A History of English Autobiography [Hardcover ed.] 1107078415, 9781107078413

Citation preview

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

i

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A History of English Autobiography explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of English autobiography. Organised thematically, these essays survey the multilayered writings of such diverse authors as Chaucer, Bunyan, Carlyle, Newman, Wilde and Woolf. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History is the definitive single-volume collection on English autobiography and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike. adam smyth is the A. C. Bradley-J. C. Maxwell Tutorial Fellow in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford and University Lecturer in the History of the Book. He is the author of Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010) and ‘Profit and Delight’: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682, and coeditor, with Gill Partington, of Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

ii

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

iii

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY ADAM SMYTH Oxford University

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

iv

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107078413 © Adam Smyth 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data isbn 978-1-107-07841-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

v

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

Contents

List of contributors

page ix

1 Introduction: The range, limits, and potentials of the form

1

Adam Smyth

part 1 autobiography before ‘autobiography’ (ca. 1300–1700) 2 Medieval life-writing: Types, encomia, exemplars, patterns

11 13

Barry Windeatt

3 Autobiographical selves in the poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate

27

David Matthews

4 The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography

41

Molly Murray

5 Inscribing the early modern self: The materiality of autobiography 56 Kathleen Lynch

6 Re-writing revolution: Life-writing in the Civil Wars

70

Suzanne Trill

7 Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700: Balancing a life

86

Adam Smyth

part 2 religion, gender, things (ca. 1700–1800) 8 Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography from Bunyan to Cowper Tessa Whitehouse v

101 103

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

vi

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

Contents

vi

9 ‘Written by herself’: British women’s autobiography in the eighteenth century

119

Robert Folkenflik

10 The lives of things: Objects, it-narratives, and fictional autobiography, 1700–1800

133

Lynn Festa

11 Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography 148 John Richetti

part 3 the many nineteenth centuries (ca. 1800–1900) 163 12 Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century

165

David Vincent

13 Romantic life-writing

179

Duncan Wu

14 Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography: Carlyle, Newman, Mill 192 Richard Hughes Gibson and Timothy Larsen

15 Emerging selves: The autobiographical impulse in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and Annie Wood Besant

207

Carol Hanbery MacKay

16 Victorian artists’ autobiographies: Transgression, res gestae, and the collective life

221

Julie Codell

17 Victorian print culture: Periodicals and serial lives, 1830–1860

237

Stephen Colclough

part 4 relational lives and forms of remembering (ca. 1890–1930)

253

18 ‘Fusions and interrelations’: Family memoirs of Henry James, Edmund Gosse, and others

255

Max Saunders

19 Queer lives: Wilde, Sackville-West, and Woolf Georgia Johnston

269

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

vii

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

Contents 20 Anecdotal remembrance: Forms of First and Second World War life-writing

vii 284

Hope Wolf

21 Experiments in form: Modernism and autobiography in Woolf, Eliot, Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, and Richardson 298 Laura Marcus

22 Psychoanalysis and autobiography

313

Maud Ellman

part 5 kinds of community (ca. 1930–contemporary)

329

23 Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s: Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, Spender

331

Michael O’Neill

24 Documenting lives: Mass Observation, women’s diaries, and everyday modernity

345

Nick Hubble

25 Postcolonial autobiography in English: The example of Trinidad 359 Bart Moore-Gilbert

26 Around 2000: Memoir as literature

374

Joseph Brooker

27 Illness narratives

388

Neil Vickers

28 Breaking the pact: Contemporary autobiographical diversions

402

Roger Luckhurst

29 The machines that write us: Social media and the evolution of the autobiographical impulse Andreas Kitzmann

417

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

viii

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

ix

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

List of contributors

joseph brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Joyce’s Critics (2004), Flann O’Brien (2005), and Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed (2010), and has edited special issues of New Formations, Textual Practice, and Critical Quarterly. julie codell is Professor of Art History at Arizona State University and affiliate faculty in English, Women’s and Gender Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Asian Studies. She wrote The Victorian Artist (2003; rev. ed. 2012) and edited Transculturation in British Art (2012), Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (2012), The Political Economy of Art (2008), and Imperial Co-Histories (2003). She also coedited Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (2016, forthcoming), Encounters in the Victorian Press (2004), and Orientalism Transposed (1998). She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale’s British Art Center, The Getty, The Huntington, the Ransom Humanities Center, and the American Institute for Indian Studies. stephen colclough is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the School of English, Bangor University. He is the author of Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities 1695-1870 (2007) and a contributor to a number of recent collections on the history of the book, including The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume VI- 1830-1914 (Cambridge 2009), The History of Oxford University Press: Volume II- 1780-1896 (2013), and The Oxford History of the Novel in English Volume Two: English and British Fiction 1750-1820 (2015). maud ellmann is the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. She has written widely on modernism and literary theory, including ix

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

x

x

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

List of contributors psychoanalysis, feminism, and animal studies. Her most recent book is The Nets of Modernism (Cambridge 2009), a study of James, Woolf, Joyce, and Freud.

lynn festa is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (2006), and the co-editor, with Daniel Carey, of The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (2009). robert folkenflik, edward a. dickson emeritus Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, writes mainly on eighteenth-century narrative. He has published Samuel Johnson, Biographer (1978), The English Hero, 1660-1800 (1982), and The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (1993), as well as editions of Swift, Smollett, and Sterne. nick hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London and the author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life (2006; 2nd edn. 2010), as well as chapters and articles on Mass Observation. He was a co-organiser of the Mass Observation 75th Anniversary Conference in 2013. richard hughes gibson is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author of Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community (2015) as well as essays on Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, and T. S. Eliot. georgia johnston is Professor of English at Saint Louis University, where she studies the cultures and literature of the early twentieth century. She has particular interests in Modernist autobiography in terms of sexual theories of the period. Her publications include The Formation of 20th-century Lesbian Autobiography (2007). andreas kitzmann is Associate Professor of Humanities at York University, Toronto. He has written widely on the impact of communications technology on the construction and practice of identity, electronic communities, and the influence of new media on narrative conventions. His publications include Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (2011) and Saved From Oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams (2004). timothy larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

xi

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

List of contributors

xi

has been a Visiting Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge, and All Souls College, Oxford. His monographs include Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2006) and A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2011). roger luckhurst is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including, most recently, The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy (2012), and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015). kathleen lynch is Executive Director of the Folger Institute. She researches the material culture of early modern English literature. Her book, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (2012), directs critical attention to the collaborative processes by which truthful texts of spiritual experience were constructed and endorsed. carol hanbery mackay is the J. R. Milliken Centennial Professor of English literature and Affiliate of Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas in Austin. Her most recent relevant publications include Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest (2001) and a critical edition of Annie Besant’s Autobiographical Sketches (2009). laura marcus is Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College, Oxford University. Her research and teaching interests are predominantly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, including life-writing, modernism, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury culture, contemporary fiction, and literature and film. Her book publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007; awarded the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association), and, as co-editor, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge 2004). david matthews is Senior lecturer in Middle English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship, and Literature in England (Cambridge 2010) and Medievalism: A Critical History (2015), and recently completed a sixyear stint as editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

xii

xii

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

List of contributors

bart moore-gilbert is Professor of Postcolonial Studies and English at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he works on colonial and postcolonial literatures, postcolonial theory, and autobiographical writing. He is the author of many books and articles including Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation (2009) and The Setting Sun: a Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets (2014). He is currently working on a monograph about Palestine and postcolonialism. molly murray is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. She is the author of The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge 2009), as well as numerous articles and essays on the literature and culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. She is currently at work on a book-length study of literary communities in the early modern English prison. michael o’neill is Professor of English at Durham University. His books include Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (1992; with Gareth Reeves) and The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (2007), as editor, The Cambridge History of English Poetry (Cambridge 2010), and, as a poet, The Stripped Bed (1990), Wheel (2008), and Gangs of Shadow (2014). john richetti is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. His interest in the three British philosophers he writes about in this volume dates from his book Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (1983). He has published a number of books on the English novel and in particular on Daniel Defoe, including his The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (2005), and he has edited The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660-1780 (Cambridge 2005). max saunders is Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for LifeWriting Research at King’s College London. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (1996) and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (2010). adam smyth is the A. C. Bradley-J.C. Maxwell Tutorial Fellow in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in the History of the Book. His most recent books are Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge 2010) and, co-edited with Gill Partington, Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

xiii

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

List of contributors

xiii

(2014). He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. suzanne trill is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on women’s writing in England and Scotland (c. 1550–1700), especially devotional literature. Her publications include Lady Anne Halkett; Selected Self-Writings (2008). She is currently working on a modernised edition of Halkett’s True Account of My Life for ‘The Other Voice’ series. neil vickers is Reader in English Literature and the Medical Humanities at King’s College London. He led the project on illness narrative and subjective experience at the Centre for Humanities and Health. He is the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (2004), and of several articles on the literature and medicine. david vincent is Emeritus Professor of Social History at the Open University and Visiting Professor at Keele University. His publications include Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1979, 1982); with John Burnett and David Mayall, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, 3 vols (1983, 1987,1988), and studies of the history of literacy and secrecy in Britain and Europe. His most recent book is I Hope I Don’t Intrude. Privacy and its Dilemmas in NineteenthCentury Britain (2015). tessa whitehouse is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720–1800 (2015) as well as chapters and articles on dissenting education, manuscript circulation, and epistolary culture. She currently researches friendship, memorial practices, and nonconformist women’s writing. barry windeatt is Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Keeper of Rare Books at Emmanuel College. Among many other publications, he has edited The Book of Margery Kempe (2000). hope wolf is a Lecturer in British Modernist Literature at the University of Sussex. Previously, she held a Research Fellowship in English at Girton College, University of Cambridge. An AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award between the Imperial War Museum and King’s College London supported her PhD research. Her most recent publication is an anthology, A Broken World: Letters, Diaries

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6839550/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413PRE.3D

xiv

xiv

[1–14] 21.10.2015 6:00PM

List of contributors

and Memories of the Great War (2014), which she co-edited with Sebastian Faulks. duncan wu is Professor of English at Georgetown University; a former Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford; formerly Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford; and former Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Among his many books are William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (2008), New Writings of William Hazlitt (2007), and, with Tom Paulin, Metaphysical Hazlitt (2005).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

1

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

chapter 1

Introduction The range, limits, and potentials of the form Adam Smyth

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.1 Christopher Isherwood

[T]he whole matter is reduced to the papers.2 Algernon Sidney

The twenty-nine chapters and 170,000 words that comprise A History of English Autobiography take as their subject autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital contemporary. The chapters represent the critical state of play in the field, and intervene in urgent ways with current thinking, often through the deployment of new research. Thus, running through several chapters is an engagement with the latest scholarly issues of debate, including, for example, the medical humanities; the materiality of texts; the history of reading; and objects and thing theory. The narrative is an English one, but it frequently engages with non-English authors (including Augustine, Rousseau, and Freud) who were important for the development of English autobiographical writing. The book is structured chronologically, and has a spine of canonical texts: in this sense, English Autobiography will serve as the ideal source for a reader coming to the topic for the first time, or seeking to set their periodspecific knowledge in a broader context. But alongside this robust coverage, the collection also treats ‘autobiography’ in ways that are expansive, imaginative, and suggestive. The collection does this in part by greatly expanding the chronological range normally given over to histories of autobiography: backwards, into the medieval and early modern, and forwards, into the contemporary world of social media, smartphones, and omnipresent digital cameras. 1

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

2

2

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

adam smyth

One of English Autobiography’s central contentions is that autobiography, in its widest sense, is not an exclusively modern, post-Romantic phenomenon, but a way of writing and reading that has a much richer, longer history. Standard histories of the form often discuss Augustine’s Confessions and perhaps one early modern writer (usually either Montaigne or Bunyan), before finding a real beginning with Rousseau’s Confessions (1782). The pre-1750 serves as a space for throat-clearing or limbering up – but this is to miss a wealth of significant texts, authors, and lives. In Part 1, ‘Autobiography before “autobiography” (ca. 1300–1700)’, coverage of medieval and early modern forms of autobiographical writing provides a crucial pre- or counter-history to the better-known story of autobiography’s nineteenth-century origins. Early chapters demonstrate how writers in England between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries made vibrant records of their lives, in letters and visions like Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, or, spectacularly, in the Book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1373– ca. 1440): an ‘uneasy hybrid of an autobiographical saint’s life or autohagiography’, Barry Windeatt suggests in Chapter 2 (p. XX), possessed of both a mould-breaking originality and an acute awareness of tradition. These texts, and the early modern life-writings that followed them – diaries, spiritual testimonies, financial accounts – challenge us to rethink our idea of autobiography in a period of English literary history in which the modern notion of a written life as (according to one definition) ‘a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’ (Lejeune 1989, 4) was not yet fully recognisable. The chapters do this in part by challenging the link between self-writing and inwardness. Autobiography is so powerfully yoked in modern formulations to notions of interiority and depth that the concept of a written self, assembled through surfaces and things, seems counter-intuitive or lacking. But such a life is possible, as suggested here in discussions of seventeenthcentury financial accounting, where the death of a wife might be narrated through the columns of funeral expenses in an account book, and in a chapter on eighteenth-century ‘it-narratives’ – that is, fictional autobiographies narrated, as Lynn Festa describes in Chapter 10, by inanimate objects (coins, canes, and clothing) and animals (birds, fleas, dogs). Autobiography may be ‘the literature of subjectivity’ (Marcus 1994, 231), but subjectivity has a history and can mean different things at different times. Early autobiographies rely, too, perhaps counter-intuitively, on the overt redeployment of existing scripts: they produce a sense of self not through a process of detachment or alienation from other life-stories, but

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

3

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

Introduction

3

rather through a series of alignments and overlappings. Augustine’s Confessions provides one crucial paradigm across the full chronological range of this collection, with its emphasis on a pre-conversion spiritual wandering, a child’s voice heard in a garden (‘tolle, lege; tolle, lege’: ‘pick up and read; pick up and read’), and the sudden conversion on reading part of Paul’s letter to the Romans (Augustine 1992, 152–3). The spiritual autobiography that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries worked in part by redeploying already-known Biblical narratives to order and make sense of a life: thus in The Vocacyon of Johan Bale (1553), Bale describes a year’s hardships endured by a Protestant reformer under Queen Mary I by using St Paul as a template, stretching the story of his own trials in Ireland over St Paul’s last journey to Jerusalem: ‘Sanct Paule also rejoyced’, Bale writes; ‘Whie shulde I than shrinke or be ashamed to do the lyke?’ (Bale 1553, f. 5). Far from erasing Bale’s story, his life is conveyed through a reworked retelling of a narrative of virtue under fire – a process that invokes the dual meaning of ‘identity’ as both sameness (he is St Paul) and uniqueness (he is not St Paul, he is himself). Past written lives, in Bale’s conception, are ‘left to us for example that we shulde do the lyke whan we fele the lyke’ (Bale 1553, f. 5). Donald Stauffer calls Bale’s text the first separately printed English prose autobiography, and it may well be this (Stauffer 1964, 178, noted in Skura 2008, 49). But a language of firsts and origin points is not always the best way to talk about autobiography, not only because it can result in an arid kind of literary history concerned with the trumping of one origin point for another (d’Israeli in 1809?; Rousseau in 1782?; Augustine in 397?; the earlier stories of other Christian converts on which Augustine drew?), but also because a sense of the seminal usually works to exclude texts that fall outside of that particular and often very male genealogical line of descent, ‘returning the critics to the same set of texts with the same set of demands’ (Marcus 1994, 2). Moreover, the uses of convention that we see in Bale and spiritual life-writing more generally reveal a tension that is always at the heart of autobiography, across all periods: on the one hand, the writing of a life through an inherited pattern, a formal, generic, or moral duty to conform to a legible template, to produce a life that is comprehensible as a life; on the other, the writing of a life as a departure from those existing patterns, a breaking away, a sense of the inadequacy of what has been said before. It is tempting to figure this tension in terms of an opposition between constraint and liberation, and to settle on a notion of authentic self-writing as a writing away from past forms. But the earliest life-writing was always a restless tussle with the available (that is, inherited) literary

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

4

4

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

adam smyth

traditions, just as the newness of contemporary forms of self-accounting is often indebted to older traditions, even if an excited rhetoric of digital newness often conceals those continuities. Moreover, that separation of life as experience, and autobiography as written representation of experience – of life as the thing lived, and the written account as subsequent – can become blurred, too: an awareness of the conventions of autobiographical forms might feed back into the lived life, as Nick Hubble describes in his account of Mass Observation and its prescribed forms of self-accounting. To live knowing one will soon write about living means the present-tense life will be shaped by genres: conventions of representation (like, for example, a modernist self-reflexivity) tumble out of the text and into the world. This pressure or feedback is certainly evident in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when a sea of smartphones and tablets rise up at a pop concert or a school play. Early forms of autobiography highlight two particular pressures that weigh heavily on much autobiographical writing across the whole of this collection. First, the relationship between the writing self and the written self is a relationship both of identity and difference: the autobiographical contract (Lejeune 1989, 4, 17) demands that these two figures are one, but the form’s investment in a narrative of development or at least change requires differentiation. And second, within the autobiographical text there is a toggling between the particular and the exemplary: the detail of one day (a view from a bridge in the early morning) is amplified, by virtue of its inclusion, to suggest an aesthetic or moral pattern, but at the same time the text recoils from that condition of exemplarity by stressing its stubborn singleness. Different autobiographical texts, at different times, have different ways of negotiating these tensions, but they remain refrains across the centuries covered by this collection. Literary histories often fall into a narcissistic pattern: an older period of foundation-laying leads to the modern complexity or radicalism that we frequently identify with our own historical period; homogeneity breaks into a diversity that we claim as our own. English Autobiography attempts to avoid this predictable and excluding arc of progress or sophistication. As Molly Murray notes, the word ‘radical’ comes from the Latin radix, or root: it suggests a concern with sources, as much as a growing away from them. Life-writing from all periods is frequently radical in this double sense: forward-looking, in the production of new kinds of text, and backward-looking, in the sense of being self-consciously indebted to earlier textual roots. To write a life – and indeed to write in general – means necessarily to engage with patterns, types, and conventions and, through

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

5

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

Introduction

5

those engagements (and engagements can describe a range of responses, from recycling to agonistic struggle to rejection), to be aware of the overlaps and the gaps between pattern and life and to feel the twin pull of the documentary and the parable. In the words of Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘[t]he crucial literary problem of autobiography is to articulate a significant form for the relative incoherence of human experience’ (Spacks 1976, 434). The always-changing nature of those engagements is the subject of this volume, rather than a story of the gradual shedding of skins of convention. These engagements between autobiographical convention and text take many forms, but running throughout the chapters in the collection are three recurring modes: negotiation (adjusting conventions to meet new forms of experience and circumstance); improvisation (taking conventions sharply in surprising, unforeseen directions); and patchwork (gathering parts of distinct texts or conventions to produce new hybrids). Each form of engagement produces new texts which in turn become available precedents or, if repeated sufficiently, conventions for future writers. This sense of autobiographical writing in a state of development or, more neutrally, flux, is reflected in the terminology deployed throughout this volume. Autobiography was, from its first coinage, a difficult term, a word that could more easily be pushed away than embraced. The earliest recorded use, in 1797, was a call for its rejection: The next dissertation concerns Diaries, and Self-biography. We are doubtful whether the latter word be legitimate: it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have seemed pedantic. (‘autobiography’, Oxford English Dictionary)

The term blossoms in the nineteenth century, although the alignment between word and concept is never entirely tidy: if a term comes into being to describe a practice that is already legible, then it must lag behind that practice, rather as writing can never quite keep up with experience. Nonetheless, the historical contingency of the term raises immediate questions about the applicability of the word to periods before and after its moment of coining (Davis 2006, 19–34). Contributors to this volume deploy a multiplicity of terms to describe their texts: alongside autobiography jostle (among many other descriptors) life-writing, self-accounting, self-writing, reflected autobiography, memoir, family or relational memoir, anecdote, automated biography (life narratives produced on social media often featuring branding and implied corporate loyalties), autobiografiction (Max Saunder’s revival of an early-twentieth-century term to describe a relation ‘between fiction and a self’s autobiography’ (Saunders

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

6

6

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

adam smyth

2010, 7–8)), autography (first-person writing which offers no ‘claim to any systematic relation to documentable truth’ (Spearing 2011, 7)), and even, in Joseph Brooker’s discussion of Alasdair Gray’s A Life in Pictures (2010), ‘autopictography’. Moreover, as the chapters in this collection describe, autobiography might be understood not as a genre in itself but an impulse or, as Barry Windeatt puts it in Chapter 2, ‘an act of self-assertion’ (p. XX) that finds expression within literary genres as diverse as Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess (ca. 1368) and Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s novel The Story of Elizabeth (1863). Autobiography can be a form of writing, or it can be a presence within a form of writing (thus an ‘autobiographical novel’), or it can be, as Paul de Man argues, a way of reading (de Man, 1984). Autobiography might be the unforeseen, or secondary consequence of a literary project: not the primary intention of the author but a way of understanding his or her text nonetheless. These terms overlap but are not quite synonymous. What does this chatter of related but different terms suggest? For past critics it might be a cause of anxiety: how can we write about a kind of writing if it evades categorisation, or, to be more exact, doesn’t quite conform to categorisation? But alongside an expansion of chronological range, English Autobiography is committed precisely to this widening of the kinds of texts that fall under the category of ‘autobiography’. An instability, or variability, of forms of lifewriting3 has traditionally been seen as a problem for criticism: one account of British autobiography opens with a wish to ‘frame a definition which excludes the bulk of random or incidental self-revelation scattered through seventeenth-century literature’ (Delaney 1969, 1); another focuses on narrative autobiography, precisely defined, ‘to clear the air by imposing limits on autobiographical emissions’ (Mascuch 1997, 7). Mascuch’s use of ‘emissions’ is a deliberately provocative word in a book published the year of the Kyoto Protocol, but a sense of generic unfixity and experimentation has always been, and continues to be, a central trait of autobiography. Questions about autobiography as a genre lead quickly and inexorably to questions about the referential stability of the text, the relationship between truth and fiction, and authorial intention – that is, they lead away from the formal properties of the text on which definitions of genre usually depend. In this sense, while Derrida is right to note that all texts have a tentative relationship to genre(s) – ‘[e]very text participates in one or several genres . . . yet such participation never amounts to belonging’ (Derrida 1980, 65) – autobiography presents particular challenges. Lejeune’s influential definition identifies formal properties even if it is possible to problematise those terms (how retrospective does a retrospective prose narrative have to be; and how

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

7

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

Introduction

7

can writing about an event be anything other than retrospective, occurring as it must do after experience?), but he also needs to invoke traits that reside outside the text, or that straddle both outside and inside, pointing to what he calls an autobiographical pact or contract affirming the identify between the names of author, narrator, and protagonist (Lejeune 1989, 4, 17). But if autobiographical writing qua genre ‘has proved very difficult to define and regulate’ (Marcus 1994, 229, 1), that trickiness is not a problem that needs cordoning off, or a pollution clouding the skies: it is a condition of autobiographical writing. Max Saunders’s important recent book, Self Impression (2010), is concerned precisely with the productive overlaps between auto/biography (that is, autobiography and/or biography) and literary modernism: indeed, and even more expansively, Saunders suggests ‘one story of the novel in English is of a troubled relation between fiction and autobiography, from fictive autobiographies by Robinson Crusoe . . . to autobiographical novels like Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage or D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers’ (Saunders 2010, 8). English Autobiography acknowledges, and tackles, this sense of shifting, evolving, various forms – taking forms, again, to mean both formal or literary properties, and the material instantiations these texts might assume. Thus in Part 2, ‘Religion, gender, things (ca. 1700–1800)’, chapters covering eighteenthcentury materials consider spiritual autobiographies such as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding; John Wesley’s printed journals; letters; philosophical works by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume; and – in response to recent compelling theoretical work on the social lives of objects – so-called ‘it-narratives’. What happens to our sense of autobiography when it is organised around an object, not a person? English Autobiography’s widening of chronology and of written forms is accompanied by an attempt to place established or dominant narratives about the history of autobiography alongside newer, revisionist conceptions of the written life. We see this clearly in Part 3, ‘The many nineteenth centuries (ca. 1800–1900)’. The nineteenth century is traditionally, and to some degree rightly, regarded as the period in which a recognisably modern sense of autobiography came into being: when writers began to produce retrospective, chronological, richly interior life narratives. English Autobiography recognises and describes this important paradigm, and attends to vital nineteenth-century figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill. But the collection also supplements and complicates this story by offering a series of alternative conceptions of autobiography in the period. Thus, sustained attention is given to the great burgeoning of working-class autobiography (described in Chapter 12

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

8

8

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

adam smyth

by the pioneer in the field, David Vincent); to the variety of forms of women’s life writing, including the rich overlaps between novel and autobiography, and the generically dizzying hybrids such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s autobiography-poetry-novel-epic Aurora Leigh (1856); to Victorian artists’ autobiographies; and to the interface between cheap print culture and written lives in penny journals like the London Journal: journals which achieved remarkable circulation figures, and which offered extracts from existing autobiographies for an often working-class readership. Part 4, ‘Relational lives and forms of remembering (ca. 1890–1930)’, sustains this interest in the new forms autobiographical writing might assume by considering the first third of the twentieth century, and the radical (once more: both backward- and forward-looking) developments of English literary modernism. Queer lives, such as those by Wilde, SackvilleWest, and Woolf, challenge an often naturalised heterosexual script that continues to shape modern expectations of autobiography; while experiments in the forms of fiction produced new possibilities for generic overlaps between the novel, letter, diary, and autobiography, as seen in the writings of Woolf, Eliot, Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, and Dorothy Richardson. The twin emphasis on the urgency, and difficulty, of remembering one’s life is a strain running throughout this volume. The autobiography is a combination of a drive towards the all-seeing, ‘the evocation of a life as a totality’ (Marcus 1994, 3), and a recognition of the impossibility of that task: the baffling challenge to fully represent the life from within the life, ‘the conceptual problem of how a mind can simultaneously observe and be observed’ (Marcus 1994, 5). This is, in Kathleen Lynch’s words, one of the conditions of autobiography: ‘a simulacrum of completion against the impossibility of the task’ (Chapter 5, p. XX). This sense of struggle and adversity was amplified by the trauma of two world wars and the enormous influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, the latter leading to a new emphasis on the adventitious and the unintentional, rather than the rational and deliberate; and on the need, as Maud Ellman explores in the present volume, to find literary forms ‘responsive to the dynamics of regression, deferred action, compulsive repetition, and other temporal upheavals characteristic of the primary process of the unconscious’ (Chapter 22, p. XX). Life narratives determined by trauma might be narratives in which crucial shaping experiences left, as Roger Luckhurst suggests, no trace in conscious memory. Such a conception of a written life puts tremendous pressure on ideas of truthfulness and the autobiographical pact. Part 5, ‘Kinds of community (ca. 1930–contemporary)’, tracks across various social groups: literary, political, and digital. Running through these

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

9

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

Introduction

9

culminating chapters is an exploration of the interplay between affinity and difference that is crucial for the creation of a written self. We see this in chapters on literary writing and its relation to a life. In the poetry of the 1930s, for instance, Auden uses an ‘I’ to illuminate a broader social condition, while Spender’s verse represents a contrasting, and uniquely constructed, self (‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’), often as a means to suggest, as Michael O’Neill notes, that ‘what we share is difference, obstinate singleness’ (Chapter 23, p. XX). The literary memoir (including books by Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Hilary Mantel, and Alasdair Gray) often rests on a dynamic of aligning with, and withdrawing from, a sense of literary tradition. Political community is explored in Chapter 24, which focusses on Mass Observation (MO), founded in 1937 as a scientific study of human social behaviour in Britain, which established a focus on everyday life. By asking participants to keep diaries to be read by others, MO encouraged an ‘intersubjective autobiography’ built around both an individual and collective sense of self. Postcolonial life-writing further complicates a sense of the autobiographer’s relationship to convention and tradition, and challenges models of unified, or ‘sovereign’ autobiographical subjectivity which have often been prized in Western autobiographical studies. The degree to which an existing autobiographical discourse can, or cannot, provide a script for a written life is also considered in Chapter 27, which discusses illness narratives (an important, emerging area of scholarship): is it still true that, as Virginia Woolf noted, for pain ‘language runs dry’? Part 5 concludes by asking whether the collective mediations of digital technology represent a fundamental paradigm shift in terms of autobiographical practices and possibilities, or a continuity with existing modes. What links might we posit between the dissemination of life data via images, video, timelines, charts, real time video/audio feeds and tweets, and centuries of shifting autobiographical writing? If the forms of life generated by social media break, as Andreas Kitzmann puts it, ‘the link between humanism, life narrative, and the impulse towards “mastery”’ (Chapter 29, p. XX), is this a bold new chapter, or the latest iteration of centuries of exploration of the paradoxes of autobiographical writing?

Notes 1. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939. St Albans: Triad/Panther, 1977), p. 11.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C01.3D

10

10

[1–10] 20.10.2015 9:50AM

adam smyth

2. Algernon Sidney, Colonel Sidney’s speech delivered to the sheriff on the scaffold December 7th 1683 (1683), p. 3. 3. By form I mean both genre and materiality: unlike many accounts of autobiography, organised around the individual author as source, the present collection is interested in the production and circulation of texts.

Bibliography Augustine. 1992. Confessions. Edited and translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bale, John. 1553. The vocacyon of Iohan Bale to the bishiprick of Ossorie. Davis, Lloyd. 2006. ‘Critical Debates and Early Modern Autobiography’. In Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, 19–34. Edited by Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Delaney, Paul. 1969. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. De Man, Paul. 1984. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” In The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 67–81. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. ‘The Law of Genre’. In Critical Inquiry, 7.1: 55–81. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. ‘The Autobiographical Pact’. In On Autobiography, 3–30. Edited by Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marcus, Laura. 1994. Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mascuch, Michael. 1997. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England, 1591–1791. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Autobiography’. Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com (accessed 9 September 2015). Saunders, Max. 2010. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skura, Meredith Anne. 2008. Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spacks, Patricia. 1978. Imagining a Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spearing, A. C. 2012. Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Stauffer, Donald A. 1964. English Biography before 1700. New York: Russell and Russell.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

11

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

part 1

Autobiography before ‘autobiography’ (ca. 1300–1700)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

12

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

13

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

chapter 2

Medieval life-writing Types, encomia, exemplars, patterns Barry Windeatt

And in case things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing so many evils, and the whole world placed, as it were, within the grasp of the evil one – and being myself as if among the dead, waiting for death to visit me – have put into writing truthfully all the things that I have heard. And – lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail with the labourer – I leave parchment to continue this work, if perchance any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun. (Butler 1849, 37)

So writes John Clyn, a friar of Kilkenny, after the plague has left him all alone, the sole survivor of his brethren, and soon to succumb himself. This longing to leave behind at least some testimony that we ever existed may be universal, but it is a powerful part of the various forms of selfcommemoration and self-fictionalisation through which an autobiographical impetus manifests itself across medieval English textual culture. It is high time to challenge the orthodoxy that the Middle Ages are irrelevant to understanding the evolution of those more recent autobiographical forms which so satisfyingly mirror back to us the complexity and subtlety of our modern selves. When the craft of life-writing was pursued so frequently and so perceptively as it was in the Middle Ages, it would seem intrinsically unlikely that – as is so often repeated – medieval authors regarded writing about the self as a profitless vanity and rarely did so. Auto(bio)graphy in medieval English texts is more an action than a form, an act of selfassertion, only exceptionally expressed through any extended narrative, which itself may appear discontinuous and bitty.1 But modes of auto(bio) graphical activity can be identified as subsumed and implicit, bubbling up across very different medieval genres, which poses the question whether medieval representations of selves in more fragmented forms – interstitial, 13

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

14

14

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

barry windeatt

implicit, in unnerving fusions of fact and self-fictionalisation – may not offer their own compellingly unillusioned readings of how far the self may be represented. Constructing commemorations of the self might take many forms in medieval culture. When John Hoo (d. 1492) paid for an inscription on the exterior of the church at Hessett in Suffolk – Prey for the sowles of John Hoo and Katrynne his wyf the qweche hath mad y chapel aewery deyl, heyteynd y westry and batylmentyd y hele [who hath made the chapel every bit, heightened the vestry and battlemented the aisle]. (Munro Cautley 1982, 295) –

he left an account of his life and charity as many other medieval benefactors did. At an altogether grander level is the proud inscription in Latin hexameters on Richard II’s tomb in Westminster Abbey: Prudent and elegant, Richard the second by right, conquered by fate, lies here depicted under this marble. He was truthful in discourse and full of reason. Tall in body, he was prudent in mind as Homer. He favoured the Church, he overthrew the proud and threw down whoever violated the royal prerogative. He crushed heretics and laid low their friends. O merciful Christ, to whom he was devoted, O Baptist, whom he venerated, may you by your prayers save him. (Lindley 1997, 72)

This – ‘which we may presume Richard himself commissioned’ (Barron 1993, 19) – is a notable instance of an autobiographical self-inscription, in which the qualities and achievements highlighted provide a revealing insight into how this most self-absorbed king regarded himself. To put together a book can hardly not be a revealing form of selfinscription, as is witnessed by both the humblest and most accomplished medieval English examples. It is possible to delineate a character at work behind the selection of contents in some surviving medieval English commonplace books, just as the sermon-diary of a busy prelate, with its notes in the first person, was planned as a record of his diocesan activity, showing him at work over twelve years (Gwynn 1937). The commonplace book of John Colyn, a London mercer (in British Library MS Harley 2252), witnesses to his concern with economic politics and commercial rights, while the contents of the commonplace book of Robert Reynes, of Acle in Norfolk, reveal its compiler to be a man of the rural middle class: essentially conservative, especially in matters of faith; apolitical but with a strong sense of community; mentally curious but uninterested in intellectual speculation and above all, practical (Louis 1980). As such, it offers a snapshot of the mindset of a fifteenth-century Englishman, his personality and way of life.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

15

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

Medieval life-writing

15

The mindset of an altogether more accomplished fifteenth-century figure, a doctor of theology and chancellor of Oxford University, is revealed in the massive Liber Veritatum of Thomas Gascoigne, a hybrid of theological dictionary with waspish biographical sketches of contemporary and past English notables, often accompanied by autobiographical commentary. So Gascoigne’s nostalgic admiration for Bishop Robert Grosseteste prompts reflections into which Gascoigne insinuates a self-endorsement: Things now are not as they were then. When Henry VI spoke to me at his castle at Windsor and asked me ‘Dr Gascoigne, why aren’t you a bishop?’, I replied to him, ‘My Lord, I’m telling you, the state of things in England these days is such that if I wanted to make a pot of money, I’d rather be a good shoemaker than the most learned academic in England’ – for I’d rather that many good preachers of God’s word multiplied amongst the English people than possess all the material goods of the richest man in England. (Rogers 1881, 176–7)

This gossipy report is characteristic of how Gascoigne writes himself into his historical analysis, as when his notes about seeing a manuscript of Grosseteste at Oxford lead on within Gascoigne’s notebook to careful provision for how this version of himself created for posterity will be completed within his manuscript after his death: And I saw this in the year 1445 AD and then wrote this. And in the year of Jesus Christ one thousand four hundred and [space left for the date of Gascoigne’s death] died Thomas Gascoigne, called to be a priest and doctor of theology, born in the county of York in 1402, son and heir of Richard Gascoigne, sometime lord of the manor of Hunslet in that same county. (Bodleian Library, MS Lat. theol.e.33, ff. 40–1)

In writing other lives the bookish Gascoigne’s autobiographical impetus is to commemorate himself, whereas in his Philobiblion (1344) Richard of Bury writes with such captivating enthusiasm about his life-long mania for book collecting that his account of this consuming passion of his life becomes a version of that life (Thomas 1960, ch. viii). His prominent career is mentioned only because of the opportunities it affords for book collecting: people realise that the more customary bribes of gifts and gems should be replaced in his case by ‘soiled tracts and battered codices, gladsome alike to our eyes and heart’, and to please him monasteries throw open their libraries, normally (he drily observes) the preserve of mice and moths. Embassies abroad on the king’s business enable more book collecting, and Richard writes a lover’s paean to Paris and its opportunities for book lovers. In divulging how he chose his company

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

16

16

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

barry windeatt

and colleagues to ensure he was always surrounded by fellow book lovers – while maintaining ‘in our different manors no small multitude of copyists, binders, correctors, illuminators’ – Richard reveals something of the tone and quality of his life and career. Yet the hunt for books also leads him into exchanges with humble schoolmasters, in a confraternity of book lovers which links him to his society at its broadest: ‘All of both sexes, and of every rank and position, who had any kind of association with books, could most easily open by their knocking the door of our heart’, and when he declares with disarming fervor, ‘In books I find the dead as if they were alive’, he might be describing how his own personality springs to life again for each reader of his book. Chaucer’s literary personality, his self-fictionalisations within his poems as a somewhat anxious and deferential authorial persona, had a significant posterity in licensing his successors to intrude themselves into their works, as in the self-image as author projected by the fifteenth-century Augustinian friar Osborn Bokenham. One version of his lives of female saints is interspersed with chatty and gossipy passages which set his compositional activity in the context of requests for his writing received alike from dear friends and grand patronesses. Bokenham appears comically over- conscious about being middle aged, worried about how his works will be received, and anxious to authorise his life of St Margaret through his own experience of her shrine in Italy and her effective miracles (Serjeantson 1938, lines 1407–16, 5040, 41–2, 100–58). The recent discovery of another manuscript without such personal interjections suggests the production of different copies for known and unknown readerships, where some texts are still couched as if communications from a writer personally familiar to his readers. Bokenham’s is a self-characterisation as a writerly persona, endearingly fussy, with mention of real places and some historical persons of his acquaintance, but he is communicating more a stylisation of a manner of life than a sustained and continuous autobiography. Autobiographical self-expression in medieval texts may be disguised from later readers by the genre ostensibly adopted by the text or given it by later editors. It would seem likely that the remarkable ‘Life’ of the recluse Christina of Markyate – describing so intimately such a hidden and secret existence – was written with input from its redoutable subject (Talbot 1959). What is usually termed Jocelyn of Brakelond’s ‘chronicle’ of Bury St Edmund’s Abbey reads more like a biography of one masterful abbot, but it also reads as a personal diary-cum-history of its author’s fluctuating and ambivalent feelings about Abbot Samson, and as such a history of its writer’s own disappointments (Greenway and Sayers 1989). In

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

17

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

Medieval life-writing

17

his prison dialogue modelled on Boethius, Chaucer’s associate Thomas Usk constructs a self by inscribing allusions to his own circumstances, hence importing an implicitly autobiographical dimension (Shawver 2002). Implicit autobiography also characterises the untitled corpus of English poems which Charles d’Orléans created as an independent version of his collected poems in French. These English poems are designedly a sequence, differing from the French series precisely because Charles strives to thread a significantly more continuous dramatic unity through his English poems, which cumulatively build an identity as a fictionalised autobiography of a very courtly lover’s intently personal and inward feelings (Arn 1994). The ‘I’ of the poems is identified proudly within the text as Charles, Duke of Orleans, but the ladies for whom he longs so passionately or grieves so intensely remain unidentified, so that although few other authors writing in medieval English show more insight than Charles into the human heart, or encode feeling more exquisitely, the outcome remains more implicitly than directly autobiographical, a kind of sublimated autobiography. One of the key differences which makes Charles’s English poems into a more sustained personal narrative is his introduction of the dream which marks a turning point for the ‘I’ of the poems, and it is texts reporting dreams and visions that present some of the most challenging mixtures of literary convention with autobiographical composition. At a modest level of writing, there survive such accounts as the vision of the other world in 1465 reported by Edmund Leversedge, of Frome in Somerset (Nijenhuis 1990), or the widower’s vision of his dead wife and children in 1492, which is included in a Cheshire commonplace book (Youngs 1998). In such reports the machinery and landscape of the vision tend to be of a piece with other purgatorial visions, whereas the individualising details of identity – Edmund’s obsessions as a fashion victim and his fondness for kissing, or the unfaithful widower’s remorse at seeing his wife dressed in her wedding-day outfit – bring conventionality and autobiographical reference into the kind of encounters that are exploited by those such as Langland or King James I of Scotland. In Piers Plowman the person who narrates his dream is named Will, an appropriate allegorical name for the dreamer but also the real name of the poet, William Langland, who includes within his dream poem various allusions to his actual circumstances, his wife and daughter, and – in an especially autobiographical passage (C.5.1–104) – how his father and family friends paid for his education until they died, leaving him, half-trained for a clerical vocation, to shift for a living (Pearsall 2008). This coexistence of a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

18

18

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

barry windeatt

version of personal experience with a dream poem provides an enigmatic interface between a particular identity and its imaginative exploration through the surreal developments of the dream. Much of the dreamer’s life, as he belatedly realises, has flashed by in the course of the poem, which thus makes a fictionalised autobiography of a questing spirit part of its restless continuum, although the degree of fictionality remains tantalisingly indeterminate, as in some poems in the Chaucerian tradition. In the dream poem The Kingis Quair, attributed to James I of Scotland, the dreamer’s encounters with such goddesses as Venus, Minerva, and Fortune are part of what appears a coded representation of the historical James’s love match with Joan Beaufort, a relative of Henry IV, and his gaining of freedom and resumption of kingship after long political imprisonment in England – rather poignantly, with the hindsight that James I would soon be brutally assassinated back in his homeland (Norton-Smith 1971). A stylised account of courtship, written as if by a close reader of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, is part of the same poem that also includes a salt-sprayed recollection of how the young heir to the Scottish throne had been kidnapped on the high seas by the English foe, while fleeing from enemies at home to exile in France. The dream poem’s first-person narrative allows a stylish and allusive celebration of a destiny realised, where autobiography and convention comment upon each other and a degree of fictionalisation implicitly has its place in telling the self. Telling about himself and his failings was something that one of the most celebrated Englishmen of the later Middle Ages seems to have been unable to resist in his prolific writings. Richard Rolle’s autobiographical reflections, bubbling up as confessional asides in his spiritual treatises and even in his biblical commentaries, recur to the theme of his attraction to women, as in his Melos Amoris (Arnold 1957, 63–4). In his commentary on the first verses of the Canticles he digresses to give an account, later circulated separately in the Nominis Iesu Encomium, of how he was tempted one night by an apparition of a beautiful young woman, whom he already knew and knew loved him: Scho laid hire beside me, and when that I felyd hir thare I dred that scho sulde drawe me to ivell, and said that I would ryse and bless us in the name of the Haly Trynytee, and sche strenyde me so stallworthely that I had no mouthe to speke, ne no hande to styrre: and whene I sawe that, I perceyvede well thare was na womane bot the devell in schappe of a womane. (Perry 1866, 5)

Our hero has a humblingly narrow escape, from both himself and his own weakness, just as in Incendium Amoris, his great treatise on spiritual longing

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

19

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

Medieval life-writing

19

and transcendence, he pauses to tell, against himself, the story of his humbling rebuffs by four women: There was a time when I was rebuked quite properly by three different women. One rebuked me because in my eagerness to restrain the feminine craze for dressy and suggestive clothes I inspected too closely their extravagant ornamentation. She said I ought not to notice them enough to know whether they were wearing horned head-dresses or not. I think she was right to reprove me. Another rebuked me because I spoke of her great bosom as if it pleased me. She said, ‘What business is it of yours whether it’s big or small?’ She too was right. The third jokingly took me up when I appeared to be going to touch her somewhat rudely – and possibly had already done so – by saying, ‘Calm down, brother!’ . . . A fourth woman – with whom I was in some way familiar – did not so much rebuke me as despise me when she said ‘You’re no more than a beautiful face and a lovely voice: you’ve done nothing’. (Deanesly 1915, ch. 12, 178-9)

A crestfallen Rolle adds ruefully: When I came to myself I thanked God for teaching me what was right through their words . . . I’m not going to put myself in the wrong with women from now on. (Ibid., ch. 12, 179)

Rolle’s significance for an account of medieval English life-writing is the manner in which his writings of mystical counsel are framed with accounts of his intensely personal experience, which are as beguilingly sensuous and as warmly enthusiastic as the model of mystical experience that he is encouraging. The unforgettably spontaneous opening of the Incendium would buttonhole anyone’s attention with its personally felt immediacy, inviting the reader to share in the experience it evokes: I cannot tell you how surprised I was, the first time I felt my heart begin to warm. It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it! But once I realized that it came entirely from within . . . I was absolutely delighted, and wanted my love to be even greater. ( Deanesly 1915, prologue, 145

In the Incendium the conviction of a personal calling and special divine favour allow for an intense but dehistoricised projection in the text of a self at prayer, where conventional chronology and development are irrelevant. Rolle’s Incendium is one of the books which Margery Kempe records by name as having been read to her in The Book of Margery

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

20

20

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

barry windeatt

Kempe, which was evidently composed with some recollection of Rolle’s construction of himself.2 The Book of Margery Kempe is often described as the first autobiography in English, whereas the Revelations of Julian of Norwich are not usually construed as autobiographical writing, yet both include autobiographical accounts of a key moment of crisis, in which the vocation that underpins the two women’s lives meets a challenge and overcomes it, as the very existence of their books proves. For Julian, it is the moment of crisis that she records when she has already seen fifteen of her sixteen revelations (Windeatt 2015, ch. 66). Julian amuses a priest who visits her on her supposed deathbed by telling him that she has been having hallucinations and raving. But his face changes when Julian tells how she saw the crucifix bleeding, and the priest’s reverence for what little she divulges to him causes Julian an intense inner turmoil over her lack of faith in her revelations and therefore in God. The existence of authentic shorter and longer versions of Julian’s revelations witnesses to how that early crisis of doubt was overcome, and to how Julian’s struggle to interpret initial revelation through subsequent meditation remained an ongoing challenge. The survival of two versions, and the differences between them, enables readers to map developments in a mystic’s mind and art over the twenty years between 1373 and 1393 and probably longer. Developments between the two textual states represent an archive of the stages in a developing spiritual autobiography, albeit never written as such. Indeed, Julian goes to some lengths to excise those few clues to the author’s identity that were originally in her short text: deleting all reference to the author’s being a woman and to her mother being present at Julian’s deathbed. Yet even as Julian’s meditation seeks to divest itself of a particular identity, its record of a search for understanding promotes such a sense of questing and discovery as to represent a kind of implicit autobiography of the contemplative soul from that early moment of doubt (‘For thus have I felt in myselfe’, ch. 41, 93). Julian’s sole authorship of her Revelations is never seriously questioned, whereas Kempe’s account of how her Book comes to be written down raises questions for some about how far Kempe can be considered the author of this writing of her life. For Kempe, a key moment of intense crisis is when a friar’s hostile preaching turns many against her, amongst whom ‘the same preyste was one that aftirward wrot this boke’ (Windeatt 2004, ch. 62), although the story is partly told to recount how his faith is restored, as the Book’s existence demonstrates. By her own account illiterate, Kempe must rely on others to get her text written down, once she is convinced, when in her sixties, that God wishes it to be written. Initially Kempe dictates a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

21

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

Medieval life-writing

21

version of her book to a visiting Englishman who has been long resident in Germany (possibly her son), but this proves to be illegible. After a four-year delay, a priest – probably her confessor and long-term spiritual adviser – rewrites the illegible first version by reading it over word for word in Kempe’s presence as he writes, ‘sche sumtym helpyng where ony difficulte was’. The priest possibly transcribed the Book much as a clerk in a legal proceeding would tidy a witness’s spoken testimony into the third-person discourse of a court record. If the priest had translated Kempe’s testimony into Latin he could have exercised greater control, and the Book does not read as if composed out of Kempe’s replies to the writer’s questions. In a transcription process through collaborative conferral Kempe evidently exercises a decisive role in determining the substance of what is written ‘at hom in hir chamber wyth hir writer’ and ‘ocupiid abowte the writing of this tretys’. Based on this account, Kempe is no less the author of her book just because she uses an amanuensis, who records her narrative in the third person. In places the priest probably shaped the text more interventively: some passages read as if recast into a more clerical discourse than Kempe was likely to use, while some chapters (24, 25, 62) are apparently written from the priest’s perspective, although these only underline how unclerkly is the viewpoint from which the Book is generally written. Anachronistic modern assumptions about sole authorship undervalue the intellectually dominant role that Kempe’s account of the composition process attributes to her, and overvalue the priest’s essentially secretarial contribution in phrasing and tidying a text which would never have existed without the life and character of the indomitable personality that animates its every page. The Book of Margery Kempe is not the unedited transcript of an old lady’s tape-recorded reminiscences. This earliest self-account by an Englishwoman must be read in the knowledge that her words have been mediated by a man, however supportive of her. Yet how vividly and unstoppably her voice is heard, despite whatever editing: the voice of a Norfolk housewife, mother, pilgrim and self-styled holy woman. The contrast between the somewhat preachy tone in the proem and the rest of the Book suggests how relatively superficial and unsystematic has been any male clerical project to re-voice Kempe’s speech. The Book of Margery Kempe is indeed the earliest account in English of a life ostensibly authored by the subject of that life narrative, although focussed so selectively that it constitutes a ‘Life’ and conforms only partially to more recent conceptions of autobiography as a retrospective narrative charting the development of a stable ‘I’. Yet rather than assessing Kempe’s text by anachronistic comparisons, it is more revealing to let the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

22

22

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

barry windeatt

seeming strangenesses and occlusions in the Book establish the text’s nature to us on its own terms. Kempe’s casualness about matters important in later life-writing, and the idiosyncratic structure of her Book, are to be celebrated as tokens of how she sees her inward life. The way in which the Book does not match sustainedly with any single genre is mimetic of how Kempe’s own way of life could never fit comfortably with established roles and lifestyles. Saints’ lives, or medieval pilgrimage and other travel narratives, are nothing like the actual texture of writing in the Book. For Kempe, travel is a means to an end and of scant interest in itself: all that concerns her is her spiritual destination and any obstacles to that. The Book often gives a vivid sense of being a saint’s life in modern dress and domestic circumstances – with the difference that martyrs are not usually in a position to dictate their memoirs, nor is their sanctity such a point of extended controversy and communal discord. These are the experiences of a would-be saint, the uneasy hybrid of an autobiographical saint’s life or autohagiography, not yet written from the posthumous retrospect of accepted sanctity. Dictated by the aspiring saint during her lifetime, the autohagiography cannot include either the saint’s heroic final martyrdom, nor her posthumous cult and miracles. Even so, the Book does project a powerful image of martyrdom, albeit not literally. Here the assaults and tortures of a martyrdom have been updated into a middle-class housewife’s endurance, for her convictions, of her society’s contemptuous humiliation and character assassination. The climactic mutilations and humiliations of martyred women like Saints Catherine or Margaret have been translated into the barbs and rack of spiteful gossip, sneers, and accusations of hypocrisy, played out in an unending martyrdom at the hands of her community in everyday life. Within its structure the Book conflates several narrative trajectories: an account of conversion, followed eventually by a frenetic mid-life story of her flight from domesticity and matrimony into a restless devotional lifestyle, succeeded by a lengthy anticlimax of living at home again, in poor health, and seemingly strapped for cash. As a conversion narrative, the Book has nothing to report about childhood. The beginning, revealingly abrupt, is with the marriage that is also an important ending – of the virginity whose loss comes to seem to Kempe an abiding disadvantage to her contemplative vocation. The Book then deals sketchily with the first twenty years of her married life (actually nearly half the time span included within the narrative), only concerned with experience that complements her later vocation. Much of the Book focusses intently on the events of just five hectic years (ca. 1413–ca. 1418), after Kempe negotiates with her husband an

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

23

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

Medieval life-writing

23

end to their sexual relations and embarks on her various pilgrimages around England, to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago, and in England again. Back home in Lynn, the last twenty years of Kempe’s life allow for a narrative of spiritual reflection as well as events. Such a trajectory has the delayed flowering, the apparent lack of follow-through, and the lapse into repetition which matches the unevenness of living and does not make for a shapely narrative. Kempe’s life narrative is framed in turn by contemplations of Christ’s life, with early chapters on contemplation of the Nativity (chs. 6–7), an account of Kempe’s visits to the Holy Places near the middle of her text and meditations prompted by the Holy Week observances near the close. The proem declares the Book’s aim to ‘schewen in party the levyng [life]’ of its subject, and this is a significant delimitation of scope. On various occasions Kempe records, without further detail, how she confessed to a priest her whole life ‘as ner as hir mende wold servyn hir, fro hir childhode unto that owre’ (ch. 33), but her Book, however confessional she thought it, comprises less than her whole life. Kempe’s Book seems uninterested in what later readers might regard as the whole person and shows no ambition to present anything other than that part of her life which is of spiritual import as she sees it. Since Kempe has been assured of salvation by Christ early in the Book she has nothing to prove by charting spiritual progress, and, since outward history is largely irrelevant, occurrences need only be located in relation to her inner story. Kempe is unconcerned to record something of her lifespan from all its decades: her Book focusses on periods of particularly intense activity and trying experience but is not concerned to date them, and Kempe shows no sense of the felt time of her own years passing, until those years suddenly catch up with her in the brief late sequel she appends to her Book. Indeed, the Book is strikingly indifferent to locating itself in historical time (except in the two dated prologues, perhaps indicating further limits to the influence of her amanuensis). Kempe explicitly notes that things are not written down in chronological order, which she candidly admits she has forgotten, but nor does she elaborate on what does order the materials. Events have significance not in themselves but when read as signs and tokens of larger import. For Kempe it is enough to record that a remembered incident occurred at a point in the liturgical calendar – ‘on the Wednysday in Whitson-weke’ (ch. 44) – but the year is never specified, perhaps not remembered and evidently not valued in itself. On the other hand, the Book pays keen attention to time in recording the duration of Kempe’s tribulations or how the passage of time proves her right: here time is a token of value and precisely accounted for.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

24

24

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

barry windeatt

What Kempe feels herself divinely commanded to set down, as the Book’s Prologue declares, is ‘hyr felyngys and revelacyons and the forme of her levyng [i.e. living]’. Her Book aims less to chronicle a life than to communicate her way of living. As a contemplative, Kempe’s medium is not so much visual as verbal, in prayerful dialogues with Christ, reported as if verbatim in the present tense. What Kempe’s amanuensis records is her characteristic mode of recollection through remembered exchanges of direct speech, between Kempe and her contemporaries or between her and members of the Trinity. Reported direct speech is the fabric and texture of the Book (and the key to its continuing vitality), and for Kempe the point of her book, as of her life, is that in it God speaks to her and she speaks to God. By comparison with this, her difficulties with charges of illicit teaching and supposed heresy – with disbelieving clerics and irritable archbishops, or the disobliging mayor and lecherous steward of Leicester – are for Kempe only a trying distraction. Her narrative of such encounters, recalled through exchanges of dialogue, prompts comparisons with how The Testimony of William Thorpe presents itself as an autobiographical account – presumably embellishing any actual encounter – in which the Lollard Thorpe out-argues an archbishop (Hudson 1993). Beyond this, the Book’s continuum of prayerful colloquy with Christ reflects Kempe’s inward spiritual life, largely indifferent to time and place, anxious, reiterative, and with the immediacy of a stream-of-consciousness narrative. However stylised and formalised, it represents states of mind, worry, and irresolution, never for themselves, but as prompts for the resolutions that God gives her. Kempe’s inward dialogue with God is necessarily contained within her interruptive and disputatious outward dialogue with her generally disbelieving society, so that there develops the strongest contrast between this imperfect, annoying outer world and an inner world where, however uncertainly, assurance and endorsement may be sought. Kempe’s Book recalls Kempe to life so powerfully as a presence and a voice that modern response, although as divided as her contemporaries, generally takes Kempe at her own valuation, determined to position the Book at the start of English autobiographical writing. Kempe’s courage moves readers to this, and the inconvenient honesty of her testimony (‘sche wolde not for al this world sey otherwise than sche felt’, ch. 61). The Book’s solemnly recorded narrative of spats, spite and put-downs can have a disconcertingly Pooterish inconsequentiality. Yet here the self is being presented through a collage of incidents, quarrels, and vindications, thematically associated and mimetic of the bitty unevenness of reiterated acts of self-assertion. The Book is an astonishing exemplar of a view of the self

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

25

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

Medieval life-writing

25

found more widely across medieval English texts, which acknowledge the self’s experience in this fallen world through writing that is as essentially fragmented, discontinuous, and indeterminately fictionalised as Kempe’s ‘forme of her levyng’.

Notes 1. For discussions, see Porter Abbott 1988 and Spearing 2012. 2. Rolle’s influence is felt in Richard Methley’s autobiographical spiritual treatises. For a day-by-day diary of graces received for two months in 1487, see Hogg 1981.

Bibliography Arn, Mary-Jo, ed. 1994. Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Arnold, E. J. F., ed. 1957. The Melos Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole. Oxford: Blackwell. Barron, Caroline M. 1993. ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’. In Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych, 13–19. Edited by Dillian Gordon London: The National Gallery. Butler, Richard, ed. 1849. Annals of Ireland. Dublin: The Irish Archaeological Society. Deansly, Margaret, ed. 1915. Incendium Amoris. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Greenway, Diana, and Jane Sayers, trans. 1989. The Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gwynn, Aubrey, 1937. ‘The Sermon-Diary of Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh’. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 44, sect. C: 1–57. Hogg, James, 1981. ‘A Mystical Diary: The Refectorium Salutis of Richard Methley of Mount Grace Charterhouse’. Analecta Cartusiana 55.1: 208–38. Hudson, Anne, ed. 1993. Two Wycliffite Texts. EETS, o.s. 301. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindley, P. 1997. ‘Absolutism and Regal Image in Ricardian Sculpture’. In The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, 62–74. Edited by D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam. London: Harvey Miller. Louis, Cameron, ed. 1980. The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle. New York: Garland. Munro Cautley, H. 1982. Suffolk Churches and their Treasures. 5th edn. Woodbridge: Boydell. Nijenhuis, Wiesje Fimke., ed. 1990. The Vision of Edmund Leversedge. Nijmegen: Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C02.3D

26

26

[11–26] 20.10.2015 10:02AM

barry windeatt

Norton-Smith, John, ed. 1971. The Kingis Quair. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pearsall, Derek, ed. 2008. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Perry, George G., ed. 1866. English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle of Hampole. EETS, o.s. 20. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter Abbott, H. 1988. ‘Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories’. New Literary History 19.2: 597–615. Rogers, J. E. Thorold, ed. 1881. Loci e Libro Veritatum. Passages selected from Gascoigne’s Theological Dictionary Illustrating the Condition of Church and State 1403–58. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Serjeantson, Mary S., ed. 1938. Osborn Bokenham: Legendys of Hooly Wummen. EETS, o.s. 206. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shawver, Gary W. (ed.). 2002. Thomas Usk: Testament of Love. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Spearing, A. C. 2012. Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press). Talbot, C. H., ed. 1959. The Life of Christina of Markyate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, E. C., ed. and trans. 1960. Richard of Bury: ‘Philobiblion’. Rev. edn. by M. Maclagan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Windeatt, Barry, ed. 2004. The Book of Margery Kempe. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Windeatt, Barry, ed. 2015. Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Youngs, Deborah, 1998. ‘Vision in a Trance: A Fifteenth-Century Vision of Purgatory’. Medium Aevum 67.2: 212–34.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

27

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

chapter 3

Autobiographical selves in the poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate David Matthews

Medieval culture was profoundly influenced by two great spiritual autobiographies inherited from late antiquity: Augustine’s Confessions and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Late in the Middle Ages, their influence was undimmed: Geoffrey Chaucer translated Boethius into Middle English in the fourteenth century, for example, and Augustine remained very broadly influential. For many scholars today, the Confessions is the origin of Western life-writing (see DiBattista and Wittman 2014, 5–6).1 Yet under this influence, the medieval period itself did not produce many autobiographies as they are conventionally defined. Peter Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum is generally thought to be one; Guibert of Nogent’s Monodiae or Memoirs another (Fleming 2014). The Book of Margery Kempe is also often said to be the first English autobiography, but this is a complicated case, not least because Margery did not write the book herself (for more, see the preceding chapter). Kempe’s book is known from a single manuscript, while Guibert of Nogent’s work did not survive in any manuscript. In all, the evidence is that there was little demand for or even interest in what we call ‘autobiography’ in the Middle Ages. Hence, while a recent account of autobiography like Linda Anderson’s might begin with Augustine, it then leaps over the Middle Ages entirely to John Bunyan (Anderson 2011). Nevertheless, several late-medieval English literary writers appear to present us with autobiographical fragments or moments and what appear to be performances of self in their work. Such poems as the Divine Comedy and the Canterbury Tales, as John V. Fleming puts it, ‘are narrated by ‘characters’ who are at once the poet and the poet’s invention’ (Fleming 2014, 43). We know from contemporary records that Geoffrey Chaucer worked for several years as a controller of customs in the City of London, so when we see the dreamer of the House of Fame named as ‘Geffrey’ and described as spending his days on ‘rekenynges’ before coming home to sit 27

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

28

28

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

david matthews

in front of ‘another book’ (that is, something other than accounts) until he is dazed with his reading, it might appear that we have a fragment of the Chaucerian real life.2 On the other hand, this particular moment occurs in a dream and in the words of an eagle who is flying Chaucer to Fame’s palace: a textual situation which frames the supposed ‘autobiographical’ moment and arguably compromises its claims to truth. Chaucer’s fifteenth-century successors followed him in incorporating themselves into their works and seem even more invested than he was in the notion of writing the self. Thomas Hoccleve’s Compleinte and Dialogue with a Friend are both first-person works which seem in many ways direct and personal, with a speaker named ‘Thomas’ who is, like the real Hoccleve, a clerk of the privy seal. The Testament of the prolific monk John Lydgate seems similarly concerned with self-revelation, as Lydgate looks back with candour on a misspent youth. All of these works seem invested in self-revelation: Hoccleve’s as he relates the circumstances of a serious depression which afflicted him, Lydgate’s as he surveys a dissolute youth which continued even after he was professed as a monk. Nevertheless, neither Hoccleve’s nor Lydgate’s text is immediately recognisable as what we think of as autobiography. Very broadly speaking, autobiography has become identified with first-person prose texts which soberly recall past events and deliver some kind of narrative of development. Hoccleve’s and Lydgate’s texts are poems, and in Lydgate’s case, it is a particularly highly wrought and elaborate poem. Hoccleve not only writes in poetic form but seems to be in the thick of the things he is narrating; his narrative is not at all developmental but prone to dart off in unexpected directions. Of these features, formal complexity does not on its own make autobiography impossible: it probably came more naturally to Hoccleve to write his narrative in rhyme royal stanzas than it would have done to write in prose. But such complexity does suggest that life-writing and self-revelation were not necessarily the primary aims of these writers, raising the possibility that literary artifice was of at least as much interest to them. The modern reader is therefore entitled to wonder how far such artifice might have compromised their works’ claims to autobiographical truth. It has recently been proposed that the category of autobiography is altogether a mistaken one to use in the medieval context. A. C. Spearing states that a great deal of medieval writing about the self is rather what he dubs ‘autography’, a form of writing which in English suddenly became popular in the fourteenth century. Autography, Spearing writes, is different from what is now called autobiography ‘in not being based on a claim to any systematic relation to documentable truth; it is first-person writing

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

29

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

Autobiographical selves in the poetry

29

in which there is no implied assertion that the first person either does or does not correspond to a real-life individual’ (Spearing 2012, 7). Spearing’s contention is that a vast amount of criticism of the works of Chaucer and other English writers is mistaken in seeing the use of the first person as autobiographically expressive of the poet. Making a somewhat different argument, Isabel Davis points out that whereas modern biography and autobiography share conventions, medieval first-person composition is quite different from biography. She suggests that ‘medieval “autobiographers” dwelt only on those bits that were thought to be important, leaving aside the story-arc provided by the life-cycle’ (Davis 2009, 850). In a rather different conclusion from Spearing’s, Davis does not suggest that there is therefore no autobiographical writing in the Middle Ages. She proposes that ‘the idiosyncrasy of medieval authorial representations – regardless of whether they can be legitimately termed “autobiographies” – makes them more than just failed early attempts at autobiography and offers vital evidence of how the self was thought to be constituted in the medieval past’ (849). In this chapter, I survey the presentation of self in the works of late medieval literary writers. As is already suggested above, there is reason for scepticism about their autobiographical intentions. But what can be said about the ways in which such writers might have entwined life-writing into their larger literary projects?

The fourteenth-century ‘I’: the Harley Lyrics to Geoffrey Chaucer In fourteenth-century English writing, the first-person pronoun can seem entirely generic. The longing lovers of some of the Harley Lyrics written down in the 1340s, for example, could be voiced by anyone, and there is little sense that any specific individual was trying to leave his mark with these poems. Other writers, however, did apparently wish to record their names for posterity. Adam Davy, the avowed author of a dream vision about King Edward II composed around 1307, is one of these; Laurence Minot, who wrote a series of poems about Edward III’s wars around the middle of the century, is another. We have no documentary evidence of the existence of either of these poets; in theory, they could be fictitious, the names invented for the occasion of their verse. There is no particular reason to think this, however, and it is possible that two men named Davy and Minot were sufficiently moved by contemporary events (and

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

30

30

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

david matthews

perhaps by the possibility of currying favour with their kings) to try their hands at verse. Whatever the truth of the matter, these poems do look like evidence for an increasing tendency in the fourteenth century for English writers to want to leave traces of their personae in their verse – even while, around the same time, the Harley lyricist represents the typical medieval fashion of effacing his identity in his writing. Spearing has noted that what he calls autography suddenly becomes widespread in English in the later fourteenth century and he relates this to the French form popular in the thirteenth century, the dit (Spearing 2012, 8). This affects such urban poetry as Chaucer’s, emanating from a place close to court. But it may also be that in English this move away from the generic, lyric ‘I’ to a personified speaker was a more widespread tendency. It is clear that Geoffrey Chaucer, at the end of the century, inherited a sense that the playful portrayal of himself in his work was a viable poetic strategy. In The Book of the Duchess, a dream vision usually assumed to be a very early work, readers are left to think that the speaking ‘I’ is a representation of Chaucer himself. This is what makes sense of the fact that the subject of the complaint, the Man in Black, represents Chaucer’s real-life patron, John of Gaunt. In The House of Fame mentioned above, a further step is taken when the eagle addresses the dreamer as ‘Geffrey’, apparently clinching the link with the real author. From The Book of the Duchess onward, this poet persona is roughly consistent: he is a little naive, not a doer or a lover himself, but rather a poetic servant of love. In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women he is identified as a poet when the queen, Alceste, defends him before a wrathful Cupid: ‘Al be hit that he kan nat wel endite’, she says of the dreamer, ‘Yet hath he maked lewed folk delyte / To serve yow, in preysinge of your name’ (Legend of Good Women, F 414–6). Having told Cupid that Chaucer is not much of a poet, Alceste goes on to list a comprehensive canon of his works, so this is an ironic moment in which poetic authority is disavowed at the same time as it is claimed. Chaucer’s image as a somewhat awkward and diffident figure is extended in what was probably his next major work after the Legend: the Canterbury Tales. Where the prologue to the Legend is a dream vision set in an allegorical landscape, the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales looks like realism, with its fourteenth-century setting in Southwark, where Chaucer portrays himself as falling in with a group of pilgrims in the Tabard Inn. Later called upon to tell a tale on the pilgrimage by its Host, Chaucer is famously ridiculed as a ‘popet’ or doll-like figure with an ‘elvyssh’, otherworldly look on his face. Chaucer then launches on his

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

31

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

Autobiographical selves in the poetry

31

doggerel tail-rhyme burlesque, the Tale of Sir Thopas, which is ultimately cut short by a disgusted host, who notoriously says of Chaucer’s effort that it is not worth a ‘toord’ (Canterbury Tales, VII.701, 703, 930). This image of a slightly hapless figure is consistent with Chaucer’s earlier self-portrayals. But, of course, it is at odds with the somewhat more assured voice of Chaucer elsewhere, as narrator in such passages as the introduction to the tale of the Miller. And it cannot but underline a distance between this Chaucer, a character on the pilgrimage, who says that this is the best poetry he is capable of, and the Chaucer who writes the Canterbury Tales and is manifestly capable of more. But there is no way of realistically resolving the metafictional play at work here, because Thopas is both a piece of ‘drasty’ doggerel and a performance of comic genius. Geoffrey Chaucer is a short, fat ‘popet’ but also a commanding poet. To portray oneself in such an ironic mode suggests a certain confidence in one’s own abilities. Nevertheless, the stance taken may also betray a real diffidence about the status of English poetry in the period, a sense that however well Chaucer thought he could write, a joke could certainly be made about the project of making verse in English for ‘lewed folk’. If that possible anxiety hovers over the project then the real author, Chaucer, and his fictional creation, the pilgrim Chaucer, are perhaps not so far from one another as criticism has often maintained. The opacities are intensified by Chaucer’s so-called Retraction, which stands after the Parson’s Tale and ends the Canterbury Tales in twentyeight of the manuscripts as well as Caxton’s first printed edition of the text. In this short prose passage Chaucer disavows many of his works, specifically ‘my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’, which include those Canterbury tales which ‘sownen into synne’ (X.1085–6). The Retraction may well be a genuine disavowal, presenting the ‘real’ Chaucer, now turning his thoughts unironically, like any late medieval Christian, to judgement. It has been much discussed, with some past readers refusing to accept it at all; at different times it has been explained away as a monastic interpolation, or to be understood as the voice of the immediately preceding speaker, the Parson, rather than of Chaucer. Still another explanation is that it is the voice of ‘Chaucer the pilgrim’, and therefore as fictional as Thopas. The Retraction can be usefully thought of in relation to the Prologue of the Legend of Good Women. The latter is an enabling fiction (leading to the commission of the legends) while the Retraction is a concluding text (showing that the plan announced in the General Prologue has been changed and that the performance is over). But they share the characteristic that they are very concerned with Chaucer as author and,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

32

32

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

david matthews

more particularly, with what he actually produced. In the Legend, the dreamer is an abject figure, cowering before the lordly authority of the God of Love, whose servant he elsewhere represents himself as being. The speaker in the Retraction sounds different. The only lord before whom he stands (so to speak) is God and this is not an occasion for abjection. Rather, the speaker claims to be the author of fictional works (like the dreamer of the Legend), specifically disowning or regretting some of them, while laying fresh claim to those of religious purpose. It is easy to see how some critics could not accept the shift of register that occurs here: nevertheless what we have here may well be as close to the actual voice of Chaucer the author as we are likely to get, in a genuine performance of penance, as Caroline M. Barron has recently suggested (Barron 2014, 39–40). While the Retraction offers a similar moment to that in which Alceste both says that Chaucer is not much of a poet and goes on to list his works authoritatively, it is arguably different in that Alceste is thoroughly within the framing fiction while the Retraction is outside the fictional boundary. But does such a notion even apply in fourteenth-century writing? When Michel Foucault wrote that ‘the author’s name . . . mark[s] off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterising, its mode of being’, it was not medieval textuality he had in mind (Foucault 1998 [1969], 211). Yet the point does arguably apply in the case of Chaucer, who constantly uses his own name to mark off the edges of texts which are his own. After his death, his name continues to be used by other poets, compilers of manuscripts, and then by early printers and editors to mark off texts – regardless of whether they are by Chaucer or not. With the possible exception of the Retraction, it would be difficult to label any of what goes on in the Canterbury Tales as autobiographical. It certainly is, nevertheless, a kind of performance of self. It seems quite possible that Chaucer was ironising himself at every level, making a series of jokes which contemporaries who knew him would have enjoyed. Several references in the poems, and the illustration of Chaucer that appears in the famous Ellesmere manuscript, suggest he was indeed rather plump. This would hardly make sense if Chaucer was, in reality, tall and thin. But his self-portrayal suggests not that he wishes to present a lacerating examination of his own physical failings, so much as an in-joke about what was obvious to everyone who met him. There were clearly exaggerations: Chaucer’s verse was regarded as being worth more than a ‘toord’ by his contemporaries, we may safely surmise. The Chaucerian self is clearly embodied in his work, but his self-presentations can rarely be taken at face value.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

33

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

Autobiographical selves in the poetry

33

Similar things can be said about the way in which Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower represents himself in his long series of narratives contained in Confessio Amantis. The framework for this poem is that the allegorical figure Amans (‘The Lover’) speaks to his confessor, a priest named Genius. Their discussions provide the framework for a series of narratives. When these are done, Amans appeals to Cupid and Venus, seeking absolution, and it is at this point that he explicitly names himself as ‘John Gower’. The use by Gower of an elaborate framework enclosing a series of narratives is obviously similar to the Canterbury Tales and, different as it is in conception and execution, the Confessio may have been inspired by Chaucer’s work. But the confessional moment at the end of Gower’s poem more clearly offers a link with the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, with a poet once again playing the game of abjecting himself before the God (and Goddess) of Love. There is little to be gleaned about the real Gower’s autobiography from these passages, though there is a clear sense that the game of inserting a version of oneself into literary works was by this time a viable poetic strategy. So far as autobiography is concerned, critics have been more interested in what goes on at the beginning of the Confessio, and the claim made there that the work was commissioned by King Richard himself.

After Chaucer: complaint, testament, and confession Chaucer’s immediate poetic followers took a stance of reverence towards him, and imitated him. But they also innovated. Thomas Hoccleve, for example, took a further step in the insertion of his self into his poetry. Whatever Hoccleve wrote about – and his interests were broad – one of his topics was always himself. In his poem My Compleinte, for example, Hoccleve is extremely precise about a mental illness he says he underwent: ‘the substaunce of my memorie / Wente to pleie as for a certein space’.3 He did not return to his wits, he goes on to say, until All Saints’ Day (November 1) five years before the writing of the Compleinte, that is, in 1416. Elsewhere, he names himself as ‘Hoccleve’, apparently leaving no doubt that this is a first-person account of mental illness. The Compleinte arises from this illness. Even though Hoccleve is convinced it has passed (or wishes to convince himself, or his readers, through his writing, that that is the case) he is still obsessed with the idea that people think the worse of him. In one of the best-known moments in the poem,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

34

34

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

david matthews

Hoccleve describes himself as returning to his room and going to a mirror to try to see what others are seeing when they look at him: And in my chaumbre at home whanne that I was Myseilf aloone I in this wise wrouʒt. I streite vnto my mirrour and my glas, To loke howe that me of my chere thouʒt, If any othir were it than it ouʒt, For fain wolde I, if it not had bene riʒt, Amdendid it to my kunnynge and myʒt.

Notably, Hoccleve does not stand in front of the mirror but jumps back and forth as if trying to catch himself out, to see himself as an other and thereby reassure himself that he looks normal: Many a saute made I to this mirrour, Thinking, ‘If that I looke in this manere Amonge folke as I nowe do, noon errour Of suspecte look may in my face appere. This countinaunce, I am sure, and this chere, If I forthe vse, is nothing repreuable To hem that han conceitis resonable.

(lines 154–68)

Such moments of naked and even painful self-scrutiny have led readers to think that Hoccleve is genuinely a poet of the self. But why, having learned to be so sceptical of Chaucer’s self-descriptions, are readers so prepared to take Hoccleve’s account of himself at face value? As D. C. Greetham suggests, Hoccleve ‘does, admittedly, make so much of his own life in his poetry that critics are inevitably tempted to allow such ostensibly autobiographical statements more value and credit than they might otherwise receive in a more reticent author’. And as Lee Patterson writes, ‘Hoccleve’s obsessive concern with representing his own inner life is not a strategy directed to some larger literary goal but is the goal itself’ (Greetham 1989, 244; Patterson 2001, 440). At the end of the Compleinte, Hoccleve self-referentially describes himself as finishing the poem when there is a knock at the door, revealing a friend who has the precise purpose of discussing both Hoccleve’s state of mind and the question of public perceptions of him. The poem that ensues, known as the Dialogue with a Friend, is among other things about poetic making, linking the question of madness to poetic creation. The Friend is sceptical about Hoccleve’s project of writing about his illness and through his voice the poem asks whether it is the case that overmuch study produces madness. The alternative is, as Hoccleve himself insists,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

35

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

Autobiographical selves in the poetry

35

that his illness came from God and is now over. While this question is not resolved, the text is insistently concerned with the relations between poetry and a disturbed mind, in a way that we might readily associate with the Romantics but are not used to seeing in the Middle Ages. Did any of this happen? The arrival of the Friend at the most opportune moment for discussion of the newly completed Compleinte seems convenient indeed (he is the inverse of the notorious ‘person from Porlock’ who supposedly arrived in time to make Coleridge forget the remainder of Kubla Khan). But on the other hand, Hoccleve’s poem remains within a soberly believable framework, as two friends debate in a room in the City of London and no one is whisked away by a verbose eagle. One modern comparison here could be with W. G. Sebald’s narrator in such books as The Rings of Saturn or Vertigo, where a sober and melancholic voice seems initially trustworthy but characteristically veers into paranoia and panic, tinging the narration with a bizarre edge which pushes the reader to the bounds of credulity. But unlike Sebald and his readers, Hoccleve does not have a pre-existing standard of autobiographical writing against which to measure himself. There seems no reason to doubt his illness or the timing he ascribes to it. But whether in reality the Friend turned up at the completion of the Compleinte or two weeks later hardly seems an issue Hoccleve would have thought twice about. The nexus of autobiography and art in his work is not something he uses to provoke readers, as Sebald does. The Friend is a handy device (whether he existed or not) who allows for that entirely characteristic medieval literary phenomenon, the debate. In that debate, Hoccleve and the Friend trade different positions about poetic authority and it is this, rather than Hoccleve’s state of mind, which is ultimately the real topic of the poem. To the extent that Hoccleve fictionalised his own autobiography he did so in a way that does not appear to recognise much of a boundary between the two textual activities of fiction and life-writing. A near contemporary of Hoccleve, the long-lived and prolific poet John Lydgate, also inherited from Chaucer the characteristic technique of inserting himself (or a version of himself) into his work. In his Siege of Thebes, a self-conscious extension of Chaucer’s own Canterbury Tales, Lydgate portrays himself as catching up with Chaucer’s pilgrims at Canterbury itself. He describes himself as a poor monk (implicitly contrasting himself with the Monk of the Tales, well arrayed and a lover of the hunt). Harry Bailey, now ventriloquised by Lydgate, is a ‘wonder sterne and fers’ figure who describes Lydgate as pale and bloodless, wearing a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

36

36

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

david matthews

threadbare hood. The moment allows Lydgate to name himself: ‘I answerde my name was Lydgate, / Monk of Bery, nygh fyfty yere of age – / Come to this toune to do my pilgrimage’.4 While this is parallel to the Chaucerian moment in which Harry addresses the poet and calls him a ‘popet’ before Thopas, it is also crucially different: there is no apparent split here between narrator and author. Harry’s description of Lydgate matches Lydgate’s own self-description, so that there is no ironic distance between portrait and man, it would seem. What we appear to have here, then, is the real author posing as a narrator internal to the story. As Robert Meyer-Lee remarks, for many critics this is a clumsy moment, underlining the way in which Lydgate misunderstands the ironic subtleties of his master Chaucer, confusing fact with fiction and diluting the ‘aesthetic power’ of Chaucerian fiction. But conversely, it can be argued that Lydgate misunderstands nothing here. The metafictional peculiarity of the scene is that Lydgate enters the fictional frame of the Canterbury Tales twenty years on; Chaucer is dead but his absence from the pilgrimage is strangely unmentioned. Harry Bailey might be a fierce and stern figure here (as he never was in Chaucer), but it is Lydgate who is firmly in control as he launches on his story of the siege of Thebes, vastly longer than any actual Canterbury tale, ‘bestow[ing] upon it the authority that he possesses outside it’ (Meyer-Lee 2007, 39). None of this is conventionally autobiographical. Lydgate may well have made a pilgrimage to Canterbury aged fifty, pale, and dressed in threadbare clothes, but obviously he did not mingle with the fictional Canterbury pilgrims. When this kind of self-insertion of the author into his own story occurs in more recent works, we call it postmodern and approach it sceptically, as a game authors play. But as Meyer-Lee’s point emphasises, in Lydgate’s hands this not necessarily playful, so much as the exercise of authorial authority. A quite different performance appears in the poem known as Lydgate’s Testament. In this poem Lydgate presents himself as old and looks back to a misspent youth, though with a measure of acceptance: ‘Of myspent tyme a fole may weel compleyne’.5 The fourth section of the poem offers twenty stanzas of what appears to be autobiography, in which Lydgate recalls this wasted youth, including a memorable passage about youthful indiscretion in which he reveals himself as more apt to steal grapes from other people’s vines than to hear matins (640–1). Lydgate candidly suggests that his shiftless existence continued up to his profession as a monk and beyond. He is careful not to blame his teachers, but himself. ‘I herd all weel’, he says of his early days in the monastery, ‘but towchyng to the dede, / Of that thei

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

37

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

Autobiographical selves in the poetry

37

taught I toke litel hede!’ (689–90). He wore the black habit, but this was only an outward appearance. ‘[D]isordinat of language’ (713), he is given over to the senses: intemperate diet, drinking, his ears open to vain fables (719–21). At the end of this section Lydgate recalls a turning point, when he describes seeing a crucifix with the word vide (‘behold’) written beside it. This is a generative moment for Lydgate, who is moved to write about the Passion. The next and final section of Lydgate’s Testament is the avowed result, eighteen admonitory stanzas ventriloquising Christ himself. The implication is that Lydgate is reborn through Christ in this moment of recognition in which an unruly past is disavowed. But there is also perhaps the further implication that Lydgate the future poet was born at this moment. The spiritual autobiography here is complicated by Lydgate’s claims on the secular world in which he know he moved as a writer. Although it is in every way a completely different kind of writing from Chaucer’s short Retraction, Lydgate’s Testament can be read in relation to it. Lydgate himself invites comparison with the Chaucerian intertext in a description of spring in stanza 43: First Zepherus with his blastes sote Enspireth ver with newe buddes grene, The bawme ascendeth out of every rote, Causyng with flowres ageyn the sunne shene May among mon[e]thes sitt like a quene, Hir suster Apryll watryng hir gardeynes With holsom shoures shad in the tender vynes.

(lines 325–31)

This echoes without naming it the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales and its famous opening lines. Like the Retraction, the Testament ostensibly offers the poet’s voice in propria persona and without irony, telling us a narrative of sin followed by repentance. The Testament does not offer the bibliographical moment of the Retraction but it does at least seem to figure the creation of a writer. Nevertheless Lydgate’s possible autobiographical motives in the Testament have to be balanced against the fact that this is formally a highly wrought poem, perhaps the most ornate that Lydgate ever wrote. In its five separate parts it employs two different stanza forms. The more confessional mode is written in rhyme royal stanzas, no doubt under the influence of Chaucer. Three sections, including a sequence of praise for Christ, are written in huitains, eight-line stanzas rhyming ababbcbc. Furthermore, there are often complex patterns of repetition and stanza linking. The final

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

38

38

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

david matthews

word of each of the thirty stanzas of the first section, for example, is ‘kne’, meaning that the c-rhyme throughout the section is unvarying. Lydgate, so often accused by modern critics of slapdash verse, is here ostentatiously concerned with form. For the modern reader this kind of formal intricacy does not sit easily with autobiographical motives. For one thing, it suggests that it is form which is privileged in the poem, with selfrevelation subordinated to its requirements. For another, it can lead to the sense that Lydgate’s evident Christian purpose in the poem overwhelms the personal narrative. In the third section, for example, the final line of each stanza is a variation of ‘Graunt or I deye, shryft, hosel, repentaunce’. Even the most confessional moments can seem less personal under close scrutiny: the young Lydgate may well have stolen grapes, but it is hard not to wonder whether the vines in question were more biblically inspired than a likely feature of gardens in late medieval Suffolk, and harder still not to suspect the influence of Augustine’s well-known tale of his theft of pears in Book II of his Confessions. Like Chaucer’s Retraction, Lydgate’s work simply never claims to be autobiographical, but instead does specific work for a specific occasion. ‘Testament’ was not necessarily his own title, but ‘Explicit testamentum Johanis Lydgate’ is found at the end of the poem in the manuscripts, suggesting that it was as a testament that early readers took the poem. It is exemplary and admonitory, exhorting readers, through Lydgate’s own bad example, to turn to Christ. Fascinating and even persuasive as its brief glimpses into the supposed dissolute early life of England’s most prolific poet are, its primary purposes lie other than in the autobiographical impulse. This is chiefly because what lies in the background of Lydgate’s Testament is surely Augustine’s Confessions, or at least the confessional mode of writing. In modernity, autobiography has become inextricably linked to confession, since Rousseau’s announcement of what he said was an unprecedented new form of writing at the beginning of his own Confessions, completed in 1770. Today, particularly in the memoirs of politicians, celebrities, and sportsmen and women, confession is almost a necessary prerequisite of autobiography: it is not enough to tell a life, but readers must learn something new, previously unrevealed, and preferably scandalous. In the Middle Ages, however, there is no necessary link between confession and life-writing. Confession was a sacrament (strictly speaking, part of the larger sacrament of penance) and was everywhere in the Middle Ages, particularly later in the period. Lydgate confesses to stealing grapes not to titillate or thrill, but to provide an example: his point is to say that

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

39

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

Autobiographical selves in the poetry

39

anyone can surmount a dissolute start to life by turning to Christ. For Lydgate, then, confession is not an integral element of autobiography but a sacrament essential to spiritual health. He might tell something of his life story to make this point, but ultimately that life story is less important than the example it offers to others.

Conclusion: from Chaucer to Knausgaard What then can we really glean from the writings of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate about their lives? Can we finally trust their selfrepresentations? As I have suggested above, in general we cannot, and their truth value is not reliable. As A. C. Spearing has proposed, the very expectation of such truth value does not apply to late-medieval writing. But this does not mean that there is a sharp demarcation between what went on in the Middle Ages and what happened to autobiography thereafter. Rousseau, after all, is not as honest as he claims; Sebald is more artful than he claims. In recent times, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard has gained notoriety from a huge six-volume autobiographical project which focuses on the author’s life in extraordinarily minute detail with notorious frankness about his own life and the lives of family members. At times in Knausgaard’s account, it is the very banality of the detail which serves as a guarantor of the truth value (challenging the reader with the implicit question, ‘Who would make this up?’). But Knausgaard also frequently comments on the unreliability of memory and has been accused of major distortions, which means that the reader is also often challenged with the question, ‘Can that really have happened?’ Autobiography in modernity is haunted by the possibility of exaggeration, distortion, playful misrepresentation, and outright deceit. All of this was present in the medieval versions of such writing. Medieval writers seem to have seen no incompatibility between such artistic licence and the writing of the self. The evidence suggests that they did not insert their selves into their writing without also privileging their art, subordinating the project of life-writing to that art. But the same is clearly true of Knausgaard; it is also true, if in a different way, of Marcel Proust, another plunderer of his own life for the creation of works which sit somewhere between autobiography and fiction. The experience of reading the medieval works is always an exercise in uncertainty. We can be sure that Chaucer flew nowhere in an eagle’s talons, but can we be sure that he sat dazed at his books in the evenings? Might he, instead, have sat alertly while efficiently transcribing his notes? We will never know.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C03.3D

40

40

[27–40] 20.10.2015 10:10AM

david matthews

Notes 1. My grateful thanks go to Anke Bernau for her advice on many aspects of this chapter. 2. Geoffrey Chaucer, House of Fame, lines 653, 657; all further Chaucer quotations are given parenthetically in the text and are from Benson, 1988. 3. Thomas Hoccleve, My Compleinte lines 50–1 in Ellis 2001. 4. ‘John Lydgate’s Prologue to the Siege of Thebes’, lines 81, 92–94 in Bowers 1992. 5. ‘The Testament of Dan John Lydgate’, line 248, in MacCracken 1911.

Bibliography Anderson, Linda. 2011. Autobiography, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge. Barron, Caroline M. 2014. ‘Chaucer the Author and Chaucer the Pilgrim’. In Historians on Chaucer, 24–41. Edited by Stephen H. Rigby. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benson, Larry D., gen. ed. 1988. The Riverside Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowers, John M., ed. 1992. The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. Davis, Isabel. 2009. ‘Expressing the Middle English “I”’. Literature Compass 6: 842–63. DiBattista, Maria, and Emily O. Wittman, eds. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fleming, John V. 2014. ‘Medieval European Autobiography’, in DiBattista and Wittman, eds. 35–47. Foucault, Michel. 1998 [1969]. ‘What is an Author?’ In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 205–22. Edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley et al, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2. New York: The New Press. Greetham, D. C. 1989. ‘Self-Referential Artifacts: Hoccleve’s Persona as a Literary Device’. Modern Philology 86.3: 242–51. Hoccleve, Thomas. 2001. ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems. Edited by Roger Ellis. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Lydgate, John. 1911. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Edited by H. N. MacCracken, vol. 1, EETS e.s. 107. London: Early English Text Society, reprinted 1961. Meyer-Lee, Robert J. 2007. Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, Lee. 2001. ‘“What is me?”: Self and Society in the Poetry of Thomas Hoccleve’. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29: 437–70. Spearing, A. C. 2012. Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

41

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

chapter 4

The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography Molly Murray

All autobiographical writing requires a kind of double vision, at once retrospective and prospective. This is especially striking in the case of spiritual autobiography, which often presents the authorial self in relation to, and in terms of, both the sinful life that preceded the moment of writing and the new life that the writing portends. In the words of the familiar hymn, ‘I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see’: by elaborating on this rudimentary plot, the spiritual autobiographer re-narrates and recuperates the past in order to anticipate an as-yet-unnarrated future. In post-Reformation England, the genre itself occupied a similarly Janus-faced position: the earliest authors of English spiritual autobiography looked backward toward a variety of textual models, but in these retrospective engagements they also developed new ways of imagining and expressing personal experience. Early modern spiritual autobiography is thus ‘radical’ in both senses of the term: at once firmly rooted in extant models and conventions (recalling the word’s etymology in the Latin radix, or root), and far-reachingly innovative, leaving an important legacy to English literature and its representations of subjectivity. For the purposes of this chapter, I will define ‘spiritual autobiography’ as a free-standing account of some period of a Christian’s religious life, written in the first person and read beyond its author’s immediate circle. This is, of course, only one of the many forms that early modern Christian life-writing could take. To recover all the textual traces of the self and soul in this period, we would need to look farther afield: to letters and diaries, to the margins of record books and almanacs and bibles and genealogies, and even to published works on other subjects – biography, politics, philosophy – in which the author turns, briefly, to consider his or her religious experience. Recent work by Meredith Skura, Kathleen Lynch, Adam Smyth, and Brooke Conti, among others, has helpfully challenged Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as a ‘retrospective prose 41

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

42

42

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

molly murray

narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality’ (Lejeune 1989, 4). When applied to the early modern period, as the editors of a recent collection suggest, such a schematic definition excludes much of the ‘surprising range of traditions and genres’ that might be termed autobiographical (Dragstra, Ottway, and Wilcox 2000, 2–3). Yet, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English people did compose – and consume – recognisable first-person narratives concerning, if not the ‘development of [the author’s] personality’, certainly the development of the author’s spiritual life. In the pages that follow, I will attend to the doubled radicalism of such texts, attending to their dynamic combination of convention and originality.

The denominated self: institutional contexts Although we might intuitively associate the genre with a singular or spontaneous account of sin and regeneration, the vast majority of early modern spiritual autobiographies originated in institutional contexts, often composed according to explicit directives from spiritual directors or congregational leaders. Across the Reformed churches, the so-called ‘morphology of conversion’ offered a model by which individual Christians could understand and express their spiritual progress (Hindmarsh 2005, 35–3). William Perkins’s extremely popular Armilla Aurea (1590), and its English version The Golden Chain (1591), instructed Protestant readers in how to examine their lives for signs of God’s grace, instituting what Lynch calls ‘a semiotics of salvation’ (Lynch 2012, 6–7). This ‘semiotics’ applied not only to reading the self, but also to writing the self; many English Protestants, particularly in the Puritan gathered churches in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, wrote accounts of their spiritual lives as an act of institutional affiliation, thus contributing to the genre of ‘spiritual experience’ described by Edmund Morgan, Owen Watkins, G. F. Nuttall, and others. Such testimony, despite its public purpose, can sometimes strike the modern reader as vividly personal; in one collection of such ‘experiences’, edited and published by the Welsh nonconformist Vavasor Powell in 1653, we hear the idiosyncratic voices of various male and female ‘beleevers’: from ‘M. W.’, who recounts her early life ‘in Ireland, and in the fullness of outward enjoyments’, including ‘Children, and Servants, and Cattell’, to ‘T.M.’, who recalls his teenage apprenticeship among ‘rude people [who] would drinke, sweare, and be very deboyst [debauched]’, before being converted by a dream of a ‘red

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

43

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography

43

Dragon’ and ‘a little child . . . which was so beautifull’ (Powell, 1653, 8–9, 369). Despite the persistent critical association of Reformed theology with introspection (and, conversely, of Catholicism with outward-facing forms of devotion), Protestantism had no monopoly on autobiographical reckoning in early modern England (Murray 2007). English Catholics, particularly those living in European convents and seminaries, were also encouraged – and occasionally required – to describe the progress of their faith. Fully a third of the magisterial recent six-volume set of writings generated by women in the early modern English convents abroad is devoted to ‘Life-Writing’; nuns produced copious ‘personal papers in the form of “intentions” [statements of commitment to claustral devotion], devotional diaries, confessions to spiritual advisers, and Lives of other religious, written in first- or third-person or both’ (Hallett 2012, xi). While many of these texts seem to have been composed for no audience beyond the author herself (or the God to whom she prayed), some achieved a wider readership, either within the convent or across the broader Catholic diaspora. Male students arriving at the English Jesuit College in Rome, meanwhile, were presented with a set of standard questions about their families, health, education, and commitment to the faith; they answered these questions in their own handwriting, submitting their responses to their superiors for collection in College records (Kenny 1962, vii–viii). Most respondents offered simple, paratactic lists of names, dates, and events, either in Latin or (rarely) English – for example ‘I am called John Dingley, my proper name is Faulkner; I will be twenty-four years old at the next feast of the Annunciation; I was born in Dorchester; I was educated by my uncle John Brook and cousin Edward Peto’ (Kenny 1962, 67, my translation). Others composed more extensive and detailed accounts of their lives, demonstrating how the conventional form of the responsa scholarum could enable autobiographical writings of greater length and greater art. Henry Chaderton, for instance, eschews the numbered questions and instead offers an extended narrative (twenty-two pages long in the modern edition), complete with marginal notes indicating important events – ‘mors primi fratris’, ‘de conversione mea’, ‘quomodo a prima tribulatione liberatus essem’ – an elaborate presentation perhaps indicating Chaderton’s intention to publish his life more broadly (Kenny 1962, 32–50). Both Catholic and Protestant churches, then, trained their members in habits of self-reflection conducive to autobiographical writing, and often gave them explicit paradigms and occasions for such writing. In addition,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

44

44

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

molly murray

the heated conflict between churches produced a number of polemical subgenres of spiritual autobiography. As the pendulum of state religion swung across the Reformation dividing line, first-person accounts of persecution and perseverance helped to bolster the faith of adherents to outlawed denominations. From the published testimonies of Marian martyrs in the early sixteenth century to Quaker trial narratives in the late seventeenth, Protestants used spiritual autobiography not only to testify to individual experience, but also to indict repressive religious authorities. On the Catholic side, members of the Jesuit mission composed first-person chronicles of their careers as ‘hunted priests’, detailing their encounters with both persecutors and co-religionists. John Gerard, for instance, wrote a lengthy Latin narrative of his clandestine missionary work in England, after returning to Europe in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. This text, written for distribution among English and European Catholics, offers vivid descriptions of priestholes and secret chapels, interrogations and confessions, imprisonments and risky escapes, as well as short inset biographies of noted recusants to whom Gerard ministered and noted pursuivants with whom he sparred. Such instances of spiritual autobiography were, again, motivated less by spontaneous introspection than by institutional exigency; in the preface to his text, Gerard insists that he is writing ‘at [his superiors’] orders’, assuring his reader that ‘it must not . . . be thought an unusual and remarkable thing to do’ (Gerard 1952, 23). In Gerard’s rhetoric of writerly ordinariness, and his insistence that ‘what was done, was done by God’, conventional modesty topoi reinforce the exemplary nature of the text; by narrating his own courageous actions, Gerard urges his Catholic readers toward their own acts of bravery. The autobiographies of early modern martyrs and missionaries generally emphasise outward steadfastness rather than inward cataclysm. By contrast, another polemical sub-genre of post-Reformation spiritual autobiography emphasises authorial transformation, specifically the conversion from one church to another, thus mapping the development of the individual Christian soul against the coordinates of the English religious landscape. In accounts of ‘motive’, authors of every denomination describe the process by which they reconsidered their adherence to a particular church, thus fusing autobiographical narrative with a survey of points of contested doctrine (Murray 2009, 74–9). In one published text of motive, framed as a letter to King James, the Catholic convert Benjamin Carier describes his upbringing by his father, ‘a learned and devoute man . . . a Protestant and a Preacher’, who encouraged Carier to ‘ynforme my self whether the Religion of England were indeed the very same’ described in

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

45

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography

45

the Bible (Carier 1614, 2–3). Carier goes on to describe his subsequent reading and reflection, including the ‘greife’ he felt during his reconsideration and the ‘comfort’ he found afterward, couching his theological convictions in highly affective language (Carier 1614, 12–3). Similarly, Richard Sheldon followed his Protestant conversion by publishing the motives that induced him ‘to relinquish & renounce the communion of the present Bishop of Rome’; here again, rather than simply presenting a dry summary of doctrinal points, Sheldon first describes his education at the English College in Rome, and his early career as a Jesuit-in-training, situating his new beliefs within a narrative of the ‘secrets of my soule’ (Sheldon 1612, sig A1 r).

