eager to describe God’s garb and what leaves moved when the bush spoke.

But now for a little history of the corruption of a form. Once upon a time history concerned itself only with what it considered important, along with the agents of these actions, the contrivers of
significant events, and the forces that such happenings enlisted or expressed. Historians had difficulty deciding whether history was the result of the remarkable actions of remarkable men or the significant results of powerful forces, of climate, custom, and economic consequence, or of social structures, diet, geography, and the secret entelechies of Being, but whatever was the boss, the boss was big, massive, all-powerful, and hogged the center of the stage; however, as machines began to replicate objects, and little people began to multiply faster than wars or famines could reduce their numbers, and democracy arrived to flatter the multitude and tell them they ruled, and commerce flourished, sales grew, and money became the really risen god, then numbers replaced significant individuals, the trivial assumed the throne (which was a camp chair on a movie set), and history looked about for gossip, not for laws, preferring lies about secret lives to the intentions of Fate.

As these changes take place, especially in the seventeenth century, the novel arrives to amuse mainly ladies of the middle class and provide them a sense of importance: their manners, their concerns, their daily rounds, their aspirations, their dreams of romance. The novel feasted on the unimportant and mimicked reality like the cruelest clown. Moll Flanders and Clarissa Harlowe replace Medea and Antigone. Instead of actual adventures, made-up ones are fashionable; instead of perilous voyages, Crusoe carries us through his days; instead of biographies of ministers and lords, we get bundles of fake letters recounting seductions and betrayals. Welcome to the extraordinary drama of lied-about ordinary life.

Historians soon had at hand, then, all the devices of exploitation. Amusing anecdote, salacious gossip, would now fill their pages, too. History was human, personal, full of concrete detail, and had all the suspense of a magazine serial. History and fiction began their vulgar copulation, or, if you prefer, their diabolical dance. The techniques of fiction infected history; the materials of history were fed the novelist’s greed. It is now difficult, sometimes, to tell one from the other. It is now difficult to find anyone who wants to bother.