The self as other: scriptural models In addition to following institutional and controversial paradigms, early modern spiritual autobiographers also looked to earlier narratives on which to model their own. Chief among these models, unsurprisingly, was scripture, but more particularly books of scripture written in the first person – enabling autobiographers to couple a general imitatio Christi with more particular instances of imitatio scriptoris. As Hannibal Hamlin and Rivkah Zim have amply demonstrated, early modern English writers translated or paraphrased the book of Psalms for a variety of purposes: devotional, evangelical, philological, or purely literary. The voice of David also offered some writers in the period a vehicle through which to communicate their own emotional or spiritual states. Both Wyatt and Surrey adapted psalms while in prison at the hands of Henry VIII; in doing so, they used David’s words to bewail their own misfortunes, to declare their beliefs, and to condemn political tyranny (Cummings 2007, 223–31; Sessions 1999, 374–6). Elizabeth Heale argues that in Surrey’s psalms ‘the voice of the biblical speaker disappears entirely before an insistent and personal “I”’ (Heale 1998, 173). This disappearance, however, is never allowed to be total; even as Surrey uses the Davidic voice as a vehicle for his own autobiographical lament, he insists upon its biblical origin in order to lend that lament additional force. We can see a similar tactic of autobiographical ventriloquism in other psalm paraphrases, especially those of the so-called ‘penitential’ psalms. Psalm 55 was ‘considered the pre-eminent martyr’s psalm’ in the period (Hamlin 2004, 190), appearing frequently in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments as a refrain of early Reformers in extremis, and in the last words of Catholics on the scaffold. More elaborately, the Marian exile Anne Vaughan Lock (or Lok) concluded her

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

46

46

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

molly murray

translation of Calvin’s sermons with A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: a text which she describes as ‘written in the maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51 Psalme of David’. This ‘paraphrase’ took the form of twenty-one sonnets – the first sonnet sequence in English – each poem elaborating on a verse of the psalm. Lock’s five-sonnet preface, ‘expressing the passioned mind of a penitent sinner’, however, encourages the reader to understand the whole Meditation’s lyric ‘I’ to be both David and the general post-lapsarian Christian – and also the devoutly Protestant Lock herself. In 1553, the title page of the Protestant John Bale’s Vocacyon featured an epigraph from the Psalms, as well as a second taken from another important scriptural model for early modern autobiography: the letters of St. Paul. The story of Paul recounted in Acts, of course, provided many post-Reformation Christians with a pattern for both conversion from sin and evangelism in the face of persecution; as the Independent prophetess Anna Trapnel put it when detailing her mistreatment by interregnum authorities, ‘Paul may have met with beasts at Ephesus, I may say also I met with beasts at Cornwall’ (Trapnel 1654, 54). Similarly, throughout the Vocacyon, Bale presents his life as a version of Paul’s, detailing the trials and triumphs of his Irish mission as re-enactments of episodes from the Acts and Epistles. But he also shapes his text according to the structural conventions of Paul’s own writing, particularly 2 Corinthians. Meredith Skura has argued that Bale’s imitation of Paul in the Vocacyon is thus primarily formal and superficial, a matter of style rather than substance: ‘if Bale modeled himself on Paul, it was a Paul remade in his own image’ (Skura 2008, 52). In this, however, Bale’s use of Paul resembles that of many other early modern spiritual autobiographers. In the lengthy narrative expanded from his English College responsum, for instance, William Alabaster describes his conversion to Catholicism as a recapitulation of Paul’s return to sight after his post-Damascene blindness: ‘as the squames that fell from Paules boddylye eyes, so was I lightened upon the sudden’ (Alabaster 1997, 118; cf. Acts 9:18). More significantly, Alabaster narrates his subsequent Catholic career as a Pauline mission to convert the recalcitrant through acts of self-revelation and testimony. Like Bale, Alabaster uses Paul not only as a model for Christian ethics, but also as a model for Christian self-expression: indeed, the first gesture Alabaster makes after his conversion is to ‘discover [himself] publiquely’ in a sermon on ‘the woordes of St. Paul to his Timothy’ (Alabaster 1997, 131). The framing of his own autobiographical text as a letter to an unnamed ‘friend’, meanwhile, underscores Alabaster’s formal debt to Paul’s epistolary (and autobiographical) evangelism.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

47

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography

47

The self as other: Augustine Early modern spiritual autobiographers also looked beyond the scriptures for experiential and formal models, and found one of the most significant in the Confessions of St. Augustine. In this text, often cited by modern critics as the first noteworthy spiritual autobiography in the Western canon, Augustine describes his early intellectual and spiritual errancy and his protracted and anguished search for resolution. The narrative centres on a climactic experience in a garden, when Augustine ‘suddenly hear[s] a voice from the nearby house’, a voice which he determines to be that of a child, mysteriously chanting ‘tolle, lege; tolle, lege’ (‘pick up and read; pick up and read’). Heeding the voice, Augustine picks up the nearest book (which happens to be scripture), casts his eye on a passage of Paul’s letter to the Romans, and within minutes ‘neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled’ (Augustine 1991, 152–3). In the five subsequent books of the Confessions, Augustine describes the aftermath of this epiphany: his attempts to convert others, his private and emotional responses to God’s love, and his vigorous intellectual engagement with Christian theology. Throughout, Augustine’s story – and his manner of telling it – jointly illustrate the spiritual autobiographer’s double vision. On the one hand, the story centres on a sudden turn to a new life, and a concomitant turn to a new way of narrating the self. On the other, both the story and its genre are entirely unoriginal: Augustine composed the Confessions not in a moment of inspiration, but in an institutional context, partly to refute allegations of heresy. Within the narrative, Augustine surrounds his moment of conversion with the first- and second-hand stories of other Christian converts: Simplicianus, Victorinus, Ponticianus, Antony (Augustine 1992, 133–46; Stock 1996, 75–111). Like those converts, Augustine turns to Christianity after reading a work of scripture, but that climactic experience of reading is only one strand in a complex fabric of other narrative encounters. In turn, Augustine weaves his own readerly transformation into his writerly mission, proposing his autobiographical text as a means for readers to experience and express conversions of their own. Scholars have traced Augustine’s influence on English Reformation thought, from Perry Miller’s classic account of an ‘Augustinian strain of piety’ in the Puritan churches of England and New England to Katrin Ettenhuber’s recent treatment of Augustine’s reception among mainstream English Protestants. Two of the most deeply Augustinian autobiographers

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

48

48

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

molly murray

in the period, however, converted away from the Reformed church. We have already encountered the first of these men, William Alabaster, who embeds the Pauline moment of his conversion in a narrative otherwise heavily indebted to the Confessions. He explains that after a period of irresolution, and of wrestling with the various claims of Christian denominations, he retired to his room with a work of controversy written by another Catholic convert, William Rainolds: ‘I had not read for a quarter of an howre’, he recalls, when he was ‘lightned upon the suddene, feeling my selfe so wonderfully and sensybly chaunged in both judgement and affection as I remaned astonished at my trewe state. I fownde my minde wholie and perfectly Catholique in an instante’ (Alabaster 1997, 118). Like Augustine’s, Alabaster’s conversion is mediated by text, and modelled upon other conversions (in this case, that of Rainolds). It is instantaneous, but it is also followed by ‘many great difficulties, damages and dangers, the overthrowe of my whole course of lyf hitherto ledd and designed, the leesing [losing] of my lyving, freends, honors, and other worldly comodities’ (Alabaster 1997, 119), and by experiencing ‘floodes of teares’ when contemplating God (Alabaster 1997, 122). Finally, like Augustine’s, Alabaster’s conversion inspires him not only to devotion and disputation, but to the composition of autobiography – both to profess his faith, and to ‘stir up’ the emulative reader. Less than a decade later, another English Catholic convert, Sir Tobie Matthew, composed another recognisably Augustinian conversion narrative. He describes a journey to Italy, inspired by an ‘insatiable desire of the perfection of the Italian tongue . . . which I loved as well as any fool would dote upon a fine bauble’ (Matthew 1904, 34). There, a series of encounters with English Catholics encouraged him to doubt his faith. This ‘perplexity, and anxiety of mind’, Matthew recalls, was punctuated by a recurrent event: ‘every day there passed once, and sometimes oftener, under my window, near a certain hour, . . . a procession of little boys, singing the litanies of our B. Lady. And I know not by what chance, or rather Providence of Almighty God, the tune of that sweet verse, Sancta Maria, Ora pro nobis, came so often in at mine ears, and contented me so much, that at length my tongue took it up; not indeed as a prayer . . . but as a song’ (Matthew 1904, 14–5). This refrain, which Matthew repeats ‘like a parrot’, eventually leads to a decidedly non-intellectual revelation: ‘I saw [points of theology] not discursively one by one, but they were represented to me all together, as in a most bright glass, in such a manner as really I am not able to express.’ Having converted, Matthew recalls, he was ‘delivered from all reluctation of mind’ (Matthew 1904, 51). The early scholarly hubris, the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

49

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography

49

perplexity, the overheard songs of children, the sudden illumination transcending its textual source – throughout his autobiography, Matthew employs a series of recognisably Augustinian tropes. The intensity of Matthew’s identification with Augustine might explain one of the more remarkable moments in the autobiography, where a Protestant’s declaration that ‘St. Austen . . . was a villain’ leads Matthew to ‘confess, I was half tempted to throw him down and break his neck’ (Matthew 1904, 92). Matthew’s engagement with Augustine extended beyond his own autobiographical text. In 1620, several years after his conversion, Matthew produced the first English translation of the Confessions, inspiring a heated polemical debate. In his preface to the reader, despite his ecumenical statement that the book is intended for ‘Bothe Catholikes, and Protestants’, Matthew also insists that ‘the beliefe and practise of S. Augustine, and the Church of his tyme, were fully agreable to that of the Catholike Roman Church at this day’ (Matthew 1620, 3, 8). Throughout, Matthew’s marginal notes assert consonances between Augustine’s theology and tenets of postTridentine Catholicism. Such claims would be multiply rebutted by Protestants in print. Matthew Sutcliffe, in the energetically-entitled The Unmasking of a Masse-Monger, who in the counterfeit habit of S. Augustine hath cunningly crept into the Closets of many English Ladyes, Or: The Vindication of S. Augustine’s Confessions, from the false and malicious Calumniations of a late noted Apostate, flatly asserted that ‘the poyson of [Catholic] Heresie cannot be found in that holy Fathers workes’ (Sutcliffe 1626, f2b), offering point-by-point ripostes to each of Matthew’s marginal claims. In 1631, William Watts, rector of St. Albans, published his own English version of the Confessions as an alternative to Matthew’s ‘Arrantly, Partially Popish’ translation – replacing the frontispiece of Matthew’s 1620 Confessions, featuring a mitred church father at his desk, with another image of Augustine in the plain dress of a reformer (Watts 1631, 4; Lynch 2012, 31–49). Despite their conflicts over Augustine’s theological affinities, Matthew, Sutcliffe, and Watts agree on a basic principle: that the autobiographical text of the Confessions ‘declares as it were the Complexion of the soule of this incomparable saint’ (Matthew 1620, 4), and that translating or even ‘parroting’ that text can be understood as an act of self-expression (tellingly, when Watts refers to ‘the Author’ of the 1620 Confessions, he doesn’t mean Augustine, but rather Matthew). Sutcliffe’s vociferous doctrinal objections to Matthew’s Confessions nevertheless accept the logic of impersonation and ventriloquism on which the translation rests: by ‘Englishing’ the Confessions, the convert Matthew has not simply Catholicised

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

50

50

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

molly murray

Augustine, but has become Augustine (a process that Sutcliffe caricatures as a cunning ‘disguise’ meant to convert unwitting ladies). Watts, in turn, justifies his own translation of Augustine not simply as a corrective to Matthew’s, but as his own act of ‘Lenten Devotion’ that will allow him to identify with, and partake of, Augustine’s sanctity; he extends this idea of textual empathy to ‘the devout Reader – or such a one I hope this book will make thee’ (Watts 1631, A5 r). The early modern debates over Augustine’s Confessions thus reinforce an understanding of spiritual autobiography as something both imitative and imitable, indicating further how the translation of an extant autobiography can function as an autobiographical gesture in its own right.

The self as other: St. Teresa of Avila Taken as a whole, Toby Matthew’s writerly career illustrates what we might call spiritual autobiography by proxy, comprising not only his own Augustinian conversion narrative and his translation of the Confessions, but a host of translations of other life-writings, all underscoring the effectiveness of textual imitation as a form of religious selffashioning. His English version of Vicenzo Puccini’s The Life of Suor Maria Maddalena de Patsi (or Pazzi), drawn in part from the writings of Pazzi herself, suggests that ‘good and fit examples’ are more effective devotional aids than ‘the counsaile of vertuous friends, the reading of holy bookes, and the observation of Gods universall providence’ (Matthew 1619, np 2). This rhetoric of exemplarity, while downplaying the importance of the ‘holy bookes’ of scripture, is nevertheless deeply textual: Matthew imagines a chain of imitation extending from Pazzi’s autobiographical writings, to Puccini’s construction of her ‘Life,’ to Matthew’s translation of both, and finally to the reader of Matthew’s English version. A similar notion animates Matthew’s translation of Giuseppe Biondo’s The Penitent Bandito, or A Relation of the death of . . . Troilo Savelli. This text, which Matthew prefaces as a ‘lesson . . . to all Readers in general’ (Matthew 1663, 36), is both a second-person account of Savelli’s conversion on the eve of his execution, and a firstperson narrative by Biondo, who describes ‘the progress, and period of [the conversion] as in the night when it hapned, I went observing it pace by pace, to the comfort of mine own Soul’ (Matthew 1663, 38). Biondo’s text is thus both hagiography and spiritual autobiography, and Matthew’s translation allows him to occupy the position of both the ‘penitent bandito’ and his sympathetic narrator.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

51

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography

51

Most notably, in 1623, Matthew published The Flaming Hart, or The Life of the Glorious S. Teresa: an English translation of the Vida of St. Teresa of Avila (ca. 1567). While this early edition does not survive, the 1642 edition is prefaced, like Matthew’s translation of Biondo, by a discussion of autobiographical exemplarity. Addressing ‘the Christian and Civil Reader’, Matthew asserts that ‘when Saints themselves write their owne Lives; as the Incomparable S. Augustin did a great part of his, the Divine Booke of his Confessions’, such texts are ‘incomparably, of the most credit of all’ (Matthew 1642, np *7 v-8 r). Spiritual autobiographies, Matthew declares, reflect more than the ‘Brain, or Understanding’ of their authors, or the facts of their lives; more importantly, such texts convey the ‘Truth, & Sincerity and Candour’ of their authors’ ‘Hart, or Will’ (Matthew 1642, np **1 r). Here, Matthew borrows Teresa’s own rhetoric of affective authority (for instance, her extensive discussion of holy ‘rapture’ in Book 20 as a ‘fierce, and yet a savourie and delightfull kind of Martyrdom’ (Matthew 1642, 259)), to describe the effect of the work on the reader. Dedicating The Flaming Hart to Queen Henrietta Maria, Matthew urges her to ‘study [Teresa’s] Life (I meane, that Life of hers, which she wrote, with that most holy, & wise hand of her owne, which I Here present)’ (Matthew 1642, 3). By studying not just Teresa’s life, but Teresa’s Life (written, Matthew says, according to ‘her owne Processe’), Henrietta Maria and others will not only be instructed in holiness, but will be inspired by Teresa’s emotionally charged mode of self-expression as well. Matthew thus proposes a process of enkindling that extends from Teresa’s text, through his own translation, and beyond. The flame seems to have reached Lucy Knatchbull, Matthew’s spiritual advisee at the English Benedictine convent at Ghent, who composed a spiritual autobiography in the late 1640s. Matthew included this text in a larger manuscript biography of Knatchbull, recalling (in a phrase that exchanges fiery imagery for liquid) ‘how deeply she was wont to wade, in those supernaturall waters, where St. Theresa used to bath and swimme’ (Hallett 2012, 173). Knatchbull’s autobiography seems to bear out Matthew’s claim that she and Teresa ‘are as like one another . . . for Quality and kind as even two dropps of water can be’ (Hallett 2012, 194). Like Teresa, Knatchbull describes a youthful spiritual awakening, when ‘I Conceaved a great desire, to beginne in good earnest to serve Almighty God’. This desire, however, was accompanied by ‘extreeme repugnance’ – a psychomachia, Knatchbull confesses, that left her ‘hart . . . in peeces’ (Hallett 2012, 161). Finally, after three years of struggle, Knatchbull came to ‘a firme Resolution to be Religious, though I could not then see, howe it was possible but that I

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

52

52

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

molly murray

should suffer all the days of my Life intollerably by it’ (Hallett 2012, 162). Knatchbull sticks to her resolution, however, and eventually her intermittent doubts are compensated by moments of blissful illumination: when I had Received the holy Communion; and was returned into the Place in which I was to pray me thought I found my Soule as it were Casting her Self into the armes of our Lord, and he haveing regard to her seemed in the same instant to draw into himself the affections of my whole hart . . . I became all faint and as Comeing out of a most delightful trance; knew not what to doe but as it were to seek to dye by ingulfing my selfe in that sea of goodnesse. (Hallett 2012, 169)

This highly Teresian moment of eroticised spiritual bliss (where the self ‘seeks to dye’ in a paroxysm of divine love) happens, un-coincidentally, on ‘the first of October being the Feast of the Mother St. Teresa of Jesus’. As a final instance of Teresa’s (and Matthew’s) influence on early modern spiritual autobiography, we might consider a text that seems, at first, not at all autobiographical: a poem by the English Catholic convert Richard Crashaw. In this poem, entitled ‘The Flaming Heart’ after Matthew’s translation of Teresa’s Vida, Crashaw begins by narrating Teresa’s early life, and ends by describing her text’s effect on himself as a Christian and as a writer:

[. . ..]

O sweet incendiary! Shew here thy art Upon this carcasse of a hard, cold, hart, Let all thy scatter’d shafts of light, that play Among the leaves of thy larg Books of day, Combin’d against this Brest at once break in And take away from me my self and sin By all the heav’ns thou hast in him (Fair sister of the Seraphim!) By all of Him we have in Thee Leave nothing of my Self in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may dy. (Crashaw 1972, 64–5; lines 85–108)

Despite its rhetoric of self-annihilation, Crashaw’s praise of Teresa in these concluding lines is profoundly self-expressive. Extoling Teresa’s ‘life’ and ‘leaves,’ and borrowing her (and her English translator’s) language of affective, erotic ‘dying’ into new life, Crashaw finds a way to describe his own spiritual experience (in lieu, perhaps, of the first-person conversion narrative that he would never write). The poem thus illustrates what we could call the radical transitivity of religious life-writing in early modern

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

53

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography

53

England – that is, the capacity of the autobiographical text to provide a link between subjectivities, or even to express multiple subjectivities at once. Such a capacity belies, or at least complicates, post-Reformation spiritual autobiography’s oft-cited status as the fons et origo of the individualist self, or as early evidence for Georges Gusdorf’s claim that autobiography’s ‘deepest intentions [are] directed toward a kind of apologetics or theodicy of the individual being’ (Gusdorf 1980, 39). By contrast, Crashaw’s poem, like many of the other spiritual autobiographies surveyed in this essay, emphasises the inextricability of ‘the individual being’ from a larger matrix of lives and stories. In their combination of sincerity and emulation, these texts paradoxically give voice not only to a time that is both past and future, but also to a being that is both self and other.

Bibliography Alabaster, William. 1997. Unpublished Works. Edited by Dana Sutton. Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 126. Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg and Portland, OR: International Specialized Book Services Inc. Augustine. 1991. Confessions. Edited and translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bale, John. 1553. The vocacyon of Ioha[n] Bale to the bishiprick of Ossorie in Irela[n]de. Carier, Benjamin. 1614. A Treatise Written by Mr. Dr. Carier. Brussels. Conti, Brooke, 2014. Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Crashaw, Richard. 1972. The Complete Poetry. Edited by George Walton Williams. New York: New York University Press. Cummings, Brian. 2007. The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dragstra, Henk, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox, eds. 2000. Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English texts. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ettenhuber, Katrin. 2011. Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerard, John. 1952. The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest. Edited and translated by Philip Caraman, SJ. Garden City, NY: Image. Gusdorf, Georges. 1980. ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, 28–48. Edited by James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

54

54

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

molly murray

Hallett, Nicky, ed. 2012. The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Vol 3: Life Writing I. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hamlin, Hannibal. 2004. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heale, Elizabeth. 1998. Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry. London: Longman. Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. 2005. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenny, Anthony, ed. 1962. The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome. 2 vols. Newport: Publications of the Catholic Record Society. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. ‘The Autobiographical Pact.’ In On Autobiography, 3–30. Edited by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lock, Anne Vaughan. 1999. The Collected Works. Edited by Susan M. Felch. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Lynch, Kathleen. 2012. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mathew, A. H., ed. 1904. A True Historical Relation of the Conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew to the Holy Catholic Faith: With the Antecedents and Consequences Thereof. London: Burns & Oates. [Matthew, Tobie], trans. 1619. The Life of the Holy and venerable Mother Suor Maria Maddalena de Patsi . . . written in Italian by the Reverent Priest Sir. Vincentio Puccini. St. Omer. [Matthew, Tobie], trans. 1620. The Confessions of the Incomparable Doctour S. Augustine, Translated into English. [St. Omer.] [Matthew, Tobie], trans. 1642. The Flaming Hart or the Life of the Glorious S. Teresa. Antwerp. [Matthew, Tobie], trans. 1663. The Penitent Bandito: or, the history of the Conversion and death of the most illustrious lord Signor Troilo Savelli. [np]. Miller, Perry. 1961. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Boston: Beacon. Morgan, Edmund. 1963. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Murray, Molly. 2007. ‘‘Now I ame a Catholique:’ William Alabaster and the Early Modern Catholic Conversion Narrative.’ In Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, 189–215. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur Marotti. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Murray, Molly. 2009. The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Nuttall, G. F. 1957. Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–1660. Oxford: Blackwell. Powell, Vavasor. 1653. Spirituall experiences, of sundry beleevers. London.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C04.3D

55

[41–55] 20.10.2015 10:25AM

The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography

55

Sessions, William. 1999. Henry Howard, The Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sheldon, Richard. 1612. The Motives of Richard Sheldon, Pr., for his iust, voluntary, and free renouncing of Communion with the Bishop of Rome. London. Skura, Meredith. 2008. Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smyth, Adam. 2010. Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stock, Brian. 1996. Augustine the Reader. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. S., M. [Sutcliffe, Mathew]. 1626. The Unmasking of a Masse-Monger. London. Trapnel, Anna. 1654. Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea: or, a narrative of her journey into Cornwal. London. Watkins, Owen. 1672. The Spiritual Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography. London: Routledge. Watts, William. 1631. St. Augustines Confessions Translated. London. Zim, Rivkah. 1987. English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

56

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

chapter 5

Inscribing the early modern self The materiality of autobiography Kathleen Lynch

Even as we write about autobiography before ‘autobiography’, we often still read early modern autobiographical narratives through the lens of generic conventions that reified an introspective, retrospective self. It is equally likely that early modern exemplars will be read through the lens of nineteenth-century print conventions. Many of the earliest print publications of these texts date from nineteenth-century series. These series highlight certain genealogies – of aristocratic families, religious denominations, or local histories – that also shape the ways we read early modern autobiography (Peterson 1993). Imposing a Victorian sensibility on early modern texts, the print revival also effaced early modern material forms. Two hundred years on, with many of these texts now in archives and rare book libraries, it has taken another wave of scholarly discoveries for us to better understand the range of documentary practices through which early modern autobiographical intentions were realised. Excitingly, contemporary editorial practices (including the examples referenced here) are newly concerned with documenting early modern material forms of inscription, including descriptions and illustrations of the preparation of notebooks, the mise-en-page of composition, the placement of marginal comment, the evidence of authorial revision over time, and the admixtures of autobiography with a range of genres and other authorial hands, even in a single volume. Online transcriptions and digital images are further helping today’s readers appreciate the full range of experiment and innovation with early modern forms of autobiography. This chapter focuses on materials and occasions of composition to highlight early modern autobiography’s characteristic experimentation with form and function. It argues that we must attend to the processes and material forms of writing if we want to understand fully the constructedness of autobiographies’ shifting relations between writing self and written self. 56

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

57

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

Inscribing the early modern self

57

A signature is a basic inscription of self. But does a signature signify assent? Legal interrogation frames some of the earliest extant English accounts of personal belief. Throughout the English Reformation, an autograph may become the contested crux of conviction. Such was the case for Anne Askew (ca. 1521–1546), a young gentlewoman who attracted the attention of the bishops persecuting Protestant reformers in the court circles of Queen Katherine Parr. Askew was burned at the stake in Smithfield when she was just twenty-five, after having been arraigned for heresy, imprisoned, and tortured. Askew created a first-person report of her interrogations, and though it exists only in heavily mediated forms, the trace of her account reflects the dangers of her attempts to negotiate room for personal conviction. Through multiple interrogations, Askew never spoke unless she was spoken to, never asserted anything except in answer to a question, and then, often tactically aimed to leave room for interpretation, for deferral, for redirection (Matchinske 1998, 40–9). What did Askew sign at the end of the First Examination? And what did she understand the document to say? According to John Bale’s printed edition, it was a confession of faith produced for her signature by Bishop Edmund Bonner in March 1545. Bonner read it aloud to her, but did not give her a copy. Struggling to remember the text, she responded that ‘I beleve so moche thereof, as the holye scripture doth agre to’ (Askew 1996, 60). When the bishop insisted she sign, Askew reported ‘I writte after thys maner, I Anne Askewe do beleve all maner thynges contayned in the faythe of the Catholyck churche’ (Ibid., 62). There are no surviving manuscripts of Askew’s written reports of her interrogations that we could identify as the handwritten report that she attested was ‘written by me Anne Askewe’ (Ibid., 65). Neither is the signed confession extant. But the multiple, conflicting layers of editorial commentary in print publication and manuscript church records attest to the significance of this signature as court and church officials jostled for power near the end of Henry VIII’s reign. Credible reporting and networks of witnesses were activated and communal religious identities solidified by Askew’s case. Documentary evidence was sought. When John Foxe included Askew’s story in The Actes and Monuments (1563), he eliminated Bale’s mostly self-referential commentary. But Foxe added his own commentary on the entry in the church register, which he, or someone on his behalf, had looked up. Foxe reprinted the derogatory register headnote and then refuted it as ‘a double sleight of false conveyaunce’ (Foxe 2011, 3: 72r). With this, Askew fully entered polemics and Protestant martyrology as a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

58

58

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

kathleen lynch

conscientious objector, even as her first-person, handwritten testimony was lost to history. The highly developed arts of genealogy and heraldry were another genre where elite identities were recorded and, sometimes, contested. These, too, were seedbeds of autobiographical narrative, especially as they drew on discourses of nobility. Virtue and merit was the tenor of the upbringing of Margaret Cavendish (1623?–1673), as she tells it, emphasising that her father was a gentleman of the old order, having earned his title by action, not purchase. Her stress on virtue is sharpened by a marginal addition in the British Library copy of Natures Pictures drawn by fancy’s pencil to the life (1656), one of her earliest publications, which included ‘A true relation of my birth, breeding, and life’. The extent of Cavendish’s concerns with her self-representation in print can be illustrated in many ways, including the engraved frontispiece portrait of her aristocratic family at their domestic entertainments, the multiple prefaces she composed for her own writing, and her (presumably) direct contact with publishers Martin and Allestrye, who operated out of the Rose and Crown in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Multiple extant presentation copies of Cavendish’s publications also include corrections and small revisions in her hand, including attributions of passages to her husband. Other copies of her publications include pasted in, printed slips. These functioned neither as index or correction, as Jeffrey Masten points out. Rather, they instantiated the ‘lavish and conflicted performances of her printed texts’ (Masten 2004, 68). Cavendish had a pioneer’s heightened awareness of what it meant to appear in print, and she had the means to orchestrate her authorial self-representations. Precisely what it meant for her to add a handwritten ‘virtuous’ in the margin of a page of her autobiography is unclear – but it doubles down on the appeal to blood as an essentialising element of her self-portrait:‘we had for all sorts of

virtuous

Vertues, as singing, dancing, playing on Music, Reading, writing, working, and the like’(Cavendish 1656, 370–1).

Throughout her singular writing career, Cavendish set many, strikingly individualised moves against this overdetermined background. Yet she still grounded the singularity of her ambition in class-based terms. Cavendish also needed to specify which of her husband’s wives she was. She concluded her autobiography with the sceptical question she imagines her readers asking: ‘why hath this Ladie writ her own Life?’ She gives two answers. The first is defiant. ‘I write it for my own sake, not theirs’. The second sets the genealogical record straight. ‘To tell the truth, lest after-Ages should mistake, in not knowing I was daughter to one Master Lucas of St. Johns neer Colchester in Essex, second Wife to the Lord Marquiss of Newcastle,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

59

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

Inscribing the early modern self

59

for my Lord having had two Wives, I might easily have been mistaken, especially if I should dye, and my Lord Marry again’ (Ibid., 390–1). No one in the period documented her family position more assiduously than Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676). Clifford’s autobiographical writings were prolific across a range of genres and media, with sculpted memorials, commissioned paintings, and financial account books all contributing to her self-documentary efforts (Friedman 1995, Myers 2006, Smyth 2010). Throughout, Clifford claimed property rights and contested what she understood to be the illegitimate usurpation of those claims. Clifford’s father, George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, one of the richest men in England, willed his estate to his brother in 1605, leaving Anne, his only surviving child, with a modest annuity and the promise of a substantial dowry if she did not contest the inheritance. But contest she did, finally regaining the estates in 1643 at the death of her cousin. Civil War kept her from the properties for another several years. Clifford’s work (supported by her mother, various secretaries, and antiquarians) is steeped in the methods of heraldry and the sculptural arts of memorialisation. Clifford’s massive documentation of her lineage, her property claims, and her daily experience includes four years of diaries (1603 and 1616–1619) that survive in posthumous copies (Clifford 2007, 37–40); a three volume ‘Great Books of Record’ begun in 1650 (surviving in multiple copies); and a ‘Day Book’ with dictated entries in multiple hands from January through March 1676. Throughout she stresses her belonging to the land. This position is entirely consistent with the vested interests of the aristocracy and the nation. In Clifford’s hands, it becomes the chorography of the self. Clifford’s earliest extant text is the 1603 ‘Memoir’. This personal history begins with Queen Elizabeth’s death and her own youthful proximity to the court (Ibid., 43). But Clifford’s texts are never linear. They contain abundant evidence of layerings of notation – and accumulations of meaning over time. Throughout her life, Clifford returns repeatedly to events she has described earlier and adds annotations to those earlier descriptions that enrich her sense of belonging. For instance, also near the beginning of the 1603 ‘Memoir’, she adds in a later marginal note: ‘At the death of this worthy Queen my mother and I lay at Austin Friars in the same chamber where afterwards I was married’ (Ibid., 42). Recursiveness turns writing into an aide-de-memoir, and eventually a prosthetic memory. There was no place more resonant for Clifford than Brougham Castle, where her father was born and her mother died, facts she repeats ritualistically. Arriving at Brougham in 1653, to claim her paternal inheritance, she records: ‘And I had not layne in this Brougham Castle in Thirty Seaven

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

60

60

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

kathleen lynch

yeares till now (when I was married to Richard, Earle of Dorset). . . In which long time I past through many strange and hard fortunes in the Sea of this World’ (Clifford 1990, 120). The providentialism of her death at Brougham is recorded in a last, posthumous entry in the last volume of ‘The Great Books of Record’. This gesture is of a piece with what Anne Myers describes as Clifford’s insatiable ‘desire to reproduce her own authoritative presence’ in the places that belong to her and to which she belongs (Myers 2006, 592). In Clifford’s life-writings, retrospectively imposed distinctions between diary and autobiography crumble. As elsewhere, material evidence here gives us a better understanding of the ways people observed and recorded their lives, working through interrelated forms. A fuller set of recovered examples has also revealed multiple framing devices for self-observation – from the margins of a printed history like Stow’s Survey, for instance, to the interleaved blank pages of printed almanacs and intermixed with financial accounts (Smyth 2010). The idea that one might dedicate a blank book to self-observation was also beginning to take hold in the seventeenth century. One might well undertake this new routine with a new year – as did the most famous of all early modern journal writers, Samuel Pepys (1633–1703). The beginning of what Pepys called his journal is also caught up in historical senses of new beginnings – the return of monarchy and his own service to the state. Six volumes of Pepys’s journals are extant, with daily entries from 1 January 1660 to 31 May 1669 (excepting only eleven days in autumn 1668). But the assumption that Pepys wrote on a daily basis does not hold up to the evidence. In places, Pepys talks about his journal entries in spurts, as on 14 January 1666, a Sunday, when he determines ‘to perform my vow to finish my Journall and other things before I kiss any woman more, or drink any wine’ (Pepys 197–83, vol. 7, 15). Equally spurious is the assumption that diary writing lacks a sense of narrative drive or of the larger stakes of introspection. Stuart Sherman has demonstrated that the diarist’s tactics may include ‘tiny prose strategies of motion and enclosure’ that gesture towards the autobiographer’s retrospection (Sherman 2005, 656). Pepys’s daily records, so seemingly self-contained with the conclusory ‘and so to bed’, are just as attuned to the length of a page. His entries also yield regularly to larger temporal contexts – with summary statements at the ends of months, at ends of years, and at ends of volumes. Events of national or local importance can also lead to summary observations, in confirmation that temporal frameworks are multiple and juxtaposed.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

61

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

Inscribing the early modern self

61

By the time Pepys put pen to blank book in 1660, a convention of spiritual reckoning was also well established. Richard Rogers’s Seven Treatises (1603) was among the early printed exhortations to selfexamination. Rogers himself kept a diary. So did his grandson, Samuel, a third-generation godly minister. Samuel Rogers (1613–1642?) began his book with a prelude. His announcement that ‘I have long bene thinking of a generall view of my life’ again belies any easy distinction between diary and autobiography (Rogers 1634–1638, 1). The leather bound blank book of nearly 200 pages is completely filled with just over four years of diary keeping, from 18 November 1634 to 31 December 1638. Each leaf of the text shows signs of having been folded twice vertically into quarters. The left columns thus established are reserved for dates. Perhaps the folded pages also served as a navigational guide, like a turned down corner, providing a tabular sense of the writer’s place in the volume. There is no consistent amount of space apportioned to an entry. Rogers simply draws a line most of the way across the page to separate his entries. ‘Samuel Rogers His Booke’ was begun shortly after what he called a second conversion at the age of twenty-one (Ibid., 7). As in so many other devotional accounts, the habit of self-examination is a generative device. Rogers attends to the rhythm of a week, as leading up to and then away from the Sabbath – even despite his regular disappointment in the Sabbath sermons. The momentum from one day’s entry to another can also have a playful cast, as when he spins a single sentence rapidly across a week in September 1638. The present tense of the entries does not admit what is nevertheless the possibility that these were all entered retrospectively at one sitting: 24 25 26 27

Now we visit friends, and recreate our selves at C.[ousin] Suttons, &: but I find it hard to walke closely with G[od] in such occasions; we see desolate sister Hannah and comfort her, and cheare her weary spirit; 28 we goe to colne, and the L[or]d was with mee in the ordinance there and wee rejoice much in each others companies; 29 I returne home, and the L[or]d is good to mee, I find it hard to keep up my sp[irit] in riding; and am saluted with the sad newes of pox in familye, but thou oh Lord art my hiding place in life, and death (Ibid., 352).

Rogers was nearing the end of his book at that point. The material limits of the book are almost a conceptual challenge. What can I do in and with this

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

62

62

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

kathleen lynch

space? One of the things he does with his book is read it. Occasional passages are starred in the margin. These are almost always moments of spiritual sustenance, as on 1 July 1638: ‘Saboth; and sacrament at Coleman, broken to pieces with joy; drunk with comfort; this is a day of rejoicing and strength, for the joy of the L[or]d, hath bin my strength; A sweet communion of Saints, . . . and now I lye downe with praises’ (Ibid., 335). Such mystical ecstasy is not sustainable. He writes on the very next day, ‘Somewhat down ag[ain] oh Lord thou liftest mee up, and casteth mee downe’ (Ibid., 335). That pattern of finding and losing spiritual joy is part of the rhythm of life and narrative alike. The starred passages raise the question of how Rogers used ‘His Booke’. The marginal stars are in the same ink. Presumably these are his markings, but were such passages marked when written or later when reread? Clearly, they are instrumental for him,as he relied on them for remembering and recovery purposes. For Tom Webster, ‘the material site of his past became an object, like Scripture, of meditation and, unlike Scripture, of active re-making’ (Webster 1996, 48). The volume concludes neatly enough. An entry for December 31 fits nicely at the bottom of the verso of the last page, followed by a flourish of ‘Finis Anno 1638‘. He brings the volume to a close at the end of the year. This exercise in self-study is intentionally complete. But how representative is it of the life in full? There’s pathos in the question, for little else is known of this young man in the years following, and he may have died by 1642, before the age of thirty. We could not in any event get a picture of the life in full from within the life. Such is the condition of autobiography – a simulacrum of completion against the impossibility of the task. But Rogers has worked with the material limits of a blank book to shape a portrait of his way of being in the world. Elizabeth Isham’s play with material limits provides further evidence of early modern understandings of the operations of memory and the construction of identity. Isham (1609–1654) wrote a ‘Booke of Rememberance’ in 1638. Intriguingly, she also constructed another autobiographical document, this as much about memory, if less about narrative. The second document is a summary of the first forty years of her life on a single sheet of paper (Isham ca. 1650). One is tempted to think of this breviate of her life as portable, something she kept on her person, perhaps. But all we really know is that she folded a single sheet of paper along two different edges to form eighteen sections on each side – six across and three down. Then, in each section, she summarised a year of her life (with the first three sections covering her first eight years). In a tiny hand, she noted events in her life

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

63

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

Inscribing the early modern self

63

that she remembered from that year. In 1629, for instance, her list of notes includes: I began my cutwork {hanckerchiefe?} I read som of Chawser and danced and sung to my selfe somtimes My Sisterwas somewhat ill I began to plock flowers

about this time I thought I should . . . know, what was best . . . for my selfe and agreeable to my owne Nature according to the proverb by 20 one should be a foole or phisition. New England was now began to be spoken on. (Isham ca. 1650) The section dedicated to 1638 confirms the significance of her ‘Booke of Rememberance’, which she also called her ‘Confessions’, after Augustine: ‘I began my confessions which was my Chiefest worke for this yere and almost the next’. But this was not the first item Isham noted in her summary of the year. That honour went to a note about her Aunt Denton wanting Isham to come live with her. References to needlework (‘I wrot Bandstrings; I made me a pare of bodis’), beekeeping, prayer, illness, and other everyday concerns of a provincial gentlewoman were also noted in that year. This mixture of experiences is as revealing of the nature of retrospection as is found in any early modern English text. A variety of practices come together here – spiritual examination, notations in almanacs, and the keeping of domestic accounts, among them. Isham’s needlework powerfully activates memory and self-understanding. A subject might constitute itself through a variety of material forms. Nehemiah Wallington’s self-exploratory entries, kept over four decades, take the idea of active remaking of self a step further. Wallington (1598–1658) could say, with Montaigne, my book is my self – though for Wallington, it would be books. Is the self then multiplied, as well? There is no better early modern English illustration of the inability of writing to keep up with experience. Wallington was twenty years old when he began to write down his sins in 1618. He began the ‘last book which I intend to write’ in 1654, and he was annotating others as late as 1658, just weeks before he died at the age of sixty. Wallington brings a palpable despair to his exploration of spiritual identity. Over fifty volumes, he creates a fully externalised memory palace. We know there were fifty, because volume forty seven is an ‘Extract’ of the others, and it contains a list, including three overlooked titles that were added on a loose slip of paper bound in to the blank book. ‘The Lord make me humble and write it in my heart’ (Wallington 1654, insert after iv).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

64

64

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

kathleen lynch

If only God’s inscriptions had taken affective hold, his whole life of writing would have been spared. Paul Seaver estimated the volume of Wallington’s writing as at least twenty thousand pages, an astonishing output for an ordinary wood turner (Seaver 1985, 2). Even more striking are the mnemonics and the taxonomies Wallington deployed. He provides many physical descriptions of his volumes: ‘A black cover Book’, ‘A Book with Clasps’, ‘A Book with a red cover and clasps’, ‘A Book with a black cover, yellow Leaves & Clasps’, ‘A Long Book’, and ‘A thin paper book with a parchment cover’ (Wallington 1654, i–v). This is description as finding aid, as well as evidence of the ways Wallington personalised books and attended to their material and bibliographical traits. Wallington also has an expansive understanding of ‘writing’. Most fundamentally for him, to write is the physical act – to copy out, to transcribe, to take notes on, or to extract. In keeping with an authorcentric understanding of writing, Seaver extracted Wallington’s autobiographical writing from the larger textual production. But such an approach cannot fully account for the way the authorial self-representation emerges from the exchange with news, with scriptures, with sermons, with lists of self-imposed disciplines, and so on. Three volumes dated 1632 illustrate Wallington’s taxonomical framework for self-study. One is extant, and each is extracted in the 1654 epitome of the volumes, also extant. Collectively, they exemplify Wallington’s elaborate commonplacing system that operates across volumes. Warnings are listed together in one place; comforts in another. But taxonomies escape his control. Even Wallington’s dating is misleading, for the ‘Memoriall of Gods Judgments’ reaches back to 1618 when he records ‘a Blazing starre’ and continues forward through the 1650s with observations on various fires in London (Ibid., 4 r and 92 r). Wallington’s last extant entry is in this volume, when he notes, just months before his death, that he had begun to re-read the book, but ‘I forebare to take any further notice of it, for at the present I am very ill in my body’ (Ibid., 2 v). To the very end, Wallington collected, categorised, and consulted passages of his life. He tracked experience as it unfolded, doubled back, and moved in a new direction. He worked the same ground for four decades in his struggle for spiritual ‘assurance’. He characteristically set goals and disciplines (like how to stay awake during sermons) and imposed penalties on himself (like money for the poor box). As recorded in the penultimate volume, these lists may be copied out from earlier volumes, as the summa of the contents of a previous volume, but the re-reading of an

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

65

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

Inscribing the early modern self

65

older list of exhortations may equally generate a fresh list. There is a continually generative loop of gathering exempla, drawing lessons, establishing disciplined routines, and flickering through moments of achieving and losing some comfort from the process. Wallington also wrote for an audience. Folger V.a.436 follows certain paratextual conventions of the printed book, including a preface ‘To the Reader’ and running headers. He decided to write ‘in Roman hand that others mite benifet by it as well as I’ (9). He specifies that certain volumes were written for his wife and others. Each extant volumes is signed and dated by Wallington’s son-in-law, Jonathan Houghton, on the inside flyleaf, apparently to mark his receipt of the collection from Wallington’s widow. Among the most affecting, outward-facing autobiographical narratives is the spiritual advice to an unborn child from a mother who fears she will not live. Such a manuscript by Elizabeth Joscelin (1596–1622) was purportedly found in her desk after she died shortly after childbirth. Joscelin’s work proved to have enduring appeal, printed seven times in eleven years as The Mothers Legacy to her unborne childe (1622). Many early modern women’s autobiographical narratives descended in family papers. Among them is The Life of Mrs Lucy Hutchinson, written by herself. The text was edited into print in 1806 from a now lost manuscript, and it is subtitled A Fragment. Hutchinson’s editor notes ‘many leaves being torn out’ from the manuscript just after Lucy had written of her aptitude for ‘witty songs and amorous sonnets or poems’ and broached the topic of youthful loves. After ellipses, the narrative picked up, presumably on a new page in the manuscript: ‘. . . any one mentioned him to me, I told them [that I] had forgotten those extravagancies of my infancy’. After only a few more lines, the editor reports, ‘here the story of herself abruptly ends’ with a half-completed sentence about Lucy’s temper being ‘not so pleasing to my. . .’. (Hutchinson 1806, 17–8). We cannot know if it was Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) herself who tore out pages of her autobiographical narrative and then abandoned the effort, just as she was touching on some difficult subjects – young loves and disagreements with her mother. In print, the autobiographical fragment continues to be appended to the Memoirs she wrote of her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson (Hutchinson 1995). Editors subsume the autobiographical effort in the biographical one. There is another way to look at this fragment of Hutchinson’s autobiography: neither a draft nor a dead end; rather, the autobiographical fragment rehearses a history of English exceptionalism that is confirmed with

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

66

66

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

kathleen lynch

reference to the Scriptures, Tacitus, and Shakespeare. We are reminded again of the multiple contexts of genealogy, national self-image, and religious community in which personal identity is constructed. But the English Civil Wars opened up a fault line in English society. In terms of autobiographical self-construction, the Civil Wars and the Restoration fundamentally challenged the codes of aristocratic lineage and geohumoral theory which Hutchinson took to be the essentialising basis of her identity. Hutchinson’s autobiographical construction is ongoing – ongoing in the Memoirs of her husband, which she also undertook after his death, and ongoing in a life of writing, which we can see as the writing of a life. And that is precisely the point about Hutchinson’s self-representation. Whatever she is writing, and she is often writing, she is writing a self (Mayer 2007, 326–7). To an uncommon degree, Hutchinson had to account for the choices she and her husband made throughout an eventful public life, with the most dramatic crisis coming with Hutchinson’s appeals not to be ‘excepted’ from the Restoration Act of Oblivion (Norbrook 2012). In the Memoirs, Lucy Hutchinson writes of herself in the third person as being ‘awakened’ when the colonel’s loyalty to the returned monarchy was challenged. ‘Therefore, herein only in her whole life, resolved to disobey him’ (Hutchinson 1995, 280). She rallied a network of aristocratic friends and relations on his behalf, and, she confessed, ‘she writ a letter in his name to the Speaker, to urge what might be in his favour’ (Ibid., 281). She impulsively signed her husband’s name, ‘being used sometimes to write the letters he dictated, and her character not much different from his’ (Ibid., 281). The letter was one step in an orchestration of Colonel Hutchinson’s assurances of loyalty to the restored monarchy. Its careful rhetoric and selective detail navigate the shifting fronts of political and religious division. The letter evokes the language of spiritual awakening for its repentance of ‘an illguided judgement’ (Norbrook 2012, 278–9). How does it matter if this turn to the language of spiritual autobiography is Lucy’s imposition rather than the colonel’s choice? It must be left to interpretation to separate their interests and assign responsibilities for speech acts that were vulnerable to charges of compromise, betrayal, and collusion. With the same stroke of her pen, Lucy Hutchinson exerts the greatest agency and obfuscation. We are reminded that personal narrative is as uncertain and layered a guide to events as any. The writing of a history within that history is inevitably provisional, interested, and unfinished.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

67

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

Inscribing the early modern self

67

Authorship and interiority are both at stake in the letter’s signature. Not even recourse to a draft in the State Papers Domestic can resolve the question of authorship (Ibid., 261–9). First-person statements are never transparent windows to the soul. The terrible consequentiality of a handwritten statement of political beliefs was central to the case of another adherent to the republican cause. Nearly a century and a half after Anne Askew was executed, Sir Algernon Sidney (1623–1683) was executed on charges of treason. It was not a signature but a handwritten treatise for which he was held accountable. As Sidney declared in a paper he delivered to the sheriffs on the scaffold (and had distributed among his friends, with copies quickly multiplying in print), ‘the whole matter is reduced to the papers, said to be found in my Closet by the Kings [sic] Officers, without any other proof of their being written by me, than what was taken from suspition [sic] upon similitude upon a hand, that is easily counterfeited, and which had been lately declared in the Lady Carr’s case to be no lawful evidence in criminal causes’ (Sidney 1683, 3–4). The papers at issue argued for armed resistance against oppression. It did not matter to the state prosecution that the work had not been circulated, but was found secreted in Sidney’s ‘closet’. Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys ruled, ‘Scribere est agere’ (to write is to act). In an age of persecuted martyrs, Sidney sacrificed himself to highlight the abuses of power that so tightly constrained the ways an early modern self could safely speak of and for itself. Running right through to the end of the seventeenth century, these legal and political constraints throw into relief another kind of autobiographical statement penned by Lucy Hutchinson. In the years after her husband’s death, Hutchinson wrote two drafts of ‘My own faith and attainment’ in a theological notebook, and then revised the work again for a letter to her daughter (Hutchinson 1667–1668). These are iterations of an astonishing Credo. Highly attuned to late-seventeenth-century religious controversies, and yet not polemical, Hutchinson addresses the trinity, the nature of angels, Christian virtues, infant baptism, and the importance of a covenant of works, among many topics. Hutchinson’s credo is perhaps the most singular and yet the most representative self-expressive act of late-seventeenth-century English men and women: I believe, therefore I know who I am. Early modern English autobiography is a matter of the survival of written traces of the self. In privileging the introspection of the early modern self, we have overlooked the ways that self sought external means

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

68

68

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

kathleen lynch

of expression and prosthetic extensions of life. Self-inscription is an outward facing act. This chapter has argued that we can best understand early modern self-representational experiments with form and method if we take into account the sensory engagements with paper, pen, and notebook. When we attend to the means by which early moderns shaped their personal histories, the generic contexts they developed in personally meaningful ways, the often traumatic and sometimes dangerous circumstances in which they articulated personal convictions, and the repositories by which those narratives were preserved, then we can see the act before the genre and reanimate the vibrant self-life-writings of these individuals.

Bibliography Askew, Anne. 1996. The Examinations of Anne Askew, Edited by Elaine V. Beilin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavendish, Margaret. 1656. ‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life’. In Natures Pictures drawn by Fancy’s Pencil to the Life, 368-91. British Library copy BL11599. Clifford, Lady Anne. 1990. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford. Edited by D.J.H. Clifford. Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton. Clifford, Lady Anne. 2007. The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of 1616–19. Edited by Katherine O. Acheson. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Fitzmaurice, James. 1991. ‘Margaret Cavendish on her own Writing: Evidence from Revision and Handmade Correction’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 85, no. 3: 297–307. Foxe, John. 2011. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1563 edition). HRI Online Publications, Sheffield. http//www.johnfoxe.org [last accessed Sept. 17, 2015]. Friedman, Alice T. 1995. ‘Constructing an Identity in Prose, Plaster, and Paint: Lady Anne Clifford as Writer and Patron of the Arts’. In Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660. Edited by Alice T. Friedman, 359-76. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hutchinson, Colonel John. 1660. Letter of June 5, 1660. National Archives, Public Record Office manuscript SP29/3/39 [45 r]. Hutchinson, Lucy. 17th century. ‘Memoirs of Colonel John Hutchinson’. British Library manuscript Add MS. 25901. Hutchinson, Lucy. 1667–1668. ‘My own faith and attainment’. Nottinghamshire Archives manuscript DD / HU3. Hutchinson, Lucy. 1806. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. . . To which is prefixed The Life of Mrs. Hutchinson, written by herself. Edited by Julius Hutchinson. London: Longman.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832302/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C05.3D

69

[56–69] 20.10.2015 10:40AM

Inscribing the early modern self

69

Hutchinson, Lucy. 1995. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Edited by N. H. Keeble. London: Phoenix Press. Isham, Elizabeth. 1639. ‘Booke of Rememberance’. Firestone Library, Princeton University manuscript RTC01 no. 62. Isham, Elizabeth. ca. 1650. Autobiographical Manuscript. Northamptonshire Record Office IL3365. www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/isham last accessed 17 September, 2015]. Masten, Jeffrey. 2004. ‘Material Cavendish: Paper, Performance, “Social Virginity”’. Modern Language Quarterly 65, no. 1: 49–68. Matchinske, Megan. 1998. Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, Robert. 2007. ‘Lucy Hutchinson: A Life of Writing’.The Seventeenth Century 22, no. 2: 305–35. Myers, Anne M. 2006. ‘Construction Sites: The Architecture of Anne Clifford’s Diaries’. ELH 73, no. 3: 581–600. Norbrook, David. 2012. ‘Memoirs and Oblivion: Lucy Hutchinson and the Restoration’. Huntington Library Quarterly 75, no. 2: 233–82. Peterson, Linda H. 1993. ‘Institutionalizing Women’s Autobiography: Nineteenth-Century Editors and the Shaping of an Autobiographical Tradition’, In The Culture of Autobiography. Edited by Robert Folkenflik, 80103. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pepys, Samuel. 1970–1783. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews. Berkeley: University of California Press. 11 vols. Rogers, Samuel. 1634–1638. ‘Samuel Rogers His Booke’. Queen’s University Belfast Special Collections manuscript Percy MS7. Seaver, Paul S. 1985. Wallington’s World, A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London. London: Methuen & Co. Sherman, Stuart. 2005. ‘Diary and Autobiography’. In The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780. Edited by John Richetti, 649-72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sidney, Sir Algernon. 1683. ‘Colonel Sidney’s Speech delivered to the Sheriff on the Scaffold December 7th 1683’. British Library manuscript Add. MS 63057, 2.158. Smyth, Adam. 2010. Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallington, Nehemiah. 1654. ‘An Extract of the passages of my life’. Folger Shakespeare Library manuscript V.a. 436. Wallington, Nehemiah. 1632. ‘A Memoriall of Gods Judgments’. British Library manuscript Sloane MS. 1457. Webster, Tom. 1996. ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’. The Historical Journal 39, no. 1: 33–56.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

70

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

chapter 6

Re-writing revolution Life-writing in the Civil Wars Suzanne Trill

On the face of it, the two writers upon whom this chapter will ultimately focus – Anne, Lady Halkett and Nehemiah Wallington – have little in common. Halkett (née Murray, 1622–1699) was a Royalist member of the gentry who maintained a life-long commitment to the Church of England, whereas Wallington (1598–1658), a London wood turner, was a puritan supporter of Parliament. Their experiences are also geographically distinct; although Halkett was born in London, her parents were Scottish and she lived most of her adult life in Scotland (predominantly in Fife), whereas Wallington was born, bred, and died in the parish of St Leonard’s in Eastcheap. In terms of sex, politics, theology, geography, and social position, then, Halkett and Wallington occupy polarised positions. Despite their divergent politics, however, Wallington’s and Halkett’s writing practices share a surprising amount in common and together their texts display a number of characteristics which are symptomatic of significant developments in Civil War life-writing more broadly. For both, writing was a regular exercise with devotional meaning centred on self-examination (which meant exploring their relationship with God, their household, and (inter)national political events), to which they remained committed throughout their adult lives. While both wrote in manuscript, their texts bear markers of potential print publication; both are also avid readers of printed books, pamphlets, and proclamations who frequently engage with ‘public opinion’. They also share an exceptional status in terms of their prolific output: according to Wallington’s own account, he wrote fifty different ‘notebooks’; according to Halkett’s eighteenth-century biographer, she produced twenty-one ‘Books’ (defined as ‘Select and Occasional Meditations’). From a twenty-first-century perspective, however, neither ‘notebook’ nor ‘meditation’ are classifications which are generally associated with ‘autobiography’; indeed, their generic recalcitrance reinforces Smyth’s proposition that ‘generic unfixity and experimentation was . . . a defining characteristic of early modern autobiography’ (Smyth 2010, 14). 70

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

71

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

Re-writing revolution

71

Significantly, the material differences between Wallington and Halkett simultaneously gesture towards the most striking characteristic of midseventeenth-century ‘autobiographical’ material: its astonishing diversity. Across Britain, men and women of a range of social positions (from artisan to aristocrat), with often highly nuanced political awareness (frequently founded upon an unparalleled array of religious identifications), recorded their lives and commented upon contemporary events in texts which survive in unprecedented numbers. Over the course of the turbulent events in England in the 1640s and 1650s, many of the nation’s political, social, and religious co-ordinates were redrawn in ways which helped to reshape literary production through seismic shifts in three key areas: censorship, authorship, and genre. The collapse of press censorship created a significant increase in the number of printed texts which, in turn, provided opportunities to reflect the lives of a greater diversity of the population. While generically, autobiographical material from this period is miscellaneous (including, for example, accounts, conversion narratives, letters, meditations, prophecies, testimonies, travel narratives, true relations, and vindications), it also appears at the point at which the diary became firmly established and the ‘memoir’ emerges. In modern usage, the terms ‘diary’ and ‘memoir’ signify distinctly different conceptualisations of the time of the relationship between the self who is writing and the self being written; that is, simultaneous or retrospective. However, Civil War life-writings rarely conform to such twenty-first-century expectations.

The 1640s By the outbreak of the Civil Wars, Wallington was already a well-practised writer: indeed, by 1637 he was on his twelfth notebook, which records the ‘cruel suffering of Mr Burton, Mr Prynne, and Doctor Bastwick’ (Seaver 1985, 200).1 As Lynch’s chapter in this collection illustrates, Wallington’s dating of his books does not always entirely tally with their contents’ dates. However, his list privileges chronology. According to that, Wallington filled twenty-one notebooks in the 1640s, which parallels a noticeable increase in textual production within this decade. Returning to the same sources used by McKay, but including writers of all four nations, I identified 356 seventeenth-century diary writers, of whom 255 (72%) were writing between 1630 and 1689. Significantly, there are also noticeable differences in numbers when these figures are further broken down into decades: thirty-one in the 1630s; fifty-seven in the 1640s; thirty-two in the 1650s; thirty-five in the 1660s; forty in the 1670s; and sixty in the 1680s.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

72

72

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

suzanne trill

Stunningly, these statistics suggest that the number of diary writers increased by 84% from the 1630s to the 1640s (with a 50% increase from the 1670s to 1680s). Furthermore, the highest yearly numbers within these decades correlate with times of greatest civil unrest and include the highest proportions of ‘military diaries’.2 While it has frequently been observed that the break-down in the censorship of the press partially accounts for the large increase of printed material during the 1640s, it would seem something similar is also happening with manuscript diaries. Wallington’s twelfth notebook is no longer extant; however, Burton, Prynne, and Bastwick’s sufferings also feature in both A Record of God’s Marcys and A Bundle of Marcys. Wallington’s interest in these figures reflects his allegiance, but he also has a more personal investment in their sufferings: in February 1638, Wallington, his brother, and a neighbour were summoned to appear before the Star Chamber, and there was great matters laid to our charge . . . we ware inserted in the same Bill with Master Burton Master Prinne and Docter Basticke (and divers other godly men) how we had malingned the Kings happie goverment and did vilifie and defame his goverment and that we had printed and devolsed libellows books with other heinous crimes, which we did Answre wee ware cleare off them all (Booy 2007, 79).

In the version of events in A Record, the most traumatic element of this incident for Wallington was the ‘divellish’ and ‘excrable oth’ he had to take (Ibid., 80). Despite assurances from friends that he could do so ‘lawfully’ (i.e., without troubling his conscience) and that not to do so would cause unnecessary suffering both to himself and others, Wallington sought all possible means of avoiding this situation. This not proving possible, he ‘forttifie[d]’ himself with prayer and scripture: seeking the Lord in this way was, for Wallington, ‘a sure token’ that God ‘would either deliver mee out of my troubl[e] or eles hee would . . . support me under it . . . and I did (believe and) say many times that deliverance out of trouble was better than to be freed from trouble’ (Ibid., 80). Before his examination, Wallington asks God ‘to give me wisdom to speake that I might no way dishonour him’ (Ibid., 81). He then provides his own transcript of the proceedings, with the questions asked and his answers laid out in dialogue form (rather than his usual narration), and tells us that he ‘came away with my heart lifted up unto the Lord’ after an experience which confirmed his fitness ‘to undergoe whatsoever that shalt call mee tow’ and ‘keepe a cleare continence’ (Ibid., 81–2, 83). When it re-emerges in A Bundle of Marcys, however, Wallington focuses more on the injustice of both the charges and court processes,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

73

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

Re-writing revolution

73

which brought ‘much trouble with imprisonment and much expences and fines to the undoing of some (I the wrighter speake by some wofull experiance) and all for having some books that taught us how we should feare God and honour our King and not to medel with them that change’ (Ibid., 122). Around the same time as he wrote this, Wallington composed another account of this event within a letter (dated 1642) that he sent to his best friend, James Cole, who had relocated to New England:3 I had some Books which were not to the lordly prelates liking[.] And an honest man being in some trouble about them did betray me and my Brother with divers others (in hope to free himselfe) that we were had up into the Starr Chamber Cort which is a very [c]hargable cort[.] And it cost me a grat dele of [m]ony and lose of time with much greefe and sorrow and could not be fred out of the cort but yet God hath turned it that all hath worked to the best (Ibid., 238)

These subtly different accounts of the same event offer some insight into how Wallington revises his life-story. As even the same individual might highlight one part of a story in one context and another elsewhere, this example provides a powerful reminder of the partiality of such narratives. In Wallington’s case, some of the complexity of his shifting subject position can be reconstructed. In other instances, we are only able to note that we do not have the whole story. For example, when recounting a tale of toad-eater William Utting, John Rous alludes to his other writings in this parenthetical aside: ‘of whom, see in my first long note-booke, covered with redder forrell, page 43, and in the notes of 1612’ (Green 1856, 45). While these have not survived, it would seem that Rous kept note-books or memoranda of some kind prior to writing up his diary, which he subsequently rewrites. Even so, some entries remain concise and note-like: ‘A parliament was assembled anno 1640, but forthwith dissolved. The warres were prosecuted and renued against Scotland. Much discontent. Insurrections at London. Insolencies by souldiers . . . Ship mony exacted, and in diverse places diversly refused . . . A fast ordained July 8, & c’ (April 13, 1640, Ibid., 88). Yet, even here, Rous signals further inter-textual interchange in a marginal comment, ‘Of this Scottish business many books, writings, and records are to be had’. In fact, throughout, Rous’s Diary interweaves hearsay reports with references to contemporary printed materials with only an occasional interjection of his own opinions. On September 21, 1642, Rous is ‘at Bury’ where he buys some books, ‘sawe . . . diverse horsemen to goe into Lincolnshire’, ‘heard of a late insurrection in Kent’; and only finally observes ‘I could relate diverse things that make me

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

74

74

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

suzanne trill

aston’de’ and ‘hopes’ that the king ‘will not desire . . . [n]or the Parliament grant’ a pardon for Malignants (Ibid., 123–4). Elsewhere, Rous simply notes an event without personal commentary: ‘Many railes were pulled downe, before the parliament; at Ippiswich, Sudbury, &c. Marlowe, Bucks: the organs too, &c’ (Ibid., 99).4 By contrast, when the ‘supersticious picters in the Glasse’ in Eastcheap were removed, Wallington kept some of the pieces ‘for a remembrance to shew to the generation to come what God hath don for us’ (Booy 2007, 131). Rous’s and Wallington’s practices exemplify how the ‘process of transmission and rewriting lies behind many diaries’ and that ‘perhaps the biggest misconception about diary writing is that it was immediate and artless’ (Smyth 2013, 444). Indeed, their practices highlight the complex intersections of inter-textual relations which characterise Civil War lifewriting, especially how ‘printing refashioned political consciousness’ in their reading of printed books and pamphlets (Achinstein 2015, 51). Whereas in 1600, the English press output ‘was 259 separate items. By 1642, that figure exploded to 2,968, a more than ten fold increase’ (Ibid., 51). While few amassed as many tracts as Thomason, Wallington’s engagement with pamphlet culture provides a rare insight into how the personal and the political interrelate in early modern culture.5 As a Parliamentarian, Wallington’s antipathy to Prince Rupert is to be expected; however, his description of him as ‘that bloody prince Rober’, while seemingly personalised, can be traced to contemporary pamphlets (Booy 2007, 175; Achinstein 2015, 58). In other instances, Wallington’s sources are specifically identifiable. In his account ‘Of the Tryall of this cunning and cruell Earle of Strafford’, for example, Booy notes that his ‘first two paragraphs draw heavily on the relevant entry in Diurnall occurrences . . . (1641: 57) or A Perfect journal (1659: 57)’, which means that Wallington drew upon the very first ‘English printed newsbook’.6 Wallington’s customary copying of a wide range of contemporary printed material led Webb to describe A Bundel of Marcys as a ‘Commonplace-book’ (1869, I.xxv). In Webb’s (somewhat problematic) edition, Wallington’s account of Strafford’s accusation, trial, and execution encompasses twenty-one pages and includes an almost wholesale reproduction of the contents of Depositions and Articles Against, Thomas, Earle of Strafford, Feb. 16 1640.7 While he draws on external explanations for the accusations against the Earl, Wallington offers an eye-witness account of the huge numbers involved in petitioning ‘the Lords for Justice on this traitor’ (3 May 1640) for ‘I myself wase there and surely I never did see so many together in all my life’ (Booy 2007, 129). Having had a ‘heavi and sade’ heart, Wallington then records hearing the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

75

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

Re-writing revolution

75

‘Joyfull newes’ that the Earl ‘should losses his head,’ which he ‘take notis so much of . . . the more to sett forth Gods grate mercy in delivering us from so grate cruell crafty, oppressing and Bloody enemie’ (Ibid., 129; 130; 131). Elsewhere, when Wallington recalls that the ‘Debetie was beheaded to the joy of the church of God’, he validates his response via scripture: ‘For when the wicked perisheth the righteous rejoice’.8 And, in a letter to his friend James Cole of 1642, Wallington summarises that Strafford ‘was proved by law to be a Traytor to the King and the whole land and so desarved death and yet our King sayd he should not dye yet at the last the Lord did here us’ (Ibid., 240). Of course, Royalists also engaged in the propaganda wars over the meaning of Strafford’s trial. Whereas for Wallington the king’s reluctance to sign Strafford’s death warrant is a sign of his recalcitrance, for Alice Thornton the king’s prevarications prove him to be ‘most Pieous’ (Anselment 2014, 20). For Thornton, whose father was a close friend of Strafford, the Earl ‘suffered Martiredome’ (Ibid., xxi; 20). She would no doubt have included Wallington among those ‘Vulger meaner People’ who, through ‘the inuention of abundance of Lies & callumnies cast about’ against Strafford, ‘gathered together in infinitt numbers of Prentices of London & head strong Seperates & Schismaticks’ (Ibid., 19–20). Thornton concludes that ‘this galant Earle . . . cheerfully submitted’ to his death ‘with so much Serenity & tranquillity of thoughts’, while justifying ‘his innocency to the death, as may be seene in his papers, and last speech’ (Ibid., xxi; 10; 20). Various versions of these circulated at the time, but Thornton may have a specific account in mind as she refers to his putting ‘vp praires for the King & the whole Kingdome as it may be seene in his triall, written by an Eye & eare witnesse’ (Ibid., 20). A retrospective ‘eye-witness’ description of Strafford’s trial is contained in Evelyn’s Diary. In April 1641, Evelyn writes that he was among the audience comprised of ‘the Lords and Commons . . . together with the King, Queene, Prince, and the flower of the Noblesse’, who ‘were Spectators, and auditors of the greatest malice, and the greatest innocency that ever met before so illustrious an Assembly’ (de Beer 2006, 18; 19). For Evelyn, ‘the fatal Stroake, which sever’d the wisest head in England from the Shoulders of the Earl of Strafford,’ symbolised the break-down of the legal system; for, his ‘crime coming under the cognizance of no humanLaw, a new one was made, not to be a precedent, but his destruction, to such exorbitancy were things arrived’ (Ibid., 19). Although Wallington, Evelyn, and Thornton are uncompromising in their divergent positions, others are more difficult to pin down. In An

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

76

76

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

suzanne trill

Historicall Narrative of the two howses of Parliament . . . Proceedings against Sr Roger Twysden, Twysden attempts to maintain an academic impartiality in which he carefully establishes his ‘neutrality’ upon his concern for constitutional principle rather than affection for either king or parliament (Smith 2008). The Twysdens’ ‘neutrality’ is attested to in another way, which also illustrates a different kind of relationship between printed texts and early modern life-writing: Isabella Twysden’s Diary consists of notes within the pages of her almanacs. Her entries chronical the years 1645–1651, and reveal a range of interests: from her own and others’ life-events (birth, marriage, and deaths) through her own illnesses to noting her intermittent collection of ‘part of my 5th part’ from ‘the collector for sequestration for Kent’ (6 April, 1647; Bennitt 1939, 120). As Eales notes, Twysden’s ‘diary starts with the execution of Sir John Hotham, his son, and Archbishop Laud’, and records events both within the county of Kent and beyond with her references to the Battle of Naseby, the fall of Bristol, and ‘the defeat of Charles II and his Scottish allies by Cromwell at Worcester in 1651’ (Eales 2006). The books in which Isabella writes arguably reflect the Twysdens’ attempts to remain impartial.9 Edward Pond was dead by 1648; however, Booker was ‘a militant parliamentarian’, whereas Wharton was ‘the foremost royalist astrologer’ (Raymond 2004; Capp 2004, 2006). In her copy of Pond’s almanac, Twysden noted Fairfax’s soldiers billeting at WhiteHall (15 January 1647/1648); the apprentices’ uprising (April 9); the dates of several counties presenting petitions to Parliament (Essex on 4 May; Surrey on 16 May; Kent on 29/30 June), as well as news of battles in June, July, and August (Bennitt 1939, 125–6). Indeed, while Smyth suggests that Twysden’s practice responds to Wharton’s political commentary (Smyth 2010, 50), it is worth noting that her copy of Pond also records the following: The 21 of april 1648 the duke of York went a waye from St Jameses about 9 o’clock at night, none going from thence with him, nor knowing of it, nor missing of him in 2 owers after, then there was much sending all ways about for him, but could not be heard where he was, nor whether he went, nor who went with him. (Bennitt 1939, 124)

Her next entry reads ‘the 8 Maye or there abouts it was knowne the duke of yorke was in Holland’ (Ibid., 124). Thus, when Wharton records ‘D. of Y escap’d from S Jam. 1648’ (B4r) in his 1651 almanac Hemerosopeion, it is perhaps another example of almanac writers responding to their readers’ interests (Smyth 2010, 41). This book reveals another connection between almanacs and life-writing, as its paratextual materials include a five-page

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

77

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

Re-writing revolution

77

prefatory address ‘To the Impartiall Readers’, in which Wharton defends himself against accusations that his recent release from jail (accomplished primarily with William Lilly’s assistance) was achieved ‘upon promise to betray the Kings party’ (Wharton 1651, A5r). According to Halkett, the date of the prince’s escape was actually 20 April 1648; otherwise, the rumours which reached Isabella Twysden accord with Halkett’s version of events, including that the ‘designe’ was not ‘noised abroad’ until the next day (Trill 2007, 69–73, (72)). However, by the summer of 1649, Halkett’s main motive for heading north ‘was that itt began to bee discoursed of amongst many Parliament Men that I had beene instrumentall in the Dukes escape &[,] knowing that Seuerall weemen were Secured vpon Lese ground[,] I thought it best to retire for a time outt of the Noise of itt’ (Ibid., 78). In between times, the king had been executed; or, as Halkett succinctly states, ‘the Kings misfortune dayly increasing & his enemys rage and Malice; both were att Last determined in that execrable Murder neuer to bee mentioned without horror and detestation’ (Ibid., 75). The brevity of this depiction perhaps attests to its horror; nevertheless, few reacted like Sir Henry Slingsby, who stopped writing his diary as a result (although he has to record the king’s death twice before doing so (Parsons 1936, 184;185). Significantly, one of the final publications of this decade was Eikon Basilike, which purported to be the king’s diary: thus the Royalists used ‘life-writing’ as propaganda to position Charles I as Christological martyr.

The 1650s Not surprisingly, the execution of the king ‘putt Such a dampe vpon all designes of the Royall party that they were for a time like those that dreamed’ (Trill 2007, 75; Psalm 126.1). For more radical groups such as the Baptists, Ranters, True Levellers, Fifth Monarchists, and Quakers, there was disappointment in the re-emergence of kingly power when Oliver Cromwell became ‘His Highness’ or ‘the Lord Protector’. Arguably the most distinctive aspect of life-writing to emerge in this decade is the way in which one’s personal story becomes representative of the political ‘truth’ as the radical sects attempt to pressurise the new government. While Wallington saw ‘the Cromwellian “liberty of conscience” as a source of “national sin”’ (Seaver 1985, 171), the radicals took the opportunity to spread their ideas by publishing prophecies and personal testimonies. Among them, for the first time, there were significant numbers of women (Hobby 2015, 163). Thus the Fifth Monarchist prophetess Anna

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

78

78

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

suzanne trill

Trapnel didn’t simply emerge out of nowhere, nor was she alone; however, she ‘was one of the most important public political women’ of the period as her life and writing ‘strategically exploits the gaps and contradictions inside the patriarchal theology of the spirit to create a new political project integrating female praxis and Fifth Monarchist resistance to the Protectorate’ (Holstun 2000, 267). In 1654, four texts attributed to Trapnel were published: The Cry of a Stone, Strange and Wonderfull Newes from White-Hall, A Legacy for Saints and Anna Trapnel’s Report, and Plea. Despite the fact that it was the inclusion of an excerpt from the final text within the influential Her Own Life anthology which revived interest in her writing, most modern critical discussions still focus on Cry. As this was the text which recorded her prophetic outpourings that powerfully critiqued the new Cromwellian regime, and for which she was imprisoned, this may seem reasonable. However, the critical focus on Trapnel as passive prophetess – unconscious of her utterances, which are relayed by a self-confessedly unreliable narrator – has obscured a significant trajectory within her writings which has masked her agency; that is, the autobiographical aspects of her writing. Indeed, even her texts’ titles ‘reveal a striking movement into a public identity and voice’ (Ibid., 295). In her ‘oral’ utterances, as represented in Cry and Strange . . . Newes, Trapnel is unconscious; however, in her rewriting of her experiences in the Report there is conflict between that self and the subject who reformulates the narrative. It is through the telling and re-telling her story that Trapnel constructs the Report: And though I fail in an orderly penning down these things, yet not in a true relation, of as much as I remember, and what is expedient to be written; I could not have related so much from the shallow memory I have naturally, but through often repeating these things, they become as a written book, spread open before me, and after which I write. (Trapnel 1654d, 34)

The repeated oral reiteration of her experiences enables her to construct her subjectivity in textual form, from which she reads and writes the Report, which then re-textualises her experiences in words which have become her own. By the end of the Report, especially in ‘A Defiance,’ the distinction between Trapnel’s words and God’s words becomes difficult to discern (Ibid., 49–59). The contents of the ‘Defiance’ are strikingly similar to the copies of Trapnel’s letters appended to the Legacy (Trapnel 1654c, 49–64), and its rhetoric echoes the discursive strategies she employs in her prophetic utterances. Crucially, however, she is conscious when she signs off the ‘Defiance’ as ‘Your praying Friend ANNA TRAPNELL’ (Trapnel 1654d,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

79

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

Re-writing revolution

79

59). The ‘Defiance’, which concludes Trapnel’s life in print, deploys a combination of visionary rhetoric and personal signature, which manifests the inseparability of the personal from the political in the production of Anna Trapnel as a prophetic subject. Serendipitously, as 1654 draws to a close, Wallington determines to stop writing: ‘And now the day, the weeke, the month and the yeere, this booke nay my very life drawes to an ende . . . as for bying any more books to wright in I am resolved to by no more because I have often sayd it and have also I have [sic] written that I will write no more books’ (Booy 2007, 342). Wallington’s equivocation here is evidenced when he adds the caveat, ‘yet I intend not to give over the worke of Examination nor any holy duty nor altogether my writing’ and permits himself ‘sometimes to write in one end of my writing book (that hath some wast paper called the travilors Meditation which I was a writting in the yeere 1632’ (Ibid., 342; 342–3). Wallington’s typological sense of self is attested to as he signs off by identifying himself with ‘my predecessor Nehemiah (13.22), Remember mee O my God concerning this, and pardon mee accordin to thy grate mercie’ (Ibid., 343). Wallington’s final words in this notebook are ‘therefore I will with Gods helpe out of myselfe and by Faith sucke vertue from Jesus Christ to inable mee who saith without him I can doe nothing’ (Ibid., 343; John 15.1). Curiously, whereas Trapnel’s texts move from the relator recounting her announcement that she was ‘a voyce within a voyce, anothers voyce, even thy voyce through her’ (Trapnel 1654a, 42) to an assertion of self through signature, Wallington’s corpus concludes in fusion with his biblical predecessor through God’s word which aims at self-obliteration by becoming ‘nothing’.

The 1660 to 1680s In August 1660, the Convention Parliament passed the ‘Act of Indemnity and Oblivion’, which was intended to promote peace by precluding revenge and institutionalising collective amnesia. However, people stubbornly refused to forget; instead, they not only remembered but recorded their memories in increasing numbers, and did so with the explicit intention of justifying their actions to future generations on conscientious grounds. Ironically, then, the 1660s to 1680s is the period in which the ‘memoir’ emerges as a major form of life-writing. Memoirs apparently offer an inherent challenge to the category of autobiography insofar as they often manifest their inseparability from biography (as in the case of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson) or family history

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

80

80

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

suzanne trill

(as with Ann, Lady Fanshawe). Indeed, what counts as a ‘memoir’ is as complicated as the category of early modern ‘diaries’. In this, the transmission of Anne, Lady Halkett’s life-writings offer a cautionary tale. First edited by John Gough Nichols as The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett for the Camden Society in 1875, Halkett’s narrative is more widely known as her Memoirs. This is partly because of John Loftis’s edition and partly because this remains the title ascribed to her text introducing the ‘Springing the Duke’ extract included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. When undertaking research for my edition for Ashgate, it transpired that Halkett herself referred to this narrative as A True Accountt of My Life. As the next chapter demonstrates, ‘accounting’ for one’s life was a complex genre during this period, so how does this manifest itself within Halkett’s writings? At the age of approximately twenty-two, the then Anne Murray started writing on a regular basis, a practice which she maintained for fifty-five years. Most of what she wrote in the 1640s is no longer extant and materials from the 1650s are scant; from 1659/1660 onwards, however, a substantial collection of writings remain. While the National Library of Scotland catalogues these as under the broad-brush category of ‘Religious Meditations,’ Halkett divided her materials into ‘occasional’ and ‘select’ meditations. The latter are primarily exegetical and contain very little reflection upon her own or other people’s lives; by contrast, the former represent a rich repository of self-revelation. The earliest existing volume of such materials begins with ‘Vpon my miscarrying of two children’ on March 7 1658/1659, and concludes with ‘Vpon the retarne of his Ma afftir his Long banishment and variety of other troubles’ in May 1660. The penultimate entry sees Halkett musing on ‘the late change in puplicke affaires’ (Trill 2007, 10–2). After summarising the horrors of the wars and the suffering of all the participants, Halkett expresses wonder at the recent announcement that the king is to be invited to return in peace. Her entry concludes by engaging with others’ opinions of her actions: [S]ome hath thought mee no[tt] so Cordiall for the King as themselues because I did nott, as they, wish all his enemys Confounded’, wch I neuer durst doe Seriously, because I Looked vpon my Selfe & [m]any more that wished him well to bee his enemys in that wee did wrastle with those Sins that hindred our prayers from beeing granted[. Y]ett while others Cursed, I praid for his enemys that there eyes might bee opened to See there Sin, repent and mend itt, & I thinke the Lord is now shewing that hee hath heard my Suplication by turning of many of there harts towa[rd] the king who had former[ly] a hand in his Sad trial. (Ibid., 12)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

81

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

Re-writing revolution

81

Like Wallington’s variant tales of his appearance before the Star Chamber, Halkett’s writings illustrate how the same subject re-emerges in different contexts. In the next entry, she reiterates that even ‘att the Lowest Condittion I euer had a very grea[t] assurance that the Lord would bring the king home in peace’, and tells us that ‘as many as I spake itt to, I was Laughed att for what seemed to them imposible’ (NLS Ms 6490, 369). However, while staying with the Countess of Dunfermline at Fyvie Castle, Halkett recounts, in detail, a conversation she had there with Colonel Overton in which she predicts ‘you will euer find reason to Change what euer Gouermentt you try till you Come to beg of the King to Come home and Gouerne againe’ (Trill 2007, 112). To his doubtful response, she reiterates her claim, adding that he would find the king to be forgiving, to which Overton answers ‘if this should Come to pase I will Say you are a prophetese’ (Ibid., 112). However, while Overton said this in 1652, Halkertt’s Account was written in 1676, with the considerable advantage of hindsight. While the proto-novelistic, romantic aspects of Halkett’s narrative has dominated critical discussion of her writing, Mary Ellen Lamb recently remarked upon its parallels with casuistry (Lamb 2007). Indeed, the True Account is best understood as a series of cases of conscience. One of Halkett’s favourite writers, Joseph Hall, devoted the fourth ‘Decade’ of his Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Cases of Conscience to cases ‘Matrimoniall’ (Hall 1650, 374–499). As much critical ink has been spilt attempting to determine the nature of Halkett’s potentially bigamous relationship with Colonel Joseph Bampfield, Hall’s reflections on ‘whether Marriages once made, may be annulled, and utterly voided’ are obviously relevant to Halkett’s narrative. However, she also addresses ‘whether the marriage of a Son or daughter, without or against the Consent of Parents, may be accounted lawfull’, and ‘whether it be necessary that marriages should be celebrated by a Minister’. The former is dealt with at some length in her representation of her relationship with Sir Thomas Howard (Trill 2007, 56–68); the latter receives more cursory treatment when she describes her marriage to Sir James Halkett, at which ‘the Iustice performed what was vsuall for him att that time . . . Butt if itt had nott beene done more Solemnly affterwards by a Minister I should nott beleeued itt Lawfully done’ (Ibid., 139). Critical speculation on Murray and Bampfield’s relationship has been fuelled by some apparently strategic missing pages. Rather less commented on, however, is the fact that the narrative stops in mid-sentence, amidst Halkett’s intercessions to prevent her husband ‘from having any thing imposed vpon him that was Contrary

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

82

82

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

suzanne trill

to the duty & Loyalty that became a faithfull Subiect’ (Ibid., 142). Thus, Halkett’s story concludes with another ‘case’ requiring resolution in which her husband’s (and, by extension, her own) integrity is at stake. Ultimately, it is this concern with conscience which is the crucial characteristic of Civil War life-writing. Despite their differences, all the writers discussed above share an absolute (though absolutely incompatible) conviction that God was on their side: their lives provided the evidence, as the personal and the political coalesced. While lives had been political previously, these tended to be high-status figures who were positioned as exemplary: in the Civil Wars, even the king’s life became the subject of dispute. Furthermore, the large-scale dissemination of different versions of the same event (such as Strafford’s trial) or the use of ‘personal’ papers to provide evidence of treason (as in the publication of extracts from Laud’s diaries) created an awareness that one’s life was contentious. Consequently, self-examination was not a purely personal process; it also registered one’s political position. Whether inscribed in a series of notebooks, a collection of published texts, or in a range of meditations and an account, these materials are rarely easily divided into either simultaneous or retrospective records. In her later writings, Halkett regularly dates her entries in ‘diary’ style; however, when labelling these in her contents list, she highlights the occasion or event they describe. When Wallington resolves not to buy any new books, he intends to use up the ‘wast paper’ in an earlier book ‘to write some of Gods Marcys and dispensations to mee Even New yers Marcys as Return of old yeers prayers’ (Booy 2007, 343). There is then rather less difference between the Civil War ‘diary’ and ‘memoir’ than we might expect; rather, the two shade into each other in ways which have been obscured by (predominantly) nineteenth-century editions.10 In this, we can perhaps see the impact of almanacs, which effectively fused variant conceptions of time: they ‘systematized the past . . . facilitated the present . . . [and] predicted the future’ (Sherman 1996, 56). For Civil War life-writers, ‘every day [wa]s a little map of our life’ (Caussin 1648, A1r); however, that ‘map’ required constant rereading, re-evaluation, and re-writing.

Notes 1. For a concise overview of ‘The causes and course of the British Civil Wars’, see Morrill 2015. 2. 1640s (5, 2, 8, 6, 7, 4, 5, 3, 9, 7) = 56 + 1 (Creaton 2003) = 57; 1680s (7, 6, 1, 3, 4, 3, 3, 5, 11, 13) = 56 + 4 (Creaton 2003) = 60. See Matthews (1950) for sub-generic classifications.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

83

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

Re-writing revolution

83

3. For a discussion of the time of writing A Bundle, see Booy 2007, 115. 4. The organs and the rails may have disappeared in late 1640 but Suffolk had clearly not been fully purged of superstition: in his Journal (1643–1644), William Dowsing – the ‘Parliamentary visitor for demolishing the superstitious pictures and ornaments of churches, etc., within the County of Suffolk’ – records removing such items from Sudbury (Peter’s Parish, Gregory Parish and Alhallows on 9 January 1643) and, at the end of that month, he visited eleven different churches in Ipswich and took something down at all but one (White 1885, 15; 18–19). 5. Achinstein cites Thomason, ‘who bought 22 printed titles’ in 1640 and ‘well over 2,000’ in 1641 (2015, 50). Wallington ‘quotes, or refers to, more than three hundred’ of ‘“The King’s Pamphlets”’, and mentioned collecting one ‘hundred and three petitions’ (Webb 1869, I.xxv). 6. Booy 2007, 128, fn. 87; Achinstein 2015, 58; see also Booy 2007, 129, fn. 95. 7. Webb, 1869, I.224–45. There are some variations from the ‘further impeachment’ section of this text (STC 25247.5). 8. Booy 2007, 151, fn. 19. Prov. 11.10, Ps. 68: 2–3. 9. Successively these were John Booker Mercurious Coelicus . . . 1647, Pond’s almanac . . . 1648; Booker, Uranoscopia . . . 1649; and George Wharton, Hemeroscopeion . . . 1651. 10. See, for example, Jackson’s Yorkshire Diaries, which includes Eyre’s A Diurnall, or Catalogue of all my Accions and Expences from the 1st of January, 1646–[7], as well as The Life of Master John Shaw.

Bibliography Achinstein, Sharon. 2015. ‘Texts in conflict: the press and the Civil War’. In The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, 50–68. Edited by Neil H. Keeble. Cambridge University Press. Anselment, Raymond A., ed. 2014. My First Booke of My Life: Alice Thornton. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Bennitt, Rev. F. W., ed. 1939. ‘The Diary of Isabella, Wife of Sir Roger Twysden . . . 1645–51’. Archaeologia Cantiana 51: 113–36. Booy, David, ed. 2007. The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654: A Selection. Aldershot: Ashgate. Capp, Bernard. 2006 [2004]. ‘Wharton, Sir George, first baronet (1617–1681)’. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online edn., edited by Lawrence Goldman. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29165 (accessed 18 May 2015). Capp, Bernard. 2004. ‘Booker, John (1602–1667)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn. Edited by Lawrence Goldman. www.oxforddnb.com/v iew/article/2865 (accessed 18 May 2015).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

84

84

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

suzanne trill

Caussin, Nicholas. 1648. The Christian Diary. London. Creaton, Heather. 2003. Unpublished London Diaries: A Checklist. London: London Record Society. De Beer, E. S., ed. 2006. The Diary of John Evelyn. Oxford: Everyman. Eales, Jacqueline. 2006. ‘Twysden, Isabella, Lady Twysden (1605–1657)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn. Edited by Lawrence Goldman. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/93802 (accessed 15 April 2015). Graham, Elspeth, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, eds. 1985. Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by seventeenth-century Englishwomen. London: Routledge. Green, Mary Anne Everett, ed. 1856. Diary of John Rous, 1625–1642. London: Camden Society. Hall, Joseph. 1650. Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Cases of Conscience. London. Hobby, Elaine. 2015. ‘Prophecy, enthusiasm and female pamphleteers’. In The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, 162–78. Edited by Neil H. Keeble. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holstun, James. 2000. Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London & New York: Verso. Jackson, Charles, ed. 1877. Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Durham: Surtees Society. Keeble, N. H, ed. 2000. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. London: Phoenix Press. Lamb, Mary Ellen. 2007. ‘Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs’. In Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, 81–96. Edited by Michelle, M. Dowd, and Julie A. Eckerle. Aldershot: Ashgate. Larking, L. B., ed. 1858–1861. ‘Sir Roger Twysden’s Journal’. Archaeologia Cantiana 1 (1858), 184–214; 2 (1859), 175–220; 3 (1860), 145–76; 4 (1861), 131–202. Loftis, John, ed. 1979. The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe. Oxford: Clarendon. Matthews, William. 1950. British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written between 1442 and 1942. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McKay, Elaine. 2005. ‘English Diarists: Gender, Geography and Occupation, 1500–1700’. History. 90: 191–212. Morrill, John. 2015. ‘The Causes and Course of the British Civil Wars’. In The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, 13–31. Edited by Neil H. Keeble. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nichols, John Gough, ed. 1875. The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett. London: Camden Society.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C06.3D

85

[70–85] 20.10.2015 10:16AM

Re-writing revolution

85

Parsons, Rev. Daniel, ed. 1936. The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby. London: Longman. Raymond, Joad. 2004. ‘Pond, Edward (d. 1629)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn. Edited by Lawrence Goldman. www.oxforddnb.com/v iew/article/22489 (accessed 18 May 2015). Seaver, Paul S. 1985. Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London. California: Stanford University Press. Sherman, Stuart. 1996. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries ad English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, David L. 2008. ‘Twysden, Sir Roger, second baronet (1597–1672)’. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Online edn. Edited by Lawrence Goldman. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27929 (accessed 15 April 2015). Smyth, Adam. 2013. ‘Diaries’. In The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640, 434–51. Edited by Andrew Hadfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smyth, Adam. 2010. Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press. [Strafford, Thomas.] 1640. Depositions and Articles Against, Thomas, Earle of Strafford, Feb. 16 1640. London. Trapnel, Anna. 1654a. The Cry of a Stone. London. Trapnel, Anna. 1654b. Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall. London. Trapnel, Anna. 1654c. A Legacy for Saints. London. Trapnel, Anna. 1654d. Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea. London. Trill, Suzanne, ed. 2007. Lady Anne Halkett: Selected Self-Writings. Aldershot: Ashgate. Webb, Rosamund, ed.1869. Historical Notices by Nehemiah Wallington. London: Richard Bentley. 2 Vols. Wharton, George. 1651. Hemeorscopeion: A Meterorologicall Diary and Prognostication for the yeere of Christ. London. White, Rev. C. H., ed. 1885. The Journal of William Dowsing. Ipswich: Pawsey and Hayes.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

86

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

chapter 7

Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700 Balancing a life Adam Smyth

The financial record – a category including everything from the sophisticated double-entry account to lists of expenses scribbled at the back of an almanac – was one of the most common forms of personal documentation, or self-accounting, in seventeenth-century England, and its significance for seventeenth-century life-writing was profound. We might sketch three points of particular resonance. First, the financial account was often an early site of record-keeping that fed into later, fuller, narrative written lives of the sort that might more comfortably fit into the category of autobiography; the financial account sat in a network of texts that were variously concerned with the production of a written life, including diaries, autobiographies, annotated almanacs, letters, family histories, and commonplace books. Early modern culture was a culture of the notebook (Vickers 1968, 76–7), and one consequence was the transfer of notes from one site to another, and the repeated recording, amplifying, and revising of the ‘same’ event across multiple texts. To understand autobiographical writing in seventeenth-century England means thinking about the connections between texts and the movement and revision of a written life. The financial account was often an early or founding site in this process of transfer, and the conventions, discourses, and expectations of the financial account were frequently legible in later texts. Second, guides to financial accounting provided a paradigm for the writing of a life, both in terms of how a text produced the effect of truthfulness, and also in terms of the mechanics of writing. Writers produced textual lives by following prescriptions that originated in guides to financial accounting: the need to record every detail, the stress on fullness of account, the pursuit of a moralised sense of balance, and the process of writing by transferring and revising records. Third, a conception of autobiography, or proto-autobiography, as a form growing out of an accounting for objects and possessions has 86

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

87

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700

87

significant implications, not least because it suggests a conception of the self, and of identity, that is less about interiority and detachment, and more about things in the world: a life less of depths than of surfaces, as if Hamlet’s identity was not ‘that within which passeth show’, but his cloak and his tables. But before these connections are more fully explored, a word about terminology, and a defence of multiple terms (autobiography, life-writing, self-accounting, diary) to describe the texts I discuss. Philip Lejeune defined autobiography as ‘a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’. Autobiography is, according to Lejeune, held in place by a contract affirming the identity between the names of author, narrator, and protagonist (Lejeune 1989, 4, 17). In the seventeenth century the traits and conventions of this model of autobiography were yet to be established, and this has, to put it mildly, consequences for a chapter on seventeenth-century autobiography. We can either dismiss the century as a blank, or perhaps a cloudy pre-history, or we can, in the manner of other early chapters in this collection, adjust and augment our critical terms to accommodate the forms that were available. The more inclusive ‘life-writing’ designates – or is taken by me to designate – written records of a writer’s experiences. This label’s relative lack of baggage enables some consideration of genre or convention without the imposition of anachronistic expectations of pattern, development, or coherence: an effort ‘to notice generic clues without imposing generic expectations’ (Seelig 2006, 2). But there are also reasons to persist with ‘autobiography’ as a heuristic, precisely because the problems it raises are productive: the awkward fit between the expectations autobiography evokes and the nature of early modern writing helps foreground those often problematic assumptions, and illuminates the instability of forms of early modern written lives. The difference, variability, generic unfixity, and strangeness of early modern life-writing thus comes more clearly into focus. The diary of Samuel Pepys is a good place to start, not only because it is often used as an exemplar of the seventeenth century’s new concern with an interiorised written self-hood, but also because it shows the ways in which records of money might saturate a written life. For Pepys, money is both an irresistible topic for discussion and a way of organising the world. Money is gossip, and money is also epistemology. Financial success was, for Pepys, one of the markers by which he anxiously and excitedly tracked the elevations and descents of the 1660s London

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

88

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

88

adam smyth

around him: money made success legible, and his very first entry has him ‘at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts’ (Pepys 1970– 1983, I.3). Money was a way of expressing his craved-for claims to social eminence – ‘At this time my wife and I mighty busy laying out money in dressing up our best chamber, and thinking of a coach and coachman and horses, &c.’ (Ibid., 8.332) – and of tracking the sometimes tumbling stock of his patron, Sir Edward Mountagu: ‘to see in what a condition my Lord is for money, that I dare swear he do not know where to take up L500 of any man in England at this time’ (Ibid., 8.322). Financial exchange was also a means for Pepys to enforce his sexual power over women: ‘Mrs. Daniel come [sic] and staid talking to little purpose with me to borrow money, but I did not lend her any, having not opportunity para hazer alieno thing mit her’ (Ibid., 8.306). But finance was not just a theme within Pepys’s diary; it was also the paradigm through which the text was written. Pepys’s apparently impulsive prose seems to have begun life as lists of expenses that were gradually worked up into fluent prose. At two points in the diary from the first half of 1668, these earlier drafts survive in an unrevised form (Dawson 2000). From 10 to 19 April and 5 to 17 June 1668, the narrative diary breaks off: eight and ten pages, respectively, are blank, and rough notes have been bound into the volume, written and (mis)numbered in ink in Pepys’s hand on three foolscap leaves folded to produce six pages for April, and three and half foolscap leaves folded twice to produce eight and half pages for June (Pepys 1970–1983, 9.160–8, 224–43). These notes constitute the moments when Pepys neglected to revise into narrative the sparse notes and financial accounts which provided the skeleton for his subsequent prose entries: in these moments, the earlier records, normally effaced, become visible, bound into the volume next to the blank pages left for transcription. Thus, for Friday 5 June: At Barnet for milk 00. 00. 06 On the highway to menders of the highway 00. 00. 06 Dinner at Stevenage 00. 05. 06 And for Monday 8 June: Father’s servants (father having in the garden told me bad 00. 14. 00 stories of my wife’s ill words) One that helped at the horses 00. 01. 00 Menders of the highway 00. 02. 00

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

89

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

89

Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700 Pleasant country to Bedfd. where while they stay I rode through the town and a good country town and there drinking we on to Newport and there light and I and WH to the church and there give the boy

00. 01. 00

These records, poised between punctual financial account and narrative through time, reveal the beginnings of Pepys’s text as a series of financial records, subsequently reworked into the supposedly ‘spontaneous’ prose we know today. (In fact, there was a broader, more complicated process of textual traffic beneath the smooth surface of Pepys’s text, involving many kinds of texts: but financial accounts are central.) The prominence Pepys gives to his finances throughout the diary registers the presence of these early notes as a kind of foundation under the later text, although, in general, Pepys effaces the process of drafting and reworking. But these skeleton entries let that process be glimpsed. The centrality of money as a topic in many other early modern diaries suggests that a similar writing process was often at work: the 1616–1619 diary of Lady Anne Clifford is organised not as continuous prose, but in two columns – a more personal narrative at the centre, with public and social events on the left – which duplicates the layout of her financial accounts (Smyth 2010, 90). The common perception of Pepys as someone who, in his diary, offers unmediated plunges at life breaks down in the light of this evidence. Pepys’s famously impulsive prose was not immediate, unconscious, or unreserved, but was in fact the product of distinct and careful stages of revision, and Pepys’s diary represents not spontaneity, but the artful construction of spontaneity. A similar process of note-taking and later revision – a mode of writing indebted to financial record keeping and the movement of accounts between texts, described below – is evident in John Evelyn’s diaries. Evelyn began the process of self-accounting by setting down notes in printed almanacs, ‘in imitation’, he wrote, ‘of what I had seen my father do’ (Evelyn 1955, 2.10), and these notes formed the first, preparatory stage of his later diary writing. Evelyn’s almanac annotations for 2 July 1637 were entered on or close to this date in a copy of Thomas Langley’s A new almanack and prognostication (1637), now in Balliol College, Oxford: the notes are transcribed below, left. Below right is the entry for this day in the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

90

90

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

adam smyth

diary, composed about a quarter of a century later, sometime after 1660 (Ibid., 1.19–20). [July 2] A oxfor I first Receued Upon the 2d of July, being the first the holy communion being yn in of the Moneth, I first received the Bal Coll Chap Mr Cooper preacht B: Sacrament of the Lords Supper in the Colledge Chapell, one Mr. Cooper, a fellow of the house preaching; and at this tyme was the Church of England in her greatest splendor, all things decent, and becoming the peace, and the Persons that govern’d. The most of the following Weeke I spent in visiting the Colleges, and several rarities of the University, which do very much affect young comers; but I do not find any memoranda’s of what I saw. There is, to use Paul de Man’s language, a ‘spectral’ quality to this text once the process of composition is visible: if ‘[t]he autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution’ (De Man 1984, 70), this is John Evelyn in his early forties, writing John Evelyn, aged seventeen. The two Evelyns both are and are not the same, just as, in all autobiographies, the relationship between the writing self and the written self is a relationship both of identity and difference: the autobiographical contract demands that these two figures are one, but the form’s investment in a narrative of development requires differentiation. The temporal gap within Evelyn’s diary (if that text is taken to be both notes and finished prose) also puts strain on the generic distinction between diary and autobiography: a founding difference between these forms is the quantity of time between event and written representation of event. Evelyn’s text collapses this temporal gap in its self-presentation (it seems to be written close to its moment, diary-style) but embraces it in its method of composition (in this sense resembling an autobiography). Only two of Evelyn’s annotated almanacs survive – a third disappeared after a Sotheby’s sale in 1925 – so it is not possible to anatomise the whole diary in this way. But even these brief instances suggest a compositional practice that has significant implications for how we think about

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

91

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700

91

autobiographical texts: most fundamentally, that the production of Evelyn’s diary was less the direct transcription of lived experience, and more the result of successive revisions of prior texts. This method of writing was widespread. John Wesley made notes and lists of his actions assigned to particular hours, which ‘he later expanded . . . into a more discursive narrative journal’ (Nussbaum 1988, 130). Lady Anne Clifford composed a series of closely related autobiographical texts which chronicle her life-long, and ultimately successful, battle for the inheritance of her family estates in Westmorland and Yorkshire. These texts constitute ‘the longest surviving autobiographical record of the early modern era’ (Acheson 2007, 9), and include an autobiography, a chronicle, and a diary, as well as financial accounts. Each of these first-person accounts is, it seems, linked through a chain of transmission and revision: the financial accounts fed into the diaries, which supplied the chronicles, which informed the autobiography. If there is a tendency in contemporary culture, perhaps even a craving, to associate diary writing with immediacy and candour, and if, as Laura Marcus notes, the presence in life-writing of spontaneity’s perceived opposites – artfulness, literary craft – is read as a kind of falseness (Marcus 1994, 6), the accumulative, ongoing, deliberate practice of early modern diary writing suggests that these assumptions need rethinking. To put that more aphoristically: seventeenth-century life-writing was as much about writing as it was about life. For Pepys, moments of debt settling provide a larger, reassuring, one might say existential sense of balance in the world: the world is right when a bill is paid, as it was when, on 18 March 1660, Pepys ‘called at Mr. Blagrave’s, where I took up my note that he had of mine for 40s, which he two years ago did give me as a pawn while he had my lute. So that all things are even between him and I’ (Pepys 1970–1983, I. 91). This slippage between a financial exchange (‘40s’) and a broader social relationship that appears to but doesn’t quite transcend the monetary (‘all things are even between him and I’), is more generally legible in early modern culture. A pool of terms – words such as trust, bond, credit, debt, and interest – moved back and forth between the spheres of the economic, on the one hand, and the affective or social, on the other. When people spoke of relationships, they were also often speaking about, or in terms of, money (Connor 2004). The city comedies that were fashionable around 1600 exploit these lexical migrations with intensity: Eastward Ho (1605) by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, for example, picks away at the term ‘credit’, in particular (and also ‘licence’, and ‘angel’). In his anxiety to ‘save my credit’ (Chapman 2001, 81), downwards-spiralling

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

92

92

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

adam smyth

apprentice Quicksilver toggles between credit as financial power (according to the Oxford English Dictionary from 1542: ‘[t]rust or confidence in a customer’s ability and intention to pay at some future time, shown by allowing money or goods to be taken or services to be used without immediate payment’); as social standing (the OED from 1529: ‘[t]he estimate in which the character of a person (or thing) is held; reputation’); and as plausibility (the OED from 1531: ‘[r]ight to be believed; authority on which to be accepted as true, truthful, or authentic’). Connections between tracking money and a moralised sense of one’s place in the world were in part fostered by guides to financial record keeping that encouraged a particular idea of truthfulness and generated certain assumptions about how to create a reliable, right, or true record. Guides to financial book-keeping told readers how to write a true account, and these methods and notions of trust often migrated from financial accounting to life-writing more generally. Hugh Oldcastle’s A Briefe Instruction and Maner How to Keepe Bookes of Accompts After the Order of Debitor and Creditor (now lost, but reissued by John Mellis in 1588) – a translation of Luca Paccioli’s Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (Venice, 1494) – first popularised doubleentry book-keeping for an English readership, and a wave of other printed guides followed, including Jan Ympyn Christoffels, A Notable and very Excellente Woorke, Expressyng and Declaryng the Maner and Forme Howe to Kepe a Boke of Accomptes or Reconynges (1547); James Peele, How to Keep a Perfect Reckoning after the Order of . . . Debitor and Creditor (1553) and The Pathwaye to Perfectnes, in th’accomptes of Debitour and Creditour (1569); John Carpenter, A Most Excellent Instruction For The Exact And Perfect Keeping Merchants Bookes of Accounts (1632); Richard Dafforne, The Merchants Mirrour (1636); John Collins, An Introduction to MerchantsAccompts (1675); Robert Chamberlain, The Accomptants Guide or Merchants Book-Keeper (1679); and Robert Colinson, Idea Rationaria, or The Perfect Accomptant, Necessary for All Merchants and Trafficquers (1683). These guides, for a long time ignored by everyone except historians of double-entry book-keeping, are now beginning to receive their critical due as powerful influences on early modern culture (Tomlin 2014; Woodbridge 2003). The particular significance of this genre of printed texts for the history of autobiographical writing was that they forged a connection between certain regularised ways of ordering financial accounts and connotations of honesty, clarity, balance, virtue, and truth. These methods for constructing good records became common traits of diaries and autobiographies. Thus the accountant should ‘bee prompt and readdy’ in his

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

93

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700

93

recording of every single transaction, no matter how small. A ‘marchant may be applied unto Argus,’ Mellis writes, ‘which as Poetes shewe, had a hundreth eyes’ (Mellis 1588, sig. B3) – just as life-writing became associated with quotidian detail. Guides to accounting thus encouraged a connection between the individual compiler, the privacy of records, and a reliable journal of events. While some kinds of financial record might be collaboratively written, the financial ‘journal’ was to be the work of only one hand. ‘[N]o man is to write, but hee that keepth the Accounts’ (Carpenter 1632, 6), ‘for in times of controversie he can best answer for his own postings’ (Dafforne 1684, 8). A sense of truthfulness was produced in part through conformity to particular rhetorical templates, such as ‘In the name of God, AMEN . . . The Inventory of me A.B. Citizen and Mercer of London, containing my whole estate generall, in Lands, Rents, Goods, ready money, Debts and Creditors which I have in this present world, at this present day’ (Carpenter 1632, 92). Entries in life-writing texts such as diaries and autobiographies are rhetorically regular, and this regularity is linked to connotations of order and trust. The pages of the financial account were to be full, with no space, since blanks suggest records might be added later on, perhaps duplicitously. This connection between spatial fullness and truth found its narrative equivalent in diaries that strained for the effect of having conveyed the whole day – from Pepys’s ‘Waking in the morning’ until ‘and so to bed.’ Perhaps most importantly of all, guides stressed that good accounting is based around the construction of multiple, interconnected note-books, and that records should be shunted from book to book, and revised in the process. John Mellis urged compilers to create an initial inventory of possessions and debts; a second book, called the ‘Memoriall or Remembrance’ or waste book, to note down business transactions as they occur; a journal, into which every five or six days the compiler should transfer this information, producing a leaner narrative; and finally, the ledger, or ‘great booke of accompte’ (Mellis 1588, sig. H8). This process of transmission and revision produces, in theory, increasingly regular records whose system and clarity means the accountant can tell ‘at all times, and in every respect, how his Estate standith’ (Dafforne 1640, sig. B), and so demonstrate his or her honesty, virtue, godliness, diligence, skill, and social credit. By compiling his accounts, an individual ‘in an Instant can see (as he doeth his Person in a mirror) his whole estate and in what posture it is in at the time’ (Colinson 1683, 2). In the account books of Sir Edward Dering, antiquary and MP for Kent, we see one enactment of these prescriptions and a text that conveys the slippage between the atomised exactness of the expense list and the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

94

94

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

adam smyth

interpretative moralising of narrative. This is a written life of pieces and patches. Dering titled his record of accounts ‘A Booke of expences from ye yeare 1619 (being halfe a yeare before I was first marryed); unto ye yeare [blank]’, and the text runs up until 1628. Dering’s accounts have interested theatre historians because they record, among other things, the purchase of more than 200 playbooks between 1619 and 1624, and the payment of four shillings paid to ‘mr Carington for writing out ye play of K Henry ye fourth’, a transaction which yielded the earliest extant manuscript of a Shakespearean drama (Dering 1617–1628).1 But it is possible to do more with this text than raid it for documentary fact (although we can do this, too). In pursuit of the narrative and indeed literary potentials of financial accounts, I want to pay close attention to the formal properties of Dering’s text to examine how his record can express something we might call a seminarrativised autobiographical impulse. The section of his financial records I want to examine concerns the account written by the twenty-four-yearold Dering of the funeral of his wife, Elizabeth. This is how Dering records the day. June 23

{ { { { { { { { { { {

1622 first halfe yeare Horsemeate Giuen giuen G. Smith goinge by water to Grauesend post horse to Rochester Giuen post boy hire of a hackney for Nichls to maidstone horsemeate and giuen att Rochester Giuen ye poore of Pluckley + Giuen Mr Bennett ye phisitian Giuen Mr Dr Moseley for his funerall sermon Banquett from maidestone Banquett from Ashford Giuen a woman sent from Hothfeild Giuen Lydia Giuen ye poore att Surrenden house + Giuen Mrs Benett Giuen ye sexton for tollinge ye bell and digginge ye graue goodwife Maresface and goodwife Hill’s for helpe

l

s

d

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 03 03 01 00 00 00 00 00

06 00 02 06 04 00 02 03 00 02 00 03 19 19 10 17 06 10

08 06 00 00 06 06 06 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 00 00

00

02

00

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

95

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

95

Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700 1622 first halfe yeare

l

s

d

p . Tho: Robins for lendinge of blacke Cotton to hange escocheons on viz to hange all ye Church except ye greater Chancell, 3 times Downe ye body. and my fathers hall 3 blacke liueryes and a pulpett Cloath wch Mr Copley had to make a Cloake of for ye hire of a velluett hearse cloath Riband for ye liueryes ffor Carrying ye hearse cloath backe to London ffor carryinge and retaininge of itt in London 2 dozen and 6 escocheons in mettle 16 escocheons in paper more to ye poore att Surrenden Coffin and embalminge Nichls his Charges up and downe bet London and home 3 times A blacke Cloake for my selfe at 35s p yd 2 p of gloues, garters, and ribandes A hatt and band A Ruffe and Cuffes 3 dozen of pointes p of stockins p of spurres p of hangers

00

07

06

06

03

04

01 00 00 00 04 01 00 01 00

00 04 01 00 07 04 03 06 18

00 04 00 10 00 00 00 08 10

04 00 00 01 00 00 00 00

11 16 11 01 13 12 01 07

10 06 06 10 06 00 02 06

June {

{ { { { { { { { {

d

There is something simultaneously unsettling and compelling about a funeral in account book form: Dering presents not a coherent narrative, but a list of discrete transactions, and the impression is of an event crumbled into pieces. This bathetic form jars with how we expect a funeral to be conveyed: our conception of an ‘event’ is of a collection of actions grouped together in time which collectively gather, and cohere, to produce a single entity which we label, in this case, ‘a funeral’. Dering’s accounts are not double entry, and they do not seem to be enmeshed in other kinds of record in the way Pepys’s or Clifford’s accounts were, but in other respects Dering’s records display many of the features demanded by guides to good accounting. Dering’s accounts are overwhelmingly consistent in layout and design and terminology, generating a sense of regularity and of the generic. Dering fills all the space on the page, drawing a line after the prose description to fill the whole central column (in the manner we might

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

96

96

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

adam smyth

fill space on a cheque), and always recording six digits for each record: a one penny transaction is never ‘1’, but ‘00 00 01’. The fullness of the page becomes a marker of its veracity. And Dering’s records display a meticulous attention to even the smallest of sums: for ‘pitch and pins’, for a ‘matche’, for ‘Flaying a sheepe yat died’ (Dering, 2 September 1620; 1 May 1622; 16 February 1627). Such precision creates a sense of comprehensiveness and surveillance, and suggests a process of recording that is arduous and time consuming. Dering even records small sums that were mislaid: ‘Stolne out of my pockett’ (13s); ‘Spent I haue forgotten how’ (9s 1d) (Dering, 2 March 1622; 27 April 1621). Yet despite the atomised form of the financial account, in some ways Dering’s record strains to lend coherence to these individual transactions: hence the addition of brackets on the left, enclosing the funeral day transactions. The account is thus characterised by a kind of twin pull: the structure of the account book resists the creation of coherent events, but Dering’s brackets tug the account towards coherence. Is there any prioritising of transactions? At first glance, there is a startling juxtaposition of the apparently trivial and the significant: ‘Coffin and embalminge’ is given equal space with a ‘p of stockins’ and ‘Giuen post boy’, producing a kind of anti-narrative levelling. But each record is given a financial value, and this precisely calibrated system of value means a clear hierarchy of significance emerges. By the criteria of the account book, the most significant record is ‘3 blacke liueryes and a pulpett Cloath wch Mr Copley had to make a Cloake of’. Thus out of the apparently indiscriminate list of financial transactions, a system of evaluation emerges. This application of an exact financial value to each record results in the conversion of different kinds of record to a single scale (Woodbridge 2003, 8). The effect of this is to enable exact, quantifiable relationships to be established between records that might otherwise seem incomparable. Everything is put in the same currency. Thus, for example: by the logic of the account book, the charity displayed towards ‘ye poore of Pluckley’ (one pound) is twice as significant as ‘ye sexton for tollinge ye bell and digginge ye graue’ (10 shillings). This kind of comparison appears odd because we apply our own nonfinancial systems of value to records, creating different ladders of significance, based probably around hard-to-quantify ideas of moral worth (although certainly muddied with other, including financial, value systems). And the implications of this culture of equivalency – where everything can be converted into financial value, and so becomes fungible, can always be swapped with something else – haunts much of the drama of

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

97

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700

97

the period: in King Lear, where the old king draws a correspondence between love and land, and in the figures of Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Shylock, who seek an equivalency between ducats and gold and daughters. Yet while the account book converts all events into comparable financial value, Dering also resists this system of evaluation by occasionally breaking away from accounting norms to convey other assessments of worth. Two instances can stand as examples. First, Dering adds titles for sections of his accounts to offer an interpretation of the time covered: the last quarter of 1618 he labels ‘My prodigall yeare’; after Michaelmas 1619, when he gets married, he writes ‘My desperate qrter’. Second, at times Dering suddenly provides a level of description that exceeds the requirements of the account book. He writes: ‘paid my Cosen Deringe [6 pence] which he gaue away’ (Dering, 9 June 1621 (my italics)). Those final four words are not necessary for the account book, and so suggest some significance, presumably disapproving, for Dering. When Dering writes, ‘Giuen my wife this quarter, [£1 3s 8d], besides her allowance, which she lost att Cardes’ (Dering, 1 April 1620), he again invests his record with a response that is beyond the purely financial. If we read these financial records with a sense of genre – which means reading with a sense of the text’s relationship to convention – we can do more than read them for facts. Dering’s text also suggests the importance of objects in the production of his written selfhood, and thus recalls that Renaissance homonym, lost (as Margreta de Grazia has noted) to modern pronunciation: what one is depends on what one owns (De Grazia 1996, 34). The category of autobiography is so powerfully yoked in modern formulations to an idea of interiority and depth that the notion of a written self assembled through surfaces and things seems counter-intuitive or lacking. But the word ‘personality’ has an etymological link with ‘personalty’, or ‘personal property’: it might be a subjectivity not of depths, but of accumulated things; a subjectivity not built around a process of detachment or alienation, but rather through a series of alignments and overlappings and exchanges with people and things in the world.

Notes 1. Due to the nature of the online text, references are given to Dering’s entries by date.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

98

98

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

adam smyth

Bibliography Acheson, Katherine O, ed. 2007. The Memoir of 1603 and The Diary of 1616–1619. Ontario: Broadview. Carpenter, John. 1632. A Most Excellent Instruction For The Exact And Perfect Keeping Merchants Bookes of Accounts. London. Chapman, George, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. 2001. Eastward Ho. In The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies. Edited by James Knowles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colinson, Robert. 1683. Idea Rationaria, or The Perfect Accomptant. London. Connor, Rebecca Elisabeth. 2004. Women, Accounting, and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England. London and New York: Routledge. Dafforne, Richard. 1640. The Apprentices Time-Entertainer Accomptantly. London. Dafforne, Richard. 1684. The Merchant’s Mirrour, or, Directions for the Perfect Ordering and Keeping of his Accounts. London. Dawson, Mark S. 2000. ‘Histories and Texts: Refiguring the Diary of Samuel Pepys’. The Historical Journal 43.2: 407–31. De Grazia, Margreta. 1996. ‘The Ideology of Superfluous Things’. In Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 17–42. Edited by Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Man, Paul. 1984. ‘Autobiography as De-Facement.’ In The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 67–81. New York: Columbia University Press. Dering, Sir Edward. 1617–1628. ‘Booke of Expences’ 1617–1628. Edited by Laetitia Yeandle (undated), www.kentarchaeology.ac (accessed 3 May 2015). Evelyn, John. 1955. The Diary of John Evelyn. Edited by E.S. De Beer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 6 vols. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. ‘The Autobiographical Pact’. In On Autobiography, 3–30. Edited by Paul John Eakin. Translated by Katherine M. Leary. Miineapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marcus, Laura. 1994. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Mellis, John. 1588. A Briefe Instruction and Maner How to Keepe Bookes of Accompts After the Order of Debitor and Creditor. London. Nussbaum, Felicity. 1988. ‘Toward Conceptualizing Diary’. In Studies in Autobiography, 128–40.Edited by James Olney. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 1970–1783. Edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 11 vols. Seelig, Sharon Cadman. 2006. Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D

99

[86–100] 20.10.2015 10:29AM

Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700

99

Smyth, Adam. 2010. Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tomlin, Rebecca. 2014. ‘Sixteenth-Century Humanism, Printing and Authorial Self-Fashioning: The Case of James Peele’. Journal of the Northern Renaissance 6, online journal. Vickers, Brian. 1968. Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodbridge, Linda. 2003. Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C07.3D 10:29AM

100

[86–100] 20.10.2015

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

101

[101–118] 20.10.2015

part 2

Religion, gender, things (ca. 1700–1800)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

102

[101–118] 20.10.2015

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

103

[101–118] 20.10.2015

chapter 8

Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography from Bunyan to Cowper Tessa Whitehouse

‘Spiritual autobiography’ was not a label that eighteenth-century writers, editors, or readers of religious life-writing would have recognised. The predominant term for narratives written in the first person and detailing one’s spiritual development in the context of life events was ‘experience’. Such experiences did not fit into a single category in terms of form, genre, physical appearance, or mode of circulation. An experience might appear as a duodecimo pamphlet of thirty-six pages (like John Newton’s 1816 edition of William Cowper’s Adelphi) or as a serial issued over the course of years, such as John Wesley’s Journal. It might be produced by a tract society intended for mass distribution and priced accordingly, like the exemplary life story of the child Cartaret Rede, which was ‘faithfully taken from her own mouth’ (Rede 1760, title page). It might not be printed at all: the carefully preserved autobiographical narrative of Mary Steele in the archive of The Angus Library, Oxford, remained virtually unknown until its publication in 2011. Even within a single work, manuscript or printed, a narrative of religious experience was often a composite text. It was common to weave together biographical narrative with personal testimony, diary entries, letters, and prayers, and to intersperse personal expressions of religious feeling (which might themselves be composed out of hymns and Scripture) with editorial comments.

Patterns for spiritual autobiography Recognising the complexity of the term ‘spiritual autobiography’ and the varied narrative practices contained within it problematises two influential twentieth-century conceptualisations of the practice. The first of these is ontological in that it understands autobiography as a technology for constructing individualised patterns for narrating being. The second is structural, and is known as the morphology of conversion. The first is 103

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

104

104

[101–118] 20.10.2015

tessa whitehouse

articulated by Patricia Meyer Spacks, according to whom ‘[t]he crucial literary problem of autobiography is to articulate a significant form for the relative incoherence of human experience’ (Spacks 1976, 434). Spiritual autobiography is unique among autobiographical forms for being able to avoid that fundamental ontological difficulty because God provides the form. The writer cannot be held responsible for the pattern of the narrative they present. More than that: they cannot even understand the shape of the life they are representing until it is written. The radically uncertain, provisional, and creative identity for the spiritual autobiography and the liberation therefore offered to its writers that Spacks celebrated is, however, challenged by the conformity to a set pattern of many examples from the eighteenth century. Bruce D. Hindmarsh notes that the sequence of stages in the life of the believer first articulated in William Perkins’s Armilla Aurela (1590) ‘provide the structure for countless autobiographies in the seventeenth century and beyond’ (Hindmarsh 2005, 35). While it is true that autobiographical narratives of spiritual experience share themes, metaphors, and structuring devices, neither Spacks’s nor Hindmarsh’s claims about the literary and psychological particularities of spiritual autobiography acknowledge the fact that the majority of such pieces collage a variety of different narrative forms. Therefore, evidence of the subject’s experience of repentance, conversion, patience, and assurance is rarely presented in a single or univocal account, but instead is dispersed across retrospective narration, reported speech, diary extracts, and letters. Because of this formal miscellaneity, written accounts of spiritual experience required the shaping hand of a human editor as much as they might owe its origins and direction to divine intervention. Titles and subtitles acknowledged this patchwork, editorialised composition process, as with Some Account of the Choice Experience of Anne Brine. As Written by Herself, and Collected out of her Letters edited by her husband, the minister John Brine. The instability of the term ‘spiritual autobiography’ as a formal label for eighteenth-century texts complicates Spacks’s claim that ‘spiritual autobiography is by definition a success story, a record of sanctioned change in the service of incontrovertibly acceptable goals’ in two respects (Spacks 1976, 434). First of all, there is no ‘definition’ of spiritual autobiography; it is, rather, an umbrella term for myriad narrative forms and documentary assemblages. Secondly, any ‘success’ proclaimed by the majority of such narratives is elusive. The processes of spiritual development described are arduous and painful, and the outcomes ambivalent at best. The most positive narratives reach their conclusion at the subject’s deathbed; a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

105

[101–118] 20.10.2015

Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography

105

situation requiring a move out of first-person and into third-person narration, and therefore into the realm of interpreting outwards signs rather than attesting to inward assurance. While eighteenth-century Christians would have recognised the various manifestations of written experiences then circulating, twentieth-century scholars preferred to identify and categorise religious life-writing according to a set of conventions thought to define conversion narratives. The shape – or morphology, as Edmund S. Morgan termed it – of conversion became the predominant heuristic for analysing experiential accounts, first applied to those of individuals involved in religious awakenings in colonial New England in the 1730s but, over time, to texts produced throughout the Anglophone world from the 1640s to the early nineteenth century. The stages of conversion Morgan identified were ‘knowledge, conviction, faith, combat, and true, imperfect assurance’ (Morgan 1963, 72). These can certainly be discerned in many narratives, but it is not a uniform pattern and texts themselves offer a range of alternative structures for the experience of conversion. For James Barry, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, the four ‘particulars’ of experience comprised: 1 ‘The miraculous Preservation of . . . bodily Life’ in the face (and teeth) of wild boar, dogs, Catholics, horses, and frost-nails. 2 ‘The Method God took . . . in awakening him . . . to mind Soul Concerns’ at the age of fourteen. 3 ‘How the Spirit of Bondage took him’. 4 ‘How the Spirit of Adoption succeeded . . . healing and binding up the deep Wounds’. (Barry 1699, title page) A similar structure is detailed by G. A. Starr, based on James Fraser’s narrative from 1670. The eight-stage pattern articulated by Fraser divided up the ebbs and flows of assurance more precisely in terms of duration and of quality of experience than Barry would, thus: ‘Some things concerning my conversion, the time and manner; and what immediately followed’; ‘the sad and long decay that happened thereafter’; ‘some things touching my recovery out of that decay’; ‘some things that happened immediately after this recovery, for the space of four or five years’; and ‘some things relating to my present condition’ (Starr 1965, 38).

Beyond conversion narrative The morphology of conversion is a complex topic. Where and when the narrative practices associated with the mode of conversion to the belief of

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

106

106

[101–118] 20.10.2015

tessa whitehouse

being born in Christ started, how different religious groups adapted the pattern, and the degree to which it served either to fix individual experience or to establish meaningful group identities have been debated at length, and the key claims are lucidly evaluated by both Hindmarsh and Lynch (Hindmarsh 2005, 10–2 and 49–50; Lynch 2012, 12–9 and 174–8). Spiritual autobiography has been understood primarily in terms of conversion narrative and this, Lynch notes, ‘cast[s] a hegemonic shadow over an emergent genre’ (Lynch 2012, 16). Attempting to step out of that shadow and bring the fullest possible range of texts into the light, this chapter focuses on the range of forms that the term ‘spiritual autobiography’ can encompass and investigates the practical and communal functions articulated and served by particular works. By considering examples written by Quakers, Methodists, Catholics, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Anglicans, and by looking across the whole length of the long eighteenth century, this chapter aims to show that writers’ denominational and social circumstances and gender shaped the autobiographies they produced, but so did the commitments of their readers and editors, sometimes in surprising ways. Members of virtually all Christian denominations produced spiritual autobiographies of one sort or another in the eighteenth century. It is important to remember this, even though the scholarly literature on Anglophone culture in the period has focused almost exclusively on the narratives of Protestants, because it enables narratives of religious experience to be understood positively in terms of continuities over time and commonalities across denominational divides. The shared literary practices through which faith and religious experience were articulated had powerful Biblical precedents in terms of form and theme. It is to these considerations of literary heritage, which also include material issues such as editorship and the presentation of printed texts, that the rest of this chapter will attend, rather than to the psychological states of individual Christians that spiritual autobiographies may or may not manifest. In order to emphasise continuities in community and tradition, it will take a broad view of the range of materials that constitute spiritual autobiography. Though spiritual autobiography is very strongly associated with Protestant revivals in the eighteenth century, it was not the exclusive domain of evangelicals. Certainly there are many examples of narratives written by Christians who were moved by the spirit and experienced conversion in a context of revival, including the Methodist leaders John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, and Calvinist Anglicans such as John Newton. But there is a varied and enduring tradition of Quaker spiritual autobiography written by women and men, as manifested in

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

107

[101–118] 20.10.2015

Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography

107

works by Elizabeth Stirredge, John Banks, and Alice Hayes. Conversion predated the evangelical revivals of the mid eighteenth century too, of course. John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) is today the best known among many examples of seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography. The denominations of traditional religious nonconformity (Baptist, Congregationalist, and Presbyterian) encouraged spiritual self-reflection, as the narratives of Melicent Sills (which was printed in the eighteenth century) and that of Mary Steele (which was not) attest. At opposite ends of the religious spectrum in terms of ecclesiology and doctrine, Unitarianism and Catholicism are, perhaps, the denominations least readily associated with spiritual autobiography. But members of these churches did write them. The Unitarian Richard Wright followed a traditional pattern in relating his own spiritual development as a young man in the 1780s. He read seventeenth-century autobiographical and practical writings by John Bunyan and Richard Baxter, attended sermons, and engaged in religious conversation. The resultant conversion experience was presented as ‘new light . . . respecting the Great love of God in the gift of his son’ (Wright 1817, 55). In the English convents of Europe, exemplary lives of women religious were carefully preserved for the edification of future generations.

Writing religious experience The authors of spiritual autobiographies belonged to diverse communities of faith and came from very different backgrounds. In a hierarchical culture that valued maturity and privileged the opinions of men, there was a striking openness to the spiritual wisdom that the experiences of immature or less-educated people could provide. Children and young people only rarely articulated their religious experiences in conventional first-person sequential narratives. It was far more usual for their lives to be presented in the form of biographies narrated by a parent (as with Cartaret Rede), spouse (as with Melicent Sills), or minister (as with Phoebe Bartlet in Jonathan’s Edwards’s Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God). In each of these examples, though the nominal author is distinct from the subject and occupies a more conventionally authoritative social position, the voices of these young females dominate the narratives of their lives. Their opinions and guidance are articulated in letters included in the works and in statements of faith and guidance that take place at their deathbeds, a privileged time of spiritual insight represented with ‘sombre detailed care’ in diaries, letters, and narratives (Rack 1992, 42). Cartaret Rede, who died

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

108

108

[101–118] 20.10.2015

tessa whitehouse

in 1701 at the age of six, responds in exemplary fashion to her mother’s questions ‘What do you see?’, ‘Does God lift up the Light of his Countenance upon you Soul?’, and ‘Are you willing to go to Christ?’, and describes a vision of ‘Christ hanging on the Tree’ before submitting to her father’s prayers and dying peacefully (Rede 1760, 20–1). In 1799, during a protracted consumptive illness, Melicent Sills spoke powerfully to friends and relatives gathered around her: “My dear friends, I have waited for the Lord, and he is come, he is come!” she announces joyfully. She reassures her companions through conversation and communal activity: ‘Seeing some weep, she said, “weep not for me, I love a death bed”’, and encourages joy and praise in them by asking them to recite hymns together and then discuss their meanings, including Isaac Watts’s lines ‘The more thy glories strike my eyes, / The humbler I shall lie; / Thus while I sink my joys shall rise / Unmeasurably high!’ (Sills 1800, 8–14). Humility as a personal attribute of both character and status becomes a powerful tool for selfexpression for the convinced and dying Christian across many spiritual autobiographies. Male autobiographers of lower social status include Gronniosaw, a former slave leading a life of a destitute itinerant, Quaker naval conscripts John Smith and Richard Sellar, and many itinerant Methodist preachers from modest backgrounds. Perseverance in the face of increasingly difficult trials is characteristic of these narratives. Sometimes that resolution is rewarded and sometimes not, even in the same autobiography: Gronniosaw, for example, escapes execution but is sold into slavery. While working on an American plantation he reads Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted sheltering in a stable whereupon ‘my heart lifted up to GOD’ (Gronniosaw 1774, 24). But spiritual fulfilment does not render material want irrelevant: years later, in England, he is so destitute that he is happy to receive a gift of carrots and closes his autobiography by stating that ‘As pilgrims, and as very poor pilgrims, we are travelling through many difficulties towards our heavenly home’ (Ibid., 48). In this example, the process of narrating a life does not bring coherence to experience despite the occurrence of biblical parallels in the depictions of captivity (Bannet 2011, 143–4). Nor does the fact of a printed spiritual autobiography place the subject in a community of faith. Notwithstanding its dedication to the countess of Huntingdon, its statement of authenticity from her cousin (one Reverend Shirley) and the transcription of the story by ‘the elegant pen of a young lady of Leominster’ (Gronniosaw 1774, 4), Gronniosaw’s actual and spiritual journeys take place mostly in isolation. The forlorn story Gronniosaw tells of his own life and the material destitution with

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

109

[101–118] 20.10.2015

Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography

109

which that story ends indicates how not all spiritual autobiography is positive, though his personal tale of neglect is mitigated by the subsequent textual history of the narrative, which had twelve reprintings in England, Wales, and America by 1800 (Carretta, 1996, 54). Attention to socially marginal but spiritually significant autobiographers should not obscure the dominance of religious ministers over autobiography as over so much else in religious culture. Melicent Sills’s experience was mediated for readers by both her husband, who narrated the account, and the minister whose editorial interventions framed the whole work. The work ends: ‘Reader reflect: – You have been reading a plain account of the last moments of a young woman, the sincerity of whose profession of religion, was proved by her consistent temper and conversation’ (Sills 1800, 23). This interposition between narrator, subject, and reader to determine a single interpretation of a complex example is characteristic of the editorial practice of ministers. They also exerted a powerful influence on lay Christians through their own autobiographical writings, and this was a strong motivation for them to write autobiographical accounts.

Reading, writing, and spiritual autobiography The nature of the genre makes it impossible to identify a single or primary purpose for writing. Bruce Hindmarsh suggests a range of possible motivations: to monitor one’s own progress towards grace; less solipsistically, to prompt self-examination and religious awakening among other Christians and readers; more bureaucratically, receiving written accounts of spiritual development enabled international church movements to monitor the practice and progress of their ministers and evangelists (Hindmarsh 2005, 143–50, 171–4, and 247–5). Kathleen Lynch emphasises that the ‘methodology of replication’ that the content of experiential narratives encouraged was supported materially by mass reproduction enabled by print technology (Lynch 2012, 121). From the mid seventeenth century, on this view, the mutually enhancing possibilities for the interrelation of religion and writing to enrich collective experience was expanded by the potential for texts to enter communities unknown to their writers and producers. The evangelical horizon was vastly enlarged. Michael Davies has shown how the enduring patterns of Calvinist spiritual autobiography exemplified by Bunyan – being lost in mazes, being ‘cast down’ and then ‘raised up’ repeatedly – provided a figurative and expressive structure within which eighteenth-century writers (his examples being John

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

110

110

[101–118] 20.10.2015

tessa whitehouse

Newton and William Cowper) could play out the complexities of their personal experiences of faith (Davies 2007). Motivations to write identified by autobiographers themselves include demonstrating the interconnection of their piety and their literary facility. Awareness of existing models for plotting spiritual experience was one aspect of this. The model of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding is followed in figurative and structural terms to represent what Hindmarsh terms ‘the travail of conversion’ (Hindmarsh 2005, 159). Echoes of Bunyan can be found in the imagery and structures of autobiographical writing by his dissenting successors such as John Ryland, by evangelical Anglicans like John Newton, and, more unexpectedly, in the ‘Short Account’ of the life of the eighteenth-century leisured Methodist Hester Rogers. Rogers finds it difficult to resist ‘all the vain customs and pleasures of a delusive world’ such as ‘novels, balls, cardtables, assemblies’; these are snares that appear on almost every page. Despite the fact that ‘I repented and sinned . . . sinned and repented again’, Rogers finds no relief until she has experienced deep despair and found a Methodist preacher (Rogers 1796, 6–7, 15). Even then, her spiritual torments are not over. Her weeping and praying, attention to inward piety, but inability to move forward are all strongly reminiscent of Grace Abounding, though transposed to a worldly setting. Rogers’s gesturing to Bunyan’s seventeenth-century narrative both invokes a literary tradition and demonstrates conformity to an authentic pattern of religious experience reaching back more than a century. Such structural manifestations of godly reading were complemented by the presence of books performing spiritual functions at key points in these autobiographical narratives. Gronniosaw’s experience of reading A Call to the Unconverted was far from unique, and reference to Baxter’s work generally was a mainstay of religious autobiography. Mary Steele, writing in 1780, alludes to ‘My favourite Mr Baxter’ as she grapples with the intellectual and theological challenges of accepting the doctrines of free grace and justification by faith alone (Whelan 2011, 191). Her spiritual development is strongly shaped by the reading she does. For both Gronniosaw and Steele (as for Rogers, Ryland, and many others) religious books act as prompts to conversion and tools for understanding faith. Demonstrating that faith was bolstered by literary engagement both to oneself and to the readers of one’s narrative – who might be individuated (such as Mary Steele addressing her father) or imagined more broadly – bound Christians into a shared culture of reading and writing that reached across centuries. This is one aspect of the literary culture that Bruce Hindmarsh has termed ‘narrative communities’ (Hindmarsh 2005, 128).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

111

[101–118] 20.10.2015

Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography

111

Communities and individuals A narrative of religious experience might serve to bear witness to persecution endured individually or collectively. This became a significant tradition in itself, particularly for marginal groups such as Quakers. The reasons for the publication of Elizabeth Stirredge’s autobiography Strength in Reason Manifest are given as instruction, edification, and commemoration, as a record of persecution and as spiritual comfort to readers (Stirredge 1711,‘Preface’). The editor has been chosen by the descendants of Stirredge, he says, because he had been imprisoned with the author. Shared personal experiences of persecution inform the editorial making of the volume as well as the content of the narrative. The work was reprinted throughout the eighteenth century, and as such it constitutes a personal narrative of experience beginning in the troubles of the seventeenth century that found a wider audience in the eighteenth. Alice Hayes’s autobiography (first printed in 1723) also represents the collective history of persecuted ‘Friends’ in its content and form. Hayes relates her prosecution for non-payment of tithes (Hayes 1723, 57). But hers is not the only experience at stake in this account of private spiritual experiences and their public consequences: within her autobiographical narrative, she provides a formal testimony ‘for my Dear Friend and FellowLabourer’, the minister Francis Stamper (Ibid., 57). She addresses the work to two audiences: the well-known circle of her family and, more widely, to ‘you Children of Men into whose Hands these lines may come’ (Ibid., 70). To these readers she addresses a ten-page discourse on the vanities of the world and the need to bear witness to God’s truth. The autobiography is a call to action. This communal meaning of the text extends beyond Hayes’s own words. The preface to a nineteenth-century edition alludes to contemporary resonances that might be found in her narrative. Observing that ‘[i]t will show that false accusations of our principles are not now for the first time made’, the editor invokes a climate of contention whose nature is not explicitly stated (Hayes 1836, iii). However, the concluding question, ‘Our dangers may not consist in the confiscation of goods and imprisonment of body, but . . . are they not more insidious – more deadly to the body?’ suggests that the editor hopes the positive example of eighteenth-century narratives such as Hayes’s will counteract the temptations of worldliness that Quakers in all centuries must face (Ibid., iv). Though Catholics are theologically distant from Quakers, the two groups are comparable in terms of the persecutory culture that shaped the ways in which they recorded and preserved their personal experiences

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

112

112

[101–118] 20.10.2015

tessa whitehouse

of faith. Catherine Holland was born a Protestant, and to fulfil her calling to become a Catholic she had to plot to deceive her parents and become a fugitive (Durrant 1925, 290–300). The careful factual accounting in her narrative is comparable to the writings of Quaker women, and indicates that late-seventeenth-century religious experience, however personal, was understood by writers with reference to political and legal frameworks. If it is difficult to situate Catholic autobiography in a wider Anglophone Christian tradition, that is partly due to some critical resistance to the possibility of finding cross-confessional connections. Scholars have claimed that ‘Catholic women in post-Reformation England do not seem to have produced a body of autobiographical writings comparable to their Protestant counterparts’ (Dolan 2003, 328). Perhaps it is because of the marginal presence of Catholic writers in print culture that this view has prevailed. Emerging scholarship based on archival sources, however, shows that the English convents in exile fostered cultures of self-examination and expression of religious identity through professions of faith and documents written at the instruction of spiritual directors (Hallett 2012). Victoria Van Hyning usefully suggests that anonymously authored chronicles and other institutional records may be thought of in terms of ‘subsumed autobiography’ (Van Hyning 2014, 221). Though the social and cultural circumstances of autobiographical production, circulation, and preservation within Catholic communities are quite different to those of Protestant groups, there are similarities in terms of the reasons for writing. Fragmentary and bureaucratic though many of the convent manuscripts are, they attest, like Protestant autobiography, to the connections between religious identity, spiritual expression, and participation in a larger tradition. Autobiographical writings by English women religious were shaped by the circumstances of exile created by legal persecution while evincing strong textual communities among those exiles.

Autobiographical patterns A variety of literary, textual, and practical circumstances bore on the writing of spiritual autobiographies. Scripture provided justifications for the validity of experiential accounts of those now dead (‘the memory of the just be blessed’, Proverbs 10.7, and ‘He, being dead, yet speaketh’, Hebrews 11.4), models of conversion (notably the roadside experience of Saul), and imagery that could pattern a narrative, such as that of the quest or pilgrimage. Maritime motifs of voyage, shipwreck, and drowning are omnipresent. Sea voyages provide the real-life setting for events of testing and

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

113

[101–118] 20.10.2015

Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography

113

temptation in John Newton’s Authentic Narrative (many editions of which also included maps) and the experiences of the Quakers John Smith and Richard Sellar, as well as the occasion that gave George Whitefield leisure to record his own first ‘emplotted’ autobiographical narrative – itself the story of a voyage (Hindmarsh 2005, 104–5). In all of these examples, the sea is both a practical fact of the writers’ quotidian experience and a nexus of spiritual struggle, as when Newton describes how he ‘made shipwreck of faith, hope, and conscience’ (Newton 1764, 31). The sea also figures in narratives written by women. Along with a boatful of fellow Methodists, Hester Rogers is delivered from drowning after a shipwreck (Rogers 1796, 48). These Protestant autobiographers invoked the sea to write themselves into the long literary history of the motif from its origins in the Old Testament misfortunes of Jonah to the present. As Michael Davies observes, ‘seafaring metaphors [are] a language inherited not just from Bunyan, of course, but from the likes of Wyatt and Spenser, Donne and Milton too’ (Davies 2007, 13). They are not, however, a language used only by Protestants. Catherine Holland’s account of her conversion to Catholicism written in the early 1660s uses the sea both metaphorically to depict her spiritual turmoil – when she writes ‘Thus was I several Years troubled in Spirit and tossed up and down with every Fancy’ – and literally as the setting for an encounter with the divine: ‘In this my journey at Sea, Almighty God touched my Heart in a more especial Manner . . . Thoughts came into my Mind and that after a very lively Manner; not simply and passively but impressively; so as I could not but take notice of them’ she writes (Durrant 1925, 281–2). Autobiographical writings were at least as strongly shaped by oral culture as they were by published literature. Autobiographers frequently invoke conversation as a factor affecting their spiritual development. Catherine Holland first related her experience to her spiritual advisor who, she said, encouraged her to write it down. Mary Steele specified the advantages that religious conversation with her mother and close friends had brought her. Richard Wright fondly recalled Sundays spent in twenty-mile round trips to hear sermons ‘going in small parties to the meeting, and from one meeting to the other, the conversation by the way &c. giving much mental pleasure’ (Wright 1817, 49). Non-narrative forms of spiritual autobiography included admissions testimonies for church membership, dying sayings, and conversation with friends, pastors, and spiritual directors. These oral elements of autobiographical culture enriched written narratives and provided sources of imagery and shared points of references for hearers and readers.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

114

114

[101–118] 20.10.2015

tessa whitehouse

Oral culture was also important for the authorisation it gave to an autobiographer. The inclusion of many signed testimonies as paratexts to printed Quaker experiences is interpreted by Barbour and Roberts as evidence that their primary audience was expected to be fellow Quakers (Barbour and Roberts 1973, 180). The presence of authorising statements signed by ‘Friends’ certainly has the effect of centring an individual life story in the community out of which it emerged, as in the example of Elizabeth Stirredge. Her account contains three testimonials, including one signed by six men. This authorising practice is not exclusive to Quakers, however. A letter written by a female friend of the Baptist Melicent Sills attesting to the veracity of her deathbed sayings was included at the end of the Brief Narrative. The relatively wide use of such testimonies, which almost always specified that the writer was a fellow congregant, suggests that they served an authorising function as much as an advertising one, and restated the centrality of congregational life to the religious experience of the individual. The cross-confessional resonances of this practice extended to Catholics. Conversion narratives or accounts of spiritual experience might be requested or authorised by a male spiritual director, as in the case for Catherine Holland and many others from the early seventeenth century onwards. The situation of texts coming into being with authorising paratexts may often have been motivated by uneasiness about controlling the power of expression, but it was not only a question of women benefitting from the supporting voice of a male patron. Ministers’ interventions authorised the autobiographical activities of the laity. John Newton’s editorship of William Cowper’s biography of his brother John Cowper, Adelphi, is an instance of authorisation significantly changing a text. Cowper had paired his account of his brother’s spiritual experiences with a description of his own journey from childhood security through instability and despair alleviated by God’s saving hand. Newton’s editorial decision separates the two halves of the work and obscures from readers the full implications of William Cowper’s presentation of his own ongoing conversion in terms of his brother’s religious experiences.

Conclusion: authority and survival The role of Newton’s intervention in Cowper’s work raises the significant question of how it is we know what spiritual autobiographers actually

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

115

[101–118] 20.10.2015

Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography

115

wrote. Cowper’s twentieth-century editors found epistolary and archival evidence for earlier, and rather different, manuscript versions that circulated relatively widely long before Newton published the stripped-down single account of John Cowper (King and Ryskamp 1979, xxiv). But these methods of dissemination and the version of Cowper’s text they presented should not necessarily be set in opposition. Transcribing, editing, archiving, and printing projects by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christians ensured the survival of accounts of religious experiences of fellow-believers, but questions of authenticity troubled eighteenth-century editors of earlier autobiographical texts no less than their readers. James Barry’s account of his religious experiences was printed in 1699 with the title A Reviving Cordial for a Sin-sick Despairing Soul. It was reissued three times in the eighteenth century before being revived in 1788 by the ardent Calvinist William Huntingdon, who retitled the work The Coal-Heaver’s Cousin Rescued form the Bats, and his Incomparable Cordials (republished in 1802 and 1814) in order to forge a connection between himself (the selfstyled coal heaver) and Barry. Huntington’s edition not only gave Barry’s tale new life and, like the Quaker narratives surveyed above, presented a positive spiritual example from an earlier age to readers at risk from modern corruptions, but it responded to debates about the authenticity of the seventeenth-century narrative by offering various proofs gleaned in his biographical sleuthing. Huntington relates a visit to Barry’s daughter (‘Her husband’s name is Wilson . . . they keep a toy and earthen-ware shop, opposite Hackney church’), locates Barry’s grave, and concludes this evidence of Barry’s existence with an attack on moderate dissenting historians such as Edmund Calamy, who ‘are sure to bury the names of such men, and their testimonies, in silence, lest the devil’s interest should fall to the ground’ (Barry 1802, 136). The fervour of this particular editor’s interventions in religious history serves as a reminder that the uses of autobiographical narratives were never neutral. The capacity of printed books to secure the tradition they represent motivates scholarly publishing of eighteenth-century religious writing. Editors and reviewers of The English Convents in Exile hope the ‘shifting sands’ of archival collections can be stabilised by the permanence of published volumes (Coolahan 2012. Introducing the life and work of Mary Steele, Timothy Whelan claims that ‘[w]ith the publication of this volume, her voice “sings” again’ (Whelan 2011, 25). Importantly, she sings in the company of her fellow nonconformist women, eight volumes of whose writings are now available to readers thanks to Whelan’s work. Together with the bibliographies of Quaker writings compiled by

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

116

116

[101–118] 20.10.2015

tessa whitehouse

Barbour and Roberts and the selections of texts edited by David Booy, these works attest to the diversity of forms spiritual recording could take, and enable the reassessment of canonical autobiographical writings (whose authors are often male and often ministerial) in terms of oral cultures, editorial practices, community bureaucratic procedures, and the role of the laity, and through cross-confessional comparisons. This chapter has attended to works of spiritual autobiography written and circulated between the publication of Grace Abounding in 1666 and Adelphi in 1802 to argue that similarities in theme, purpose, and form are, paradoxically, found in patchwork texts from a range of religious perspectives produced in a variety of circumstances. Placing lesser-known writers at the centre of the account highlights the fact that while the structure and content of Bunyan’s and Cowper’s narratives are typical of the broad range of spiritual autobiography written, circulated, and published in this period, the cultural prestige and secure place in the English literary canon of these two writers are not. A striking feature of published autobiographical writing of religious experience is recurrent editorial statements of the need for its recovery. This preoccupied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors as it does their successors today. At stake for all spiritual autobiographers and their editors is the value, in literary and social terms, of a single story beyond the life of its teller.

Notes I would like to thank Caroline Bowden, Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, Louisiane Ferlier, Felicity James, and Brooke Palimeri for productive discussions. Any errors are, of course, my own.

Bibliography Bannet, Eve Tavor. 2011. Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720– 1810. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barbour, Hugh and Arthur O. Roberts, eds. 1973. Early Quaker Writings 1650– 1700. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Barry, James. 1699. A Reviving Cordial for a Sin-Despairing Soul. Edited by William Huntington. London. Barry, James. 1802. The Coal-Heaver’s Cousin Rescued from The Bats and his Incomparable Cordials Recovered. Edited by William Huntington. London. Brine, John. 1813. A Treatise on Various Subjects . . . And Some Account of the Choice Experience of Mrs. Anne Brine, Written by Herself. London: J. Upton.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

117

[101–118] 20.10.2015

Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography

117

Booy, David. 2004. Autobiographical Writing by Early Quaker Women. Aldershot: Ashgate. Carretta, Vincent. 1996. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Coolahan, Marie-Louise. 2012. ‘Book Review: The English Convents in Exile (Part I, vols. 1–3)’. History of Women Religious Archives. www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgibin/webadmin?A2=HWR;b930a541.1212. Cowper, William. 1802. Adelphi. Edited by John Newton. London: Williams and Son. Davies, Michael. 2007. ‘Shaping Grace: The Spiritual Autobiographies of John Newton and William Cowper’. The Cowper and Newton Bulletin. 6.1: 3–30. Dolan, Frances E. 2003. ‘Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies’. English Literary Renaissance. 33.1: 328–57. Durrant, C. S. 1925. A Link Between Flemish Martyrs and English Mystics. London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne. Gronniosaw, James. 1774. A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw. Bath: B. Southwick. Hallett, Nicky, ed. 2012. The English Convents in Exile Volume III: Life Writing. Farnham: Ashgate. Hayes, Alice. 1723. The Widow’s Mite. London: J. Sowle. Hayes, Alice. 1836. The Widow’s Mite. London: Darton and Harvey. Hindmarsh, Bruce D. 2005. Evangelical Conversion Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, James and Charles Ryskamp, eds. 1979. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper Volume I. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lynch, Kathleen. 2012. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century Anglophone World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, Edmund S. 1963. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Newton, John. 1764. An Authentick Narrative. London: J. Johnson. Rack, Henry D. 1992. ‘Evangelical Endings: Deathbeds in Evangelical Biography’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 74: 39–56. Rede, Sarah. 1760. A Token for Youth. London: J. Oliver. Rogers, Hester. 1796. A Short Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers. Bristol: R. Edwards. Sills, Melicent. 1800. A Brief Narrative of the Experience and Dying Sayings of Melicent Sills of Chesham, Bucks. Chesham: J. Sleap. Spacks, Patricia. 1976. Imagining a Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Starr, G. A. 1965. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832370/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C08.3D 10:45AM

118

118

[101–118] 20.10.2015

tessa whitehouse

Stirredge, Elizabeth. 1711. Strength in Weakness Manifest. London: J. Sowle. Van Hyning, Victoria. 2014. ‘Expressing Selfhood in the Convent: Anonymous Chronicling and Subsumed Autobiography’. Recusant History 32: 219–34. Whelan, Timothy. 2011. Nonconformist Women Writers Volume 4: Poetry, Prose and Correspondence of Mary Steele. London: Pickering and Chatto. Wright, Richard. 1817. ‘Materials Which May be Used in Composing Memoirs of My Own Life’. Harris Manchester College MS Wright 12.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

119 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

chapter 9

‘Written by herself ’: British women’s autobiography in the eighteenth century Robert Folkenflik

There are fewer autobiographies by eighteenth-century British women and men than we may realise. William Matthews, the foremost bibliographer of the subject, says there are around four hundred in total, but in fact there are far fewer (Matthews 1973, 3). In the case of women’s autobiography, by my count there are under thirty known narratives, not including very short ones, by women born in Britain, though others are undoubtedly hidden in manuscripts in libraries and family archives. Felicity Nussbaum noted nearly thirty years ago that there was no history of ‘women’s autobiographical writing’ for the century, and that remains true (Nussbaum 1989, 128). Nevertheless, a generation of feminist scholars, including but not limited to the pioneering Patricia Meyer Spacks, Felicity Nussbaum, Amy Culley, Dianne Dugaw, Cristine Levenduski, and Lynda M. Thompson, have greatly forwarded our understanding of eighteenth-century women’s autobiography. In the eighteenth century, autobiographies of both men and women appeared in greater numbers than in the seventeenth century, and the voices of women who would not have written or been published earlier were heard. Some women preachers spoke in print. Actresses, women accustomed to presenting themselves to an audience and to playing roles (from 1660), began to represent themselves in autobiographies. In their books, these women are constructing the selves they are, or want their audience to believe they are, often in opposition to received opinions. As Mary Poovey, drawing on Patricia Meyer Spacks, puts it, ‘The struggle to be a self takes place simultaneously with the effort to express the self’ (Poovey 1985, 41). ‘Scandalous memoirs’ were published by women (often actresses) whose sexual liaisons would not have been self-described by them in the past. The word ‘autobiography’ itself did not appear in a title until the nineteenth century, or indeed at all before 1797 (Folkenflik 1993, 3–6).1 One could plausibly argue that there were no autobiographies in the 119

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

120

120 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

robert folkenflik

century, only memoirs, but that term is too broad, covering both autobiography and biography, as well as events recounted from personal knowledge, such as Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough’s account of her years at court (1742). Wayne Shumaker notes that the earlier in time one focuses on autobiography, the more expansive one’s definition is likely to be (Shumaker, 1954, 2). I generally focus on works, as Aristotle put it when speaking of tragedy, ‘of a certain magnitude’, but length as criterion would exclude the impoverished poet, Mary Collier, and the soon-to-be-executed Anne Elliott. Collier prefaces her Poems on Several Occasions (1762) with ‘Some Remarks of the Author’s Life Drawn by Herself’, a thumbnail autobiography that packs into a few pages topics such as poverty; reading; learning to write so as to write down the poems that she had composed in her mind in response to Stephen Duck’s ‘too severe’ treatment of women in his ‘Thresher’s Labour’; hard labor as a washerwoman; old age on a farm; and ‘a Garret (The Poor Poets Fate) in Alton’ (Collier 1762, iii-v). A genuine account of the Behaviour, Confessions, and Dying Words, of the six malefactors, Executed at Guildford (1742) includes The Life of Anne Elliott, written by Herself. Elliott, the only one of the condemned six to write her own life (on seven sides of paper), begins by denying she stole silver household goods, but confesses to not living ‘the most upright life’, though not a drinker nor a ‘company keeper, for I had an Aversion to a Whore, tho (God forgive me) I was one myself’. She tells a story of the death of her father, going into service, reading plays instead of ‘good books’, becoming a ‘fine promising girl’ at sixteen, and obtaining ‘the addresses of many People of Quality’. Meeting her ‘ruin’ at the hands of such a man, she tells a predictable, though not formulaic, story that, except for the ending, resembles later accounts of victimised women. She has illegitimate children, lives the high life, but, poor again, mistakenly hires as a maid a young girl who had (putatively) stolen the goods that brought Elliott to the scaffold. Her account reads like a detailed, compressed version of Moll Flanders without the happy ending (Elliott 1742, 4–9). Lives ‘written by herself’ (a frequent formula in the period) may be fiction or fact, and they may sometimes have, even when factual, been written by men. In Tatler (1713), Sir Richard Steele observed dryly that ‘the Word Memoir is French for a Novel’ (Steele 1987, 2:36). As if to prove him right, Delarivier Manley published The Adventures of Rivella (a nearanagram of her name) the following year. After her death her publisher, the unscrupulous Edmund Curll, retitled it Mrs. Manley’s History of her Own Life and Times. Published from Her Original Manuscript, claiming

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

121 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

‘Written by herself’

121

that he had commissioned Charles Gildon to write the book, and when Manley got wind of the intention, Curll invited her to write it. Yet the 1714 subtitle identifies the book as The History of the Author of the Atalantis, and the 1717 edition calls it Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Manley. The book, which promises ‘Secret Memoirs’, is narrated by Sir Charles Lovemore ‘in a conversation’ with Chevalier D’Aumont. Furthermore, the ‘Translator’s Preface’ informs us that as servant to D’Aumont, the publisher was the amanuensis who took French dictation from the Chevalier of Lovemore’s remembered conversation. This convoluted narrative (the treacherous main source for modern biographies of Manley) has much in common with Manley’s fictions, which she called ‘novels’. We might follow her lead (or Steele’s), or think of this book as a short romance, or in modern terms a roman à clef. Nevertheless, the form has seventeenth-century precedents, such as Sir Kenelm Digby’s Loose Fantasies (1628?), in which he is Theagenes, a hero of early romance; his wife, the beautiful Venetia, née Stanley, becomes Stelliana. This tradition of using romance names and tropes in autobiography, as in Mary Delany’s mid-eighteenth-century version, ‘Letters to my dear Friend begun in the year 1740’, which features such romance names as Valeria, Sappho, and Superba for the women and Roberto, Tranio, and Alcander for the men, disguises actual identities, while throwing the appearance of fiction over the doings of the real actors (Delany 1861, 1: 7–242). Delany, neither aristocrat nor demi-rep but the chaste wife of the Dean of Down, tells of her early days and unhappy first marriage as the wife of Gromio (Pendarves), an old, jealous, bibulous husband, the very stuff of Restoration comedies and the amorous fictions of Manley, Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood. Given the quality of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters, it is a pity that we only have a fragment of autobiography by her, written in the style of the French romances. Steele was questioning the truth of autobiography tout court, but in the eighteenth century some readers were perplexed by the narrower question of whether books that were ostensibly autobiographies were novels, as illustrated by a review of Anne Wall’s The Life of Lamenther: A True History Written by Herself (1771), which begins ‘If this be real history, and we are positively assured it is, it will excite the attentions of those who delight in dismal scenes.’ (Anonymous. 1771, 46: 77–78). Though not totally convinced, the reviewer believes it would be charitable to buy the book. Recent bibliographers list it as a novel. An Apology for the Conduct of Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748) is mainly a third-person male narration by someone (possibly Paul Whitehead)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

122

122 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

robert folkenflik

representing himself as knowing her for twenty years, but having been alone in a room with her only once. He never claims that he uses her own words. Her first-person voice appears in the Dedication to her former husband and in a number of her letters and other documents – a reminder that other forms, including journal and travel entries as well as poetry, are often encompassed within an autobiography. ‘Audi alteram partem’ (‘Hear the other side’) is a ‘Latin maxim’, and Phillips, having lost her court battle, wishes to try her case in the court of public opinion (Phillips 1748, 1: v). This intention is characteristic of numerous women autobiographers who were victims of men and institutions controlled by them, such as marriage, law, and publishing. Catherine Jemmat in her Memoirs (1762) promises to ‘arraign my words, thoughts, and actions, with the minutest truth, at the tribunal of publick Justice’ (Jemmat 1762, 1: 3) Both books, along with George Anne Bellamy’s Apology (1785), Jane Elizabeth Moore’s Genuine Memoirs (1786), Elizabeth Gooch’s The Life of Mrs. Gooch (1792), and Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs (1794), among others, are ‘Printed for the Author’ (or in the case of Gooch, the ‘Authoress’) and multi-volumed. The Apology represents Phillips as seduced when barely into her teens, raped and otherwise mistreated, taken into keeping, and tricked into bigamous marriages. Phillips speaks several times of men – newspaper editors, printers, and above all Mr. Muilman, her Dutch husband (‘Tartuffe’) - who have attempted to ‘stifle’ her. She regards her autobiography as an ‘unpleasing way of justifying myself to the World, as well as relieving my Fortune at the same Time’ (Phillips 1748, 1: i). Nonetheless, it is a selling of one’s self that is different from that of her earlier life as an upmarket kept woman. One of her early complaints is that her wine merchant overcharged and cheated her, but nevertheless had her imprisoned for debt (Ibid., No. 3, 1: 3 [*2]). Her inability to pay large wine bills probably gained her little sympathy. She was roundly mocked and vilified for her life and book by a range of satirists and moralists including Henry Fielding, who compared her in his novel Amelia to a rogue’s gallery of women beginning with Delilah, Jezebel, and Medea and ending with Katharine Hayes and Sarah Malcolm, modern murderesses. The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality appeared in Tobias Smollett’s novel Peregrine Pickle (1751) and was taken then as written by the subject, Lady Vane. Yet some readers of the time, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, suspected Smollett had a strong hand in this long chapter. I too think Smollett probably wrote it, as do the latest editors of the novel (Zomchick and Rousseau 2014, xxxviii–xl). It reads as a very long inserted tale in a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

123 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

‘Written by herself’

123

novel with information and perhaps materials from Frances Anne, Viscountess Vane herself, though she may have had a ghostwriter. A related set of problems is posed by The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies commonly call’d Mother Ross (1740), represented on the title page as ‘Taken from her own mouth when a pensioner of ChelseaHospital’. Davies cross-dressed as a soldier to find her soldier husband. Both her army service and her being a pensioner at Chelsea are documented (Easton 2003, 144, 146). But although the anonymous editor testifies to her words as the source of this account published the year after her death, and in the second edition (1741) mentions that the dictation took place ‘at divers Intervals, often at a good Distance asunder’ when introducing additions ‘recollected and communicated’ by her daughter (‘still living’), this lively, literate, and highly detailed ostensible autobiography may be largely picaresque fiction (Davies 1741, 1). It is not, as is sometimes claimed, written by Defoe, who died in 1734. Davies, however, could possibly have told such a story, though some of the very detailed anecdotes, such as her courting of a young woman, and fighting a duel with a soldier who assaulted the girl, are only borderline believable: In my Frolics, to kill Time, I made my Addresses to a Burgher’s Daughter, who was young and pretty. As I had formerly had a great many fine Things said to myself, I was at no loss in the amorous Dialect; I ran over all the tender Nonsense (which I look upon as the Lovers heavy Canon, as it does the greatest Execution with the raw Girls) employed on such Attacks; I squeezed her Hand whenever I could get an Opportunity; sighed often when in her Company, looked foolishly, and practised upon her all the ridiculous Airs which I had often laughed at, when they were used as Snares against myself. (Davies 1740, 27)

The book earns its title, Life and Adventures, commoner in fiction than autobiography. Remarkably consistent and detailed for an oral history, it reads like picaresque fiction with historical battles. One of its most striking passages is hard to credit: ‘Captain Bodeaux, who, after the battle of the Boyne, fled with my Father to our House,. . . commanded that Body of Troops which defended the Bridge. . ., his death lamented, by even his enemies, who, to their great Surprize, found, on stripping this brave Officer, that it was a Woman had given such Proofs of an invincible courage’ (Davies 1740, 7). The Bookseller’s Advertisement in the second edition strains credulity even more. Christian makes use of a ‘Urinary Instrument [that] belonged to the brave female Captain’, a prosthetic penis (‘a Silver Tube painted over, and fastened about her with leather Straps’) to pass as a man (Davies 1741, 2). That this strap-on

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

124

124 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

robert folkenflik

from an earlier cross-dressing soldier happens to be lying about the house when young Christian Welsh decides to follow her missing husband by entering the army in male dress is improbable. Finally, the literary quality of the book is deeply suspicious. Having found her husband and forgiven his unfaithfulness, she catches him with the Dutch woman again, cuts off her nose, and puts him in danger of running the gauntlet until her temper cools: ‘His Dulcinea did not come off at as easy a Rate, for she was put into a turning Stool, and whirled round, till she was dizzy, and so sick, that that she emptied her Stomach’ (Davies 1740, 117). My objection here is to the use of ‘Dulcinea’, alluding to Don Quixote, as a jocular appellation for ‘sweetheart’. This literary usage, earlier than the OED’s, seems outside the scope of the ‘British Amazon’, as the second edition title page calls her. Davies’s transgressive story is unusual both for its tale of cross-dressing and of heroism rewarded. She received a shilling a day from Queen Anne and became the only female pensioner of Chelsea Hospital. Most of the other transgressive women discussed here, by contrast, were characterised as ‘scandalous memorists’ for sexual reasons of the sort seen in Phillips and Vane. The claim in Authentic and Interesting Memoirs of Miss Ann Sheldon (1787), possibly a novel, that ‘Public curiosity has of late manifested a very considerable gratification in Memoirs similar to those which I have now published’ (Sheldon 1787, 4), refers to such books, which often went into multiple editions. ‘Interesting’ here means ‘affecting’, a sign of the way such narratives depend on the sentimental feelings of the late eighteenth century in nonfiction as well as fiction. These books were looking for sympathy, although they often did not obtain it, and cash. One of the most accomplished and earliest scandalous memoirs, published in the same year as Phillips’s book, is The Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington. The title page identifies her as ‘Wife to the Rev. Mr. Matth. Pilkington’, but much space is devoted to their growing estrangement in this autobiography filled with anecdotes of Jonathan Swift and others, as well as many of her poems. If this sounds somewhat miscellaneous, Pilkington herself jokes, ‘I am a sad digressive writer; by which my readers may plainly perceive I am no Methodist’ (Pilkington 1748, 1: 109). Yet her poetry and Swift’s relationship to the two of them is part of the story told. When Swift questions her, sharply as usual (sometimes teasingly), about his enjoining her not to copy his ‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift’, which he gave her to read overnight, she says ‘the Dean did not know, what sort of a Memory I had . . . I had no occasion for

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

125 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

‘Written by herself’

125

any other copy than what I had registered in the Book and Volume of my Brain’. She claims, as the allusion to Hamlet suggests, that she knows Shakespeare by heart; he puts her to a successful trial (Ibid., 1: 54–55). Her memory seems exceptional. Swift’s best biographer, Irvin Ehrenpreis, comments ‘Though her Memoirs seem incredibly detailed for events that passed twenty years before the book appeared, she had a most extraordinary memory, and has proved reliable wherever I could verify her facts – except for natural evasions concerning her shady liaisons’ (Ehrenpreis 1983, 3: 637 n.). A. C. Elias, Jr., in his annotation to his edition of the Memoirs, details inaccuracies and evasions (‘There is some garbling and telescoping here’), but also testifies to her powerful memory, all the more impressive as she confesses herself ‘too volatile to revise or correct anything I write’ (Elias 1997, 2: 363; Pilkington 1748, 1: 95). Throughout her book Pilkington continually alludes to literature, especially Shakespeare’s plays, and a number of her own poems further the autobiographic ‘plot’. One to Matthew when he is away from her for nine months in London portrays her as ‘a tender faithful wife’. A postscript praising her husband’s friend James Worsdale foreshadows their later relationship. A poem in praise of John Smith’s musicianship arouses her husband’s hatred (Ibid., 1: 103–04). Matthew Pilkington, jealous of Swift’s praise of his wife’s writings, let her know that ‘a Needle became a Woman’s Hand better than a Pen and Ink’, a phrase often internalised by women writers who used a version in apologising for writing at all (Ibid., 1: 121–22). Through Swift’s patronage, he obtained a chaplaincy that kept him in London most of the year, and she regards him as pressing other men upon her and encouraging her to be alone with them. Finally, she is caught with a man in her room, an event (prefaced by numerous quotations) that she represents as proceeding from love of reading: I own myself very indiscreet in permitting any Man to be at an unseasonable Hour in my Bedchamber; but Lovers of Learning will, I am sure, pardon me, as I solemnly declare, it was the attractive Charms of a new Book, which the Gentleman would not lend me, but consented to stay till I read it through, was the sole Motive of my detaining him. (Ibid., 1:187)

She represents this outcome as the result of her husband’s ‘machinations’. It leads to a divorce, several husbands, many lovers, and many problems, especially monetary. Colley Cibber, himself the author of an Apology (1740) and the father of the autobiographer Charlotte Charke, encouraged her to

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

126

126 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

robert folkenflik

write this narrative: it is by turns charming and malicious, the latter especially in the volumes that follow. Pilkington raises the threat of blackmail to an art within her pages, which contain warnings to the clergy, aristocrats, and others about what she can say of them; such threats were especially effective in the first volume of a three-volume work. Following the third volume, she prints an appendix explaining why she does not print the ‘Key’, naming names as she had promised. The theme of blackmail or simply revenge is noticeable in Phillips, and with a very specific target, Charlotte Charke. Although Pilkington is less digressive than she sometimes appears, autobiographies before ‘autobiography’ may also include things we would never think to find there. In reading Jane Elizabeth Moore’s Genuine Memoirs (1786), we readily encounter the ‘singular adventures of herself and family’ of volume one, and will be unsurprised by ‘Her Sentimental Journey through Great Britain’ in volume two, but not many readers will expect volume three, ‘A comprehensive Treatise on the Trade, Manufactures, Navigation, Laws and Police of this Kingdom, and the necessity of a Country Hospital’. All of these topics appear on the title page, but her self-accounting in prose is more business-like than sentimental (‘This manuscript being finished on the twenty-eighth of April last’), and her interest in economics throughout may somewhat prepare us for what comes (Moore 1786, 1: 3). In fact, that ‘sentimental journey’ consists of ‘specifying the various Manufactures carried on at each Town’ and the account of her life seems to exist in order to show her qualifications for writing on economic themes, even though her speculations and her late husband’s debts landed her in a debtor’s prison in the 1780s. She does not recount her woes so much as inventory them. I have been speaking of transgressive women: cross-dressers, actresses, prostitutes. The religious women whose autobiographies follow are also often oppressed and often see themselves as sinful, but they overcome their personal difficulties through their sometimes painfully won beliefs. If the scandalous women seem audacious, a number of these women, some of them preachers, should be recognised as daring. Religious autobiographies often have a rigorous notion of what qualifies for mention and restrict their remembrances and observations to those with religious implications. They have powerful models: St. Paul (and behind him the Old Testament, especially Psalms and the prophets), Augustine, John Bunyan. These narratives draw upon Biblical language and rhetoric highly familiar to their audience. Their very words separate them from non-believers and identify them as imbued with Protestant

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

127 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

‘Written by herself’

127

Christianity. These female life narratives are more apt than the male ones (which often mention wives only in passing) to devote space to the others in their lives, frequently male (fathers, husbands, sometime brothers, or key religious mentors). At the same time the tight conventions that give coherent form to the spiritual autobiographies and provide them with a vocabulary and rhetorical force can lead to a number of formulaic testaments to faith at the cost of individuality. Autobiographers in general write late in their lives, but a number of religious women autobiographers write early, sometimes because the life story and conversion are part of their acceptance in a religious community. The epigraph to An Account of the Experience of Mrs. H. A. Rogers (1793), as in so many spiritual autobiographies from the seventeenth century onwards, comes from Isaiah 51:1 – ‘Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the LORD’. This epigraph frames the relation of text and audience. The ‘autobiography’ exists not for the self but to bring the other to find God, as the writer has. The book rejects narcissism, while focusing on the self. The writer does not love the self, but loathes it. Hester Rogers, a Methodist who corresponded with John Wesley, continues with the text of Isaiah in her first paragraph: ‘I ever found it an unspeakable blessing to ‘look back on the rock from whence I was hewn, and to the hole of the pit from whence I was digged’. The long paragraph concludes ‘I am a brand plucked from the burning! A sinner saved by grace! – I am NOTHING! and CHRIST is ALL in ALL!’ Hers is the standard claim of Protestant spiritual autobiography in its Calvinist forms. Spiritual autobiography is strongly a dissenter’s form: more Quakers and Methodists appear among women authors than others (Rogers 1793, A2 r). Joanna Turner, an Anglican evangelical, represents herself as a child ‘unhappy very early, through my proud, passionate disposition’ (Turner 1820, 1). She stole a shilling at school, lied about it, and the memory of this theft and occasionally of half-pennies disturbs her. Like many a spiritual autobiographer, she says ‘I thought I was the greatest sinner that ever breathed’ (Turner 1820, 13). (John Bunyan’s title Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is paradigmatic.) Her mother’s religious readings and the later influence of a married brother with whom she lives helps her to aspire to a Christian life. She reads Watts and other sacred lyrics. But reading a sermon (‘I forget by whom’) leads to her becoming ‘a new creature’: ‘My eyes were anointed with the divine eye-salve: I believed’ (Turner 1820, 14). Here she marks the moment of conversion, of great formal importance for many autobiographies, for it changes her from the person described up to this point

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

128

128 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

robert folkenflik

to the one who is the narrator of this life, from the self she has been to the one she becomes. This very brief life (eighteen pages) is published by an editor who fills out the volume with Turner’s journal entries and other materials. Many spiritual autobiographers lead quiet lives while unregenerate, filled with commonplace sins and scruples (Bunyan’s inordinate love of bell-ringing, which led him to fear that God would cause the steeple to fall on him, comes to mind). Elizabeth Ashbridge’s life, however, is full of incident, ‘uncommon occurrences’, as she rightly notes. Like the others, she believes (using the words of David) ‘It is good for me that I have been afflicted’, and she offers her story as a warning. Born into an Anglican family with a religious mother, she marries against her parents’ will, an act she sees retrospectively as an ‘error’: ‘In five months, I was stripped of the darling of my heart, and left a young and disconsolate widow’. Sent to live with Dublin Quaker relatives, she dislikes their forbidding dance and song. Planning to go to America, she is tricked and kidnapped. Free again, she boards another ship where Irish servants discuss mutinying. Understanding Irish, she informs the Captain, who tricks the mutineers and, when they reach New York, ungratefully ‘caused an indenture to be made, and threatened me with a gaol, if I refused to sign it.’ Her eventual master is a harsh, religious man. These woes lead her into ‘atheistical opinions.’ Stripped for an undeserved whipping, she calls upon God. Her master desists, but she soon, ‘tempted to put an end to my miserable life . . . went into the garret to hang myself’. Here she ‘seemed to hear a voice saying, “There is a hell beyond the grave”’. Despite this ‘heavenly vision’, some backsliding follows her new conviction when she nearly becomes an actress. She avoids this but marries a schoolmaster who admires her dancing. She is contemptuous when she hears a Quaker woman preach, but she becomes such a Quaker woman preacher herself, a step her brutal, drunken husband opposes. The ‘convincement’ is dramatised. Reading a ‘Quaker’s book’, ‘my heart burned within me’. Like Augustine before her, she enters a garden, with tears flowing as she reads. She cries out: ‘My God, must I, if ever I come to the knowledge of thy truth, be of this man’s opinion . . . and must I join this people, to whom, a few hours ago, I preferred the papists’ (Ashbridge 1807, 3, 8, 10, 12, 25). Such reversals are characteristic of spiritual autobiography. What visions, dreams, and the voice of heaven have not accomplished proceeds from reading the sermon. Her adventures and religious questing, with near suicide and temptations to theft result in a short, hard life (1713–55) devoted to Quaker belief.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

129 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

‘Written by herself’

129

Charlotte Charke occupies a number of categories: she is an actress, transgressive, fallen into poverty, but her autobiography marshals familiar material in unique ways.2 Although she makes no mention of Colley Cibber’s Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian (1740), she repeats a number of its tropes and emphases in her Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755). She identifies herself on the title page as the ‘Youngest Daughter of Colley Cibber, Esq.’. Like her father, Charke sees herself as ‘odd’, in fact unique: a ‘nonpareil’. In some sense all autobiographers are singling themselves out and autobiography tends towards uniqueness, but Charke, who cross-dressed on- and offstage, was even more unusual than her scandalous cohort of autobiographers. With her frequent apologies for her behaviour, beginning in her ‘Dedication to Herself’, which accuses her of not having been a friend, and her defences implicit and explicit of her conduct, she might have followed her father here too and called the book an Apology, as did Phillips before her and George Anne Bellamy (1785) after her. This is an apology, like those of a number of destitute women who led difficult lives that broke with social norms, especially sexual norms. Treated as pathology in the early nineteenth century (Hunt and Clarke 1827, v–vi) and read by theatre historians in the twentieth century for its account of an itinerant actress, Charke’s autobiography was called a ‘minor masterpiece’ at the end of the twentieth century (Rehder 1999, ix). It is as rewarding in its way as any autobiography of a man or woman written in the eighteenth century. It has been accused of incoherence; her syntax and spelling are wayward. It does not have the elegance or intellect of Gibbon’s Memoirs, but its comic verve, its moving account of a disowned princess of the theatre reduced to provincial player and working at increasingly odd jobs, and its sheer irrepressible vitality make it unlike any other autobiography. No one among these women went through a wider range of occupations (often male): oil merchant, waiter, valet, sausage maker, printer’s devil, in addition to her more central activities: actress, playwright, novelist, singer, dancer, prompter, and puppeteer. Charke’s initial self-fashioning, dressing up at the age of four in her father’s clothes, the first memory which she recounts and a kind of prelude to the narrative, is one of the most brilliant anecdotes in eighteenthcentury autobiographical literature: Having, even then, a passionate Fondness for a Perriwig, I crawl’d out of Bed one Summer’s Morning at Twickenham . . . and, taking it into my small Pate, that by Dint of a Wig and a Waistcoat, I should be the perfect

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

130

130 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

robert folkenflik Representative of my Sire, paddled down Stairs, taking with me my Shoes, Stockings, and little Dimity Coat; which I artfully contrived to pin up, as well as I could, to supply the Want of a Pair of Breeches. By the Help of a long Broom, I took down a Waistcoat of my Brother’s, and an enormous bushy Tie-wig of my Father’s, which entirely enclos’d my Head and Body, with the Knots of the Ties thumping my little Heels as I marched along, with slow and solemn Pace. The Covert of Hair in which I was concealed, with the Weight of a monstrous Belt and large Silver-hilted Sword, that I could scarce drag along, was a vast Impediment in my Procession. (Charke 1999, 10–11)

Thus accoutered, with male protuberances slowing her down, she makes her first theatrical appearance (as her father: a role she would later play in a satire by Henry Fielding) in this ‘Grotesque Pigmy-state, walk’d up and down the ditch bowing to all who came by me’. Her ‘Oddity’ raises a crowd, soon to include her mother and father, and, though the ‘Drollery of my Figure render’d it impossible . . . to be angry with me’ she is ‘forc’d into my proper Habiliments’ (Ibid., 10–11). There is too much going on of relevance to her later life to unpack here, but, cross-dressed as her father, she makes her first appearance on a low stage. Charke’s book is, among other things, an explicit attempt to regain Cibber’s love, having been disowned by him years before. She passiveaggressively denies newspaper stories that she robbed her father at gunpoint dressed as a highwayman, or that ‘selling some Flounders one Day, and, seeing my Father. . . slapt one of the largest I had Full in his Face’ (Ibid., 60, 74). The serial publication, perhaps influenced by Phillips, enables her to create suspense by sending him a letter begging his forgiveness in one number and describing his response in the next (he sends her a blank sheet of paper). After she parts with her faithless husband, Richard Charke (she never mentions her second husband, John Sacheverell), her life on the road crossdressed as Mr. Brown to her good friend’s Mrs. Brown is one of hardship and rough acting, often hilariously recounted, in the provinces. Charke draws upon both comic and tragic drama in devising a pre-Dickensian mixture of laughter (often at her own expense) and tears. Her literary allusions to plays are a form of textual role-playing. Her epigraph, which transposes the adjectives from the prologue to a farce by John Gay, The What d’ye Call It, helps to locate her form: ‘This Tragic Story, or this Comic Jest, / May make you laugh, or cry – as you like best’. Like so many other men and women, Charke claims that her life and hence her autobiography has a nearly universal applicability: ‘my volume may bear a part

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

131 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

‘Written by herself’

131

in some circumstance or other in the perusal, as there is nothing inserted but what may daily happen to every mortal breathing’ (Ibid., 8). What reader could possibly believe that claim, and who would want the narrative otherwise than it is?

Notes 1. The assertion here that Anne Yearsley used ‘autobiographical’ is an error.

Bibliography Anonymous. 1771. ‘Review of The Life of Lamenther: A True History Written by Herself ’. Monthly Review 46: 77–8 Ashbridge, Elizabeth. 1807. Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge. Philadelphia: Benjamin and Thomas Kite. Charke, Charlotte. 1999. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke. Edited by Robert Rehder. London: Pickering and Chatto. Collier, Mary. 1762. Poems on Several Occasions. Winchester: Mary Ayres; for the Author. Davies, Christian. 1740. The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies. London: R. Montagu. Davies, Christian. 1741. The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies. 2nd edn. London: R. Montagu. Delany, Mary. 1861. The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany. Edited by Lady Llanover, 1st ser., 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1: 7–242. Easton, Fraser. 2003. ‘Gender’s Two Bodies: Women Warriors, Female Husbands and Plebeian Life’. Past and Present 180: 131–74. Ehrenpreis, Irvin. 1983. Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elias, A. C., Jr., ed. 1997. The Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington. 2 vols. Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press. Elliott, Anne. 1742. The Life of Anne Elliott, written by Herself. London: R. Crouch, 4–9. Folkenflik, Robert. 1993. ‘Introduction: The Institution of Autobiography.’ In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Folkenflik, Robert. 2000. ‘Gender, Genre, and Theatricality in the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke.’ In Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, 97–116. Edited by Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C09.3D

132

132 [119–132] 20.10.2015 5:23PM

robert folkenflik

Hunt and Clarke. 1827. ‘Introduction’ to A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke in Autobiography. Vol. 7 London: Hunt and Clarke. Jemmat, Catherine. 1762. The Memoirs of Mrs. Catherine Jemmat Daughter of the late Admiral Yeo. 2 vols. London: Printed for the Author. Manley, Delarivier. 1713. The Adventures of Rivella. London, [Edmund Curll]. Matthews, William. 1973. ‘The Seventeenth Century’, 3–28. In Autobiography, Biography and the Novel, Edited by William Matthews and Ralph Rader. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Moore, Jane Elizabeth. 1786. Genuine Memoirs of Jane Elizabeth Moore. London: Logographic Press. Nussbaum, Felicity. 1989. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Phillips, T. C. 1748–1749. An apology for the conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips. 3 vols. London: Printed for the Author. Pilkington, Laetitia. 1748–1754. The Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington. 3 vols. Dublin and London: Printed for the Author. Poovey, Mary. 1985. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rehder, Robert. 1999. ‘Introduction: The Woman who was Mr. Brown’. In A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, ix–liii. London: Pickering and Chatto. Rogers, Hester Ann. 1793. An Account of the Experience of Mrs. H. A. Rogers. Bristol: R. Edwards. Sheldon, Ann. 1787. Authentic and Interesting Memoirs of Miss Ann Sheldon. 4 vols. London: Printed for the Authoress. Shumaker, Wayne. 1954. English Autobiography Its Emergence Materials and Form. University of California Press: Berkeley. Turner, Joanna. 1820. Memoir of Mrs. Joanna Turner. Edited by David Bogue. London: J. Nisbet. Steele, Sir Richard. 1987. The Tatler. Edited by Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zomchick, John P. and George S. Rousseau. 2014. ‘Introduction,’ to Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

133 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

chapter 10

The lives of things Objects, it-narratives, and fictional autobiography, 1700–1800 Lynn Festa

In the mid eighteenth century, things – coins, clothing, coaches, walkingcanes, and writing implements – as well as animals – cats, dogs, birds, mice, and vermin – began to recount the histories of their lives in the first person. What happens to our understanding of autobiography when it is organised around a thing or an animal, not a human being? Since things possess neither a reflexive self (autos), nor a life (bios), nor the capacity to write (graphe), and animals’ capacities in all three regards were the object of vociferous debate throughout the period, these tales told by things and animals – often called it-narratives or novels of circulation – raise questions about the distinctively human aspect of autobiography and about the notions of the self so central to definitions of the form. In these tales, personified things and anthropomorphised animals dislodge humans from centre stage, usurping the first-person consciousness and self-reflexivity of autobiography in order to expose a world governed and animated by nonhuman forces: by an economic system that seizes on minds and bodies as commodities, by social and political structures driven by ungoverned passions, self-interest, and the compulsive striving after gold. Even as these tales connect autobiographical form to broader eighteenth-century debates about human difference from animals and things (including machines), they point to something inhuman or impersonal lodged within human forms of life, raising questions about the mechanisms and structures – economic and political, but also linguistic – that are made by people but that also supersede them. Shifting from Covent Garden to the Royal Exchange, from bandits’ lair to aristocratic boudoir, the nonhuman narrators of these texts offer serial portraits of the lives, histories, and characters of the people they encounter. These peripatetic narrators move from domestic spaces above and below stairs, through the public domains of church, market, tavern, 133

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

134

134 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

lynn festa

theatre, and palace. In shifting from courtier to beggar to baker to courtesan, the objects offer an unusually comprehensive portrait of a society increasingly fractured by economic relations, tracing the broader patterns of circulation structuring social and commercial life in eighteenth-century Britain. The tales themselves participate in the burgeoning print market of the time, creating a mid-century vogue. Characterising itself as a contribution to this ‘Life-writing Age’ – an unusual early usage of a now-fashionable term – Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little: The Life and Adventures of a Lapdog, would be reprinted fourteen times between its publication in 1751 and the end of the century, while Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, or the Life and Adventures of a Guinea, which doubled from two to four volumes between 1760 and 1765, would go through twenty editions by 1800 (Coventry 2008, 41). The popularity of these literary commodities allows the circulation of the tale-telling thing to serve as a reflexive version of the circulating book that bears its tale, even as the it-narrator’s ostensible role in producing the text reduces the human author to little more than a speaking object whose alienated intellectual labour raises pointed questions about the precarity of literary property (Flint 1998). These texts, as Christina Lupton has argued, are both ‘the life story of a pile of paper’ and ‘the story of the objects represented on there’ (Lupton 2006, 412). By the early 1780s, the market was glutted: ‘Every thing has had its adventures, from a Bank Note to a Shilling, from a Coach to a Sedan, from a Star to a Gold-headed Cane’, one critic lamented in 1783. ‘This mode of conveying political censures, private scandal, or general satire, is almost exhausted; and the spirit and good sense which animated the imaginary Chrysal, was lost in the Hackney Coach, and scarcely breathe in the “Phantoms”’ (Critical Review 1783, 234). Towards the end of the century, the satirical coins and coaches are increasingly joined by pegtops, pincushions, and a host of animals, instructing juvenile readers in virtuous conduct, while detailing the cruelties inflicted by humans upon other creatures. As a derivative hodge-podge – ‘a convenient method to writers of the inferior class, of emptying their common-place books’, one critic observed in 1781 – these narratives are not the fruits of individual inspiration or the unique experiences of the writer, but rather a hack writer’s mechanical regurgitation of half-digested animal fables, sentimental novels, picaresque adventures, and oriental tales, as well as various forms of life writing: the diary, the letter, the memoir, the travelogue, the essay, the confession, the biography, the slave autobiography, and à clef satires and secret histories (Critical Review 1781, 478).1 Rather than a selfconscious subject recording and reflecting upon original experiences, the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

135 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

The lives of things

135

author here is an unthinking channel for the redistribution of the already written. What life there is in these tales belongs to the things. The first-person form of these narratives projects the developmental categories of human life onto the stages of an object’s history, deciphering the mysterious processes by which a commodity acquires value and comes to structure social relations through what Igor Kopytoff has famously called the ‘cultural biography of a thing’ (Kopytoff 1986). The feather’s childhood happiness on the tranquil banks of a stream comes to an abrupt end when it is brutally plucked from its mother’s wing and shipped to London to become a pen; as an adult, the Goosequill enjoys youthful successes in business, but, as it passes from one corrupt hand to another, gradually passes into middle-aged disillusionment, and eventually, by ‘a Succession of Misfortunes’, declines into poverty in Gin-Lane (Goose-Quill 1751, 1). The gold watch ‘sprang from the dirt’; the riches-to-rags tale of the lady’s slipper concludes with it ‘upon my last legs’ (Watch 1788, 5; Lady’s Slippers 1754, 27). The animal tales likewise invite their young readers to recognise the parallels between human and animal lives, fostering experimental extensions of sympathy beyond species boundaries by underlining the kinship of mice and men. Although these digressive, self-referential tales often describe themselves as the heirs of Laurence Sterne’s quasi-autobiographical sentimental novels, Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1769) – the 1789 Life and Adventures of a Fly even features a cameo by an eight-year-old Sterne – their narrators do not offer the kind of sustained self-reflexive exploration of subjectivity normally associated with autobiography. Whereas autobiographies offer a retrospective narrative of how the first-person subject came to be the individual s/he is today – ‘neither the autos nor the bios is there in the beginning, a completed entity, a defined, known self or a history to be had for the taking’, as James Olney puts it – things in it-narratives are, tautologically, always already what they are (Olney 1980, 22). The it-narrator is more estranging device than character to be developed: a first-person without a self, a grammatical subject without a subjectivity, the unliving historian of a life. The rupee acquires ‘the roundness and character I still retain’ by being ‘poured into a mould’ and, although the coat may rip and petticoat may stain, the personified narrator does not change (Scott 1782, 7). It-narratives are thus usually understood as a hiatus in the progressive elaboration of techniques for representing psychological depth associated with the eighteenth-century novel and emerging forms of life-writing (Spacks 1976).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

136

136 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

lynn festa

Indeed, the autobiography of the thing proves to be the biographies of the people the thing encounters: ‘Not the adventures of the coat, but of the persons who wore it, make up the greatest part of the performance’, the Critical Review notes of the 1760 Adventures of a Black Coat (Critical Review 1760, 499). Unobtrusive in their ubiquity and unconstrained by birth or rank, objects move from hand to hand to offer a taxonomy of social types whose allegorical names – Peter Padabout, Mr. Trueman, Mrs. Snarewell, Captain Fearless – make psychology coextensive with social role, moral character, dominant passion, or behavioural trait. The objects instruct readers in the proper interpretation of social signs by revealing the neatly decipherable ‘truth’ beneath the surface. Notwithstanding his name, Captain Fearless proves to be ‘one of those heroic mortals, who deal more in words than actions’, and although ‘learned gentlemen commonly appear with a formal gravity on their countenance’, the cork-screw observes, ‘such who think that real, will find it only a mask’ (Cork-screw 1775, 78, 37). If, as John Dryden observed in 1683, in biography ‘you are led into the private Lodgings of the Hero: you see him in his undress, and are made Familiar with his most private actions and conversations’, the itnarrative, like an eighteenth-century Candid Camera, reveals how people act when unobserved (Dryden 1971, 275). What better than a smock or a petticoat to air dirty laundry? That the Life of the thing is gleaned parasitically from the lives of those it encounters suggests that the seeming singularity of the ‘I’ is wrung from serial encounters with the world outside the self. So absorbed are the objects in recounting the histories of their human owners that we learn almost nothing about ‘who’ the things are. Indeed, it’s easy to forget whether one is reading the tale of a cane or a coin. The autobiography of a thing is of a life lived vicariously; the itnarrator only intermittently takes centre stage to explain how it passed from one person to another.2 Even as autobiography is torn between the mimetic reproduction of the events of a life and the imperative to conjoin events into a meaningful narrative yielding a self-portrait, so too does the it-narrative struggle to unify the arbitrary encounters of the meandering object into a ‘life’. Feebly ‘stringing a parcel of adventures together’ through an ‘ill-designed personification’, one reviewer sniffs, is insufficient to furnish ‘the ground-work of the plot’ (Critical Review 1760, 499). The it-narrative thus reveals the risk to which all autobiography is exposed: that the metonymic detail will not point to any metaphoric unity, that the random event will have no higher purpose, that the ‘self’ will prove insufficient to produce narrative coherence.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

137 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

The lives of things

137

‘My work is barren of incident’, the rupee confesses, ‘and what incident it has, may not be in its kind of importance’ (Scott 1782, viii). On these terms, it-narratives perhaps may be understood less in opposition to autobiographical writings by humans than in continuity with them. As Felicity Nussbaum has argued, ‘eighteenth-century works of self-biography are less quests toward self-discovery in which the narrator reveals herself or himself than repetitive serial representations of particular moments held together by the narrative “I”’. Rather than a progressive narrative culminating in a ‘self made whole by humanist ideology, Cartesian philosophy, or Christian theology’, they offer sequential anecdotes without generating a consolidated identity (Nussbaum 1989, 18, 34). Indeed, the narrative power conferred upon the thing indicates a world in which agency can no longer be located with any certitude in the human individual, undercutting the autonomy autobiography might seem designed to secure. These texts describe the ‘life’ not simply of an object but of an entire social and economic system: the autobiography less of the thing itself than of the network produced by – and made visible through – its movement through the world. ‘Without me’, the counterfeit coin explains, ‘many think trade and commerce would dwindle to a shadow’ (Birmingham Counterfeit 1772, 1.40). The coin that facilitates a transaction with a prostitute also observes it, revealing the social relations it produces, like dye added to a sewer to trace the flow of water. The mutinous pawn of forces greater than itself, the thing possesses scant control over its fate; instead, it marks the spot where agency is obscured, indecipherable. The declaration of Addison’s coin that ‘we shillings love nothing so much as travelling’ is the endorsement of an inevitability, to be sure, but it also attributes to the volition of the object, the vagaries of an increasingly abstract economic system that obeys no individual will (Addison 1987, 3.270). The things’ itineraries delineate circuits of exchange and the notalways visible limits that govern them: a prince may not dine with a pauper, but a cat may look at a king. As Bruno Latour has argued, to understand the composition of networks ‘you have “to follow the actors themselves,” that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish’ (Latour 2007, 12). Rather than treating social aggregates as the backdrop against which an individual life is played out, the it-narratives offer an autobiographical account of the forces that constitute collectivities.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

138

138 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

lynn festa

What lacks agency, will, consciousness, is not the ostensibly inanimate thing, but the person driven by the desire to possess it. ‘[W]hen the mighty spirit of a large mass of gold takes possession of the human heart, it influences all its actions, and overpowers, or banishes . . . those immaterial unessential notions called virtues’, Chrysal explains (Johnstone 1760, 1.7). We think of society as human, made by and made up of people, but the world depicted in these texts is one in which things make people, rather than the other way around, and money speaks louder than words or actions. Thus the ‘Embroidered Waistcoat’ helps a lord seduce those who believe ‘his Sincerity [to be] . . . as real inwardly as my Embroidery render’d him brilliant outwardly’ (Embroidered Waistcoat 1751, 6), while the banknote offers an impoverished poet a new title: ‘After the Bank has dubb’d you an esquire, no man will dare to say a word against it; you may then boldly add the title esquire to your name the very next work you publish. Your title to the title will then be as indisputably a title, as your own title to your title-page’ (Bridge 1770, 1.14–5). Names here issue not from interpersonal acknowledgment, but from the bank – a corporate body that inheres in no one in particular. Rank is conferred not on an individual but on the bearer of the note, the person as appendage to the thing. In showing how possessions constitute identities, these tales unmask the anthropocentric delusion of autonomy that characterises autobiographical stories of self-made men. These tales foreground the transactional nature of story-telling in an era in which language – spirit and letter alike – has become a commodity. If autobiography, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued, saves ‘individual identity from pure subjectivity by converting human beings into objects: quite literally: pages with words on them: illusions of consistent substantiality’, it also renders that identity a marketable item (Spacks 1976, 22). In selling one’s story, one sells an aspect of oneself. Human beings are likewise powerless before a system that converts them into objects to be bought and sold. The bijoux indiscret that narrates the ‘Adventures of a Ring’ serves as the ‘price of a maidenhead’, which, ‘virginity [being] a commodity not always well ascertained’, is subsequently ‘disposed of more than once, as the property of the same individual’ (‘Gold Ring’ March 1783, 87; April 1783, 128). Animals are the victims of unspeakable brutality. The narrator of John Hawkesworth’s 1752 ‘Various Transmigrations Revealed by a Flea’ has had its tail docked as a dog, its eyes put out as a bird, and its intestines skewered on a fish-hook as a worm; when squashed as a flea by the human frame narrator, it metamorphoses into a beautiful young lady, even more vulnerable to men’s predations. Rather than

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

139 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

The lives of things

139

elevating things and animals to the status of humans, these narratives suggest that humans lead a dog’s life. The titles of these tales make the Lives, Adventures, and Memoirs of animals and things interchangeable with those of humans. The narrator is often denominated as a kind of object or animal (a corkscrew, a coat, a cat) rather than by a proper name, not unlike the memoirs of human types (a woman of pleasure, a lady of quality). Although the title pages do not label the narratives autobiographies – the word was not used until the end of the century3 – they give prominence to the first-person form of the narrative (‘written by itself’) in a way that underlines the reflexive quality of the life history being recounted: what Philippe Lejeune describes as the autobiographical pact grounded in the ‘identity of name between the author (such as he figures, by his name, on the cover), the narrator of the story, and the character who is being talked about’ (Lejeune 1989, 12). (Since many itnarratives were published anonymously, the name of the human author was often absent from the title page.) Yet the sheer impossibility of the text really having been written by a dog or a stagecoach unsettles the first person of the text from the get-go, such that the title page designed to guarantee Lejeune’s autobiographical pact instead proclaims the text’s fictionality – these cannot be autobiographies. In this sense, it-narratives make apparent the insecurity of reference that resides at the heart of all autobiography, the fragility of the ‘I’ or proper name meant to secure identity. Although the initial counterfactual premise would seem to undermine the whole, these narratives are hemmed around by affirmations of the text’s referential veracity. The (human) frame narrator of The Adventures and Metamorphoses of Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket-Pistol insists that every detail is ‘capable of Proof, both from History and living Witnesses’, and ‘desires but one Fact to be taken on his Word . . . to believe it possible that a Gun may speak’, while the Goose-Quill pen concludes its narrative with the assurance that ‘this is an exact and impartial Narrative of the Occurrences [t]hat have befel[l] Your Humble Servant, And Brother Sufferer, GOOSE-QUILL’ (Pocket-Pistol 1756, 1; Goose-Quill 1751, 26). The elaborate paratexts – dedications, prefaces, advertisements, frame narrators – that accompany most it-narratives indicate that the seemingly self-evident proclamation of the title page requires supplementary explanation. The prefaces, often written in the first person of a human authorial proxy, typically feature elaborate stories about found manuscripts, while the frame narratives explain the circumstances – often a reverie, a dream, or the appearance of an apparition or spirit – under which the object came to speak. The multiple layers that the reader has to wade through to get to the narrative proper reflect a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

140

140 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

lynn festa

disquiet about converting the third person of a thing to the first person, exclusive to the human. In bestowing characteristics like language, memory, thought, animation, and personality upon things, these narratives produces the effect of subjectivity in an entity that does not really possess these capacities or traits. They remind us that the traits conferred by personification may not be exclusively human. Sometimes texts begin with a plea for the reader simply to credit the fancy: ‘my Readers will be pleased to indulge me with poetical Licence, and imagine me to possess the faculties of a living Being’, the air balloon begins (Air Balloon 1780, advertisement). Literary precedent consolidates the sedan chair’s claim to speech: ‘Aesop, Phaedrus, and others . . . have given it under their hands, that brutes and fish have spoke . . . [and] Ovid swears that inanimate things have had speaking faculties’ (Sedan 1757, 1.1). Some narratives cut humans out of the loop altogether: made into a pen, the goose-quill can write its own story, and the prosy Black Coat pontificates to a spanking new addition to the closet. Still others represent the speaking object or creature as a spirit trapped in an object or animal body who responds to the address of its human possessor. The Adventures of a Cork-Screw opens with a despairing prisoner apostrophising the eponymous narrator – ‘thou [that] hast perhaps belonged to some wealthy monster, . . . while I am destitute even of the common necessaries to support a wretched life’ – prompting the spirit imprisoned within to materialise and recount its tale (Cork-Screw 1775, 1–2). Chrysal appears to an alchemist as ‘a blue effulgence’ that breaks from ‘liquid gold’ and forms ‘an incorporeal substance in the form of a spirit’ from which ‘a voice, celestially harmonious’, sounds (Johnstone 1760, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2–3, 1.2). Apostrophes to inanimate objects convert the third person, which, as eighteenth-century grammars note, is the proper pronoun for a thing, into the second-person pronoun belonging to discourse, creating the possibility that the ‘you’ may become a speaking ‘I’.4 As Barbara Johnson observes, ‘apostrophe enables the poet to transform an “I-it” relationship into an “I-thou” relationship, thus making a relation between persons out of what was in fact a relation between a person and non-persons’ (Johnson 2008, 9). Whereas personification animates an inanimate entity, whether in the third or the first person, the apostrophe elicits and enacts a kind of personification, by addressing an entity so as to provoke a response. Paul de Man famously argues that ‘the trope of autobiography’ is a specific form of personification involving exactly such an address: the prosopopoeia, ‘the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

141 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

The lives of things

141

confers upon it the power of speech’ (De Man 1984, 75–6). In autobiography, the present writing ‘I’ apostrophises the absent past ‘I’, creating what de Man describes as a specular or mirroring structure between these two subjects: ‘The autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution’ (De Man 1984, 70).5 In the it-narrative, the entity brought to life and granted speech by the apostrophe is not the first person of one’s own past (human) self, but the third person of a thing. In claiming that the very literary techniques that vivify the inanimate are those we use to resurrect our prior selves in autobiography, de Man’s argument creates a menacingly reciprocal relation between present and past selves, between animating trope and dead letter, between human and nonhuman. If narratives about things coming to life threaten the human monopoly on qualities like speech, to what degree does the it-narrator assume the features of the human? De Man sees prosopopoeia as projecting a visage onto the entity addressed – ‘Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon)’ (De Man 1984, 76) – but there is nothing to guarantee the humanity of that mouth, eye, or face. Animals possess these features, and some things figuratively do: clocks have faces and hands, even as shoes have tongues. Addison’s shilling, we are told, ‘reared it self upon its Edge, and turning the Face towards me, opened its Mouth, and in a soft Silver Sound gave me the following Account of his Life and Adventures’ (Addison 1987, 3.290). The idiomatic transfer of terms proper to humans onto things is a catachresis, a figurative substitute – the arm of a chair – for a proper or literal term that does not exist. (The grotesque image of a needle with an actual eye indicates why catachresis is sometimes called the trope of monstrosity, and perhaps explains why almost none of the stories is illustrated.) The absence of a proper term opens up the abyssal possibility that language may not align with things, that there may be no referent behind the word. Even as prosopopoeia confers a mask with no guarantee there is anything beneath, so too does the it-narrative offer a first person without an actual speaking subject or reflexive consciousness, a pronoun without a real-world antecedent, an ‘I’ without a face. In removing the referent to which the first person in the autobiographical text refers, the it-narrative exposes the tenuous nature of identity and the work performed by language – the ‘I’ – in securing continuity for all forms of first-person writing, including autobiography.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

142

142 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

lynn festa

That form-giving language may lead back to nothing in particular or nothing at all is a problem not just for it-narratives, but also for human autobiography and eighteenth-century discussions of the self. The tales make only scattershot allusions to Descartes, Locke, and materialist philosophers, but questions of personal identity and the distinction of human and animal haunt these narratives (for example, Coventry 2008, 68–73, 184–7). In Johnstone’s Chrysal, for example, the frequent shifts in diegetic level make the ‘I’ elusive. Following a dedication and a preface by the ostensible finder of the manuscript (two additional ‘I’s), the story proper begins in the narrative first person of the alchemist to whom Chrysal, the spirit of gold, appears. Chrysal subsequently takes over the first-person narration – the quotation marks setting off his account disappear after a paragraph – but at times relinquishes it to those he encounters. In entering the sensorium of the corrupt merchant Traffick, for example, Chrysal encounters ‘the spirit of consciousness, which you call SELF’, which is busy ‘running over a number of niches, or impressions, on the fibres of the brain’ (Johnstone 1760, 1.8, 1.9), thereby reinscribing the ‘traces’ of the past on Traffick’s mind. Created through the labours of this strangely impersonal personification, Traffick’s ‘self’ is the product of quasi-mechanical processes. When the spirit subsequently claims the right to speak in Traffick’s first person –’this man whom, as I am his self, I shall henceforth, for conciseness and perspecuity, call my self ’ – the nested “I”s start to resemble Matryoshka dolls, leaving it unclear to whom (or what) the first person refers (Johnstone 1760, 1.11). Such incertitude about identity shapes the philosopher John Locke’s definition of the person: ‘as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then; and ’tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done’ (Locke 1979, II.xxvii.§9; 335). The continuity of the person depends on an alignment between past and present selves (‘the same self now it was then’), raising a question central to autobiography: how can the self, transformed by the experience it has undergone, be identical to the self it once was? Since we sleep and forget things, since limbs may be amputated and bodies change over time, the continuity of the person depends on what is recognised as our own: ‘That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join it self ’, Locke writes, ‘makes the same Person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else; and so attributes to it self, and owns all the Actions of that thing, as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no farther’ (Locke 1979, II.xxvii.§17; 341).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

143 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

The lives of things

143

The difficulty of parsing the sentence – the number of clauses, the pronouns with uncertain antecedents – make agent and object, subject and predicate, elusive. It is not the consciousness of the present thinking thing, but ‘that with which the consciousness of the present thinking thing can join itself’ that ‘makes the same Person; and is one self’ with it. If the verb ‘makes’ indicates an act of production (the ‘same Person’ being brought into being), the present tense of ‘is’ suggests an identity already realised. In a somewhat circular logic, the self constituted by those elements to which the thinking thing can ‘join itself’ doubles over and ‘attributes to it self . . . all the Actions of that thing’ of which it is conscious. Locke’s account of personal identity here bears some kinship to De Man’s specular structure of autobiography – a mutually constituting figure of reading (for de Man) and of consciousness (for Locke). Yet, as Chrysal suggests, consciousness can be strangely difficult to locate. The first-person ‘I’ is dangerously prone to usurpation. Locke repeatedly raises questions of how to secure identity in a discontinuous, mutable world through fanciful thought experiments: what if consciousness goes along with an amputated little finger, or a prince’s soul decamps from his body and takes up residence in that of a cobbler? Such wild hypotheses are enacted in the it-narratives, where identity variously inheres in the persistence of a consciousness or spirit, the perdurability of the object in its materiality, or the tenacity of the grammatical ‘I’. Thus the ‘Quire of Paper’ tells of its idyllic infancy as a happy thistle in the field, its adolescent growing pains as a flax seed, its youthful adventures and sedate middle age as linen and its decline into rag and thence into paper. Although it undergoes various fates – as a handkerchief it moves from ‘the unspeakable luxury’ of wiping royal tears to absorbing ‘the libidinous drops from the reeking brow of a debauched wretch’ in a brothel – the quire of paper possesses a general spirit or consciousness that enables it to recount the fate of the various lengths of cloth and scraps of paper of which it is composed, not unlike the unity of a text despite its dispersal in innumerable printed copies, or Locke’s speculations that consciousness might travel with an amputated finger (‘Quire’ Oct. 1779, 450). Yet the ‘quire’ is not simply a spirit; as a handkerchief, it literally feels ‘the punctures of the needle’ and ‘the tortures of the scissors’, and it is metaphorically sensitive to its degradation when it becomes worn to a rag and is ‘huddled into a nasty bag with the coarsest and dirtiest linen, fragments of all sorts and sizes, though in truth my condition and theirs was now equal’ (‘Quire’ Sep. 1779, 396, 397, 398). At such moments, things ascend to something like self-consciousness, becoming, as Jonathan Lamb puts it, ‘singular and self-aware as they negotiate the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

144

144 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

lynn festa

threat of annihilation on one side and resumption into circulation on the other’ (Lamb 2001, 157; Lamb 2011). Yet this self-awareness proves inhospitable to humans. Although the perspective of the personified thing or animal at times makes it appear as if their interests were amenable to our own, more often we discover that the gaze of the object is charged with such antipathy as to defy any return or reciprocation. Speaking from the place of human desire, the objects offer no return on emotional investment. The things hate their masters. The pen is so revolted at being ‘an instrument of accumulated tyranny and treachery’ that it ‘wish[es] that I could drown myself in my own ink’; the silver thimble may be delighted to fit Clara Steady’s finger, but its life in the hands of the unworthy is ‘captivity, for I cannot call it service’ (‘Pen’ Sep. 1806, 188, 190; Trimmer 1799, 96). The dog, the cat, the mouse, and the louse document the atrocities inflicted upon them as victims – and hence privileged witnesses – of human barbarism. These narratives do not ultimately reconcile the lives of human and nonhuman entities; at best, they offer a fleeting imaginative liberation from ourselves through identification with the mobile perspective of an object or an animal – the freedom of the nonhuman and the impersonal in a first-person form. Anthropomorphising but not anthropocentric, the autobiographical form of these narratives does not ultimately confer a human face upon things or animals; instead, it reveals the world wrought by human hands and rendered in human language to be never quite, never completely, human.

Notes 1. These tales have attracted substantial critical attention of late. See the essays collected in Blackwell 2007. 2. Badgered by the bookseller to churn out text more rapidly, the banknote ceases to explain how it travels from one pocket to another: ‘if therefore I tell you into whose hands I fell, that is all you must now look for’. Bridges 1770, 3.3. 3. The English word first appeared in a 1797 review of Isaac D’Israeli’s Miscellanies. On its origins, see Smith and Watson 2010, 1–2 and Folkenflik 1993, 1–7. 4. The first and second person, James Elphinston notes, ‘personate the speaking and the spoken to’; the third person allows one ‘to confound the speakers and the subjects, the present and the absent, and to lose every animation of direct address’. Elphinston 1765, 2.32, 2.62. On the I/you dyad and the third person, which, as the object spoken of, is ‘not a “person”’ at all, see Benveniste 1971, 198.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

145 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

The lives of things

145

Anyone who has been referred to in the third person while standing smack-dab in front of the speaker can attest to the alienating effect of this form of speech. 5. Johnson’s Dictionary defines ‘personification’ as ‘prosopopoeia; the change of things or persons: as “Confusion heard his voice”’; prosopopoeia, with neat reciprocity, is defined as ‘personification; figure by which things are made persons’.

Bibliography Anonymous. The Adventures and Metamorphose of Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket-Pistol. 1756. Dublin: T. Birn. Anonymous. Adventures of a Cork-screw. 1775. London: T. Bell. Anonymous. ‘Adventures of a Gold Ring’. 1783. The Rambler’s Magazine, March– July. Anonymous. ‘Adventures of a Pen’. 1806. The European Magazine and London Review 50: 187–91. Anonymous. ‘Adventures of a Quire of Paper’. 1779. London Magazine, or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 48, August–October. Anonymous. The Adventures of a Watch! 1788. London: G Kearsley. Anonymous. Adventures of an Air Balloon. ca. 1780. London: H. Hogge. Anonymous. The Birmingham Counterfeit; or, Invisible Spectator. 1772. 2 vols. London: S. Bladon. Anonymous. The Genuine Memoirs and Most Surprising Adventures of a Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill. 1751. London: M. Cooper. Anonymous. The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes, Written by Themselves. 1754. London: M. Cooper. Anonymous. Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat. 1751. London: J. Brooke. Anonymous. ‘Review of Adventures of a Black Coat’. 1760. Critical Review 9: 499. Anonymous. ‘Review of Adventures of a Rupee’. 1781. Critical Review 52: 477–80. Anonymous. ‘Review of Phantoms; or The Adventures of a Gold-Headed Cane’. 1783. Critical Review 57: 234. Anonymous. The Sedan. 1757. 2 vols. London: R. Baldwin. Addison, Joseph. 1987. Tatler 249 (11 November 1710). In The Tatler, 3.269–73. Edited by Donald Bond, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Blackwell, Mark, ed. 2007. The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and ItNarratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Bridges, Thomas. 1770. Adventures of a Bank-Note. 4 vols. London: T Davies.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

146

146 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

lynn festa

Coventry, Francis. 2008. Pompey the Little. Edited by Nicholas Hudson. Peterborough: Broadview. de Man, Paul. 1984. ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’. In The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 67–81. New York: Columbia University Press. Dryden, John. 1971. The Works of John Dryden, vol. XVII: Prose, 1668–1691: An Essay of Dramatick Poesie and Shorter Works. Edited by S.H. Monk and A. E. Wallace Maurer. Berkeley: University of California Press. Elphinston, James. 1765. Principles of the English Language Digested. 2 vols. London: James Bettenham. Folkenflik, Robert. 1993. ‘Introduction: The Institution of Autobiography’. In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, 1–20. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Flint, Christopher. 1998. ‘Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century England’. PMLA 113: 212–26. Hawkesworth, John. 1752. ‘Various Transmigrations Revealed by a Flea. In The Adventurer, 2 vols., 1.25–30. London: J. Payne. Johnson, Barbara. 2008. Persons and Things. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Johnstone, Charles. 1760. Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea, 2 vols. London: T. Becket. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’. In The Social Life of Things, 64–91. Edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, Jonathan. 2001. ‘Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales’. Critical Inquiry 28: 133–66. Lamb, Jonathan. 2011. The Things Things Say. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. ‘The Autobiographical Pact’. In On Autobiography, 3–30. Edited by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Locke, John. 1979. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lupton, Christina. 2006. ‘The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectification in the Eighteenth Century’. Novel 39: 402–20. Nussbaum, Felicity. 1989. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Olney, James. 1980. ‘Autobiography and the Critical Moment’. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, 3–27. Edited by James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C10.3D

147 [133–147] 20.10.2015 5:43PM

The lives of things

147

Scott, Helenus. 1782. Adventures of a Rupee. London: J. Murray. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography, 2nd edn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1976. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Trimmer, Sarah. 1799. The Silver Thimble. London: E. Newbery.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

148 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

chapter 11

Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography John Richetti

Of the three pre-eminent Restoration and eighteenth-century British empiricist philosophers, English, Anglo-Irish, and Scottish respectively – John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–1776) – only Hume composed an autobiography, the exceedingly brief and ironically self-effacing, ‘My Own Life’, which he wrote during his final illness in 1776 and left to his friend, Adam Smith, to send to his publisher with instructions that it be printed with all future editions of his works. Smith was attacked by the pious for his part in the publication of Hume’s autobiography, which Hume himself described in disarming fashion as his own funeral oration: ‘I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one’ (Hume 1987, xli). Hume’s serenity and calm resignation in the face of his mortal illness provoked incredulity and indignation from believers, notably Samuel Johnson, over his untroubled rejection of the existence of an afterlife. But each of these philosophers, Hume especially, projects in their formal philosophical writings various forms of autobiographical presence. That is to say, in each of their works we can speak to varying degrees of their insertion of a dramatised ‘self’ as part of the philosophical narrative. Each of them in his own entirely distinctive way is an empiricist, so that it is rhetorically and logically inevitable that each speaks of his own experiences in the world, taking them of course as typical, indeed universal, common to all thoughtful or indeed sentient individuals. In so doing, these philosophers implicitly articulate an inevitable and almost paradoxical turn in autobiography: the autobiographer seeks to project a distinctive individuality but necessarily finds a general if not universal selfhood in his or her personal story. Or at least there is generally a balance in autobiography between the unique and the typical. Naturally, the philosophers’ autobiographical ‘revelations’ (if we can call them that) or self-dramatisations are shaped by the necessities of 148

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

149 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography

149

philosophical argumentation; the person in each case is to some extent a rhetorical persona, a stand-in for a generalised or universalised human entity. However, we know a good deal about each of these men and about their lives and personalities, mostly from epistolary exchanges between them and their friends. We are thus enabled to trace links and affinities, as well as divergences, between the personae in their writings and something like the actual men behind those universalised and conventionalised figures who appear in their treatises. Philosophical thinking and of course writing for them crucially involved narrative sequences that illustrate how we perceive the external world, since each of their philosophies is basically epistemological, as each seeks to explain how we know what we know (or think we know) about the world. Of the three, Locke is the most self-conscious and specific in offering an evocative and as it turns out a plausible, historically authenticated narrative of the origins of his greatest work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), which in its title balances modesty (‘essay’ in the older sense of an attempt, a preliminary effort) and ambition, indeed grandiosity (‘human understanding’ is about as allencompassing a subject as one could imagine). Indeed, all three philosophers announce their totalising ambitions in the titles of their main works: Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710); Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–1740), later made less abstruse in the two more elegant, accessible, and more modestly entitled renderings of parts of his youthful treatise into the two Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1748, 1751). But the towering explanatory ambitions claimed by such titles must in practice return to the specific individual scenes and moments of sensation, perception, or cognition. There is always in philosophical narratives like theirs a descent from universalising explanatory ambition to the individualised, sometimes personal and anecdotal and to that extent autobiographical moments of actual experience. Of the three, it is Locke who is from the outset most personal and effectively autobiographical. He begins his book with an ‘Epistle to the Reader’, describing the book as ‘the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours’ (Locke 1975, 6–7). Locke also offers later in his preface a disarming, unpretentiously modest anecdote of the work’s origins in the informal gathering of some intellectual friends and their casual curiosity about basic epistemological problems. As it happens, we know that there is a good deal of truth in Locke’s account of the Essay’s origins in conversations with five or six good friends, who

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

150

150 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

john richetti meeting at my Chamber, and discoursing on a Subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the Difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled our selves without coming any nearer a Resolution of those Doubts which perplexed us, it came into my Thoughts, that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set our selves upon Enquiries of that Nature, it was necessary to examine our own Abilities, and see, what Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with. (Ibid., 7)

As he narrates the sequence, this discussion with friends caused him to make some notes as he prepared for the next meeting of this informal intellectual circle, so that the Essay ‘thus begun by Chance, was continued by Intreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resum’d again, as my Humour or Occasion permitted’ (Ibid., 7). Locke even goes so far as to say that this book as he first conceived it was ‘not meant for those that already mastered this Subject, and made a thorough Acquaintance with their own Understandings; but for my own Information, and the Satisfaction of a few Friends’ (Ibid., 7). The irony here is massive, although sly: anyone foolish enough to think he understands how human cognition actually or fully works and what it reveals about a real world is deluded. Locke’s Essay is careful, at times guarded in its claims, even ostentatiously modest to a fault; so modest that in fact the prefatory ‘Epistle to the Reader’ may well strike readers nowadays as almost comically disingenuous. When he began, says Locke, he thought what he had to say about the understanding ‘would have been contained in one sheet of Paper; but the farther I went, the larger Prospect I had: New Discoveries led me still on, and so it grew insensibly to the bulk it now appears in’ (Ibid., 7–8). Locke describes himself, moreover, as an ‘Under-Labourer’, toiling like a gardener’s assistant in support of masters such as Robert Boyle, Thomas Sydenham, and Isaac Newton, ‘clearing Ground and removing some of the Rubbish that lies in the way to Knowledge’ (Ibid., 10). And there is some truth in this characterisation, since Locke was a friend and might even be described as a disciple of all three men, although he was closer to the pioneering scientist Boyle and the physician Sydenham at Oxford than to the eccentric Newton, who lived in Cambridge. So, too, the friends he evokes as part of the intellectual circle who began his thinking about the workings of human understanding were actual people, the members of a small club (a spin-off of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge) that he organised at Exeter House in London, the home of Locke’s patron and patient, the Whig grandee Anthony Ashley

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

151 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography

151

Cooper (later the first Earl of Shaftesbury). Cooper was part of this club, as was Sydenham, the medical pioneer, and James Tyrell, later a Whig historian. Years later (in 1694) when John Wynn, an Oxford don, wrote to ask if he might compose an abridgement of the Essay for the use of undergraduates, Locke repeated in his answer to Wynn that the book had ‘been begun by chance and continued with noe other designe but a free enquiry into that subject . . . the diversion of my idle hours’. And he continued, even more modestly, that it had been written ‘in a plain and popular stile . . . haveing in it noething of the aire of learning’ (Locke 2002, 206–7). ‘The air of learning’ is a jab at the Scholastic philosophical jargon, along with the formal disputations in Latin, featured at the Oxford where Locke matriculated in the early 1650s. Modesty is a tricky trope, since one needs to present evidence that one has something to be modest about, and the transparent irony here is that ‘learning’ of the sort paraded at Oxford is worthless as well as antiquated. As a practising physician and an amateur scientist and naturalist, Locke by training and temperament was a dissenter from the traditional Scholastic verbal philosophy still taught at Oxford. His philosophical project of novelty and re-constitution of the essence of cognition was grounded in the friendship of like-minded ‘new men’, avant garde intellectuals and scientists. From a relatively ‘humble’ but not poor background, culturally privileged, a graduate of the prestigious public school, Westminster, and Christ Church College, Oxford, Locke embraced newness, being himself a new man, as it were, even though he was hardly in any sense a radical. The Locke one meets outside of his philosophical and political writing is cautious with money, eager for scholarly and professional advancement, careful too if often flirtatious and even on intimate terms with a number of women, although he never married. Locke thought of himself, explicitly, as a deeply reserved and private person, given to a few intense personal relationships but not gregarious or outgoing. As he wrote to one of his friends from Oxford, Thomas Pembroke, the eighth Earl of Pembroke, from his political exile in Holland in December 1684, his temper was ‘unmedling’ as he ‘always sought quiet, and inspired me with noe other desires, noe other aimes, than to passe silently through this world with the company of a few good friends and books . . . I have often wonderd in the way that I lived, and the make I knew myself of, how it could come to passe that I was made the author of so many pamphlets’ (Locke 2002, 100). In addition to wondering why he has been accused of sedition and disloyalty, Locke claims that he has no real stylistic identity in his writings, an unconvincing modesty of

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

152

152 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

john richetti

course. Here is part of how he reacted, as he explained to Sir John Somers when offered a diplomatic post by King William III: ‘My temper, always shie of a crowd and strangers, has made my acquaintance few and my conversation too narrow and particular to get the skill of dealing with men in their various humours, and drawing out their secrets’ (Ibid., 260). Locke in the Essay, we may say, is drawn to its intense introspection and selfexploration because he is incapable, by his own exaggerated version of his self-effacing personality, of relating fully or deeply to other people. And yet there are various quasi-anecdotal moments in the Essay that dramatise Locke as an aggressively Socratic ironist who engages with imagined interlocutors, a sly questioner whose admission of ignorance is part of the liberating clearing of the intellectual decks. Locke recounts that he ‘was once in a meeting of very learned and ingenious physicians, where by chance there arose a question whether any liquor passed through the filament of the nerves’. Locke then asks them to define ‘liquor’, and they agree, being as he says ‘ingenious’. But his point emerges as he remarks that ‘had they been perhaps less ingenious, they might perhaps have taken it as a very frivolous or extravagant’ question. These ingenious and learned men come to realise that whatever the fluid passing through the nerves is, it is ‘a thing which, when each considered, he thought it not worth the contending about’ (Locke 1975, 484–5). Simple, straightforward suspicion of received and unexamined postulates is for Locke a crucially neglected activity, and his self-defined rhetorical role in the Essay lies in dramatising his own lonely but intellectually superior simplicity in the face of others’ misleading confidence about the nature of our understanding of the world. So Locke is, in anecdotal moments like this, in fact engaging with others. Or, to put this another way, Locke needs to invoke various opponents to make his own philosophical project clear. Hence his recurring and heavyhanded attacks on the ‘Schools’, that is the traditional scholastic philosophy inherited from the Middle Ages, whose proponents he says were out to serve their pride and to make themselves singular by the possession of an esoteric science. Locke’s position is that his philosophical method is available to anyone who looks at things clearly, honestly, and directly, and examines without presuppositions his own mental life. Locke’s practice in the Essay, overall, is frequently a matter of claiming to literalise perception, to look at things in a rigorously empiricist manner that excludes prejudice and preconceptions, to look without thinking, to look at looking, as it were. Thus thought is slowed down and examined for what it can reveal. At one point, in Book II, chapter xi (‘Of Discerning, and other Operations of the Mind’), Locke makes his project explicit in a revealing

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

153 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography

153

way: ‘I pretend not to teach, but to inquire; and therefore cannot but confess here again, That external and internal Sensation are the only passages that I can find, of Knowledge, to the Understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the Windows by which light is let into this dark Room’ (Ibid., 162–3). This is a characteristically Socratic, ironic moment, since Locke’s inquiries (and his answers to those explorations) were controversial and indeed explosive. And of course he was well aware of that, and often enough the modesty drops and Locke announces his revolutionary program. For example, in the very early pages of the opening book of the Essay, as he begins to dismantle the traditional notion of innate ideas, he scornfully notes that ‘Custom [is] a greater power than Nature’, which keeps men ignorant and content with received opinion: ‘it is no wonder that grown Men, either perplexed in the necessary affairs of Life, or hot in the pursuit of Pleasures, should not seriously sit down to examine their own Tenets; especially when one of their Principles is, That Principles ought not to be questioned’(Ibid., 82). The italics in this case tell part of the tale, expressing a strong contempt for unreflectively following custom. And Locke follows this with a self-aggrandising rhetorical question: ‘Who is there hardy enough to contend with the reproach, which is every where prepared for those, who dare venture to dissent from the received Opinions of their Country or Party? And where is the Man to be found, that can patiently prepare himself to bear the name of Whimsical, Sceptical, or Atheist’ (Ibid., 83). Locke continues in this vein, but the effect is to make his book from its outset a decidedly heroic enterprise, a sweeping away of the absurdity of customary beliefs and unexamined assumptions. In the concluding fourth book of the Essay, to take one example among many, Locke tells us that his book has shown that most of what passes for truth about reality is merely ‘verbal’, and he issues at the end of chapter viii (‘Of Trifling Propositions’) of this book a summarising set of instructions to the reader so that he can categorise most other books: ‘wherever the distinct Idea any Word stands for is not known and considered, and something not contained in the Idea, is not affirmed, or denied of it, there our Thoughts stick wholly in Sounds, and are not able to attain no real Truth or Falshood’ (Ibid., 617). Peter Laslett makes the valuable point that Locke was something of a loner, remarkably free from what he calls ‘engagement’, since he had in effect no family as an adult, and belonged to no church, stable community, or one locality (Laslett 1965, 44). And yet in his correspondence with his Irish admirer William Molyneux, Locke writes in 1695 about the need he has for intimacy with philosophical friends, especially ones he can confide

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

154

154 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

john richetti

in like Molyneux, and he also stresses the potential dangers of isolated thought: I cannot complain that I have not my share of friends of all ranks, and such, whose interest, assistance, affection, and opinions too, in fit cases, I can rely on . . . I want one near me to talk freely with . . . to propose to, the extravagancies that rise in my mind; one with whom I would debate several doubts and questions, to see what was in them. Meditating by ones self is like digging in the mine; it often, perhaps, brings up maiden earth, which came near the light before; but whether it contains any mettle in it, is never so well tryed as in conversation with a knowing judicious friend, who carries about with him the true touch-stone, which is love of truth in a clearthinking head. (Locke 2002, 208)

In private, in correspondence and personal relationships, in other words, Locke’s ironic confidence in the Essay is necessarily moderated. He needs friends who will counsel him, who will act as a check on his speculations. Such admissions are touching, distinctly humanising; Locke’s hubris on public and aggressive display in the Essay is moderated in a private exchange with a close friend, where ideas require vetting. No such modesty is apparent in George Berkeley’s career. An activist Anglican clergyman who became an Irish bishop, he was from his early days as a writer a fierce religious polemicist, the eloquent enemy of what the age called ‘free thinking’. And later in life he became a visionary missionary to North America who hoped, quixotically as it turned out, to establish a college for young Americans and Indians in Bermuda. The funds the government had promised for the college never materialised, and Berkeley had to return to Ireland and life as a vicar, later Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. His personal history and philosophical writing provide a sharp contrast with the shy, often sickly, asthmatic, self-effacing Oxonian, the ironically indirect Locke of the Essay. Whereas Locke spent a good part of his earlier years living a semi-cloistered existence at Oxford and later living quietly, sometimes reclusively, in political exile in the Netherlands, Berkeley came to London from Trinity College Dublin, where he was a teaching fellow, in January 1713 to publish his new book, his third in fact, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonus, and, as he put it in his journal, to meet ‘men of merit’ (Luce 1949, 56). Berkeley was a supremely self-confident, brilliant twenty-eight-year-old philosopher, whose precocious early but in retrospect supremely mature books – An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) – were full of provocative and even outrageous assertions, especially the Treatise, which developed his most

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

155 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography

155

controversial theory, immaterialism, his insistence that the material world is constituted by our perception of it. His notoriously counterintuitive claim is summed up in his concise Latin/English formula, ‘esse is percipi’: to exist is to be perceived. Berkeley clearly possessed a winningly attractive, even magnetic personality, and his time in London was a blazing success. Quickly, he became an intimate of many of the most prominent literary men of the day, including Addison, Steele, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift. Steele had received a copy of the Principles of Human Knowledge, and he sought out the young philosopher, his fellow Anglo-Irishman, and invited him to contribute to his new periodical paper, The Guardian, the successor to The Spectator. Berkeley wrote at least a dozen of these essays, and according to tradition he sat in the author’s box for the first performance of Addison’s tremendously popular play, Cato. To Stella Swift wrote in April of 1713 that he had presented ‘Mr Berkeley . . . a very ingenious man, & great Philosopher’ at Court. He also introduced him to Lord Berkeley of Stratton (Swift 1948, II.659) Berkeley met other powerful aristocrats such as the Earl of Pembroke, who became a friend and patron. As his biographer A. A. Luce points out, Berkeley impressed the distinguished men he met ‘by his talents, his social charm, and force of character’ (Luce 1949 I.57). As Pope wrote of him many years later in Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II: ‘To Berkley, ev’ry Virtue under Heaven’ (Pope 1738, I.73). The self-confidence dramatised in Berkeley’s triumphant entrance into London’s early-eighteenth-century literary and political culture might well be predicted from a reading of his first three precocious philosophical works. But can we say that personality influences philosophy or at least philosophical style? Did Locke’s modest and self-effacing personality, his struggles to make his way at Oxford and to establish himself as a physician, affect the style of the Essay, lending it a sly ironic deference as it delivers explosive revisions of received opinions and traditional notions? Did Berkeley’s unalloyed confidence in his own precocious brilliance, his comfortable childhood and brilliant young manhood, help to support his supreme assurance in offering the bewildering paradoxes of his thought, especially his defining doctrine of immaterialism? Luce summarises his youthful personality, perhaps rather too enthusiastically, when he says that Berkeley ‘had the physical courage of youth; he had the intellectual courage that marks the Protestant; individualist by birth, accustomed to think for himself, jealous for private judgment, proud to stand alone, he was ready to question what his neighbour accepted’ (Luce 1949, 38).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

156

156 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

john richetti

To read Berkeley’s youthful (and indeed his later) prose is to be struck by the supremely confident, even aggressive and pugnacious persona he projected from the beginning of his career. To some extent, of course, Berkeley knew that his ideas were so repugnant to common sense that they required this extreme assertiveness. Conveniently enough, Berkeley left behind notebooks that have been labelled by Luce as Philosophical Commentaries in which he worked out the doctrines central to his philosophy. These notebooks present notes toward an intellectual autobiography in which, as one commentator has put it, we see Berkeley as ‘a young philosophical dictator, confident, independent, scornful of mathematicians, sceptical of traditional philosophy, refreshing in the field of moral thought’ (Wisdom 1953, 39–40). Early in the Principles of Human Knowledge there is a revealing rhetorical moment in which Berkeley for a moment claims, disingenuously, that he is ‘needlessly prolix’: For, to what purpose is it to dilate on that which may be demonstrated with the utmost evidence in a line or two, to anyone that is capable of the least reflexion? It is but looking into your own thoughts, and so trying whether you can conceive it possible for a sound, or figure, or motion, or colour, to exist without the mind, or unperceived . . . Insomuch that I am content to put the whole upon this issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended moveable substance, or, in general, for any one idea, or any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the cause. (Berkeley 1871, II.154)

And a few paragraphs later, he insists that the mind, ‘taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and does conceive bodies existing unthought of or without the mind’. Rather, only ‘a little attention will discover to any one the truth and evidence of what is here said’ (Ibid., II.5051). How striking and almost absurdly presumptuous that Berkeley should assert that ‘only a little attention’ on the part of readers of his treatise will make his counter-intuitive thesis irrefutable. Obviously, Berkeley’s doctrine of immaterialism flies in the face of the traditional understanding of what the material world is to common apprehensions and normal experience. He actually claims in his notebooks that he always knew just how controversial his views would be. Here is one short observation with a fascinating autobiographical revelation: ‘Me: that I was distrustful at 8 years old and Consequently by nature disposed for these new Doctrines’. And this slightly longer note might serve as a summary of what Berkeley at twenty-two or twenty-three would aspire to do in his youthful published works, although its Boswellian bravado remained of course private:

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

157 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography

157

I am young, I am an upstart, I am a pretender, I am vain, very well. I shall Endeavour patiently to bear up under the most lessening, vilifying appelations the pride & rage of man can devise. But one thing I know, I am not guilty of. I do not pin my faith on the sleeve of any great man. I act not out of prejudice & prepossession. I do not adhere to any opinion because it is an old one, a receiv’d one, a fashionable one, or one that I have spent much time in the study and cultivation of. (Ibid., I.58)

The basic dynamic in Berkeley’s philosophical writing lies in its aggressive and indeed defiantly simple refusal of Lockean limitations concerning our knowledge of the world. The rousing concluding paragraph from his last philosophical work, Siris (1744), exemplifies this life-long intellectual and moral activism and certitude that are at the heart of Berkeley’s philosophical and personal portrait: The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it. Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a few. Certainly, where it is the chief passion, it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views; nor is it contented with a little ardour in the early time of life, active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that must make a real progress in knowledge must dedicate his age as well as youth, the later growths as well as first fruits, at the altar of Truth. (Berkeley 1979, V.164)

This is fine pulpit eloquence. The opening allusion is Pauline (‘For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face’ (1 Corinthians: 13:12)). But there is also a colloquial vigour to Berkeley’s manner: ‘Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a few’. As a philosopher, Berkeley’s insights are impelled and supplemented by theological as well as personal confidence, by strong faith as well as energetic reasoning that he tries to ground in common sense: if we look long enough at something, even when it’s dark, its truth will appear. The passage has a stirring autobiographical resonance for the nearly sixty-year-old philosopher. Note, too, the polemical insistence. Perhaps because of the striking oddity and singularity of his views, Berkeley keeps his eye on opponents; his writing is conscious of its daring and poised to counter-attack those who lie ready to reject it. In his audacious and precocious Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739–1740), composed between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five, Hume, like Berkeley, attempted nothing less than the renovation or indeed the revolutionising of philosophy. In his later works he strove to make his writing more elegant and his thought more accessible to lay readers. He re-wrote the Treatise into the two shorter and simpler

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

158

158 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

john richetti

Enquiries (concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals), published respectively in 1748 and 1751. He hoped to reverse what he saw as the failure of the Treatise, which as he put in his autobiography ‘fell dead-born from the press without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots’ (Hume 1987, xxxiv). His initial philosophical work not only offers explosively new insights about our understanding of the world but stages the personal dramas and failures of radical philosophical investigation with humorous self-deprecation or with what looks at times like real anxiety. Unlike the serene and supremely self-confident Berkeley or the modest but assertive Locke, Hume in the Treatise dramatises his moments of intellectual crisis and self-doubt that sounds very much like a nervous breakdown. To be sure, such scenes are literary and functional, part and parcel of Hume’s persuasiveness and not necessarily authentically or perhaps not fully autobiographical. And yet Hume’s grandiose youthful ambitions as well as his nervous self-doubt were clearly sincere, as we know from a long letter he composed in March 1734 to Dr. John Arbuthnot (but never mailed) in which he described his philosophical ambitions from a very early age: left to himself to read after completing the Scottish secondary school curriculum, Hume was inclined ‘to Books of Reasoning & Philosophy, & to Poetry & the polite Authors’ (Hume 1932, I.13) But his reading revealed that the writings of philosophers and critics ‘contain little more than endless Disputes, even in the most fundamental Articles’. So he found a ‘certain Boldness of Temper’ arise in him, ‘not enclin’d to submit to any Authority’ but to ‘seek out some new Medium, by which Truth might be establisht’ (Ibid., I, 13). And then he continues, when he was about eighteen years old, ‘after much Study, & Reflection . . . there seem’d to be open’d up to me a new Scene of Thought, which transported me beyond Measure’ (Ibid., I.13). And yet despite this youthful enthusiasm, Hume also describes in this letter his anguished self-doubt as he progressed in his great work: ‘I had no Hopes of delivering my Opinions with such Elegance & Neatness, as to draw to me the Attention of the World, & I wou’d rather live & dye in Obscurity than produce them maim’d & imperfect’ (Ibid., I.17). He goes so far as to label his depressed mental state as close to madness: ‘there seems to be as great a Difference betwixt my Distemper & common Vapors, as betwixt Vapors and Madness’ (Ibid., I.17). Hume’s only remedy for his depression, he writes to the doctor, is resolving ‘to seek out a more active Live, & tho’ I cou’d not quit my Pretensions in Learning, but with my last Breath, to lay them aside for some time, in order more effectually to resume them’ (Ibid., I.17).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

159 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography

159

Obviously, Hume recovered enough to complete the enormous Treatise, and yet that book dramatises at key moments a few of the debilitating and depressing effects of an intense philosophical rumination that challenges conventional understanding of what the world as we perceive it actually is. Let’s look at Hume’s most important, and in the end shocking, set of insights, developed in part III, ‘Of Knowledge and Probability’, of the first Book of the Treatise, ‘Of the Understanding’. At the end of part III of this Book, Hume observes dryly that our notion that every ‘new production’ must have a cause comes from ‘observation and experience’ (Hume 1978, 82). In what follows, he will carefully dismantle that universal assumption, reducing causes to experience and observation; that is, as necessarily fallible and drawn from merely customary rather than strictly truthful or accurate expectations about the world. Cause and effect, Hume tells us, depend upon ‘contiguity and succession’, and they are ‘not sufficient to make us pronounce any two objects to be cause and effect’ or to find what he calls a ‘necessary connexion’ between the two objects or events (Ibid., 87). And as he continues with undiminished rigor Hume asserts that even if we observe the ‘constant conjunction’ of causes and effects, ‘it is impossible for us to satisfy ourselves by our reason why we should extend that experience beyond those particular instances’ (Ibid., 91). Hume’s rigor does not obscure the deeply sceptical trend of his philosophy, whereby, as he puts it rather casually in this same section of the Treatise, ‘all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation’ (Ibid., 103). Moreover, ‘all reasonings are nothing but the effects of custom; and custom has no influence, but by inlivening the imagination, and giving us a strong conception of any object’ (Ibid., 149). In the final section of the first book (‘Of personal identity’), Hume presents his most radical and of course personal conclusions, but he also offers a memorable anecdote evoking the emotional effects on him of his sceptical philosophy. The idea of a self, he begins, is incoherent in his own experience: ‘For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception . . . I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception’. The mind and by extension the self for Hume is a series of perceptions, ‘successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind’ (Ibid., 252–3). The ‘Conclusion’ of Book I is extraordinary, since Hume drops this philosophical rigor and reacts to the subversive insights he has just concluded, a moment with no precedence in the work of his two rival philosophers, Locke and Berkeley. It is difficult to gauge just how completely serious he is: ‘I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

160

160 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

john richetti

solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster . . . Everyone keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side . . . When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance’ (Ibid., 264). He even claims to have lost his confidence in his reasoning: ‘Can I be sure, that in leaving all establish’d opinions I am following truth . . . After the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I shou’d assent to it’ (Ibid., 265). At last, Hume says he is growing frantic, desperate; his philosophy ‘has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning . . . and begin to fancy myself inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty’ (Ibid., 268–9). I have abridged this extraordinary dramatisation over several pages of what Hume claims is his state of mind at the end of Book I of the Treatise. But then ‘nature’ intervenes and cures him of this ‘philosophical melancholy and delirium’ as normal life asserts itself, life outside the study of philosophy: ‘I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour’s amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther’(Ibid., 269). But in fact, as Hume examines his thoughts he also finds that his ambition remains to do philosophy, to contribute ‘to the instruction of mankind, and of acquiring a name by my inventions and discoveries’ (Ibid., 271). Such ‘sentiments also spring up naturally’ for him, he says. Hume retreats for a time from logical rigor and abstruse philosophy but he does not renounce them. He admits his intellectual ambitions are as strong and insistent as ever, even as he now desperately seeks rest and relaxation in the normal, thoughtlessly carefree human world.1 In so doing, he dramatises the instability of the self and its perceptions that is at the heart of his understanding of ‘human nature’. Autobiography in Hume’s case is part and parcel of his philosophical presentation of his system. His staged and melodramatic (and perhaps sincere or even actual) retreat from his philosophy’s subversive implications testifies to its dangers, but also, most powerfully, to its truth and force. And, finally, coming as it does at the end of Book I, this little dramatic and personal scene seals Hume’s resolve to continue to Books II (‘Of the Passions’) and Book III (‘Of Morals’). This autobiographical narrative is the crucial, impelling prologue to the science of man in the second and third books of The Treatise. Hume recovers from paralysing self-doubt and impotent disillusion, and so does his philosophical project.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

161 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography

161

Notes 1. I have explored this aspect of Hume’s thought more fully in Richetti 1983, 226–9.

Bibliography Berkeley, George. 1871. The Works of George Berkeley, D.D. 4 vols. Edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. Berkeley, George. 1979. The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne. Edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. London: Nelson, 1948–1957; rpt. Nendeln: Kraus Reprint. Goldie, Mark, ed. 2002. John Locke, Selected Correspondence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, David. 1932. The Letters of David Hume. Edited by J. Y. T Greig, 3 vols. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. Hume, David. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge. 2nd edn., edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. Hume, David. 1987. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Laslett, Peter. 1965. ‘Introduction’. In Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. New York: New American Library. Locke, John. 1975. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Luce, A.A. 1949. The Life of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd. Richetti, John J. 1983. Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Swift, Jonathan. 1948. Journal To Stella, 2 vols. Edited by Harold Williams. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. Wisdom, J. O. 1953. The Unconscious Origin of Berkeley’s Philosophy. London: Hogarth Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C11.3D

162 [148–162] 20.10.2015 5:49PM

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

163 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

part 3

The many nineteenth centuries (ca. 1800–1900)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

164 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

165 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

chapter 12

Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century David Vincent

The earliest recorded use of the term that defines this volume is by a writer from a humble background. Ann Yearsley, the ‘Bristol Milkwoman and Poetess’, attached an ‘Autobiographical Memoir’ to the fourth edition of poems published in 1786 (Falke 2013, 12–3). By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century the genre of working-class autobiography had become sufficiently established to attract the attention of the literary establishment. In 1827 John Lockhart introduced the readers of The Quarterly Review to the new voice: The classics of the papier mâché age of our drama have taken up the salutary belief that England expects every driveller to do his Memorabilia. Modern primer-makers must needs leave confessions behind them, as if they were so many Rousseaus. Our weakest mob-orators think it a hard case if they cannot spout to posterity. Cabin-boys and drummers are busy with their commentaries de bello Gallico; the John Gilpins of ‘the nineteenth century’ are historians of their own anabaseis; and, thanks to ‘the march of intellect’, we are already rich in the autobiography of pickpockets. ([Lockhart] 1827, 149)

The authors ranged from the obscure to the outcast. Amongst the ten texts arraigned for Lockhart’s censure were The Adventures of a Ship-Boy; The Memoirs of John Nicol, Mariner; and The Life of David Haggart, alias John Wilson, Alias John Morison, alias Barney M’coul, alias John M’Colgan, alias Daniel O’Brien, alias the Switcher. Written by Himself, while under Sentence of Death. The blame for this corruption of English letters lay not just with the writers but with the marketplace. An epochal change was taking place in the realm of written intercourse. ‘There was . . . little danger of our having too much autobiography’, wrote Lockhart, ‘as long as no book had much chance of popularity which was not written with some considerable portion of talent, or at least by a person of some considerable celebrity in one way or another. But the circle of readers has widened strangely in these times . . . It seems as if the ear of that grand impersonation, “the Reading 165

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

166

166 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

david vincent

Public,” had become as filthily prurient as that of an eaves-dropping lackey’ ([Lockhart] 1827, 164). The wrong lives were attracting the wrong kind of popular interest. Partly as a consequence of the disdain of the emerging profession of letters, working-class autobiography failed to establish itself as a recognised literary form for the remainder of the century and the first two-thirds of the twentieth. As late as 1984 an authoritative survey could claim that only 175 autobiographies of any kind were written in the nineteenth century (Buckley 1984, 19). A handful of books, such as Samuel Bamford’s Early Days (London 1848–1849) and Charles Manby Smith’s The Working-Man’s Way in the World: being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer (Smith [1853]), were issued by reputable publishers and found a readership amongst those curious about the political challenge from below and the culture from which it emerged. But right through to the emergence of ‘history from below’ in the 1960s, the known works were limited in number and scattered in form. Around fifty texts supplied occasional anecdotes to illustrate generalisations drawn from more comprehensive and authoritative sources such as government blue books. Eventually, a growing interest in popular literature more generally intersected with an increasing search for the voice of the dispossessed. John Burnett edited a series of widely read anthologies (Burnett 1974, 1982) and I wrote the first systematic study of the genre based on an enlarged group of 142 memoirs (Vincent 1979). These works made possible the funding of a large-scale research project which set about collecting, annotating, and indexing every extant autobiography written by working men and women between 1790 and 1945 (Burnett, Vincent, and Mayall, 1984, 1987, 1989. See also Hackett 1985). Every effort was made to locate not just the texts in the catalogues of national and local libraries and the columns of political and trade union journals, but unpublished manuscripts still in the private possession of descendants. The appearance of one of the editors on BBC’s Woman’s Hour generated the largest single trove of hitherto unknown material. What had once been a marginal collection of writings was transformed into a major archive comprising more than a thousand works written before the end of the nineteenth century and a similar number from the first half of the following century. Taken together they constituted by far the largest commentary by working men and women on their experiences and aspirations before the era of the recorded interview. The oral history movement which emerged at this time could only reach back as far as men and women born in the early years of the twentieth century. Beyond lay the written word or silence. Through the bibliographic research it became

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

167 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century

167

possible to take a more comprehensive view of the nature of the genre and its value to historians and literary critics. The initial conclusion to be drawn is that working-class autobiography was an immensely diverse event, nowhere more so than in its physical existence. Just over a third of the discovered texts were issued by London firms, ranging from general interest publishers to those specialising in niche markets such as spiritual or temperance writings. A further quarter was produced for local audiences by small provincial enterprises. One in ten was to be found in the multitude of nineteenth-century periodicals dedicated to particular interests and objectives. This left more than a quarter of the material that was either selfpublished, or survived as hand-written (or latterly typed) texts circulating at best amongst the writer’s immediate family. These were documents handed down to descendants whose significance only became apparent once historians and the media began to draw attention to their value. Whilst it may be assumed that just about all the mainstream published material has been located, the tail of printed ephemera and unpublished reminiscences has no ending. As academic and popular interest grows, fuelled by the bibliographies and the research they generated, so more texts continue to emerge. A fifth of the autobiographies brought together for the most recent large-scale study, Emma Griffin’s Liberty’s Dawn, are additional to the collections that were compiled more than a quarter of a century ago (Griffin 2014, 4). The association of the genre with the disordered and disregarded fringes of literary expression contrasts with many other categories of autobiography, particularly the nineteenth-century canon of intellectual and professional memoirs written by those, as Lockhart put it, with recognised ‘talent’ or ‘celebrity’ and subject to full-length examination by generations of academic commentators. The existence of the form is a consequence of much toil in the archival back streets and this is reflected in its overall character. The most important consequence of the bibliographical research has been to divest the genre of the sense that it was the product of a narrow, educated elite within the working class. Signature literacy was already virtually universal amongst male artisans by the early decades of the nineteenth century, and every neighbourhood and village possessed at least a scattering of unskilled labourers familiar with the printed word (Vincent 1989, 96–104). Female literacy was only ten points lower than male, and increased even more rapidly during the Victorian period as the proportion unable to inscribe their names fell to single figures. The cost of paper, steel pens, correspondence, newspapers, and eventually full-length books came within the penny economy of the labouring poor. Whilst

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

168

168 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

david vincent

extended composition remained unusual, it was sufficiently feasible to attract a diverse range of practitioners. The cohort of autobiographers included, as might be expected, teachers, poets, preachers, and journalists, but the occupations experienced or described in the texts encompass errand boys, domestic servants, farm labourers, soldiers and sailors, navvies and hawkers, and a host of trades in the by-ways of the nineteenth-century economy such as coal trammer, docks hobbler, rivet carrier, and slopedresser. In spatial terms, the sample is equally comprehensive. There are dense clusters in the era’s major conurbations, but lives were led and written about in every corner of the British Isles, from Stromness in the Orkneys to Newlyn in Cornwall and Amlwch on Anglesey. The discovery of the scale of the archive has moved the genre into the centre of studies of the culture and economy of the era, such as the sophisticated quantitative analysis of accounts of working-class childhood recently conducted by Jane Humphries, which is based on 617 texts containing accounts of the first phase of occupational labour across the economy (Humphries 2010). The major continuing imbalance in the form is that of gender. In the early research on working-class autobiographies there were so few written by women as to discourage any substantive discussion of their work. The subsequent enlargement of the genre located a richer seam of accounts and has permitted some preliminary analysis of their contents (Swindells 1985, 116–35). Nonetheless they remain a minority presence, accounting for less than ten per cent of the surviving texts, despite the further discovery of unpublished material. The disparity is not a simple reflection of signature literacy. The differential in the marriage register scores was never large and narrowed consistently through the period, a consequence in part of the relative equality of basic instruction in the elementary schools. It is likely that the explanation lies in the distinction between nominal and functional literacy. Few working-class children emerged from their schooling as capable writers. What was termed ‘composition’ was only taught to the very brightest children from 1871 onwards, and even then only covered simple letter-writing. Following the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840, correspondence became more accessible as a mode of transmitting sentiment and summaries of past experience, but the use of the mails by the labouring poor remained relatively infrequent until the appearance of the picture postcard at the end of the nineteenth century. The journey to the level of skill and confidence required to attempt a sustained life history required practice and this was most often available in the range of occupational or organisational settings from which women were largely excluded for much of the period. The humdrum tasks of providing accounts for

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

169 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century

169

customers or preparing minutes of meetings or notes for nonconformist sermons generated a familiarity with pen and ink which could be applied when the occasion arose to the task of attempting longer prose narratives. Only in the closing years of the nineteenth century were women able to play leading roles in organised protest movements, or to find employment as typists, teachers, or nurses where the use of literacy was a requirement. Even amongst the more prolific male autobiographies there was a general sense of making do with scarce resources and limited expectations. Such was the case with Benjamin Shaw’s life history, which was edited for publication in 1991. In their original manuscript form the two volumes of the autobiography were literally home-made. The cheap soft paper was sewn and bound by the author, who used his skills as a mechanic to fashion his own steel-nibbed pen. He had taught himself to write at the age of twenty in order to maintain a correspondence with his literate sweetheart, and his command over written language remained partial. A wide vocabulary, derived at least in part from extensive reading, was set down with inconsistent spelling and idiosyncratic punctuation. Nothing was fixed in the account. Shaw struggled with the conventions of formal discourse as he had battled with material and emotional circumstances in the life he sought to describe. Movement and compromise characterised both the form and the content of the text. The overriding commitment was not to a single drama or outcome, but rather to a pact with the truth. In his preface, Shaw described the essence of his project: in the following Pages, I have put down a few broken, and imperfect hints, from memory partIy, & partly from a few notes kept by me, for my own use, mostly of the latest dates, mentioned, &c – I have not attempted to deceive any that may read this account, by falsehoods or by selecting those circumstances that might make the most favourable appearance – but I have simply attempted to state facts, whether hounourable or shameful – as I consider truth the most valueable ingredient in any History or Biographycal account. (Shaw 1991, 1)

The more restricted the audience for the text, the more compelling the need for accuracy (Howard 2012, 172). The bulk of the works were written for a local market, whether or not they were printed, and would thus be read by an audience far more informed about the detail of conditions and experiences than any historian can hope to be. In a handful of cases, such as the edition of Shaw or the republication of James Dawson Burn’s The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (Burn 1978), it has been possible to check the circumstantial evidence in the texts. There are occasional

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

170

170 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

david vincent

instances of confused recall, or of misquoting texts lodged in the memory, but these fall short of deliberate misrepresentation. It mattered to the autobiographers that they were not writing fiction, and indeed one of the stimulants to the proliferation of the genre in the Victorian era was the need to counter the increasing representation of working-class lives in the novels of Dickens and other middle-class writers (Vincent 1979, 23). However limited their expected circulation, the autobiographies were never entirely private documents. The emphasis varies from work to work, but the most complacently didactic conducted some inward search, and the most intensely introspective had a sense of a wider readership, even if it never came into being. Shaw set down his ‘Family Records’, as his title page stated, ‘Partly for his own use & Partly for his Children’ (Shaw 1991, 1). Another contemporary semi-literate autobiographer, the Northumbrian waggonway-wright Anthony Errington, explained at the commencement of his account that ‘the reason of my wrighting the particulars of my life and Transactions are to inform my famely and the world’ (Errington 1988, 26). In the more sophisticated work the perceived audience might fracture still further, but in the least ambitious autobiographies there was a constant shifting of perspective, as the narrators wrote in order to read themselves and to be read by others who were in some way expert in the world that was being recalled. As Shaw recognised, however, he was free to select and give weight to the events he chose to write about. The conventional distinction between an autobiography and a diary is that the former is subject to a shaping perspective at a single point of composition as distinct from a multiple series of short-term records that are completed only when the writer dies or abandons the task. Recent scholarship has argued that diaries themselves are influenced by one or more overarching conceptions of a developing life (Millim 2013, 12–25). They can be seen as part of a broader autobiographical project, conducted, as in the case of the weaver and Peterloo veteran Samuel Bamford, through two volumes of memoirs, extensive correspondence in the press defending his role in radical politics, and the maintenance of a daily record which itself included cuttings from newspapers (Hewitt 2006, 21–39). In either case, the author has choices in composing the account of the interaction over time between the self and its surroundings. This is not to oppose literary form to fact, merely to recognise that like any source material, life-histories are conditioned by the narrative assumptions that have called them into being (Thomson 2012, 102–4). Amongst historians seeking to use large collections of working-class autobiographies to illuminate specific issues there remains a resistance to the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

171 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century

171

notion of reading them as complete texts. The first major use of the expanded genre, Jonathan Rose’s study of working-class reading practices, ignored the broader question of form altogether (Rose 2001). In Emma Griffin’s recent study, the generally optimistic account of the industrial revolution extends to the challenges posed by her source material, where, she notes, ‘some have gloomily concluded that autobiographies are a form of literature – even fiction’ (Griffin 2014, 9). They are the first, not the second, and as Carolyn Steedman has argued, we need to develop further a sociology of literary forms if we are fully to comprehend the nature of the enterprise in which the writers were engaged, and how we might best deploy the texts to comprehend how lives were lived and understood in the past (Steedman 1992, 15). There were two models of temporal self-analysis available to working men and women at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The tradition of spiritual memoirs stretched back to the Reformation (Delany 1969, 6–104; Morris 1966, chs. 2 and 3), as Molly Murray (see Chapter 4) and Tessa Whitehouse (see Chapter 8) explore in the present collection. Their function was not the celebration of the autonomous self but rather its transcendence through the discovery of Christ’s purpose for the penitent sinner (Mascuch 1997, 55–96; Peterson 1986, 2–28). Fulfilment of this task emphasised the movement of the soul through time and the discovery of its destination through a range of social interactions and physical experiences. It was increasingly seen to be necessary to engage not just in prayer and preaching but in writing for a wider audience. And from the Puritan revolution onwards, humble birth was no disqualification from setting pen to paper. Thus in 1705 the tiler and plasterer’s son Thomas Tryon, who had begun working at the age of six, felt the need to write his life story ‘to encourage others, by the Example of God’s gracious dealing with me’ (Tryon 1705, 4). His acquisition of the tools of communication during his teens was far from straightforward. He struggled for a while with a primer he had bought, and then struck a bargain with his only available resources: ‘At last I bethought my self of a lame young Man who taught some poor Peoples Children to Read and Write; and having by this time got two Sheep of my own, I applied my self to him, and agreed with him to give him one of my Sheep to teach me to make the Letters, and Joyn them together’ (Tryon 1705, 14–5). By this means he was able to embark on the real journey of his life until the point at which ‘I had an inward Instigation to Write and Publish something to the World’ (Tryon 1705, 54). During the eighteenth century nonconformist sects, particularly the Wesleyans, institutionalised the practice, commissioning and publishing

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

172

172 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

david vincent

exemplary lives as a means of educating and inspiring their congregations (Rivers 1978, 189–203). Alongside these relentlessly purposeful accounts was a more relaxed and less visible tradition of oral story-telling. Parents spoke of their forebears to their children; neighbours gossiped about the deeds and misdeeds of others; fellow drinkers told tales of high adventure and low behaviour. By its nature, such practices left little record for historians and literary critics to examine, but the presence throughout the genre of working-class autobiography of inconsequential anecdotes and diverting characters is testament to the continuing pleasure of narration for the sake of general entertainment and occasional instruction. The late-twentieth-century memoir of George Hewins was driven by ‘the sheer delight of his storytelling’ (Hewins 1982, 139). During the eighteenth century some categories of reminiscence had begun to assume specific forms in the publishing market place, particularly thieves’ tales and gallows confessions. The nation at arms during the Napoleonic Wars created a demand for the life-histories not just of generals but of the common soldiers who had left their homes to fight for their country (Fitchett 1900). From the 1790s onwards, the radical movement began to generate its own temporal identity, recounting its struggles and victories in various forms of public gathering and increasingly in fragmentary or full-length autobiographies (Vincent 1977). It was no longer enough to speak of the past. Written history became a contested arena to which the personal memoir could make an immediate contribution (Hackett 1989, 211). The traditions of spiritual and oral memoir were at once a resource and a limitation for working people attempting the task of a written life-history. The travails of the soul endowed the genre with a pervasive sense of moral purpose but were increasingly unable to frame the drive to a secular understanding of personal improvement (Falke 2013, xv–xvi). Tales continued to be told in every kind of social context, but the forms of organised protest that embodied the growing sense of collective identity were now infused with the printed or hand-written word in the shape of manifestos, correspondence, journalism, and institutional bureaucracy. Men and sometimes women set out on an unfamiliar project lacking confidence in any single model of temporal self-analysis. The consequence was a plural and provisional approach to the task of shaping the narratives. Inexperienced writers responded to their own and their audience’s demands by attempting various approaches to explaining a life, sometimes reviving fading structures, elsewhere contributing to emerging literary sub-categories or trying different models within the boundary of a single account.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

173 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century

173

Benjamin Shaw’s Family Records is a case in point. As the title suggests, he began with the basic model of the genealogical tree which might be contained in the family Bible, presenting a sequence of brief pen portraits of ‘my parents and my relations’ (Shaw 1991, 2–21). When, after twenty or so pages he reached his own history, he was faced with at least three alternative narrative structures. The first was the well-rehearsed drama of the spiritual journey. Shaw had himself experienced a classic Baptist conversion in his late twenties. He recalled that after a period of religious crisis, ‘god was Mercifull, & spoke Peace to my Soul, & now I found that Peace with god which Passeth all understanding, & rejoiced all the day long, & saw every thing in a new light, I wondered that I never saw them before, my heart was Chainged, & my life was Chainged of course’ (Ibid., 39–40). However, he had many years of intense hardship ahead of him in which his moment of grace seemed of diminishing relevance. Gradually the turning point became just another corner. Shaw’s faith never left him completely, and traces of the standard spiritual progression can be discerned in the subsequent narrative, including a number of providential escapes from death. But now there was a competing narrative structure. His amorous acquisition of literacy had been put to use during a long convalescence following amputation of a leg. He became a classic case of the literate mentality, fascinated with printed learning in all its aspects, and with the organising power of writing. His memoir was not only structured but fully indexed, as were the collections of aphorisms and medical cures he made in separate notebooks. Once he was back on his foot, the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties became the main business of his leisure until the moment when he took up his home-made pen to turn himself into an autobiographer. But here again, the form was not dominant. Components of the emerging genre of the self-improving life are clearly visible, including the distancing from the community, the mutual assistance of fellow readers, the long, unfinished road of mental growth. In the end, however, it proved impossible to smooth the jagged edges of his life into a standard account of intellectual development. A third narrative framework had to be called into being to help organise the account. Shaw’s epistolary courtship had been consummated during one thoughtless night in Preston in February 1793, when he was just twenty-one. The subsequent enforced marriage, which produced a total of eight children, of whom seven survived infancy, was very difficult. He spent the first few months hoping, as he later admitted, that his new wife might die in childbirth, and despite occasional periods of harmony, notably after the religious conversion in which his wife shared,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

174

174 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

david vincent

he never found his way to a satisfactory relationship. His deeply selfdisciplined nature was endlessly offended by the more happy-go-lucky nature of his household manager, who was too generous with the neighbours and too spendthrift with the shopkeepers. Eventually, on 8 August 1826, his wife, now ill with consumption, ‘being afrunted at my grumbling at being disturbed with her, left my bed & went into the other Room, & we never Slept together after’ (Ibid., 97). She died on 4 February 1828, Shaw recording with typical precision that she was ‘aged 54 years 14 weeks & 1 day had been married 34 years 22 week 2 days &c’ (Ibid., 100). By the close of the account the narrative had adopted the form of a long, anguished love letter. In retrospect, the night in Preston was seen as the ‘Creitical time’ (Ibid., 29) and the narrative reached its climax with his wife’s death. His courtship had been sustained by learning to write, and at the end of the marriage his literacy made possible one last communication. The main part of the autobiography concluded with a valedictory poem, ‘on Betty Shaw wife of Benjn. Shaw’: The time is past that I should her condemn, Child of caprice, and to her will the slave, She had her virtues let me think of them, Her faults be Buried with her in the Grave.

(Ibid., 100)

The account of past time had, however, exhumed all her faults as well as her less persuasive virtues. It was evident that Shaw could not forgive his wife her failings, nor himself for failing to forgive her. The lack of resolution in his text reflected both Shaw’s personal dilemma and the more general condition of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography. The fading paradigm of the spiritual journey had provided an authoritative means of overcoming the divisions inherent in the practice of life history. Through a transcendence of the self the author could be united with the life that had been lived and the life hereafter. Once the hair shirt of the Puritan confessional tradition had been discarded, no other single model could reliably answer all the needs of temporal self-analysis, especially for men and women who felt their lives in some sense marginal to the received central history of their society. The deployment of multiple narratives of the self, within or between texts, was not confined to a particular group of writers. It has been argued that in different national contexts, working-class autobiographers negotiated with available versions of selfhood, often bequeathed from earlier eras (Fulbrook and Rublack 2010, 264–7; Maynes 1995, 4–6). The contrast between the multiple personality of the postmodern era and the assumed

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

175 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century

175

singularity of past identities has been challenged (Gagnier 1990, 101). The essentialism of categories such as women’s autobiography has dissolved into a range of self-presentations, some of which were common to other periods and groups of writers (Dentith and Dodd 2005, 6; Peterson 1999, 15). The spiritual narrative, for instance, was appropriated by well-born and low-born, male and female, over several centuries. If the emerging genre of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography had a distinct dilemma it was not so much in the range of choices available for constructing a life, but rather in fitting the intractable data of their lives into any one narrative structure. Just as the family economies of the poor subsisted on a basis of make do and mend, so their autobiographies were a matter of improvisation and patchwork. James Dawson Burn turned to the epistolary form in his Autobiography of a Beggar Boy, first published in 1855. He set out to present ‘an honest history of my life’ by means of a series of letters to his son, each of which would contain a lesson that would guide his footsteps and by extension the rising generation at large. However, by the third letter the enterprise was already in deep trouble. Burn was finding it increasingly difficult to relate his inner self to the series of occupational and political reversals he was required to encompass. The framework of the exemplary narrative could not cope with the sheer scale of the material and ideological challenges he had endured, and he was forced to confess that, ‘amid the universal transformation of things in the moral and physical world, my own condition has been like a dissolving view, and I have been so tossed in the rough blanket of fate, that my identity, if at any time a reality, must have been one which few could venture to swear to’ (Burn 1978, 56). His dilemma, for which he could find no final solution, was that of how to negotiate between his private and public selves in an essentially secular universe. He wanted to give an account of his disaster-strewn life as a beggar, hatter, and commercial traveller, and as a self-improving reader, radical politician, and Oddfellow, but was deeply uncertain about the interchange between external structural processes and inner moral development. The working-class autobiographers were embarked on a search for purpose in a world that persistently denied it. ‘For working-class autobiographers’, notes Regenia Gagnier, ‘subjectivity – being a significant agent worthy of the regard of others, a human subject, as well as an individuated “ego” for oneself – was not a given. In conditions of long work hours, crowded housing, and inadequate light, it was difficult enough for them to contemplate themselves, but they also had to justify themselves as writers worthy of the attention of others’ (Gagnier 1991, 141). Their attempts to

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

176

176 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

david vincent

pattern what was constantly fragmented, to assume responsibility for forces largely out of their control, were the common, continuing experiences of the excluded groups in society. A contrast may be drawn with the emerging genre of the self-made businessman’s memoir. James Lackington, author of the prototype text in 1791, was confident that his narrative would demonstrate his personal responsibility for his success as a London bookseller: ‘Should my memoirs be attended with no other benefit to society’, he wrote, ‘they will at least tend to shew what may be effected by a persevering habit of industry’ (Lackington 1791, xvii). In her broader survey of nineteenth-century middle-class autobiographies, Donna Loftus has argued that the individual self of the male writer was constituted through a range of social relations. The upwardly mobile figure formed economic, political, and recreational networks with other local figures as a means of securing commercial and social advancement, and in turn addressed that community in the written summation of his life (Loftus 2006, 68). The issue was one of agency. Newly educated working men depended on formal and formal connections as they sought to improve themselves through the use of the written word. But for the most part their networks served merely to pool the impotence of their members. Their lives as they were endured and subsequently committed to paper remained a search for coherence that was rarely attainable.

Bibliography Bamford, Samuel. 1848–1849. Early Days. London: Simpkin Marshall. Buckley, Jerome H. 1984. The Turning Key. Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1880. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burn, James Dawson. 1978. The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy. Edited and introduced by David Vincent. London: Europa. Burnett, John, David Vincent, and David Mayall. 1984. The Autobiography of the Working Class. An Annotated Critical Bibliography. Vol.I, 1790–1900. Brighton: Harvester. Burnett, John, David Vincent, and David Mayall. 1987 The Autobiography of the Working Class. An Annotated Critical Bibliography, Vol.II, 1900–1945. Brighton: Harvester. Burnett, John, David Vincent, and David Mayall. 1989. The Autobiography of the Working Class. An Annotated Bibliography. Vol.III, Supplement 1790–1945. Brighton: Harvester. Burnett, John, ed. 1974. Useful Toil. Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

177 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century

177

Burnett, John, ed. and intro. 1982. Destiny Obscure. Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane. Delany, Paul. 1969. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dentith, Simon and Philip Dodd. 2005. ‘The Uses of Autobiography’. Literature and History 14.1: 4–22. Errington, Anthony. 1988. Coals on Rails Or The Reason of my Wrighting. The Autobiography of Anthony from 1778 to around 1825. Edited by P. E. H. Hair. Liverpool; Liverpool University Press. Falke, Cassandra. 2013. Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiographies, 1820–1848. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press. Fitchett, W. H., ed. 1900. Wellington’s Men, Some Soldier Autobiographies. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Fulbrook, Mary and Ulinka Rublack. 2010. ‘In Relation: “The Social Self” and Ego-Documents.’ German History 28.3: 263–72. Gagnier, Regenia. 1991. Subjectivities. A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. New York: Oxford University Press. Gagnier, Regenia. 1990. ‘The Literary Standard, Working Class Autobiography, and Gender’. In Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography and Gender, 93–114. Edited by Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom. Albany: State University of New York Press. Griffin, Emma. 2014. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hackett, Nan. 1985. XIX Century Working-Class Autobiography: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: AMS Press. Hackett, Nan. 1989. ‘A Different Form of “Self”: Narrative Style in British Nineteenth-Century Working-class Autobiography’. Biography 12.3: 208–26. Hewins, Angela. 1982. ‘The Making of a Working Class Autobiography: “The Dillen”’. History Workshop Journal 14: 138–42. Hewitt, Martin. 2006. ‘Diary, Autobiography and the Practice of Life History’. In Life Writing and Victorian Culture, 21–39. Edited by David Amigoni. Aldershot: Ashgate. Howard, Ursula. 2012. Literacy and the Practice of Writing in the 19th Century. A Strange Blossoming Spirit. Leicester: NIACE. Humphries, Jane. 2010. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lackington, James. 1791, Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington . . . Written by Himself. In a Series of Letters to a Friend. London: for the Author. [Lockhart, John Gibson], 1827. ‘The Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds’. The Quarterly Review 35.69: 148–65.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6834755/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C12.3D

178

178 [163–178] 20.10.2015 5:52PM

david vincent

Loftus, Donna. 2006. ‘The Self in Society: Middle-class Men and Autobiography’. In Life Writing and Victorian Culture, 67–85. Edited by David Amigoni. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mascuch, Michael. 1997. Origins of the Individualist Self. Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England, 1591–1791. Cambridge: Polity Press. Maynes, Mary Jo. 1995. Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Millim, Anne-Marie. 2013. The Victorian Diary. Authorship and Emotional Labour. Farnham: Ashgate. Morris, John N. 1966. Versions of the Self. Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart Mill. New York: Basic Books. Peterson, Linda H. 1986. Victorian Autobiography. The Tradition of SelfInterpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Peterson, Linda H. 1999. Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography. The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Rivers, Isabel. 1978. ‘“Strangers and Pilgrims”: Sources and Patterns of Methodist Narrative’. In, Augustan Worlds, 189–203. Edited by J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. R. Watson. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Rose, Jonathan. 2001. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shaw, Benjamin. 1991. The Family Records of Benjamin Shaw Mechanic of Dent, Dolphinholme and Preston, 1772–1841. Edited by Alan G. Crosby. Stroud: The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. Smith, Charles Manby. [1853]. The Working Man’s Way in the World: being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer. London: William and Frederick G. Cash. Steedman, Carolyn. 1992. Past Tenses. Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History. London: Rivers Oram. Swindells, Julia. 1985. Victorian Writing and Working Women. The Other Side of Silence. Cambridge: Polity. Thomson, Alistair. 2012. ‘Life Stories and Historical Analysis’. In Research Methods for History, 101–17. Edited by Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tryon, Thomas. 1705. Some Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Tho. Tryon, Late of London, Merchant: Written by Himself. London: T. Sowle. Vincent, David, ed. and intro. 1977. Testaments of Radicalism. Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790–1885. London: Europa. Vincent, David. 1979. Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of Nineteenth Century Working Class Autobiography. London: Europa. Vincent, David. 1989. Literacy and Popular Culture. England 1750–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

179 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

chapter 13

Romantic life-writing Duncan Wu

Autobiography came of age in the Romantic period. The term was coined at that time: according to the Oxford English Dictionary it was used by William Taylor in 1797 as an alternative to ‘self-biography’, ‘confessions’, and ‘memoirs’. This essay explains why the form came to prominence, examines the manner in which some of the finest writers of the time approached it, and offers some notion of how Romantic autobiography differed from that in subsequent decades. I have been guided by Adam Smyth’s suggestion that an influential conception of autobiography would be ‘a narrative that is retrospective, chronological, whose central theme is the development of the author’s personality’ (Smyth 2010, 13). The emergence of autobiography into the literary mainstream may be explained by a single name: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Sometimes described as the first Romantic, he completed his Confessions in December 1770, the year of Wordsworth’s birth.1 It confronted readers with such topics as an account of his mistress, Madame de Warens (O’Rourke 2006, ch. 1). In Britain it was improper to speak of such matters in print, whatever was thought acceptable in France. Almost as bad was to suppose such things would interest readers, as contemporaries did not hesitate to point out: This was the man whose vanity and presumption so imposed on his understanding, as to lead him to imagine that mankind would lend a ready ear to the most trifling, to the most dull, to the most impertinent, to the most disgusting relations, because they concerned rousseau! (Monthly Review 1783, 150).

These arguments were crucial to the reputation not only of Rousseau but of autobiographical discourse of any kind, and for decades the form was thought to harbour indecency and immorality, the resort of shameless egotists (Treadwell 2005, chs. 1 and 2). Rousseau’s Confessions elicited critical disapproval, but proved popular with readers, sparking a bidding war even before its first appearance on the Continent, and selling in large 179

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

180

180 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

duncan wu

quantities after British publication in 1783. The critical response continued for years, often in the form of ad hominem attacks on Rousseau himself, and for that reason the reputation of the Confessions ‘overshadowed’ the period (Ibid., 41), raising anxieties about the propriety of autobiography as a form. Rousseau’s faith in the emotions allied him with the cult of sensibilité (Damrosch 2007, 288), which licensed discussion of subjects formerly considered off limits. Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, first published in 1784, spoke unashamedly of what we would call depression, some of her poems being variations on the state of mind described by Goethe in his Sorrows of Young Werther, which made suicide fashionable: ‘Towards the deep gulph that opens on my sight / I hurry forward, passion’s helpless slave!’ (Smith 1786, 22).2 Decades before, such matters were seldom mentioned, and then in terms that indicated scant insight into human psychology; by the 1780s it was de rigueur. That explains the popularity of William Cowper’s The Task (1784), a blank verse meditation by a man who had suffered mental breakdown. I am conscious, and confess Fearless, a soul that does not always think. Me oft has fancy ludicrous and wild Sooth’d with a waking dream of houses, tow’rs, Trees, churches, and strange visages express’d In the red cinders, while with poring eye (Cowper 1980–1995, ii 194) I gazed, myself creating what I saw.

It is hard to imagine anyone writing like this before Cowper, harder still to imagine anyone admitting they did ‘not always think’. To say that, you had not only to be able to hold yourself up to ridicule, but to be in possession of some fairly sophisticated psychological insights. What Cowper understood was that ‘not thinking’ – that is, an absence of conscious intellectual activity – permitted the mind access to other kinds of process that were no less important. In this case he witnesses ‘strange visages . . . In the red cinders’. Such honest self-analysis is the stuff of autobiography, and there is no doubt Coleridge and Wordsworth learnt from it. (There is no space in which to discuss it here, but the most obvious place in which Coleridge reveals how much he had learnt from Cowper is ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798)). The Prelude might be held to comprise a powerful argument that autobiography came to maturity at the same moment as English Romantic poetry; it is ‘a record of Wordsworth’s life up to the point at

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

181 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

Romantic life-writing

181

which he conceived The Recluse in 1798’ (Gill 1991, 11). (The Recluse was an epic poem that was to expound a philosophy by which love of nature would lead to love of mankind; despite a number of false starts Wordsworth never completed it (Wordsworth 1982, 340–77)). Yet his principal aim was not to write a memoir. Although The Prelude takes its structure from its author’s life, much of it is commentary on the historical present. For instance, having described the occasion in 1790 when he and his College friend Robert Jones crossed the Alps without realising it, Wordsworth exclaims: Imagination! lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my Song Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power, In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through, And now recovering to my Soul I say (Wordsworth 1991, vi.525–32) I recognize thy glory. . .

Wordsworth’s celebration of his mental powers is a principal element of his poem, and reflects Cowper’s influence. But none of that is necessary to autobiography, and when judged as such The Prelude is found wanting: many events, incidents, and people find no place there, and it has scant regard for chronology. For the correct facts in the correct order, readers are better advised to read a biography. The ebb and flow of The Prelude’s narrative is dictated by the desire to attest to its author’s imaginative power. It is because Wordsworth presents himself as prototype of the enlightened man of an unrealised millenarian future that he finds it necessary to say how he became the way he is so that others might follow. If this is autobiography, it is of a singularly wayward and distracted kind. Wordsworth is more directly autobiographical in his correspondence, prose recollections (most notably in his ‘Autobiographical Memoranda’), and poems less preoccupied with The Recluse – ‘Resolution and Independence’ and ‘Composed by the Sea-Side, near Calais’, for instance. Yet they were the kind of shorter poem Coleridge dismissed as unequal to Wordsworth’s genius: see, inter alia, Coleridge’s letter of 14 October 1803 to Thomas Poole (Coleridge 1956–1971, ii.1012–3). Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) could not have been written without knowledge of The Prelude, but then its author was one of the few acquainted with Wordsworth’s poem, and by the time he mooted his own ‘Life’ in September 1803, he knew its earliest drafts.3 Work began on Biographia soon after publication of Wordsworth’s collected Poems in late April 1815, several years after their friendship had foundered. By then,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

182

182 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

duncan wu

Wordsworth’s poetry had taken a critical battering (most obviously from Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review), and Coleridge understood how it might be defended. But he wanted also to settle some scores. For one thing, he wanted to claim credit for Wordsworth’s originality, leading him to fabricate (in chapter 14) an account of how Lyrical Ballads came into being – which some scholars continue to accept as true (Wu 2015, ch. 9). In chapter 17 he took pleasure in criticising some of the ideas in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads without admitting he had played a part in formulating them. Even the definitions of primary and secondary imaginations in chapter 13 of Biographia are designed to expose the inadequacy of the account of imagination and fancy given by Wordsworth (Jackson 1997). So is Coleridge’s book autobiography? Undoubtedly, even if its author’s resistance to ‘any formal attempt at sustained self-representation’ challenges our notions of what conventional autobiographies should be (Mudge 1986, 33). Byron was more popular in his lifetime, and sold many more books, than Coleridge and Wordsworth put together. He wrote his autobiography ‘with the fullest intention to be “faithful and true” in my narrative, but not impartial – no, by the Lord! I can’t pretend to be that, while I feel’ (Marchand 1973–1993, vii.125). If that is to be credited, his memoirs were probably as concerned with self-justification as those of Rousseau. Had they been published, they might have constituted the best argument for the emergence of autobiography into the mainstream of literary fashion during the Romantic period, except that they were entrusted to Byron’s friend Thomas Moore, who consigned them to the flames of John Murray’s drawing-room hearth. As Moore must have suspected, the effect was to stimulate an already intense appetite for biographies and reminiscences of the noble Lord, regardless of quality – and by good fortune Moore was able to furnish one which Murray published in 1830.4 Readers had for years been desperate for tittle-tattle about Byron, in part because they were teased by the personae through which he projected himself into the culture. It was a deliberate strategy. In 1821 Byron noted the manner by which he was compared ‘to Childe Harold – to Lara – to the Count in Beppo’ (Marchand 1973–1993, ix.11), as well as to such historical figures as Napoleon (Bainbridge 1995, ch. 4). The success of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) was due to the belief it was ‘thinly disguised autobiography’ (Douglass 2004, 8), and, as one critic has noted, Canto III ‘renews the figure of the author in the form of Byron reflecting on his own figure’ (Treadwell 2005, 191), making it more autobiographical still. It is in those

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

183 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

Romantic life-writing

183

works which seem most revealing that Byron is most elusive, as contemporary reviewers sensed: ‘Childe Harold may not be, nor do we believe he is, Lord Byron’s very self, but he is Lord Byron’s picture, sketched by Lord Byron himself, arrayed in a fancy dress’ (Quarterly Review 1818, 217). Autobiographical strategies are everywhere to be found in Byron’s poetry; he is not Manfred, Cain, or Sardanapalus, but our impulse as readers is to infer his ventriloquising presence in their shadow. Part of the problem with ‘self-biography’ was that throughout the period 1780 to 1830 it remained the soiled, disreputable thing Rousseau had left it (Duffy 1979, 32–5), that stigma being renewed by such works as Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that ‘decent drapery,’ which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them: accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers: and for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and selfrespecting part of society, we must look to French literature, or to that part of the German, which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French. (De Quincey 2013, 3)

This admission of the problematic status of confession, placed at the beginning of De Quincey’s Confessions, betokens an awareness on its author’s part that he was taking an artistic risk. It did little to forestall disapproval. ‘Better, a thousand times better, die than have anything to do with such a Devil’s own drug!’, said Thomas Carlyle, while the Eclectic Review described the Confessions as an ‘apology for a secret, selfish suicidal debauchery’ (Morrison 2009, 210–1). Critics could sneer, but booksellers knew better: confessions made money. Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs of Herself and Others (1825), written with the intention of extorting money from former clients, sold 7,000 copies at its first appearance and many more after it was pirated (Wilson 2003). Two thousand copies of De Quincey’s Confessions circulated in periodical form, and between 1822 and 1826 it went through four successive editions as a book, each time selling 1,000 copies (St Clair 2004, 596–7, 657). The expectation of scurrilousness explains the marketability of many autobiographical works, even those presented as fiction. Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) was thought to be a veiled account of its author’s pursuit of William Frend, and contained rewritten versions of correspondence between her, Frend, and William Godwin, which made it

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

184

184 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

duncan wu

a succès de scandale.5 Lady Caroline Lamb’s anonymously published Glenarvon (1816) was known to recount her affair with Byron, and the first edition of 1,500 copies quickly sold out (Douglass 2006, 151).6 Similarly, those who purchased Charles Lloyd’s epistolary novel Edmund Oliver (1798) believed it contained lurid accounts of Coleridge’s laudanum binges. Some biographies contained the same (unspoken) promise. Godwin’s partly autobiographical Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798) described its subject’s unhappy affair with Gilbert Imlay, a married man, and provided ammunition for attacks in subsequent years (Clemit and Walker 2001, 32–6). No wonder, then, that in 1805 Wordsworth preferred to keep the completed manuscript of the thirteen Book Prelude to himself, its autobiographical content rendering it improper. Other autobiographers who wrote with no intention to publish in their own lifetimes included Mary Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson, Benjamin Franklin, Anne Richman Lefroy, Elizabeth Lynn Linton, and Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. When authors did recount their life stories for immediate publication, the result was almost always less revealing than what we find in their private papers. The exception is William Hazlitt. Who else would have compiled a detailed account of a love affair that exhibited its author in the worst conceivable light – and publish it while the affair was still dragging on? But then Hazlitt was an admirer of Rousseau’s Confessions, having read it in French (Paulin 1998, 217–8, 261–2), and seems to have written about himself from an early age, for his letters to his father from the Unitarian New College in Hackney, dating from the 1790s, are among the most evocative he ever wrote. In 1821 he published ‘The Fight’, a remarkable description of a sporting event held outside London, narrating the trials and tribulations of someone travelling out of the capital to reach the venue near Hungerford. The modern taxonomy might be ‘documentary’, as its ambition was to evoke the vantage point of a boxing enthusiast, but it is as autobiographical in style as it is in substance. Hazlitt’s gifts were ideally suited to the new genre: he missed nothing, had an incredibly retentive memory, and could articulate his perceptions with a crispness and accuracy few could rival. In early 1817 he published a brief memoir of his earliest meeting with Coleridge. Returning to it in 1823, he expanded it into one of his finest essays, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (Hazlitt 1998, iv.120–1). Hazlitt was intent on explaining what was special about the writers he had known in youth, why their vision had been important to him, and (most of all) how those hopes had failed. Though ‘My First Acquaintance’ appeared only as one item in a periodical, The

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

185 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

Romantic life-writing

185

Liberal, it attracted critical attention because the journal’s editor was Leigh Hunt and a fellow contributor was Byron. Hazlitt’s essay was condemned as ‘disgusting’, a ‘prosaic piece of egotism’, and a ‘display of personal conceit and vanity’ (Ibid., ix.232). Perhaps such hostility was inevitable: concentration on the author’s early youth was too redolent of Rousseau to escape criticism. By the time ‘My First Acquaintance’ appeared in print, Hazlitt was completing a book that would test the genre to its limits – Liber Amoris (1823). It confronts the reader with evidence concerning its author’s infatuation with his landlady’s nineteen-year-old daughter, in the form of conversations and intimate correspondence. Those materials are presented in their starkest form, apparently unmediated by editor or commentator – the raw materials of autobiography. Even so, Hazlitt was responsible for transcriptions of the conversations, having focused and shaped them. He also revised the letters, and generated some from scratch.7 Richardson had attempted something like this in Clarissa, but that was a fiction, whereas the relationship described by Liber Amoris had actually taken place – and, at the time of writing, was continuing.8 No one before Hazlitt had subjected a real-life relationship to such forensic treatment, and, so far as I am aware, no one has tried it since. Not only is Liber Amoris autobiography, it is autobiography taken to its extreme. Together with ‘My First Acquaintance’, ‘The Fight’, and The Spirit of the Age, it can be seen as part of a larger narrative which Hazlitt would continue almost up to the moment of his death, with such late writings as ‘On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth’, ‘The Free Admission’, ‘The Sick Chamber’, ‘The Letter-Bell’, and ‘London Solitude’ (Hazlitt, 1998, vol. 9; Hazlitt 2007, ii.353–5). It draws on two aesthetic principles. The first is that art, being entwined with life, should contain what Hazlitt called gusto, ‘power or passion defining any object’ (Ibid., ii.79). And what could better embody such intensity than the words used by those involved, unmediated by the intrusive presence of a commentator? The second principle is disinterestedness – the ability to transcend one’s own vanity so as to portray things as they are, without the filter of self-admiration. That explains why Hazlitt does not emerge from the book in a favourable light: he did not hesitate to render his words with scrupulous accuracy, regardless of the consequences for himself. For these reasons, Liber Amoris is more demanding of readers than any other autobiographical work of the period, and was controversial from the moment of its publication. To the horror of critics, Hazlitt seemed to be saying one’s most intimate affairs were a fit subject for publication, and so

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

186

186 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

duncan wu

appeared to pre-empt the debate about what was morally acceptable (North 2009, 64–8). The reaction was predictable: J. G. Lockhart was representative in declaring: ‘we call down upon his head, and upon the heads of those accomplished reformers in ethics, religion, and politics, who are now enjoying his chef-d’oeuvre, the scorn and loathing of every thing that bears the name of man’ (Lockhart 1823, 646). Lockhart is echoed by those who argue for Hazlitt’s elimination from the curriculum today (Wu 2000; McCutcheon 2004). Throughout the period, critics cautioned readers against autobiography. In an article surveying ten working-class life-writers, Lockhart condemned ‘the mania for this garbage of Confessions, and Recollections, and Reminiscences, and Aniliana’ (Quarterly Review 1827, 164; Treadwell 2005, 76–8). Such comments implied a more general disapproval. A conduct-book of 1827 warned readers that ‘the biography of women who have been conspicuous, and too often notorious, is ill adapted to your studies’ (Dow 2012, 96). There were two obvious strategies that enabled authors to circumvent charges of immorality: one was to present their memoirs as a travel book (Jump 1999, xv); another was to frame it as a moral or religious treatise, as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna did in her Personal Recollections (1841), which begins with condemnation of those who pander to ‘the prying spirit that some are but too ready to cater to, for filthy lucre’s sake’ (Tonna 1841, 3). Working-class autobiographers often framed their life-stories as a journey towards religious salvation, perhaps because of the influence of Bunyan and Wesley, as with James M’Kaen’s Life (1797) and Mary Saxby’s Memoirs of a Female Vagrant (1806) (reissued by the Religious Tract Society in 1820). (See David Vincent’s chapter in the present collection for the latest on working class autobiography). Women writers were particularly vulnerable to criticism. Fanny Burney was among the most successful novelists of the period, but her biography of her father, Charles Burney, attracted negative comment from John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly (Delafield 2012, 29). In that light, it was an act of open defiance to prepare her own letters and journals for publication. She would not live to complete the task, which was completed by her niece, who saw what was, in effect, Burney’s autobiography into print in a seven-volume edition between 1842 and 1846. By plundering her own life-writing, Burney acknowledged a paradox: writers are at their most autobiographical when not trying to be so. ‘I think even to madness & torture of the past’, Mary Shelley told a correspondent in 1823 (Bennett 1992, 298); she would have refrained from saying so in a more formal account of her life.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

187 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

Romantic life-writing

187

Burney’s letters and journals entered a culture intolerant of emotional intensity. The Victorian response to Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne is symptomatic: Matthew Arnold condemned their author for ‘the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity of the merely sensuous man, of the man who is passion’s slave’; Gerard Manley Hopkins complained ‘his work is at every turn abandoning itself to an unmanly and enervating luxury’ (Najarian 2002, 96–9, 100–2; Schoemaker 1999); while Algernon Charles Swinburne declared: ‘if they [the letters] ought never to have been published, it is no less certain that they ought never to have been written; that a manful kind of man or even a manly sort of boy, in his love-making or in his suffering, will not howl and snivel after such a lamentable fashion’ (Keats 1958, i.4). Their reaction indicates the degree to which intimate correspondence had become unacceptable when formally published. That shift in taste prompted Victorian autobiographers to concentrate more on external circumstance than on interior response. Autobiography was felt to be at its most proper when aping the Bildungsroman,9 recounting a story of honourable struggle, an apology of which the virtues were modesty, discretion, and reticence (Nadel 1982). Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Anthony Trollope each kept his autobiography in manuscript, leaving publication to heirs, seeing it as their opportunity to shape the manner by which an unknown future would perceive them. Other than settling old scores (John Stuart Mill’s unsympathetic portrait of his father and Spencer’s condemnation of his uncle, for instance), they tended to withdraw from the realm of the personal, producing works attesting to their respectability, aspiring on occasion to the frigid austerity of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Mill’s account of his mental crisis might be held to exempt his posthumously-published Autobiography from such strictures, but modern commentators concur in regarding it as ‘an obstacle’ to further investigation, ‘misleading’ to those who wish fully to understand its subject (Capaldi 2004, xii–xiii).10 Modern scholars of Trollope find his Autobiography unhelpful when discussing ‘his marriage, his feelings for Kate Field, his relationship with his sons, let alone the secrets of his inner life’ (Trollope 2014, p.x). Smyth argues that ‘generic unfixity and experimentation was a central trait of early modern life-writing’ (Smyth 2010, 14), and something similar could be argued of the Romantics, who were more adventurous than the Victorians when deciding what to say, and how to say it. The newness of the form made them want to challenge its conventions and test its boundaries; for a brief while, at the start of the nineteenth century, autobiography was, as Stephen Behrendt has observed, ‘a form (or vehicle) of discourse in

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

188

188 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

duncan wu

search of a genre: it had not yet acquired the author-reader protocols or the literary conventions that define and distinguish other, more established genres’ (Behrendt 2009, 147). For that reason, it was uniquely susceptible to creative innovation: it provided the structure for Wordsworth’s greatest long poem and Coleridge’s most famous prose work; Byron used it to project aspects of his constructed self into the public imagination, while Hazlitt turned his unflinching gaze on a scandalous episode in his private life. There was more conscious manipulation of the genre during this period than in the remainder of the nineteenth century, when authors would compose autobiographies that seem pious and disembowelled by comparison. Writers of the Romantic period were more likely to interrogate generic norms or deal in intimate self-revelation, such as Charles Lamb in his essays of Elia11 or Fanny Burney in her letter book of 1811 (which describes the after-effects of her mastectomy (Sabor 2012)). Autobiography was for them a means of exploring aspects of the self to which their Victorian counterparts did not readily invite visitors, preoccupied as they were with the judgement of posterity.

Notes 1. Rousseau was deeply indebted to Augustine’s Confessions; for discussion, see Hartle 1983; Riley 1986; Hartle 1999. 2. Some reviewers were alarmed by Smith’s poems, and identified their melancholy with her; see Wu 1997, 68. 3. According to Coleridge’s notebook, Wordsworth recited his ‘divine Selfbiography’ on 14 January 1804. 4. The biographers who followed are listed by Douglass 2004, 16ff. 5. Recent critics such as Rajan 1998 have questioned its autobiographical intent. 6. Most readers appear to have been outraged by it; see Douglass 2004, 185. 7. So far as I am aware, no editor has yet provided a detailed collation of Hazlitt’s surviving correspondence and the texts published in Liber Amoris; Charles E. Robinson is currently undertaking that task in preparation for his forthcoming edition of Hazlitt’s letters. 8. It should be pointed out that Liber Amoris resolves the story of the affair so as to provide the book with a conclusion; see Jones 1991, 348. 9. For a consideration of Harriet Martineau’s autobiography as Bildungsroman, see Linda Peterson’s introduction to her Broadview edition of the work. 10. Capaldi 2004 is surely right to suggest that the Autobiography is, to a large extent, shaped by Mill’s position as ‘the conscience of Victorian England’ (31). One of the most persuasive defenders of Mill’s volume is Levi 1991. 11. There is a strong case also for regarding Lamb’s ‘Letter to Robert Southey, Esq.’ as autobiography; see Ruddick 1991.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

189 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

Romantic life-writing

189

Bibliography Anonymous. Monthly Review. 1783. 69. Anonymous. Quarterly Review. 1818. 19. Anonymous. Quarterly Review. 1827. 35 Bainbridge, Simon. 1995. Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Behrendt, Stephen C. 2009. ‘“I am not what I am”: Staged Presence in Romantic Autobiography’. In Romantic Autobiography in England, 145–60. Edited by Eugene Stelzig. Farnham: Ashgate. Bennett, Betty T. 1992 ‘Finding Mary Shelley in her Letters’. In Romantic Revisions, 291–306. Edited by Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Capaldi, Nicholas. 2004. John Stuart Mill: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clemit, Pamela and Gina Luria Walker. 2001. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by William Godwin. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956–1971. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cowper, William. 1980–1995. The Poems of William Cowper. Edited by John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Damrosch, Leo. 2007. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. De Quincey, Thomas. 2013. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Edited by Robert Morrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delafield, Catherine. 2012. ‘Barrett Writing Burney: A Life among the Footnotes’. In Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship, 26–38. Edited by Daniel Cook and Amy Culley. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Douglass, Paul. 2004. ‘Byron and his Biographers’. In The Cambridge Companion to Byron, 7–26. Edited by Drummond Bone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglass, Paul. 2004. Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Douglass, Paul. 2006. The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Dow, Gillian. 2012. ‘A Model for the British Fair? French Women’s Life Writing in Britain, 1680–1830’. In Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship 86–102. Edited by Daniel Cook and Amy Culley. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

190

190 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

duncan wu

Duffy, Edward. 1979. Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gill, Stephen. 1991. Wordsworth: The Prelude. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hartle, Ann. 1983. The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions: A Reply to St Augustine. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Hartle, Ann. 1999. ‘Augustine and Rousseau: Narrative and Self-Knowledge in the Two Confessions’. In The Augustinian Tradition, ch. 15. Edited by Gareth B. Matthews. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jackson, H. J. 1997. ‘Coleridge’s Biographia: When is an Autobiography not an Autobiography?’. Biography 20: 54–71. Hazlitt, William, 1998. Selected Writings of William Hazlitt. Edited by Duncan Wu. 9 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto. Hazlitt, William. 2007. New Writings of William Hazlitt. Edited by Duncan Wu. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, Stanley. 1991. Hazlitt: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jump, Harriet Devine. 1999. Women’s Writing of the Victorian Period, 1837–1901: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Keats, John 1958. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821. Edited by Hyder E. Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levi, A. W. 1991. ‘The Writing of Mill’s Autobiography’. In John Stuart Mill: Critical Assessments, 165–81. Edited by John Cunningham Wood. London: Routledge. Lockhart, J. G. 1823. ‘Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 13: 640–6. Marchand, Leslie A., ed. 1973–1793. Byron’s Letters and Journals. 13 vols. London: John Murray. McCutcheon, Mark. 2004. ‘Liber Amoris and the Lineaments of Hazlitt’s Desire’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46: 432–51. Morrison, Robert. 2009. The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Mudge, Bradford K. 1986. ‘The Politics of Autobiography in the Biographia Literaria’. South Central Review 3: 27–45. Nadel, Ira Bruce. 1982. ‘Apologise or Confess! The Dilemma of Victorian Autobiography’. Biography 5: 189–204. Najarian, James. 2002. Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. North, Julian. 2009. The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Rourke, James L. 2006. Sex, Lies and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession. Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6832608/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C13.3D

191 [179–191] 20.10.2015 5:58PM

Romantic life-writing

191

Paulin, Tom. 1998. The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style. London: Faber and Faber. Rajan, Tilottama. 1998. ‘Autonarration and genotext in Mary Hays’ “Memoirs of Emma Courtney”’. Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, ch. 9. Edited by Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riley, Patrick. 1986. The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ruddick, William. 1991. ‘Coleridge against Romantic Autobiography: Charles Lamb’s “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey”’. In Coleridge and the Armoury of the Human Mind, 115–27. Edited by Peter J. Kitson and Thomas N. Corns. London: Frank Cass. Sabor, Peter. 2012. ‘Journal Letters and Scriblerations: Frances Burney’s Life Writing in Paris’. In Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship, 71–85. Edited by Daniel Cook and Amy Culley. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schoemaker, Jacqueline. 1999. ‘Female Empathy to Manliness: Keats in 1819’. In Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods, 79–94. Edited by C. C. Barfoot. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Smith, Charlotte. 1786. Elegiac Sonnets. London: Dodsley. Smyth, Adam. 2010. Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. St Clair, William. 2004. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. 1841. Personal Recollections. London: Seeley and Burnside. Treadwell, James. 2005. Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–1834. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trollope, Anthony. 2014. Doctor Thorne. Edited by Simon Dentith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Frances. 2003. The Courtesan’s Revenge. London: Faber and Faber. Wordsworth, Jonathan. 1982. William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wordsworth, William. 1991. The Thirteen-Book Prelude. Edited by Mark L. Reed. 2 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wu, Duncan, ed. 1997. Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell. Wu, Duncan. 2000. ‘Hazlitt’s “Sexual Harassment”’. Essays in Criticism 50: 199–214. Wu, Duncan. 2015. 30 Great Myths about the Romantics. Wiley: Oxford.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

192 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

chapter 14

Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography Carlyle, Newman, Mill Richard Hughes Gibson and Timothy Larsen

Thus have we [. . .] followed Teufelsdröckh, through the various successive states and stages of Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, and almost Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himself seems to consider as Conversion. ‘Blame not the word,’ says he; ‘rejoice rather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in our modern Era’. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

The nineteenth century is often touted as a time of religious doubts and defections: the sea of faith was judged by some English observers to have receded, while orthodoxy proved too constraining for others, and a troupe of Oxford dons and their pupils made the (once unthinkable) voyage over to Rome. But, as religious historians have reminded us, this was also the age of evangelicalism’s ‘dominance’, perhaps even ‘the Evangelical century’.1 Evangelicalism went mainstream in the nineteenth century, shaping not only its devout adherents but English culture broadly. As historians such as Boyd Hilton and David Bebbington have shown, evangelicalism had a pronounced influence on nineteenth-century moral, social, political, and even economic thought.2 Its effects on the literary scene, meanwhile, have been at times underappreciated or misunderstood – in no small part because no practising evangelical now ranks among the period’s first-rate novelists or poets. As George Landow has observed, however, evangelicalism nonetheless has a ‘special importance’ to Victorian literature because so many of its major figures – such as Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, and both Brownings – experienced an evangelical phase and ‘retained many attitudes and ideas, including notions of biblical symbolism, even after they abandoned their childhood and young adult beliefs either for another form of Christianity or unbelief’ (Landow 2014). This chapter examines evangelicalism’s impact on the genre of autobiography in the nineteenth century by considering the cases of three eminent 192

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

193 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography

193

Victorians – Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, and John Stuart Mill. We focus on two issues: first, the authors’ responses to evangelical models of life-writing; and, second, their shared investment in sincere speech and action. On the first point, we pay close attention to the evangelical conversion narrative whose origins lie with the puritans of the seventeenth century and that flourished in the evangelical revival of the eighteenth. Regarding sincerity, we must recall that evangelicalism assigned paramount importance to genuine, heartfelt belief. As a result, mere formal adherence, let alone dissembling, came to seem not only problematic but morally repugnant as they had not seemed previously. All three of our authors bear witness to this evangelical prerogative, albeit in distinct ways. It is important to stress at the outset that our ambition is not to reveal Carlyle, Newman, and Mill as closeted or crypto-evangelicals. These writers do not simply or easily participate in the Protestant tradition of spiritual autobiography: they draw on its resources self-consciously, show the genre’s flexibility and variety, and highlight areas where their experiences require alternative descriptive categories. These texts, then, may borrow, but they also negotiate and, in the process, transform the genre.

Thomas Carlyle Though often classified as an autobiography, our earliest text, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (initially published serially in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833–1834), is not strictly, or even straightforwardly, one. A generic hybrid, Sartor mixes elements of fiction, essay, philosophical commentary, and life-writing. The book presents itself to the reader as a rather ungainly intellectual biography, relating the efforts of an English editor to weave the ‘life and opinions’ of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, German philosopher of clothes, out of the ‘miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips‘, on which Teufelsdröckh has scribbled thoughts and remembrances (Carlyle 2000, 59). In assessing Sartor’s significance for life-writing, critics have often focused on how Carlyle blurs the line between fiction and autobiography. Sartor’s paradoxical importance to the history of autobiography, especially spiritual autobiography, can also be appreciated by reflecting on the two issues named above, conversion and sincerity. Carlyle famously claimed that ‘nothing’ in Sartor was ‘fact’ – the book being ‘symbolical myth all’ – though he admitted in the same statement that there was an exception: ‘that of the incident in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer, which occurred quite literally to myself at Lieth [sic] Walk’ (Carlyle 1974, 49). This takes us back to the early 1820s, when Carlyle

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

194

194 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

richard hughes gibson and timothy larsen

was sputtering psychologically and professionally. His letters vividly recount his despondency and spiritual unrest. In the summer of 1821, for example, he lamented to a friend that he had passed ‘long, solitary, sleepless nights . . . – with no employment but to count the pulses of my own sick heart – till the gloom of external things seemed to extend itself to the very centre of the mind’ (Carlyle 2014a). Momentary but profound relief came in 1822 when, halfway down Edinburgh’s Leith Walk, he experienced a ‘mystical communion’ in which the ultimate beneficence of the universe was revealed (Tennyson 1966, 40). While the Edinburgh epiphany is often treated as Carlyle’s ‘conversion’, the author dated the decisive change to his retreat at Hoddam Hill, the family’s farm, in 1826. Only now, the author later argued, did ‘a grand and ever-joyful victory [get] itself achieved at last!’ (Carlyle 2014b). His description of this ‘victory’ is permeated with the discourse of his religious education in a Scotch puritan home: The final chaining down, and trampling home, ‘for good‘, home into their caves forever, of all my Spiritual Dragons, whh [sic] had wrought me such woe and, for a decade past, had made my life black and bitter. [. . .] I found it to be, essentially, what Methodist people call their ‘Conversion‘, the deliverance of their soul from the Devil and the Pit; precisely enough that, in my new form. (Carlyle 2014b)

Carlyle’s contemporaries by turns criticised and celebrated him for preaching ‘Christianity without dogma’ (or ‘Calvinism without Christianity’). Passages like this one shows why. Carlyle grants that the Methodists are on to something, and he makes rigorous use of their word-stock to describe his experience. The ‘Devil and the Pit’, however, have become simply metaphors, and his soul’s ‘deliverance’ is not from sin but despair. His invocation of Methodist speak is thus marked by continuity – in terms of a tradition of religious experience – and rupture – in terms of its theological content (or lack thereof). More than simply a ‘translation’, Carlyle attempts to expand the experiential domain where the discourse of conversion can be applied. Sartor, in turn, is supersaturated with the traditional language of conversion but its usage has been similarly altered. Here, too, conversion is not a single, isolated event; it plays out across three chapters – the aforementioned ‘The Everlasting No’, ‘The Centre of Indifference’, and ‘The Everlasting Yea’. At the beginning of the first of these, Teufelsdröckh wanders around Europe in ‘whining sorrow’ and self-pity, his despair recalling Carlyle’s in the twenties, as the author himself suggests. On the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

195 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography

195

Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer (in effect, ‘Doubting Thomas of Hell Street’), though, the philosopher withstands a ‘Satanic’ assault, the Devil in the classic formulation now swapped for the ‘diabolical’ temptation to believe that the modern (mechanised) world has been forsaken by a higher, benevolent spirit. Teufelsdröckh characterises this moment as his ‘Spiritual New-birth’, a tip of the hat on Carlyle’s part to the evangelical preoccupation with ‘regeneration’ or being ‘born again’ (Carlyle 2000, 126). In ‘The Centre of Indifference’, the ‘Legion’ of ‘Satanic’ doubts and temptations is at last ‘cast out’ of Teufelsdröckh (or, as he says, echoing St. Paul, the ‘old Adam, lodged in us at birth’, is gradually ‘dispossessed’) (Ibid., 135, 137). He has yet to affirm a new set of positive beliefs, though; that comes in the next chapter, when he affirms the ‘Everlasting Yea’. He now recognises that the universe is animated by a benign power and that the path of blessedness lies in self-renunciation and dedication to one’s work, which assumes a sacred character. In the ‘morphology of conversion’, to use the historian Edmund Morgan’s phrase, developed by the puritans in the seventeenth century and adapted by the Methodists in the eighteenth, the soul was understood to wrestle through phases of hardship, insight, testing, doubt, and even despair on its passage along the via salutis. The ‘successive states and stages’ – ‘Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, and almost Reprobation’ – that Teufelsdröckh passes through recall this morphology but also measure his distance from the old pattern (Ibid., 147). Noticeably diminished here is the role of personal sin, which must be repented of, and a personal God, to whom the repentance is made. Teufelsdröckh’s is, as Barry Qualls notes, a worldly conversion. In traditional puritan accounts, such as Pilgrim’s Progress (a strong influence on Sartor), the convert breaks away from the self as well as the world; in Sartor, by contrast, renouncing the self allows one to become a fit inhabitant of this world – not, as in Bunyan, a suitable candidate for the next (Qualls 1982, 26–27). Having shorn conversion of its transcendent trappings, Teufelsdröckh can now defend it to religion’s cultured despisers: ‘Blame not the word . . . rejoice rather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in our modern Era’ (Carlyle 2000, 147). In their practices of conversion, ‘your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists’ grasped spiritual truths closed to the ancients and desperately needed by moderns (Ibid., 147). Here, once again, Carlyle eagerly acknowledges his discursive debts to evangelicalism while also jettisoning the limits Methodists and Pietists had placed on the application of that discourse. Conversion is now a ‘potentially universal process’ (Barbour 1994, 40).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

196

196 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

richard hughes gibson and timothy larsen

Carlyle’s handling of our second issue, sincerity, is similarly marked by multiple, even competing, impulses. Carlyle repeatedly asserted the book’s sincerity, including the claim he sent to Fraser’s with the manuscript, that the ‘Creed promulgated’ in the book ‘is mine, and firmly believed’ (Carlyle 2000, lxxi). In a famous 1834 letter to Emerson, moreover, he urged his ‘Transoceanic brothers’ to ‘read this earnestly, for it was earnestly meant and written, and contains no voluntary falsehood of mine’ (Carlyle 2014c). For this commitment to sincerity, Carlyle became known, in Walter Bagehot’s memorable phrase, as an evangelist for the ‘gospel of earnestness’, a disposition that Bagehot attributed to Carlyle’s heterodox puritanism (Bagehot 1910, 10). These might seem like strange statements to make about a book as seemingly haphazard, often ironic, and so obviously full of falsehood as Sartor. There are two issues that we should address here. The first concerns Carlyle’s style. In the letter to Emerson, he argues that the book’s style represents a response, perhaps a failed one, to their ‘mad times’. Only the eccentric voice could ‘claim assent and assume the burden of meaning’ in modernity (Manning 2009, 126). In Carlyle’s view, the traditional ‘Pulpits for addressing mankind’ – ’Poetics and Rhetorics and Sermonics’ – had become ‘as good as broken and abolished: alas, yes! if you have any earnest meaning which demands to be not only listened to but believed and done, you cannot (at least I cannot) utter it there’ (Carlyle 2014c). Sartor’s idiosyncrasy, then, represents a strategy for reaching those who are no longer attentive to traditional homiletics. This text bears witness to the author’s search for (slanted) modern forms in which to convey an in many ways old-fashioned religious sensibility. The second issue concerns the relation between the text and the author’s life. It is useful to remember that Pilgrim’s Progress has long been viewed as a thinly-veiled fictionalisation of Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography. Pilgrim’s Progress, furthermore, came to be seen as the ‘prospectus for anyman’s autobiography’ despite its fictional status, and its impact on spiritual autobiographers outpaced Bunyan’s own classic contribution to the genre, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) (Peterson 1986). Carlyle’s characterisation of Sartor as ‘symbolical myth all’ speaks to his desire to provide such a pattern, one potentially applicable to ‘anyman’s autobiography’. Carlyle sought to renovate the conversion narrative – a tradition in which, as we have seen, he located his own experience – so that it would remain vital. Sartor, then, is not only conventional in the sense of deriving from a tradition; it also aspires to be conventional, in the sense of offering a pattern in which other modern lives might participate. Carlyle

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

197 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography

197

was, in fact, enormously successful in this endeavour, remembered by countless readers as the catalyst to their conversion experiences (Jackson 2002, 87). In 1869, the American George Ripley, for example, recalled that Sartor’s publication had caused a tremendous stir in Boston because it ‘reproduced the experience of a large class of readers’ (quoted in Ibid., 87).

John Henry Newman John Henry Newman’s and John Stuart Mill’s writings show us how Carlyle’s work influenced subsequent autobiographers: both trace the cultural pattern Carlyle had popularised in which earnest spiritual searching ends with conversion to ‘a new religion replacing an older, inadequate, decayed’ one, if not multiple ones (Turner 2008, 107). Both authors trade on readers’ shared investment in the familiar evangelical emphases of spiritual vitality and sincerity now also promoted by and channelled through Carlyle. The seeker should, under these prerogatives, follow where the spirit leads and alter his or her outward practice accordingly. But while in Carlyle’s and, as discussed below, Mill’s cases the convert’s quest advances with modernity, with Newman the pilgrimage leads the convert through the Church of England to a ‘new’ religion that is, in fact, more ancient: Roman Catholicism. That the same pattern could be invoked by both Carlyle and Newman speaks to how influential and how pliable the conversion narrative becomes in this period. As we noted in Sartor, moreover, Newman’s autobiographical pieces not only rely on but openly query the tradition of life-writing that reaches back to figures such as Bunyan and Wesley. If Newman aims, in Frank Turner’s apt phrasing, to ‘domesticate’ his conversion to Roman Catholicism by invoking an English tradition of spiritual autobiography, he also responds to, critiques, and ultimately transforms the previously Protestant genre by giving it a Catholic trajectory (Ibid., 106). The text began as Newman’s public reply to an attack on his character launched by the Anglican Charles Kingsley in early 1864. In a review of J. A. Froude’s History of England, Kingsley argued that ‘Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy’, and that now ‘Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be’ (quoted in Ibid., 32). Kingsley’s barb plays, of course, on traditional Protestant anxieties about Catholic priestcraft. But it also speaks to the elevation of sincerity in Victorian culture. For Kingsley, Catholicism is all formality and evasiveness, as opposed to Protestant straightforwardness and sincerity. Newman, on this account, doesn’t speak truly, from the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

198

198 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

richard hughes gibson and timothy larsen

heart, about what he believes. Recognising this helps us to understand why Newman’s reply, what we now call Apologia Pro Vita Sua, took the form it did – that is, a personal narrative. The evolving title page of this book succinctly demonstrates Newman’s complex dealings with the English tradition of spiritual autobiography. After debuting in the summer of 1864 as series of pamphlets, the text was released later in the year as a book titled Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled ‘What, Then Does Mr. Newman Mean?’. The title speaks directly to the moment, its use of Latin a rhetorical flourish well suited to the occasion of a polemic campaign waged by donnish clerics. Revised and re-issued the following year, the book now bore an anglicised title: History of My Religious Opinions. Its domestication is not simply a matter of the author’s exclusive use of English words; more significantly still, the new title portrays the work not as defence but as a personal spiritual ‘history’, a word rich with resonances from the ‘classics’ of English spiritual life-writing. The revised title thus frames the book on homegrown spiritual terms. With a new edition in 1873, however, Newman combined his previous attempts: Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions. This version presents Newman’s text as at once foreign and domestic, ancient and modern, a Catholic’s apology and an Englishman’s spiritual history. Perhaps no issue, though, better reveals Newman’s reliance on and divergence from Protestant models than his treatment of evangelical notions of conversion. Newman was, we must remember, a former card-carrying member of the evangelical party. In his recollections of his evangelical phase, particularly in the ‘Autobiographical Memoir’ (1874) written to supplement the Apologia, Newman cites evangelical thinking about conversion in order to show that he was never a true evangelical. For example, the memoir records how in 1821, at the height of his evangelical phase, Newman had ‘[drawn] up at great length an account of the Evangelical process of conversion’ based, in good evangelical form, on Scripture (Newman 2014). Newman now demonstrates his thorough command of the ‘morphology’ noted above, listing the ‘stages’ of conversion (‘conviction of sin, terror, despair, news of the free and full salvation . . . and so on to final perseverance’) (Ibid.). Producing memoranda written in the twenties, Newman argues that he only grasped the evangelical model of conversion intellectually; it remained foreign to his experience. Unlike Carlyle, he enjoyed no bright moment or season that brought a sense of ultimate assurance. Instead, Newman wrote in 1821, ‘my own feelings, as far as I remember, were so different from any account

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

199 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography

199

I have ever read’ (Ibid.). In 1826, he would again observe that ‘my own feelings were not violent, but a returning to, a renewing of, principles, under the power of the Holy Spirit, which I had already felt, and in a measure acted on when young’ (Ibid.). In the memoir, Newman likens his former condition to feeling ignorant of a secret society’s ‘prescribed sign’. Certain kinds of conversion narratives, we must recognise, function not only as expressions of but evidence for Protestant belief. The motifs that Carlyle seizes on – that is, sudden epiphany, the rapturous sense of deliverance and assurance – are suspect for Newman for this reason. By highlighting the absence of the secret handshake, Newman stresses his experience’s departure from Protestant norms and, in turn, the insufficiency of Protestant explanations of the spiritual life. The evangelical lifepattern, in effect, failed him. He suggests, in turn, his need to continue the spiritual journey that brought him, ultimately, to Rome. Part of Newman’s project, then, is to write his autobiography out of the evangelical pattern by way of his lack of (what he presents as) a regular and regulative conversion; and in doing this he establishes the fitness of the narrative’s Catholic resolution. Meanwhile, the Apologia sings the praises of Thomas Scott, author of an immensely popular ‘alternative’ evangelical account of conversion, The Force of Truth (1779). While we need not doubt the authenticity of Newman’s paeans to Scott (‘the writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than another, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul’), we should also recognise, as Linda Peterson has argued, that introducing Scott a few pages into the Apologia’s first chapter represents a shrewd rhetorical move (Newman 2008, 134). Scott’s conversion narrative eschews the ‘agitation’ foreign to Newman’s experience. Although announced in the preface as ‘nothing more than the history of my heart . . . and conscience’, the conventional terms of the genre, Scott’s tale focuses on his readings and reasonings about Scripture and doctrine, thereby making it as much a ‘history’ of Scott’s mind (Scott 1814, iii). Scott’s text thus provided Newman an ideal means to ‘shop local’, since Scott’s English credentials were spotless and his conversion was free of the baggage of ‘violent’ emotions or personal revelation. In capitalising on this, Newman should be viewed as an astute and resourceful reader of the established canon of Protestant life-writing. The Force of Truth chronicles Scott’s progress from a morally vacuous Socinianism to a restorative, distinctly evangelical Trinitarianism. Sincerity is one of Scott’s chief themes: truth compels him to accept evangelical doctrine and to put what he truly believes into practice. Thus

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

200

200 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

richard hughes gibson and timothy larsen

Newman praises Scott for his ‘vigorous independence of mind’ and for ‘[following] truth wherever it led him’ (Newman 2008, 135). As critics have observed, Newman endeavours to present, and thus legitimate, himself as the new Scott, though now following truth takes the convert out of the party where Scott landed. In narrative terms, The Force of Truth offers Newman a kosher example of the kind of conscientious party hopping that the Apologia then recounts. The invocation of Scott helps Newman to frame the standards by which the narrative and narrator should be judged. Through Scott, Newman connects himself with a time-honoured tradition of truth seeking that comes out of a thoroughly English source. From within the resources of the tradition of spiritual autobiography, then, Newman locates the sanction for his Catholic conversion. That the reception of the work was so warm suggests his success in the project of ‘domestication’.

John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill would seem the most unpropitious of subjects for our thesis that evangelical concepts and strategies pervaded Victorian autobiographical writing. Not only did Mill not write his life story as an evangelical, he was not even raised as one. In his Autobiography (posthumously published in the year of his death, 1873), he noted the peculiarity of his position: ‘I was brought up from the first without any religious belief [. . .] I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it’ (Mill 2006, 40, 45). His father, James Mill, moreover, raised him to view Christianity as not only false but pernicious. If any Victorian should be largely unaffected by the evangelical ethos, it would be the author of On Liberty. Nevertheless, Mill serves in certain key respects a textbook example of the phenomenon we have traced here in which the strategies of puritanevangelical spiritual autobiography remain active in the writings of Victorian sages. His famous account of his consolatory turn to Romanticism, to cite a succinct example, takes on the air of an evangelical conversion. Indeed, the connection to evangelical tales of redemption is readily apparent to the author himself: It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

201 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography

201

to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first ‘conviction of sin’. (Ibid., 137)

John Morris, one of the great students of English autobiography, finds in this passage the key to the genre. Starting with this ‘hint’ in Mill, Morris argues that Christian conversion provided the structure for the genre even when its subjects or subject matter were formally secular (Morris 1966, 22). In effect, English autobiography never entirely escapes its religious roots. This hint can now be pursued with even greater precision thanks to the historian Bruce Hindmarsh’s analysis of the hallmarks of the conversion narrative in The Evangelical Conversion Narrative. To begin, Hindmarsh observes that descent into madness and the confession of suicidal urges were ‘typical, if not universal, features’ of the genre (Hindmarsh 2005, 276). A number of well-known figures made such confessions, including John Newton, the ‘wretch’ famously saved by ‘amazing grace’. Carlyle also invokes this convention in stressing the despair that precedes Teufelsdröckh’s conversion (as in Carlyle’s own). In the Autobiography, Mill follows suit. Before narrating his spiritual breakthrough, he stresses how suicidal he had become: ‘I seemed to have nothing left to live for . . . I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year’ (Mill 2006, 139, 145). If such spiritual depths might seem extreme or peculiar to modern readers, Hindmarsh reminds us that this kind of despair was not only familiar, even normal, for Mill’s nineteenth-century readers. It was to some extent necessary – part of the traditional redemptive plot. Hindmarsh also notes that the turning point of the convert’s story generally comes through an encounter with a text. While the Bible is the quintessential such text, it is by no means the only one, and this is true even among the classic conversion accounts. The conversion of John Wesley, the father of evangelicalism, occurred amidst an encounter with Martin Luther’s preface to St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. Peterson, following Morris’s lead, likewise emphasises the ‘textual encounter’ of spiritual autobiography as fundamental to the nature of Victorian self-interpretation, even in its ostensibly non-religious forms. Scott serves as a prototype: his conversion is facilitated by reading Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Times. (On this score, Newman, once again, appears an insider-outsider. He stresses the role of textual encounter to his conversion but names books on fifth-century church history as the key reading.) Mill, meanwhile, records that ‘a small ray of light’ penetrates his despair while ‘reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

202

202 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

richard hughes gibson and timothy larsen

Memoirs’ (Mill 2006, 145). Perhaps it is not overstraining to hear even in that brief statement an invocation of the tradition of ‘accidental’ reading that reaches back to the ‘take it and read’ episode of Augustine’s Confessions in which ‘accidentally’, as it were, opening his bible to the thirteenth chapter of Romans dispersed the gloom of perplexity. The more decisive textual encounter for Mill, however, came when he read the 1815 edition of William Wordsworth’s poems. Not only was his despair dispelled and he was thereby born again to a new life, but he then goes on to say that he had joined a new spiritual fellowship: he was to be now numbered among the ‘Wordsworthians’ (Ibid., 153). While this reading of Mill’s Romantic transformation as a secular imitation of a spiritual form is well established, scholars have overlooked another account in the Autobiography that also parallels the evangelical conversion narrative in striking ways. Many evangelical conversion stories highlight turning points in the lives of people who have been raised in the faith and – to both outward appearances and their self-perception – have been heartily adhering to it. Indeed, a sizable body of literature relates the conversion experiences of acting Christian ministers. Wesley, for instance, was already a clergyman, had indeed already served as a missionary, before his famous Aldersgate conversion. More typically, a dutiful Christian teenager suddenly has the faith come alive in a dramatic moment. By Bebbington’s reckoning, in the nineteenth century the mean age for the conversion of future Methodist ministers was fifteen or sixteen years old (Bebbington 1989, 7). Mill’s original conversion thus came right on time – when he was fifteen and half years old. As with a typical such event for evangelicals, it was a moment that made the faith of his father, which he had already formally accepted, an existentially alive, inward reality of transforming power. James Mill was Jeremy Bentham’s greatest disciple. This relationship was so close that Mills and Bentham lived in the same house for several stretches of John’s youth. John’s education, managed directly by his father, was designed to produce a thorough-going Benthamite: ‘My previous education had been, in a certain sense, already a course of Benthamism. The Benthamic standard of “the greatest happiness” was that which I had always been taught to apply’ (Mill 2006, 67). The decisive textual encounter on this first occasion was with Traité de Législation by the interpreter of Benthamism, Étienne Dumont. Hindmarsh observes: ‘This experience of a text of Scripture being made personal (‘applied to me’) recurred frequently in evangelical conversions’ (Hindmarsh 2005, 27). So Mill testifies exuberantly: ‘Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

203 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography

203

of novelty’ (Mill 2006, 67). What had once been a formal faith was now a living one. Once again, Mill himself makes explicit that the only fit analogy to his experience is the discovery of religious faith: I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine. (Ibid., 69)

Bebbington has taught us that, for evangelicals, conversionism is closely associated with activism. Mill sounds such a note here. The next section of the Autobiography, in turn, presents Mill as a ‘sectarian’ who, with a new convert’s zeal, went out as a Benthamite missionary to convert to the world. Startlingly like those future Methodist ministers, Mill would look back on his conversion at the age of fifteen as the orientating point of his life and as his call to ministry: ‘From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham . . . I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world’ (Ibid., 137). It is only when he began to question this creed and to lose the joy of his salvation that the narrative is set up for the second, more famous, conversion narrative. The young John Stuart Mill, in keeping with the spirit of the nineteenth century, thus wanted to be, as it were, an evangelical Benthamite. He therefore censured his father for having given him as part of the Benthamite creed the tenet that Christianity was erroneous but then instructed him to dissemble about this conviction when among outsiders: ‘In giving me an opinion contrary to that of the world, my father thought it necessary to give it as one which could not prudently be avowed to the world. This lesson of keeping my thoughts to myself, at that early age, was attended with some moral disadvantages’ (Ibid., 45). The Autobiography vindicates the author’s evangelical integrity by insisting that he was unable to follow this advice, revealing his heart’s truth to his adolescent acquaintances. He testified to his faith even in the face of persecution. The Autobiography likewise sought to refute charges that Mill had dissembled in his relationship with Harriet Taylor. In Mill’s account, the inner truth of their relationship aligned with his outward, formal profession that there was nothing improper about it even when she was still married to her first husband. Harriet herself – both an instigator of and a collaborator with full veto power on the Autobiography – claimed that their goal in this literary endeavour was to present an account of their relationship ‘in its genuine truth and

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

204

204 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

richard hughes gibson and timothy larsen

simplicity’ (Ibid., xxii). In that sense, the Autobiography was also Mill’s apologia pro vita sua in which the standard of judgment was the evangelical religion of the heart. We observed at the start that evangelicalism’s influence on Victorian literary culture is often misunderstood or undervalued. Our readings have attempted to show how that impact might be properly gauged by attending to attitudes and narrative techniques. Although our chosen authors are a Calvinist-sans-dogma, a Roman Catholic priest, and a devout Benthamite, respectively, we have seen that they share recognisably evangelical convictions about sincere belief and practice and anticipate that their readership will too. We have also observed that these authors availed themselves of the conventions and templates of puritan-evangelical life-writing to organise and relate their varied experiences vividly. All of this testifies to the persistence of evangelical impulses, categories, and narrative structures as rhetorical strategies. In so arguing, we do not mean to reverse courses and now suggest that these writers are being insincere. Rather, we are arguing that evangelicalism provided these writers with touchstones that facilitated their interaction with a wide readership. Its conventions made experience comprehensible to others as well as the autobiographer. It was also, of course, a means of persuasion. In this respect we might recognise another way (à la Morris), namely that the genre of autobiography never fully escapes its religious origins even if its subject is explicitly secular. Our readings have also shown us how these conversion narratives serve as arguments for their authors’ new values and belief systems. Hindmarsh has observed that evangelical life-writing is always a form of evangelism. In this respect, the ‘unorthodox’ Victorian inheritors of the tradition remain true to form. Carlyle’s Sartor, Newman’s Apologia, and Mill’s Autobiography do not just describe conversions: they promote them. In the end, for the Victorians, all autobiography was spiritual autobiography.

Notes 1. On evangelicalism’s ‘dominance’, see Bebbington, 2005. The phrase ‘Evangelical century’ was advanced by Michael Gauvreau in a 1991 book of that title, which focused on Canadian intellectual history. The phrase is now frequently used in discussions of Victorian England. 2. See Bebbington, 2005 and Hilton, 1988.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

205 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography

205

Bibliography Bagehot, Walter. 1910. ‘Macaulay’. In Literary Studies. Edited by R. H. Hutton. New York: Longman’s. Barbour, John D. 1994. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bebbington, David. 2005. The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press. Bebbington, David. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman. Carlyle, Thomas. 2014a. To John A. Carlyle. 30 December 1855. The Carlyle Letters Online. 30:151–3. DOI: 10.1215/lt-18551230-TC-JAC-01 (accessed 7 October 2014). Carlyle, Thomas. 2014b. Notes on Correspondence to Mrs. George Welsh. 1 October 1826. The Carlyle Letters Online. 4:140–5. DOI: 10.1215/lt-18261001JBW-MW-01 (accessed 7 October 2014). Carlyle, Thomas. 2014c. To Ralph Waldo Emerson. 12 August 1834. The Carlyle Letters Online. 7:262–267. DOI: 10.1215/lt-18340812-TC-RWE-01; CL 7:262–267 (accessed 7 October 2014). Carlyle, Thomas. 2000. Sartor Resartus. Edited by Mark Engel and Rodger L. Tarr. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carlyle, Thomas. 1974. Two Reminiscences. Edited by John Clubbe. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Hilton, Boyd. 1988. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. 2005. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Leon. 2002. ‘The Reader Retailored: Thomas Carlyle, His American Audiences, and the Politics of Evidence’. In Reading Acts: U. S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950, 79–106. Edited by Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press. Landow, George. 2014. ‘Evangelicalism’. Victorian Web. www.victorianweb.org/ religion/evangel1.html (accessed 7 October 2014). Manning, Susan. 2009. The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mill, John Stuart. 2006. Autobiography and Literary Essays. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Vol. I. Edited by J. M. Robson. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Morris, John N. 1966. Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart Mill. New York: Basic Books. Newman, John Henry. 2008. Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons. New Haven: Yale University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C14.3D

206

206 [192–206] 21.10.2015 3:17PM

richard hughes gibson and timothy larsen

Newman, John Henry. 2014. ‘Autobiographical Memoir’. Letters and Correspondence of Newman to 1845. Edited by Mozley. Newman Reader. www. newmanreader.org/biography/mozley/ (accessed 7 October 2014). Peterson, Linda. 1986. Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of SelfInterpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Qualls, Barry. 1982. The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as the Book of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Thomas. 1814. The Force of Truth. Boston: Belcher and Armstrong. Tennyson, G. B. 1966. Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Frank. 2008. Editor’s Introduction. In Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons, 1–115. New Haven: Yale University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

207 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

chapter 15

Emerging Selves The autobiographical impulse in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and Annie Wood Besant Carol Hanbery MacKay

Nineteenth-century women writers employed an ingenious array of narrative and publishing strategies to construct their sense of an autobiographical self, frequently honing in on the less overt modes of the diary, letter, memoir, and fiction. This chapter examines the autobiographical impulse in the writing of three nineteenth-century English women by exploring the concept of the individualistic self versus the sense of self or selves as part of community – and the ways in which that communal self can contribute to others while advancing self-actualisation. Given the range of genres that they employ, the following figures stand out for my chief inquiry: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837–1919), and Annie Wood Besant (1847–1933). Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley serve as a backdrop to the century; with both Wollstonecraft’s Mary (1788) and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Shelley’s Matilda (1820), mother and daughter segué into that murkiest of territories, the novel whose autobiographical implications remain buried until unearthed by subsequent generations. A survey of nineteenth-century autobiographical fiction would include Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860), and Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883), but I will focus on Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), an epic verse-novel written in the firstperson that brings her full circle back to two youthful autobiographical essays (1818; 1820) and her 1831–1832 diary, all three essentially hidden from public view until the last third of the twentieth century. The memoir, or reflected autobiography, further challenges the generic concept of nineteenth-century women’s autobiography. While the Romantic 207

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

208

208 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

carol hanbery mackay

era had its own monumental paternal tribute in Sara Coleridge’s five-volume edition of the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s multi-volume biographical introductions to the complete works of William Makepeace Thackeray stake out more personal terrain (1899; 1911). Ritchie’s creative, not to mention subversive, response to her father’s proscription against writing his biography also represents her reflected autobiography as Thackeray’s sometime amanuensis and collaborator. But the whole story of this intergenerational memoir cannot be told unless readers unpack the body of Ritchie’s own oeuvre, going back to her apprenticeship in the essays and fiction published in The Cornhill Magazine (co-founded by her father) and finding her increasingly assured autobiographical voice in the essay collections Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning (1892) and Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs (1894). Moreover, this Victorian daughter extends her memoir writing into three more collections that catapult her into the Modernist era – Blackstick Papers (1908), From the Porch (1913), and the posthumous From Friend to Friend (1919). Some Victorian women undertook the task of telling their own life story more directly, yet even these instances often reveal convoluted and interrupted publishing histories. For example, we have Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, hurriedly written in 1855 under the assumption that she had not long to live but not published until 1877, when it was accompanied a year after her death by a third ‘memorial’ volume compiled and edited by her friend Maria Weston Chapman. We encounter another suspended case with Margaret Oliphant’s The Autobiography and Letters (1899), edited by her cousin Annie Coghill, who, along with another relative, constructed the published text from manuscript material that was variously rearranged and censored; the original manuscript lay dormant at the National Library of Scotland for almost a century before seeing the public light of day (1990). Most intriguing in the annals of rewriting autobiography is the saga of Annie Wood Besant’s self-conscious recasting of her life eight years after the initial publication of her life story. As Autobiographical Sketches (1885) is succeeded by An Autobiography in 1893 (four years after Besant’s conversion to Theosophy), the autobiographer gives readers an opportunity to recognise the continuity of her concerns for social justice while discovering how her aspirations grow to encompass wider and wider spheres of human and spiritual experience.

‘An anxious employment’: ‘I write’ When Elizabeth Barrett Browning published Aurora Leigh in 1856, she was already a poet of international renown; she had been, in fact, a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

209 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

Emerging Selves

209

behind-the-scenes contender for the prize position of England’s Poet Laureate in 1850. But the romance of her elopement with fellow-poet Robert Browning in 1846 from her patriarchal confinement in London to the sunny artist colonies of Italy had already begun to capture the public imagination. More than halfway through the twentieth century, the story told by their courtship correspondence and her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) constituted the master co-narrative of her life, and Aurora Leigh, which had been reprinted over twenty times in Britain alone by 1900, had fallen into obscurity. Then, in the 1970s, feminist critics seized upon and celebrated it, primarily for how it brought to the fore key issues of female education, the double sexual standard, and the woman writer’s potential for social activism. These concerns combined with a broader range of Barrett Browning’s letters, most notably her exchanges with novelist Mary Russell Mitford about the writer’s craft, to produce a more complex portrait of the poet. Although readers of Aurora Leigh might have still considered the eponymous narrator as providing some autobiographical insight into its author, the majority of them turned to her published correspondence as the most reliable source for her emotional life and intellect. But the last third of the twentieth century also witnessed public access to private documentation of Barrett Browning’s inner life, not only filling in important gaps in our knowledge about her but also establishing more of Aurora Leigh as an autobiographical accounting than heretofore realised. The first of these manuscripts is her 1818 essay, ‘My Own Character’. Written when she was only twelve, the essay sounds the fearful keynote of the nineteenth-century woman autobiographer who knows that she will be judged harshly merely for daring to pen her life story in the first place: ‘The investigation of oneself is an anxious employment – The heart may appear corrupted by vanity, exalted by pride’ (Barrett Browning 1974, 119). As William Peterson points out, the essay falls within the evangelical tradition of spiritual self-examination, but it also acknowledges its impetus in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) – challenging reading indeed for the precocious twelve-year-old who is equally enamoured of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Amazingly self-aware and intellectually mature, a compulsive learner, she clearly informs Aurora’s rapturous, emotional engagement with the literature she reads in her father’s library in Book I of Aurora Leigh. The first autobiographical essay serves as an initial template for Barrett Browning’s second essay written two years later, ‘Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character’, and previously only available for the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

210

210 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

carol hanbery mackay

resourceful reader to consult in a 1914 limited edition published by the Boston Bibliophile Society. Now fourteen, Barrett Browning is motivated by a major change to reexamine her life: between 1817 and 1820, she had been allowed to study Greek and Latin with her brother Edward’s tutor, but with Edward’s departure for boarding school that instruction ended. The year 1820 was also noteworthy for her father’s private publication of The Battle of Marathon, her epic poem in four books modelled after Pope’s translation of Homer. Rewarded for her intellectual and literary aptitude yet denied the opportunity to pursue her education in earnest, the youthful Elizabeth Barrett is thus faced with the same contradictory message other intelligent nineteenth-century women encountered. In time, the second book of Aurora Leigh would reframe and dramatise that conflict in Aurora’s debates with her cousin Romney. ‘Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character’ demonstrates from its outset that Barrett Browning understands that ‘[t]o be one’s own chronicler’ (Barrett Browning 1974, 121) is a challenge, for ‘to be impartial is a difficult task’ (Ibid., 122), yet she tackles it with gusto. Already at ten, she declares, ‘I read that I might write’, and then the following year, she announces the identity she and Aurora will claim for the rest of their lives: ‘I wish to be considered an authoress’ (Ibid., 124). Enjoying a ‘literary life’ at twelve, she does so with ‘wild visions of an enthusiast’, adding to her agenda, ‘I now read to gain ideas’ (Ibid., 126). Although the thirteen-yearold fears ambition because she remains obsessed with long-held admonitions against vanity, she cannot resist lauding the strength of her own mind. Neither typically feminine nor subservient, she is never humbled in her own eyes – nor is Aurora, despite the mock heroic injunction with which she opens Book V of Aurora Leigh, ‘Aurora Leigh, be humble’ (Barrett Browning 1992, V.1). Life without learning and literature would be monotonous for the young autobiographer, and, with this selfrealisation, she pronounces her character determined and unchanging at fourteen. She playfully concludes her essay by addressing ‘my most patient auditors’ (throughout, she has been invoking them as fellow writers), giving them ‘a little advice before the Curtain falls’: ‘if you wish to keep up your spirits never to write your own life’ (Barrett Browning 1974, 133). Despite recognising the dangers of self-writing, Barrett Browning committed to keeping a diary in June of 1831. Her father had previously arranged for an anonymous printing of her epic poem, An Essay on Mind (1826), which builds to her ecstatic thesis: ‘But where Philosophy would fear to soar, / Young Poesy’s elastic steps explore!’ (II.900–1). The poem attracted the attention of Hugh Stuart Boyd (1781–1848), a blind Classics

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

211 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

Emerging Selves

211

scholar retired to a local village, and the diary coincides with the period when she often met with him at his home to study Greek and serve as amanuensis to her newfound father figure and mentor. Meanwhile, her family’s financial standing was crumbling (their wealth derived from Jamaican slave plantations), and her father resented Boyd’s alienation of his daughter’s affections. As a result, family tensions compounded Barrett Browning’s expected qualms about undertaking intense self-examination: ‘I wonder if I shall burn this sheet of paper like most others I have begun in the same way. To write a diary, I have thought of very often at far or near distances of time: but how could I write a diary without throwing upon paper my thoughts, all my thoughts – the thoughts of my heart as well as of my head? – and then how could I bear to look on them after they were written?’ (Barrett Browning 1969, 1). Given her self-mandate to submit to exhaustive self-scrutiny, it is no wonder that she could not sustain such a pace. Eleven years later she confessed to her friend Richard Horne, ‘Once, indeed, for one year, I kept a diary in detail and largely; and at the end of the twelve months was in such a crisis of self-disgust that there was nothing for me but to leave off the diary’ (Barrett Browning 1889, 124). Nonetheless, Barrett Browning clearly continued to entertain an autobiographical impulse. ‘Yet I could write an autobiography, but not now, and not for an indifferent public’ (Ibid., 128–9), she confided to Horne in the same letter that renounces the notion of keeping a diary, the letter that also voices her fascination with the effect of self-writing on the mind: ‘It is curious, especially where elastic spirits and fancies are at work upon a fixity of character and situation’ (Ibid., 124). The formlessness of the diary may well have contributed to her frustration with it. Recognising the role of her early essays and the diary in confronting her own character, yet fearful of exposing the private self to the world at large; believing in the power of poetry, but wanting to tell a contemporary story – Barrett Browning was struggling to find a form to express herself, and she discovered it in the epic sweep of a verse-novel narrated in the first-person she called Aurora Leigh. Turning to fiction allowed Barrett Browning to write a covert account of herself as a Victorian woman coming to terms with herself as both a woman and an artist. Ten years in the planning, the nine books running to over 11,000 lines, Aurora Leigh immediately announces its goal in prologue to “write my story for my better self’ (Barrett Browning 1992, I.4). Then, launching the autobiography proper with the declaration ‘I write’ (Ibid., I.29), Aurora embarks upon her Küntslerroman – her growth of the artist to maturity. But the self-doubts brought to the fore by Barrett Browning in her private diary emerge when Aurora reaches the threshold of adulthood:

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

212

212 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

carol hanbery mackay

‘I stood / Woman and artist, – either incomplete, / Both credulous of completion’ (Ibid., II.3–5). Undertaking a full-length autobiography with the passionate intensity of her diary-keeping would have resulted in a monumental monstrosity, but, with the benefit of perspective, the spontaneous outpourings of the diarist’s self-conflicts could be externalised and productively recast. Thus, Aurora’s (and the youthful Barrett Browning’s) internal tension between the prospects of amatory fulfilment and poetic calling devolves into her arguments with Romney, to whom she asserts, ‘I too have my vocation, – work to do’ (Ibid., II.455). To the extent that Romney is an obstacle, Aurora’s own inner debates (internalised from society’s contradictory messages) remain unresolved. At the centre of Aurora Leigh lies Book V’s ars poetica, Barrett Browning’s treatise on the art of poetry and its potential to generate the modern epic. Aurora celebrates poets for their ability to ‘[e]xert a double vision’ (Ibid., V.184) – to see the near as if afar, the distant as intimate – a skill her creator has been exercising in the writing of her magnum opus, ‘the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered’, she stipulates in her dedication. As Aurora writes her own long poem within the world of Barrett Browning’s fictional creation, life and art conflate, confirming that their intertwining constitutes not only the subject matter of Aurora Leigh but also the key to understanding its author’s life story. The last two books witness Aurora as narrator and character merging into the ongoing present, echoing the language of the sonnets Barrett Browning wrote during her secret correspondence with Robert Browning. So Robert blends into Romney, with a backward glance at the blind scholar who once served as the author’s mentor, and Aurora and Romney move toward their resolution to devote themselves to life and art. Taken out of context, ‘Art is much, but love is more’ (Ibid., IX.656) seems to suggest that art has been demoted, but Barrett Browning is careful to explain that love is equated with love of God, who will continue to inspire her two protagonists to bring to fruition ‘Art’s a service’ (Ibid., IX.915).

‘Only connect’: ‘We go back to meet our old selves’ Conditioned by Thackeray’s aversion to biography, Anne Thackeray Ritchie remained sceptical about the explicit, large-scale undertaking of autobiography as well: ‘People sometimes regret that my father left no autobiography, and that no important printed book has been published about his life; but I cannot help thinking that whatever may or may not be

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

213 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

Emerging Selves

213

published in the future, his life has been told by himself, in his own pages, better than any other person can tell it’ (Ritchie 1891, 811). This suggestion about reading Thackeray’s life story as reconstituted from his oeuvre can also prompt us to consider how Ritchie has instinctively engineered her own autobiographical impulse across the spectrum of her writing career. Essays and short stories with character-narrators published in The Cornhill Magazine and serialised novels featuring ruminative digressions – such selfreflexive exercises served as the caldron in which she developed her semiautobiographical voice. Thirty years after her father’s death in 1863, his proscription against writing his biography still ringing in her ears, Ritchie could look back on her recent series of ‘records’ of literary friendships with her father’s contemporaries, examine her ongoing string of articles about her ‘unwritten memoirs’, and begin to contemplate writing biographical introductions to Thackeray’s canon. As biography meets the autobiographical impulse, reflected autobiography emerges. Recalling Ritchie’s first novel, The Story of Elizabeth (1863), Henry James described her almost eidetic memory infusing the fictional scene with detailed images of living in the Paris of her youth. This ability to call upon the rich storehouse of her memory served Ritchie well when she agreed, at the behest of Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to write about his life for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1883). The biographer is ever-present, weaving together past and present: ‘As the writer notes down these various fragments, and compiles this sketch of remembered and of present things, she cannot but feel how much of the past it all means to her’ (Ritchie 1892, 33–4). Moreover, when reports from other players in Tennyson’s life story are insufficient or she was not herself witness to events in the poet’s life, Ritchie treats factual information as a springboard into her imagination, dramatising a fanciful but plausible scenario, even speculating about how many of us might have appreciated overhearing and overseeing the great man in his youth. Ritchie’s impressionistic style pulls the reader into her narrative, drawing attention to itself and thus to herself, validating her endorsement to find connections, seek out influences, appreciate relationships. Her mood may be whimsical at times, as when she remembers her visit to an elderly friend of her father’s who described the young Tennyson ‘in a fragment, which is a remembrance, a sort of waking dream, of some bygone days and talks’ (Ibid., 15), but even this whimsy points up how we invoke memory and invite nostalgia, ultimately foregrounding the memoirist’s own creative process at work. Chronology and dates receive their occasional due in Ritchie’s biographical series reprinted as Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Robert and

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

214

214 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

carol hanbery mackay

Elizabeth Browning in 1892, yet far more important is celebrating the nexus of relationships she can revive by reliving a wide array of memories and invoking the scenes where they transpired. As a result, it seems strange that the article on the Brownings takes an encyclopaedic turn to convey Barrett Browning’s early history, but that lapse in style can be explained by the knowledge that Ritchie authored the entry on Barrett Browning for the Dictionary of National Biography (1884). Ritchie’s brother-in-law, Leslie Stephen, had assigned the entry to her, but was typically upset by her personal voice and impressionistic modus operandi. Once the facts are out of the way, so to speak, Ritchie returns to her relational mode, finding grounds for her shared life story with that of the Brownings, moving back and forth in time between her childhood impressions and her later appreciation of their stature. And as with both the Tennyson and Ruskin articles, the role of place is paramount to Ritchie’s technique. Apart from the scenes she recalls and then repaints from shared moments in London, Paris, and Rome, Ritchie extends her scope to include a fresh experience outside her lived time frame with Barrett Browning. This time Ritchie merges her story with that of the poet by undertaking a pilgrimage to the Barrett family residence, Hope End, a quarter of a century after Barrett Browning’s death. Travelling with her young son, Ritchie observes, ‘it seemed to me as if an echo of her melody was still vibrating from hedgerow to hedgerow, even though the birds were silent, and though summer and singing-time were over’ (Ibid., 186–7). ‘I love my recollections, and I now understand why everybody writes them. One begins to dance again, and lark, and frisk, and thrill, and do all the things one can hardly believe one ever did’, reported Ritchie to her friend Julian Sturgis, who was writing a biography of his father (Ritchie 1924, 294). At fifty-seven, Ritchie was completing the article series entitled ‘Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs’ for Macmillan’s Magazine and planning once again to collect and publish her piecemeal forays into life writing in a single volume. Although Thackeray reappears throughout, along with many literary figures from the past they have in common, there is a more individual, proprietary cast to the first five chapters over which Ritchie claims her own authority: ‘My Poet’, ‘My Musician’, ‘My Triumphal Arch’, ‘My Professor of History’, and ‘My Witch’s Caldron’. Utilising her skills as a novelist, she stages scenes from the flood of memories she has unleashed with increasing self-awareness about how much she lives in the past – how her own character has been shaped by the ease with which she can negotiate between the past and the present. Once again, strict chronology and specific dates are less important than

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

215 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

Emerging Selves

215

narrating her growth in self-consciousness about the role of the past in the present, not only for herself but for those whose lives intersect with her own, as they all contribute to a communal story. The theme of separation infuses many of the later chapters, however, demonstrating how Ritchie begins to write herself out from under Thackeray’s shadow. Parting from and reuniting with their father comprised the life pattern of Ritchie and her younger sister, Minny, as he variously shunted them back and forth across the English Channel during the half dozen or so years when he consigned them to the care of his mother living in Paris. Later, visiting Weimar with their father, the girls take pleasure in finding ‘ourselves actually alive in his past somehow’ (Ritchie 1894, 108), but such ‘living backward’ (Ibid., 109) cannot stave off ‘a curious feeling of terror and emotion’ at the prospect of his departure for his first American lecture tour (Ibid., 144). Having survived the great grief of her father’s death thirty years before the writing of these chapters, revisiting and recognising the recurring motif of loss and return free Ritchie from her propensity to hold Thackeray in uncritical suspension. Thus, while celebrating the fairy-tale atmosphere of their Roman sojourn – ‘We go back to meet our old selves’ (Ibid., 181) – she can also record one of his angry outbursts and his penchant for deflating his daughters’ naive optimism. By the time she is preparing her volume for publication, Ritchie’s perspective on her relationship with her father has shifted sufficiently that she chooses to reorder the sequence of the chapters, placing the one on Fanny Kemble (herself the author of multiple autobiographical volumes) at endpoint, where she can openly acknowledge the equality of their shared outlook and spirit of generosity, ‘like some secret link binding humanity together’ (Ibid., 204). ‘I am suddenly conscious as I write that my experiences are very partial’, Ritchie concedes mid-way through ‘My Witch’s Caldron’ (Ibid., 69), and as if to demonstrate her haphazard methodology, she proceeds to skip from a partial description of Thackeray’s study to a broader picture of the house and garden, ending up in her old schoolroom (Ibid., 74–6). But before the decade was out, Ritchie returned to that depiction of her father’s study to develop it into one of her many points of origin for illuminating the creative process behind each of his major works. Her introduction to The History of Henry Esmond (Ritchie 1988, X.xxii) is central to her project, for anchoring it in an intimate description of Thackeray’s study establishes her shared narrative of the novel’s inception as she reenacts her role as recorder to its dictation. As her father’s confidante, Ritchie becomes in essence his apprentice to the art of fiction-making, and between the perspective

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

216

216 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

carol hanbery mackay

afforded by time and her own experiences as a writer, she is now prepared to challenge his attitude toward privacy and serve as his piecemeal biographer, not hagiographer. Moreover, to the extent that she also generates her reflected autobiography, she does so as a fellow creative artist. Like Ritchie’s previous life-writings, The Biographical Introductions to the Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (1898–1899; 1910–1911) may at first seem unstructured, but she continues to treat the self-conscious evocation of memory and highlighting the process of creativity as her guiding directives, this time adding to the caldron her consistent empathetic voice as daughter, critic, and author in her own right. These multiple roles conjoin with multiple layers of time with respect to place, making her invocation of Thackeray’s rooms in Weimar, for instance, combine with the use of one of his mock self-portraits to convey the complex inspiration leading to Vanity Fair (Ritchie 1988, I.xxvi-xxx). Given the panoply of sketches, manuscript material, and correspondence at her disposal, Ritchie can set them in interplay, overcoming any remaining ambivalence about writing biography or autobiography. However, although she utilises letters as a bridge between the public and private, she remains protective of sensitive elements in the family record, silently editing out or outright omitting any references to her mother’s mental health or Thackeray’s emotional attachment to Jane Brookfield. Alternately direct and indirect in telling her own life story, Ritchie deploys her impressionistic style to conjoin her autobiographical impulse with the chronicle of her father’s writing career as a series of co-epiphanies about the creative life. In effect, her double vision allows the past and present to co-exist, and her attention to beginnings and endings in Thackeray’s canon reinforces her insight into the cycles of a writer’s experience, further emphasising the spirit of renewal she finds in her own life and art.

‘At war all round’: ‘Through storm to peace’ While writing a full-length, openly acknowledged autobiography was outside the ken of either Barrett Browning or Ritchie, it was a project Annie Besant was well motivated to undertake, albeit with some qualifications, at the age of thirty-seven. Having left her marriage to an Anglican clergyman, Besant subsequently became an atheist, Freethinker, birth control advocate, defendant in two controversial trials, and was on her way to adopting socialism when she began to indulge her autobiographical impulse, ostensibly to gratify the desires of others. In 1883, with fellow National Secularist leader Charles Bradlaugh, she had co-founded the monthly journal Our Corner, for which

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

217 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

Emerging Selves

217

she was sole editor, and the first issue of the ensuing year sets in prologue the following announcement: ‘I have resolved to pen a few brief autobiographical sketches, which may avail to satisfy friendly questioners, and to serve, in some measure, as defence against unfair attack’ (Besant 2009, 57). So began the monthly instalments of what Besant published between book covers a year and a half later as Autobiographical Sketches (1885). Labelled as mere ‘sketches’, appearing piecemeal over an indeterminate length of time, her seventeen chapters belie their scattered format, however, for once she had decided to conclude her last chapter with the loss of her daughter’s custody in 1879, Besant and her readership could recognise in these collected chapters a coherent life story driven by a call for justice. Yet just eight years later, Besant published another autobiographical account, retracing the parameters of the same personal history and bringing her story up to the present, this time entitling her endeavour An Autobiography (1893). The significant change Besant had experienced in the meantime was her conversion to Theosophy in 1889. But why did she rewrite her earlier life story and not simply take up a second autobiographical volume, beginning where she had left off with the outcome of the custody trial? A clue to answering this question lies in the title itself. Neither claiming individual ownership nor exhibiting a defensive stance, the title refers to a life story that is one of many, underscoring the message of her preface that ‘since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may well be that the story of one may help all’ (Besant 1893, 6). And this time Besant’s endpoint is clearly established from the outset, her final words a universal invocation, ‘PEACE TO ALL BEINGS’ (Ibid., 364). In order for that framework to have meaning, Besant needed to revisit her entire life story to uncover the seeds of her current belief system and to seek out the continuity and consistency of her life choices. Although she eventually posits an unrestricted readership, one that she hopes to convince of the tenets of Theosophy, the writing process initially sets the autobiographer as her own audience – someone who knows she must test the honesty of her own introspection. Putting the two texts side by side, the reader often sees similar phrasing or the repetition of key word choices, but this is not the case of an autobiographer taking passages from one text wholesale into another or simply providing commentary by adding new insights at predictable plot points. Instead, the second text demonstrates Besant seeing her life anew without denying the validity of her first experience of self-writing. In this respect, she especially validates her early passion to believe in something larger than herself, one that may

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

218

218 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

carol hanbery mackay

have led her astray in terms of inordinate submission to authority figures in the Christian Church but that nonetheless confirms an underlying spiritual quest that has always informed her life. In essence, writing An Autobiography gave Besant the opportunity not to reinvent herself but rather to clarify to herself and her readers how she has been engaged in a life-long process of growth and progress as a spiritual being committed to humanity on a worldwide scale. An Autobiography is thus Besant’s argument by reenactment that counters the charges of her detractors, who had accused her of abruptly exchanging one belief system for another, based on allegiance to a series of male leaders or partners: ‘I may add that such shafts are specially pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than resign the belief she had struggled to in solitude; . . . such a woman . . . may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence of judgment’ (Ibid., 316). Step by step, Besant demonstrates the shifts in her perspective while bringing to the fore once again the motifs of light, truth, and peace that had emerged in Autobiographical Sketches. Her first foray into autobiography had already shown her periodically revisiting and celebrating the role of motherhood and especially the relationship between mother and daughter, but in her second she can end the suspense of her previous cliffhanger about the loss of her children, quietly stating from a place of certitude, ‘The moment they were old enough to free themselves, they came back to me’ (Ibid., 225). Moreover, given her newfound peace, she is now ready to acknowledge and confront an episode of contemplating suicide that she was not ready to admit to when she wrote her ‘sketches’, as well as to take greater responsibility for the breakdown of her marriage. But Besant was hardly prepared to undertake a second autobiography immediately upon joining the Theosophical Society in 1889. On a smaller scale and in typical fashion, the practised speaker from the platform of the National Secular Society informed an audience of Freethinkers about her conversion some three months earlier. Why I Became a Theosophist begins with the thesis that will undergird An Autobiography four years later: ‘Growth necessarily implies change, and, provided the change be sequential and of the nature of development, it is but the sign of intellectual life’ (Besant 1889, 3), and it ends by sounding the note of ‘truth’ already reiterated throughout her ‘sketches’: ‘I ask no other epitaph on my tomb, but SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH’ (Ibid., 31). In both this accounting and the address she delivered two years later at the same Hall

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

219 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

Emerging Selves

219

of Science, Besant declared her inclusive intentions, arguing that it was possible to be a Theosophist and either a Freethinker or a Christian, although by 1891 she realised that her message would likely fall on deaf ears. Entitled 1875 to 1891: A Fragment of Autobiography, this autobiographical lecture thus became a parting gesture: ‘I would not have left your platform had I not been compelled; but if I must be silent on what I know to be true, then I must take my dismissal, and to you now, and for the rest of this life, to you I bid – FAREWELL’ (Besant 1891, 14). Autobiographical Sketches had paved the way by helping Besant recognise the key elements in her master narrative through her trials for the right to publish birth control literature and to regain custody of her daughter, but now those trials could be consolidated into a single chapter. ‘At War All Around’ became the first chapter of An Autobiography to pick up where she had left off, but this recasting of her life relegated the language of warfare to chapter titles, rather than the guarded posture that permeated Autobiographical Sketches. The title of the final chapter of An Autobiography, ‘Through Storm to Peace’, might sum up her life story to the present time of its writing, but it also projected the steadfast promise for her future. There would be no need for Annie Besant to write a third incarnation or another instalment of her autobiography.

Afterword For each of these three women autobiographers, there is no single text that constitutes a definitive autobiography, and that very multiplicity points to their postmodern experience of identity as comprised of multiple (sometimes even conflicting) selves. And all three move back and forth between seeing themselves as individuals, at specific stages of their lives or in terms of their roles vis-à-vis others, and as part of a larger community, exemplifying the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howards End – ‘Only connect’. Elizabeth Barrett Browning provides her primary self-portrait disguised as the fictional Aurora Leigh; Anne Thackeray Ritchie disperses herself among a variety of different memoirs and biographical endeavours; and Annie Wood Besant situates herself across the territory of two autobiographies that affirm her evolutionary life passage. Reconstructing Barrett Browning’s life story by consulting some of her private self-writing allows the reader to view Aurora Leigh as the culmination of her search for a unique form to express her abiding tension between gender and genre, while Ritchie’s oeuvre defies any attempt to construct a master narrative beyond noting reiterations of her relational sense of self, its impressionistic

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C15.3D

220

220 [207–220] 20.10.2015 7:25PM

carol hanbery mackay

mode nonetheless conveying an immediacy of mediated selves. As for Besant, her self-accountings clearly detail a growth process, but rather than seeing her life story as a linear quest or progression, the reader would do well to envision it through her eyes, as a concentric circle, expanding to encompass the full scope of humankind.

Bibliography Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. 1826. An Essay on Mind, With Other Poems. London: James Duncan. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. 1889. Letters Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne. Preface and memoir by Richard Henry Stoddard. New York: Worthington. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. 1969. The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1831–1832. Edited and introduced by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson. Athens: Ohio University Press. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. 1974. ‘Two Autobiographical Essays by Elizabeth Barrett’. Edited by William Peterson. Browning Institute Studies 2:119–34. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. 1992. Aurora Leigh. Edited and introduced by Margaret Reynolds. Athens: Ohio University Press. First published 1856. Besant, Annie. Why I Became a Theosophist. 1889. London: Freethought Publishing Company. Besant, Annie. 1891. 1875 to 1891: A Fragment of Autobiography. London: Theosophical Publishing Society. Besant, Annie. An Autobiography. 1893. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Besant, Annie. Autobiographical Sketches. 2009. Edited and introduced by Carol Hanbery MacKay. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press. First published 1884–1885. Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. 1891. ‘Thackeray and His Biographers‘. Illustrated London News 98 (June 20): 811–2. Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. 1892. Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning. London: Macmillan. Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. 1894. Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs. New York: Harper & Brothers. Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. 1924. Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, with Forty-Two Additional Letters from Her Father William Makepeace Thackeray. Selected and edited by Hester Ritchie. London: John Murray. Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. 1988. Biographical Introductions to the Centenary Edition of the Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. The Two Thackerays. Critical introduction by Carol Hanbery MacKay. Bibliographical introduction by Peter L. Shillingsburg and Julia Maxey. 2 vols. New York: AMS Press. First published 1910–1911.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

221 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

chapter 16

Victorian artists’ autobiographies Transgression, res gestae, and the collective life Julie Codell

Despite increasing attention paid to autobiographies, artist autobiographies have largely been ignored by scholars of the genre.1 Art historians have examined life writings of William Holman Hunt, Benjamin Haydon, and some women artists,2 but unique features of Victorian artist autobiographies become apparent when more texts are read collectively and in relation to Victorian autobiographies in general. Artists such as William Holman Hunt, Elizabeth Butler, William Powell Frith, and Henrietta Ward wrote from contradictory positions: once extremely successful, they published their autobiographies after the decline of their markets and reputations. Painfully aware of such fluctuations, artists sprinkled their texts with stories of failed or mad artists or those who died young, countering their narratives of success, to expose the capricious social and market forces that directed their careers. They invoked the res gestae mode – digressive non-sequiturs, gossip, and anecdotes – which they strategically deployed to reveal the speculative and contingent nature of artistic life and to recall the imaginary community of their former professional and social cohorts. The res gestae memoir was ‘distinct from the developmental autobiography’ due to its use of ‘recollection and reminiscence as the bases of its form’ (Peterson 1990, 183).3 Bernd Neumann has further articulated this mode as an external orientation, the individual acting as a social being, as distinguished from the narrative of memory and identity, which constitutes a more internal focus. He identifies res gestae with the memoir, while memory and identity belong to autobiography.4 Among historians, the phrase refers to a type of history that narrates accomplishments and structures narrative around events.5 Artists’ autobiographies, the term they used for their narratives, deployed the res gestae mode in these several ways. Artists bragged about their accomplishments, organised their narrative around career events, and represented themselves as social beings. Their networks, social events, and 221

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

222

222 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

julie codell

sociability reflected their need to attract patrons among the well-to-do, create friendships with critics and other artists, and build a clientele in which social and economic spheres overlapped. Unlike Victorian spiritual autobiographies, artists were rarely introspective. William Bell Scott described his autobiography as having ‘little introspection’ and focusing on ‘the lives of my dear and intimate friends’ (Scott 1892, 4–5). Most artists were intrepid travellers due to traditional ties between art making and travel: this included sketching tours, trips to Italy, and commissions abroad. They incorporated travel narratives in their autobiographies, presenting themselves and their lives as contingent, without ‘a universalizing, transcendent subject memorialized . . . in metaphors of stasis and permanence’ (Watson 1993, 59). Their fluid identities were not forged from inner struggles but from social, economic, and professional pressures, positioning them in a ‘complex and intricate web of cross-references . . . in the intellectual and cultural community’ (Machann 1994, 163–4). Stereotypes of male narratives as autonomous career stories and of female narratives as primarily domestic plots do not apply to artist autobiographies.6 Collegial and intensely social male artists recorded their social events, dinners, gossip, and hunting trips. Some praised female artists’ emergence into professional life. Female artists’ autobiographies embraced flânuese posturing, erotic projections, professional struggles, and alternative femininities that did not privilege domestic life. These women were self-assured and well supported in their professional ambitions by families and husbands. They inhabited public spaces of studios, exhibitions, soirées, press criticism, and travel abroad. Despite extraordinary difficulties for women artists throughout the century, these middle- and upper-middle-class women spoke with authority, perhaps sharing Harriet Martineau’s motive for writing her autobiography when ‘my life became evidently a somewhat remarkable one’ (Martineau 1877, I.1). Focusing on their careers, their writings were ‘by no means anemic imitations of those of men’ (Pomerleau 1980, 22). They wrote narratives filled with pleasures, desires, and travels, and sometimes openly disparaged hegemonic femininity. Domestic life was treated differently by men and women. Men reduced domestic content to near invisibility, despite dedicating their books to their wives. Women artists subordinated domesticity to their careers, while mentioning families and children. Only Louise Jopling included photographs of her children. Deborah Cherry argues that for them, ‘the representation of professional activity required a careful negotiation of the codes of propriety which shielded the feminine subject from public scrutiny’ and

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

223 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

Victorian artists’ autobiographies

223

failed to chart ‘the development of an artistic credo or an intellectual position’ (Cherry 1993, 7–8). But these women openly bragged about their gender transgressions, and male artists’ autobiographies, too, lacked credos or intellectual positions, being flooded instead with anecdotes about social engagements and friends. Indeed, ‘autobiographical writing, published and private, serves as a location where residual and emergent notions of gender and class clash to replicate and challenge reigning notions of identity’, and can reveal ‘a critique of the dominant . . . and . . . the resistances of the marginal’ (Nussbaum 1989, xiv). As artists, both men and women negotiated gender conventions and artist stereotypes in a period in which women’s opportunities for work, education, and travel were expanding, and in which artists’ public images were conflicted: they identified with and became representative of nationhood and respectable professionalism, while also being condemned by popular degeneracy theories as decadent and bohemian. Successfully entrepreneurial in finding original subjects to paint to earn an income from fluctuating markets and public taste, male and female artists constructed themselves through social relations and networks in their texts as they did in their art careers, freely acknowledging influences, cohorts, and mentors, to reveal a deep sociality at the heart of artists’ professional lives. Those who maintained civility, shared knowledge, and promoted the profession above individual attainments were elected to the Academy and ate at the tables of wealthy patrons. Insisting that they were the social equals of their patrons, artists affirmed their authority while also disguising and purifying economic relations by transforming them into social relations. The intertextuality of artist autobiographies included reproduced images of their popular paintings that once circulated widely as prints in Britain, the Empire, Europe, and North America. Over 250,000 prints of Estella Canziani’s popular painting The Piper of Dreams, the frontispiece of her autobiography, were sold worldwide in the first year (Canziani 1939, 204). These images formed a bond with readers beyond the Victorian period, as artists hoped their autobiographies might induce later generations of readers’ appreciation of their oeuvre and their names. Combining an emphasis on hard work, to assure readers their paintings had labour value, with descriptions of their centrality in prominent social circles, artists were as entrepreneurial in autobiography as they had been in art production, in the hope that readers might become art buyers and revive dead reputations. But artists’ textual selves were also dramatised by narrated absences – recitations of dead colleagues, absent families, and lost reputations

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

224

224 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

julie codell

(Fleishman 1983, 33). Such lack resonated with the conditions of autobiography itself – incompleteness (the subject is still alive), metalepsis (past acts under present narration), and a narrative ‘transubstantiation’, transporting the author into both death and self-preservation for artists thoroughly imbued with historical canons of great artists with whom they hoped to join ranks. Autobiography, like canons, is diachronically intertextual: ‘models of identity permeate the discourse and imagery of a culture . . . in stories that offer to the nascent self a pattern’ (Eakin 1992, 90). Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (1563) was such a model and ‘produced’ Victorian artists, just as Victorians produced versions of Cellini by retranslating, reinterpreting, and imitating his text. Like his Victorian descendants, Cellini wrote after losing favour in his career. Victorian artist-autobiographers preferred the swashbuckling Cellini, whose Autobiography went through over sixty editions and printings and five translations between 1771 and 1914, most after 1880, to homegrown William Hogarth’s posthumous, didactic Biographical Anecdotes, edited and expanded by John Nichols and reprinted eight times from 1781. Frederic Wordsworth Haydon compared his father, Benjamin’s, autobiography to Cellini’s (F. W. Haydon 1876, I.viii). Joseph Pennell, asked by James McNeill Whistler in May 1900 to write the artist’s life, responded, ‘You are the modern Cellini and you should write it yourself’ (Pennell and Pennell 1911, 389). Dante Gabriel Rossetti relished Cellini’s Life. William Holman Hunt, like Cellini, presented himself as representative of his age and turned the creation of art into an adventure (Marcus 1989, 18–19). Swaggering, bragging, and conceited, Cellini described creating his masterpiece Perseus as a drama of achievement, struggle, and suffering, transforming his studio labour into a public spectacle. While Giorgio Vasari represented artists as heroic, Cellini presented himself as knavish and criminal, mixing picaresque, rambling structures with res gestae gossip of famous people and events. His ‘shrewd management of his artistic reputation’ and integration of the ‘technicalities of art . . . with the risks and excitements of a social strategy founded on fearless arrivisme’, reappeared, though softened, in Victorian artists’ accounts of hard work and social aspirations (Sturrock 1993, 69). However, Cellini’s theme of rivalry was anathema to Victorian artists for whom fraternity, generosity, and collegiality were necessary in a free-market economy sustained by networks. Condemned earlier in the century, Cellini’s book became ‘one of the most valuable autobiographies extant, and probably the most truthful’ (Baker 1875, 310). Margaret Oliphant’s autobiography series for Blackwood’s Magazine from 1881 began with Cellini, ‘an admirable artist . . . full of the truest

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

225 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

Victorian artists’ autobiographies

225

instinct . . . the most swaggering of gallants, the fiercest of swordsmen, the most choleric of egotists’, although not representative of all artists (Oliphant 1881, 3). John Addington Symonds acknowledged Cellini as all surface without ‘ponderings or meditative broodings’ (Cellini and Symonds 1906, I.5–8) at a time when genius combined with force of character ‘released men from the shackles of ordinary morality’ (Ibid., I.9). Royal Cortissez masculinised Cellini, ‘every inch a man’ without ‘effeminate weakness’ (Ibid., I.xxx, xi). Benjamin Robert Haydon’s autobiography (1853) also haunted Victorian artists. Haydon wrote out of great suffering: ‘Every man who has suffered for a principle and would lose his life for its success . . . has eaten the bitter crust of poverty . . . should write his own life’ (Haydon 1950, 3). Finishing his text by 1845, a year before his suicide, Haydon claimed that his ‘monumental labors’ outdid past artists, identified himself as an outsider, and attacked his enemies (Porter 1993, 171–9). Art critic Tom Taylor, who edited Haydon’s autobiography in 1853, constructed a hygienic ‘Victorian’ Haydon, eliminating anything offensive to ‘Victorian propriety’ (George 1967, 324). Victorian reconstructions of Cellini and Haydon shaped artist autobiographies that oscillated between Cellini’s braggadocio and Haydon’s depression. William Frith’s popular three-volume autobiography, My Autobiography and Reminiscences (1887–1888) and Further Reminiscences (1888) employed the genre’s characteristic narrative modes. Frith interrupted chronological narrative with digressions, anecdotes, and reminiscences of famous celebrities and his many successes, borrowing Cellini’s digressive narrative. Frith characterised the artist’s life as cyclical, contingent, capricious, and professional, but also exemplary of self-help. Highlighting his relationships with famous people while modest about his achievements, he distinguished success from genius and represented himself as respectable, never mentioning his having two families at the same time. But Frith criticised the art world. He praised collectors but condemned patrons who bought forged Old Masters that any artist could spot. Frith’s obsession with class precipitated his hostility to models. Recalling Academy banquets and pre-exhibition parties, he criticised the Academy for ignoring quality, and insisted on artists’ expertise and marketplace autonomy, characteristics of their emerging professionalism. His success became his major theme. Imitating Cellini, Frith spent one chapter on each painting in his 1850s modern life series (Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day, and The Railway Station), making much of their novelty and his long working hours. Chauvinistic and nationalistic, Frith attacked foreign

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

226

226 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

julie codell

artists, Jews, and even the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for its love of Italian art. Yet Frith was haunted by the dark side of the profession, such as mad artists and Haydon. His success narrative was disrupted by stories of failure and market volatility, exemplified by hostile public responses to his ultimately successful Ramsgate Sands, which had attacked it as vulgar and Cockney. His two narrative threads – the chronology of his life and digressive anecdotes – thematised public fickleness and market precariousness afflicting artists. Autobiographies by George Percy Jacomb-Hood (1925) and Frederick Goodall (1902), like Frith’s, were digressive career narratives. Goodall cited his every award and exhibited pictures with prices. He thematised the contingency of an artist’s life in which chance encounters with people or events led to success. His sociability earned him a suburban house built by architect Norman Shaw and a house in fashionable Regent’s Park. Yet he wrote elegiacally in ‘a melancholy retrospect’ (161), being ‘left almost alone’ (170), a common complaint in artist autobiographies published long after their successes. Jacomb-Hood remembered ‘forgotten’ artists, whose stories darkened his success narrative, returning, like Goodall, to the theme of lost fame. His hostility toward modern art was also typical of Victorian artist autobiographies. These autobiographies had a brisk market into the twentieth century. Walter Crane was asked to write his autobiography An Artist’s Reminiscences (1907) by the publisher Methuen, an indication that artist autobiographies had a ready market. Solomon Hart’s rambling Reminiscences was deemed worthy of posthumous publication in 1882, perhaps because his digressive narrative had become a conventional structure, making his unfinished memoirs appear finished. Hart’s plot was his success, tied to the community of artists, and he touched on everything from the market to madness, common tropes in artists’ autobiographies, although his mention of the anti-Semitism he suffered revealed a dark snobbery in the profession. However self-promoting, artists’ autobiographies represented an art world as sociable, jovial, and conversational. One departure closest to Haydon was William Holman Hunt’s melodramatic Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905), interpreted by his contemporaries as an attempt to claim priority as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s (PRB) founding father. Hunt mirrored the nationalistic discourse on cultural identity, ‘Vigorous, manly, and English’, between 1880 and 1920 (Dodd 1986, 6). By seamlessly blending several narrative strands – the PRB,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

227 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

Victorian artists’ autobiographies

227

the English ‘school’, and the Empire – he promoted the PRB and himself as central forces in the formation of national cultural identity, interpellating a national role for artists. In 1905 the reputation of Pre-Raphaelitism was simultaneously at its height and threatened by modernism, as British artists increasingly studied Impressionism in France. In response, in 1905 Hunt created an 1848 revolutionary, originary ‘Hunt’ to dramatise the PRB’s place in English art history and define Britishness in art, ‘the exceptional artistic genius of the race’ (Hunt 1905, I.2–3). Nineteen photogravures and seventy-five reproductions appeared in Volume I and twentyone photogravures and eighty-three reproductions in Volume II, of his and others’ work, a monumental visual record. Hunt imitated Cellini’s claim of credibility in a simple style: ‘I disclaim all pretensions to those graces of style and deft mingling of exquisitely selected words into variegated tints of meaning’ (Ibid., I.ix). While presenting a collective artistic life, Hunt was also markedly self-aggrandising, following both Cellini’s bravado and Haydon’s exaggerated suffering, and eschewing digressive anecdotes. While posturing as a rebellious outsider, Hunt claimed to have saved English art from unhealthy foreign influences. He constructed himself as the link between an imaginary community of past and future artists and emphasised artists’ public, civic, and imperial roles to nationalise, professionalise and masculinise the artist. He was emphatic about the racial origins of art; his final chapter was a paean to social Darwinism and racial identity. Jerome Bruner maintains that modern autobiographies can no longer simply draw on stock images (such as the martyr), but must impersonate values, personal myths, and fantasies (Bruner 1993, 38–56). Hunt’s Haydonesque self-fashioned suffering genius ignored by a philistine public was incoherent with his other autobiographical performances as entrepreneur and successful artist. Hunt disguised this incoherence by describing diverse artist identifies that he combined into his ‘self’: artists who died young (Seddon, Chatterton) or destitute (Haydon, Brown), or who had to compromise (Millais, Leighton) or defied popular taste (Hogarth, Rossetti). Martyr, professional, rebel, manly Englishman, businessman, and sage; in his dramatic self-representation, Hunt invented a cultural lineage of Haydon, William Blake, and other ‘rebels’ from whom, he argued, he was a descendent. More aligned with suffering martyr Haydon and masculinising Cellini than were his sociable raconteur cohorts, even radical loner Hunt filled his text with stories of his colleagues’ lives and reproductions of works by other artists, as well as his own, to present himself, however rebellious, as part of a community that embraced the canon as much as other living artists.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

228

228 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

julie codell

Just as male artists defied stereotypes of masculine autonomy, women artists also broke the mould. Their concerns with studio space, patrons, and Academy exhibition acceptance were identical to concerns of their male counterparts. But some behaviour, however identical, was more transgressive for these women who were not shy about bragging about success, behaviour that was more acceptable when men engaged in it. Most of these artists were active feminists, lobbying for education, professional opportunities, and suffrage: Anna Mary Howitt, Louise Jopling, Henrietta Ward, and Elizabeth Butler supported suffrage (Cherry, 2000). Women artists were among the most mobile women, so the static domestic plot took up little of their narratives; for example, Ward travelled long distances to paint portraits, and her artist husband then took care of the children. These women’s autobiographies had brisk markets: Howitt’s went into several editions, and Ward’s and Butler’s were published in both the United States and Britain. There was a ‘diversity of artistic identities constructed by and for women artists in the later nineteenth century . . . in their portraits and self-portraits’ (Cherry 1993, 90), and in their autobiographies, too, published into the 1920s, a time of dramatic changes in women’s professional and social opportunities when the maternal defence was no longer required for public acceptance of women’s professional ambitions. Women artists, writing autobiographies for women of the 1920s, sought to underscore their attempts to degender Victorian art-making, representing themselves as mainstream Victorian artists seeking Academy exhibitions (though barred from Academy schools), painting lucrative portraits, and building large show studios as their male cohorts did. Sublimating domesticity, they nonetheless appeared femininely dressed in their texts’ photos, a reflection of the persistent complexities of blending professionalism and femininity. Anna Mary Howitt’s two-volume An Art-Student in Munich (1853), consisting of letters she wrote while an art student in Munich, was first serialised in the press in 1850-51 before becoming a book in 1853. She hoped to refute the notion ‘that it is man who thwarts every effort of woman to rise to eminence in the life of Art’ (Howitt 1853, viii). Women artists mentioned obstacles to their progress, but often insisted that obstacles were overcome as much through men’s help as through their own individual efforts. In Germany, Howitt moved about unchaperoned, exuberant over her freedom to travel, work, and play without social restrictions. She became a flânuese, walking the streets in Munich and Bavaria, visiting artists’ studios, and enjoying unrestrained German religious festivals that aroused in her ‘a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

229 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

Victorian artists’ autobiographies

229

strange fascination’. These ended with ‘war-dances’, javelin throwing, and a frenzy of ‘beer, sausages, and cheese’ (1853, I.125–6). Structuring contiguities between art making and public festivals in her text, the carnival world mirrored her unconventional, unchaperoned travels. Both volumes ended with a synchronicity between unrestrained German festivals and her mentor Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s paintings. Abandoning the pious opening of her book and her orderly domestic arrangements, she moved into the street and the countryside, from inside to outside spaces, traveling extensively in Volume II. The indulgence and eroticism of Howitt’s pleasures in art making, with its scopophilia and picaresque freedoms, were repeated in other Victorian women artists’ autobiographies, such as Louise Jopling’s peripatetic Twenty Years of My Life, 1867 to 1887 (1925). Like her sister artists, Jopling enjoyed the freedom of a Continental art education: ‘Only abroad can a working and a domestic life be carried on simultaneously with little effort. . . . How my relations in England would have stared, and thought me little less than mad’ (Jopling 1925, 5). Her book’s frontispiece was John Everett Millais’s portrait of her, originally shown at the fashionable Grosvenor Gallery in 1880. In this and other images of ‘an elegant and assured social actor, resplendent in a magnificent gown by a Parisian couturier’ (Cherry, 2000, 155), she self-fashioned ‘an utterly respectable but nevertheless stylish professional woman’ (Cherry 1993, 89–90). Professional photographs abound in her autobiography: of her students, male cohorts, and her sketches and paintings. Her autobiography included an appendixed list of her works, listing dates and exhibition sites from 1867 to 1887, tracing her successful career. She was frank about her ambitions and insisted that she and her second husband, artist Joe Jopling, never neglected studio work, whose solitude and independence she loved. Jopling created a subplot about the authority of women artists, writers, actors, friends, and patrons. Her book’s reproductions privileged women (fourteen portraits and subject paintings) over men (one image). She praised women’s friendships and singled out Georges Sand, Queen Vashti, ‘the originator and victim of ‘Women’s Rights’ (Jopling, 1925, 32), and Charlotte Corday, murderer of the French Revolution hero Marat. Jopling identified herself with Lady Macbeth and Madame Roland, expressed open hostility to marriage as a threat to her career, although she was married three times, and praised George Eliot’s unconventional domestic arrangement. Jopling was also proud of her transgressions. Being ‘a keen suffragist, a tax resister, and in the early 1890s a successful campaigner for equal rights

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

230

230 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

julie codell

for women members of the Society of Portrait Painters’ (Cherry, 2000, 149), Jopling described her transsexual impersonation of violinist Pablo de Sarasate at a social gathering. She transgressed gendered space when she accompanied male companions into a club. She insisted on voting in the Society of Portrait Painters, which forbade women members from voting, forcing the Society to change its rule. She defended a nude male model as ‘a gentleman of the highest character’, rejecting Victorian anxieties about the moral contamination of women artists by life studies. Quoting earlier letters about her successes, prices, and acclaim allowed her to invoke multiple selves at various ages, facilitating self-promotion through an earlier voice of her successful younger self, while retaining a modest authorial persona forty years later, a common autobiographical layering. Jopling presented herself as rebellious, transgressive, and bohemian, but also successful, citing earnings, exhibition venues, commissions, and sales, while strategically calling the art market sordid. Despite her transgressions, she reconstructed her well-to-do circle of intimacies (‘Jimmy’ Whistler) and told anecdotes about the rich and famous, parties, hunts, friendship with the Rothschilds, and royal visits to her studio. More restrained than Jopling but still feminist, Henrietta Ward wrote her 1924 autobiography ‘to . . . recall past triumphs and priceless friendships of youth’ (Ward 1924, 31–42). She had family support, typical of women artist autobiographers, in an artist mother and famous artist grandfather. She called her husband, Edward, ‘the greatest influence in shaping my career, as well as the best friend I was ever blessed with’ (Ibid., 1). Her entire life was shaped by the support and advice of prominent Victorians she mentioned throughout: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Jenny Lind, and Lord Lytton. She began with a remarkable frontispiece of herself in old age at her easel, a marked difference from Jopling’s glamorous frontispiece. Reproduced art works included only three of her own works and works by husband Edward, grandfather James Ward, and other male artists, as well as pictures of prominent events or people. There were no reproductions of her most famous history paintings, for which there was no market by 1924. Ward described her husband’s achievements in detail, but only mentioned her works in passing en route to anecdotes or ghost stories through which she disguised her achievements. But comments on domestic life often segued into her professional plot. Ward bragged about her transgressions, especially her elopement against her parents’ wishes and pursuing her career after marriage. She was especially proud of her husband’s encouraging her most transgressive act,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

231 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

Victorian artists’ autobiographies

231

attending an Academy lecture. She described her liberated household: her husband refused to disturb her when she was in her studio, and she handled their business matters. Despite the paucity of her reproduced works, she spotlighted her painting of Mrs. Fry the Quaker philanthropist, ‘the forerunner of the woman of to-day who champions liberty and hope for herself and for everyone’ (Ibid., 121). Elizabeth Butler, the most famous Victorian painter of war battles, was already a published writer by the time her autobiography appeared in 1922 in London and Boston, having published books of sketches and travel narratives. Butler achieved overnight celebrity with her first painting and she detailed successes without feigned modesty. Like Ward and Jopling (and Cellini!), she expressed the erotic pleasures of art making in her adventurous life, so much so that her editor, M. E. Francis, felt obliged to hygenicise Butler, defending her against charges of ‘grossness and degeneracy’ and calling her ‘at once feminine and virile’ with ‘lofty aims’ (Butler 1922, v). This ‘cross-gendered’ Butler chronicled meetings with famous writers and artists in parties, carnivals, Italian festivals, and extensive travel, including to Egypt with her children while continuing to send pictures to the Academy from abroad. Despite having a famous sister poet and critic, Alice Meynell, Butler never mentioned her sister’s accomplishments. She presented herself as assured from the very start in several anecdotes: when told by her father that attending the Academy schools would put her into ‘a tremendous ruck of painters’, she replied ‘I will single myself out of it’ (Ibid., 14). John Ruskin, marveling at her painting Quatre Bras, called her an Amazon, which pleased her. Butler’s autobiography was about her; no other artists’ lives were cited. She was entrepreneurial and blunt about money, describing her rising prices and brisk sales, and equally blunt about her erotic attraction to the military, her husband’s physical appearance, and soldiers she sketched: ‘gorgeous officers curvetting and jingling behind me’ (Ibid., 116). Resisting gender stereotyping, Butler paraded her inability to carry on small talk and her faux pas at dinner parties that separated her from the glib frivolity associated with femininity. Estella Starr Canziani, too, felt obliged to describe herself as outside hegemonic femininity. She was intentionally unfashionable in loose fitting clothes that indicated she was artistic and serious (Canziani 1939, 12). Her autobiography, Round Three Palace Green, referred to her house in fashionable Kensington and her family’s social status. Her extraordinarily popular work The Piper of Dreams was the frontispiece. The Piper of Dreams was popular with the Tommies (Ibid., 204–5) and hung prominently at the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

232

232 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

julie codell

Academy. A demand for 1,500 reprints came from Cairo, India, and France, and 250,000 prints sold in the first year. Canziani incorporated a biography of her mother, Louisa Starr, who came to London at fourteen to study and broke through the Academy’s gender barrier, a feminist genealogy and matriarchy. Canziani, too, enjoyed early success and recounted Academy events and parties with as much gusto as male artists. Filled with digressions, free associations, multiple identities, contradictory selves, anecdotes, and intersecting lives, Victorian artists’ autobiographies were highly performative and recast their historical community into a virtual community in texts published twenty to forty years after their careers ended. Cellini’s text offered a digressive and exaggerated performativity of masquerades, contradictions, and transgressions. Victorian artists inhabited conflicting identities: suffering artists could be clever businessmen (Hunt), and women could enter men’s worlds and be braggarts. Bohemian moments were playfully indulged by Victorian artists who worked hard to appear respectable in public, unlike their more Bohemian French contemporaries. Autobiography offered artists unrestrained expression in the postVictorian or late-Victorian eras, freed from the social restraints that once determined their careers. Modern readers were more accepting of transgressivity for women artists. The res gestae mode mediated these forces by emphasising their successes and underscoring their sociality. Anecdotes and gossip served profound purposes ‘to imagine an alternate life story, to resist cultural stereotypes and construct another self’. Gossip ‘reveals . . . irrational, erotic motivations’ (Peterson 1986, 185–6). Goodall referred to his digressions as ‘promiscuous’, aware that digression was indulgent, erotic, and disorderly (Goodall 1902, 38). Signifying a privileged access to knowledge, gossip re-instated them at the re-imagined cultural centre they no longer physically inhabited. It reinforced the autobiographer as a social being, an especially piquant issue in light of late-nineteenth-century popular (and still resonant) cultural stereotypes of artists as anti-social degenerates and bohemian loners. Sissela Bok notes that gossip can construct a makeshift hierarchy to become a tool of power, the gossiper having often intimate knowledge for which others are beholden. In autobiographies the contradictions and fragilities of artistic life were mollified by the sociality of gossip, transforming economic contingencies and market competition into social networks of parity between artists and patrons and between female and male artists. Juxtapositions and contiguities created by digression presented a utopian decentred system that operated outside restricted lived social systems

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

233 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

Victorian artists’ autobiographies

233

of organisation, and thus empowered artists to brag and underline the pleasures of their lives, despite the ghosts of failure and suicide among their numbers. While their successes had already occurred, through autobiographies they could resist narrative closures of slumped markets or cohorts’ deaths. They balanced the erotics of success and professional transgressions with conventional autobiographical topics: family genealogies, local geographies, and emphases on labour and self-help. Considered within the degeneracy discourse of the late nineteenth century in which artists were condemned, themes of self-help and genealogy presented artists as healthy, well-bred, normal, and English, constituting the ‘family’s sense of the stability and the “cleanness” of its ethnic composition, its maintenance of or “improvement” in social class’ (Watson 1996, 307), to anchor their worldliness, digressions, bragging, transgressions, and amnesia. Victorian artists chose to display congenial sociality and bury tensions with patrons and critics, a strategy that guaranteed successful careers through compliance with the social order then and popular autobiographies later. Even women’s transgressions were carried out in most cases with male collaboration and in line with the decorum of professionalism, despite their challenges to hegemonic femininity and institutional authority.

Notes This chapter is a revision of chapter three, “Artists’ Autobiographies: Cellini, Res Gestae, Jouissance, and the Collective Life,” from Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist, rev. ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 117-71, © Julie F. Codell 2003. Reprinted with permission. 1 As early as the middle of the century artists wrote mini-autobiographies for the press. Their lives followed a pattern: education at Sass’s Academy and Royal Academy schools, Academy and professional society membership, portrait painting, networks of patrons, success, purchases of works by the Crown, and engravings of their popular paintings. 2 Studies of women artists appear in: Cherry 1993; Casteras and Peterson 1994; Marsh and Nunn 1989 and 1997; Nunn 1987; Codell, 2012, Gillett 1989. Studies of William Holman Hunt’s autobiography are Pointon 1989; Marcus 1989; Codell 1996; Bronkhurst 1984. 3 Wayne Shumaker 1954, 61, considers several artist autobiographies as examples of res gestae. 4 On Neumann’s work, see Helga Schwalm 2014. 5 See Boone 1994, 54. 6 See Martin Danahay 1993 on the autonomous male autobiographer. Estelle Jelinek 1980, 7–8, argues that women’s autobiographies do not mirror historical periods but focus on family and friends.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

234

234 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

julie codell

Bibliography Baker, Henry. 1875. ‘Benvenuto Cellini’, Temple Bar 43, 315–7. Bok, Sissela. 1982. Secrets. New York: Pantheon. Boone, Elizabeth. 1994. ‘Aztec Pictorial Histories’. In Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, 50–76. Edited by Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo. Durham: Duke University Press. Bronkhurst, Judith. 1984. ‘An interesting series of adventures to look back upon’. In The Pre-Raphaelite Papers, 111–25. Edited by Leslie Parris. London: Tate Gallery. Bruner, Jerome. 1993. ‘The Autobiographical Process’. In The Culture of Autobiography, 38–56. Edited by Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Elizabeth. 1922. An Autobiography London: Constable. Canziani, Estella. 1939. Round Three Palace Green. London: Methuen. Casteras, Susan and Linda Peterson. 1994. A Struggle for Fame: Victorian Women Artists and Authors. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art. Cellini, Benvenuto. 1906. The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Written by Himself. Edited and translated by J. A. Symonds. Intro. Royal Cortissoz. 2 vols. New York: Brentano’s. Cherry, Deborah. 1993. Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists. London: Routledge. Cherry, Deborah. 2000. Beyond the Frame: Feminism and the Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Codell, Julie. 2012. The Victorian Artist. Rev. edn. New York: Cambridge University Press. Codell, Julie F. 1996. ‘The artist colonized’. In Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites, 211–29. Edited by Ellen Harding. Aldershot: Scolar. Crane, Walter. 1907. An Artist’s Reminiscences. London: Methuen. Danahay, Martin. 1993. The Community of One. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dodd, Philip. 1986. ‘Englishness and the National Culture’. In Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, 1–28. Edited by. R. Colls and P. Dodd. London: Broom Helm. Eakin, John Paul. 1992. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fleishmann, Avrom. 1983. Figures of Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frith, William. 1887–8. My Autobiography and Reminiscences. 3 vols. Volume 3: Further Reminiscences. London: R. Bentley. George, Eric. 1967. The Life and Death of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

235 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

Victorian artists’ autobiographies

235

Gillett, Paula. 1989. Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Goodall, Frederick. 1902. The Reminiscences of Frederick Goodall. London: Walter Scott. Hart, Solomon A. 1882. The Reminiscences of Solomon Alex Hart, R. A. Edited by Alexander Brodie. London: Wyman. Haydon, Benjamin Robert. 1950. The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Edited by Malcolm Elwin. London: Macdonald. Haydon, Frederic Wordsworth. 1876. Benjamin Robert Haydon. 2 vols. London: Chatto and Windus. Hogarth, William. 1970. Anecdotes of William Hogarth Written by Himself. Edited by R. W. Lightbown. London: Cornmarket Press. Howitt, Anna Mary. 1853. An Art-Student in Munich. 2 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Hunt, William Holman. 1905. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Jacob-Hood, George Percy. 1925. With Brush and Pencil. 2 vols. London: J. Murray. Jelinek, Estelle. 1980. Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jopling, Louise. 1925. Twenty Years of my Life, 1867–1887. London: John Lane; New York: Dodd, Mead. Machann, Clinton. 1994. The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Marcus, Laura. 1989. ‘Brothers in their anecdotage’. In Pre-Raphaelites Reviewed, 11–21. Edited by M. Pointon. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marsh, Jan and P. Nunn. 1989. Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. London: Virago. Marsh, Jan and P. Nunn. 1997. Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists. Manchester: Manchester City Art Galleries. Martineau, Harriet. 1877. Autobiography, 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Nunn, Pamela. 1987. Victorian Women Artists. London: The Women’s Press. Nussbaum, Felicity. 1989. The Autobiographical Subject. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Oliphant, Margaret. 1881. ‘Cellini’. Blackwood’s Magazine 129: 3–30. Pennell, E. R. and J. Pennell. 1911. The Life of James McNeill Whistler. New and rev. edn. London: William Heinemann. Peterson, Linda. 1990. ‘Harriet Martineau: Masculine Discourse, Female Sage’. In Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse, 171–86. Edited by T. Morgan. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Peterson, Linda. 1986. Victorian Autobiography. New Haven: Yale University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C16.3D

236

236 [221–236] 20.10.2015 7:34PM

julie codell

Pointon, Marcia. 1989. ‘The artist as ethnographer’. In Pre-Raphaelites Reviewed, 23–44. Edited by Marcia Pointon. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pomerleau, Cynthia S. 1980. ‘The Emergence of Women’s Autobiography in England’. In Women’s Autobiography, 21–38. Edited by Estelle Jelinek. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Porter, Roger J. 1993. ‘In me the solitary sublimity’. In The Culture of Autobiography, 171–9. Edited by Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schwalm, Helga. 2014. ‘Autobiography’. In The Living Handbook of Narratology. www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/autobiography – Neumann (accessed 3 February 2015). Shumaker, Wayne. 1954. English Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, William Bell. 1892. Autobiographical Notes. New York: Harper. Sturrock, John. 1993. The Language of Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Symonds, J. A. 1887. ‘Benvenuto Cellini’s Character’. Fortnightly Review 47.41: 73–87. Taylor, Tom, ed. 1853. Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon. 3 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. Ward, Henrietta Mary Ada. 1924. Memories of ninety years. Edited by Isabel McAllister. London: Hutchinson. Watson, Julia. 1993. ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Autobiography’. In The Culture of Autobiography, 57–79. Edited by Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Watson, Julia. 1996. ‘Ordering the family’. In Getting A Life, 297–323. Edited by S. Smith and J. Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

237 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

chapter 17

Victorian print culture Periodicals and serial lives, 1830–1860 Stephen Colclough

In 1855, The Leisure Hour introduced several columns of extracts from the autobiography of the ‘American merchant’ Vincent Nolte by stating that ‘it may be taken as a rule, that all the world delights in a genuine autobiography’ (‘Passages’ 1855, 107). This weekly penny magazine was just one amongst the many newspapers and periodicals launched between 1830 and 1855 that were aimed at a new ‘mass’ audience of working- and lowermiddle-class readers. The success of the so-called unstamped press during the 1820s had shown that it was possible for cheap newspapers and magazines retailing at between 1d and 3d to attract large audiences.1 The radical tone of much of the ‘unstamped’ led to the foundation of titles which aimed to give readers an alternative to political radicalism, such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832–1956) and the Penny Magazine (1832–1845), the latter funded by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK). These new titles regularly achieved circulations of more than 50,000 copies per week, although they were just as likely to end up in the homes of the middle class as on the tables of the working-class audience that they initially aimed to reach. By the late 1840s a new range of penny miscellanies, including The Family Herald (1843–1940), The London Journal (1845–1906), and Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846–1869), had entered the marketplace for popular print. These titles blended illustrated fiction with short articles on a range of subjects and ‘answers to correspondents’ questions’ with astonishing success. Indeed, as Andrew King has argued, if Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853–1932) is added to this list, the four most popular penny fiction weeklies were reaching ‘at least 50 per cent of the population of Britain’ by the mid 1850s (King 2008, 54). Various forms of life writing could regularly be found in these cheap publications. Some, including the ‘Chapter in the Life of a Poor Man’ that appeared in Chambers’s Journal in 1841, were specially commissioned, but it was much more common for extensive passages from autobiographies to be 237

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

238

238 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

stephen colclough

reproduced as part of a review, or as an article that consisted of an abridgement of an existing (sometimes out of copyright) work. Such rewriting was often very creative. Chambers’s Journal, for example, used long extracts from the recently published Working-Man’s Way in the World: Being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer (1853) to declare the importance of autobiography as a genre: It is a theory of ours that the history of any individual whatever, high or low, rich or poor, if related with frankness and intelligence, would be found not merely interesting, but exciting to his fellow-men. (‘Story’ 1853, 216)

Although this article consists almost entirely of quotations from the original, it was radically reframed; the printer’s life is now the ‘story’ of the government ‘blue books’ that he produced. Such instances of the creative rewriting of autobiography in the cheap press has been surprisingly neglected in recent accounts of Victorian life-writing (Amigoni 2006). Chambers’s Journal, which first appeared in February 1832, was one of several titles launched in the early 1830s in order to give working-class readers an alternative to the ‘unstamped’. In declaring that it would provide ‘a meal of healthful, useful and agreeable instruction’ at a price (1½d) suited to an audience with an ‘appetite for instruction’, the first editorial was optimistic about the cultural advancement of the working classes (Chambers’s 1832). But as Aileen Fyfe has noted, it was also openly critical of ‘those charitable organisations’ such as the SDUK that ‘claimed to diffuse knowledge’ (Fyfe 2012, 22). The SDUK’s illustrated Penny Magazine, a joint project with the publisher Charles Knight, began publication in March 1832. Both Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Journal were immediately successful, claiming circulations of 200,000 and 50,000 copies per week respectively soon after publication (Ibid., 24). These magazines carried articles that chimed with the contemporary desire to provide the poorer classes with ‘useful knowledge’. Amongst articles on practical subjects such as the railways and printing, Chambers’s Journal also ran a series of biographical sketches that included summaries of the lives of Richard Arkwright and Isaac Newton. Similarly, the Penny Magazine regularly contained short biographies. Scott Bennett’s sample of a quarter of the total output of the Penny Magazine notes that 5.5 per cent of the total number of articles were on ‘modern biography’, making it one of the Magazine’s most popular subjects (Bennett 1984, 139). In September 1837 it gave front-page coverage to the annual award of the French ‘Public Reward of Merit’, which combined a biography of the award’s founder with news of the successful publication in France of ‘a cheap rate’ monthly

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

239 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

Victorian print culture

239

publication consisting of memoirs ‘of men who have benefited mankind’. The article, which imitates the French periodical by including two portraits, concludes that the widespread distribution of such lives will produce a ‘reverence’ for that ‘which is excellent in the human mind’, especially amongst ‘peasants’ and ‘artizans’ (‘Moynton’ 1837). This article makes explicit that the editors of these cheap periodicals intended the reproduction of exemplary male lives to inculcate good behaviour amongst their target audience. The Magazine’s suggestion that such portraits should be pasted on the walls in working-class homes to remind the inhabitants to fix ‘their attention upon a higher standard of existence’ may have encouraged the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star (1837–1851) into a radical retort by issuing its own portraits of Chartist leaders (Chase 2005). The ‘biographical sketches’ included in the magazines were sometimes created by cannibalising existing autobiographies to produce a new article, or took the form of reviews of recently published memoirs. In November 1836, for example, the Penny Magazine began to serialise the life of the bookseller and stationer William Hutton (b. 1723), which had just come out of copyright. The frequent editorial interventions into Hutton’s narrative serve to frame his life as a ‘shining example’ of a ‘strong-minded man’ who ‘fought his way up to wealth’ (‘Hutton’s Life’ 1836, 446). However, the autobiographical voices brought into the cheap periodicals via these reworkings were not just those of great British men. The ‘biographical sketch’ of the ‘new world’ naturalist J. J. Audubon, which appeared in Chambers’s Journal in December 1832, was based on the autobiographical ‘memoir’ that prefaced the first volume of his Ornithological Biography (1831–1838). It was framed as being of particular relevance to the magazine’s ‘young readers’, who might learn from it not to give in to ‘despondency, whatever may be the nature of the difficulties’ encountered ‘in their progress through life’, but the idea that this is an ‘exemplary’ workingclass life soon breaks down and Audubon’s tale of the successful publication of his work via the joint efforts of Scottish and English printers ends as a celebration of Scotland’s role within a united ‘British’ print culture: ‘You may easily see, good-natured reader, that to Britain I owe nearly all my success’ (‘Biographic’ 1832). If these early popular magazines often feel like peculiarly masculine spaces, book reviews at least offered access to extracts from life-writing by women, if only in a mediated form. Chambers’s review of Elizabeth Rigby’s anonymously published A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic Described in a Series of Letters (1841), for example, described the ‘lively, chatty’ style of this work as evidence enough that it was the work of ‘a lady’. However, once the gender of the author was established the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

240

240 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

stephen colclough

extracts reproduced focus on the ‘ludicrous’ national characteristics of the Estonians rather than the female experience of travel (‘Letters’ 1841). Working-class life-writing was of particular interest to the reviewers of the cheap magazines, primarily because of the expectation that at least part of their audience would consist of the literate artisan class. Chambers’s Journal used its review of Christopher Thomson’s Autobiography of an Artisan (1847) to reiterate the journal’s enthusiasm for working-class autobiography: ‘we can hardly conceive anything more interesting than a genuine account of the fortunes of a working man, written in the plain matter-of-fact style of his class’ (‘Life’ 1848, 13). In February 1844, the Journal reviewed William Howitt’s translation of P. D. Holthaus’s Wanderings of a Journeyman Tailor Through Europe and the East During the Years 1824 to 1840 (1844) in tandem with Poems by John Nicholson the Airedale Poet, (1844) which contained a ‘sketch of his life’ by John James. The recollections of a German tailor who, in Howitt’s phrase ‘literally’ sewed ‘his way from continent to continent’, was widely reviewed in 1844, making him a familiar figure to magazine readers of all classes.2 If the reviewer for Chambers’s Journal seems to worry little about Holthaus’s refusal to settle down ‘as a quiet, home staying citizen’, the overview of Nicholson’s life appears overly concerned with his inability to ‘adopt patient habits of industry’ (‘Wanderings’ 1844; ‘Nicholson’, 1844). Because these magazines often wanted working-class writers to set a good example to other readers from the same class, those that appeared to disobey these demands were condemned. The reviewer for Chambers’s judged Thomson’s style too ‘flippant’, and his morality in having married when unemployed ‘objectionable’. Indeed, Thomson is berated for not having acknowledged that it is ‘such errors’ that lead ‘too many of his class’ to live in ‘irretrievable poverty’ (‘Life’ 1848, 13). This reframing of Thomson’s autobiography ignores both the original work’s dedication ‘to the Artisans and Labourers of England, Fellow workers in the holy cause of Self Elevation’, and the suggestion in the preface that in order to succeed on the ‘road to learning and domestic comfort’ these workers must learn from his mistakes (Thomson 1847, vi-vii). This suggests that the very issues that the reviewer wanted to see in Thomson’s Autobiography were actually present in the original work. Thomson’s work was typical of the working-class autobiographies published in the mid nineteenth century, which shared a ‘concern for moral values and a common didactic purpose’, and in this instance Chambers’s Journal acted as a site in which the ideology of ‘Self Elevation’ was reproduced (Vincent 1982, 17).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

241 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

Victorian print culture

241

Although these magazines mainly reproduced passages from contemporary life-writing in reviews, both Knight’s publications and Chambers’s Journal provided some space for original autobiographical writing by working-class men. ‘The Experience of an Educated Artisan’ by an anonymous ‘Correspondent’ that appeared in the Penny Magazine in 1838 was used to put a very positive spin on the idea of ‘useful knowledge’. It seems designed both to refute the frequent satirical attacks upon the ‘the march of intellect’, which mocked the intellectual aspirations of the working class, and to reassure the audience that such attainments would not ‘indispose the labouring classes for their necessary work’ (‘Experience’ 1838, 131). That the artisan heartily recommends the sites of working-class reading that Brian Maidment identifies as subject to attack in contemporary graphic satire suggests that this article may well have served as further grist to the satirist’s mill (Maidment 2013, 177–208). However, that the artisan is allowed to provide a genuinely radical critique of the current state of the political system, in a passage which it is acknowledged ‘may appear wild and dangerous’ for a ‘working man to entertain’, indicates that it was not always easy to make such voices conform. The artisan ends with the declaration that his reading of history has taught him the superiority of ‘moral power’ over ‘physical force’ when it comes to reform, but it is perhaps not surprising to find that this article is followed by a paragraph by Sir Thomas Bernard on how the mutually supportive relationship between ‘rich and poor’ is theologically determined and cannot therefore be changed (‘Relative’ 1838). This sort of dialogic relationship between texts reproduced on the same page is another way in which the cheap periodical press should be considered as a unique site in the construction of autobiographical discourse and meaning. The editorial strategy of the Penny Magazine in this instance was clearly designed to undermine the artisan’s radicalism, but the voice of ‘A Chapter in the Life of a Poor Man’, which appeared in Chambers’s Journal in December 1841, proves equally difficult to contain, despite being in a dialogic context in which it becomes one ‘biographic’ voice amongst the many. Described in a framing paragraph as ‘written at [the] request’ of the Journal by ‘one of the depressed class of [Scottish] hand-loom weavers’, the final paragraph reveals the author to be William Thom, who went on to recycle some of this material in his Rhymes and Recollections of a HandLoom Weaver (‘Chapter’ 1841). As poet and memoirist, Thom occupied the two forms that Carolyn Steedman has identified as most likely to get a working-class man into print (Steedman 2013, 9). However, shorn of the description of origins that usually forms the opening paragraphs of a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

242

242 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

stephen colclough

working-class memoir, Thom’s ‘chapter’ proves a remarkably candid discussion of the effects of unemployment on a family at first displaced by industrial change and then made homeless. Although the closing frame paragraph reassures the Journal’s readers that Thom is a ‘man of modest and virtuous character’, Thom’s description of feelings of ‘indignation’ rather than ‘sorrow’ at his family’s sufferings (which included the death of his youngest daughter) contain a politically radical edge that this editorial intervention fails to negate. Thom’s later poems are often more explicitly political in their condemnation of tyranny and demands for workers’ rights, so it is all the more remarkable that he should find a voice within a magazine with a circulation of at least 50,000 copies that was designed to steer artisan readers away from political action. In the 1840s a number of publishers modified the style of Chambers’s Journal in order to produce a variety of cheap magazines that ‘sought to offer a cultural, philosophical, literary and possibly even a political and ideological alliance between progressive elements within bourgeois culture and intellectually ambitious sections of the artisan class’ (Maidment 2001, 108). Aimed specially at artisans, they included weeklies such as Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress (1847–1849), The People’s Journal (1846–1849), The People’s and Howitt’s Journal (1849–1851), and Eliza Cook’s Journal (1849–1854), and monthlies such as Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832–1861). One of their defining characteristics was that they allowed artisan writers who were not full-time journalists to contribute. In March 1850, The Working-Man’s Friend included ‘A working-Man’s Experience’ by ‘A Self Reformer’, and the following month’s ‘Supplement’ consisted entirely of working-class writing. Between October 1856 and May 1857 The Commonwealth included seven pieces of autobiographical writing by men who were identified by their trade. That of ‘the Journeyman Baker’ was spread over three issues (Griffin 2013, 290). Some even appeared in regular instalments, much like serialised fiction. Charles Manby Smith’s anonymously published ‘Working-Man’s Way in the World’ appeared in Tait’s between March 1851 and May 1852. Charles Knight increasingly adopted innovative modes of publishing such work in the 1840s. In 1846, Knight’s Penny Magazine included ‘A Working Man’s Recollection of America’, which detailed an English cabinet maker’s emigration in the mid 1820s in extensive detail (‘Working’ 1846). He also reproduced the well-known Memoirs of a Working Man by the cabinet maker Thomas Carter in book form as one of his cheap ‘Weekly Volumes’. Although historians have often mined such autobiographies for evidence of how working-class men reacted to the industrial revolution, it is worth remembering that each

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

243 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

Victorian print culture

243

was called into being and shaped by a specific publishing context. The manipulation of working-class autobiography for ideological ends during this period was sometimes explicit. The ‘Autobiography of a Girl-Thief’, which appeared in The Ragged School Union Magazine in January 1854, was produced in order to advocate for a ‘reformatory school’ system like that found in America. In the 1840s and 1850s a series of new penny weeklies emerged. In 1859 one Review joked that if the Family Herald was the paterfamilias of the penny weeklies, the Guide to Literature and Welcome Guest were ‘the twin Todlikins’, having been born only the year before (‘Cheap’ 1859, 329). Recent work has argued that although it was the combination of fiction and illustration that captured the attention of contemporary middleclass commentators, such as Wilkie Collins, the penny weeklies actually offered their audiences a rather more diverse reading experience (King 2004; Humpherys and James 2008). Indeed, as the use of ‘miscellany’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany and several other titles suggests, the socially diverse audience who spent a penny per week on these magazines wanted variety for their penny. During his editorship of the London Journal, G. W. M. Reynolds came up with a formula which, by combining illustrations with fiction, ‘an educational piece, one on history, or a biography of a model figure’ and ‘a page of answers to correspondents’, attracted an ‘audience of lower-middle-class and working-class readers’ (Humpherys 1983, 80). Reynolds’s own Miscellany is often considered as a more politically radical publication than the other penny weeklies, especially after 1848 when he became connected with Chartist activism, but the Miscellany’s illustrated ‘memoirs of celebrated characters’, such as Richard Arkwright, often seem to echo the magazines of the previous generation, although the introduction of the lives of actresses whose ‘form and features’ ‘please the eye’ is an innovation (‘Richard Arkwright’ 1850; ‘Amy Sedgwick’ 1858). Autobiography often came in the form of extracts from the same recent publications reviewed in other cheap titles. Circulation figures are difficult to reconstruct with any certainty, but the London Journal’s own suggestion that it had a circulation of about 140,000 copies in June 1847 is probably accurate. The appearance of serialised biographies and autobiographies was as important to the rapid increase in sales of this magazine after 1846 as fiction (King 2004, 82–9). The London’s serialisation of the ‘Memoir of the Life and Times of Daniel O’Connell’, the Irish nationalist leader known as ‘the Liberator’, overlapped with the ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

244

244 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

stephen colclough

Slave’ in the summer of 1847. The ‘Memoir’, a biographical account published shortly after O’Connell’s death, included lengthy extracts from his speeches. However, as the pause to explain the history of England’s ‘oppression and cruelty’ towards Ireland in the third instalment suggests, life-writing was used to produce a coded political discourse within the otherwise apolitical London Journal. During 1846 Douglass’s presence in Great Britain was widely documented in periodicals such as The AntiSlavery Reporter, which also made copies of his autobiography available from its offices. Short extracts from an Irish edition of Douglass’s life were included in Chambers’s Journal in January 1846 (‘Narrative’ 1846). The London’s later serialisation was still topical, however, because its ‘copious extracts’ from a new edition appeared shortly after an account of the racism that Douglass had suffered on his passage home was reproduced in several newspapers (‘Narrative’ 1847, 294). Although Chambers’s account concentrates on Douglass’s acquisition of the skills of literacy, which makes the Narrative chime with the British working-class autobiographical tradition, it still provides room for his critique of a ‘religious master’ as the worst kind of slaveholder, although with some apology. Although there is also some account of the violence meted out to slaves in the form of whippings in this version of Douglass’s story, the London didn’t flinch from including his account of two slaves murdered by their masters. Although neither included the framing letters from anti-slavery activists that authenticated Douglass’s account in the original, both Chambers’s Journal and the London chose not to let Douglass speak entirely for himself. As Sarah Meer has argued, Douglass’s Narrative was frequently re-written by white authors who chose to emphasise certain details within his story. Chambers’s emphasis on ‘the strength’ of Douglass’s mother’s ‘maternal feelings’ prefigures a similar move in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s commentary on the Narrative, but has little to support it in Douglass’s original (Meer 1995, 91). The London’s version is radically different in the organisation of the events of Douglass’s life, perhaps because it was not initially envisaged as a serial. During the 1850s some titles came into being not to make a profit, but to draw readers away from the most popular titles. The Leisure Hour was launched by the Religious Tract Society (RTS) in 1852 in order to wean the masses away from the fiction ‘of Mr Reynolds and Mr J. F. Smith’ (‘Pure’ 1856). Like the other penny journals, The Leisure Hour provided a space for autobiography, especially in the form of reviews and extended extracts. In February 1855, for example, it lifted several long passages from the autobiography of Vincent Nolte, having prefaced them with the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

245 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

Victorian print culture

245

statement ‘all the world delights in a genuine autobiography’ (‘Passages’ 1855, 107). However, the penny miscellanies also provided space for fake autobiographies in form of ‘it-narratives’, a form also discussed by Lynn Festa in Chapter 10 of the present volume. It was Douglas Jerrold’s Life of a Feather (1843) that revived this form of ‘fictional autobiography in which a thing traces its travels among a series of richer and poorer owners’ (Price 2011, 106). A review of J. B. Webb’s The Autobiography of a Five-Pound Note (1853) suggests something of this form’s popularity. It argued that although ‘the form is tried again and again’, most versions of the ‘still life’ were not as successful as Jerrold’s (Athenaeum 1853). As a form, the itnarrative was well-suited to the Leisure Hour’s educative function. The opening paragraph of ‘The Autobiography of a Shilling’, for example, mimics the setting out of the details of honest origins so often used in the ‘written by himself’ tradition of humble autobiography. The precise period of my birth has never been satisfactorily ascertained, and indeed, whether I had parents at all has been doubted by some who are reputed to be well informed upon the subject. (‘Autobiography’ 1852, 163)

The coin recounts its ‘life’ from first being a lump of silver discovered in South America in ‘the middle of the sixteenth century’ through to its present-day circulation in ‘the British metropolis’, but the main focus of the piece is not this circulation but the mechanical processes of reproduction in the mint. This autobiographical it-narrative thus fits into a tradition of writing for the working class that takes delight in the industrial processes associated with modernity. The frequent tours of factories in the Penny Magazine were clearly designed to educate workers in the processes of the new industrial economy, as well as opening up these spaces to middle-class investigation. Indeed, Chambers’s Journal had included one such narrative in 1837, in which the narrator is challenged to compose ‘the autobiography of a log of wood’ and traces the origins of a tree trunk currently resting on the shore at Leith back to the banks of the Miramichi where it was felled. The sense of regret that the log expresses about its removal from its native soil, along with its anger at the state of its ‘mutilated companions’, gives this it-narrative a disturbing air that is not entirely resolved by the narrator’s conclusion that the log’s transformation into a ship’s mast will at last make it ‘useful’ (‘Story’ 1837). Similarly, although the voice of ‘The Autobiography of a Shilling’ claims that ‘space forbids’ any in-depth discussion of circulation, the list of the various situations in which it has been exchanged suggests a dangerous world full of poverty and desperation (‘I have . . . been bedewed with the tears of the needlewoman who received

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

246

246 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

stephen colclough

me as the pittance which competition doled out to her for her labour, her nerve, her very life’) that the coin’s final ‘moralizing’ words (‘unless I am come honestly by, I never in the end do good’) fail to dispel. The author of the later ‘Autobiography of a Turtle’ managed to steer clear of such potentially controversial material, but the moralising voice of the ‘Autobiography of a City Pump’ praises the ‘labourer and the poor pedestrian’ who ‘make a legitimate use of my fountain and are grateful for it’ in order to stage a critique of those who do nothing to counteract the threat of ‘gin-shops, which thrive by’ the people’s ‘ruin’ (‘Autobiography’ 1858; ‘Autobiography’ 1859). The author of this piece clearly enjoyed the freedom to criticise the traditional autobiographical form that the ‘still life’ subgenre allows. After jokily noting that it literally cannot shut its mouth, the pump promises that its story will combine ‘the strictest veracity’ with ‘a little decent reserve’ that, if copied by ‘all autobiographers’, would make ‘such histories’ more edifying. In 1855 another edifying autobiography of an object, ‘The Story of a Pocket Bible’, was serialised in The Sunday at Home, a periodical launched by the RTS in 1854. The Bible passes through nineteen hands, and as Leah Price has suggested, ‘every step has violence and theft for its mechanisms, death and bankruptcy for its catalysts’ (Price 2011, 112). Despite the recognition of a politically violent world (its adventures include being trampled underfoot by striking workmen), the Bible’s tale is used to encourage a conservative ideology of obedience in the working-class readers targeted by this magazine. For example, a domestic servant’s snatched reading of the book, now owned and neglected by her master, is used to condemn her ‘improper’ removal of the book from the shelf: ‘I had something to say to servants. “Servants”, I said, “obey in all things your masters”’ (‘Story’ 1855, 177). Perhaps not surprisingly, Reynolds’s Miscellany used the it-narrative for more obviously radical ends, including the disruption of this idea of the domestic servant’s unquestioning obedience to an employer. The hat ‘born in Hertfordshire’ that narrates Leopold Wray’s ‘The Autobiography of a Straw Bonnet’ recalls the abuse meted out to milliners and domestic servants alike while exposing the petty jealousies and romantic intrigues of its wealthier owners. The ‘fudge and hypocrisy’ of the wealthy bourgeoisie is held up to particular criticism in the narrative of the bonnet’s fourth wearer, the governess Amelia Watson. Watson is unfairly dismissed from her post after helping the scullery maid provide food for her injured father, only to find herself back in favour when it is revealed that she has a wealthy godfather who promises to provide new employment for both women. This fantasy of working-class revenge

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

247 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

Victorian print culture

247

against uncaring and exploitative employers concludes with the recollection of the bonnet’s own ‘happy and contented’ old age as a child’s hat in the village where it was ‘born’ (Wray 1855, 91, 92). ‘The Autobiography’ is illustrated with a woodcut of rural contentment that is very much at odds with the narratives of exploitation that it contains, but the tales associated with Reynolds’s Miscellany in this period often organise ‘utopian aspirations into compelling and accessible fantasies’ (Rosenman 2008, 214). Of course, the bonnet cannot suffer the stigma of illegitimacy so often borne by the characters which appear in fiction by Reynolds and the other contributors to his publications. The mother of Mary in Reynolds’s Mary Price, or the Memoirs of a Servant-Maid, for example, was the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat. Published in penny instalments between 1851 and 1853, Mary Price was the first of four fictionalised autobiographical narratives of working-class life published by Reynolds’s in the 1850s (Law 2008). Mary Price is unique among them, however, for having been in part constructed from the ‘memoirs’ of actual servants who responded to Reynolds’s advertisements which requested that ‘servants who have special grievances to complain of’ should send ‘the particulars to Mr Reynolds, who will render the information available in the working out of his story’.3 Although it is impossible to tell which parts (if any) were constructed from actual autobiographical testimony, Reynolds reassured his readers that ‘an immense number of letters’ from domestic servants had indeed been received.4 Reynolds’s campaign to ‘shame those families who acted despotically towards their servants’ was constructed across his publications, including Reynolds’s Newspaper, which carried tales of ill treatment and brutality (Rosenman 2008, 252). After appearing in penny numbers, Mary Price had a significant afterlife as both a cheap novel and stage-play (Law 2008, 202). Working-class testimony about the shameful behaviour of their supposed superiors, whether in the form of novelised letters or the imagined autobiography of a straw hat, was thus worked into the fabric of the popular print culture of the 1850s and 1860s. In March 1845 Chambers’s Journal included an article on ‘the columns daily devoted to advertisements’ in The Times (‘Advertisements’ 1845). However, it was not the advertisements for products and services that intrigued the author, but those placed by individuals. Victorian readers were particularly intrigued by what Punch called ‘the history of a miserable life’ related in a ‘dozen lines’ (‘Our Wants’ 1842). The ‘second column’ became known as the ‘agony column’ in the 1860s, and Matthew Rubery has suggested that these personal advertisements could be read like an epistolary novel that appeared one passage at a time (Rubery 2009, 51–2).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

248

248 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

stephen colclough

However, the author of the Journal article was particularly intrigued by those advertisers who really did summarise their life in a ‘dozen lines’ in an attempt either to appeal to the charitable impulses of readers, or in order to acquire a job. The ‘fourth and fifth column’ of The Times, in which advertisements for ‘situations wanted’ appeared, was thus home to an innovative form of ‘little autobiography’ in which the advertiser needed to produce a summary of his or her career thus far while maintaining the appearance of an ‘“unexceptionable” character’ (‘Advertisements’ 1845, 260). The ‘little autobiography’ could be found in numerous places in the magazines and newspapers of the 1850s. Perhaps the strangest (certainly the smallest) form was found in the ‘Notices to Correspondents’ sections of the penny weeklies. These columns consisted almost entirely of the editor’s answers to questions sent in by readers who were identified by a signature or pseudonym. They were immensely popular. When Reynolds’s Miscellany was launched in 1846, the ‘Notice to Correspondents’ section occupied just two columns, but by 1849 it was several pages in length. Reynolds’s answers often took a biographical shape that must have been constructed from the autobiographical notes supplied by the correspondent. In December 1849, for example, the correspondent E. H. B. was told that the autobiographical notes provided proved that his father had ‘committed bigamy’ and that he or she was ‘consequently illegitimate’ (quoted in Humpherys 1983, 87). Even though the letters which had prompted these replies always remained unpublished, it is legitimate to assume that the correspondents knew that they were involved in a form of autobiographical writing in which their own words would be worked over by the editor and re-inscribed in the ‘Notices’ column. As an advertisement for the Family Herald which regularly appeared in Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory between 1867 and 1900 indicated, readers were encouraged to assume that ‘a romance and a life history’ was ‘embodied in almost’ every answer. Teresa Gerrard has used these columns to identify the cultural diet of the ‘common readers’ that bought the penny weeklies, but they were clearly also a space in which these same readers could enjoy the pleasure of seeing their own ‘life history’ reproduced (Gerrard 1998). The popular print culture of the mid nineteenth century offered an innovative space for many new forms of life-writing, from the earnest recollections of a hand-loom weaver to the mock adventures of a city pump. However, many of the autobiographical voices included in the penny weeklies were presented in a mediated form having already been published elsewhere in books or periodicals. The reworking of these texts

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

249 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

Victorian print culture

249

in a new context often significantly changed the way in which these voices could be interpreted and sometimes, as with the appearance of Douglass and O’Connell’s narratives in the London Journal, opened up new ways of reading to an established audience.

Notes 1. These publications exploited a loophole in the stamp duty laws which applied to the direct reporting of the news. Published weekly, they included commentary on recent events rather than news and thus avoided paying the duty of 4d on each copy that had been introduced in 1815. The newspaper stamp was reduced to 1d in 1836 and abolished in 1855. 2. Reviews appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1844, 121–2 and The Critic, March 1844, 106–7. 3. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 29 November 1851, 352. 4. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 6 December 1851, 319

Bibliography Amigoni, David, ed. 2006. Life Writing and Victorian Culture Aldershot: Ashgate. ‘Advertisements of The Times’. 1845. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 29 March 1845, 199–202. ‘Amy Sedgwick’. 1858. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 24 April 1858, 241–2. Athenaeum. 1853. 31 December 1853, 1592. ‘Autobiography of a City Pump’. 1859. Leisure Hour, 17 March 1859, 165–8. ‘Autobiography of a Girl-Thief’. 1854. Ragged School Union Magazine, January 1854, 210–4. ‘Autobiography of a Shilling’. 1852. Leisure Hour, 11 March 1852, 163–4. ‘Autobiography of a Turtle’. 1858. Leisure Hour, 15 April 1858, 234–6. Bennett, Scott. 1984. ‘The Editorial Character and Readership of The Penny Magazine.’ Victorian Periodicals Review 17.4: 127–41. ‘Biographic Sketches: J. J. Audubon’. 1832. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 22 December 1832, 374–5. ‘A Chapter in the Life of a Poor Man’. 1841. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 25 December 1841, 388–90. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 4 Feb 1832, 1. Chase, Malcolm. 2005. ‘Building Identity, Building Circulation: Engraved Portraiture and the Northern Star’. In Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press, 25–53. Edited by Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton. London: Merlin Press. ‘Cheap Literature’. 1859. British Quarterly Review, 29 April 1859, 329.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

250

250 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

stephen colclough

‘The Experience of an Educated Artisan’. 1838. Penny Magazine, 7 April 1838, 130–2. Fyfe, Aileen. 2012. Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerrard, Teresa. 1998. ‘New Methods in the History of Reading: “Answers to Correspondents” in the Family Herald, 1860–1900’. Publishing History 43:53–69. Griffin, Emma. 2013. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution New Haven: Yale University Press. Humpherys, Anne. 1983. ‘G. W. M. Reynolds: Popular Literature and Popular Politics’. Victorian Periodicals Review 16.3/4: 79–89. Humpherys, Anne and Louis James, eds. 2008. G. W. M. Reynolds: NineteenthCentury Fiction, Politics and the Press. Aldershot: Ashgate. ‘Hutton’s Life, Written by Himself’. 1836. Penny Magazine, 12 November 1836, 445–7. King, Andrew. 2004. The London Journal, 1845–83: Periodicals, Production and Gender. Aldershot: Ashgate. King, Andrew. 2008. ‘Reynolds’s Miscellany, 1846–1849: Advertising Networks and Politics’. In G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics and the Press, 53–74. Edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James. Aldershot: Ashgate. Law, Graham. 2008. ‘Reynolds’s “Memoirs” Series and the “Literature of the Kitchen”’. In G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics and the Press, 201–12. Edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James. Aldershot: Ashgate. ‘Letters from the Baltic’. 1841. Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, 25 December 1841, 390. ‘Life of an Artisan’. 1848. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1 July 1848, 13–4. Maidment, Brian. 2013. Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–1850 Manchester: Manchester University Press. Maidment, Brian. 2001. Reading Popular Prints 1790–1870, 2nd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Meer, Sarah. 1995. ‘Sentimentality and the Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom’, in The Uses of Autobiography, 89–97. Edited by Julia Swindells. London: Taylor & Francis. ‘Memoir of the Life and Times of Daniel O’Connell’. 1847. London Journal, 19 June–18 September 1847. ‘Moynton and the Public Reward of Merit’. 1837. Penny Magazine, 30 September 1837, 369–70 ‘Narrative of Frederick Douglass’. 1846. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 24 January 1846, 56–9. ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave’. 1847. London Journal, 10 July-7 August 1847, 294–6; 318–9, 329–31, 346–8, 355–6. ‘Nicholson, the Airedale Poet’. 1844. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 3 February 1844, 76.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

251 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

Victorian print culture

251

‘Our Wants’. 1842. Punch 3 (1842), 140–2 ‘Passages in the Life of an American Merchant’. 1855. Leisure Hour, 15 February 1855, 107–10. Price, Leah 2011. How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ‘Pure Literature’. 1856. Saturday Review, 3 May 1856, 16–7. ‘Relative Positions of Rich and Poor’. 1838. Penny Magazine, 7 April 1838, 132. ‘Richard Arkwright’. 1850. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 11 May 1850, 248. Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. 2008. ‘The Virtue of Illegitimacy: Inheritance and Belonging in The Dark Woman and Mary Price’. In G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics and the Press, 213–26. Edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rubery, Matthew. 2009. The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steedman, Carolyn. 2013. An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Story of a Blue Book’. 1853. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 2 April 1853, 216. ‘Story of a Log of Wood’. 1837. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 8 April 1837, 86–7. ‘Story of a Pocket Bible: Part IV’. 1855. Sunday at Home, 22 March 1855, 177. Thomson, Christopher. 1847. Autobiography of an Artisan. London: Chapman. Vincent, David. 1982. Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of NineteenthCentury Working Class Autobiography. London: Methuen. ‘Wanderings of a Journeyman Tailor’. 1844. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 3 February 1844, 73–6. ‘A Working Man’s Recollection of America’ 1846. Knight’s Penny Magazine, 7 February 1846, 97–112. Leopold Wray. 1855. ‘The Autobiography of a Straw Bonnet’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 1 September 1855, 88–92.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C17.3D

252 [237–252] 20.10.2015 7:39PM

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

253 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

part 4

Relational lives and forms of remembering (ca. 1890–1930)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

254 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

255 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

chapter 18

‘Fusions and Interrelations’ Family memoirs of Henry James, Edmund Gosse, and others Max Saunders

In his essay ‘Relational Selves, Relational Lives’, Paul John Eakin discusses a range of life-writing texts: Carolyn Steedman’s account of her relation to her mother in Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (1986); In My Mother’s House (1983) by Kim Chernin, written with her mother about ‘the conflicted mother-daughter relation across four generations’; Brothers and Keepers (1984) by John Edgar Wideman, a college professor whose brother was sentenced to life imprisonment; My Place (1987) by Sally Morgan, researching disturbing stories of her Aboriginal family history of ‘miscegenation, incest, and servitude’; and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (appearing in two volumes, 1986 and 1991) exploring his father’s experiences in Auschwitz, and their impact on his family (Eakin 1999, 58, 59). Eakin prefaces his discussion of these narratives of troubled relationships with a very different story: a magazine profile of a twenty-threeyear-old man, Christopher McCandless, found alone and dead of starvation in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992, an annotated copy of Thoreau’s Walden nearby.1 This, for Eakin, is a story of ‘the dangerous underside of transcendental self-reliance’ (Ibid., 45); ‘the picture of a radically autonomous identity gone wrong’ (Ibid., 45). An attempt to live a life free from human relationships, it makes Eakin reassess both the first-person nature of autobiographical narration and the lives which it narrates. Hence his chapter title: ‘relational lives’, because we (all but the most extreme isolattos) live in relation to others – and hence develop ‘relational selves’; and because the lives we write are thus inescapably ‘relational lives’ too: stories of relationship rather than autonomous individuality; or at least, stories of how relationships are the conditions for individuality to be possible at all. Eakin discusses what he calls ‘the Myth of Autonomy’, tracing feminism’s critique of it as masculinist fantasy, and its positing relationality as a feminine alternative: men’s life-writing seen as perpetuating the myth of 255

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

256

256 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

max saunders

the atomistic individual, as opposed to a tradition of women’s writing representing the self in terms of its relations to others. But, he argues, this risks entrenching the binary opposition it seeks to undermine. What it obscures is the ways in which life-writing by men was always already relational too; but in ways our mythology of autonomous individualism stopped us from seeing. To some readers the ‘myth of Autonomy’ may seem a more American than European one, though as Eakin reminds us, European figures like Rousseau have been instrumental in establishing it. He says ‘we will see more narratives’ of the relational kind, arguing both that the late twentieth-century witnessed a trend in relational life-writing that would gather momentum; but also that the prominence of this form would ensure that ‘we will increasingly recognize the extensive body of relational autobiography that already exists’ (Ibid., 55). This would include not just further examples of types already acknowledged as relational, such as women’s autobiography, or collective forms of narration in Native American memoir; but would reveal that even those forms held up as exemplary of individualist self-fashioning would appear as inherently relational too. (Think Rousseau and his lover Mme de Warens, or, as he liked to call her, ‘Maman’.) In short, the claim – cogent as far as it goes – is that, thinking in terms of relationality, we will learn to read autobiography differently. In this chapter I discuss two texts Eakin mentions en passant as examples of relational autobiography: Father and Son (1907) by Edmund Gosse, and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) by Henry James. The aim is to analyse four problematic aspects of the notion of relationality, to demonstrate how it raises questions which can be more troubling, and more troubled (and in both life and life-writing), than Eakin’s antithesis perhaps suggests. First, and perhaps simplest, to show how relationality is selective, and that narratives of relational lives are built upon exclusion and disrelation: silences, refusals, abandonments. Second, to note that although utter disrelation is unsustainable for most, relationships are often unsustainable too; most intense relationships have their conflictual aspects and moments. We need to beware sentimentalising relationality as critics, and to beware narratives that sentimentalise it. The failure of relationship has its own way of feeling unsustainable. Relational lives are often relational deaths: mourning the death of a loved one, or the death of a love. Third, to highlight the potentially troubling politics of who perceives relation, and who speaks for it. Finally, to question the concept of ‘relation’ itself; and to indicate that the framing of it in terms of interpersonal relationships, crucial though they are, is nonetheless only part of the story.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

257 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

‘Fusions and interrelations’

257

Before embarking on these arguments, we might observe that the reception history of James’s memoirs furnishes a particularly good example of the kind of critical presupposition Eakin challenges. The first volume, also bearing a signally relational title, A Small Boy and Others, appeared in 1913; the sequel, Notes of a Son and Brother, the following year. James was working on a third part, titled ‘The Middle Years’, which was left unfinished at his death, but published posthumously in 1917. An omnibus edition was first issued in 1956, edited by F. W. Dupee, and given the title Autobiography. Combining the three volumes was obviously a good idea; the collection had to be called something; and ‘Autobiography’ may well have been the least worst option. ‘Memoirs’ or ‘Reminiscences’ might have sounded too trivial. ‘Life-Writing’, let alone ‘Auto/Biography’ weren’t yet current terms. ‘Henry James and his Family’, ‘Henry James: Life and Contacts’, or ‘Henry James and Others’ would have sounded like a group biography by someone else. If James’s readers and critics wished the ‘Master’ had written his autobiography, this volume was the nearest thing to it they were going to get. In the heyday of American ego-psychology, it made perfect sense to call this sequence, charting James’s life of the imagination ‘autobiography’. As we shall see though, what James gives us is as intensely relational as life-writing gets. A much more detailed sense of James’s approach has in fact been available since 1920, when Percy Lubbock published the first selection of James’s letters, just four years after his death, and close to the first publication of the autobiographical books. One letter in them is to his nephew, also called Henry James, the son of his brother, the psychologist William James. ‘Harry’, as his uncle calls him, had queried the alterations James had made to the letters from William quoted extensively in Notes of a Son and Brother: From the moment of those of my weeks in Cambridge of 1911 during which I began, by a sudden turn of talk with your Mother, to dally with the idea of a ‘Family Book,’ this idea took on for me a particular light, the light which hasn’t varied . . . That turn of talk was the germ, it dropped the seed. Once when I had been ‘reminiscing’ over some matters of your Dad’s and my old life of the time previous, far previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our Father and Mother and the rest of us, I had moved her to exclaim with the most generous appreciation and response, ‘Oh Henry, why don’t you write these things?’ . . . it dated from those words of your Mother’s, which gave me the impulse and determined the spirit of my vision – a spirit and a vision as far removed as possible from my mere isolated documentation of your Father’s record. We talked again, and still again, of the ‘Family Book,’ and by the time I came away I felt I had

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

258

258 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

max saunders somehow found my inspiration . . . And when I laid hands upon the letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, I frankly confess I seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies I had from you showed at their face value. I found myself again in such close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn’t known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing the best thing by him that the material allowed . . . These were small things . . . tiny amendments in order of words, degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked – from the moment there was no excess of these soins and no violence done to his real identity. Everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the business, as of our old world only, mine and his alone together, with every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that I daresay I did instinctively regard it at last as all my truth, to do what I would with . . . I have to the last point the instinct and the sense for fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other. (James 1920, II.357–9)

‘Family Book’ might perhaps have provided the title for Dupee’s omnibus, except that James didn’t use the description for either of the first two volumes. James’s feeling of closeness to his brother William (b. 1842) places ‘interrelation’ at the centre of the story. But it privileges some relations over others. His other, younger, brothers, Wilkinson (‘Wilky’, b. 1845) and Robertson (‘Bob’, b. 1846) are mentioned in the books, as is his sister Alice (b. 1848). Henry (b. 1843) was closest in age to William, and often with him during their education in Europe, and later at Harvard. Though, according to A Small Boy and Others, it was Wilky who became, while in Europe, ‘off and on, for a few years, my extremely easy yokefellow and playfellow’ (James, 1983, 14), nonetheless it is William – the trainee artist, scientist, intellectual, philosopher, and like his brother Henry, later author – with whom James feels more deeply interfused. The letter describes Notes as prompted by memories of ‘your Dad’s and my old life’, and ‘of our Father and Mother and the rest of us’. Certainly all the siblings – and many other relatives – are discussed. But the volume foregrounds two relationships rather than one or many: son and brother. The Small Boy and the Notes of a Son and Brother are predominantly male affairs, narrating the interrelations of William and Henry with each other and with their father more than their mother. Insofar as James’s autobiographical books do what they have been justly praised for – giving one of the best accounts of the growth of a writer’s imagination – it is to be expected that they devote most space to the relations who were the most

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

259 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

‘Fusions and interrelations’

259

intellectually formative and stylistically inspiring. But that is to make a different claim for them than to see them comprising a ‘Family Book’. Gosse’s Father and Son presents a comparable case. There is a clear biographical justification for the focus on the relationship with his father. The early death of his mother, together with the fact that he was the only child, threw him closer together with the father. Father and Son certainly discusses Gosse’s mother. From one point of view she was airbrushed out of most of the record by cancer, not through filial impiety or misogyny. Yet from another point of view, given that Gosse’s narrative centres on his development away from the faith of the Plymouth Brethren, it is surprising that his mother doesn’t figure more prominently. She, after all, was the writer of spiritual tracts; her husband, Philip Henry Gosse, was the naturalist, whose best-remembered work now is Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857), his ill-timed and in retrospect absurd attempt to reconcile Charles Lyell’s account of the geological ages with the biblical account of creation, which appeared, disastrously, two years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Father and Son might be understood as an attempt to untie the genealogical knot tying fathers to children. But arguably Gosse had already untied the knot to his mother in his conception of the book. Omphalos argues that just as Adam (supposedly) had a navel though he had no mother or need of an umbilicus, so God planted signs of earlier creation in the fossil record to fool us into thinking the earth had a longer history than can be calculated from the book of Genesis. If the prehistory of Father and Son is the negation of the mother, the story of it is the negation of the father. Like James’s Autobiography, it is a genealogy of creation in another sense too: the story of the evolution of an aesthetic consciousness. Hugh Kingsmill is said to have said that friends are God’s apology for relations – presumably because you can choose your friends, though the Wildean aphorism implies a curious view of how marriages come about (Ingrams 1977). Autobiographers may not be able to choose their blood relations, but they can choose which to write about, or which to write more about, as the examples of James and Gosse demonstrate; or, in a more extreme case, that of John Stuart Mill, libertarian feminist and author of The Subjection of Women, whose Autobiography mentions his father in its second paragraph, and discusses James Mill’s educational experiment on his eldest son minutely, but manages to avoid discussing Mill’s mother. Such analyses have already begun to anticipate our second and third main arguments about how relationality, and its relationship to disrelation, can be troubling. Not all relations are equal; some are more equal than

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

260

260 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

max saunders

others; some may need to be fended off as often as they need to be acknowledged and honoured. A relational life might be a story of keeping some relations at a distance, as much as about narrating closeness. Any relational story a life writer tells implies the stories of other relations, either not represented, or marginalised: relations struggling to be, or not to be, heard, felt, or owned. As James famously put it – though writing about fiction, in the Preface to Roderick Hudson: Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. (James 1984, 5)

If relations really stop nowhere, relating a single life would be an impossibility – at least without that personal ‘geometry’ which can make individuality stand separate from its multiplicity of relations. Though, as David McWhirter has observed, James’s syntax is teasingly ambiguous about whether the artist’s geometry makes the relations appear to end, or makes their endlessness apparent (McWhirter 1998, 11). This notion of the multiplicity and infinite extension of relations suggests several further ways in which relationality might trouble autobiography. The flood of relations bearing upon the autobiographical subject might itself be perceived as a threat. This can itself assume several forms. The first might be described as a sociological or genealogical anxiety: a fear of dissolving the self into the solution of its circumambient relations; or dismantling it, so that you can see its component parts, and thereby lose the sense of a self that is greater than the sum of those parts. Another, more conflictual model is the notion that other people, and especially parents (or their internalisations as super-ego), block or inhibit individuation. This version of anxiety is essentially grounded in ego-psychology, though it manifests itself in contexts as diverse as D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the ‘false self’ (a compliance with parental aspirations that needs to break down in order to make space for the emergence of the subject’s individuality – arguably Mill’s situation, as his breakdown initiates his freedom from being his father’s creature); or the concept in Sartrean existentialism of ‘being for others’ (a mark of inauthenticity, bad faith, and the failure of freedom). Such psychodramas can be real performances. But a third form of such anxiety is more radically sceptical, not about the quality of individuality, but about its possibility or existence altogether. A self understood as relational might be intelligible only as a network of relations rather than a subjectivity with its own integrity. Its meaning might be a function of a set of differences or contrasts between itself and others, rather than

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

261 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

‘Fusions and interrelations’

261

anything inherent; rather as Saussurean linguistics was positing that meaning was the product of a system of oppositions, and as post-structuralists have argued of subjectivity. In the letter to Harry, James writes of ‘fusions and interrelations’; the implication there that the self might fuse into its interrelations – so that, for example, one might speak of ‘your Dad’s and my old life’, as if the two lives were one single, indivisible, life – indicates the threat to the notion of an individual life, as it registers the out-of-jointedness of Henry’s life after William’s death. Nothing undermines the autonomous self like the loss of a constitutive relation. ‘His extinction changes the face of life for me’, James wrote to a friend in the summer of 1910, soon after he heard the news (James 1983, vii). Changed the expression on life’s face? Or removed the face which James couldn’t help thinking of as the identity of their shared life? Certainly, he writes of his past as not his alone, but, as he says, ‘mine and his alone together’. When William decided he wanted to learn painting, it was decided that he and Henry would leave Europe for America, which ‘would place him in prompt and happy relation to William Hunt, then the most distinguished of our painters’ (Ibid., 274). Henry James kept in close relation to his brother, going with him to the studio, and speaks of this experience of returning just as the American Civil War war broke out (during which his younger brothers saw military service) as one ‘which I don’t pretend to speak of as all my own’ (Ibid., 276). This trait of the family treating their experience as communal appears to have been an inherited characteristic. James notes their father’s ability to speak with the authority of other people’s experience: ‘There was a kind of experiential authority in his basis, as he felt his basis there being no human predicament he couldn’t by a sympathy more like direct experience than any I have known enter into’ (Ibid., 373). When William joined the naturalist Louis Agassiz’s expedition to Brazil, his absence left James ‘the more exposed, and thereby the more responsive, to contact with impressions’ (Ibid., 481). But the arrival of William’s letters home comes back to me as perhaps a fuller enrichment of my consciousness than it owed for the time to any other single source. We all still hung so together that this replete organ could yet go on helping itself, with whatever awkwardness, from the conception or projection of others of a like general strain, such as those of one’s brothers might appear; thanks to which constant hum of borrowed experience . . . my stage of life knew no drop of the curtain. (Ibid., 481)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

262

262 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

max saunders

His relation to this ‘borrowed experience’ frames and is framed by that to the war. William’s absence in South America made Henry’s imagination grow richer: ‘It reawoke the mild divinatory rage with which I had followed, with so little to show for it, the military fortune of my younger brothers’ (Ibid., 492). Reading a letter from a relation is certainly a form of real relationship; but for James it is a form which, exercising his imaginative faculty, enhanced his power conjuring real relationships out of imagining the lives of real but absent relations; and thus of imagining unreal relations: Everything of the kind, for me, was company; but I dwelt . . . in company so constant and so enchanting that this amounted to moving, in whatever direction, with the mass – more and more aware as I was of the ‘fun’ (to express it grossly) of living by my imagination and thereby finding that company, in countless different forms, could only swarm about me . . . Ah the things and the people, the hours and scenes and circumstances, the inénarrables2 occasions and relations, that I might still present in its light if I would. (Ibid., 492)

For James, interrelationality doesn’t threaten autonomy, but enriches consciousness. Yet his very turning of his embeddedness in the family context into an opportunity turns paradoxical, and touches on a further way in which relation can trouble autobiography. William’s letters, he says, spoke to him of their shared past, but ‘with every item of it intimately known and remembered by me’. The fact that the remembrance is his makes him ‘instinctively regard it at last as all my truth, to do what I would with’. This is partly a gentle reminder to Harry that he wasn’t there; and that after the deaths of William and their parents, there is no one left with the authority to contest James’s version of the truth. The past was his to do what he wanted with in that sense; but it was his in another sense: it had made him the artist he was, so he of all people should know it and know what to do with it. But it is also an epistemological and a hermeneutic point. James may see his self as relational; as structured by his relationships, especially with his father and elder brother. But the truth of those relationships is his; something he feels free to adjust. If the truth is relational – if the truth is that experience is relational – it is a truth framed by an individual writer. He ‘owns’ it not just in the sense of acknowledging it, but in the sense favoured in today’s managerial cant, of taking ‘ownership’ of it: seeing it as ‘all my truth’. According to this move, which is a subjectivist one, the very relationality that is supposed to counteract autobiography’s tendency

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

263 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

‘Fusions and interrelations’

263

towards egotism and solipsism – its inward turn at the expense of the outer world of other people – itself becomes subject to those dangers. The truth of an interpersonal relationship becomes the individual’s personal truth of it. That is tantamount to saying it becomes an individual’s version of the truth; and to that extent no longer the truth, or certainly no longer the whole truth. What is at stake here is where exactly relation can be said to exist. Being a son or brother is a biological and social given. But the way it is understood, the perception of what is significant in such relations, and which relations are the most significant are psychological events; and they are located not between James and others, but within James’s views of others. The case of James’s ‘Family Book’ shows that where relations are located – those that are privileged by relational narratives – is in the eye of the relater or narrator. An object might exist whether anybody is perceiving it or not. But a relation? Relations are conceptual connections between different objects or subjects. They are mental constructions – at least, any relations apart from biological ones; though even these have been contested, as in Nietzsche’s proto-Wildean version of relational autobiography, in which the superman forges his psychological affiliations as distinct from his biological parentage or historical context: One is least related to one’s parents: it would be the most extreme sign of vulgarity to be related to one’s parents. Higher natures have their origins infinitely further back . . . Julius Caesar could be my father – or Alexander, this Dionysus incarnate. (Nietzsche 1992, 42)

Gosse’s Father and Son is in many ways an inverted mirror image of James’s ‘Family Book’, representing a more troubling, conflicted relation, as his father’s fundamentalism became less palatable to the son’s developing taste. Yet it too negotiates similar issues of interrelation, fusion, possession, and construction, all condensed into the extraordinary ending to the book, describing the eventual break. This manages to sound both downbeat (in all its patient and respectful qualifications) and triumphally assertive – the third person managing to avoid self-assertion while asserting an achieved objectivity and therefore autonomy and authority: No compromise, it is seen, was offered; no proposal of a truce would have been acceptable. It was a case of ‘Everything or Nothing’; and thus desperately challenged, the young man’s conscience threw off once for all the yoke of his ‘dedication’, and, as respectfully as he could, without parade or remonstrance, he took a human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself. (Gosse 2004, 186)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

264

264 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

max saunders

I have written elsewhere on the clinching ambiguity of this ending, whereby ‘to fashion his inner life’ doesn’t only mean casting off the false self of his parents’ aspirations in order to reshape his own personality, but also the fashioning of his inner life as a book of life-writing (Saunders 2010, 150–60). This second sense has two consequences. First, it transforms the plot. If it’s a story of mental liberation, the narrative leaves us at a chronological point before Gosse has been able to make anything of that freedom. The plot is of a failed relation, if of a successful escape from the parental plot for their son. But because the concluding sentence also points to the story Gosse has written about the one he has lived, it gives the work another story: that of his decision to abandon religion in favour of art. Like Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), it becomes a book about what brings the author to the point in his development when he can write the book we have just been reading. Where Gosse gives an anxious, agonistic account of the struggle to find his voice, James gives a comic version of an indeterminate youth: drifting in William’s wake, purposeless but observing. Both counter the uncertainty of personality with the certainty of achieving individuality as an artist – which is arguably the burden of most literary autobiography. But Gosse’s ending is paradoxical in another way, which risks undermining its achievement. Its inward turn asserts an interiority (an ‘inner life’) that is the unique possession of the individual: it is ‘for himself’, to do with as he would. Yet at the same time the inward turn ends up showing how that ‘inner life’ is structured in relation to others. The son as artist is the product of the struggle with the father. Gosse’s concluding phrase ‘for himself’, or James’s ‘all my truth, to do what I would with’, might sound wilful. However, as we have seen, James immediately qualifies this note. His description of his instinct and sense ‘for fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling’ returns us to the Preface to Roderick Hudson, added for the New York Edition of 1907–1909, not long before the conception of the ‘Family Book’. It is, I think, the best gloss on what he meant by ‘the exquisite problem of the artist’ and the ‘geometry of his own, the circle’, within which relations appear determinable. ‘Interrelations’ picks up on the ‘relations’ which are the artist’s subject, turning them into a form of relation that is his method: ‘framing and encircling . . . every part of my stuff in every other’. It is a credo for a radical interconnectedness of the work of art; an argument for unity, organic coherence, but also something more challenging than that, and the solidity that James’s fondness for architectural analogies for writing (‘The House of Fiction’, for example) sometimes conjures up. It is an

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

265 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

‘Fusions and interrelations’

265

argument for an interdependence of each part on every other; precisely a model of unity as interlinked network rather than uniform consistency; a model of meaning as relativistic, systemic, multi-dimensional, and multiperspectival. It is also a model of relationality as not just content but form. An autobiography, if it is to be a work of art, should not just narrate a relational life, lived by a relational self; but should do it in a relational way. The ‘interrelations and fusions’ of interpersonal experience are taken up into the geometry of the form, through the interrelation of each part. ‘I despair, however, as I look back, of rendering the fusions in that muchmixed little time’, says James of his first getting published, ‘every feature of which had something of the quality and interest of every other’ (James 1983, 477). The best examples of how James achieves the rendering of these fusions, interrelations, interpenetrations, reciprocal framings, and circlings are, perhaps, the frames he gives to the entire books: namely, their names. Or rather, the relation between their titles and their beginnings. A Small Boy and Others contains in its frontispiece a photograph of ‘Henry James and his Father’ (just as Gosse’s book used a photograph of himself as a boy with his father). So although the title doesn’t identify the subjects, most readers would assume that the small boy was Henry; in which case the opening of the book is at least slightly disconcerting: In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of William James and present him in his setting . . . I found one of the consequences of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense of some of the others. For it was to memory in the first place that my main appeal for particulars had to be made; I had been too near a witness of my brother’s beginnings of life, and too close a participant, by affection, admiration and sympathy, in whatever touched and moved him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of significant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history, than I could hope to express or apply . . . This meant that aspects began to multiply and images to swarm . . . and that I might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them, using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide–to see the world within begin to ‘compose’ with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked. (Ibid., 3–4; my italics)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

266

266 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

max saunders

With Notes of a Son and Brother there is a comparable uncertainty. This time the frontispiece is a self-portrait sketch by William James. While one wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the book thus consists of notes about William as son and brother, ‘Notes of’ is multiply ambiguous. First, ‘Notes’ is itself a complicated term, having a sensory connotation, as in the note of a scent, or a note of music; but it also connotes what is ‘of note’. The notes of William James would be his characteristics, his idiosyncrasies, his personality. But they are also the things noted down about him by his brother; Henry James’s annotations to his brother’s letters, and thus to his life. They are thus also the notes ‘of’ Henry James about William; which then makes ‘son and brother’ refer just as easily to Henry as to William. In short, the ‘Son and Brother’ in the title flips between the two: a perfect formal equivalent of the interfusion and interrelation being described in their lives. ‘Relation’ is a crucial term of Jamesian aesthetics (as well as one that recurs in his fiction, as in his auto/biography); and it is clear from these late usages that by it James means something more than interpersonal relationships. We have considered the who of relation; the where relation is located; and the how it is represented. Now we arrive at our final question: the what? James’s work is especially challenging in the kinds of answer it gives to the question, ‘What is a relation?’ He often uses the concept as a term of visual aesthetics, to describe a connexion between the different forms in a composition, and thus something that can be read in looking, as when he writes of ‘The question of how people looked, and of how their look counted for a thousand relations.’ (Ibid., 443). He continues: ‘My companions however scantly indeed they were to become such were subject to my so practising in a degree which represented wellnigh the whole of my relation with them’ (Ibid., 444). ‘Relation’ here is effectively in antithesis to a personal ‘relationship’; James’s way of relating to those he calls (disavowingly) his ‘companions’ is scarcely companionable: he looks at them. But that relation of the look leads, for his hypersensitive visual imagination, to a multiplicity of further relations. Some of these thousand other relations may be relations between people; the ways in which they look at and talk to or about others. But they could be relations to almost anything else as well: to health or illness, wealth or poverty, personal histories, education, war, social class, hints of personality, of type, physical similarities with other people, and so on. Or with works of art. Describing a cousin, Robert Temple, as seeming like a character out of Dickens or Thackeray, James writes playfully: ‘I doubtless put people “into books” by very much the same turn of the hand with

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

267 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

‘Fusions and interrelations’

267

which I took them out’ (Ibid., 324); intimating, as he does so, that relations don’t exist only between people, or between characters in books, but also between people and books, in complex ways. James might take a character out of someone else’s novel as an equivalent to a striking acquaintance, or might imagine what we might call ‘a real character’ like Robert Temple as mingling with Dickensian or Thackerayan types; but he might equally put such a real acquaintance in a fiction of his own, where, indeed, he might mingle with characters taken out of (or at least adapted from) other novels. Relations with books imply a relation to the author too. McCandless may have been living in isolation from other living humans, but remained in relation to Walden, and thus arguably to Thoreau (who himself remained in relation to his readers). ‘Relations’, then, for James, are far from being confined to the interpersonal relationships with which ‘relational lives’ are often assumed to preoccupy themselves. Such relations are second-order effects of perception. The best way to think of Jamesian ‘relations’ is, finally, to see them as indissoluble from his interest in ‘impressions’. As many critics have argued, James’s method owes much to impressionism, and his later work can be seen as his most impressionist (see Brooks 2007). This is particularly true of the autobiographical books, which are primarily concerned to recover and elaborate his impressions. But what James’s impressions are of – at least, what makes them interesting, and worthy of elaboration – is relation. His impressions are not pure sensations; they are impressions with a context; a context of relations from which meanings can be hypothesized. This makes his memoir books meta-autobiography too, always analysing the processes of recovering memories, and of representing impressions. As he puts it in A Small Boy and Others: ‘What I wanted, in my presumption, was that the object, the place, the person, the unreduced impression, often doubtless so difficult or so impossible to reduce, should give out to me something of a situation’ (James 1983, 232). So one reason such impressions are irreducible is that they bring relations with them. ‘Relation’ thus indicates the ground of Jamesian impressionism. But it is also what separates it from a pure impressionism (as in Monet, say) giving itself over to experience of the perceptual field. Relation is triple-articulated in James. There are relations he perceives; then there is his relation to them; and finally his relation of them. Relation is what stops impression from collapsing into solipsism; what makes James a novelist (whose primary materials are impressions and relations, and the human situations inferable and narratable and infinitely interpretable from them) rather than an aesthete.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6833684/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C18.3D

268

268 [253–268] 20.10.2015 7:46PM

max saunders

Notes 1. The profile is by Chip Brown, ‘I Now Walk into the Wild’, New Yorker (8 February 1993), 36–47. 2. Things too bizarre to narrate (French).

Bibliography Brooks, Peter. 2007. Henry James Goes to Paris. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eakin, Paul John. 1999. ‘Relational Selves, Relational Lives’. In How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, 43–98. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gosse, Edmund. 2004. Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments. Edited by Michael Newton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herford, Oliver. 2015. Henry James’s Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915. Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Horne, Philip, ed. 1999. Henry James: A Life in Letters. London: Allen Lane/ Penguin. Ingrams, Richard. 1977. God’s Apology: A chronicle of three friends. London: André Deutsch. James, Henry. 1920. The Letters of Henry James. Edited by Percy Lubbock, 2 vols, London: Macmillan. James, Henry. 1983. Autobiography. Edited by F. W. Dupee. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. James, Henry. 1984. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Edited by R. P. Blackmur. Boston: Northeastern University Press. McWhirter, David, ed. 1998. ‘“The Whole Chain of Relation and Responsibility”: Henry James and the New York Edition’. In Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Rev. edn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1992. Ecce Homo. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin. Saunders, Max. 2010. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

C:/ISMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

269

[269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

chapter 19

Queer Lives Wilde, Sackville-West, and Woolf Georgia Johnston

Readings of modernist queer autobiography have usefully shown that queer life-writings differ from straight autobiographies through coding and masking, a technique that sometimes produces two readers: those in the know, and those with no clue (Gilmore 1991; Loftus 1997; Stimpson 1992; Watson 1992). The focus of this chapter, however, is not to show that modernist queer autobiography is or is not modelled after a heterosexual text, using codes and masks for expression within an expected straight form of a life. Instead, if we turn from the concern of many critics that queer autobiography cannot be expressed, imagined, or read, if we set aside a focus on how queer autobiography differs from straight because of inability to signify – if, instead, we focus on the historical emergence of same-sex representation in autobiography and recognise it as part of a developing Western autobiographical discourse, then the modernist site of autobiography explodes with an awareness of how queer turn-of-the-century (nineteenth to twentieth) autobiography foregrounds a form of textual representation in the genre hitherto unrecognised as such. One might label this evocative formation as meta-autobiography, since this development consists of a self-reflexive critique of ideologies that seemingly require heteronormative and masculine subjectivities and scripts as necessary in the representation of an autobiographical ‘I’ (Jelinek 1986; Heilbrun 1988; Loftus 1997; Watson 1992). This chapter, then, recognises as historical the mutations of the genre that queer autobiography develops.1 It explores the critiques of modernist cultures as they are couched in representations of same-sex sexuality. Specifically, the modernist autobiographies I read critique the cultures surrounding phrenology, criminality and censorship, and sex/gender systems. Autobiographies that write same-sex desires into their texts in this period critique cultural contexts by recasting a relation between textual representation and experience. That recasting side-steps a (heteronormative) 269

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

270

270 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

georgina johnston

ideology of truth as factual, instead presenting truth as culturally determined and prejudicial. The signifier–signified representation of the writing and written ‘I’ is newly conceived, while the autobiographies attack societies that require individuals to conform within a recently-codified sex-gender system.

Oscar Wilde’s pose Oscar Wilde uses queer life-writing in the public sphere to comment upon cultural morays. From his novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray2 through the notorious trials (1895) and to the subsequent autobiography De Profundis,3 Wilde repositions the ‘I’ and the body as they interface with his public. Wilde extends public queer discourse but also autobiographical discourse. His presentation of Dorian contradicts an autobiographical mirroring between a public/private binary and que(e)ries the phrenological controversies concerning body’s connections with character and soul. Two years later, the trial repositions Dorian Gray as autobiographical, if it ever was seen as fully fictional, and places same-sex desire fully in the public eye, with Wilde refuting the assumptions that art must produce moral effect. De Profundis positions same-sex desire as natural between older and younger men, while condemning prison systems.4 Wilde’s essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ (first published in journal form in 1889) lays the groundwork for these representations. It famously cites art as the source of nature, undermining convention that art mirrors reality. Wilde’s character Vivian suggests that, instead of mimetically mirroring, art creates nature: ‘Where, if not from the Impressionists’, he argues to Cyril, ‘do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets?’ Artists have the power to produce what is experienced: the ‘climate of London during the last ten years’ has completely changed because of ‘a particular school of Art’ (Wilde 1891, 40). A ‘great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it’ (Ibid., 32), Vivian insists, stating that ‘the Channel, especially at Hastings’, looks ‘so often like a Henry Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights’, that he wishes it would ‘be more varied’. He hopes that ‘when Art is more varied, Nature will . . . be more varied also’. Nature’s imitation of art ‘is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilized man’ (Ibid., 42), he pronounces, both rhapsodizing about and parodying the relationships between art, life, and the artist. At issue are art, reality, vision, the spectator, as well as the centrality of humanism and fin de siècle European civilization.5 And at issue is autobiography.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

271 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

Queer Lives

271

Wilde’s thinking about art and its relation to life throws autobiographical truisms into alarming flux. Assumptions that autobiography reproduces a life hold little weight against Vivian’s maxim that life replicates art. Wilde’s thinking muddles not only the idea that an autobiography conveys a semblance of truth, even if that truth is remembered falsely. If life replicates art, then experience moves into a signifying system different from that if an autobiography (the art) represents life. The Portrait of Dorian Gray foregrounds this other system of signification. Lord Henry suggests that Dorian ‘is a Narcissus’ because of his beauty, presenting that beauty in terms of art. Basil Hallward, discussing Dorian Gray as giving him a vision of a new form or art, refers back to the Greeks in order to proclaim, ‘The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar’ (Wilde 1960, 22). From the beginning of the novel, Dorian Gray is a same-sex subject. Basil Hallward presents his portrait of Dorian Gray to Lord Henry Wotton, both men admiring the beauty Basil has captured. Ed Cohen reads this admiration as crucial to determining how Dorian Gray ‘enters into the circuits of male desire’; Cohen writes that Dorian ‘mediates’ the desires of Basil, who expresses his desire through his painting, and those of Lord Henry, who ‘play[s] out’ his sexual identity through ‘new heights of [verbal] expression’ (Cohen 1987, 808). The men mask their same-sex desires. Lord Wotton suggests that ‘beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins‘, because intellect ‘destroys the harmony of the face’ (Wilde 1960, 11–2). This novel, then, makes a pointed gesture to phrenology (as it was understood at that time to connect body, character, and soul). These connections develop as the novel proceeds. Dorian Gray himself, after Basil Hallward reveals his beauty in the painting, references phrenology, expositing an understanding of autobiography as a division from the self rather than a mimetic representation of it. He despairingly moans, ‘I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will always remain young . . . If it were I who was to be forever young, and the picture that was to grow old! . . . I would give my soul for that!’ (Ibid., 42–3). These are the terms of phrenology (and its relative physiognomy (Twine 2002; Marshall 2000)), as they appeared as a ‘science’ throughout the nineteenth century – with its terminology of body connected to soul, and the body a mirror to the soul. Early nineteenth-century phrenology (defined most broadly, in the nineteenth century, as ‘the scientific study of the mind’ with a moral

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

272

272 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

georgina johnston

inflection–Oxford English Dictionary) influenced both theory and practice, as well as theological debates. Roger Cooter remarks that it ‘applied to the reform of education and to the treatment of the insane and the criminal, as well as to the hiring of servants’ (Cooter 1989, viii). The controversy around phrenology included terminology of ‘soul’. For example, Sir Henry Thompson, pontificating against phrenology, proclaimed, ‘mind and soul are the same – no separation can be made’, and ‘I scorn the Phrenologist, who says, we have to do only with matter, and not with spirit’ (Thompson 1939, 11). The Phrenologists held equally strong views: a medical doctor, M. C. Engledue, declared, ‘there do exist individuals whose dispositions are naturally vicious . . . with peculiar formations of certain portions of the brain’ (Engledue 1837, 30). Phrenology was widespread, as evidenced by the creation of Phrenological Museums (Ibid., 29). While Jonathan Smith explains that by 1872 ‘both physiognomy and phrenology were largely discredited in elite scientific circles, [still] both remained popular and influential in the wider culture’ (Smith 2006, 198). All three men in Dorian Gray use and repeat the terminology of the phrenological debate. Lord Henry, who aims to ‘influence’ Dorian Gray, intends to ‘make that wonderful spirit his own’ (Wilde 1960, 56, 58). Later, Lord Henry interchanges body and soul as if they are the same: ‘Soul and body, body and soul – how mysterious they were’ (Ibid., 86). Basil Hallward, representing most baldly the phrenologist point of view, refuses to believe the rumours about Dorian’s vicious acts, stating ‘If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, in the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands’ (Ibid., 214). Dorian himself cries out, repelled by the slowly corrupted picture, ‘It is the face of my soul’ (224). Just before he stabs the painting, he realises it as, ‘his monstrous soul-life’ (Ibid., 315).6 The picture evokes the autobiographical text, in that the picture ‘held the secret of his life, and told his story’ (Ibid., 132). When Dorian Gray destroys the portrait, which is the real life, expressed in terms of the body as a text, it seems, phrenologically, that a person’s character can be perceived through the presentation of the body. That fallacy is made actual when Dorian Gray stabs the painting, with the result that his body takes on the painting’s corruption, so much so that, in his death, the servants could not realise who he was ‘till they had examined the rings’ (Ibid., 316). His death, caused by ripping the portrait, solidifies the understanding that the soul’s equivalence to the body is no fantasy. But because Wilde presents this connection through the fantastical nature of the division of art from body, the presentation both colludes with phrenological theory while

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

273 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

Queer Lives

273

Figure 1 ‘Wilde as Narcissus’ by James Edward Kelly.

simultaneously ridiculing the idea that a person’s subjectivity can be read on the body. The result is to produce both a complicity with and condemnation of phrenological assumptions, dependent upon the complicity and condemnation of Wilde’s theory of life depending on art. Wilde’s is a meta-generic commentary on an ideology complacently co-opted by theorists of criminology and eugenics, an ideology that Wilde himself had been brutally exposed to in the caricatures invariably produced of him as fat, even bovine, a physical representation that these caricatures equated with narcissism and a need for admiration. (See Figure 1). That presentation of Wilde also appears satirically in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, in which the ‘fleshly poet’ of the opera is ‘born of a morbid love of admiration!’ (Gilbert 1881, 15. These caricatures attack Wilde’s aesthetic theories by ridiculing his body (Williams 2008). These caricatures, both visual and textual, of Wilde as an overweight narcissistic egoist, created the bombast against which Wilde could attack formations of subjectivity as it had been theorised through ‘sciences’ like phrenology. Dorian Gray rejects the ‘prejudices’ and ‘morals’ of the audiences for which it is written. The placement of the portrait outside the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

274

274 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

georgina johnston

body and the homoerotic readings of the portrait (by Basil, Lord Henry, and even Dorian) give a transparency to Wilde’s criticisms.

Woolf’s world Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires – say to paint, or to write – could be taken seriously.

(Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’)7

Virginia Woolf also uses autobiography as a critical tool to critique society. Nominally, Woolf’s goal in A Room of One’s Own is to discuss ‘women and fiction’. To examine the abilities – and inabilities – of women to write in the time of Shakespeare, the narrator turns to ‘Professor Trevelyan’s History of England’ (an actual text published in 1926) for social data. Women in Shakespeare’s era had few opportunities or choices, Woolf’s narrator finds. Wife-beating and arranged marriages were common, and women could legally be ‘‘locked up, beaten, and flung about the room’’ (Woolf 1929, 44, 45). Drawn from details about the group, Woolf’s narrator creates Judith Shakespeare, imagined sister of William. Not allowed to go to school, Judith learns to read and write in secret. Her father will compel her to marry the neighbour’s son, and, on her refusal, the father beats her. To escape, she runs to London. With ‘a gift like her brother’s . . . she wanted to act’ (Ibid., 49–50), but she wasn’t even allowed in the stage door. Becoming pregnant, by the actor-manager, she kills herself. Woolf’s narrator imagines this life and this subjectivity because no lives could have been written of – or by – this woman. ‘Judith’ thus represents women who lived in obscurity and left no records. The details must come from data of a group, if one is to imagine an individual life and create an individual subjectivity. Shoshana Felman brilliantly argues that ‘Judith’ is autobiography – of the absent, impossible, women’s ‘I’. For Felman, Woolf’s narrator (herself an imagined ‘I’) writes women writers out of absence. By creating ‘Judith’, Woolf writes ‘an autobiography’ that is ‘impossible’, because it is ‘unwritable except through the story of the Other’ (Felman 1993, 149, 148). Felman expands her thinking to Woolf’s own life, arguing that, by imagining ‘Shakespeare’s sister . . . Woolf transforms her own insanity and suicide into vehicles of writing and into the inadvertent speaking subject’ (Ibid., 149, original emphasis). This is, I would suggest, a queer reproduction.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

275 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

Queer Lives

275

Through this autobiographical narrative, Woolf critiques that society that repulses women’s genius, parts of which still have their hold in her lifetime. Leigh Gilmore’s definition of autobiography as ‘a rhetorical setting in which a person places herself or himself within testimonial contexts’ (Gilmore 2001, 3) has traction here. Woolf is a witness to her imagined Judith Shakespeare, foregrounding that ‘testimonial context’ in which such a girl would have lived, thereby critiquing that society that prevents a woman living a life of her own. This binary interaction between society and individual recurs in Woolf’s life-writing in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, through, again, a foregrounding of queer reproduction. The ‘shape’ of her male relatives are formed ‘by that great patriarchal machine’, the career represented by the educational and professional institutions of ‘Winchester, New College and the Cabinet’. They, having been ‘shot into that machine at the age of ten and emerged at sixty a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the Warden of a college’, replace the earlier generation. Woolf revisions homosexuality, not as a perversion, but as cultural imperative that produces a queer professional reproduction. Her work in ‘Sketch’ predicts Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential theories of queer in Between Men, which expose male homoeroticism as an essential social function in patriarchy. In Three Guineas, Woolf is even more direct, observing that, ‘the professions are queered’ (Woolf 1966, 50). For Woolf, the body – as Woolf objectifies and observes it – reflects a process of enforced reproductive homosocial conformity. Similarly, though less publically, women are regarded as commodities, metonymically generational. Woolf autobiographically presents the women of her family as a ‘hand’ replicating rituals of the patriarchal family. It is the ghost of the hand that retains these rituals, ‘a flutter of the dead hand which lay beneath the surface of family life’ (Woolf 1989, 161). That ‘flutter’ is left over from the nineteenth century, a remnant of Stella, Woolf’s half-sister. Stella waved to George or Gerald, her brothers (and Woolf’s half-brothers), as they left in the morning for work. Woolf connects the action with the social system, ‘a section of upper middle class Victorian life’. After breakfast, Adrian Woolf’s younger brother would go off to school and ‘whichever of us, Vanessa or myself, was down, would see him off. Standing at the front door we would wave a hand till he disappeared behind the bulging wall of the Martins’ house’ (Woolf 1989, 161). Like the ‘machine’ that creates the conforming male individual as part of a class and economic system, the repetition of the ‘flutter’ is both generational and gendered, creating a homosocial

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

276

276 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

georgina johnston

reproductive system. Both go beyond the objectified individual and the single generation of patriarchal family. Generational queer typing gives Woolf a method through which to critique cultural conformity. She turns the idea of perversion against itself. Just as Wilde used the subject position to critique his society, Woolf’s critical attack of her society is possible through her use of autobiography. She disrupts the masculine Victorian economic narrative. In a parallel move in her fiction, she gives authority to female artists like Lily Briscoe (To the Lighthouse) and Miss LaTrobe (Between the Acts). Miss LaTrobe is lesbian. Lily Briscoe sidesteps marriage. As did Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, they rejected the reproduction of male and female homosocial economic roles and replaced those roles with active individual choices. Woolf posits female authoritative power as an issue of autobiographical script through her creation of these artist characters.

Cross-dressing Sackville-West’s ‘I’ as so much of life is sexual – or so they say – it rather limits autobiography if this is blacked out. (Virginia Woolf, Letters, Volume 6)8

Wilde’s work has had immense influence on queer theories. His writings and the effects of his public life in the culture surrounding late-Victorian queer set up the next generations’ reactions to queer modernism in particular and of autobiography in general.9 As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others have shown, Wilde’s culture made spectacles of queer at the same time as it ‘dare not speak its Name’. This combination of spectacle and revulsion appears in Wilde’s work and in the later modernist work, as a heightened awareness of the disingenuous brutality of the late nineteenth century. Sedgwick’s analysis, in its examples, centres on one historical moment. By focusing on 1891, she stages the establishment in the social sciences (of sexology, psychology, criminology) of the production of these two categories of sexuality (heterosexuality, homosexuality), which will become solidified by the time Vita Sackville-West writes in the 1920s. Foucault, ‘among other historians’, Sedgwick reminds us, ‘locates in about the nineteenth century a shift in European thought from viewing same-sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital acts . . . to viewing it as a function of stable definitions of identity’ (Sedgwick 1985, 82–3).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

277 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

Queer Lives

277

Citing Jeffrey Weeks, Alan Sinfield parallels Sedgwick in noting that ‘concepts of homosexuality’ as late as 1871 were ‘extremely underdeveloped’. He wishes to ‘recover the moment of indeterminacy’. He suggests that the ‘concept’ of homosexuality was ‘emerging around and through instances like Fanny and Stella’ (the two transvestites brought up on felony charges in 1871 for indecency – they were acquitted), ‘and Wilde’ (Sinfield 1984, 8).10 The solidification of sexual categories appears full-blown in SackvilleWest’s life writings. For Sackville-West, life, writings, and cultural imperatives are implicated with each other through her struggles with her own self-actualisation, in terms of a complicated identity, which by the 1920s has become defined by types. Her awareness of self-referentiality in her autobiographical writings is as exquisite as Wilde’s because of this context. In a memoir, secreted during her lifetime and later edited and published by her son Nigel Nicolson as Portrait of a Marriage, Sackville-West writes of herself as a ‘type’, relying upon the terminology of the current social sciences. She states that her account of herself will help scientists understand bisexuality, because ‘many more people of my type do exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted’ (Sackville-West 1980, 117). She contests the social norm by using herself as example. She presents two sides of herself (one the loving wife of Harold Nicolson, the other the passionate lover of Violet Keppel Trefusis), and, because of these two sides, she delineates herself as two separate people. She wishes they could live separate lives as each fits one life but not the other. She has a ‘dual personality . . . in which the feminine and the masculine elements alternately preponderate’ (Ibid., 118). When this type of person is ‘recognized’ by the ‘present-day system of hypocrisy’, and ‘the spirit of candour which one hopes will spread’ will ‘lead to their recognition’, then, Sackville-West believes, changes in society will take place: ‘the facilitation of divorce, or possibly even the reconstruction of the system of marriage’ (Ibid., 117). In other words, as have Wilde and Woolf, she uses autobiography, foregrounding same-sex desire and homosocial reproduction, to critique the culture of her era, connecting same-sex desire with her critique of systems that undergird her society. She fictionalised the tragic results of forced acquiescence to cultural requirements in her first novel Challenge, a roman à clef based on her relationship with Violet Trefusis. She cross-dresses herself textually as ‘Julian’, but the portrayal in Challenge was clearly, for anyone who knew Sackville-West and Trefusis, about the two women. Sackville-West’s

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

278

278 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

georgina johnston

mother ‘saw at once the portrayal of Violet in the character Eve and was horrified’ (Glendinning 1983, 109). Sackville-West ‘withdrew her book from Collins’ (Ibid., 109), because of fear of scandal, though she later did publish the book11; this withdrawal emphasises how close the novel is to autobiography. Cross-dressing as a fictional technique provided Sackville-West with the tool she needed to recast autobiographical signification. She fictionalised herself as a man (Julian), with Trefusis as Eve. Yet this is not only a tool for fiction. The fictional text parallels her actual cross-dressing as ‘Julian’ when she is with Trefusis in their experiential life. She describes the crossdressing in Portrait when the two lovers are in Paris: Once we got to Paris it was different, and we led the same life as the year before, of cafés, theatres, and ‘Julian’. There was no abatement . . . in our caring for one another . . . I used to stroll about the boulevards as I had strolled down Piccadilly [as ‘Julian’], I used to sit in cafés drinking coffee, and watching people go by . . . in defiance of every policeman I passed. (Sackville-West 1980, 126–7)

By destabilising the relationship between gender and sex, Sackville-West undermines the autobiographical generic associations with mimesis. She dresses as a young man back from war, using a bandage around her head to conceal her hair, relying on her height, deepening her voice. Deliberately, she changes both signified and signifier, countering what viewers would expect, undermining a conventional reading of her body. This new signifier ‘Julian’ is real to her; it presents one of her two selves accurately. Woolf presented both sides of Sackville-West when she wrote SackvilleWest as a multiplied signifier in her ‘biography’ Orlando (dedicated to Sackville-West), first a man, then a woman changing with the historical periods, living from the Elizabethan times through 1928. Orlando changes from a man to a woman, physically, representing Sackville-West as, separately, both sexes, with their concomitant genders (never changing in youth and beauty, a parallel to Dorian Gray).12 Orlando complies, as a woman, with the ‘spirit of the age’ and the expectations – in terms of clothes and behaviour – though Orlando also cross-dresses while a woman, as did her referential origin Sackville-West, in order to escape into the life outside the respectable world, frequenting prostitutes, for example. Wilde posited that life followed art. Woolf, in her turn, with a bow to Wilde, recognised the extent to which culture, ‘the spirit of the age’, could bind the individual, forcing at least a seeming-compliance in the nineteenth

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

279 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

Queer Lives

279

century upon Orlando, whereas the twentieth century allows Orlando to express her selves easily. Woolf reiterates Sackville-West’s social concerns. They both bring awareness, using life-writings, of oppressive gender expectations: Woolf observes in Orlando that ‘the man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it . . . Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same too’ (Woolf 1928, 188). In this ‘biography’, Woolf replicates Sackville-West even in her philosophies manifested through cross-dressing.

Coda: the queer effect It makes sense that autobiographies referencing queer in the protomodernist and modernist periods would, inevitably, reveal society’s supposed truisms as fallible, since queer opposes them. Lesbian and queer theorists have often recognised the queer effect in patriarchal cultures. For Bonnie Zimmerman, the textual lesbian, even in 1992, ‘functions as excess within the heterosexual economy’ (Zimmerman 1992, 4). Moe Meyer’s thinking that ‘queer signals . . . an ontological challenge that displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous’ (Meyer 1994, 2) parallels Lee Edelman’s insight that ‘queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one’ (Edelman 2004, 17). Same-sex eroticisms and homosocial reproductive formations provide a contestatory public area. Wilde, Woolf, and Sackville-West produce portals through which they critique other parts of society, parts which can be recognised, then, as integrally related to the same-sex structures. Production of art, phrenological controversies, conforming public education, required gender roles of men and women, and marriage structures – these all rely upon heterosexual formations. While unacknowledged as a formative development, this use of autobiography as meta-autobiography has influenced the directions of the genre and its criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.13 Stephen Spender, in his own (queerly acknowledged) 1951 autobiography points out this formation, when he explores the direction autobiography has taken already in the early twentieth century, in its textual interweaving of autobiography and biography.14 In 1979, the deconstructionist Paul de Man presented a compelling theory that autobiography is a ‘figure of reading’ in which the autobiographer reads and then writes the earlier self, who in turn has created the writing ‘I’. This ‘specular structure’, de

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

280

280 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

georgina johnston

Man explains, represents ‘a substitutive exchange that constitutes the subject’ (de Man 1979, 921).15 These modernist autobiographers enforce this divided relationship between subject and object ‘I’, truth and fiction, art and life. The queer modernist autobiographer highlights the objectivity of the observed self, foregrounding queer in order to critique social institutions, thereby developing the genre of autobiography into a new form.

Notes 1. Hallett (1999) calls for historical study: ‘In understanding why lives are depicted as they are when they are, we need to know [. . .] about the historical location of the author’ (x). 2. Published1890 in Lippicott’s Monthly Magazine, 1891 in book form. 3. Written in prison and given to Robert Ross in 1897; the first full (accurate) version was published in 1962. 4. I also see Wilde’s use of C33, his prison number, for his signature of his late work The Ballad of Reading Gaol as a critique of the brutality of prison life, which reduces the individual to a number. 5. Many critics discuss Wilde’s cynicisms. Dollimore 1991 describes Wilde’s ‘transgressive aesthetic’ (8). For Robbins 2011, Wilde’s critical work ‘puts ideas forward and refutes them, often in a single sentence’ (43). Marcovitch 2010 examines Wilde’s ‘subversion in performance’ (14). Hanson 2003 points out that Wilde’s letter to the prison authorities displays a ‘calculated parody of the popular and scientific sexual jargon . . . playing an insincere game with language’ (106). Gagnier 1987 interprets Wilde’s ‘refus[al] to meet authority on its own ground, [as desire] to change the terms’ (186). 6. These are just a few of the novel’s references to the body–soul. 7. Woolf 1989, . 8. Woolf 1980, 459–60 9. In Epistemology, Sedgwick specifically makes use of Dorian Gray. She focuses on 1891, but her understandings of 1891 also inform her understandings of gay culture more generally, so much so that Epistemology even now serves as a central text of queer theory. 10. See Bartlett’s 1998 formidable research on the (in)visibility of queer lives in Wilde’s era. Intriguingly, Fanny (Charles Parker) was one of the men called to witness against Wilde in the 1895 trials. See Mothgomery Hyde 1952. 11. It was published in America in 1923 (Glendinning 1983, 130). 12. Urmila Seshagiri 2010 recognises Dorian Gray as Orlando’s referent (167). 13. Jean-Michel Rebaté’s 2014 work with Andre Gidé and Jean Genet underscores my thinking. 14. For Hilbert 2001, Spender’s autobiography ‘is as much a reconsideration, a critique, of the art of autobiography as it is an autobiography’.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

281 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

Queer Lives

281

15. See Egan’s 1994 discussion of auto/biography as a theoretical focus pertaining to all autobiography.

Bibliography Bartlett, Neil. 1988. Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde. London: Serpent’s Tail. Cohen, Ed. 1987. ‘Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation’. PMLA 102.5: 801–13. Cooter, Roger. 1989. Phrenology in the British Isles. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press. De Man, Paul. 1979. ‘Autobiography as Defacement’. Modern Language Notes 94: 919–30. Dollimore, Jonathan. 1991. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press. Egan, Susanna. 1994. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Engledue, W. C., M.C. 1837. In Phrenology, its Nature, Principles, and Uses (no editor). 3–22. Chichester: J. Hackman. Felman, Shoshana. 1993. What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gagnier, Regenia. 1987. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Aldershot: Scholars Press. Gilbert, W. S. and Arthur Sullivan. 1881. ‘Patience or, Bunthorne’s Bride’. New York: J. M. Stoddart. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. London: Cornell University Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 1991. ‘A Signature of Lesbian Autobiography: “Gertrice/ Altrude”’. Prose Studies 14.2: 56–75. Glendinning, Victoria. 1983. VITA: The Life of V. Sackville-West. New York: Knopf. Hallett, Nicky. 1999. Lesbian Lives: Identity and Auto-Biography in the Twentieth Century. London: Pluto Press. Hanson, Ellis. 2003. ‘Wilde’s Exquisite Pain’. In Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, 101–23. Edited by Joseph Bristow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Heilbrun, Carolyn. 1988. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Norton. Hilbert, Ernest. 2001. ‘From the Vault: Ernest Hilbert Visits Spender’s World’. www.cprw.com/spenders-world (accessed 15 September 2015).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

282

282 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

georgina johnston

Jelinek, Estelle. 1986. The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne. Johnston, Georgia. 2007. Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Gertrude Stein. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, James Edward. N.d. ‘Caricature of Wilde as Narcissus’. Collected in the British Museum Library, website www.bl.uk/collection-items/caricature-ofoscar-wilde-as-narcissus (accessed 15 September 2015). Loftus, Brian. 1997. ‘Speaking Silence: The Strategies and Structures of Queer Autobiography’. College Literature 24.1: 28–45. Marcovitch, Heather. 2010. The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory. Bern: Peter Lang. Marshall, Bridget M. 2000. ‘The Face of Evil: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Gothic Villain’. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6.2: 161–72. Meyer, Moe. 1994. ‘Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp’. In The Politics and Poetics of Camp, 1–22. Edited by Meyer. London: Routledge. Monthgomery Hyde, H. ed. 1952 [1948]. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. London: William Hodge & Co., Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Phrenology’. Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com .ezp.slu.edu/view/Entry/142982 (accessed 3 March 2015). Rebaté, Jean-Michel. 2014. ‘Transgressors: André Gide and Jean Genet‘. In The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, 148–61. Edited by Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman. New York: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Ruth. 2011. Oscar Wilde. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Rotinger, Anita. 1980. Oscar Wilde’s Life as Reflected in his Correspondence and his Autobiography. Salzburg, Austria: Insitut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Universitat Salzburg. Sackville-West, Vita. 1923. Challenge. New York: George H. Doran. Sackville-West, Vita and Nigel Nicolson. 1980. Portrait of a Marriage: V. SackvilleWest & Harold Nicolson. Edited by Nicolson. New York: Atheneum. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. Seshagiri, Urmilla. 2010. Race and the Modernist Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sinfield, Alan. 1994. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Jonathan. 2006. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Cambridge University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C19.3D

283 [269–283] 21.10.2015 1:19PM

Queer Lives

283

Spender, Stephen. 1951. World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender. London: Hamish Hamilton. Stimpson, Catharine R. 1992. ‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie‘. In American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, 152–166. Edited by Margo Culley. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Thompson, Sir Henry. 1939. ‘Phrenological Controversy, Correspondence’. In Phrenology, its Nature, Principles, and Uses. 3–38. Chichester: J. Hackman. Trefusis, Violet. 1989. Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita SackvilleWest. Edited by Michell A. Leaska and John Phillip. London: Mandarin. Twine, Richard. 2002. ‘Physiognomy, Phrenology and the Temporality of the Body’. Body and Society 8.1: 67–88. Watson, Julia. 1992. ‘Unspeakable Differences: The Politics of Gender in Lesbian and Heterosexual Women’s Autobiographies’. In De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, 139–68. Edited by Sidonie Smith and Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wilde, Oscar. 1891. ‘The Decay of Lying’. In Intentions. 1–55. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1960. London: Brown and Watson. Williams, Carolyn. 2008. ‘Parody and Poetic Tradition: Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience’. Victorian Poetry 46.4: 375–403. Woolf, Virginia. 1980. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, volume 6. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. San Diego: Harcourt. Woolf, Virginia. 1928. Orlando: A Biography. New York: Crosby Gaige. Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt. Woolf, Virginia. 1989. ‘A Sketch of the Past’. In Moments of Being. 2nd Ed., 72–173. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Grafton. Woolf, Virginia. 1966 [1938]. Three Guineas. San Diego: Harcourt. Zimmerman, Bonnie. 1992. ‘Lesbians Like This and That: Some Notes on Lesbian Criticism for the Nineties’. In New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Critical Reading, 1–17. Edited by Sally Munt. London: Harvester.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

284 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

chapter 20

Anecdotal remembrance Forms of First and Second World War life-writing Hope Wolf

Anecdotes join the conventions, people, and places Robert Graves’s autobiography waves goodbye to: ‘No more anecdotes’, he writes in the epilogue of Goodbye to All That (Graves 1929, 448). ‘That’ also includes the First World War. While his book does not focus solely on the war, the war sections are, like the rest of it, markedly anecdotal. It shares this feature with many memoirs and other forms of life-writing associated with both the First and Second World Wars: letters, diaries, and popular anthologies. This chapter will pose three questions of these texts. First: why are they so frequently anecdotal? Second: is there anything wrong with this – might we join Graves in saying ‘no more’? Third: should the popular form be defended? Answers to these questions will problematise easy pairings of ‘war’ and ‘autobiography’, that is, if autobiography is imagined as: ‘An account of a person’s life given by himself or herself, esp. one in published book form’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2015). One reason for this is that anecdotes, a principal mode of representing war, do not necessarily relate to ‘a person’. Although it might be argued that the use of ‘I’ is always a fabrication, imposing a false unity upon the subject, the collective weave of war writing is especially evident. War has also complicated the idea of ‘a life’. ‘War narratives aren’t like autobiography’, Samuel Hynes reflects: ‘Autobiographies narrate continuous lives; but a war narrative concerns a separate life that, however vividly it remains in the memory, is not continuous with the life the teller lives as he writes’ (Hynes 1997, 8). Anecdotes offer a means of responding to this: the need to narrate the past without providing a sense of sustained development. ‘Autobiographical’ is also tentatively used where war anecdotes are concerned because they do not always give ‘accounts’ of past actions, in the sense of describing events as they happened. ‘Anecdotal evidence’ has become almost a synonym for insubstantial documentary value. In a letter sent to Graves on 7 February 1930, poet and memoirist Siegfried Sassoon wrote: ‘I wished that your anecdotal method had been more accurate’ (Graves 1982, 199). This 284

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

285 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

Anecdotal remembrance

285

chapter will not be suggesting that anecdotes do not have documentary bearing; to the contrary, many do. Rather, it will emphasise their additional capacities for different kinds of truth-telling: those that have been associated with fables, folktales, and stories. Like these genres, the anecdote is a collective composition. The named author of the example below, set in the Second World War, is Macdonald Hastings. His son, Max Hastings, also contributed, editing it for The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes, adding the caption: Scavenging for fresh food in Normandy In the no-man’s land between the two sides, in the deserted farmsteads, there were plenty of fowls if you could catch them. I couldn’t. These chickens, as soon as they saw anybody in battledress, however much he whistled disinterest, scrambled up the nearest rampart, and you could not get after them without revealing yourself in a field of machinegun fire. But I discovered a flock of geese, and I broke my penknife trying to slaughter the first. When I had at last killed them all and loaded them into my jeep for my hungry colleagues, I was covered from top to tail with feathers. A soldier looking like one out of a Giles wartime cartoon, climbed out of a slit trench and said to me balefully, ‘Them was laying eggs.’ (Hastings 1985, 456)

The anecdote is reminiscent of the Aesopic fable, The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs, in which the protagonist(s), upon discovering their goose’s miraculous talents, mistakenly attempt to get at all of its riches at once by killing it. The soldier whose quip closes the text may be referencing the fable. Co-authorship is implied again with a nod to cartoons. But the collaboration of readers is also crucial: the allusion to the fable is inferred. And so is its meaning. Given that Hastings was acting for his ‘hungry comrades’ and not just himself, the moral added to versions of the fable, ‘Much wants more and loses all’ (Aesop 1912, 2), is not immediately drawn from his narrative. But it can be read for alternative lessons: in foraging (advocating temperance and thoughtfulness), in war (intimating, by means of allegory, that peaceful relations are more profitable than violence), or history (a metaphor linked with the German military, ‘goose-step’, encourages consideration of the excerpt as a synecdoche for a specific war or battle). Adding to the last two interpretations, does the description of the feather-covered protagonist suggest that in slaughtering in excess one is slaughtering oneself? Does it equate the slaughter of the weak with cowardice (‘chicken’)? Or would pursuing these lines of inquiry constitute a wild goose chase? The point here is not to provide a definitive interpretation, but rather to show the many ways in which the anecdote could be read, and how it provokes the making of associative connections.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

286

286 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

hope wolf

Might the way in which the text simultaneously seems so ripe with meaning, yet so resistant to conclusive interpretation, have contributed to its survival? It has been plucked out of its original context (a book of reminiscences about sporting life, published in 1979), and reproduced in a new one. Continuing to provide riches, the anecdote appears as the goose that laid the golden eggs. Wresting a definitive meaning from it becomes equal to slaughtering the goose. Although it might be argued that its productive potential has been circumscribed by transcription, ‘pen’ and ‘knife’ should not be so quickly conjoined. Where re-reading prevents textual mortification, chasing meaning, like chasing the fowls in the story, appears perilous. It misses the point of why events have been related in a form that allows readers to fly in different directions. But does not the application of a formal category itself constitute a narrowing of interpretation? Here it is proposed that ‘anecdote’ not be treated as an exclusive term, denying its participation in other genres. Developing a distinction made by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay, ‘The Storyteller’, one characteristic that texts usually recognised as anecdotes tend to have in common is their sharing of qualities attributed to both ‘story’ and ‘information’. So doing, they offer two different kinds of truth: wisdom and fact. For Benjamin, the ‘chaste compactness’ of the story, and its capacity to be detached from a single context, meant that it could be integrated with listeners’ experiences, and so remembered and passed on (Benjamin 1999, 90). ‘Information’, by contrast, is explained and verified only in relation to the moment that produces it (Ibid., 88–90). Hastings’s anecdote, not including an explicit moral, might be viewed as ‘chaste’ in the sense that it does not give itself away. It also includes sufficiently scant detail about the protagonists to tempt assimilation with other narratives. However, it is not without an identifiable temporal and geographical setting. The detail of the ‘jeep’ cannot be subsumed easily into a transferable life lesson. It marks the text as military and locates it in history. It was for their contingent details that New Historicists argued that anecdotes give readers the ‘effect’ or ‘touch of the real’ (Fineman 1989, 61; Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000, 49). They are said to offer a kind of counter-history, disrupting attempts to use them as examples to support overarching teleological frames. Comparing many of the anecdotes quoted in this chapter with what has been the most influential grand narrative applied to early-twentieth-century warfare – that of disillusionment – the former seem to offer condensed versions of the latter, but with elements that exceed attempts to contain them. To elucidate this point, it would be amiss not to cite the ‘myth’ (a plot which bestows meaning) presented in

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

287 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

Anecdotal remembrance

287

Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975): ‘Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected’ (Fussell 2000, 7). His version of ‘irony’ associates soldiers with fallen men and casts war as an educator: ‘the irony of situation arises from a collision between innocence and awareness’ (Ibid., 5). In some respects Hastings’s anecdote aligns with this model: the breaking of the penknife shows that the task proved much greater than he anticipated, and his comrade’s remark foregrounds his shortcomings. However, while Fussell’s structural reading is helpful for identifying broad similarities between texts, it nonetheless negates points of complexity and singularity. The presumed feeding of the troops confuses the ‘innocence’ and ‘awareness’ binary. Also significant are details the editor of the anthology omitted: Macdonald Hasting’s use of the term ‘loot’ when describing his activities, and his concluding comments upon the episode, and others in which he used a gun to obtain food (when, as a war correspondent, he was banned from carrying one): ‘I make no excuse for my conduct at that time. The lily-hearted have no place in the ruthlessness of war. What we were concerned with was survival. But it never lacked its grim fun’ (Hastings 1979, 38–9). De-emphasising the issue of property with the gloss ‘scavenging’, and removing the admission of enjoyment, makes Hastings fit better the category of ‘innocence’. And this highlights the importance of considering how far the text and how far the reader/editor is the myth-maker. Hastings’s was a Second World War anecdote, and it should be noted that although Fussell described all wars as ‘ironic’, the First World War was deemed ‘more ironic than any before or since’ (Fussell 2000, 8). The examples his argument is based upon resemble the following anecdote, excerpted from a nineteen-page letter of handwritten reminiscences by S. W. Aldridge. It is dated 16 July 1963 and is addressed to television producers at the BBC. Aldridge remembers a mistake he made when trying to find a place to sleep for the night when at La Brique, Ypres Salient, in May 1915: I found a nice surface shelter dug out. I found a beauty, it smelt pretty dank and mildew. It was my turn for a four hours doss. I struck a match, and saw somebody stretched out asleep covered in a blanket. What luxury. But on striking another, I saw a pair of German field boots sticking out on the right wall. Whoever built it (French). ‘Blimey, I said Mme, Tussauds’. I took off my equipment (strictly against orders, as usual), and hung it over the two boots & contents! the floor was cold and damp, I spoke and the chap ‘having a kip’ never answered. I got down beside him, and edged under part of the blanket beside him. It was like a fridge, I couldn’t sleep, so I pulled a bit

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

288

288 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

hope wolf more blanket round me, he never spoke, I pulled a bit more, until I had over half, and thinking it would be warmer I pinched the lot. I thought there will be a row when he wakes up. I was chilled though, when an officer shone a torch in. I looked up, he shone a torch on me and the sleeping Frenchman. I went out of that dug out like a whizz-bang! I had been kipping with a pair of Jerry feet and a Moroccan Stiff the French had dumped there! It gave the lads a laugh for days. (Aldridge 16 July 1963, 10)1

Similar narratives appear in Second World War writing. Soldier-poet Keith Douglas, for instance, describes a ‘reclining’ Libyan soldier in his Second World War memoir, Alamein to Zem Zem (published in 1946; Douglas was killed in action in 1944): Looking down for a moment at a weapon-pit beside us, I saw a Libyan soldier reclining there. He had no equipment nor arms, and lay on his back as though resting, his arms flung out, one knee bent, his eyes open. He was a big man: his face reminded me of Paul Robeson. I thought of Rimbaud’s poem: Le Dormeur du Val – but the last line: Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit was not applicable. There were no signs of violence. As I looked at him, a fly crawled up his cheek and across the dry pupil of his unblinking right eye. I saw that a pocket of dust had collected in the trough of the lower lid. The fact that for two minutes he had been lying so close to me, without my noticing him, was surprising: it was as though he had come there silently and taken up his position since our arrival. (Douglas 1946, 29)

There is an important difference between these texts, however. The latter cites a precedent: Arthur Rimbaud’s deceptively titled poem ‘The Sleeper in the Valley’, written in 1870 and responding to the Franco-Prussian War. That Douglas is here using an earlier war to mediate another is significant given a point writer J. B. Priestley makes in his 1962 memoir, Margin Released. Although he imagines ‘younger men and women feel much the same about the Second World War’, he adds: ‘I think the First War cut deeper and played more tricks with time because it was first, because it was bloodier, because it came out of a blue that nobody saw after 1914’ (Priestley 1962, 88, his italics). Given Priestley’s descriptions, and Fussell’s remarks about the peculiarity of the First World War, it is interesting that Douglas does not seem particularly shocked by the Libyan soldier: the event is only ‘surprising’. Could this be because he had already been prepared for war by earlier accounts? At other points in the book he acknowledges the way in which the First World War shaped his experiences: ‘the General alone refrained from calling me “old boy” although he said good morning, good morning as civilly as Siegfried Sassoon’s General’ (Douglas 1946, 8). There is

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

289 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

Anecdotal remembrance

289

another moment in which the soldiers pre-empt the possibility that the ‘object’ at the bottom of the trench in which they intend to sleep might be a dead man: ‘“Oh!” John peered down into the murk. “I hope it’s not a corpse”’ (Ibid., 22). They later find that it is indeed not a corpse, but ‘someone else’s bedding’. Aldridge, by contrast, casts himself as unprepared for what is to come, untrained by prior narratives. One problem with this analysis is that it uses a single anecdote and memoir as representative examples of First and Second World War lifewriting. More could be added. In Goodbye to All That, Graves commands a man who had lost the back of his head to ‘Stand-to, there’, thus compromising his confident assertion that he ‘was ready for anything odd in the trenches’ (Graves 1929, 141–2). However, a more extensive, quantitative analysis would be needed to substantiate confident claims about differences between the ways in which the two wars were experienced and remembered. However, this does not negate the suggestion that one function of the anecdote is to offer a kind of training. Narratives like Graves’s could be used to teach soldiers to prepare for the worst lest they be shocked out of service. They are assisted by a response that very often accompanies the telling of anecdotes. Laughter, as Henri Bergson wrote in his 1900 essay on the subject, can function to correct ‘inelasticity’: that is, the inability to adapt one’s habits to new situations (Bergson 1911, 10). And it is adaptation that is particularly required of the soldier: upon entering a military academy, the youth is given a set of ‘ordeals to face’ which have the object of ‘breaking him into harness’ (Ibid., 134). Looking to the response of the soldiers in Aldridge’s anecdote, we might say that laughter is one of the means by which he is broken. The implication this has for anecdotes is that they appear to facilitate the preservation of the status quo. Like JeanFrançois Lyotard’s ‘popular stories’, they seem to offer ‘apprenticeships’ or ‘models . . . of integration into established institutions’ (Lyotard 1984, 19–20). What they do not do is protest the situation in which the protagonists find themselves. Hastings does not complain that he and his comrades were insufficiently provided for, in terms of food or weapons to obtain it. Aldridge does not explicitly grumble about his makeshift sleeping conditions. Like the folktales Robert Darnton describes in his book on French cultural history, the anecdotes offer ‘a program for survival, not a fantasy of escape’ (Darnton 1984, 40). Fantasies can be suggested: for instance, Graves describes two soldiers plotting to kill their sergeant who gives them ‘the most dirty and dangerous jobs’; but wishes are not fulfilled: the soldiers are killed for shooting the company sergeantmajor by mistake (Graves 1929, 149–50).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

290

290 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

hope wolf

Only a few incidents have been referenced so far, but thinking more generally, is there something about the form of the anecdote that diffuses criticism? Aldridge’s reminiscences were sent in response to a call for ‘vivid’ memories and ‘anecdotes’ of the First World War (Anon., Radio Times 4 July 1963, 20; Norman, Daily Mail 3 July 1963, 3). Asking for these forms was a means of making the invitation inclusive – specific expertise was not required. But it also delegated the work of sustained analysis to the few. Selected letter writers would be invited to appear in the 1964 BBC documentary series, The Great War; their reminiscences would be used to illustrate a narrative provided by historians. Yet readers and audiences can also use eyewitness accounts as inspiration for their own critical reflections. If ‘trickery’, for instance, which Victor Propp deemed a key element in the folk story, is substituted for Fussell’s terminology, Aldridge’s and Graves’s anecdotes begin to make an indirect complaint: expectations had been quashed as a result of misinformation (Propp 1968, 29). Adding to this, it is important to consider what is mistaken for what. Aldridge’s anecdote could be read as a challenge to a recurrent euphemism, often found in First World War poetry, which conflated death with sleeping. Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnet ‘Peace’, for example, includes the lines: ‘Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there, / Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending’ (Brooke 1918, 5). Any consolatory imaginative attempt to merge the two collapses under the weight of the real. That the dead man in Aldridge’s anecdote is a member of the colonial troops, and is confused with a French soldier, may also be significant, highlighting similarities and dramatising how the former have so often been forgotten in the history of the conflict (with regard to this last point it is interesting too that Douglas is at first unaware of the presence of the Libyan soldier). To give further instances of anecdotes presenting possible challenges to the binaries of propaganda and tradition: that German and English soldiers, and also privates and generals, could be confused questions the assumptions of difference upon which their respective treatment rests (see Wolf 2010, 62–5). Anecdotes, read in this way, can be seen to register fantasies and fears that their tellers might neither have wanted, nor been able, to articulate directly. Upon close inspection, the examples given become more ambivalent, and less like straightforward ‘apprenticeships’, than they at first appear. It might be argued that even if they question categories, the latter ultimately remain in place: by their conclusion mistakes have been corrected. However, it is still the case that they draw attention to points of tension and contradiction and can provoke discussions about them.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

291 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

Anecdotal remembrance

291

This is especially evident in the way in which they navigate rules by which the civilian-turned-soldier was expected to act. Aldridge’s anecdote could be read as a response to two conflicting dicta that novelist and First World War officer Ford Madox Ford outlines in Parade’s End (1924–1928): ‘the thing is to be able to stick to the integrity of your character, whatever earthquake sets the house tumbling over your head’; ‘But one must adapt oneself to one’s day; the times were changed’ (Ford 2002, 454, 778). Earlier the soldiers’ mistakes were read as examples of ‘inelasticity’. However, Bergson’s use of this term, and his discussion of the military academy, predated the First World War: could he have anticipated the stretch, or rather the snap, that it would involve? Looking for alternatives, the anecdote could instead be viewed as a moment of, to borrow terminology from Jacques Lacan, ‘misrecognition’; we could say Aldridge was refusing to subject his context to a reality test in order to remain obedient to former customs or, as Lacan poignantly puts it, ‘the law of the heart’ (Lacan 2006, 140). His actions begin to mark a refusal to fit into a world in which one can expect to sleep with dead men. Resistance to adaptation is never marked, and reasons are given for his confusion (darkness). To act otherwise would deviate from what was expected of a soldier. These contradictions are reminiscent of the conflict between the ‘old ego of peacetime’ and the ‘new war ego of the soldier’ that Sigmund Freud described as driving the soldier into traumatic neurosis (Freud 1921, 2). Yet anecdotes tend not to formally express the psychic impact of war – its capacity to induce amnesia, repression, hallucination, and mutism, for example. Observing the latter, Benjamin ranked the First World War amongst the contributors to the decline of the storyteller: ‘Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?’ (Benjamin 1999, 84). The limits of communicability become manifest in oral and filmed testimonies where unexpected questions steer the interviewee from rehearsed narratives (see Langer 1991). But there are also experimental forms of life-writing that foreground how disturbing experiences compromise confident representations of the past. Take the following excerpt from The Forbidden Zone by writer and First World War nurse Mary Borden: I think that woman, myself, must have been in a trance, or under some horrid spell . . . she moves ceaselessly about with bright burning eyes and handles the dreadful wreckage of men as if in a dream . . . Her eyes and her

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

292

292 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

hope wolf hands and her ears are alert, intent on the unseen thing that scurries and hides and jumps out of the corner on to the face of a man when she’s not looking. (Borden 1929, 151–2)

She is unable to remember what happened in any straightforward way (‘I think’), detaches her present self from her past self, and appears as a character in a monstrous tale. Although she claims ‘I have not invented anything in this book’ (‘The Preface’, her italics), her writing blurs distinctions between fact and fiction. Anecdotes, by contrast, generally remain ostensibly in the realist mode. The confusions poet-soldier Edward Thomas reports in his 1917 war diary show how war realises nightmares. But it is a weapon, not a phantasmic figure of death that comes knocking: ‘At night I quite thought someone was knocking excitedly at one of the doors, when it was really machine guns’ (Thomas 2004, 157). Gothic symbols materialise; they are not, as Borden’s ‘unseen thing’, imagined: ‘what I thought first was a piece of burnt paper or something turned out to be a bat’ (Ibid., 164). Literature was not required to do the work of ‘defamiliarization’ for Thomas (Shklovsky 1965, 13). But this does not mean that it had lost its defamiliarising role. Modernist experimentation still had the capacity to counter the way in which more popular forms wrested the shocks of the new into familiar structures. In Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Bernard reflects: How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. (Woolf 1931, 261)

‘Broken words, inarticulate words’ sounds like the voice of the shellshocked soldier. Where anecdotal narratives generally have a linear chronology, the past comes crashing into the present as present in characterisations of the veteran in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Disturbing memories of the First World War come back to haunt the female protagonist of Elizabeth Bowen’s short story of the Blitz, ‘The Demon Lover’ (first published in 1941). The way in which the experience of war disrupts temporal linearity is also portrayed in Sassoon’s poem ‘The Dug-Out’, framed as a work of life-writing by a spatial and temporal marker: ‘St Venant. July, 1918’ (Sassoon 1919, 5, his italics). In the poem anxieties about the future transfigure the present. The sleeping soldier is spatially disembodied, fragmented across the poem: ‘legs ungainly huddled’, ‘one arm

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

293 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

Anecdotal remembrance

293

bent across your sullen, cold, / Exhausted face’. The speaker’s body parts are added to the uncanny scene: ‘It hurts my heart to watch you’. Although ‘guttering’ denotes a weak flame when ascribed to a candle that casts the observed soldier in shadow, its corporeal connotations are brought to light by the final haunting line: ‘And when you sleep you remind me of the dead’ (his italics). Knowledge that his friend is alive offers no relief. Remaining with uncertainty, the poem differs from anecdotes in which expectations are fulfilled (the inverted commas around Aldridge’s ‘“having a kip”’, for instance, hint at what is to come). By comparison with these forms of writing, anecdotes can seem to domesticate violence, containing it in a ‘neat’ and familiar structure. However, there is a danger here of reading them out of context – as anthologies or collections often do, transforming the anecdote into a fetishised object (see Monks 2013, 148). Context, as Ford shows in Parade’s End, can lend a sense of pathos to the telling of an anecdote. In the midst of an awkward conversation, it is the form to which General Campion resorts: ‘. . . Mind, I’m not saying always . . . Usually . . . There was a fellow called . . .’ He went off into an anecdote . . . Tietjens recognised the pathos of his trying to get away from the agonising present moment, back to an India where it was all real soldiering and good leather and parades that had been parades. (Ford 2002, 479)

The anecdote, contrasted with the elliptical fragments that precede it, evidently responds to emotional intensity and acts as a substitute for what cannot be said. It provides an escape from the intimacy of unprepared revelation. The textual context of many war anecdotes, by contrast, is often more anecdotes. Evelyn Cobley has suggested that the episodic form of published war memoirs expresses ‘precarious and fragmented experience in a hostile world’ (Cobley 1999, 133). Priestley, in Margin Released: A Writers’ Reminiscences and Reflections (emphatically ‘not an autobiography’), writes of the First World War taking place in ‘almost another life in another world’ (Priestley 1962, vii.88). A collection of reminiscences, with a ‘purely chronological rather than teleological and causal’ linearity (Cobley 1999, 26), can offer a means of talking about the past without needing to reconcile pre-war and wartime identities. Diverging from the traditional Bildungsroman still further, more ephemeral forms of war-writing are sometimes not even chronological. Graves was described as having an ‘anecdotal method’; the phrase would be less apt for Aldridge’s much less organised notes, with their seemingly erratic use of underlining. While the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

294

294 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

hope wolf

anecdote might not involve conspicuous fragmentation, texts comprising many anecdotes often do. T. S. Eliot, in an essay first published in 1923, wrote that the ‘mythical method’, as pursued in James Joyce’s Ulysses, constituted ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history . . . a step toward making the modern world possible for art’ (Eliot 1975, 177–8). Some of the readings in this chapter could be used to substantiate the idea that the ‘anecdotal method’ made the modern world possible for remembrance and war. Anecdotes were at first critiqued for training for conflict, facilitating the delegation of critical thinking and softening distressing experiences. Should they, for these reasons, be treated as the soldiers treat the kitsch object in the anecdote below from Goodbye to All That? We officers spend a lot of time practising revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only undestroyed living-room in our billetarea. It was a glass case full of artificial fruit and flowers, so we put it up on a post at fifty yards range. He said: ‘I’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn things. My aunt had one. It’s the sort of thing that would survive an intense bombardment.’ For a moment I felt a tender impulse to rescue it. But I smothered it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Nobody could hit it. So at last we went up to within twenty yards of it and fired a volley. Someone hit the post and that knocked the case off into the grass. Jenkins said: ‘Damn the thing, it must be bewitched. Let’s take it back.’ The glass was unbroken, but some of the fruit had come loose. Walker said: ‘No, it’s in pain; we must put it out of its suffering.’ He gave it the coup de grace from close quarters. (Graves 1929, 158, his italics)

A defence of anecdotes has been provided by drawing attention to the role of readers in their construction. Meaning does not lie ‘inside like a kernel’ (to remember the description of the ‘yarns of seamen’ in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness), but is constructed dialogically (Conrad 1963, 5). Editing can shape perspectives. So can the interpretative lenses brought to texts: anecdotes started to register desires, fears, contradictions, and intensities once exposed to new critical terminologies. It was perhaps in part for their potential to transform upon re-reading – frustrating a readerly trajectory from ‘innocence’ to ‘awareness’ – that they were able to weather the pressures violent twentieth-century events placed upon representation and form. Modernism intervenes: Christopher Isherwood, in the excerpt from his autobiography below, fragments (‘I’, ‘him’ and ‘“Isherwood”’). But the anecdotal method ‘still goes on’, as texts quoted in this chapter show, and as Graves admits by remembering, then breaking, his promise of ‘no more anecdotes’ in

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

295 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

Anecdotal remembrance

295

the sequel to Goodbye to All That (Graves 1930, 7). The form keeps, like Isherwood’s decadent survivor of the Second World War, ticking away: When they said goodbye, Frl Thurau gave him the brass dolphin clockstand, holding a clock on its tail, which is described in Goodbye to Berlin and about which ‘Isherwood’ asks himself: ‘What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed?’ A prophetic comment – for a bomb-blast had hurled it across the room and only slightly scratched its green marble base. It stands ticking away on my desk, as good as new, while I write these words. (Isherwood 1977, 103).

Notes 1. Every reasonable effort has been made to seek permission from the respective copyright holders to publish archival material included in this chapter, but if you should consider yourself to hold publication rights for the extracts included and have not already been contacted, the author would be pleased to hear from you.

Bibliography Aesop. 1912. Aesop’s Fables. Translated by V. S. Vernon Jones, introduced by G. K. Chesterton, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London, New York: Heinemann. Aldridge, S. W to Tony Essex and Gordon Watkins. 16 July 1963. BBC Great War Series Correspondence, Aar-All. Imperial War Museum. Anon. 4 July 1963. ‘The Great War.’ In Radio Times, 20. Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1936]. ‘The Storyteller’. In Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zorn, edited by Hannah Arendt. London: Pimlico. Bergson, Henri. 1911 [1900]. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan. Borden, Mary. 1929. The Forbidden Zone. London: Heinemann. Bowen, Elizabeth. 1947[1941]. ‘The Demon Lover’. In The Demon Lover and Other Stories, 80–7. London: Cape. Brooke, Rupert. 1918. ‘Peace.’ In Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke With a Memoir [by Sir Edward Marsh], 5. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Cobley, Evelyn. 1999. Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Conrad, Joseph. 1963 [1899]. Heart of Darkness. Edited by Robert Kimbrough. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Darnton, Robert. 1984. The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

296

296 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

hope wolf

Douglas, Keith. 1946. Alamein to Zem Zem. London: Editions Poetry London. Eliot, T. S. 1975 [1923]. ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’. In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 175–8. Edited by Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber. Fineman, Joel. 1989. ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction.’ In The New Historicism, 49–76. Edited by H. Aram Veeser. New York and London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1921. ‘Introduction.’ In Psychoanalysis and the War Neurosis, 1–4, by S. Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel and Ernest Jones. London: The International Psycho-Analytical Press. Ford, Ford Madox, 2002[1924–1928]. Parade’s End. London: Penguin. Fussell, Paul. 2000 [1975]. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. 2000. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Graves, Robert. 1929. Goodbye to All That. London: Cape. Graves, Robert. 1930. ‘Postscript to “Goodbye to All That”’. In But It Still Goes On: An Accumulation by Robert Graves, 13–56. London: Cape. Graves, Robert. 1982. In In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves, 1914– 1946, 197–201. Edited by Paul O’ Prey. London: Hutchinson. Hastings, Macdonald. 1979. Game Book: Sporting around the World. London: Joseph. Hastings, Max. 1985. The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hynes, Samuel. 1997. The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: Penguin. Isherwood, Christopher. 1977 [1976]. Christopher and His Kind. London: Methuen. Lacan, Jacques. 2006 [1966]. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Langer, Lawrence L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984 [1979]. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Monks, Aoife. 2013. ‘Collecting Ghosts: Actors, Anecdotes and Objects at the Theatre’. Contemporary Theatre Review 23:2: 146–52. Norman, Barry. 3 July 1963. ‘BBC asks viewers for 1914–1918 memories.’ In Daily Mail, 3. Oxford English Dictionary. 2015. ‘Autobiography’. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.oed.com (accessed 1 May 2015). Priestley, J. B. 1962. Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections. London: Heinemann.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6837842/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C20.3D

297 [284–297] 21.10.2015 1:49PM

Anecdotal remembrance

297

Propp, Victor. 1968 [1928]. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott, edited by Louis A. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1919 [1918]. ‘The Dug-Out’. In Picture Show, 5. Privately printed. Shklovsky, Victor. 1965 [1917]. ‘Art as Technique’. In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, 3–24. Translated and with an introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln [Nebr.]: University of Nebraska Press. Thomas, Edward. 2004. ‘War Diary’. In The Collected Poems and War Diary, 1917, 137–72. Edited by R. George Thomas. London: Faber and Faber. Wolf, Hope. 2010. ‘“Something yet unpublished”: Anecdotes in the Imperial War Museum Archive of the 1964 BBC Series, The Great War.’ PhD diss., University of London. Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1931. The Waves. London: Hogarth Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

298 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

chapter 21

Experiments in form Modernism and autobiography in Woolf, Eliot, Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, and Richardson Laura Marcus

There has been a long-held assumption that the genre of autobiography did not flourish in the contexts of literary modernism, with few of the writers most fully associated with Anglophone modernism producing fullyfledged autobiographical works. The recent shift away from this view, and the appearance of a number of significant critical works focusing on modernism and autobiography, has a number of causes. One relates to concepts of modernism which have both expanded, to take in ‘moderns’ such as H.G. Wells, among whose publications was the two-volume Experiment in Autobiography (1934), and extended, to include the turnof-the-century writings, including the autobiographical works, of authors such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Secondly, the category of autobiography has become more expansive, with the term ‘life-writing’ (originally used in the eighteenth century but deployed in modernist contexts by Virginia Woolf) becoming inclusive of a range of personal writings, including memoirs, letters, and diaries. As a related point, the extensive publication in recent decades of such personal writings (as in the ongoing publication of Samuel Beckett’s Letters), as well as manuscript versions of texts, has led to a new, or renewed, focus on the person of the author and the processes and stages of literary creation. Such a ‘genetic criticism’, while not necessarily concerned with the lives of authors, has contributed to the sense that the life and the work cannot, after all, be seen (as they were in much mid-twentieth-century structuralist criticism) as radically distinct. While the perception that modernism excluded autobiography is thus questionable, the attitudes of many modernist writers towards autobiography were ambivalent and often contradictory. The period produced many highly ‘autobiographical’ fictions, including those by Mansfield, Joyce, Lawrence, Richardson, and Woolf, but their authors frequently expressed a distaste for ‘confessional’ literature and produced far fewer direct 298

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

299 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

Experiments in form

299

autobiographies (that is, works explicitly declared to be the story of the lives of their authors) than the generation of writers preceding them. One reason for this was, as a number of critics have suggested, the development of an increasingly ‘aesthetic’ approach to autobiography, in which the divide between fiction and autobiography became ever less absolute.1 A further cause was almost certainly the increasingly complex understanding of the nature of self and identity, resulting in the perceptions that, firstly, ‘conventional’ forms of autobiography were inadequate to the multiplicity of selves that make up the single individual and, relatedly, that the self has a substrate (or substrates) which is not knowable and communicable in any direct and unmediated way. Autobiographical fiction, with its possibilities for multiple perspectives on characters and situations, answered to the need to represent complex, composite and divided selves: its mediations also seemed to create the most appropriate vehicles for identities which can never be fully known. The philosophical and psychological, including the psychoanalytical, theories of the period both shaped and supported these approaches. Katherine Mansfield’s meditations, in her letters and journals, on the topic of autobiography are powerful illustrations of these tendencies and complexities. In a letter to the novelist Hugh Walpole, dated October 1920 (Mansfield 1996, 86–7), she wrote: ‘I sympathise more than I can say with your desire to escape from autobiography . . . I think there is a very profound distinction between any kind of confession and creative work – not that that rules out the first by any means’. A few months previously she had written in her journal of the sentiment which had habitually furnished old-fashioned autograph albums: ‘To thine own self be true’. She commented on the impossibility of the prescription: True to oneself! which self? Which of my many – well really, hundreds of selves? For what with complexes and repressions and reactions and vibrations and reflections, there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests. Nevertheless, there are signs that we are intent as never before on trying to puzzle out, to live by, our own particular self, Der Mensch muss frei sein – free, disentangled, single. Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent? (Mansfield 1997, 204)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

300

300 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

laura marcus

Mansfield images this self in relation to a plant which, growing slowly ‘through years of darkness’, is finally discovered by the light and has its flower shaken free: ‘and – we are alive – we are flowering for our moment upon the earth? This is the moment which, after all, we live for – the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal’ (Ibid.,, 204) While the passage has frequently been read as offering a model, or models, of selfhood, it should be noted that Mansfield frames the concept of the multiple self as a product of modern, and in particular Freudian, constructions of identity, rather than as defining the nature of being. At the same time, the counter-image of the singular self, ‘continuous and permanent’, is described as ‘persistent yet mysterious’: a matter of intuition rather than knowledge. Mansfield’s paradoxes on this topic point to the impossibility of stepping outside the self in order to apprehend it as either single or multiple, an issue which relates not only to self-understanding but to conceptions of subjectivity and identity more broadly. As a modern philosophical problematic, this was central to the thought of Henri Bergson, who (in lectures given in the early 1910s) had explored the topic of the unity and multiplicity of selfhood. He took this concern back to the philosophy of Plotinus, for whom, in Bergson’s words, the central question is: ‘How can our person be on the one hand one or single, on the other hand multiple?’ Plotinus’s answer, Bergson (1972, 1055) writes, was that ‘each of us was multiple “in our lower nature” and single “in our higher nature”’ – a metaphysics which Bergson’s philosophy resists, even as he acknowledges its force. Plotinus’s hierarchy (the lower multiple and the higher singular) is not entirely absent from Mansfield’s meditations on selfhood. Her assertion that ‘we are most ourselves’ when ‘least personal’, linked as it is to an epiphanic or ecstatic moment of ‘flowering’ (one that is represented repeatedly in her short stories, as in the writings of both D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf) can be understood in relation to the idealist model in which the self merges with that which is outside itself. ‘Ecstasy’, as derived from its ancient Greek origins, is a removal from or a standing outside oneself, often involving a merging with another substance or self, divine or human, by, in Bergson’s words, ‘its identification with the One by a saltus [leap] which takes it out of itself’. We can compare this ‘leap’ to Mansfield’s insistence on the importance of becoming at one with the object of perception: ‘I don’t see how art is going to make that divine spring into the bounding outline of things if it hasn’t passed through the process of trying to become those things before recreating them’ (Mansfield 1984, 330). Idealism, as well as quidditas, transmutes here into the preoccupation,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

301 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

Experiments in form

301

in many respects running counter to Bergson’s thought, with the material world of ‘things’ and the identity of objects. The paradox that ‘we are most ourselves’ when ‘least personal’ connects to one of the central issues in modernist literature: the topic of ‘impersonality’. Mansfield wrote in her journal for January 1920 that her ‘philosophy’ was ‘the defeat of the personal’, an assertion linked to T. S. Eliot’s formulations in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) that ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’ and that the poet has ‘not a “personality” to express but a particular medium’ (Eliot 1953, 26; 28).2 The authority of Eliot’s statements on this topic has been largely responsible for the perception of modernism as an anti-autobiographical movement. Yet critical readings of Eliot in recent decades have pointed out the complexities and inconsistencies in the modernist doctrine of ‘impersonality’, and have suggested that it proved a spur rather than a barrier to experiments in life-writing. As Robert Caserio writes of modernist autobiographers: ‘They produce life-writing, however perplexingly, as records of selves impersonally distanced from selfhood; of identities that are none. They thereby sometimes court, and value, their own dissolution’ (Caserio 2014, 197). Distancing and displacement are indeed defining features of much modernist autobiographical experimentation, from the autobiographical novel, the Bildungsroman, and the roman-a-clef to third-person autobiographies, including Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein writes her own life as if in the voice of her companion. A number of writers shared the perception that the truest autobiography would emerge in fictional form. D. H. Lawrence expressed deep resistance to writing a direct account of his life – ‘I simply can’t write biographies of myself’. He did, however, produce a number of brief autobiographical sketches, including one, entitled ‘Mushrooms’, of which we have only a fragment. This appears to be the beginning of an autobiographical account, in which Lawrence declares the futility of the endeavour: It is perhaps absurd for any man to write his own autobiography. The one person I find it impossible to ‘know’ is myself. I have dozens of little pictures of what purports to be myself, and which is me? None of them. The little animal is now a bigger animal. But what sort of animal it is, I do not know, and do not vastly care. (Worthen 1991, vii)

The impossibility of self-knowledge, in the context of the self’s multiplicity, bears closely on Mansfield’s reflections on the same topic, though Lawrence goes further in his denial that there can be any accord between

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

302

302 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

laura marcus

self-perceptions and true identity. Multiplicity is not an imperfect manifestation of a higher unity, because neither multiple selves nor the unified self are veridical. After being pressed for a written account of himself by the novelist and publisher Philippe Soupault, Lawrence wrote: ‘With great reluctance I have forced myself to write out a draft of an autobiography – Let [Soupault] read Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow – and he’s got all he wants’ (Boulton and Boulton 1991, 465). In his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, written a year after the ‘Autobiography’ he produced for Soupault, Lawrence offered brief descriptions of his parents and their differences: the father ‘a collier, and only a collier’, the mother from ‘the lower bourgeoisie’, though ‘a working man’s wife, and nothing else, in her shabby little black bonnet and her shrewd, clear, “different” face’. Difference defines Lawrence’s felt relationship to the world. He becomes a teacher and then a published author, but success in his own terms, he writes, eludes him, because ‘I feel, somehow, not much of a human success . . . There is a breach. And my contact is with something that is non-human, non-vocal’. The ‘breach’ is linked to the class divide: ‘As a man from the working-class, I feel that the middle class cut off some of my vital vibration when I am with them . . . Then why don’t I live with my working people? Because their vibration is limited in another direction’. Lawrence wrote that it was in Italy, living amongst ‘the peasants who work the land of this villa’, that ‘the human flow comes to me’ (Lawrence 1978, 592–6). If we look for ‘autobiography’ in Lawrence’s writings, it can be found, to a significant extent, in his travel writings. Movement in and through places brings to the fore the relationship between the narrating self and those he encounters, while Lawrence represents models of identity and consciousness as central aspects of different cultures, whose otherness he makes absolute and which he represents as radically non-autobiographical. In ‘Twilight in Italy’ he describes a meeting with an old woman who is, as he defines it, without self-consciousness because she knows no world which is not herself: ‘That I had a world of my own, other than her world, was not conceived by her’ (Lawrence 1985, 240). He wrote, in Mornings in Mexico, of the Mexican Indians: ‘There is no individual, isolated experience . . . The experience is generic, non-individual’ (Lawrence 1960, 56). In Etruscan Places, written towards the end of Lawrence’s life, he explored questions of life and death. As Caserio writes of this text: ‘Immortality belongs to places, because they, not souls or selves, endure. Etruscan Places functions . . . as Lawrence’s way of coming to terms with his own

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

303 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

Experiments in form

303

disappearance. His personal farewell resonates with a new corpus of lifestories that pursue a like end’ (Caserio 2014, 208). In addition to the writing of place, Lawrence’s self-representations emerge in displaced form in, as he suggested, his autobiographical fictions. His assertion that Sons and Lovers was ‘all autobiography’ implies both that it is in the fiction that the truth is to be had and that a writer’s truest autobiography lies in his writings. The statement requires, however, some interrogation. As Lawrence’s biographers have pointed out, there are only partial correspondences between life events and the narratives of Lawrence’s early novels, and he wrote and rewrote the materials of his first fictions. He worked intermittently on an earlier version of Sons and Lovers, titled Paul Morel, in 1909–1910. The final version of Sons and Lovers was completed after Lawrence’s life-changing meeting with Frieda Weekley (von Richthofen): she introduced him to psychoanalytic ideas, and it seems likely that an understanding of Freud’s formulations of the Oedipal structure played its part in Lawrence’s representations of Paul Morel’s love for his mother and hatred of his father. Moreover, while Lawrence would later write in strong reaction against Freud’s concepts of the unconscious, Freud’s words, when he was involved in his own selfanalysis, would seem to have an important bearing on the questions of autobiography, truth, fiction, and fantasy central not only to Lawrence but to modernist autobiography more generally: ‘There is no “indication of reality” in the unconscious, so that it is impossible to distinguish between truth and emotionally-charged fiction’ (Freud 1954, 216). While creating a fictional narrative from aspects of his experience, Lawrence was also able, through the use of the novel form, to represent events and experiences which lay outside his own memory and consciousness: those, in particular, relating to his parents before his birth. Much autobiographical writing will find ways of narrating such pre-autobiographical materials: often, in more traditional autobiography, through genealogies. As Jean-Paul Sartre, amongst others, has argued, we are born into family structures, histories, myths, and stories which we do not choose, and which we must either accept or escape. In this sense, our lives do not begin with our birth. Lawrence was by no means alone amongst writers in seeking, through the medium of autobiographical fiction, to infer or imagine a past which did not yet contain him, but which would, quite literally, bring him into being. This becomes particularly charged when, as in Lawrence’s case, the defining relationship between the engendering parents is that of ‘difference’ (one which Lawrence habitually exaggerated in representing his mother as from a significantly higher social order than his father). How does an identity

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

304

304 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

laura marcus

emerge out of agonistic struggle, and would it be condemned to self-division in such contexts? Self-splitting emerges strongly in Lawrence’s short story ‘A Modern Lover’ (written between 1909 and 1910), which is a fictionalised account of a visit to the Haggs farm, the home of the young woman, Jessie Weston, to whom Lawrence was extremely close as a young man and who had encouraged him in his early writing. In the story the two protagonists sit awkwardly in the parlour in which the young man’s photograph sits on the mantelpiece: ‘She too glanced at the photo, which had been called the portrait of an intellectual prig, but which was really that of a sensitive, alert, exquisite boy. The subject of the portrait lay smiling at her. Then it turned voluptuously, like a cat spread out in the chair’ (Lawrence 1975, 7). Subject and object, self and other, seem to change places here, as if the sitter were the double of the photograph rather than the reverse. The distancing from subjecthood, manifested in the choice of ‘it’ rather than ‘he’, merges with Lawrence’s habitual displacements of experience into fiction. The use of the term ‘portrait’ to represent both visual and verbal representations and self-representations has a long history, though it reached its point of highest intensity in the creation of the ‘imaginary portraits’ of the late nineteenth century, and finds its way into James Joyce’s early fiction. Parallels to Lawrence’s revisions of Paul Morel into Sons and Lovers can be found in the relationship between Joyce’s Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce worked on Stephen Hero, only parts of which have survived, between about 1901 and 1906, with the bulk of the writing probably taking place between 1904 and 1906. At the opening of the extant text (the first part of the manuscript, which we may assume focused on Stephen as a child, is lost) there is a ‘portrait’ of Stephen as a young man: ‘A girl might or might not have called him handsome: the face was regular in feature and its pose was almost softened into [positive distinct] beauty by a small feminine mouth . . . the face was to a certain extent the face of a debauchee’ (Joyce 1963, 23). Stephen Hero is largely governed by such exterior views of the central protagonist, though this is by no means incompatible with narration as self-observation. Herbert Gorman, in his biography of Joyce, wrote that, as Joyce planned it, Stephen Hero was to be ‘an autobiographical book, a personal history, as it were, of the growth of the mind, his own mind, and his own intensive absorption in himself and what he had been . . . He endeavoured to see himself objectively, to assume a godlike poise of watchfulness over the small boy and youth he called Stephen and who was really himself’ (Gorman 1941, 133).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

305 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

Experiments in form

305

While a number of Joyce’s biographers have used his fiction as relatively unmediated evidence for the life, recent critics have moved towards the position that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which is much more fully focused within Stephen’s consciousness than Stephen Hero) could be understood as a parody, pastiche, or inversion of autobiographical tropes. In Max Saunders’s reading, Portrait is to be understood not as Joyce’s autobiography but as a novel written by his creation, Stephen Dedalus: ‘Could we have here a novel that, instead of being Joyce’s masterly rendering of Stephen’s stream of consciousness, is Joyce’s masterly rendering of Stephen’s own rendering of his own consciousness . . . Joyce writing the novel his character would have written’ (Saunders 2010, 312). Such a relationship between author and character entails a radical destabilisation of identity and narration. While Joyce’s writings cannot be read as autobiographical in any direct or unmediated way, a number of his contemporaries found the play of consciousness in his work, most particularly Ulysses, to manifest an allsubsuming ego. Lawrence, habitually intemperate, wrote in his essay ‘Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb’ of the deadly self-consciousness of the modern novel. Shifting in his discussion from the representation of character to the identity of the author, he wrote that: ‘Through thousands and thousands of pages Mr Joyce and Miss [Dorothy] Richardson tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads . . . It’s awful. And it’s childish. It really is childish, after a certain age, to be absorbedly self-conscious’ (Lawrence 1978, 518). Virginia Woolf also linked the two writers in her critique of the ‘damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce and [Dorothy] Richardson to my mind’ (Woolf 1981, 14). In her 1919 review of Richardson’s The Tunnel (the fourth novel in the thirteen-volume sequence Pilgrimage), Woolf focused more positively on the author’s ‘method’, in which the ‘scaffolding’ (to borrow Woolf’s own term) of the conventional novel is dismantled, to leave ‘denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished, the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, the small sensitive lump of matter, half transparent and half opaque, which endlessly reflects and distorts the variegated process, and is, so we are bidden to believe, the source; beneath the surface, the very oyster within the shell’ (Woolf 1988, 10–1). Woolf’s concern was that, rather than reaching into the depths, Richardson’s method left consciousness on the surface. A similar criticism was more strongly made by Katherine Mansfield, also in a review of The Tunnel, and with reference to what she perceived as Richardson’s failure to select from the welter of experiences:

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

306

306 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

laura marcus Miss Richardson has a passion for registering every single thing that happens in the clear, shadowless country of her mind . . . There is Miss Richardson, holding out her mind, as it were, and there is Life hurling objects into it as fast as she can throw. And at the appointed time Miss Richardson dives into its recesses and reproduces a certain number of these treasures . . . But the pace kills . . .. She [Richardson] has no memory . . .. If we are to be truly alive there are large pauses in which we creep away into our caves of contemplation. And then it is, in the Silence, that Memory mounts his throne and judges all that is in our minds. (Mansfield 1930, 4)

Neither Woolf nor Mansfield described Pilgrimage as ‘autobiography’: it was for them, as Joyce’s work was for Woolf and Lawrence, rather a literature of consciousness and the ego. Mansfield refers to Miriam Henderson, the autobiographical/fictional persona of Pilgrimage, as Richardson’s ‘soul-sister’, but does not reflect any further on the complex narrative relationship between the author and her creation. By contrast, H. G. Wells, who was at one point close to Richardson and whose counterpart in the novel-sequence is Hypo Wilson, described the Pilgrimage volumes as ‘a very curious essay in autobiography; they still lack their due meed of general appreciation; and in one of them, The Tunnel, she has described our Worcester Park life with astonishing accuracy’ (Wells 1934, 64). In the thirteen volumes or ‘chapters’ (her preferred term) of Pilgrimage (1915–1946), Richardson recounts the experiences of the years between 1891 and 1912 through Miriam’s consciousness. Pilgrimage troubles generic categories. It is an autobiographical fiction, and a woman’s Bildungsroman or Kunstlerroman: in the final volumes of the sequence we see Miriam begin to write her story. Written substantially in the third person, though at times moving into first-person narration (with the ‘I’ becoming increasingly prominent in the later volumes), it creates a new literary space between the genres of autobiography and the novel. It raises difficult issues for biographers and critics: while the narratives of Richardson’s life and of Miriam’s are closely connected, they cannot simply be mapped onto each other. As Richardson’s biographer Gloria Fromm wrote: ‘Dorothy Richardson found the way to be someone else and herself at the same time’ (Fromm 1994, 91), a doubling, mirroring or multiplication of selfhood (critics have noted that ‘Miriam’ encodes ‘a myriad I ams’). As the overall title suggests, Pilgrimage is a quest sequence and a journey. The work suggests the two different conceptions of ‘experience’ in German

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

307 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

Experiments in form

307

philosophical traditions: ‘Erlebnis’, the realm of subjective, immediate responses to the world, and ‘Ehrfahrung’, understood, in at least one of its definitions, as a more accretive, totalising narrative model, which contains within it ‘fahren’, the German word for taking a journey. (‘Pilgrimage’ in German, a language Richardson knew well, is ‘Walfahrt’.) Mansfield, critical of the immediacy, the Erlebnis, of Richardson’s writing, which for her represented a lack of artistic mediation, neglected the second mode of representing experience (though the duality in Richardson’s work has affinities with Mansfield’s own dialectics of multiplicity and unity). She also failed, in her review, to register the complex temporalities of the work: while the dominant tense of Pilgrimage could be construed as a perpetual present, the novel-sequence also exists in two time-continua: that of the experiences recounted and that of the time of writing. Far from being the work of an author without memory, Pilgrimage could be understood as all memory, though this is admittedly truer of the later volumes: memory becomes a property of the text, accumulating and deepening as the novel-sequence developed. In this sense, the later volumes ‘remember’ the events, experiences, and emotions of the earlier ones; thus the text comes to remember itself. When Richardson began the writing of the first volume of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs, in 1913, she understood, as she was later to represent it, that at the heart of her novel must be a heroine who would be alone in her narration, not mediated through an authorial consciousness as if ‘the drama was a conducted tour with the author deliberately present telling his tale’ (Richardson 1989, 139). In an essay on the novel, she wrote that the genre provides ‘a conducted tour . . . into the personality of the author, who, willy-nilly, and whatever be the method of his approach, must present the reader with the writer’s self-portrait’ (Ibid., 190). Literature is rendered here as the presentation not so much of the writer’s identity as of the portrait he or she (knowingly or otherwise) composes of the self: a construction created in and through the text. In an autobiographical sketch, ‘Beginnings’, and referring more specifically to her own life and work, Richardson noted the ways in which experience and thought inaugurate ‘the divided mind’ (Ibid., 112). ‘Instruction and experience’, she writes, inevitably shape the mind which comes to observe the past. Nonetheless, there is also an ambition, manifested not only in Pilgrimage but also in Joyce’s Portrait and Mansfield’s stories ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, to go behind or before such mediations and to recapture those perceptions and understandings that held sway (most powerfully in the child’s mind) before their inevitable effacement.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

308

308 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

laura marcus

As Mansfield was planning The Aloe, the first version of ‘Prelude’, she wrote in her journals (22 January 1916) of her desire to ‘to renew . . . in writing’ the New Zealand island on which she had grown up: ‘Now – now I want to write about my own country till I simply exhaust my store . . . Oh, I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World. It must be mysterious, as though floating . . . I shall tell everything, even of how the laundry-basket squeaked at 75’ (Mansfield 1977, 65). This recapturing, or renewal, of the past was not defined by Mansfield as autobiography, retaining as it did the force of ‘impersonality’ for her. ‘Since things there were,’ Richardson wrote of her childhood self in ‘Data for a Spanish Publisher’, ‘I preferred to become one with them, in the child’s way of direct apprehension, which no subsequent “knowledge” can either rival or destroy’ (Richardson 1989, 132): it is an apprehension cognate with Bergson’s ‘leap’ and Mansfield’s ‘spring’ into the otherness of the world. The birth of writing came about for Richardson in adulthood, she writes, when ‘the not uncommon desire to focus from a distance’ led to solitude and the rediscovery of ‘what was known before [instruction and experience] began their work of befogging and destruction’ (Ibid., 113). Her phrase ‘focus from a distance’ embeds the language of optics and of the technologies of vision (magic lantern, photograph, film) which are also instruments of memory and which are shaping forces in modernist autobiographical texts by, among others, Proust, H. D., Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. ‘So much depends then . . . upon distance’, muses Woolf’s artist-figure Lily Briscoe, in To the Lighthouse, as she seeks to recapture past time and to complete her painting of the now deceased Mrs Ramsay. Woolf was explicit about the autobiographical dimensions of the novel, writing that it was ‘about’ her parents – ‘to have father’s character done complete in it; & mother’s; & St Ives; & childhood’ (Woolf 1982, 18), but the text also functions through distance and displacement (including the placing of the novel in the Hebrides rather than the Cornwall of Woolf’s own childhood). Woolf extended the reach of ‘impersonality’ in The Waves: ‘This shall be Childhood; but it must not be my childhood’ (Ibid., 236). Woolf wrote the fullest of her directly autobiographical works late in her life, turning to the memoir that would become ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in 1939, as she worked on her biography of Roger Fry and on her final, posthumously published novel Between the Acts. Earlier autobiographical sketches, such as ‘Hyde Park Gate’, were produced in the context of the Bloomsbury Group’s ‘Memoir Club’, a gathering in which the group’s members would take it in turns to deliver

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

309 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

Experiments in form

309

autobiographical accounts of their lives and experiences. The ‘Memoir Club’ is an important dimension of Bloomsbury’s engagements with life-writing, and with experiments in its various genres: Lytton Strachey’s biographical work Eminent Victorians (1918), followed by his Queen Victoria and Elizabeth and Essex, inaugurated the ‘new biography’ of the early twentieth century and revolutionised the form. Woolf and her peers both produced and commented extensively on the genres of biography and autobiography: in letters Woolf wrote of the overwhelmingly male canon of autobiographical writing, noting in 1940 that there had been no woman’s autobiography to challenge the centrality of Rousseau: ‘Chastity and modesty have I suppose been the reason’ (Woolf 1980, 453). ‘A Sketch of the Past’ was written at the point at which Woolf, whose Hogarth Press had been publishing English-language translations of Freud’s work since 1924, had begun to read Freud in depth for the first time. The term in his work which most struck her was ‘ambivalence’, a new word in the language, and one that gathers up the admixture of love and hate (‘odi et amo’) that she explores in a number of her novels. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf opened up her complex feelings towards her father, and the complete clash of the Victorian and Edwardian ages represented by Leslie Stephen in relation to the Stephen children, most particularly after her mother’s death. Writing of her adolescent years, Woolf notes: ‘it was the tyrant father – the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the appealing, the alternately loved and hated father – that dominated me then’ (Woolf 2002, 123). In the first part of the memoir, it is the mother, Julia Stephen, who has the central place in the narrative and in memory. ‘A Sketch of the Past’ opens with ‘the first memory’, after a paragraph in which Woolf discusses the difficulties of writing an autobiographical work: In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember; in the second, the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written. As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways. But if I begin to go through them and to analyse them and their merits and faults, the mornings . . . will be gone. So without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself – or if not it will not matter – I begin: the first memory. This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground – my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. (Ibid., 78)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

310

310 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

laura marcus

While Woolf retains the perspective of the present ‘I’ looking back at the past, she nonetheless produces ‘the child’s way of direct apprehension’ described by Richardson, through recall of her infant self’s close-up view. Woolf does not disguise the possibly constructed nature of the memory, for she immediately offers another memory, ‘which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories’: ‘It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two . . . and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out . . . and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive’ (Ibid., 80). Woolf thus stages, through these two equiprimordial memories, the birth of consciousness. She refers to the first memory as a ‘first impression’, suggesting not only the ‘impressionist’ dimensions of modernist autobiography (including an intense visuality, to which she adds auditory sensations) but the ‘impress’ of experience on subjectivity at its origins. The failure of so many autobiographies, she writes, is that they ‘leave out the person to whom things happened’: there is the strongest recognition in the opening pages of ‘A Sketch of the Past’ that the interest of autobiography lies not in events but in identities, and that a central difficulty of the genre relates not only to self-knowledge but to knowledge of those other minds by which the self can measure its likeness and its difference. Woolf’s modernist memoir thus begins with a psychology and philosophy of selfhood and life-writing. She further reflects on the importance of the body and bodily experience to identity, the relationship between the unremarkable nature of much of our experience (in Woolf’s term ‘non-being’) and the heightened, sometimes ecstatic nature of ‘moments of being’, the relationship between the present of autobiographical narration and the past which it recounts and the contrast between ‘the two people, I now, I then’. The central problematic of autobiography, Woolf suggests, is the nature of time: ‘for no sooner has one said this was so, than it was past and altered’ (Woolf 2002, 91). The perception, which takes us back to Heraclitus (‘one cannot step in the same river twice’), is also a modernist one, in its apprehension of the fleeting, evanescent,and fluid qualities of identity and experience: an apprehension which lies at the heart of modernist autobiography.

Notes 1. See, for example, Nabaltian 1997 and Saunders 2010.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

311 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

Experiments in form

311

2. For a full account of modernist impersonality, see Ellmann 1987.

Bibliography Bergson, Henri. 1972. Mélanges. Edited by André Robinet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Boulton, James T. and Margaret H. Boulton, eds. 1991. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caserio, Robert. 2014. ‘Abstraction, Impersonality, Dissolution’. In Modernism and Autobiography, 197–210. Edited by Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman. New York: Cambridge University Press. DiBattista, Maria and Emily O. Wittman, eds. 2014. Modernism and Autobiography. New York: Cambridge University Press. Eliot, T. S. 1953. Selected Prose. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ellmann, Maud. 1987. The Poetics of Impersonality. T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound. Brighton: Harvester Press. Fromm, Gloria. 1994. Dorothy Richardson: a Biography. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1954. The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. New York: Basic Books. Gorman, Herbert Sherman. 1941. James Joyce: a definitive biography. London: John Lane. Joyce, James. 1963. Stephen Hero. New York: New Directions. Lawrence, D. H. 1960. Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lawrence, D. H. 1975 The Collected Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence. London: Book Club Associates. Lawrence, D. H. 1978. ‘Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb’. In Phoenix: the posthumous papers, 517–20. Edited by Edward D. McDonald. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Lawrence, D. H. 1985. D. H. Lawrence in Italy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mansfield, Katherine. 1930. Novelists and Novelists. Edited by J. Middleton Murry. London: Constable. Mansfield, Katherine. 1977. Katherine Mansfield: Letters and Journals. Edited by C. K. Stead. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mansfield, Katherine. 1984. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol. 1, 1903–1917. Edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mansfield, Katherine. 1996. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol. 4, 1920–1921. Edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C21.3D

312

312 [298–312] 21.10.2015 2:08PM

laura marcus

Mansfield, Katherine. 1997. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. Vol 2. Edited by Margaret Scott. Canterbury, NZ: Lincoln University Press. Nabaltian, Suzanne.1997. Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin. New York: St Martin’s Press. Richardson, Dorothy. 1948. ‘Novels’. Life and Letters To-Day 56: 190. Richardson, Dorothy. 1989. ‘Data for a Spanish Publisher’. In Journey to Paradise: Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches. Edited by Trudi Tate. London: Virago. Saunders, Max. 2010. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wells, H. G. 1934. Experiment in Autobiography. Vol. 2. London: Gollancz and the Cresset Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1980. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, 1936–41. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Woolf, Virginia. 1981. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2, 1920–24. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Woolf, Virginia. 1982. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, 1925–30. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Woolf, Virginia. 1988. ‘The Tunnel’. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 1919–1924, 10–12. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 2002. ‘A Sketch of the Past’. In Moments of Being, 78–160. London: Pimlico. Worthen, John, ed. 1991. D.H.Lawrence. The Early Years 1885–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

313 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

chapter 22

Psychoanalysis and autobiography Maud Ellmann

In an essay of 1935 assessing the impact of Freud on modern culture, W. H. Auden pokes fun at current misconceptions of psychoanalysis: to ‘the man in the street, the cure for all ills is (a) indiscriminate sexual intercourse; (b) autobiography’ (Auden 1935, 69). Option (b) has certainly flourished in the age of psychoanalysis, notably in the great autobiographical novels of Freud’s modernist contemporaries Joyce, Proust, Mann, Musil, and Svevo. Psychoanalysis actively produces autobiography in Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience) (Svevo, 1923:3), where the hero’s analyst urges him to write his life story to get to the root of his smoking addiction, but then publishes this confession out of revenge when the patient abandons the analysis. Svevo’s satire seems to endorse Foucault’s charge that psychoanalysis perpetuates the ‘immense and traditional extortion of the sexual confession’ enshrined in the Catholic Church, while adapting this ritual to a supposedly scientific framework (Foucault 1978, 65). Indeed, psychoanalysis and autobiography have abetted one another throughout the long century following Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900), itself an autobiographical work based on the author’s self-analysis. Joseph Wortis recalls Freud’s admission that ‘he was never analyzed himself: there was nobody to analyze him. “But I discovered analysis,” he said. “That is enough to excuse me”’ (Wortis 1954, 17). Freud’s self-analysis could be seen as both cause and symptom of the autobiographical explosion that began with high modernism and still reverberates in today’s popular culture, where memoirs regularly outsell fiction and TV viewers flock to the tell-all confessions of the Oprah Winfrey show. This appetite for self-revelation goes back at least as far as the Romantics, with their celebration of the (usually male) individual, not for his typicality but for his uncommonness and strangeness. Commenting on this popular enthusiasm, Goethe writes, ‘We love only the individual; hence our enjoyment of all public self-expressions, confessions, memoirs, 313

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

314

314 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

maud ellman

letters and anecdotes, even of unimportant persons’ (Reik 1949, ix). Psychoanalyst Theodor Reik quotes this aphorism in his own autobiography, Fragment of a Great Confession, whose title derives from Goethe’s autobiography, where the author claims that all his works are ‘fragments of a great confession’ (Goethe 1987, 214). Likewise, Nietzsche affirms that every great philosophy is ‘the personal confession of its author, and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’ (Nietzsche 1989, 5). Freud takes these insights further, detecting confession not only in the works but in the body of the psychoanalytic subject. ‘He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret’, Freud declares. ‘If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore’ (Freud 1953–1974, 7.78–9). In Freudian theory, memories repressed by consciousness resurface on the body in the form of psychosomatic symptoms: ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’, he claims (Ibid., 2.7). Thus autobiography oozes from every pore. For the purposes of this chapter, psychoanalytic autobiographies may be grouped into two broad genres, the first comprising life stories by psychoanalysts, many of them Jews driven out of their home countries by the Nazis, which resulted in ‘a new kind of diaspora’, as Anna Freud described this wave of emigration in 1934 (Steiner 2000, 17). The second genre consists of patients’ accounts of their experience of psychoanalysis. In both genres, the writer is obliged to compromise between fidelity to the analytic process – slow, piecemeal, recursive, dialogic, inconclusive – and the conventions of the Bildungsroman, pledged to the chronological development and integration of the self. By imposing narrative continuity on orts and shards of memory, traditional autobiographies perform the function that Freud ascribes to ‘secondary revision’ in the dreamwork, whereby ‘the dream loses its appearance of absurdity and disconnectedness and approximates to the model of an intelligible experience’ (Freud 1953– 1974, 5.490). This pseudo-narrative has to be dismantled in order to gain access to the stuff of dreams, the memories and desires encoded in their pageantry. The remainder of this chapter explores how analysts and patients contend with these formal challenges in writing their life stories. I begin with Freud, whose autobiographical writings veer between the continuity of the Bildungsroman and the discontinuities of psychoanalytic anamnesis or unforgetting. Next I discuss memoirs written by the refugees from Nazism who transplanted psychoanalysis from Germany and Eastern Europe to the Anglophone world. I also consider Wilfred Bion and

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

315 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

Psychoanalysis and autobiography

315

Marion Milner, British psychoanalysts who experimented with offbeat forms of life-writing. The last part of this chapter turns to memoirs by analysands, examining how these works tackle the discrepancy between the linearity of narrative and the timelessness of the unconscious.

Autobiographies by psychoanalysts In his case history of ‘Dora’ (1905), Freud suggests that hysterics suffer from an autobiographical disorder that renders them incapable of telling their own story. When asked to recount the history of their illness, the ‘first account may be compared to an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks’ (Ibid., 7.16). Only towards the end of the treatment does this confusion yield to ‘an intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history’ (Ibid., 7.18). Freud’s description of hysterical autobiography as an ‘unnavigable river’ evokes the modernist novel – think of Marlow’s journey up the Congo River in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with its dreamlike obscurities and inconsistencies. The cure for this narrative disorder, as Freud sees it, consists of an ‘intelligible, consistent, and unbroken’ history told in a straight line, comparable to the traditional Bildungsroman. The trouble with linear narrative is that it belies the anachronistic nature of the unconscious. In Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud compares the unconscious to the city of Rome, where ‘all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one’ (Ibid., 21.70). The past therefore lives on, encroaching on the present and disrupting the continuity of history. As Michel de Certeau puts it, the psychoanalytic past ‘re-bites’ (il re-mord; it is a secret and repeated biting). History is ‘cannibalistic’. Conventional historiography, by contrast, depends on ‘a clean break between the past and the present’ (Certeau 1986, 3–4). To do justice to the psychoanalytic conception of mental life, autobiography would have to jettison the principle of chronological development, inventing forms of narrative responsive to the dynamics of regression, deferred action, compulsive repetition, and other temporal upheavals characteristic of the primary process of the unconscious. How do these observations reflect on Freud’s autobiographical writings? His highly impersonal ‘An Autobiographical Study’ (Freud 1953–1974, 20), first published in 1925, focuses on the author’s public life; a few perfunctory remarks about his childhood quickly give way to accounts of his education and professional development, culminating in the discovery of

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

316

316 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

maud ellman

psychoanalysis and the history of its cultural dissemination. Apart from the bare mention that his parents were Jews, Freud touches only briefly on his father’s background and passes over his mother entirely, although her formative influence is acknowledged in the theoretical pronouncement that ‘the first love-object in the case of both sexes is the mother; and it seems probable that to begin with a child does not distinguish its mother’s organ of nutrition from its own body’ (Ibid., 20, 36). An Autobiographical Study therefore reveals little of Freud’s inner life, except by way of omission and ellipsis. Virginia Woolf objects to this form of life-writing for providing only a record of external facts while leaving out ‘the person to whom things happen’ (Woolf 2002, 79). Fortunately, Freud shows more candour in his analytic works than in his official autobiography. To find ‘the person to whom things happen’, we must look to works like The Interpretation of Dreams. In composing this masterwork, Freud told his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he had ‘lost the feeling of shame required of an author’ (Freud 1985, 315). Indiscretions aside, the formal innovations of the ‘dreambook’ recapitulate the analytic process in which ‘everything that has to do with the clearing-up of a particular symptom emerges piecemeal, woven into various contexts, and distributed over widely separated periods of time’ (Freud 1953–1974, 7.12). By adding multiple footnotes to the original text, Freud creates a kind of palimpsest in which ‘all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one‘, as they do in Rome or the unconscious (Ibid., 21.70). Although The Interpretation of Dreams emerged out of Freud’s selfanalysis, he enlisted his friend Wilhelm Fliess as correspondent and effectively as analyst. The vicissitudes of this relationship are responsible for many of the interruptions in the writing process to which The Interpretation of Dreams owes its ‘modernist’ texture. These interruptions, as Ilse Grubrich-Simitis has shown, ‘tore holes in the emerging textual tissue’ and contributed to ‘the piecing together, the excisions, the shifting back and forth of material, the character of what, so to speak, remained an open book, a collective text, a patchwork’ (Grubrich-Simitis 2004, 25). The resulting openness has encouraged Freud’s readers to become his analysts, using his own methods to re-interpret his interpretations. The most discussed example is Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, the analysis of which begins in Chapter 2 and resumes throughout the dreambook with an insistence reminiscent of the return of the repressed. On the night of 23–24 July 1895, Freud dreamt that he was reproaching his patient

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

317 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

Psychoanalysis and autobiography

317

Irma, who was suffering from abdominal pains, for failing to accept his ‘solution’ to her symptoms. Taking her to a window, he looks down her throat, discerning ‘extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures . . . evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose’. He then invites his colleague Dr M to repeat this laryngeal/gynaecological investigation, accompanied by his friends Otto (a stand-in for Fliess) and Leopold. The dreamer then concludes that Irma’s infection has been caused by an injection of trimethylamin mistakenly administered by Otto: ‘Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly . . . And probably the syringe had not been clean’ (Freud 1953–1974, 4.107). Freud interprets this dream as an attempt to exculpate himself of professional misconduct. But as Freud’s doctor Max Schur (1966) was the first to point out, it is Fliess, rather than Freud, that the dream is trying to exonerate. Swayed by Fliess’s fanciful theory of the nasal aetiology of hysteria, Freud had arranged for his friend to perform his signature nasal operation on Emma Eckstein, a patient suffering from stomach pains and menstrual problems that Freud attributed to excessive masturbation. Some days after the operation the patient suffered a massive nasal haemorrhage, filling two bowls with pus, and her nose began to emit a fetid odour. The wound continued to haemorrhage until another specialist pulled out of her nose a long string of purulent gauze, which Fliess, in an egregious act of medical negligence, had forgotten to remove. Although Freud defended Fliess at the time, this episode opened a crack in their friendship that eventuated in a full-scale rift. ‘Few dreams have been the subject of so much comment’, Didier Anzieu has pointed out (Anzieu 1986, 137). Indeed, a bibliography of Irma’s Injection would exceed this chapter’s word limit. Anzieu himself proposes that this dream conjures up the primal scene of parental intercourse, the white patches in Irma’s throat representing the father’s semen in the mother’s vagina. Such conjectures probably reveal as much about the reader as the dreamer, demonstrating how the holes and ‘patches’ of Freud’s text call forth the unconscious of its interpreters. ‘In psychoanalytic treatment’, Phillips remarks, ‘it takes two to make a life-story’ (Phillips 1994, 68). Thus autobiography becomes hetero-biography, with the analyst’s unconscious informing the patient’s reconstruction of the past.

Psychoanalysis in exile The psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler, a Hungarian by birth who emigrated to New York, records in her memoirs that within two months of the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

318

318 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

maud ellman

Anschluss of 1938, when Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany, ‘virtually the entire Austrian psychoanalytic community had departed for Britain or America’ (Mahler 1988, 86). They also fled to Palestine, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and even Ceylon (Steiner 2000, 5). Among the estimated hundreds of psychoanalytic refugees were a significant number of women who, having already achieved professional success against the formidable odds of sexism and anti-Semitism, went on to take a shaping role in the British and American schools of psychoanalysis. These women include Mahler herself, together with her erstwhile analyst Helene Deutsch (1884–1982), who was born in Poland and moved to Boston in 1934, and Hanna Segal (1918–2011), also born in Poland, who boarded the last Polish ship to leave for Britain in 1940 and completed her training at the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1945 at the precocious age of 27. Segal’s analyst, Melanie Klein (1882–1960), born in Vienna, had moved to Britain earlier in 1927, where she was to cross swords with Anna Freud (1895–1982), herself an émigré who accompanied her father to London so that he could ‘die in freedom’ in 1939 (Gay 2006, 656). The memoirs of these female psychoanalysts offer an inspiring contribution to the history of women’s emancipation in the West; they also provide a poignant record of Jewish European culture prior to the Second World War. Most psychoanalytic refugees lost close relations to the Holocaust, including Freud himself, four of whose five sisters were murdered in Auschwitz shortly after his own death in London. Freud’s female disciples mainly hailed from educated middle-class assimilated Jewish families; both Deutsch and Segal came to psychoanalysis through the Communist movement, a paradoxical trajectory given the widespread Communist disdain for Freud’s ‘bourgeois’ science (Wortis 1954, 59). Deutsch and Mahler were born to parents who had hoped for boys, and both felt rejected by their mothers, developing a strong identification with their fathers: ‘for most of my childhood and youth I hated my mother’, Deutsch confesses (Deutsch 1973, 50). Ironically, these father-identified female analysts were to contribute to a major shift of emphasis in psychoanalysis away from the father toward the mother. It is as if they were compensating for their defection from the mother by affirming her absolute dominion over psychoanalytic theory. “‘Everyone lives two lives simultaneously’, Deutsch declares: One of them is devoted to adapting to the outside world and improving one’s external circumstances. The other consists of fantasies, longings,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

319 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

Psychoanalysis and autobiography

319

distortions of reality, undertakings unfinished, achievements not won. (Ibid., 14)

This doubleness, however, makes little impact on the linear progression of Deutsch’s narrative. Its traditional form may reflect the need to restore continuity to a life story riven by geographical exile, and to summon up a lost community destroyed by genocide. Like Mahler, Deutsch takes few risks with form, but both their autobiographies stand out for their attention to the authors’ early years. Similarly, Hanna Segal told an interviewer: ‘I like talking about my early childhood, not only because old people like to reminisce but also because I find that in the biography of great analysts (and other people as well) information about their early childhood is always missing’ (Segal 2008, 3). Segal is probably thinking of Freud’s Autobiographical Study, with its frustrating reticence about his early life. By contrast, Segal, who was analysed by Melanie Klein, takes a Kleinian perspective on her own formation, emphasising the traumatic effects of early weaning when her mother succumbed to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. While the autobiographies of famous men usually focus on the adult years, female psychoanalysts adapt the genre to delve into the mysteries of infancy.

Milner and Bion The British psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900–1998) started her career as the author of a series of pseudonymous autobiographical studies, culminating in her famous study of inhibition, On Not Being Able to Paint (1950). While Deutsch claims that ‘everyone lives two lives simultaneously’, Milner brings this duality to the surface by using her own diaries and drawings as the material for her analysis. As Hugh Haughton has observed, this technique creates a ‘double-time sense’ comparable to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), where Krapp replays tapes of his own voice supposedly recorded at different moments of his life (Haughton 2014, 351). But Krapp’s derisive attitude to ‘that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago’ (Beckett 2009, 24) contrasts sharply to Milner’s quasi-mystical absorption in her inner life. Quoting Woolf on Montaigne, Milner insists that the ‘soul, or life within us by no means agrees with the life outside us’ (Milner 2010a, 9–10). The only way to achieve ‘a life of one’s own’ is therefore to acknowledge the ‘mysterious force by which one is lived’ (Ibid.; 2010b, 196). For Milner, as for Rimbaud (Rimbaud 2003, 571), ‘“je” est un autre’. Hence

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

320

320 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

maud ellman

Milner’s ‘excursions into the hinterlands’ (Milner 2010a, 62) of her own mind evade the standard highlights of life-writing, such as lovers, family, contacts, and career. Nor does she have much to say about her war-torn century, except as its horrors impinge upon her introspection. Although she denied the charge of mysticism, her idealisation of the unconscious makes her something of an outlier to the psychoanalytic establishment, which tends to emphasise the pathological rather than the creative force of the unconscious. Of the psychoanalytic autobiographers of the last century, Wilfred Bion (1897–1979) arguably takes the greatest risks with literary form. Although his first two volumes of memoirs are more or less straightforward narratives, Bion’s final autobiographical work, paradoxically entitled A Memoir of the Future (1991), mobilises multiple alter egos in a mixture of fiction and confession that flouts conventional chronology. Described by Bion as ‘a fictitious account of psychoanalysis including an artificially constructed dream’, the three-volume Memoir could be seen as an attempt to ‘study the living mind’ in all its turbulence, without resolving its warring elements into a stable form (Jacobus 2005, 261, 274). Unlike the psychoanalytic refugees from Europe, Bion and Milner were rooted in Britain, and perhaps their rootedness enabled them to risk discontinuity in form, having suffered fewer radical discontinuities in life. Their European colleagues, on the other hand, may have opted for traditional techniques in order to repair their shattered life-stories.

Patients’ autobiographies The second category of psychoanalytic autobiography consists of patients’ recollections of analysis. These include patients of Freud’s, some of whom provide amusing anecdotes about the founder of psychoanalysis. The modernist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) travelled to Vienna in 1933 to be analysed by Freud, thanks to the generosity of her put-upon lover Bryher (Winifred Ellerman). H. D.’s Tribute to Freud offers memorable glimpses of Freud’s couch-side manner, including his preoccupation with his chow Jofi, who snoozed through the sessions and frequently distracted ‘the professor’ from his patient’s outpourings (H. D. 1985, 162). Dogs also loom large in Roy Grinker’s account of his analysis with Freud in 1932, especially Anna Freud’s giant Alsation called Wolf, who would bark furiously when the doorbell rang and thrust his jaw into the trembling patient’s genitals. Grinker confesses: ‘I entered Freud’s office with a high degree of castration anxiety’ (Grinker 1975, 39).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

321 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

Psychoanalysis and autobiography

321

Helene Deutsch, also analysed by Freud, reveals little of the master’s methods except that he cut short her treatment to give her hour to the Wolf Man, who had recently returned to Vienna after the Russian Revolution. Freud’s blatant act of favouritism towards his most famous patient triggered the first major depression in Deutsch’s life (Deutsch 1973, 133). The Wolf Man’s autobiography, meanwhile, shows little sign of the ‘first-class intelligence’ that Freud admired in (and probably projected on) his patient (Pankejeff 1971, xi). In his nineties the Wolf Man dismissed psychoanalysis as a confidence trick, complaining in particular that Freud’s reconstruction of the primal scene is ‘terribly far-fetched’ (Obholzer 1982, 35). So it is, but it is infinitely more intriguing than the valetudinarian to whom it is imputed. One of the most harrowing accounts of mental illness from the patient’s point of view is Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963). This well-known work, however, scarcely touches on the ‘talking cure’. Instead the novel focuses on cruder forms of treatment, notoriously the botched electroconvulsive therapy that Plath also remembers in her poem ‘The Hanging Man’ (Plath 2008, 141): ‘I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet’. The word ‘silence’ reverberates throughout this narrative, a silence Plath compares to a foetus pickled in a bottle, and the doctors rarely try to break this hush with words, preferring insulin injections and electric shock to verbal engagement. Although the novel ends with the heroine’s (unconvincing) recovery, the images that linger are those of a mental health establishment pledged to drastic interventions, including lobotomy, to restore its victims to ‘normality’, that is, compliance. Equally harrowing, Marie Cardinal’s autobiographical novel The Words to Say It (1975) recounts the author’s descent into insanity, followed by her recovery through psychoanalysis. As Diane McWhorter (1984) has remarked, reading The Words to Say It ‘feels like a drastic act, a surrender to the protagonist’s apocalyptic mental illness’. What makes the narrative bearable is its positive outcome – the unnamed narrator emerges from her seven-year analysis reborn; what makes it a page-turner is its skilful plotting and lush metaphoric prose. Born in Algiers in 1928 to a French colonial family, Cardinal was forced to leave the country soon after the outbreak of the Algerian War, and she associates her illness with the bloodshed that ensued. Indeed, bleeding is her most debilitating symptom; by the time she meets her psychoanalyst, she has been haemorrhaging from the vagina for three years. Her symptoms having baffled the medical establishment, the narrator is sent to an asylum to be doped with drugs, which reduce her to inertia without providing any respite from the anguish that she calls ‘la

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

322

322 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

maud ellman

Chose’: ‘the Thing was not the same anymore, agitated, breathless, weak; it had become thick, gelatinous, sticky’ (Cardinal 1983, 17). Realising that she prefers the ‘exhausting struggle with the Thing when it was enraged’ (Ibid., 18) to this nauseating stickiness induced by drugs, the narrator escapes from the asylum and seeks help from an unnamed psychoanalyst. ‘I am bled dry’ (Ibid., 31), she informs him in her first session, having bled continuously since their previous interview. The doctor pronounces this disorder psychosomatic: ‘That doesn’t interest me. Speak about something else’ (Ibid., 32), he demands. The patient is outraged – how dare he ignore this spectacular, life-threatening symptom, which has brought her so much shame – and so much attention? But the doctor’s drastic intervention works: the bleeding gives way to a wholesome haemorrhage of pent-up tears. Indeed the symptom is permanently trounced: ‘I didn’t know, I couldn’t know it, not on that day, that the blood would never flow again without stopping for months and years’ (Ibid., 33). Bruno Bettelheim, in an afterword to The Words to Say It, defends the verisimilitude of this implausible recovery – ‘although there are no magical cures, as the long period of psychoanalytic treatment . . . amply demonstrates’ (Bettelheim 1983, 297–8). Yet he claims to have encountered other cases in which symptoms were outfoxed by the analyst’s determined disregard for their flamboyance (Ibid., 305). Even so, sceptics may wonder if Cardinal invented this episode or telescoped the time involved in its curative effect. In fact the author has admitted that the climax of the novel, the scene in which the narrator’s mother reveals that she attempted to abort her, never happened in reality. A fictional necessity rather than an autobiographical fact, this confession provides a psychic rationale for the narrator’s incessant bleeding; that is, she is trying to abort herself on her mother’s behalf, miming the menstrual flow that her mother failed to induce. This confession also implicates the personal in the political, taking place on ‘la rue sur lequel coulera plus tard le sang de la haine’ – the same street where blood would flow during the Algerian war (Cardinal 1983, 132; Heathcote 2006). What flows from the mother in this episode, however, is ‘the words to say it‘, her incontinent confession. This word-letting proves almost as lethal to her daughter as the blood-letting of the botched abortion, the ‘curse’ her mother failed to bring about. As Cardinal reflects, words can be ‘wounds’ or ‘monsters’, ‘the SS of the unconscious’ (Cardinal 1983, 240), but they can also be agents of salvation: by the end of the analysis, the talking cure has overcome the talking curse, together with the curse of ceaseless blood.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

323 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

Psychoanalysis and autobiography

323

Some readers have felt ‘taken in’ by the fictional element of Cardinal’s memoir (McWhorter 1984). But if the truth were ‘easy to tell’, Dan Gunn comments, ‘we wouldn’t need analysis (or fiction for that matter) in the first place’ (Gunn 2002, 8). Cardinal herself explains that psychoanalytic autobiography necessitates at least a rearrangement, if not a full-scale fabrication of the facts: to help those who lived in the hell where I also lived, I promised myself that I would some day write an account of my analysis, and turn it into a novel . . . For analysis can’t be written down. It would take thousands of pages, many of them repetitious, in order to express the interminability of nothingness, the emptiness, the vagueness, the slowness, the deadness . . . And then, in this immense monotony, several strokes of lightning, those luminous seconds during which the entire truth appears, of which one takes in only a fraction, believing one has taken it all in . . . Fantastic volume composed of all the paper in the world. (Cardinal 1983, 248–9)

In other words, psychoanalytic autobiography is unnarratable. Much the same could be said of autobiography per se, which would be unreadable without selection and fabrication. Although some analysts have tried to write case histories that trace the daily course of an analysis, those that are successful bow to the discipline of story-telling. Freud, an enthusiastic reader of detective fiction, produced case histories that read like murder mysteries, omitting most of the frustrations of the analytic process. Even Marion Milner’s (2010c) lengthy case history of Susan, a schizophrenic patient whom she analysed for sixteen years, makes use of fictional techniques of suspense and peripeteia, while acknowledging the glacial pace of analytic work. Melanie Klein’s Analysis of a Ten-Year-Old Boy (1961), on the other hand, records each session of a four-month treatment conducted in Wales in 1940, when both analyst and patient had evacuated London during the bombing. This case history makes for gruelling reading because of its unedited exhaustiveness, but also because of the monotony of Klein’s interpretations, in which every game the child plays, every shape he draws and every syllable he utters, is commandeered into the presumptive primal scene. Weirdly, these interpretations grow increasingly convincing, at least to this reader, making me wonder if Klein’s obsessions are contagious, or if the unconscious really is as boring and repetitive as she implies. Dan Gunn, a distinguished scholar of fiction and psychoanalysis, as well as an editor of Beckett’s correspondence, takes on the challenge of narrating psychoanalysis in his witty memoir Wool-Gathering, Or How I Ended my Analysis (Gunn 2002). Although Gunn’s symptoms are far less dangerous than Cardinal’s, he also suffers from uncontrollable ‘fuites‘. One such

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

324

324 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

maud ellman

fuite, or leak, comes from a hole in the narrator’s ceiling, which is ruining his tumbledown Parisian digs; another is his diarrhoea, which stops dramatically in the first month of the analysis, only to return during a stressful love affair. A third form of fuite, or escape, is the author’s flight from his Scottish home to Paris, as well as his evasion of amorous commitment. One fuite leads to another, he tells his analyst: ‘I have a flat which leaks which causes a body to leak because I didn’t escape when I should have’ (Ibid., 18). All these fuites culminate in the fuite or release of laughter: the wry humour of Wool-Gathering – in comparison to which Plath’s irony seems flip and brittle – makes it a rarity among psychoanalytic autobiographies. If Cardinal’s analyst is idealised as a miracle-worker, Gunn’s remains an enigma. Apparently a strict Lacanian, this analyst regularly cuts off sessions long before the classic Freudian hour has elapsed, dismissing his patient with the phrase ‘Eh bien’. Whether this silent treatment has aided the patient in his ‘wool-gathering’ or merely ‘fleeced’ him of his money (Ibid., 159) remains equivocal. Wool-gathering, the narrator explains, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the action of gathering fragments torn from sheep by bushes, etc’. For Gunn, ‘psychoanalysis was such a ‘gathering’ of the fragments of the self, of the tufts which had been snagged on various obstacles encountered during my life’ (Ibid., 14). In Gunn’s analysis, as in Cardinal’s, the flow of words takes the place of the fuites of bodily substances: ‘Never did [the analyst] say anything to stop the flow, the stories, their proliferation and permutation’ (Ibid., 31). Steeped in Beckett (who was analysed by Bion), Gunn echoes the Unnamable’s lament – ‘I’m in words, made in words, others’ words’ – as well as this character’s compulsion to ‘go on’ telling stories (Beckett 1994, 390, 418), even though these stories elicit only silence from the analyst. Gunn succeeds in ending his analysis, but there is no end to the questions that arise from his account of it. Did the analysis ‘work’? Was the narrator ‘cured’? If so, what was his ‘complaint’? Was the analyst a charlatan, or was his silence a therapeutic master plot? Is psychoanalysis itself a massive hoax? In leaving these doubts unresolved, Gunn’s loose ends seem truer to the enigmas of psychoanalysis than Cardinal’s redemptive closure. Gunn’s narrative takes the form of a diary of the last month of his analysis, interrupted by snatches of one-way analytic dialogues that usually conclude with ‘eh bien’. Barbara Taylor, in her absorbing autobiography The Last Asylum (2014), takes comparable risks with narrative form, suggesting that the story of her illness, which coincided with the shutdown of the great British asylums, demands a range of tempos and perspectives.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

325 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

Psychoanalysis and autobiography

325

‘Bin memoirs are a peculiar genre’, Taylor observes (Taylor 2014, 129). Most are horror stories, like Sylvia Plath’s, where the asylum is experienced as a prison and the doctors as heartless automatons. Yet a small minority of such memoirs, including Taylor’s, defend the asylum as ‘a refuge from unmanageable suffering (a “stone mother,” as some describe it), however bleak the physical environment and attenuated the caregiving’ (Ibid., 127). Now that the Great Confinement, as Foucault dubbed the age of the asylum, has given way to the vagaries of ‘care in the community‘, Taylor’s memoir offers an elegy for a defunct institution, gone the way of workhouses and orphanages. Good riddance, undoubtedly: few would lament the demise of mass incarceration of the poor, the orphaned, the insane, and other misfits like unmarried mothers; but many would deplore the costcutting neglect that often goes by the name of community care. As Taylor points out: ‘When politicians talk about ‘community care’ what they really mean is women; women inside and outside families; women struggling, often with meagre resources, to look after loved ones who are too crazy or old or physically incapacitated to look after themselves’ (Ibid., 82). What makes Taylor’s ‘bin memoir’ more peculiar than most is that she was undergoing psychoanalysis during the months she spent in Friern Barnet. Three times a week she would leave the institution to berate her analyst. Dramatic vignettes of these duels punctuate a narrative otherwise composed of personal recollection and historical research on the asylum. The analyst’s ability to withstand his patient’s torrents of abuse, to ‘hold’ her in a safe relationship, eventually led to her recovery. This was no miracle cure, however; Taylor’s analysis lasted twenty-two years, making the seven years of Cardinal’s analysis seem perfunctory. If Cardinal’s recovery is less than convincing, given the magic powers accorded to her shrink, it is Taylor’s ‘madness’ that taxes credibility. That she was drinking too much is irrefutable; she also showed symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, compounded by severe depression. But was it mad to organise a rota of care giving from her friends before retreating voluntarily to Friern, where she was allowed to leave three times a week for her analysis? Whatever her diagnosis, Taylor’s memoir shows that psychoanalysis is out of reach to ordinary mortals: only the wealthy could possibly afford such treatment, whatever its benefits.

Epilogue While Cardinal makes extravagant claims for psychoanalysis, Taylor makes them for her own pathology. In either case these memoirs raise doubts

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

326

326 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

maud ellman

about their authors’ credibility, an occupational hazard for both autobiographers and psychoanalysts. The furore provoked by James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2005), a largely fabricated memoir of his drug addiction, exemplifies the dangers of autobiography, in which the art of story-telling tends to get the better of historical accuracy. Such memoirs, like Cardinal’s, sacrifice the facts to narrative excitement, yet leave their panting readers feeling cheated of the truth. Psychoanalysis resembles fiction in that both demand a kind of ‘negative capability’, in Keats’s words, ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’ (Keats 2009, 62). Adam Phillips explains: ‘If you buy a fridge, there are certain things you will be guaranteed. If you buy a psychoanalysis, you won’t be. It’s a real risk, and that also is the point of it’ (Phillips 2008). Both psychoanalysis and fiction depend on a willing suspension of disbelief. And perhaps this is the therapeutic benefit that both provide: an oasis of uncertainty amidst hard facts and univocal ideologies.

Bibliography Anzieu, Didier. 1986. Freud’s Self-Analysis. Translated by Peter Graham. London: Hogarth Press. Auden, W. H. 1935. ‘Psychology and Art Today‘. In Freud, 61–72. Edited by Perry Meisel, 1981. Englewood Cliffs, NJ; London: Prentice-Hall. Beckett, Samuel. 1994. Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder. Beckett, Samuel. 2009. Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces. New York: Grove Press. Bion, Wilfred R. 1991. A Memoir of the Future. London: Karnac. Cardinal, Marie. 1983. The Words to Say It: An Autobiographical Novel. Translated by Pat Goodheart. Preface and Afterword by Bruno Bettelheim. Cambridge, MA: VanVactor & Goodheart. Certeau, Michel de. 1986. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deutsch, Helene. 1973. Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue. New York: Norton. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. The Will to Know. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1953–1974. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Standard Edition. Translated by James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

327 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

Psychoanalysis and autobiography

327

Freud, Sigmund. 1985. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Edited by J. Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gay, Peter. 2006. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: Norton. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1987. From My Life: Poetry and Truth. Parts One to Three. Translated by Robert Heitner. New York: Suhrkamp. Grinker, R. R., Jr. 2001. ‘My Father’s Analysis with Sigmund Freud’. Annual of Psychoanalysis 29: 35–47. Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. 2004. ‘How Freud wrote and revised his Interpretation of Dreams: Conflicts around the subjective origins of the book of the century‘. In Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis, 23–36. Edited by Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper. London: Routledge. Gunn, Dan. 1988. Psychoanalysis and Fiction: An Exploration of Literary and Psychoanalytic Borders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunn, Dan. 2002. Wool-Gathering or How I Ended Analysis. Hove: BrunnerRoutledge. Haughton, Hugh. 2014. ‘The Milner Experiment: Psychoanalysis and the Diary’. British Journal of Psychotherapy 30.3: 349–62. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). 1985. Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall & Advent. Manchester: Carcanet. Heathcote, Owen. 2006. ‘The Personal and the Political: Algeria, Violence, Gender and Writing in Marie Cardinal, Hélène Cixous and Assia Djebar’. In Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives, 53–69. Edited by Emma Webb. Oxford: Peter Lang. Jacobus, Mary. 2005. The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, Melanie. 1961. Narrative of a Child Analysis: The Conduct of the PsychoAnalysis of Children as seen in the Treatment of a Ten year old Boy. London: Hogarth Press. Keats, John. 2009. Selected Letters. Edited by Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mahler, Margaret S. 1988. The Memoirs of Margaret S. Mahler. Edited by Paul E. Stepansky. London and New York: Collier Macmillan. McWhorter, Diane. 1984. ‘Recovering from Insanity’. Review of Cardinal, Marie. The Words to Say It. New York Times, 1 January. www.nytimes.com/1984/01/01/ books/recovering-from-insanity.html (accessed 12 September 2015). Milner, Marion. 2010a. A Life of One’s Own. Introduced by Rachel Bowlby. London: Routledge. Milner, Marion. 2010b. An Experiment in Leisure. Introduced by Maud Ellmann. London: Routledge.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C22.3D

328

328 [313–328] 21.10.2015 2:14PM

maud ellman

Milner, Marion. 2010c. The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a PsychoAnalytic Treatment. Introduced by Adam Phillips. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. Obholzer, Karin. 1982. The Wolf-Man: Conversations with Freud’s Patient – Sixty Years Later. Translated by Michael Shaw. New York: Continuum. Pankejeff, Sergius. 1971. The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. Edited by Muriel Gardiner. Forward by Anna Freud. New York: Basic Books. Phillips, Adam. 1994. On Flirtation. London: Faber. Phillips, Adam. 2008. ‘The Art of Nonfiction, no. 7’. Adam Phillips interviewed by Paul Holdengräber. Paris Review 208. www.theparisreview.org/interviews/ 6286/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-7-adam-phillips (accessed 12 September 2015). Plath, Sylvia. 2008. The Collected Poems. New York: Harper. Plath, Sylvia. 2013. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper. Reik, Theodore. 1949. Fragment of a Great Confession: A Psychoanalytic Autobiography. New York: Farrar Strauss. Rimbaud, Arthur. 2003. Rimbaud Complete. Translated by Wyatt Mason. New York: Modern Library. Segal, Hanna. 2008. ‘Hanna Segal: A Psychoanalytic Autobiography’. In Listening to Hanna Segal: Her Contribution to Psychoanalysis, 1–20. Edited by Jean-Michel Quinodoz. London: Routledge. Schur, Max. 1966. ‘Some additional “day residues” of “The specimen dream of psychoanalysis”. In Psychoanalysis: A General Psychology, 45–85. Edited by R. Lowenstein et al. New York: International Universities Press. Steiner, Riccardo. 2000. ‘It is a new kind of diaspora’: Explorations in the Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of Pasychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Svevo, Italo. 1923. Zeno’s Conscience. Translated by William Weaver. London: Penguin, 2002. Taylor, Barbara. 2014. The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times. London: Hamish Hamilton. Woolf, Virginia. 2002 [1940]. ‘A Sketch of the Past’. In Moments of Being, 78–160. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico. Wortis, Joseph. 1954. Fragments of an Analysis with Freud. New York: Simon and Schuster.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

329 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

part 5

Kinds of community (ca. 1930-contemporary)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

330 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

331 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

chapter 23

Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, Spender Michael O’Neill

The 1930s was a period in which autobiography flourished; it is also a period which occasioned what one may read as expressive silences. W. H Auden dismissed the period as a ‘low dishonest decade’ (Auden 1977, 245) in ‘September 1, 1939’, but he has relatively little to say about the period in later years and he is often, though by no means always, circumspect about engaging in autobiography in the 1930s. Conversely, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice wrote autobiographically about the period during and after it. The period running from 1928 to 1939 marks a period in which individualism re-emerges as a major creative force. Often it is in dialectical conflict with accounts of the human that stressed ‘the tendency to consider oneself a product of circumstances and environment beyond one’s control’ (Spender 1978, 106). Samuel Hynes, noting the rise of autobiography as a form towards the end of the 1930s, comments on the dual nature of the genre. Autobiography, he notes, ‘is a kind of documentary’, yet it is also ‘a selfconscious art that may sometimes be read as parable’ (Hynes 1979, 322). The point is well made: autobiography in and of the period bears witness, yet it also constructs parable-like stories, and it does both things with a ‘self-conscious art’. This chapter will examine autobiography in the work of three poets: Spender, MacNeice, and Auden. It will do so by way of discussing the work of Christopher Isherwood, a novelist and prose autobiographer who collaborated with Auden and was a close friend of Spender. Lions and Shadows (1938) by Isherwood exemplifies the ‘self-conscious art’ mentioned in the previous paragraph. As Hynes remarks, the work is at once a ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’ and ‘also a portrait of the artist’s generation during its formative years’ (Hynes 1979, 323). It is extremely funny, its author ‘his own guinea-pig’, as ‘everyone must be’ ([7]), according to Isherwood in ‘To the Reader’ at the head of the work. It 331

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

332

332 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

michael o’neill

verges on parody as well as on fiction, even as it disclaims being, ‘in the ordinary journalistic sense of the word, an autobiography’: that is, Isherwood goes to say, in terms that suggest how the form is normally viewed, ‘it contains no “revelations”; it is never “indiscreet”; it is not even entirely “true”’ (Isherwood 1938, 7). It takes a newly dead-pan, laceratingly humorous view of the artist’s formation, as in the account of ‘Isherwood the artist’ who must endure ‘the self-imposed Test of his integrity as a writer’ (Ibid., 97), a test that ‘had to be kept absolutely secret: if you succeeded, there was no applause; if you failed, there was nobody to console’ (Ibid., 98). The phrasing – especially ‘nobody to console’, as though that is what others are for – captures the latent egotism of the writer’s narratorial double. This egotism emerges overtly in the next paragraph when ‘Isherwood’ turns back into ‘I’ (the initial letter of the author’s surname). Isherwood’s autobiographical ‘ego’ is well and truly ‘alter’, thanks to the pointed way in which his forming personality is fixed by the cruelly dexterous pin of the prose. The ‘I’ of Lions and Shadows maintains a ringmaster’s authority over the circus animals of his tale of the evolving self. That self exists in the shadow cast by the illuminated figures who surround him: Chalmers, fellow conspirator and co-creator of Mortmere; Mr Holmes, improbably charismatic schoolmaster, aloofly complicit in a system against which he half wishes to rebel and of which he is inextricably a part (Holmes keeps a copy, the narrator learns, of the latter’s deliberately mocking and insolent answers in his Cambridge Tripos papers); Western, modelled on Auden, looking ‘more than ever like an exceedingly dirty millionaire’ (Ibid., 299); and Stephen Savage, based on Spender. The narrator sees Savage as a person who ‘inhabited a world of self-created and absorbing drama, into which each new acquaintance was immediately conscripted to play a part’ (Ibid., 281), a view with which Spender partly concurs in World Within World. Isherwood writes here with knowing irony; he himself conscripts his acquaintances and friends into a drama which is no less concerned with the self for being resolutely taciturn or matter-of-fact about subjective feeling. His art is beguilingly to offer his comments about others and himself with laconic precision, as though they aimed only at a minimalist but tragic-comic exactitude, and yet to indicate the hinterland of bruised, reckless, and inchoate feelings that lie behind constructions devised by the artistic self, others, and the society of which he is a part. In Goodbye to Berlin Isherwood again declines to be read in simply autobiographical terms. In his introductory note, he puts the matter like this:

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

333 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s

333

Because I have given my own name to the ‘I’ of this narrative, readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical, or that its characters are libellously exact portraits of living persons. ‘Christopher Isherwood’ is a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing more. (Isherwood 1977, 7)

The image implies that the ‘Isherwood’ we meet in the pages of the work’s ‘loosely-connected sequences of diaries and sketches’ (Ibid., 9) permits us access to the ventriloquist’s voice, albeit distorted as it is thrown through his dummy. It is a voice achieving its own complexities of pitch and cadence through an illusion of extreme simplification. The writer’s presence is reflexive, self-aware, uncanny. On the first page of ‘A Berlin Diary’ dated ‘Autumn 1930’, Isherwood asserts, famously: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking, Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed’ (Ibid., 11). Throughout, we seem to watch without judgement, but the observations exercise a cumulative force, often darkly funny, sometimes chillingly prescient, as in the exchange in ‘The Landauers’ between Bernard and Christopher. Christopher tries to impress on Bernard (who is Jewish) the significance of anti-Semitic Nazi hate-mail (Ibid., 179–80). Bernhard, ironic as always, is unable to match Christopher’s degree of concern. He dies of a heart attack, we discover, in an overheard conversation, after the narrator remarks in a low-key monotone that ‘Hitler came, and the Reichstag fire, and the mock-elections’ (Ibid., 182). Isherwood’s mode is close to semi-fictional reportage; it uses the devices of autobiography to suggest how history makes itself known through a multitude of subjective particularities. Stephen Spender is a poet and writer for whom autobiography is a necessary mode of existential truth telling. ‘I believe obstinately’, he writes in the introduction to his own 1951 prose autobiography World Within World, ‘that, if I am able to write with truth about what has happened to me, this can help others who have lived through the same sort of thing’ (Spender 1951, x). At a time when authors were under pressure to surrender their private lives to some larger impersonal cause, Spender, in much of his finest writing, expresses, while wrestling with, his belief that a writer’s subjective life has to be at the centre of his writing. At the same time, he acknowledges the pressure of the ‘external events’ by which he described himself as being ‘hounded’ (Ibid., 117). Spender’s poetry in the 1930s makes us continually aware of the self as it is shaped by and responsive to social and political forces. He is not exactly a

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

334

334 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

michael o’neill

confessional poet; there is little detail of the kind to be found in, say, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), though later poems are more hospitable to revelatory disclosures of an elegiac or long-perspectival kind, as in ‘Auden’s Funeral’ or ‘Worldsworth’. Instead, in the thirties poems we encounter a presence that is undeniably subjective, yet almost impersonally so. At times Spender uses the word ‘I’ less as a means of telling us about himself than about what it is to have a self. An example might be the poem that begins, ‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’. It seems self-pitying, rawly thin-skinned, and vulnerable. In fact, it is highly accomplished in its re-entrance into the mind of the young boy, who is envious,, in a snobbish, latently homoerotic way, of the ‘boys who were rough’. The last line, ‘I longed to forgive them, yet they never smiled’ (Spender 2004, 8–9), has the effect of exposing what Blake would call a ‘state of the human soul’ (see the subtitle to Songs of Innocence and of Experience); we are given an insight into the boy’s assumption of moral superiority, and thus to the complex construction of an adult self layered by awareness of, guilty pride in, and shame about social privilege. The poem illustrates well Spender’s comment that the modern writer often only knows about his own ‘individuality’ and ‘isolation’. These terms are used in what amounts to a subdued but eloquent apologia, his 1933 essay ‘Poetry and Revolution’, in which he writes: ‘The majority of artists today are forced to remain individualists in the sense of the individualist who expresses nothing except his feeling for his own individuality, his isolation’ (Spender 1978, 53 – this text is ‘reprinted in an abbreviated version and with some obscurities clarified’, 31). It is not entirely surprising, as Spender wrote retrospectively, that ‘The essay was not well received by the comrades’ (Ibid., 32). And yet in his poetry Spender clings to the belief that fidelity to individuality and isolation will perform a truth-telling function that might help bring about an improved society. The essay concludes with rivalling assertions: ‘the majority of artists today are forced into isolation. But by making clear the causes of our present frustration they may prepare the way for a new and better world’ (Ibid., 53). Autobiography, in Spender’s hands, is often a means of ‘making clear the causes of our present frustration’. The view that what we share is difference, obstinate singleness, is one that reaches back to Wordsworth in The Prelude, in which the Romantic poet declares: ‘Points have we all of us within our souls, / Where all stand single’ (3.186–7, Wordsworth 2014, 199). Certainly in Spender’s poetry the poet often treats himself as a test case, and his finest poems leave the reader with the puzzling, enigmatic fact of what it is to be a singular, unique person. ‘Moving through the silent

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

335 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s

335

crowd’ is a small masterpiece that overthrows pages of worthy left-wing poetry as it explores the poet’s fascination with ‘the unemployed’ (to use Spender’s later title). ‘I have the sense of falling light’ (Spender 1978, 12), he writes at the close of the first stanza describing workless figures idling in the street, and the line speaks covertly of the poet’s investment in the scene: he is most interested in an elegiac ‘sense’ which he gains from the scene, covertly conceding that he is using the men as copy, catalysts for a poetic experience. That this concession avoids mere callousness has to do with an unstilled current of compassion that drives the poet in the end to perform an extraordinary act of self-sabotage. There, as the poem’s experience moves beyond the outer scene into the depths of the viewing consciousness, Spender writes: ‘I’m haunted by these images, / I’m haunted by their emptiness’ Ibid., . He hands over the ‘images’ by which he is ‘haunted’ to an aspect of himself watching himself writing the poem and speaks of being ‘haunted by their emptiness’. The reader responds to this jettisoning by the poet of his ill-gotten imaginative loot, his haunting ‘images’, as to an act of attempted self-purgation taking place in the compositional process. We seem to touch the very quick of the poet’s sensibility shaping and unshaping his poem. Elsewhere, as in ‘An “I” can never be great man’, Spender tackles head on in a post-Freudian fashion the idea of selfhood as conflicted. The creative self is at war with a bundle of other selves; it is depicted as ‘Quarrelling with “I tiring” and “I sleeping” / And all those other “I”s who long for “We dying”’ (Ibid., 6). Yet Spender retains a strong conviction of the self as continuous even as it evolves. He is, as he contrasts and compares himself with Auden and Day Lewis, ‘an autobiographer restlessly searching for forms in which to express the stages of my development’ (Spender 1951, 119). Among his finest moments of critical thought about his commitment to individuality in World Within World is his account of the poet’s vocation. ‘Most writers’, Spender asserts, ‘allow their ideas to lead them back from terrifying solitude to the consolatory society of approximate and familiar phrases.’ By contrast, ‘The writer who clings to his own metaphor is facing his own loneliness’, an encounter that is likely to result ‘in conflict with current ideas among people surrounding him, and face to face with the terrifying truth of his own isolated existence’ (Spender 1951, 80). Again, one notices how this ‘terrifying truth’ serves as a guarantor of existential authenticity. Spender ‘clings to his own metaphor’ in poem after poem in the thirties, doing so through a rhythm and syntax that mime encounters with the unforeseen, blockage, the aporetic.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

336

336 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

michael o’neill

His poems about the Spanish Civil War put into the foreground the ‘terrifying truth of his own isolated existence’. The result can be sardonically self-deflating, as in ‘Thoughts during an Air Road’, where he muses on the difference between the ‘great “I”’ that is ‘propped upon / This girdered bed which seems more like a hearse’ and ‘The pressure of those names under my fingers’, which he is able to ‘ignore’. Here, however, the emphasis on ‘isolation’ is a means of obliquely connecting with others. Spender stumbles on a ‘truth’ about us all: ‘The essential is / That all the “I”s should remain separate’ and ‘no one suffer / For his neighbour’ (Spender 2004, 109–10). Thus, he re-connects with others, including the Spanish Republicans with whom he sides, whilst suggesting a human impulse that runs disconcertingly below the surface of partisanship. In ‘Two Armies’ his imagination projects an erotic unitariness on the warring forces, as ‘a common suffering / Whitens the air with breath and makes both one / As though these enemies slept in each other’s arms’. The title’s word ‘Armies’ turns into embracing ‘arms’ through a metaphor which is the poet’s own, and emerges from his own ‘isolation’, yet which, paradoxically, results in a rare, utterly unpolemical vision of ‘common suffering’ (Ibid., 114–15). We are reminded how Spender’s individualism is not divorced from and often links to a sense of collective experience. In ‘Port Bou’, arguably his finest poem about the Civil War, he works though ‘metaphor’ to evoke the yearning for ‘freedom’. The poem begins with a comparison between the harbour and a child holding a pet, ‘Arms clutching but with hands that do not join’, allowing the creature a glimpse of ‘outer freedom in animal air’. The moment suggests how Spender’s autobiographical writing can be at its most arresting when it focuses on an external image, before it begins its work of internalisation. This internalising shows itself in ‘Port Bou’, first, as Spender draws attention to himself in the act of composing (‘I search for an image / And seeing an image I count out the coined words’) and second, though the dramatised fear of imagining himself as the target of the shooting practice that starts up: ‘I tell myself the shooting is only for practice, / And my body seems a cloth which the machine-gun stitches / Like a sewing-machine, neatly, with cotton from a reel’ (Ibid., 122–3). The poem moves between metaphors, that of the ‘coiled animal’, to begin with, and this of the ‘sewing-machine’, to end with, in each case finding a means of bringing to a focus ‘the terrifying truth of his own isolated existence’. ‘And my body’ is later changed to the more obvious ‘But my body’, yet the original reading captures the eerie co-existence of contraries: rational reassurance, irrational but credible fear.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

337 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s

337

Spender’s autobiographical material in prose quietly revolutionises the genre. It is, demonstrably, work produced in the long shadow of Rousseau’s Confessions, fascinated by the self’s idiosyncrasies, imperfections, and experience of the ‘humiliation’ from which Auden tells Spender ‘Art is born’ (Spender 1951, 45). That exchange is serio-comic, a moment of near-parodic epiphany, as Auden articulates something which, the reader senses, Spender has always known about himself. ‘But do you really think I’m any good?’ he reports himself as asking Auden. ‘“Of course”’, comes the reply, with the explanation and unvoiced retort: ‘“Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation,” he added in his icy voice – and left me wondering when he could feel humiliated’ (Ibid., 45). Spender’s manner here typically verges on, without quite toppling over into, the masochistic. The moment is recalled with the relish of a climactic scene in a novel, yet viewed as part of the flow and process of an important if near-impossible human relationship. The writer is both vulnerable tyro and reflective reconstructor of the scene. Spender is a master of the journal entry. Often his entries turn into a meditation on some aspect of self-understanding or meditation on others, as when he records Ernst Curtius listening to him with ‘amusement’ and comments in an entry for 12 September 1939: ‘Sometimes it is disconcerting to be laughed at when one is serious, but as long as it is done affectionately, one is grateful to people who enable one to see oneself a little from the outside’ (Spender 1978, 120–1). Seeing ‘oneself a little from the outside’ is a device often pursued in autobiographical writings of or arising from the 1930s. In World Within World Spender, with a candour that he often uses to arresting effect, describes the effect of seeing his early work in print, ‘able by an act of self-projection to imagine myself as another person, an unknown reader, who opened the pages and read what I had written with eyes not my own.’ Here Spender combines self-mockery of a ‘mood of self-intoxication’ with a sense that ‘in the rôle of this other self-amazed-self’ he could ‘see an error with the same clarity as I could recognize a certain rightness’ (Spender 1951, 86). The passage suggests the drive towards self-analysis as a possible mode of truth telling in Spender. World Within World, like many of his poems in the period, does not so much uncritically valorise the self as view it as an instrument for exploration and interrogation. It is the examined self that emerges with some credit from Spender’s pages, as when he discusses his response to Marxism with its explicit critique of ‘my liberal concepts of freedom and truth’: ‘was my sense of my own individuality’, asks Spender, ‘simply an expression of the class interest which I, unknowingly and instinctively in everything I

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

338

338 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

michael o’neill

thought and wrote and did, represented?’ (Ibid., 116). He concedes the force of the attack, but he refuses to accept that the notion of ‘independent witnessing’ (Ibid., 116) was invalid. Through its accumulation of engrossing insights, memories and observations, World Within World demonstrates convincingly the worth of such ‘witnessing’. Spender’s mode is one in which remembrance and what feels close to present-time reportage interweave. So, the September Journal, which details his responses to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and was published in Horizon in 1940, looks back to his experiences of Germany in 1929 to 1932 before Hitler’s rise to power. It swiftly connects the known and the nearly inexplicable, the peace, hedonistic partying and supposed sinlessness of the Weimar Republic, and the later ‘breakdown of external standards’ (Spender 1978, 106). These generalisations risk national stereotyping, as when Spender opines that ‘The German tends to think of his life as an operatic cycle emerging from a series of myths’ (Ibid., 105). But they hold our attention by virtue of Spender’s ability to tie abstractions to evocative recollection – of German friends and acquaintances, for example, whose behaviour and gestures bore witness to ‘a distress and restlessness of spirit that never ceased’ (Ibid., 111) – and by his sense of writing as a desperate form of creative action as he seeks to ‘make this journal into a book with several levels of time, present and past, which I am able to move in as I choose’ (Ibid., 122). Louis MacNeice illustrates ways in which poets of the thirties react against the doctrine of ‘impersonality’ associated with Eliot and other writers of the 1920s. The situation was a complicated one. Eliot may have hidden behind personae such as Tiresias in The Waste Land, but it was clear to his admiring juniors that his personal presence in his poetry was strong if elusive. Yeats positively thrust his self upon his readers, yet it was evident, too, that the self in his work has been recreated, reconstructed. MacNeice is not unYeatsian in his own divided views of subjectivity in poetry. He comments in Modern Poetry, as John Kerrigan notes, that ‘literary criticism should always be partly biographical’ (Kerrigan 2008, 15). Yet Kerrigan is able, with justice, to assert that MacNeice ‘rejected the idea that poetry is self-expression and argued that even the lyric voice is dramatic’ (Ibid., 15). In The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, MacNeice argues the point with some force and finesse, as he ventriloquises a poet’s rejoinder to a Procrustean critic: ‘So I am to speak only as myself,’ the poet might say, ‘my whole self, and nothing but myself?’ If you know what my whole self and my only self is,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

339 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s

339

you know a lot more than I do. As far as I can make out, I not only have many different selves, but I am often, as they say, not myself at all. Maybe it is just when I am not myself – when I am thrown out of gear by circumstances or emotion – that I feel like writing poetry. I suggest you read what Keats wrote in a letter about the poet’s personality.’ (MacNeice 1967, 146)

It is when ‘thrown out of gear by circumstances or emotion’, on this argument, that the poetic voice comes into being, finding new aspects of selfhood, taking inspiration from the Keats who denied that a poet has a fixed personality. As Jonathan Allison notes in his introduction to the letters, ‘One way of evading the limitations of home and the singular, inherited self is to imagine personhood as multiple or various’ (MacNeice 2010, xvi). Allison draws attention to a revealing metaphor that MacNeice uses in a 1927 letter, on the threshold of his career as a poet: ‘One is like a fountain – always spouting in the same shape but formed of always different water drops’ (Ibid., 172). The phrasing suggests the MacNeice who delights in ‘the drunkenness of things being various’ (MacNeice 1988, 23), and the shiftingly iridescent nature of being a person. But the passage that follows hints at another note, less delight in the ever-varying quality of personhood than a darker suggestion of unfathomable discontinuity: ‘Now suppose someone turns off the fountain; it is not. Turn it on again and it exists again (the same fountain). Where has it been in between?’ (MacNeice 2010, 172). Concern with sameness rubs against awareness of difference and what might be called the self’s interlunar vacancies. The MacNeicean voice of thirties poems is vibrant with melancholy and muffled elation, rhetorically confident, defiant, and at its most compelling when articulating uncertainty. Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, shadows his work; a cluster of images and stereotypes haunts his attempted goodbye in ‘Valediction’. Here MacNeice suggests that selfhood is not merely a verbal construction, subject to the whims or vanishing tricks of the poet-mage: ‘I cannot be’, he writes in a ruefully self-incriminating couplet, ‘Anything else than what this land engendered me’. The poem identifies what it calls in an elliptical phrase ‘Memory in apostasy’ (MacNeice 1988, 12), as though ‘memory bore involuntary witness in the face of the poet’s attempted ‘apostasy’, a strong word since it means ‘abandonment or renunciation of one’s religious faith or moral allegiance’ (Oxford English Dictionary). The word gestures towards the young poet’s struggles with the faith in which he was brought up, but in context it suggests more strongly the contention of mock-bravado and a deeper intensity.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

340

340 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

michael o’neill

Indeed, as the poem progresses, MacNeice does arrive at a position that differs from compulsive helplessness in the face of the past. But he does so through the increasing ferocity with which he shows the power of that past’s hold over him and the corresponding vehemence of poetic utterance needed to prise its fingers from his throat. Within a few lines of the justquoted passage he writes: ‘I can say Ireland is hooey, Ireland is / A gallery of fake tapestries, / But I cannot deny my past to which my soul is wed, / The woven figure cannot undo its thread’ (MacNeice 1988, 13). Yet the ‘woven figure’ that is Ireland starts to unspool its threads of images as the poet, in near-Yeatsian mode, asserts, affirms, and in the end banishes. The verb that MacNeice chooses, though, at the start of the climactic closing sentence, namely ‘resign’, is cunningly passive; even as it is consciously dismissive, it retains a lingering attentiveness. Valediction clings to that to which it says farewell: ‘Therefore I resign, goodbye the chequered and the quiet hills . . . Goodbye your hens running in and out of the white house . . . Your drums and your dolled-up Virgins and your ignorant dead’ (Ibid., 14). Renunciation builds to a crescendo of contempt in the final line, with its plague-on-both-your sectarian-houses evenhandedness (Protestant ‘drums’ and Catholic ‘Virgins’). The poet pitilessly does ‘say Ireland is hooey’ without denying the ‘past to which my soul is wed’. It is often for the expression of conflicted or varying views of the self that MacNeice’s autobiographical poetry of the thirties is most memorable. ‘Postscript to Iceland’, dedicated to Auden, with whom MacNeice had written Letters from Iceland (1937), a brilliant ragbag account of their visit to that country, shows off this array of selves, orchestrated throughout by the trochee-wielding poet. There is the quintessentially thirties awareness of the private life taking place within a framework of ‘Nations germinating hell’. There are the mocking and self-mocking references to ‘the don in me’ and ‘the don in you’. MacNeice’s donnish self contends that ‘the saga style’ is explained by ‘the landscape of the north’, Auden’s, trumping his friend’s display of erudition, argues that ‘the North begins inside’ (Ibid., 34), the self interiorising a geography of ethos and style. The moment is a reminder that, though the reverse of ‘academic’ in the pejorative sense of the word, MacNeice’s poetry intermittently alludes to the day job (he was a lecturer in Classics at Birmingham University), often, as here, to provide a long perspective on the present, a long perspective that, as here, deflates its own knowingness. The poem admits personal dread, ‘the fear of loneliness / And uncommunicableness’, but it takes evident if anxiety-tinged pleasure in the bravura of its phrasing: ‘Still I drink your health before / The gunbutt raps upon the door’ (Ibid., 36) is MacNeice performing with relish the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

341 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s

341

role of fiddler playing (or drinking) while the world awaits the apocalypse of war. In The Strings Are False, his unfinished autobiography written in 1940 but unpublished until 1965, MacNeice writes with self-mocking assurance about his early addiction to phrase-making: ‘The right phrase was something with positive, or even absolute, value – even if, as so often, it was conveying denunciation, irony, scepticism, defeatism, nihilism. (If Nil is a word it can’t be nil.)’ (MacNeice 1965, 109). Autumn Journal, MacNeice’s poetic masterpiece about what it was like to live in the period after Munich 1938, is, in many ways, about the need to construct a self that can meet the challenges that it meets. Describing the poem in a letter to T. S. Eliot of November 1938, MacNeice describes how its sectionalising permits ‘different parts of myself (e.g. the anarchist, the defeatist, the sensual man, the philosopher, the would-be good citizen)’ to ‘be given their say in turn’ (MacNeice 2010, 312). With its irregular line-lengths and apparently improvised, often enjambed, rhyming, it shows the poetic self in action, arranging, orchestrating, and pattern-making, yet all the time admitting the presence of forces that threaten the self’s powers of control. So in section VII, MacNeice writes, leaving ‘an all-night shelter’ he has gone to after finding his lost dog: And as I go out I see a windscreen wiper In an empty car Wiping away like mad and I feel astounded That things have gone so far. And I come back here to my flat and wonder whether From now on I need take The trouble to go out choosing stuff for curtains As I don’t know anyone to make Curtains quickly. Rather one should quickly Stop the cracks for gas or dig a trench And take one’s paltry measures against the coming (MacNeice 1988, 53) Of the unknown Uebermensch.

MacNeice’s inventiveness is exuberantly on display throughout the poem, yet the above passage gives the flavour of its staple idiom: conversational but edgily so, as when a line ending holds up the word ‘quickly’ for wry inspection before it ushers in the mock-panicky ‘Stop the cracks’; aware of coming threat (as in the reference to the Nietzschean ‘Uebermensch’), but often in a sardonic way; investing feeling in an image. That ‘windscreen wiper / In an empty car / Wiping away like mad’ is an image for the times and for a terrifying fear of automaton-driven nothingness.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

342

342 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

michael o’neill

Much in The Strings Are False and other autobiographical poems relies on McaNeice’s ability to bring feeling and memory into resurrected life through images, images caught up in a syntax that allows both for the image’s intensity and its existence in the life of remembering consciousness. Examples of different kinds, both concerned with the poet’s childhood, occur in ‘Carrickfergus’ and ‘Autobiography’. In ‘Carrickfergus’ MacNeice confronts his liminal status, brought up in Carrickfergus, ‘the rector’s son, born to the Anglican order, / Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor’ (Ibid., 24), educated in an English school. History impinges on the boy in the form of near-inconsequential, haunting images: ‘Somewhere on the lough was a prison ship for Germans, / A cage across their sight’ (Ibid., 25). As here, the poem works through a blend of declaration, mimicking the autobiographer’s assertion of willed control, and a mood close to reverie, recollections that speak of a world that makes no sense. ‘A cage across their sight’ picks up on the previous stanza’s reference to ‘flags on pins moving across and across’ (Ibid., 25), only to qualify suggestions of purposeless movement with an image of barred imprisonment. MacNeice’s ‘Autobiography’, though written in 1940, is among the finest achievements of thirties autobiographical poetry; it evokes and bids farewell to a childhood that is both highly particular and quintessentially generational in its traumatised helplessness. MacNeice gives distilled expression to nightmare: the loss of a mother who ‘wore a yellow dress; / Gently, gently, gentleness’; the onset of ‘dreams’ in which ‘The dark was talking to the dead; / The lamp was dark beside the bed’; the sense of bereftness – all are rendered with an affecting economy of means, one evident in the refrain, ‘Come back early or never come’ (Ibid., 88). The refrain suggests that the images and the life they depict should come back, but in an altered form, so that they can assume a prelapsarian ‘earliness’; the imperative seems also to occupy its own autonomous and suggestive space, as though it were a mode of (possibly Platonic) self-address, meaning, ‘Reincarnate yourself as a pre-experiential being or never return’. Without the self there is no poetry, but MacNeice’s poetry is constantly fighting a courageously reckless battle against the fear, darkness. and isolation of which his childhood in Northern Ireland offers examples, and which inform his adult understanding of what it is to be human. W. H. Auden writes of ‘the nightmare of the dark’ (Auden 1977, 243) in his elegy for Yeats, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, composed the year before ‘Autobiography’ was written. MacNeice’s ‘dark’ is primarily personal; Auden’s is primarily objective, public. MacNeice effortlessly moves

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

343 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s

343

between private and public when he wishes; Auden, more enigmatically and obliquely, subsumes the poet’s self within his icy, confident diagnoses. Indeed, the very notion of the private life seems sous rature in his early poems, under investigation, almost certainly symptomatic of some larger socio-political malaise. The first person pronoun is kept under wraps; address is likely to be admonitory, directed at a faulty ‘you’, as when Auden deplores, with frenetic (and parodically Freudian) high spirits, ‘The convolutions of your simple wish’ (Ibid., 47). Over and over, self is under severe orders in the early poetry to wean itself from self-concern, to attend to a public sphere. And yet it is striking how persistent Auden’s preoccupation with the self is, and to this degree his poetry is, so to speak, a paradoxically autobiographical poetry. In it we can trace the struggle to track the process by which, as he puts it in the would-be ego-less clipped speech of the second section of ‘It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens’, ‘Time passes and now is other, / Is knowledge in him now of other’ (Ibid., 38). This poem seeks to confront ‘solitary man’ (deprived of an article) as the first section has it (Ibid., 37). Yet it concedes that there is no scene without a viewer, albeit one who is ‘Tiny observer of enormous world’ (Ibid., 38). Poems that seek to purge mere subjective emotionalism acknowledge the vital if suppressed presence of the edgily conscious onlooker and participant. As the decade wears on, Auden grows less fearful of the word ‘I’ while always wishing to connect self and other. In Letter to Lord Byron, he is positively unbuttoned about his dislike of Wordsworth, love of particular landscapes (‘Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on / The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton’; Ibid., 175), ‘the large brown mole’ on his ‘right cheek’ (Ibid., 189) and even childhood memories. And yet the effect is of someone playing at autobiography, suffering its generic demands with good humour, while the essential Auden, not to be confused with his play-acting, dramatised other self, remains enigmatically removed from the scene of writing. In Spender and MacNeice, by contrast, for all their differences, autobiography is a, often the, medium for a vitally, radically new means of narrating what it is to be alive.

Bibliography Auden, W. H. 1977. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939. Edited by Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber. Hynes, Samuel. 1979 [1978]. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. London: Faber and Faber.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C23.3D

344

344 [329–344] 21.10.2015 2:32PM

michael o’neill

Isherwood, Christopher. 1977 [1939]. Goodbye to Berlin. St Albans: Triad/ Granada. Isherwood, Christopher. 1938. Lions and Shadows. London: Hogarth. Kerrigan, John. 7 February 2008. ‘The Ticking Fear’. London Review of Books, 15–18. MacNeice, Louis. 2010. Letters. Edited by Jonathan Allison. London: Faber and Faber. MacNeice, Louis. 1967. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. Foreword by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and Faber. MacNeice, Louis. 1988. Selected Poems. Edited by Michael Longley. London: Faber and Faber. MacNeice, Louis. 1965. The Strings Are False. London: Faber and Faber. Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Apostasy’. Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com (accessed 9 September 2015). Spender, Stephen. 2004. New Collected Poems. Edited by Michael Brett. London: Faber and Faber. Spender, Stephen. 2012. New Selected Journals, 1939–1995. Edited by Lara Feigel and John Sutherland, with Natasha Spender. London: Faber and Faber. Spender, Stephen. 1978. The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933–75). London: Faber and Faber. Spender, Stephen. 1951. World Within World. London: Hamish Hamilton. Wordsworth, William. 2014. Poetry and Prose. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. New York: Norton.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

345 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

chapter 24

Documenting lives Mass Observation, women’s diaries, and everyday modernity Nick Hubble

I feel that at last the working classes of this country have begun to think for themselves and wake up. They have not been fooled by the bogey of voting ‘National’ or by Churchill’s smiling face. They do not want to get back to 1939. The conscription and shortages have taught them democracy and that all men are really equal. I feel confident that a better world is going to be the result of this election and that the future in spite of so many difficulties is bright. (Wing 2008, 262)

This 31 July 1945 entry is taken from one of the several hundred personal wartime diaries that were kept by volunteers for the social research organisation Mass Observation (MO). Its focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people exemplifies the way in which the British documentary movement laid the groundwork for the 1945 political settlement. However, what particularly distinguishes MO’s approach is the manner in which it sought to combine subjectivity with objectivity by encouraging its participants to observe both themselves and others. In this respect its strength lay in what Laura Marcus describes as the ‘hybridity of autobiography as a genre’, which enabled it to investigate the relationship between ‘private and the public’ within the context of the ‘rise of mass society’ (Marcus 1994, 7). The fact that MO participants were writing about themselves with the knowledge that their writing would be read by MO staff, might be published, and would certainly be made available to future researchers gave their work a unique status, lying somewhere between a conventional diary and a published autobiography. This mode of writing proved to be of great value both to intellectuals, such as Naomi Mitchison, whose case is discussed in detail in this chapter, and to ordinary women, such as the author of the extract above, Muriel Green. The self-reflexive insight she had developed by 1945 from writing for MO stemmed from her initial desire, which marked her and her sister out from the villagers they lived 345

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

346

346 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

nick hubble

with, to participate in public debate by seeing their own words in print, as expressed in her diary entry for 19 April 1940: Before we caught the bus home we went in the town library to ask if they had got ‘our’ book. (We always call it ‘ours’, hope MO doesn’t mind, but you see we’ve never had anything we’ve written in print before and claiming 14 lines and J. 25 lines we feel a proprietary interest in the publication, and that everybody ought to sell and read it) and were delighted to see that the paper cover was pinned up inside the main entrance with other new books they had bought this month for the library. (Wing 2008, 31)

In its origins, MO hardly seems a natural means of meeting the ‘cultural and political aspirations’ identified by Christopher Hilliard as driving the democratisation of writing, and politics, in Britain (Hilliard 2006, 68). The idea for the organisation originated in the autumn of 1936 following the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Humphrey Jennings and David Gascoyne, who had both been involved in organising that exhibition, were amongst a group of poets, also including William Empson and Ruthven Todd, who met at the Blackheath flat of Kathleen Raine and Charles Madge to discuss the possibility of a ‘popular poetry’ that would channel the collective unconsciousness of the British masses. In January 1937, following the publication of Madge’s letter advertising the existence of the group in the New Statesman, they were joined by Tom Harrisson, an anthropologist who was currently engaged in participant observation of working-class life in Bolton. A further letter to the New Statesman announced an ‘Anthropology at Home’ and called for volunteers, who were soon put to work collecting ‘dominant images’ for plotting as ‘weather maps of the collective consciousness’ (Hubble 2010, 4–10). Such modernist- and surrealist-inspired ideas resulted in a book based on the day diaries that volunteers were asked to keep for the twelfth day of each month, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937, which was the date of the Coronation of George VI. The book was not a commercial success, however, and MO passed into a new phase in which the Boltonbased ‘Worktown’ project became the dominant form of activity while a London-based National Panel concentrated on sending ‘directives’ on topics such as smoking and advertising to its correspondents. This phase continued until early 1940 when MO began working for the Ministry of Information. James Hinton’s recent history of MO, The Mass Observers, demonstrates how the professionalisation of the organisation during the war coincided with women employees taking on more prominent roles. For example,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

347 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

Documenting lives

347

Celia Fremlin was taken on full time in 1940 and ‘became an important part of the management team’ (Hinton 2013, 172) assembled by Harrisson following Madge’s departure to work with John Maynard Keynes (see Hubble 2010, 189–199). In 1944, Fremlin began analysing MO’s wartime diaries for a book on middle-class housewives, who she saw as ‘prefiguring a psychological crisis that, in the coming era of affluence, would eventually affect the whole of society’ (Hinton 2013, 318). The thesis was that women’s identity had been traditionally bound up with serving the needs of men and family but that modern services and amenities, as well as welfare reform, were forcing middle-class housewives to find artificial ways of keeping themselves busy because that traditional role was no longer so time consuming. In this manner, Fremlin anticipated how social and familial solidarity and interdependence would be increasingly changed by individualism as the century progressed. Although this project was abandoned in favour of those of her male colleagues, it was when, as Liz Stanley notes, MO centred on women’s lives and experiences – as it did for its prewar ‘Economics of Everyday Life’ project, its research on women’s war work and its investigation of Britain’s falling birth rate in the mid-1940s – and explored problems from women’s perspectives that its research demonstrated ‘a quite remarkable ability to understand and predict when compared with other contemporary research on similar topics’ (Stanley 1995, 16). While Fremlin’s predictions may have overestimated the degree to which women would become free of domestic responsibilities, her general approach is vindicated by Ben Highmore’s discussion of how women in the current post-1981 MO project often write in a future perfect tense rooted in the everyday life experience ‘of the day-to-day imagining of narrative cohesion, continuity and change’ (Highmore 2011, 92). Highmore’s analysis is based on his close reading of one woman’s fiftypage type-written response to a 1983 directive calling for a week’s diary recording the household division of domestic labour. He argues that her attempt to measure the time spent on various tasks and then renegotiate her workload with her husband and children is simultaneously an application and a critique of second-wave feminism in that it demonstrates the limits of an instrumental approach to such activities. Yet, precisely through the possibilities and lost opportunities thus revealed, her diary also opens out the potential prospect of a more unconstrained ‘feminist time’ that would otherwise remain hidden: If one narrative that the account describes is of a woman worker negotiating her lack of time, and her relationship with housework, feminism and family,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

348

348 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

nick hubble another narrative describes a writer accomplishing a narrative account of housework that is ebullient and proud while also being lightly self-deprecating. (Highmore 2011, 104)

MO personal narratives – the majority of which since 1981 have been written by women – are not only of value for their thick description of the present but also for this distinctive ‘temporal atmosphere’ (Highmore 2011, 92) that underpins their predictive quality as emergent public narratives. A similar predictive potential and temporal sense characterises the diaries that around four hundred mass observers started keeping at the outbreak of the Second World War. About a quarter of these were maintained for several years at least. However, the diarist who has become most famous, Nella Last, a housewife living in Barrow-in-Furness, continued submitting hers to MO up until the mid 1960s. The wartime portion of her diary, Nella Last’s War, was first published in 1981, but gained national recognition following its adaptation for television in 2006 as Housewife, 49 by Victoria Wood, who also won a BAFTA for her performance in the lead role. Since then two further volumes, Nella Last’s Peace (2008) and Nella Last in the 1950s (2010), have been published. Another diary that charted the full duration of the war was kept by Naomi Mitchison and subsequently published in edited form as Among You Taking Notes (1985). Mitchison had known Harrisson since the early 1930s, when he was a university ‘dropout’ hanging around Oxford: ‘Not that Tom Harrisson dropped; he jumped very hard and the bottom came out – as he intended it to’ (Mitchison 1986, 201). She had become an enthusiastic participant in MO from its formation, filling in its day surveys and monthly directives. Her writing for MO was a world away from both the didacticism of her non-fiction and the emotional intensity of her historical novels: ‘While choosing sweets assistant asked twice ‘Is this your little girl?’ and beamed at Valentine. Several times I ask if goods are Japanese, but assistants don’t seem to know’ (Ibid., 53–4). This is a description of Christmas shopping on 12 December 1937 with her youngest daughter in Woolworths and, even if not all her fellow shoppers were similarly motivated to boycott goods in response to Japanese aggression in Manchuria, it situated Mitchison, perhaps for the first time in her life, symbolically amongst the masses. Such was her long-term commitment to MO that she became a contributor again when the current version of the project was started in 1981. Mitchison’s attempts to envision a utopian future before the war led to her becoming a socialist but her social and gender positions as an upper-class

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

349 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

Documenting lives

349

wife and mother prevented her from simply merging into the masses in the manner of male counterparts, such as fellow MO contributor, John Sommerfield. Therefore, she set out to work through the implications of her own class position from first principles in a lengthy philosophical treatise, The Moral Basis of Politics, first published in 1938. In trying to find a way forward from hierarchical societies in which the notions of cultural and moral value are patterned on the interests of the propertied few in power, towards non-hierarchical societies in which values are orientated towards universal happiness and a Kantian notion of the ‘Kingdom of Ends’ (Mitchison 1971, 60–2), Mitchison turned to the idea of the tragic or sacrificial king: It may be that leaders and led should always have this ‘tragic drama’ relation between them: that no leader should be tolerable to the led unless he or she has made the act of acceptance, has experienced the change of focus (‘rebirth’) and is prepared if necessary to be the sacrifice. (Ibid., 288)

Such a conclusion would not have come as a surprise to those familiar with her historical fiction as the ‘tragic drama’ relationship between the leaders and the led was a staple of her novels from the first, The Conquered (1923), to the one she was writing at that time, The Blood of the Martyrs (1939). Both of those novels were written from the viewpoint of a male character and although she did write female protagonists, it is clear that one of her driving concerns was to achieve equality by occupying a subject position indistinguishable from the male one. Her brief discussion of MO in The Moral Basis of Politics both implies that it is a means by which cultural and moral values patterned on the interests of society in general, as opposed to those of the ruling minority, might finally be discovered, but also makes it clear that she thought its primary importance would be to guide politicians and leaders in discovering them (see ibid., 320–1). However, this judgement fails to register the obvious personal value she experienced in simply recording her day’s activities on the twelfth of each month for MO and then, subsequently, in her wartime diary. Noting the difficulty facing women in trying to constitute themselves as unified subjects, Karen Meschia compares the respective diaries of Last and Mitchison in order to tell the story of how the former achieved a form of liberation through her diary, subsequently becoming an unlikely icon of emancipation, while the latter underwent something of the reverse process by which she was made painfully aware of ‘gender asymmetry’ (Meschia 2010, 7). Through participation in the activities that defined what became known as ‘The People’s War’, such as joining the WVS, running a canteen

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

350

350 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

nick hubble

van, and ‘digging for victory’, Last escaped ‘from the narrow confines of domesticity and of patriarchal pressure’ and felt liberated (Ibid., 8). In contrast, while Mitchison notes her contacts with the great and the good ranging from Leonard Woolf to Nye Bevan, and pours considerable effort during the early months of the war into setting up a local branch of the Labour Party, she becomes gradually more encumbered with domestic responsibilities over the years. Finally, her husband’s selection as the Labour candidate for Kettering in the 1945 general election relegates her to ‘the role of supportive, submissive wife’ (Ibid., 8). Meschia concludes by discussing the diversity of women’s experience during the war and suggesting that what Mitchison and Last had in common was that their diaries provided a private space for resistance. While this is true, it is not the whole story as the diaries were being sent to the MO offices in monthly batches. As James Hinton observes: ‘[MO] offered a discipline and a context which transcended the purely private, meeting a need to frame individual quests in relation to larger public purposes’ (Hinton 2010, 6). Because one of MO’s stated public purposes was to collect material for the use of future historians, it was always clear that the full meanings of these diaries would not begin to become apparent until many years later. As Meschia acknowledges, there was no way of predicting that Nella Last would one day become a household name and it is the fact that that happened which confers a significant quotient of the positivity to her diary in retrospect. While Meschia notes the turn in Mitchison’s diary towards a concern with ‘the future of Scotland [and] a growing commitment to Scottish nationalism’ (Meschia 2010, 5), the significance of this was not so obvious in 2010 as it is in 2015 following a narrow referendum defeat for independence and the huge gains made by the Scottish National Party in the subsequent general election. This future was certainly not clear to Mitchison in 1984 when she wrote the foreword to the first edition of Among You Taking Notes. Following the failure in the 1979 devolution referendum to gain a sufficient majority to establish a Scottish Parliament, it appeared to her as though her wartime efforts to bring self-government and a recognition of nationhood to Scotland had come to naught. However, in the present-day context, her diary takes on a very different complexion and, as I discuss further below, this enables us to analyse her experience more positively than Meschia does. In Nine Wartime Lives, Hinton has provided us with a series of case studies that demonstrate the long-term value of MO’s wartime diaries. He argues that the diaries allow us to reconstruct a history of everyday life which reveals the stratagems and subtle ways by which women established

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

351 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

Documenting lives

351

equality and autonomy in the private sphere during the decades between the great public campaigns of the suffragettes and the Women’s Liberation Movement. For example, he relates the stories of a couple, Bertha and Mathew Walton, who were both MO diarists. While Mathew, a schoolteacher, became increasingly disillusioned as the totalitarian atmosphere of the war gradually dissipated the pre-war Popular Front culture that he had enjoyed and, consequently, began to retreat into private life, a new world opened up for Bertha, who – like Nella Last – was liberated by getting out of the home. In her case, she started work in a factory and then became an Amalgamated Engineering Union shop steward. As Hinton shows, despite following a different, gendered route through the wartime experience, the Waltons remained mutually supportive and thus their companionate marriage may be seen as a precursor of the more democratic society that eventually emerged in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s ‘founded on autonomous individuals aspiring to relate to one another in egalitarian ways’ (Hinton 2010, 8). Such relationships were important because of the centrality of gender as an axis of difference along which institutional hierarchies function. They were the means by which men learned to set aside the primacy of their own needs and desires in order to allow understanding of the other. However, Hinton does not just privilege companionate marriages in his account and it is a very different female diarist, who provides an interesting point of comparison with Mitchison, that he suggests comes nearest to our present-day understanding of ‘modern reflexive selfhood’ (Ibid., 134). He gives this wife of a garage mechanic living in a working-class district of Birmingham the pseudonym ‘Lillian Rogers’. Having used her knowledge of the work of Havelock Ellis to organise a sexually fulfilling relationship with her husband, Rogers was able to flirt with other men in a way that afforded her power in the public sphere, especially on the local streets and in the dance halls she frequented ostensibly in the interest of reporting on popular leisure pastimes for Mass Observation. Hinton suggests that her ‘objectivity was frequently overturned by the delights of participation’ (Ibid., 121) but her behaviour may also be considered as a demonstration of how there was no boundary between her participation in the activity being observed and her participation in Mass Observation. For example, at the end of the war Rogers had a particular young man she liked to go to the cinema and dancehalls with. She dutifully records in her diary that she met him on the afternoon of VJ Day and kissed him, to his surprise, before making plans to meet again that evening. However, she was late in leaving the street party due to her husband’s annoyance, even

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

352

352 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

nick hubble

though they had a compact that she was allowed to go out with other men provided she did not have sex with them. Therefore, she missed her young man and had to brush off another male acquaintance, before returning to the street party and running the scornful looks of those local women who disapproved of her behaviour. The evening entertainment started and included the district air-raid warden doing a turn while dressed up as ‘Mrs Mopp’ wearing ‘long white [drawers] with lace on’. Nor was this an isolated incident, for, as Rogers went on to note, ‘Mr Wells was dressed up as a woman, so was young Dennis, the fun had really got going’. The party ended in the early hours with Rogers allowing the warden a ‘victory kiss’ and getting covered in grease paint as a result before finally she and her husband ‘went to bed and lay reviewing the day and its happenings’. Now, the reason for the dirty looks on her return became clear: [Stan] was hugely delighted that he had created a sensation. It appears that about an hour after I’d been gone Mr Beardsmore wanted to know where I’d gone. That gave [Stan] his ‘cue’ and he just revelled in the fact that his wife had deserted him, he wasn’t going to stand for it he should get himself another woman, he said he so worked on their sympathy that they soaked it all up – hence the looks. [Stan] and I were nearly in hysterics by the time he’d finished. (Diarist 5420)

Here this married couple are laughing, in effect, at the performance they have put on for the neighbours: him playing the long-suffering wronged husband and her the scarlet woman. At the same time, there is a redemptive quality to this shared sense of performance because he was clearly annoyed when she did go off and leave him and it is also evident that she wants more from life than she can get through the relationship alone, and yet the way they are able to relive the night together afterwards re-enchants the night and the relationship. Therefore, in Rogers’s diary we see some of the underlying and enabling dynamics of a marriage which is not companionate in the sense of doing things together as the Waltons’ marriage was, but in the looser sense that they actually talk to each other about what they do separately. Of course, what both relationships have in common with each other, and also with Last’s, is that the woman is more comfortable interacting with and negotiating her role in life outside the domestic sphere. But what about the descriptions of cross-dressing? On one level, the fact of the men dressing up in women’s clothes might be seen as ‘a ritualistic release for a heterosexual economy’ (Butler 1993, 126). However, the real interest of the piece is Rogers’s relationship to these displays, which has several different aspects. First, she describes them as ‘fun’, echoing the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

353 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

Documenting lives

353

combination of ‘fun and friendship’ which she frequently uses to define what it is that she is looking for in her relationship with men. Given that her flirting with men was largely performative, it is reasonable to assume that she interpreted the cross-dressing as a more exaggerated version of the performative elements that comprise everyday life. Second, Rogers is happy to join in these performances as her description of that final kiss with the cross-dressed warden testifies: ‘Needless to say my face was grease paint all over when he’d finished’ (Diarist 5420). Furthermore, this example illustrates that the subsequent telling of the performance is just as important as giving it. In the context of a Mass Observation diary, telling becomes writing and thus adds yet another level to the performance because it enables Rogers to gain more self-awareness and control over the process of retelling. In the diaries, therefore, we can see how writing for Mass Observation enabled otherwise ordinary people to develop a broadly modernist self-reflexivity. Finally, we can see how Rogers’s account differs from the descriptions of cross-dressing at a party described in the Lambeth Walk chapter of Britain by Mass-Observation: Two of the toughest men came in [. . .] made up with red eyebrows and white cheeks, each wearing a woman’s hat and dress, and also (under the dress) pyjama trousers. One had false breasts, the other a pregnant belly. A woman came up and kicked the belly, and the man with the false breasts made his wife hold them. One of the men made an appropriately lewd remark and there was some pantomiming of the kind that is usually classed as ‘obscene’ and which is familiar to anthropologists in many kinds of primitive dance. (Madge and Harrisson 1939, 147)

Here, the reference to anthropologists legitimises the account which is presented as part of MO’s project of an ‘anthropology of ourselves’. However, Rogers’s account is not structured in the same way. She is there and then she writes about it afterwards but there is no distance between observer and observed. This is a facet of what Hinton describes as the specificity of the MO diaries in which the individual element is framed within a larger public purpose. There is not the standard anthropological division that is found in Britain between the first hand testimony of ‘informants’ and the functionalist analysis of that testimony. It is this anthropological stance that often excludes MO from fully realising its own promise in terms of its official publications, which lies behind criticisms of the organisation as a form of middle-class voyeurism (see Hubble 2012, 146). Nonetheless, even reports by professional mass observers tend to reveal a similar dynamics of social interaction to

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

354

354 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

nick hubble

those described by Rogers. Writing about MO’s participant observation within dance halls, Jennie Taylor notes that, despite the observers clearly having an agenda of looking for types of sexual behaviour that fell within a heteronormative framework, their reports show that ‘female empowerment through sexual control and assertiveness was a fundamental feature of dance hall culture’ (Taylor 2007, 4). The difference with Rogers is that she was employing this ‘assertiveness’ for MO, as she liked to spell out in her reports: ‘I have acquired a technique in finding out secrets and ways of life of almost any man after I have been with him a short time’ (cited in Hinton 2010, 129). As Highmore argues, MO was ‘most productive, as an approach to everyday life, when it treats “natives” as the ethnographers’ (Highmore 2002, 87), and Rogers clearly provided a unique insider viewpoint. The pleasure for her was generated by the opportunity to switch ‘between her various identities’ (Ibid., 129). This performative aspect of MO, which was also very attractive to those, like Mitchison, who wanted the possibility of framing themselves as ordinary people by, for example, writing about taking their children shopping in Woolworths, might be considered as a form of textual cross-dressing. It is not, therefore, coincidence that instances of actual cross-dressing, such as at the Lambeth Walk parties and VJ Day celebrations, are recorded by the organisation. MO’s intense focus on everyday life revealed it to be a site of performance. Inevitably, highlighting something as central to British society as the staged nature of the coronation of George VI also recorded all sorts of incidental performances, including examples of women wearing trousers, which were indexed as examples of ‘transvesticism’ in May the Twelfth (Jennings and Madge 1937, 434). Marjorie Garber suggests that ‘transvestism in literature and culture’ instates ‘metaphor itself . . . precisely as that without which there would be no such thing as meaning in the first place’ (Garber 1992, 390). In this sense, she suggests, cross-dressing can be viewed as a primal scene of anthropology. It is the point at which the meaning of gender is established, which is why cross-dressing so often features in initiation rites. In line with this, I would suggest that examples such as that of Rogers and the Lambeth Walk analysis are just small instances of how Mass Observation itself functioned as a primal scene of cross-class and cross-gender cross-dressing that was endlessly repeated and became the possibility of a new kind of subjectivity that slowly emerged across society in post-war Britain. As Dorothy Sheridan, Brian Street, and David Bloome argue, the materials produced by the current post-1981 MO Project are characterised primarily by such

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

355 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

Documenting lives

355

‘“crossings” . . . back and forth between dominant institutional contexts of writing and local non-dominant ones, and [by] the use of writing to cross the social separation, alienations and marginalisations . . . created by the dynamics of contemporary social structures and institutions’ (Sheridan et al. 2000, 263). It was through these ‘crossings’ that MO was able to fulfil the aim of its founders to become observation ‘of the masses by the masses for the masses’ (Hubble 2010, 16) and its practices merged into the practices of a transformed everyday life. This process of transformation can be seen in all its complexity in Mitchison’s diary, as she struggles with the limits of her own progressivism: ‘It is always a bore being ahead of one’s time’ (Mitchison 2000, 181). The context for this complaint was her realisation that she could not act on her ideas of free love with the fishermen and villagers of Carradale, the Scottish country estate which she and her husband owned, because that would inevitably detract from her attempts to introduce more egalitarian and communal ways of social living. However, critics such as Gill Plain have implied that the real source of her dissatisfaction was local resistance to her utopian project itself: Mitchison was strongly attached to the community, its values and its socialist potential; but the village could not fulfil a Utopian role. It was not ready to become the site of her ‘brave new world’, and the disparity between its real and ideal sides were to prove a frequent source of frustration and disappointment. These small betrayals, springing from inescapable divisions of class and education, and from an often fundamentally different sense of priority, were perpetually undermining the fiction of equality that Mitchison sought to enact within the ‘real’ world. (Plain 1996, 143)

From Plain’s perspective, Mitchison’s attempt to create a future-oriented society can only be successful in a work of fiction, such as the novel she wrote during the war, The Bull Calves (1947), and her diary serves merely to highlight the shortcomings of her utopian aspirations in real life. However, the fruitful conjunction between experiencing real lived relationships as opposed to imagining these in historical fiction and being able to write about them in the distinctive MO manner, which allowed her to represent herself as ordinary in various respects, meant that the self-sacrifice demanded by the ‘tragic drama’ relationship between ‘the leaders and the led’ she had identified in The Moral Basis of Politics proved unnecessary. Here, MO diary writing fulfils the autobiographical function of resolving the opposition between self and world and so demonstrates the sense in which ‘autobiography can be understood as a Utopian form’ (Marcus 1994, 13).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

356

356 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

nick hubble

Furthermore, at times, such as when disguised at Halloween, she was simply able to become one of the ‘natives’ performatively: We went first to the MacDougalls, I very shy, not knowing the procedure, and almost blind in the rat mask. We sat down and were talked to; I squeaked, and Lilla (with the dog mask, Denny’s trousers and a shirt with a cushion under it – she had one moment of hesitation: ‘Is it vulgar?’) barked . . . Then to Alec’s where we had a good roughhouse; Willie had pulled me down on to his knee and was pretending to make love to me and Lilla was doing a turn; Alec was determined to know who we were, especially the women; I’d been keeping my hands under the sleeves, but in the rough and tumble Anna spotted a ring, so that set Alex off and he began to pull my dress off. Then we all ran for it, but going blind up the steep path Willie and I tumbled over a stone, and rolled about in dumb giggles, while Alec chased us and tried to get our masks off. (Mitchison 2000, 52–3)

Unlike other occasions – a play, a wedding, even a funeral – where she was able to take on a community role without any fuss or melodrama, the transgressive nature of the celebrations replaced conventional social relations with a magical fun that allowed her to experience what is was like to be ‘one of the gang’ (Ibid., 54). Similarly a trip outside the law, poaching for fish with the local men, further illustrates the effects of transgression on social conventions as first, on the shore, she is referred to as ‘Mrs Mitchison’ but then, out at sea, she is called ‘Naomi’ (Ibid., 155–6). The dual consciousness she gains from writing the diary for MO, and so observing the masses while simultaneously being one of them, affords her glimpses of Heaven on Earth, such as when she kills a deer on the hillside with her friend Denny: ‘But oh it was peaceful up here, doing one thing at a time instead of being impinged upon by a dozen, and the heather under one’s back, and the poacher beside one’. (Mitchison 2000, 164). By abandoning the assumed male subjectivity of many of her novels up to that point, Mitchison’s writing opened up to intersubjective experience with the result that passages such as those above come close to a utopian communist vision of a Scottish society in which people can ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as [they] have a mind’ (Marx and Engels 1974, 54). Viewed from this utopian perspective, Mitchison did not suffer a reversal of fortune over the duration of the war. While her individual ambitions ended up being subordinated to her husband’s, it might also be considered that her gaining of a new perspective was more than sufficient compensation. Through her participation in MO and her diary in

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

357 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

Documenting lives

357

particular, she was able to participate collectively with the people in a way that would otherwise have remained unavailable to her and which had a unique future orientation. As Sheridan, Street, and Bloome summarise, on the one hand MO ‘provides a forum and set of uses for writing that are otherwise unavailable to ordinary people, yet on the other it creates a context that is both sufficiently ambiguous and indeterminate to allow participants (including the [MO] correspondents, the staff of the Archive, researchers, the general public) to co-define the [MO] Project’ (Sheridan et al. 2000, 214). It is this capacity to blur social boundaries that enabled MO to transcend other forms of documentary and become a participatory form of everyday modernity.

Bibliography Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Diarist 5420. 1945. ‘MO diary of diarist 5420 for VJ Day (15 August 1945)’. The Mass Observation Archive. Brighton: University of Sussex. Highmore, Ben. 2002. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Highmore, Ben. 2011. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. London: Routledge. Hilliard, Christopher. 2006. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hinton, James. 2010. Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinton, James. 2013. The Mass Observers: A History, 1937–1949. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hubble, Nick. 2010. Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hubble, Nick. 2012. ‘John Sommerfield and Mass Observation’. The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945 8.1: 131–51. Jennings, Humphrey and Charles Madge, eds. 1987 [1937]. May the Twelfth: MassObservation Day-Surveys 1937. London: Faber and Faber. Madge, Charles and Tom Harrisson. 1939. Britain by Mass-Observation. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marcus, Laura. 1994. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1974. The German Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838216/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C24.3D

358

358 [345–358] 21.10.2015 2:38PM

nick hubble

Meschia, Karen. 2010. ‘Naomi the Poet and Nella the Housewife: Finding a Space to Write From’. Miranda 2: 1–14. doi:10.4000/miranda.1238 (accessed 13 March 2015). Mitchison, Naomi. 2000 [1985]. Among You Taking Notes: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939–1945. Edited by Dorothy Sheridan. London: Phoenix Press. Mitchison, Naomi. 1971 [1938]. The Moral Basis of Politics. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press. Mitchison, Naomi. 1986. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920–1940. London: Flamingo. Plain, Gill. 1996. Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sheridan, Dorothy, Brian Street, and David Bloome. 2000. Writing Ourselves: Mass- Observation and Literacy Practices. Cresskill, NJ: Hampden Press. Stanley, Liz. 1995. Sex Surveyed 1949–1994: From Mass-Observation’s ‘Little Kinsey’ to the National Survey and the Hite Reports. London: Taylor & Francis. Taylor, Jennie. 2007. ‘Sex, Snobs and Swing: A Case Study of Mass Observation as a Source for Social History’. Mass Observation Online: 1–7. www.massobserva tion.amdigital.co.uk/FurtherResources/Essays/SexSnobsAndSwingACaseStud yOfMassObservationAsASourceForSocialHistory (accessed 13 March 2015). Wing, Sandra Koa, ed. 2008. Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War by the Writers of Mass Observation. London: Profile.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

359 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

chapter 25

Postcolonial autobiography in English The example of Trinidad Bart Moore-Gilbert

Introduction The roots of postcolonial1 autobiography in English lie in the eighteenth century, in texts synthesising spiritual autobiography and travelogue – notably Gronniasaw Ukawsaw’s A Narrative (ca. 1767) and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789). Not all such texts were ‘slave narratives’, under which rubric they are commonly studied, particularly in the United States. For example, Sake Dean Mohamed’s Travels (1794) is a similar mix of autobiography and travelogue by the first man to open an Indian restaurant in Britain and who introduced fashionable society to shampoo. In the nineteenth century, colonised subjects began to produce autobiography across the British Empire, attesting to the rapid consolidation of English as its lingua franca and of colonial education. Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures (1857) is an early example of colonised women’s appropriation of a form which was increasingly taken up (by both genders) in the twentieth century. The genre flourished as decolonisation unfolded between the 1940s–1960s, with politicians (for example Nehru, Nkrumah, Lee Kuan Yew) and ordinary citizens alike adapting it for the purposes of ‘national allegory’ – whereby the individual’s trajectory towards ‘sovereign selfhood’ parallels his/her nation’s towards political sovereignty. Autobiography is now a major strand of postcolonial literatures in English, reflecting both far-reaching changes in once-colonised societies (notably ever-expanding Anglophone middle classes) and a metropolitan readership’s (not always benign) desire for ‘native informant’ testimonies about the non-Western world. This chapter explores two instances of autobiography in English which engage with, and are shaped by, decolonisation and its aftermath. Each addresses perhaps the fundamental cultural/political question faced by postcolonial literatures more broadly – whether narrative forms derived 359

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

360

360 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

bart moore-gilbert

from the coloniser’s culture can be used without re-inscribing its (former) authority and prestige. As regards autobiography, the stakes are established by the celebrated critic Georges Gusdorf, for whom the genre has been historically implicated in, if not directly supportive of, colonial values and ideologies. Conversely, he insists that its subsequent deployment by (once-)colonised peoples can only be an imitative activity, demonstrating how successfully colonialism has reshaped their cultural identities (Gusdorf 1980, 29). Anticipating Gusdorf’s arguments, M. K. Gandhi – author of perhaps the best-known Indian autobiography (albeit not written in English) – cautioned his fellow colonial subjects against embracing Western autobiography uncritically. Indeed he asserts that – despite its title (in the translation he supervised, An Autobiography) – his own work does not exemplify the genre as conventionally conceived (Gandhi 1982, 14). C. L. R. James (b. 1901) and V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932), my examples for this chapter, were born and bred in Trinidad, before leaving the island as young adults (James returned to settle, Naipaul did not.) They belong to different generations and ethnicities; and their conceptions of autobiography and political values could hardly be more contrastive. Nonetheless, both seek to address the issues raised by Gusdorf. And, like Gandhi, each explores how a ‘master’s form’ might be adapted to the specific context of Trinidad in the period leading to independence (in 1962) and afterwards, so as to provide appropriate means to represent the new selves – individual and collective – that were emerging in the postcolonial era. As an extreme instance of the ‘new worlds’ which colonialism fashioned around the globe, the Caribbean emphasises with particular clarity the challenges faced by postcolonial autobiographers in answering Gusdorf. Like many places in the region, Trinidad was (re-)created through the extirpation of its aboriginal inhabitants and the introduction of peoples with no previous connection to the island. However, Trinidad has historically been distinctive in the Anglophone Caribbean for the variety of its new populations. Those of African and East Asian origin now predominate, with significant minorities of whites (of various European origins, with distinct traditions), Chinese, and other groups. Accordingly, Paul Buhle argues that ‘perhaps more than any other Caribbean society’, Trinidad has been ‘the victim . . . of multiple identities’ (Buhle 1988, 7). This ‘multiplicity’ of identities has proved as much a challenge for the island’s autobiographers as for post-independence politicians struggling to achieve national cohesiveness. For James, being Trinidadian – even in a still securely colonial era – involved a disabling conflict between two

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

361 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

Postcolonial autobiography in English

361

particular strands of the ad hoc culture constructed on the island, namely those associated with Britain and Africa. Beyond a Boundary (1963), his most important autobiographical text, describes his childhood as characterised by a ‘war between English Puritanism . . . and the realism of West Indian life’ (James 1963, 21). It goes on: ‘Two people lived in me: one, the rebel against all . . . school discipline and order; the other, a Puritan who would have cut off a finger sooner than do anything contrary to the ethics of the game [cricket – like Western education – a colonial import, which James reconceptualises to represent the emerging national culture of postcolonial Trinidad]’ (Ibid., 28). For Naipaul, the difficulties in being, or becoming, Trinidadian are perhaps even greater. Consider the discussion of his father’s breakdown in Finding the Centre (1984). According to his wife, Seepersad Naipaul ‘one day looked in the mirror and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream’ (Naipaul 1985, 70). The collapse is partly attributable to personal circumstances, including Seepersad’s career problems and inability to individuate within his oppressive extended family. However, Naipaul invokes a deeper additional problem, the cultural ‘vacancy’ (Ibid., 66) which inhibits Trinidadian society’s capacity to identify (with) itself. His later and more substantial autobiographical narrative – A Way in the World (1994) – suggests that this lack of a foundational core to the island’s identity is ultimately a consequence of the destruction of the island’s pre-European cultures. Unable ‘to stand in for the aborigines’, subsequent arrivals, including Naipaul’s family, who ‘had come in a variety of ways from many continents’, could only produce an artificial, fragmented society which fails to compensate for ‘the nullity which had been created long before we had been transported to it’ (Naipaul 1994, 77). This produces a general anomic condition described elsewhere as the ‘hysteria of the islands’ (Ibid., 73, 129).

‘Mimic men’? In attempting to negotiate these disobliging existential conditions, James and Naipaul construct narratives which apparently confirm Gusdorf’s arguments about the belated, imitative nature of postcolonial autobiography. Thus one might argue that the trajectory of Beyond a Boundary is to narrate the process whereby the protagonist overcomes the disabling contradictions of his early experience of colonial selfhood to achieve a centred, ‘sovereign’ subjectivity of the kind traditionally achieved in canonical Western autobiography. Certainly, James prizes ‘unity of being’ above all

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

362

362 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

bart moore-gilbert

other dimensions of personality. Thus he praises William Hazlitt because ‘he is not a divided man . . . He takes his whole self wherever he goes’ (James 1963, 160, my emphasis). By contrast, Neville Cardus, is ‘a victim of . . . that division of the human personality, which is the greatest curse of our time’ (Ibid., 196). James suggests that even as a child, happily, he intuited the principles of dialectical synthesis and holism which were to become the hallmark of his adult thinking and, more pertinently for present purposes, his conception of personhood. ‘Somehow’, he tells us early on, he ‘selected and fastened onto the things which made a whole’ (James 1963, 18). Anna Grimshaw argues that Beyond a Boundary ‘completed the search for integration which James had begun . . . some sixty years before’ (Grimshaw 1992, 18). Indeed, so overriding was the principle of unity of being that she explains his defection from revolutionary Marxism, in which James was active for more than two decades, in terms of an increasing conviction that it ‘separated essential aspects of his being’ (Ibid., 13). Complementing James’s apparent replication of models of selfhood typical of canonical Western autobiography, the structure of his (essentially realist) text embraces the traditionally equally cardinal value of unity of form (Gusdorf 1980, 35). This is achieved by two key means. Firstly, the narrative is strictly chronological, emphasising orderly development towards unity of being. Secondly, unity of structure and focus is enforced by a process of selection which involves disregarding ostensibly important elements of James’s life, notably his romantic relationships and the decades devoted to revolutionary Marxism. Instead, James focuses the ‘plot’ of his narrative only on such key events, people, and experiences as directly facilitate his progress towards integrated, ‘sovereign’, selfhood. Naipaul, by contrast, appears to embrace a postmodernist, but thereby equally Western and derivative, conception of the genre. This is reflected in the characteristically fragmentary (and sometimes contradictory) nature of both his autobiographical personae and the form of his texts – which include features of metropolitan works like Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975). Within the narratives considered here, conflicting, possibly incommensurable, versions of ‘Naipaul’2 are evident. This can partly be ascribed to a typically postmodernist self-consciousness about memory, which is represented not only as creative and fallible, but as varying according to the temporal stand-point of the narrator/protagonist. Thus when the older ‘Naipaul’ recalls the beginning of his writing career, or his experiences in West Africa, very different emphases and details can be remarked between Finding the Centre and A Way. For example, Arlette

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

363 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

Postcolonial autobiography in English

363

(from Martinique) in the earlier text transmutes into Phyllis (from Gaudeloupe) in A Way, towards whom the later ‘Naipaul’ is also a good deal more condescending, even disapproving. Aside from the issue of the relationship between fact and fiction which such disjunctions raise (to which I will return), it becomes impossible to tell which, if either, of the two ‘Naipauls’ staged in these texts should be regarded as the more complete or authoritative. Equally contrastive to James, A Way is comprised of more or less selfcontained fragments (some, ostensibly, at most tangentially autobiographical, a topic to which I will also return below). Further, despite the text’s sub-title (in Britain, A Sequence), these fragments are not only not arranged in linear fashion but might be shuffled around without significant damage to the meaning of the ensemble. This indicates that Naipaul is no more interested than Western postmodernist autobiographers in the conventional orderly unfolding of the protagonist’s identity. Thus, while they are sometimes highly revealing about Naipaul the man and writer, comparable to Roland Barthes, such texts can only properly be described as autobiographical rather than as autobiography. As implied by the title of the first part of Finding the Centre – ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ (my emphasis), the work approaches the condition of autobiography without fully achieving it – or aiming to do so.

Postcolonial (re-)constructions of the autobiographical self Despite their apparently equally derivative, if contrasting, conceptions of selfhood and formal structure, however, James and Naipaul in fact exemplify a contestatory attitude towards Western narrative templates which characterises postcolonial literatures more broadly. For James, it derives from acute awareness of the specificities of Trinidadian society and history. Thus he re-conceives autobiography as a critical response to the fragmenting effects of colonialism on the psychic integrity and identity of the colonised – including his own. Conversely, he sees in independent Trinidad the possibility of a restoration of psychic wholeness, which is represented elsewhere in his work as dependent upon the establishment of democracy as a political institution. As Brett St Louis suggests, in James’s view, ‘the integrated personality . . . was not an accident of Greek antiquity, but a result of its direct democracy that cultivated individuals who understood and exercised their rights, liberties, freedoms, and possibilities in relation to their community’ (St Louis 2007, 161).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

364

364 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

bart moore-gilbert

The phrase ‘in relation to their community’ holds the key to understanding the crucial difference between James’s conception of ‘sovereign Selfhood’ and that pertaining in the Western canon. The self constructed in Beyond a Boundary is emphatically not set against its ‘others’, according to the model of Rousseau’s Confessions, for example, which tersely proclaims its focus as: ‘Myself alone’ (Rousseau 2000, 5). For James, psychic integration and ‘sovereignty’ of self are both the goal and effect not only of inter-personal relations with particular individuals known to the narrator – as in the ‘relational autobiography’ of the West, particularly by women – but of integration into the wider collective, represented above all at the time of decolonisation by the nation. This underpins James’s distinctive conception of ‘personality in society’ announced on the first page of his text (James 1963, 3, my emphasis). Indeed, as Ato Quayson suggests, Beyond a Boundary offers an ‘explicit collocation of the individual personality with an entire historical process’ (Quayson 1999, 340). Thus James’s trajectory towards psychic integration and autonomy functions as a typically postcolonial ‘national allegory’ of the emergence of the unified and integrated society – as well as individual selves – which he hopes will be consolidated in independent Trinidad. This helps explain what might seem – according to convention – a strange, even disappointing, ending to James’s text. Rather than summing up the author’s life and vision, the ‘Epilogue and Apotheosis’ transports the reader to a Test series in Australia in 1961. While the visitors narrowly lost the contest, what is more significant for James is that the West Indies was for the first time being captained by a black man, Frank Worrell. Given the heavy symbolic weight of cricket in James’s thinking, where it functions variously as a metaphor for society, nationhood, and national culture, this development also implied that the West Indies was entering ‘the comity of nations’ (James 1963, 261) on an equal basis. Thus James’s emergence as a complete(d) autobiographical subject at the end of his text is represented as dependent upon the emergence of the West Indies as a ‘sovereign’ postcolonial entity (at the time of writing, a federal West Indies composed of individual territories was very much on the agenda). Comparable arguments could be made about the contestatory nature of Naipaul’s conception of autobiographical selfhood – however much he might seem to endorse elements of postmodernist thinking. These include Lacanian arguments about the inevitably decentred nature of the psyche because of its dependence for its construction on the Other, Althusserian contentions concerning the ideologically manipulative functions of ‘sovereign selfhood’, and Derridean ideas about the necessarily non-foundational

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

365 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

Postcolonial autobiography in English

365

nature of subjectivity because it is constructed in discourse. Aside from the issue of his familiarity with such thinkers (and there is no evidence of this), a more convincing explanation for Naipaul’s challenging conception of autobiographical selfhood can be found in his experience of Trinidadian life. Thus apparently Lacanian ideas about identity formation are provided a distinctively postcolonial provenance (and a typically postcolonial collective dimension) in Naipaul’s repeated emphasis on the importance of ‘foreign witness’ (Naipaul 1994, 76–7; compare with Naipaul 1985, 51) in securing such Trinidadian identity as can be said to exist. And in an implicit critique of Derridean arguments, Naipaul implies that unity of being is attainable in certain circumstances. However, where he differs from James is in suggesting that it can only be aspired to in societies (notably in the ‘Old World’ of Europe) that offer ‘the mature social experience . . . which my background denied me’ (Ibid., 11). Equally, Naipaul’s approach to the ideological functions of ‘sovereign selfhood’ contrasts with Althusser’s because it is grounded in a perception that Trinidadian identity is a particular (yet materially ‘real’ and consequential) form of ‘fantasy’. This is implicit in the writer’s description of his early formation in Port of Spain: ‘Fantasy calling to fantasy on the street. And in the two rooms to which we had been reduced, our fantasy was even dizzier’ (Ibid., 37; compare with 41–3). To this extent, however, although he charts the impossibility of attaining the kind of stable personal (yet representative) identity which James achieves, and for all his assertions that ‘I couldn’t support being part of a group’ (Naipaul 1994, 16), Naipaul’s autobiographical writings are no less postcolonial ‘national allegories’ than James’s, albeit considerably darker in tone.

Postcolonial (re-)reformations of autobiographical genre Despite obvious differences, James and Naipaul also converge as writers who contest Western/colonial templates through their formal experimentations with autobiography, particularly in relation to its boundaries. To frame this argument, one might begin with Derrida’s suggestion that the fundamental ‘law of genre’, is that ‘genres are not to be mixed’ (in Kaplan 1992, 117). Indeed, the rationale of Autobiography Studies as a subdiscipline can be understood largely in terms of efforts to secure the borders of the genre, thereby establishing its specificity and difference vis-à-vis others. Both James and Naipaul, however, challenge this strategy in radical

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

366

366 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

bart moore-gilbert

ways, which again derive from their specifically postcolonial locations and histories. In James’s case, it is the fundamentally supra-individual conception of ‘personality in society’ which, more than anything else, requires going ‘beyond the boundaries’ of autobiography as conventionally understood. His preface asserts that what follows is ‘neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography’ (James 1963, n.p.). However, it clearly involves a considerable amount of both, a conjuncture almost unprecedented in the history of the latter field. Insofar as the text is ‘cricket history’, it is also, of course, for reasons given earlier, social history; and, further, in the context of Trinidad and the Caribbean, a form of national(ist) historiography. This explains James’s inclusion of an index, a very rare feature in autobiography ‘proper’. Further, his fundamentally collective conception of personhood challenges the conventional boundaries of the genre by including a broad gallery of cricketers and cultural/political figures, many of whom James did not know personally. Pre-eminent amongst those he did, perhaps, is Learie Constantine, given such extensive discussion that at one point James asserts: ‘Biography is my subject’ (Ibid., 134). Remarkably, Beyond a Boundary achieves a coherent synthesis of these contrastive, indeed ostensibly incommensurable, discourses, in a manner analogous to his integration of his ‘multiple identities’. St Louis rightly argues that the text ‘seamlessly combines [personal memoir] and West Indian social history’ (St Louis 2007, 3, my emphasis). James once argued of Walt Whitman that the American poet’s ‘passion to identify himself with his fellow countrymen did enable him to create a new social medium’ (James 1992, 209). This seems the best way to understand the impulse behind, and effects of, James’s experimentations with the boundaries of genre. Yet if James extends ‘our too limited conceptions . . . of the fine arts’ (James 1963, n.p.), notably autobiography, this does not mean that he simply disavows the Western tradition. His admiration for canonical autobiographers, notably Bunyan, whose allegorical method is plainly transferred in his own text, is clearly acknowledged (Ibid., 20–1). Philippe Lejeune influentially described autobiography as ‘a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality’ (Lejeune 1982, 192, my emphasis). Seen from this perspective, one might argue that Naipaul’s narrative experiments are even more radical than James’s in their implications. This is partly because his strategy is not one which aims at the sort of synthesis evident in Beyond a Boundary. Indeed, the fragmented, multiplicitous form of his texts under

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

367 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

Postcolonial autobiography in English

367

consideration here might be understood as the aesthetic analogue of Naipaul’s perception of the radically fractured and uncertain, because ungroundable, nature of both Trinidadian identity and his own. More fundamentally, Naipaul brings Lejeune’s idea of ‘a real person’ into crisis by ‘contaminating’ autobiography not only with a wide range of other non-fictional genres, but with fictionalised versions of some of those non-fictional genres and, indeed, with fiction itself. Thus while A Way devotes considerable space to the historiography of the New World, it often narrates that historiography in fictionalised form. It does the same with travel writing and even, apparently, with Naipaul’s personal experience. In this latter respect, the text represents perhaps the most substantial example of a dimension of Naipaul’s writing which can be traced back at least as far as In a Free State (1971). In the absence of any assurances about the identity of their unnamed protagonist/narrator/author, the journal entries which bookend this earlier text clearly breach minimum terms of the ‘pact’ identified by Lejeune as necessary for a text to constitute autobiography. Since one cannot assume of either the prologue or epilogue that the ‘author (whose name designates a real person) and narrator are identical’ (Lejeune 1982, 192), it is impossible to tell whether they are autobiography or fiction. Naipaul’s more recent work continues this propensity to aestheticise personal experience. Consider his comments on travel writing in Finding the Centre: ‘I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out to incident’ (Naipaul 1985, 87). Once arrived in the Ivory Coast, he goes on: ‘I began to live my little novel’, and he treats Arlette as if she was ‘a Balzac character’ (Ibid., 94, 145). This makes it impossible to determine whether she is a fictionalised version of Phyllis in A Way, or vice versa. Naipaul transposes this mixing of fact and fiction into his (ostensibly) more obviously autobiographical work. Thus while some sections of A Way contain material narrated in the first person which can be independently verified as part of Naipaul’s personal history, those same sections also contain fictional characters, such as Morris, Blair, and Lebrun – the latter evidently based to some degree on C. L. R. James. This reiterates the question of how far one can read the first-person narrator in documentary terms and how far he should be understood as the protagonist of an autobiographical fiction/fictional autobiography, an epistemological labyrinth from which it is impossible to escape. However, there is a further, specifically postcolonial, twist to Naipaul’s admixture of fact and fiction, which returns us to the issue of ‘fantasy’. The

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

368

368 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

bart moore-gilbert

difficulty of separating these two modes in his work also bears witness to an engagement with a Trinidadian version of the ‘marvellous real’ more commonly associated with Latin American writer/critics such as Alejo Carpentier. For Naipaul, too, aspects of the material ‘reality’ of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Trinidad are so challenging to secular Western epistemology as to be containable only in the category of the ‘marvellous’ or ‘fantastic’. Conversely, the vacillation between fact and fiction in Naipaul’s autobiographical writing also corresponds to his perception of the extent to which the ‘reality’ of the New World has been constructed by the ‘fantasies’ of its Western conquerors. El Dorado may only have been a fable but it nonetheless had profound material consequences for the region and its peoples. From Walter Raleigh to contemporary revolutionary and millenarian movements, A Way traces a discursive lineage in which ‘fantasy’ is constantly super-imposed on the region, producing ‘new worlds’ which are as much fictions as ‘real’ places.3 Thus Naipaul’s conception of the relation between autobiographical fact and fiction clearly differs from that of Western postmodernism. For example, Paul de Man’s ‘Autobiography as De-facement’ famously argued that ‘the distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but one that it is undecidable’ (de Man 1979, 1.266). However, where for de Man this undecidability is argued on philosophical grounds pertaining to the inalienably figurative nature of language, whether deployed for ‘documentary’ ends or not, for Naipaul it derives primarily from the political, social, and cultural histories associated with the New World.

Conclusion Apparently confirming Gusdorf’s arguments about the ‘belated’ nature of non-Western autobiography, both James and Naipaul have sometimes been seen as hapless ‘mimic men’. Thus Farrukh Dhondy comments of James that he was ‘the only intellectual of the black diaspora unequivocally to espouse and embrace the intellectual, artistic and socio-political culture of Europe’ (Dhondhy 2001, x). Clearly, Caribbean autobiographers like James have faced greater challenges than colleagues elsewhere in reworking the genre in distinctive new ways for postcolonial purposes. Notably, because of the extirpation of aboriginal cultures and the suppression of the traditions of those imported to replace the Amerindians, James was denied access to the kind of indigenous narrative resources which other postcolonial autobiographers often deploy in challenging or hybridising

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

369 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

Postcolonial autobiography in English

369

Western templates. For example, Sara Suleri draws on the traditions of ‘Mughal Miniature’ and the Urdu ghazal to structure Meatless Days (1989), and Aissa Djebar turns to the nouba and fantaziya in structuring her equally innovative and politically contestatory Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade (1985).4 Even so, Dhondy’s characterisation of James is hard to sustain in relation to Beyond a Boundary. James’s preface justifies what follows on the basis that ‘To establish his own identity, Caliban must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew’ (James 1963, n.p.). By identifying with Shakespeare’s anti-hero, James makes a characteristically Caribbean gesture of affiliation, which nonetheless involves an explicit challenge to the colonial order represented by Caesar and Prospero. In doing so, he reverses Gusdorf’s argument about the role played by autobiography in colonial hegemony to demonstrate how it can also – in the reconstituted form described above – serve the interests of anti-colonial nationalism. Western autobiography, as represented by figures like Bunyan, may have provided James with a preliminary ‘grammar’, much as Caliban was taught by Prospero to express himself in ‘the master’s idiom’. However, in keeping with his dissident forerunner, James takes that ‘idiom’ and stretches it to encompass quite different objectives to those it traditionally served. Naipaul, too, has been accused of identifying with ‘Caesarian’ values and perspectives. Indeed, his sometimes disobliging depictions of the non-Western world are often considered to re-articulate the demeaning traditions of colonial representation (Said 1993, 20). Yet the truth is more complicated. In A Way he recognises how travel writing, a form once associated with colonial culture, can be adapted to anticolonial ends (Naipaul 1994, 81, 102). The same holds true of his adaptations of autobiography. Not only do Finding the Centre and A Way offer biting commentary on colonialism and its successor forms in the ‘new world order’, they also contain strong defences of aboriginal societies – whether the exterminated peoples of Trinidad or cultures encountered in Africa. Indeed, on his West African travels, Naipaul is recurrently impressed by what he calls ‘African completeness’ (Naipaul 1985, 77; compare with Naipaul 1994, 134), particularly in comparison with the Caribbean. He comments of one Caribbean acquaintance that he ‘didn’t know how whole the world of Africa still was’ (Naipaul 1985, 109). Further, Naipaul’s far-reaching experimentations with established autobiographical boundaries – and his rethinking of both canonical and postmodernist ideas of selfhood – make him, no less than James, a ‘pioneer into regions Caesar never knew’.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

370

370 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

bart moore-gilbert

Nonetheless, beyond their contrasting conceptions of autobiographical selfhood and form, a crucial distinction remains. Despite its inattention to women or Trinidad’s population of East Asian descent, Beyond a Boundary sees the island’s political independence as ushering in another ‘new world’, which this time offers an unprecedented opportunity. This is to forge genuinely ‘sovereign’ identities based on principles of hybridisation and syncretism – at both the individual and collective level – without the destructiveness which characterised previous attempts to create ‘new worlds’ in Trinidad. As a ‘national allegory’ as well as a personal narrative, James’s text is therefore optimistic, even euphoric. By contrast, Naipaul’s thinking about the possibilities for postcolonial identity – whether collective or individual – remains essentially pessimistic. The disabling void he discerns in the Trinidadian self-image is certainly identified as a consequence of colonialism. He comments that ‘The idea of a background – and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility – made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves’ (Naipaul 1994, 79). But Naipaul never acknowledges independence as a potential stage towards the assumption of such responsibility. Nor does he acknowledge that ‘multiplicity of identity’ might, one day, no longer necessarily be associated with victimhood but rather provide grounds on which new solidarities and identities – personal, autobiographical, and collective – might emerge. Further, Naipaul assumes too easily the secure, foundational nature of identities in allegedly ‘mature’ societies. Regarding the ‘Old World’, he fails to register how it has been unsettled by the decline of the nation-state, the rise of local particularisms, or, indeed, the anti-foundationalist thinking associated with postmodernism. Africa, too, is less monolithic than he implies. Swahili, for example, is a product of the cultural mixing produced by unequal power relations of the kind evident in Trinidad. Indeed, if, as Naipaul suggests elsewhere, ‘peoples have been in collision since the beginning of time’ (Ibid., 56), it is difficult to accept that any society has the security of identity which the author attributes (exclusively) to locations beyond the Caribbean. But if Naipaul sees little reason to look optimistically beyond the end of European colonialism, this may be for reasons in addition to, or other than, those commonly advanced by hostile critics. Above all, perhaps, he is haunted by previous efforts to create independent nations in the region. Consider the tragedy of Francisco Miranda’s return in later life to the scene of his struggle to throw off Spanish rule in Venezuela: ‘He must have thought he was going back to a revolution that had been accomplished. He

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

371 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

Postcolonial autobiography in English

371

found a country that had been split into all its racial and cast groups, a civil war beyond any one man’s managing, and far beyond his military skill’ (Ibid., 326) It is perhaps such historical examples from the region in which Trinidad is situated (a mere few miles from Venezuela, to which it ‘belonged’ in Spanish times), rather than any constitutional perverseness, self-hatred, or simple racism which perhaps most convincingly explain Naipaul’s Burkean pessimism about postcolonial identities in emerging states like Trinidad. James and Naipaul instantiate contrasting traditions of Caribbean autobiography. The first is adumbrated in John Thieme’s reflections on Derek Walcott, which apply equally well to Naipaul: ‘The fragmenting, heterogenous nature of [Caribbean] society precludes the possibility of [imagining] a unitary Cartesian self’ (Thieme 1984, 215). The second is represented by Sandra Pouchet Pacquet, who argues contrarily that it is precisely the fragmentariness and heterogeneity of Caribbean society which underwrites the ‘quest for wholeness’ (Paquet 2002, 234) in the region’s writing – a position seemingly corroborated by James. The bifurcated conception of selfhood – and, by implication, the forms necessary to mediate those selves – evident in these pronouncements in fact characterises postcolonial autobiography far beyond the Caribbean and helps explain why such work deploys both ‘realist’, unitary, narrative forms and ‘anti-realist’ (rather than ‘postmodernist’), fragmentary, modes. Naipaul would doubtless disavow the descriptor ‘postcolonial’; nonetheless, like James’s, his autobiographical writing is characterised by scathing critiques of colonialism (and its successor forms), as well as wide-ranging experimentations with the canonical rules of genre. Like James’s, furthermore, his work is profoundly rooted in the specific, material histories of Trinidad, as well as being alert to those of the wider (post)colonial world beyond. While Naipaul may yearn to float free of his background, he is constantly drawn back to it in his elaborations of the modern world and its possibilities for identity and selfhood – both personal and collective. This makes him, no less than James, an inalienably postcolonial autobiographer.

Notes 1. The term ‘postcolonial’ is sometimes contradictorily interpreted. I use it both as an historical marker and to refer to work produced during, as well as after, colonialism, which has, as one characteristic, elements of a contestation of colonial discourses.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

372

372 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

bart moore-gilbert

2. I use inverted commas because the identity of Naipaul’s narrator/protagonists is sometimes unclear, an issue to which I shall return later. 3. In Naipaul’s preoccupation with ‘fantasy’, one might also detect traces of the ‘persistence of old Indian ideas’ (Naipaul 1994, 18), notably the Hindu doctrine of maya, further emphasising the postcolonial provenance of some of his key ideas. 4. For fuller discussion, see Moore-Gilbert 2009. Neither James nor Naipaul, however, makes much use of the creative possibilities of Caribbean English dialects.

Bibliography Buhle, Paul. 1988. C. L. R. James: the Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso. de Man, Paul. 2007 [1979]. ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’. In Autobiography: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 1, 264–74. Edited by Trev Lynn Broughton. London: Routledge. Dhondy, Farrukh. 2001. C. L. R. James. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gandhi, M. K. 1982. An Autobiography: or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Translated by Mahadev Desai. London: Penguin. Grimshaw, Anna. 1992. ‘Introduction: C. L. R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the Twentieth Century’. In The C. L. R. James Reader, 1–22. Edited by Anna Grimshaw. Oxford: Blackwell. Gusdorf, Georges. 1980. ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, 28–48. Edited by James Olney. Princeton: Princeton U.P. James, C. L. R. 1963 [1994]. Beyond a Boundary. London: Serpent’s Tail. James, C. L. R. 1992. ‘Whitman and Melville’. In The C.L.R. James Reader, 202–19. Edited by Anna Grimshaw. Oxford: Blackwell. Kaplan, Caren. 1992. ‘Resisting Autobiography: Out-law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects’. In De/Colonizing the Subject: the Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, 115–38. Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press. Lejeune, Philippe. 1982. ‘The Autobiographical Contract’. In French Literary Theory Today: a Reader, 192–222. Edited by Tzvetan Todorov, translated by R. Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2009. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and SelfRepresentation. London: Routledge. Naipaul, V. S. 1985. Finding the Centre: Two Narratives. London: Harmondsworth: Penguin. Naipaul, V. S. 1994. A Way in the World: A Sequence. London: Minerva. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. 2002. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C25.3D

373 [359–373] 21.10.2015 3:00PM

Postcolonial autobiography in English

373

Quayson, Ato. 1999. ‘Caribbean Configurations: Characterological Types and the Frames of Hybridity’. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 1.3: 331–44. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2000. Confessions. Translated by Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. St Louis, Brett. 2007. Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics: C.L.R. James’ Critique of Modernity. London: Routledge. Thieme, John. 1984 ‘Appropriating Ancestral Heirlooms: the Quest for Tradition in Derek Walcott’s Another Life’. In Autobiographical and Biographical Writing in the Commonwealth, 215–21. Edited by Doireann MacDermott. Sabadell, Spain: AUSA.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

374 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

chapter 26

Around 2000 Memoir as literature Joseph Brooker

[W]hat everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. Martin Amis, Experience (2000, 6)

Perhaps everyone has a memoir in them. But can everyone get it out? A memoir requires memory and experience. It also requires writing. Those who are known for their writing thus seem qualified for the genre. They provide the subject of the present chapter: the recent history of the literary memoir. That term can be understood in terms both of provenance (the memoir of the writer, the person from the world of literature) and of form (the memoir as literary art). A working assumption is that the two senses connect: the practising, and practised, writer is the most likely to produce a memoir that might be deemed literature. But the literary memoir also raises an immediate paradox. Writers may be the best qualified to write memoir, but they may also be among the last people who should write it, as their lives have been composed primarily of writing. Henry James thematised this very duality in the uncanny story ‘The Private Life’ (1891), where a writer needs one self to live and another to write. In modern autobiography, this corresponds to the actual practice of ghostwriting. The self who has experienced but cannot write can be voiced through the conduit of the self who has not had the experiences, but has the craft to convey them. Some writers resolve this issue through having specific, exceptional bouts of experience which are worth recounting. Exemplary here is Salman Rushdie, whose Joseph Anton (2012) centres on his uniquely dramatic experience of hiding from assassins. More common is the production of a memoir that centres heavily on the early years before the writer truly became a writer: years that may be formative and are also, in effect, preliterary. Thus the first half of J. G. Ballard’s Miracles of Life (2008) is devoted to his upbringing in Shanghai, and John McGahern’s Memoir 374

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

375 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

Around 2000

375

(2005) is largely ‘the story of my upbringing, the people who brought me up, my parents and those around them, in their time and landscape’ (McGahern 2005, 260). More specifically, a memoir may explore a particular trouble in the writer’s past or family. Blake Morrison’s sequence on his parents, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002), formed a widely discussed and influential example. Morrison’s works belong to the genre of ‘memoir’ rather than ‘autobiography’, and here it is worth briefly clarifying terms. ‘Autobiography’, ‘memoir’, and ‘life-writing’ all overlap, whether etymologically or in practical usage. No absolute distinctions between them should be sought. But for the purposes of this essay, ‘life-writing’ is the most capacious term, comprising all manner of writing on one’s own life. ‘Autobiography’ can be understood as a comprehensive chronological record of a life. Many nonliterary instances of life-writing (the ghostwritten lives of sportspeople, for instance) take this form. Creative writers appear to practise it less, but Ballard’s strikingly linear Miracles of Life is an instance. ‘Memoir’ would then suggest a piece of writing about oneself which evades the demands of comprehensiveness: giving itself licence, for instance, to focus on certain chosen periods while leaving others undiscussed. From just outside literature, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One (2004) exemplifies this mode, reminiscing in rich detail about certain scenes in Dylan’s life while leaving others invisible. The literary memoirs below follow a similar rule, though less starkly than Dylan. Finally, a memoir may also promise to shed light not only on the writer, but on his or her surroundings, or on some specific aspect of one’s life: ‘a memoir of my father’, ‘a memoir of Soho in the 1960s’. Which writers can publish memoirs? A primary qualification is a measure of fame. However gifted a writer, their memoir will have less chance of publication without an existing public profile and sales. A second criterion is experience. Sometimes a particular emotional experience such as grief, abuse, or adoption makes the memoir a viable proposition. Yet experience also tends to imply a degree of seniority. In contemporary literature, memoir has often appeared to offer seasoned writers a respite from producing new work in their usual genre. ‘1985 wasn’t the day of the memoir’, comments Jeanette Winterson, implying that 2011 is (Winterson 2011, 3). Like an academic chair, the literary memoir is an option for which one generally qualifies by substantial previous publication. Age seems to condition what use can be made of one’s life. Conventionally, the experience amassed by a 25-year-old is not memoir material but, precisely, the material

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

376

376 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

joseph brooker

for a first novel. Yet the same writer at sixty, in the contemporary book market, might well produce a memoir dwelling heavily on their first quarter-century. Different literary fields have produced differing amounts of life-writing. Theatre people (notably playwrights, also directors) can, unlike many writers, claim the making of their art itself as a vivid experience. David Hare, Howard Brenton, and Richard Eyre have all published diaries. The implication is that theatrical experience is enthralling enough to go straight into print: the mediation of ‘writing up’ we would associate with the memoir seems less necessary, and might detract from the immediacy of the diary of a production. English theatre’s most prominent and indefatigable exponent of the public diary is Alan Bennett, who has regularly published an edited selection in the London Review of Books since the mid 1980s. His persona affects to shun publicity and fuss, but he has nonetheless redoubled the exposure by reprinting the diaries in book form, for anyone who missed them in the journal. Beyond the theatre, novelists are predominant makers of the literary memoir. Few poets have the visibility and commercial traction to make memoir a viable proposition. (One exception to this, as to most claims about poetry’s status, was Seamus Heaney, who will be addressed below.) Commerce aside, it is intuitive that novelists will possess the craft of prose narrative. The shift in mode from novel to memoir is, in a sense, minimal compared with the shift required by playwright or poet (let alone politician or yachtswoman). Accordingly, we can hope that the novelist’s memoir will show something of the same craft and formal self-consciousness that they would apply to fiction. The next section of this essay will explore this proposition, by considering four acclaimed memoirs published since 2000 by major novelists from the British Isles. They are Martin Amis’s Experience (2000), Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up The Ghost (2003), John McGahern’s Memoir (2005), and Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011). The four authors are unusually prominent. Amis is a peculiarly celebrated and controversial figure, both for his fiction and for his laconic announcements beyond it. McGahern was the most esteemed Irish novelist in his lifetime. Winterson has been a public figure since her emergence as a young, openly lesbian novelist in the mid 1980s. Mantel, a latecomer to fame, has become perhaps the most successful English literary novelist of the twenty-first century. The following discussion will compare the four memoirs’ structure and handling of time, their treatment of troubling or traumatic material, and their commentary on literature, finally considering

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

377 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

Around 2000

377

how the memoirs relate to the authors’ own fiction. The comparison will offer some lessons about tendencies and options in literary memoir at the start of the twenty-first century. McGahern’s Memoir is true to its plain title in being the most formally simple of the four. It centres on his childhood and youth in rural County Leitrim, narrating this period in almost continuously chronological order. The book has no chapters and hence no immediately evident structure: its strongest formal division is an occasional line space between paragraphs. The book’s pace can slow to that of the cyclical rural world it depicts. The material world of objects, nature, and work is regularly visible: I brought water in iron barrels covered with wet sacking with the jennet and cart to the wooden barrel on the headland. When it was filled, the bluestone was set to steep in a bag hung from the broken handle of a spade, and once it had melted and soda was added, the blue turned a rich turquoise. I stood by the barrel with the resting jennet and watched the workmen back up and down the matted furrows with their knapsack sprayers. (McGahern 2005, 85)

Such a passage typifies at least one strand of the book. Its prose is largely direct and literal, stating concrete facts. Memory is being exercised and savoured, and a piece of social history is painted in, yet there remains something understated about this method. McGahern offers a chronicle but tacitly leaves any further meaning for the reader to infer. It is thus the more striking when, on occasion, he ventures out from this narrative caution to such a wider disquisition as his moving meditation on the dying, for whom everyday scenes ‘belong to a world that went mostly unregarded when it was ours but now becomes a place of unobtainable happiness, in even the meanest of forms’ (Ibid., 116). In one respect McGahern’s work dodges linearity. On its closing page, the author has returned to live in Leitrim and imagines walking the fields again with his late mother. The details – ‘blue crayfish shells where the otter feeds and trains her young’, ‘the wild orchid and the windflower’ (Ibid., 272) – precisely reproduce those of the opening page, which the reader can now recall was not so much the chronological start of the story but a vision of the landscape from a retrospective distance: ‘these fields have hardly changed at all since I ran and played and worked in them as a boy’ (Ibid., 1). McGahern thus complicates linear narrative with a slender gesture at elegant circularity, his first paragraphs forming a frame from which the rest of the book flashes back. Apart from this, his work can stand as a model of formal simplicity in the contemporary memoir.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

378

378 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

joseph brooker

The memoirs of Mantel and Winterson more strongly complicate chronology. Mantel commences ‘It is a Saturday, late July, 2000’ (Mantel 2003, 1), a time when she and her husband are selling their Norfolk cottage. Plainly she is beginning at the end. She will return to this moment ten pages from the close, recommencing: ‘It is 12 August, 2000: a Sunday in Norfolk’ (Ibid., 241) and describing the departure from the cottage. Mantel’s last pages take us up to the present tense of narration: ‘Now on light clear nights, I sometimes go out on the balcony’ (Ibid., 250–1). Her first chapter, centring on recent years, also meditates on the art of autobiography from the present. Between these post-millennial poles, the remaining four chapters of Mantel’s book narrate the past. Indeed, her second chapter stages a transition into it: ‘This is the first thing I remember. I am sitting up in my pram’ (Ibid., 27). From this point, her narrative moves consistently forward, though at varied pace. Jeanette Winterson’s structure offers a further level of elaboration. Beside McGahern’s dearth of chapters and Mantel’s five and a half, Winterson offers fifteen, along with an intermission and coda. The brief intermission effectively splits the book between distant and recent pasts. Winterson avers here that her fiction has ‘pushed against the weight of clock time, of calendar time, of linear unravellings’ (Winterson 2011, 153). She claims the right to break with chronology at this point of her memoir: The womb to tomb of an interesting life – but I can’t write my own; never could. Not Oranges. Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact. The fact is that I am going to miss out twenty-five years. Maybe later . . . (Ibid., 154).

The remaining eighty pages take us from 2007 to the time of writing: the last line is ‘I have no idea what happens next’ (Winterson 2011, 230). This later section recounts Winterson’s struggles with mental illness and her attempt to find her birth mother. The attempt’s success gives the work a coup de grâce: here the writer’s middle age has delivered a drama equal to those of childhood that memoirists often privilege. The book’s first eleven chapters hold Winterson’s version of that earlier drama, primarily set in the 1970s. The memoir is thus peculiarly split between two periods, with the intermission justifying and making explicit its leap forward from one to the other. Yet – as Winterson’s insistence on her own practice would suggest – the book’s earlier chapters are also considerably non-linear in their own right. A gradual movement forward through childhood to university (a movement that also forms the bulk of both McGahern’s

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

379 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

Around 2000

379

and Mantel’s memoirs) is complicated by diagonal moves across time, pulling us thematically sideways as well as temporally backward or forward: the narrative is striated with discussions of particular themes (Manchester, literature, religion) and complicated by an authorial presence that manifestly writes from a later point, making judgements, comparisons, and jokes about the past. Winterson is informative about her childhood, but she does not reimmerse herself (and us) in it. The past remains a set of stories around which to weave new thought, more than an autonomous sensory sphere to which one can return. Amis’s Experience is the most evidently crafted of the memoirs considered here. The book is in two parts. Each of these is further divided into named sections, several of whose titles (‘The Hands of Mike Szabatura’, ‘The Magics’) are enigmatic at first glance. Through the first part a sequence of letters from school and home are transcribed and interspersed, making these sections alternate with the irrupting voice of a much younger Amis. (McGahern also reproduces entire letters from family members, with a related sense of estrangement as we encounter the voices of the past: but unlike Amis’s the letters are not his own.) Further, the sections as named on the contents page in fact contain shorter named sections, their titles taken from the text they head. After all the above, the book offers in succession a postscript, an appendix and an addendum, as though sporting with the forms available. Riddled with these careful segregations, Experience stands as the opposite pole to McGahern’s unbroken flow: the memoir as labyrinth, or as a cabinet of many nooks and compartments. Correspondingly, Amis’s is also the least bound by linear chronological motion. Taken as a whole the book moves forward, but its formal strategy of interruption makes for frequent cuts back and forth across time. Amis himself declares that the book’s form displays ‘the novelist’s addiction to seeing parallels and making connections’ (Amis 2000, 7). In fact, its structural intricacy is greater than that of Amis’s own novels. Insofar as literary art involves form and composition, here if anywhere is the memoir as literature. The memoir of trauma has been a prominent phenomenon since the 1990s, as Neil Vickers explores in Chapter 27 of the present collection. The literary memoirs assessed here do not necessarily belong to that category. Their primary interest, on the face of it, derives from their authors’ literary repute, and from the possibility of a revelation about the roots of creativity. Yet trauma is not easily bracketed off, for experiences of suffering occupy much of these works. For both McGahern and Winterson, the primary trauma is childhood at the hands of a parent: McGahern’s police sergeant

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

380

380 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

joseph brooker

father and Winterson’s adoptive mother. Swathes of McGahern’s book recount his father’s abusive and self-pitying behaviour. After nearly two hundred pages the reader might assume that, insufferable as Sergeant McGahern was, he at least did not cross the boundary to sexual abuse. McGahern suddenly disabuses us of this assumption, noting that well into his teens they shared a bed: ‘He never interfered with me in an obviously sexual way, but he frequently massaged my belly and thighs . . . I suspect he was masturbating’ (McGahern 2005, 188). The most remarkable quality of this revelation is its casualness. The reader may experience it as the culmination of the father’s wrongs, but McGahern moves on as though no special information has been vouchsafed. In this moment, his book is almost the antithesis of the traumatic memoir of revelation and recovery: as though McGahern prefers coolly to put his father in his place by not aggrandising his crimes. Winterson does not refrain from aggrandising her adoptive mother. Constance Winterson, physically and emotionally overbearing, dominates the book’s first part. When Winterson announces that she has found happiness with a teenage girlfriend, her mother utters the title phrase, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’ (Winterson 2011, 114). The question strains logic, demonstrating the peculiar pressures on her thought. It is also ironic beyond the mother’s ken, in that she herself is far from ‘normal’: ‘a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge’ (Ibid., 1). McGahern’s strong emphasis on childhood, and Winterson’s vivid portrait of her eccentric upbringing, might support the Wordsworthian or Freudian intuition that the formative experiences of damage or drive are to be found in childhood. Mantel can give this impression too, with her uncanny recall of childhood perceptions: with ‘overwhelming sensory power’, ‘they come complete’ to her mind in the present (Mantel 2003, 24). Yet Mantel’s real wounds come later, in the severe medical problems which, from around age twenty, plague her for decades and leave her unable to bear children. For Amis, it is truer still that what he dubs ‘the main events’ arrive later in life. He discloses three dramas of unusual intensity: the discovery of a long-lost daughter; the revelation that his vanished cousin had been murdered by the serial killer Frederick West; and the dementia and death of his father, Kingsley. These events are diverse in texture and meaning, but they lend Experience gravity. The simplest rationale for this proliferation of wounds and griefs is Henry de Montherlant’s proposition that happiness writes in white ink on a white page (Becker 1970, 63). From the memoirist’s standpoint such

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

381 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

Around 2000

381

misfortunes provide material troubling enough to be worth telling. A little more specifically, it can be said that trouble drives narrative: the presence of pain or injustice enables conflict and suspense. Against life’s distress, these literary memoirs consistently have one distinctive property to offer: literature. McGahern, with a strong unacknowledged echo of James Joyce, records exchanging a vocation for the priesthood for a calling to write. In his teens he rows a boat on the nearby river and savours books: Over many days and months, gradually, a fantastical idea formed. Why take on any single life – a priest, a soldier, teacher, doctor, airman – if a writer could create all these people far more vividly? In that one life of the mind, the writer could live many lives and all of life. I had not even the vaguest idea how books came into being, but the dream took hold, and held . . . Instead of being a priest of God, I would be the god of a small, vivid world. (McGahern 2005, 205)

McGahern reverts more than once to this life-shaping revelation, which he can say ‘set me free’ (Ibid., 205). Winterson’s testimony is analogous. Banned as a child from reading books, she rebels by consuming Accrington library’s holdings: one of her chapters is called ‘English Literature A-Z’. At one moment of crisis, she takes solace in discovering T. S. Eliot’s poetry: A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place. (Winterson 2011, 40)

Books, Winterson declares, are her ‘birthright’; a library ‘was where I had always been happiest’ (Ibid., 143). Mantel, recording another working-class childhood, likewise claims to have read the contents of the local children’s library ‘upside down and inside out . . . so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and grey with exhaustion’ (Mantel 2003, 114). She stops short of Winterson’s evangelism for literature, but her more quirky love of books emerges as she describes packing her cottage’s contents, including her childhood volume of Shakespeare: ‘My child’s fingerprints were on every leaf of it. I felt as if it talked back to me, as if I had exchanged breath with it; no other Complete Works would ever be the same’ (Ibid., 243). Writing naturally emerges as a creative counterpart to the salve of reading. When her mother burns her books, Winterson defiantly realises she can write her own (Winterson 2011, 43). Confronted by emotional ‘welts’, she counsels ‘Rewrite the hurt’. Writing is explicitly a means not so much of therapy as of survival: ‘To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson’s story

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

382

382 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

joseph brooker

I had to be able to tell my own’ (Ibid., 5). Mantel’s tribulations differ, but writing has an analogous role: ‘I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next . . . sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being’ (Mantel 2003, 222). Amis is the exception here: hailing from a profoundly lettered background, he does not discover literature as a forbidden glory to set against the constrictions of home. Rather, he produces an account of life that seems surrounded and permeated by literature. Phrases, descriptions, and events from fiction (notably that of his father Kingsley) become part of the book’s medium along with ‘experience’ itself. Even Amis’s famous dental afflictions place him alongside Joyce and Nabokov, in which regard he quotes not merely biographical facts but passages from their fiction (Amis 2000, 113–7). Memoir here becomes ‘literary’ in a further sense, in spilling confidently from life to comparable fiction and back again. This brings us to a last question about these memoirs: their relation to the fiction that qualified the authors as memoirists. The answers are diverse. Amis, though producing a memoir steeped in literature, makes relatively little connection with his own fiction. A few nuggets and hints are dispensed: thus Money (1984), says a footnote, ‘is the novel that John Self, the narrator, had in him but would never write’ (Ibid., 6), and more elaborately Amis retrospectively avows that the novel ‘turned on my own preoccupations’ as a single, childless man (Ibid., 177). These are insights, but remain fleeting. Given that the memoir has offered Amis countless pages in which he could have illuminated this key post-war novel, it may be said that his treatment of his own fiction is reticent. The works are, quietly, events within the life, and Amis informs us of small details from life that went into fiction. But on the larger significance of the writing to which he has dedicated his entire professional life, he effectively withholds comment. Experience stands as an addition to the oeuvre rather than an explanation of it. For Hilary Mantel, too, memoir seems a proposition somewhat distinct from fiction. She indicates the long gestation of what became A Place of Greater Safety (1992), her epic of the French Revolution, but by definition the experience that produced that book was one of library books and card indexes (Mantel 2003, 184). Plainly some of Mantel’s fiction has been more directly primed by her life, notably by her spells in Africa and Saudi Arabia; but she does not advertise the connections. As with Amis, a degree of reticence surrounds the practice of fiction writing to which she has

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

383 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

Around 2000

383

devoted her adult life. The memoir comes partly to centre on the ‘ghosts’ of the children she could never have, but her novels are still more spectral, modestly hidden from view in Mantel’s story of herself. Something of the paradox with which we began lingers in Amis and Mantel: boldly open about traumatic experiences, the one thing they tiptoe shyly around is the undramatic act of writing fiction. Unlike Mantel’s, John McGahern’s best-known works fictionalise the same world described in his memoir. Neither The Barracks (1963) nor The Dark (1965) map absolutely on to the reality described by Memoir, but between them they correspond to much of it. Of the first novel McGahern himself states that ‘[t]he setting and the rituals of barrack life are replicated in the novel, but the characters are all imagined’, his monstrous father replaced with a more acceptable figure (McGahern 2005, 245). In The Dark the struggle with the abusive father is depicted at length. The Leavetaking (1975) recalls a mother’s death in terms that Memoir echoes, at times, almost verbatim. Even McGahern’s later novel Amongst Women (1990), with its tyrannical but ailing IRA veteran, clearly reprises strong elements of the family structure depicted in Memoir. Where Amis admits to allowing stray details from reality into a fiction which is nonetheless aesthetically autonomous, McGahern has effectively transposed whole situations from life to art. Particular elements (like the relocation of Sergeant McGahern’s tempestuous character to another policeman in The Barracks) thus become the points of difference, not similarity, between the two worlds of reality and fiction. In one sense McGahern presents us with the simplest correlation between life and art. Yet even this relation is curiously kaleidoscopic, given the discrete character of his fictional works. No single novel of McGahern’s coincides precisely with his memoir. Rather, Memoir tenders the single body of material that each novel has distinctively refracted. Among its retrospective effects is to draw together fictions that were ostensibly separate. It is Winterson who confronts head on the relation between art and life. Why Be Happy? exists in a direct dialogue with Oranges, which is mentioned on the opening page and quoted on the second. The opening setpiece depicts Winterson and her mother’s furious telephone conversation following the novel’s publication. Constance Winterson demands ‘if it is a story, why is the main character called Jeanette?’, and protests that the contents of the book are ‘not true’ (Winterson 2011, 5–6). A quartercentury later, the remembered dispute is the occasion for the author’s reflection on truth and fiction:

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

384

384 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

joseph brooker I told my version – faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time . . . And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it. (Ibid., 6)

Life and art are here inextricable, though distinct. If her debut novel was a ‘cover story’ for life, her memoir can also be considered a shadow to the fiction, following it and sounding echoes from it. Memoir does not, as with McGahern, simply narrate life and leave the reader to detect how fiction came of it. Rather Winterson, unusually, becomes a commentator on her own art, quoting her own fiction as Amis does Nabokov’s (Ibid., 26), weaving her belated factual narrative in and out of an earlier fictional one. We may say that if memoir aspires to be literature, Winterson’s also becomes a kind of literary criticism. The preceding discussion has explored how four major novelists have fashioned literary memoir since 2000: diversely, but with much suggestive common ground. Let us finally consider three distinct approaches to lifewriting that have appeared in the same period. Paul Morley’s Nothing (2000) pivots on the suicide of his father in 1977. The book culminates in a pilgrimage to the site of the suicide, and contains much reminiscence of certain scenes from Morley’s childhood. Yet these relatively conventional (though still harrowing) materials for contemporary memoir are accompanied by an extensive, wilful complication of the memoir form. The book repeatedly seems to restart and finish, interrupting its progress and approaching its subject all over again. It offers incongruous numbered lists, and digresses into dilatory passages in which words are permuted and recycled: ‘I would always have found myself in the position of needing to adopt a position during the writing about the writing’ (Morley 2000, 72–3). Nothing also imagines alternatives to itself, mentioning titles that Morley claims to have given his project: It was in the middle of a book to be called Snapping the Braces of My Confusion, a book about the death of my father, that I spent nearly forty pages wondering what on earth Kierkegaard was on about when he wrote in The Sickness unto Death:

A long quotation follows. Soon Morley is going on: As you can imagine, I never finished Snapping the Braces of My Confusion. I didn’t actually get to start it either. I did get to start The Memoir of a Man Who Cannot Remember Much and somewhere in the middle of this book, I was writing the following . . . (Ibid, 30–1).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

385 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

Around 2000

385

It is common enough for the literary memoirist to reflect openly at some point on the practice of memoir. But Morley expands such reflexivity beyond all regular proportion, not only turning it into a major seam of his book but also straying into fabulation and play. He lists ‘a series of opening sentences to a number of books that I had or hadn’t written’, including what look like serious scholarly statements alongside gambits such as ‘I never met the comedian Ken Dodd, and I don’t think about him every day, and to be honest I haven’t thought about him this year at all. Until, funnily enough, now’ (Ibid., 30). The sense that memoir is a repository of truth – as in McGahern’s case, the truth beneath the fictions – is not reliably available in Nothing. The work undoubtedly contains sincere recollections, but they coexist with what are openly fantasies and intellectual exercises. In the book’s third part, every subsection is headed; the headings range from ‘ON: SUICIDE AS COSMIC JOKE’, with the content ‘Taboo or not taboo?’, to ‘ON: JULIA KRISTEVA’, announcing a brief quotation from her Black Sun (Ibid., 288, 251). Plainly such sport seems to clash with the memoir’s ultimate subject. How can Morley jest about Ken Dodd at a time like this? But it is equally clear, in practice, that the work’s fantastic humour and obsessive digressions are his response to death: a subject which he acknowledges he has been circling or evading for the past two decades. Nothing manages to be both an authentic memoir of trauma and a protracted implosion of that genre. Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones (2008) is a continuous volume of interviews with Seamus Heaney. This work is effectively a fuller autobiography than any we have considered hitherto. It runs exhaustively from childhood to old age, describing in detail Heaney’s every dwelling and acquaintance. At the same time it discloses the development and wellsprings of the poetry, and capaciously records his thought on almost every writer, event, or issue that could be reckoned relevant to his career. The book’s success strikingly derives from its form. Heaney, we are told, chose to answer O’Driscoll’s questions ‘principally in writing and by post’ (O’Driscoll 2008, x). Stepping Stones can thus be considered primarily a prose work by Heaney – far larger than any other single written work he has produced. Yet this immense act of life-writing (nearly 500 pages) is only possible because of O’Driscoll’s contribution. Plainly, Heaney would not issue this cascade of information without O’Driscoll’s questions to prompt it. But more particularly, the questions compel Heaney to detour through nuances he would otherwise avoid. Asked about a cautious tone in North, Heaney responds with another question:

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

386

386 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

joseph brooker Is it too sophisticated to suggest that there’s a difference between being alert to the situation and addressing it or addressing the reader about it? You’re right to say I was proceeding carefully and cautiously, minding my mouth but minding it, I hope, for the right reasons. (Ibid., 159–60)

An inquisition about carefulness generates careful distinctions in response. Heaney’s alliterations (‘carefully and cautiously, minding my mouth’) are also characteristic of his weighing of words throughout. Individual terms are scrutinised as they arise. When O’Driscoll asks how legitimate a poet who had ignored the Troubles could be, Heaney’s immediate response is ‘“Legitimate” is an unnerving word there’. A page later he is expanding meticulously on his own earlier distinction between political, public, and civic poets (Ibid., 384–5). Dialogue keeps Heaney honest, compelling him to register his thought more precisely than he would if were authoring this work alone. By these lights, we might consider anthologies of existing interviews (like the Literary Conversations series published by the University of Mississippi Press) as a form of biography to equal the more conventional memoir. But few writers have matched Stepping Stones, a complete work that rests not only on Heaney’s own patiently capacious responses but, crucially, on the presence of an interlocutor whose inward knowledge of the subject’s life make him able to function almost as an alter ego. Alasdair Gray’s A Life in Pictures (2010) offers a final alternative model. Gray has been a painter since before he was a published novelist, producing murals, townscapes, portraits of friends, and book covers. All are vividly reproduced in this volume, whose formal novelty Gray emphasises by coining the term ‘autopictography’. The book’s plainest innovation, next to our other examples, is to prioritise images over words in representing life. The blurb of Experience advertises Amis’s ‘memorable pen-portraits’, but Gray more literally provides portraits, for those who wonder what the SNP MP Margo Macdonald or a young Liz Lochhead looked like. Still it cannot exactly be said that Gray replaces narrative prose with a visual counterpart, as for instance the graphic artists Alison Bechdel or Art Spiegelman have done. His images are not one continuous sequence, but many discrete works, often in groups, each captioned with a title, measurement, and details of its materials. This much would make a catalogue, but not a life story. Narrative, even in autopictography, still relies on words. Gray provides a dense, extensive commentary alongside the images, recounting his own life and how each work came about. We could say that the book neither replaces word with image, nor uses image to illustrate word, but takes image as the occasion for word. As an autobiography, the work is innately weighted toward Gray’s activity as a visual artist and the people and places it involved.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C26.3D

387 [374–387] 21.10.2015 3:11PM

Around 2000

387

Two further features merit remark. One is the tendency for Gray’s visual motifs to recur. Having painted a nude in 1980, he can still be found reusing the figure in a new context on a book cover decades later. Meanwhile, large paintings are set aside and returned to, again after decades. The autopictography thus conveys a sense of the slow and cyclical aspects of Gray’s life. Material is not simply drawn once and left behind; it recirculates and is remade in fresh contexts, providing a suggestive implicit analogy with memory itself. Even as Gray’s narrative is linear, the echoes between his paintings offer a more recursive sense of his experience. Lastly, Gray’s images are not photographs. They bear his highly distinct visual style. The reader moving through Gray’s book seems to gain an impression of how his time and place looked. But to a significant degree it is also to see how it looked to Gray, or how his aesthetic filtered and reshaped that world. The same could be said of literary style. And here we reach the quality that at once unifies and distinguishes all the works surveyed here, across their differing approaches to chronology or structure. McGahern’s stately, unshowy recital of consecutive facts; Amis’s cool measurement of clipped sentences; Winterson’s heartfelt declarations of wisdom; Mantel’s calmly droll reflections on her own eccentricity; Morley’s deadpan philosophical comedy. Narrating information and offering judgement, each of these memoirs also speaks in its own voice, which may be the purest access to whatever is singular about its author. Simply in carrying their distinct cadences, these memoirs hold one quality to which many life-writing politicians, tycoons, or footballers do not aspire. Here, perhaps, is where literature and memoir most valuably meet.

Bibliography Amis, Martin. 2000. Experience. New York: Hyperion. Becker, Lucille Frackman. 1970. Henry de Montherlant: A Critical Biography. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Gray, Alasdair. 2010. A Life in Pictures. Edinburgh: Canongate. O’Driscoll, Dennis. 2008. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber. Mantel, Hilary. 2003. Giving Up The Ghost. London: Fourth Estate. McGahern, John. 2005. Memoir. London: Faber. Morley, Paul. 2000. Nothing. London: Faber. Winterson, Jeanette. 2011. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Jonathan Cape.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

388 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

chapter 27

Illness narratives Neil Vickers

Illness narrative is a capacious category. It is comparable to life-writing in that it is defined as much as by what it doesn’t exclude as by what it includes. Illness narratives can be fictional as well as non-fictional. They can be written by carers as well as patients. They can run to any length and can take the form of poetry and drama as well as prose. And, judging by present practice, any text in which illness plays a conspicuous part can count as an illness narrative. At the highbrow end of the spectrum, we find literary and philosophic memoirs such as Philip Roth’s Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work (1995), and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011). One of the things that distinguishes literary memoirs of illness from other kinds is that they tend to range far into the surrounding life. At the lowbrow end are memoirs that would not disgrace the category of ‘misery lit’. Perhaps the most writtenabout specimen is James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, which was first published in 2003 as a memoir of the author’s addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine. In September 2005, Oprah Winfrey selected it for her television show book club, and it then topped the New York Times bestseller list for fifteen weeks. It was subsequently revealed that crucial portions of the memoir were fabricated and it was reissued as a novel. Illness narratives used to be comparatively rare. According to Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, book-length accounts of illness first became a distinct publishing phenomenon only in the 1950s and were extremely rare before 1900. The post-1950 sort were mostly self-help books, intended for patients recently diagnosed with the same condition as the author, and, as Hawkins observes, they usually ‘projected a positive attitude towards medicine’ (Hawkins 1999, 4). By the late 1970s, a new trend could be seen in which autobiographers criticised the dehumanising effects of modern healthcare. In the United States especially, this trend sometimes went hand in hand with advocacy of alternative therapies. Perhaps the most widely read memoir of this kind was Norman Cousins’s Anatomy of an Illness (1979). At the turn of the 1990s several illness narratives enjoyed popular and 388

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

389 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

Illness narratives

389

critical success, including William Styron’s Darkness Visible (1990), a memoir of depression, John Updike’s Self-Consciousness (1989), about psoriasis, and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1993). Girl, Interrupted is especially significant because it was one of the first illness narratives to be turned into a mass-market Hollywood film (in 1999), along with John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998, adapted and released as a film in 2001) and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997, adapted and released as a film in 2007). Newspaper columns such as those by John Diamond, Ruth Picardie, and Barbara Ehrenreich made illness less taboo in everyday life. Although a majority of illness narratives are written by authors with no great literary or commercial aspirations, celebrity remains the most important determinant of an illness narrative’s commercial success. Finally, it should be noted that illness became an integral part of the life imagined and lived out online. Some illness blogs, such as Kate Gross’s ‘the nuisance: News from Kate’s attic on life, and cancer. In that order’, have enjoyed huge followings. Illness was a central part of the virtual world Second Life – players were free to give their avatars all manner of exotic conditions – and it is likely to feature in any online platforms in the future that offer immersive, imaginative, real-time interaction within a large community. It is impossible to describe the evolution of scholarship on illness narrative without taking notice of the peculiar and somewhat haphazard development of the field now known as the medical humanities. Although the term ‘the medical humanities’ has been in use since the 1940s, the field as it is now constituted emerged out of two overlapping but distinct sources. In the 1960s and 1970s, many deans of medical schools and medical politicians felt that the power and prestige of biologically oriented medicine needed to be tempered. Medical practice, in their view, was a moral project, governed by certain overriding values such as the reduction or removal of suffering, the facilitation of patients’ lives as going concerns, and the capacity to alleviate patients’ doubts and anxieties. These values in turn were dependent for their realisation on certain clinical virtues such as compassion, curiosity, and moral resilience. Many believed then and believe now that the humanities offered the readiest means of developing these. In the late 1960s the medical school at Pennsylvania State University set up a humanities department at its Hershey campus. Joanne Trautmann Banks (1941–2007), the editor of Virginia Woolf’s letters, became the first professor of literature to be appointed to a medical school, and was soon joined by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, author of the first comprehensive survey of first person accounts of illness. The University of Texas at

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

390

390 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

neil vickers

Galveston established an Institute for the Medical Humanities on an even larger scale, with Anne Hudson Jones as professor of literature, alongside chairs in philosophy, bioethics, and theology. Katherine Mongomery Hunter, author of Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Study of Medical Knowledge (1991), was involved in setting up a medical school at Morehouse College in Atlanta, before becoming the first professor of the medical humanities at Northwestern University. These scholars had to think in an interdisciplinary way long before interdisciplinarity became all but compulsory in humanities departments. They had allies on the other side of the clinical divide in the shape of clinicians with a strong interest in literature (and often a PhD in literary scholarship), such as Rita Charon, who became professor of narrative medicine at Columbia, and Robert Coles, the first professor of medical humanities at Harvard. Through Johns Hopkins University Press, they established a journal for the interdisciplinary exploration of literature and medicine in 1982, called Literature and Medicine. Although no one in this pioneering group used the term ‘illness narrative’ until the 1990s – they preferred Freud’s term, pathography (Freud 1995) – there can be no doubt that they played a crucial role in demonstrating the power of literature and of narrative to yield ‘thick descriptions’ of the human condition and a fortiori of what it is like to be a patient, a carer, or a clinician.1 Literature and Medicine soon became a vector for the medical humanities’ other major point of origin: the so-called narrative turn that swept through the social sciences during the 1980s, associated with thinkers such as Alasdair Macintyre, Paul Ricoeur, and Jerome Bruner. The narrative turn was based on the idea that the world could be understood as a series of multiple interlocking narratives. The perspectives of particular social actors in the world were likened to narrative points of view, and these in turn were theorised as part of the world they sought to explain. When the Harvard psychiatrist and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman coined the term ‘illness narrative’ in his classic book, The Illness Narratives (1988), he based it on a distinction between a disease, which he equated with a biological process, and an illness, which was the lived experience of that process. Kleinman’s central argument was that ‘the meanings of chronic illness are created by the sick person and his or her circle to make over a wild, disordered natural occurrence into a more or less domesticated, mythologized, ritually controlled, therefore cultural experience’ (Kleinman 1998, 48). The illness narratives in his book were extended case histories in which he attempted to use narrative analysis to describe the processes by which the natural occurrence of disease was ‘made over’ and turned into an

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

391 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

Illness narratives

391

object of mythology and culture. The term was then taken up by the Canadian medical sociologist Arthur W. Frank, who placed it at the centre of his great book, The Wounded Storyteller (Frank 1994, 1995). Frank was interested in the stories sick people told about their own experiences and the ways in which biomedicine tended to overshadow these stories. He saw illness narratives, by which he meant first-person accounts of illness experience, as spurs to the moral imaginations of the healthy and the able-bodied. Frank took care to say that his primary concern was not with writing. He was interested in stories, specifically the stories told by people suffering from ‘deep’, life-changing illness. He was also interested in the stories that others were moved to tell in response to the testimony of the ill. The sick person’s presence in all its vitality and obscenity was and remains the locus of authority for Frank. Frank follows Emanuel Levinas in stressing the faceto-face encounter with the suffering other as the pre-cognitive core of all ethical witnessing (Levinas 1969, 86). Frank has said that all first-person stories of illness, whether spoken directly or written down, are in some sense true. But writing has always been a second-order phenomenon for him. What he really cares about is the imaginative effort involved in grasping illness as a lived experience. In a recent interview, Frank singled out Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On (1984) as having had a profound influence on him. Here was a doctor ‘who was, in effect, deconstructing his medical training through the lens of his experience as a patient’ (Jones and Tansey 2015, 19). The first literary scholars working in literature departments to use the term illness narrative were G. Thomas Couser (1997, 13) and John Wiltshire (1998, 181). These men were not only aware of all of the work that I have just described, they wanted to enter into dialogue with it. For the most part, the medical humanities, broadly conceived, have had a much greater impact on the study of illness narrative than have literary theories of autobiography. Few who work on illness narratives believe that bodily experience is merely or even mostly discursively constructed, and fewer still would agree with Leigh Gilmore’s claim in 1994 that autobiography ‘draws its social authority from its relation to culturally dominant discourses of truth-telling and not, as has previously been asserted, from autobiography’s privileged relation to real life’ (Gilmore 1994, 9). It is precisely such a relationship with real life that is taken for granted in so much of the scholarship on illness narrative. G. Thomas Couser spoke for many when he argued that ‘accounts of illness where life is literally at stake exposes a crucial divide between fiction and non-fiction’ (Couser 1997, 54).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

392

392 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

neil vickers

It has to be said that literary scholars were slow to consider illness per se as an interesting human predicament supplying a compelling occasion for writing. To the extent that literary scholars considered sickness at all, they did so by virtue of other affiliations. Historicist critics such as George Sebastian Rousseau and Lilian Furst looked at the medicine of the past in order to show the multiple ways in which medical ideas ramified into other cultural domains. Here the goal was to demonstrate the hidden power of medicine in the culture of the past. Gay activists made a specialty of AIDS memoirs. Amongst feminists, Elaine Showalter and others contested the bona fides of medical concepts such as hysteria that have served to pathologise and oppress women; but with the signal exception of Susan Sontag’s reflections on the mythologies of cancer in Illness as Metaphor (1978), remarkably little was written about the representation of breast cancer. Couser has said – rightly in my view – that the prolonged invisibility of illness in literary scholarship ‘reflects an all too common cultural denial of bodily dysfunction’ (Sontag 1978, 3). And yet change did occur. Many commentators noted a lowering of confessional boundaries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made the body available as a subject for study by life-writing scholars to an unprecedented degree and paved the way for what Lauren Berlant memorably called the creation of an ‘intimate public sphere’ (Berlant 2008, viii). Rose’s description in Love’s Work of how she managed her colostomy, to take a striking instance, breached no taboo in 1994 but it probably would have done a decade earlier. The other great catalyst of change was the integration of disability studies into the mainstream of literary studies. Lennard J. Davis’s work – notably through Enforcing Normalcy (1995) – had a particularly powerful impact on literary studies and on the medical humanities in exposing the negative effects of normative thinking. Because of this anti-normativist stance, illness and disability were claimed by some theorists to be ‘queer’ identities in their own right. One of the earliest figures to make this elision was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who declared that her breast cancer enabled her to identify with her friend Michael Lynch, who was dying of AIDS (Sedgwick 1993). So how have scholars seen the phenomenon of illness narrative? Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (1993) was the first major survey of biographical and autobiographical accounts of illness in English. In its own sphere, Hawkins’s book was as foundational as Gilbert’s and Gubar’s No Man’s Land (1994) in that it brought to notice a large body of literature to which little attention had been paid, and in the process laid the basis for a new academic sub-discipline. Like Gilbert and

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

393 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

Illness narratives

393

Gubar, Hawkins’s main aim was descriptive but she did permit herself a few generalisations about the genre. Chief among these was her observation that illness narrative (or pathography) bears witness not only to the pervasiveness of mythic thinking in situations of extreme distress but also to its effectiveness. Here she drew upon the work of the American psychiatrist and psycho-historian Robert Lifton, who had studied how the survivors of the Hiroshima bomb made sense of their lives after the Second World War. Lifton proposed that survivors dealt with their trauma by discovering patterns in the experience they had accumulated throughout the whole of their lives and using those patterns to impose order and create meaning. ‘Formulation’ was the term he gave to this process. Hawkins suggested that illness narrative enabled people to reconstruct their identities in a manner similar to Lifton’s ‘formulation’: ‘it gathers together the separate meanings, the moments of illumination and understanding, the cycles of hope and despair, and weaves them into a whole fabric, one wherein a temporal sequence of events takes on narrative form’ (Hawkins 1999, 24–5). The main overarching patterns that she found coalesced around the idea of illness as rebirth or regeneration, as battle and as journey. If Reconstructing Illness is a quietly optimistic book, Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller is at once more militant and more mystical. Frank is a medical sociologist interested in Marx, Foucault, and Lacan, who sees illness narrative as a species of ‘post-colonial’ writing in which the sick emancipate themselves from social and medical imperialism. Frank believed that far too many clinicians had no idea what it was like to have a ‘deep’ illness. The Wounded Storyteller was written to help them to recognise where patients stood in relation to their illnesses at any given moment. Frank argued that the experience of illness had been altered in subtle ways by postmodernity. The ‘narrative surrender’ to biomedical ideology that patients were required to make during the period immediately following the war had given place to a postmodern sense that illness is a many-sided experience, only part of which is captured by biomedicine. ‘Postmodern times’, he wrote, ‘are when the capacity to tell one’s own story is reclaimed’ (Frank 1995, 7). In 1991 Frank published an account of the aftermath of suffering a heart attack and developing metastatic testicular cancer in which he coined the term ‘the remission society’ to describe those people like himself ‘who were effectively well but who could never be considered cured’. For the lucky ones, postmodern illness comes with membership of the remission society. The Wounded Storyteller contains a celebrated typology of illness narratives. Although it was never intended as a theory of literary kinds, it is often

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

394

394 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

neil vickers

treated as if it were one. It is worth noting, however, that most of Frank’s examples derive from illness narratives related face to face by what he calls ‘the speaking body’. Frank’s typology is arguably the most successful concept in the whole of the medical humanities. It has been cited thousands of times. The typology divides illness narrative into three groups: the restitution narrative, the chaos narrative, and the quest narrative. These are best thought of as psychological, rather than mythic, stances. Most seriously ill people’s illness experience will take the form of a restitution narrative one day, a chaos narrative the next, and a quest narrative the day after. The restitution narrative usually amounts to denial. ‘The restitution narrative says ‘Yesterday I was healthy, today I’m sick, and tomorrow I’ll be healthy again’’ (Ibid., 77). Modern high-tech medicine encourages patients to think in these terms. In restitution narratives, the body becomes a mere ‘it’, like a car that won’t start. Frank concedes that the restitution narrative has its proper sphere, for sometimes the body can be fixed and restored to normal functioning. But he thinks that since all it can bear witness to is the expertise of others, the restitution narrative offers no scope for the moral or psychological development of the subject. Frank says that writers of restitution narratives undergo ‘Illness in the Imaginary’ because, in Lacanian terms, they always live through images offered by others, like a baby at the beginning of the mirror stage of development. If the restitution narrator looks upon illness as a mere mishap, the chaos narrator imagines life never getting better. Chaos narratives communicate unbearable anxiety. They indicate the presence of an unassimilated trauma. Frank suggests that chaos narrators have not come to terms with the temporal dimension of their plight. Chaos narratives often have an ‘and then and then and then’ structure, or else they exhibit a fragmented sense of time. ‘The body-self that is immersed in chaos lives only in immediacy’, Frank explains (Ibid., 109). Chaos narratives ‘feed on the sense that no one is in control’ (Ibid., 100). They are always ‘beyond speech and are thus what is lacking in speech’ (Ibid., 101). In chaos the body-self is experienced only as a site of catastrophe. It lacks ‘desire’ in the Lacanian sense that it cannot displace itself onto anyone or anything. Frank holds that society tends to be hostile to chaos narratives because the anxiety they communicate is too overwhelming for many people. We say that the chaos narrator is ‘depressed’ and turn the other way. But chaos is one of the boundary conditions of being human and it is therefore of primary interest to humanists in general and to medical humanists in particular. Frank argues that it is also a form of Foucauldian

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

395 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

Illness narratives

395

‘resistance’, and is to be cherished as such. Quest narratives, Frank’s third type, ‘accept illness and seek to use it’ (Ibid., 115). This narrative ‘affords the ill their most distinctive voice’. Frank makes the point that what is quested for is not always clear. ‘The healthy’, Frank writes in his own illness narrative, At the Will of the Body, ‘require health as an affirmation that their will is still effective . . . the ill accept their vulnerability as an affirmation that the world is perfect without any exercise of their will’ (Frank 1991, 20). This changes a great deal. The most authentic moments in quest narratives are those in which renewal rather than recovery is glimpsed. The essence of the quest narrative is the discovery of a new kind of meaning. Frank identifies three subtypes of quest narrative. Quest memoirs, his first category, nest the illness story in the rest of the writer’s life. They go about their business quietly. Although they are autobiographical, events don’t have to be related chronologically in a quest memoir and there is no need to include the rest of the writer’s life. Their distinctive achievement is to find a place for the illness in the writer’s identity. Manifestos – the second subtype – proceed more apocalyptically. Through the experience of illness, the speaker or writer of a manifesto often discovers how badly society treats those with a condition. Frank gives the example of Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals (1980) but the category could include less radical works such as Robert McCrum’s My Year Off (1998). The last subtype is the auto-mythology, in which writers testify to some profound and positive inner change wrought by the illness. Frank offers the Oliver Sacks of A Leg to Stand On (1984) as his example in this category. Summing up, we might say that restitution narrative resists authenticity. The chaos narrative expresses the fear that authenticity of any kind is unattainable. The quest narrative alone makes illness bearable by bearing witness to a new kind of selfhood. It is as prescriptive as it is persuasive. Frank’s own illness narrative, At the Will of the Body (1991), is part questmemoir and part quest-manifesto. It describes his experiences of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine, followed a year later by metastatic testicular cancer. He writes mordantly about the friendships that foundered shortly after his second diagnosis and he is often damning about the way he was treated by some of his doctors. Many refused to look him in the eye when they spoke to him. Almost all refused to acknowledge his wife’s presence in the room, even though she was there to share the experience of the consultation with him. He emphasises the limitations of illness narrative, noting at one point that while illness narratives don’t as a rule help people to cope with their own experience, at their best they can offer an accurate picture of what goes into coping. At the Will of the Body suggests that the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

396

396 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

neil vickers

ill person is placed under great pressure to be false to himself or herself. This is one reason why we need a theory of illness narrative. There is a mystical dimension in Frank’s thinking too. This stems in part from his commitment to the idea of testimony. The person who tells their story changes himself or herself by the act of telling. For, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub put it in their classic work on testimony, ‘texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter ― and make us encounter ― strangeness . . . the more we look closely at texts, the more they show us that, unwittingly we do not even know what testimony is and that, in any case, it is not simply what we thought we knew it was’ (Felman and Laub 1992, 7). Frank connects this dimension of testimony with the sheer alterity of illness experience – the fact that it really is, in Susan Sontag’s famous image, another country. Members of the remission society experience this alterity as a shared reality, and the language they use to describe it may strike the healthy as a little too epiphanic. Frank enters this mode quite frequently in the second half of At the Will of the Body. Chapters often close with reflections such as the following: Where we see the face of beauty, we are in our proper place, and all becomes coherent. As I looked out the window it formed a kind of haiku for me. (Frank 1991, 33)

John Wiltshire is one of the world’s leading scholars on Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen. He has also published groundbreaking articles on contemporary illness narratives using theories derived from British psychoanalysis. Wiltshire (2000) argues that the act of setting an illness narrative down on paper might be conceived by analogy with a baby projecting its distress into a mother. His model is the benign projective identification postulated by Wilfred Bion in Second Thoughts (1962). According to Bion, the baby in distress needs to rid itself of a fear of imminent death. In optimal circumstances, the mother takes this fear into herself and returns it to the infant in a benign, detoxified form. The experience of a condition that affords little perceived prospect of a full recovery deadens the body in all sorts of ways. It is a task similar to Winnicott’s idea of ‘holding’, though it adds the idea that the security the infant finds in his mother’s arms comes from her repeated acceptance of his projected fears of death (Winnicott 1986). The writer of a good illness narrative, Wiltshire argues, constructs a sort of textual mother in whose presence the sick person, albeit with tremendous difficulty, can learn to tolerate the illness and to integrate it into his life. In Kleinian terms, the best illness narratives enact a discovery of a new and vital ‘depressive position’ – they refashion the sick person’s

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

397 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

Illness narratives

397

internal world in such a way that he can be more accepting of the limitations imposed by his condition and more in touch with good aspects of relationships that have not been destroyed by it. Like Frank, Wiltshire argues that the trauma of major illness means that writers of illness narratives were at unusually great risk of being false to themselves. But when Frank invokes Lacan he does so metaphorically. What marks Wiltshire out as a follower of the British psychoanalytic traditions is his insistence that deep illness is troubling precisely because of its resemblance to infantile anxieties. Under the influence of Judith Butler and Erving Goffman, Frank has since argued that all ‘autobiographical work is a kind of performance of which the ill person becomes an effect’ (Frank 2000, 136). By carrying out this performance he or she can then claim a place within a separate ‘honour system’ peculiar to the sickness group. The Wounded Storyteller worked implicitly with the concept of an authentic self (Frank talks about Nancy Mairs as an ‘authentic witness’ (Frank 1995, 166)). Frank’s more recent work suggests that we can only discover our true selves dialogically by bringing our narratives into contact with other narratives. Rebuilding the self by means of Liftonian formulation is but the first moment in a longer dialectical process. To a large extent this shift in Frank’s thinking reflects the growing influence of disability theory by medical humanists in the late 1990s. Here mention should be made of the impact of G. Thomas Couser’s Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Lifewriting (1997). Couser was the first person to use disability theory to articulate the political implications of studying illness narrative. Following Lennard J. Davis, Couser argued that unconsciously the healthy and the able-bodied project their own frailty and mortality into the ill and the disabled. This scapegoating helps to protect health as a social value. As Verilyn Klinkenbord puts it, ‘when you contract a disease, you contract the world of that disease, and that world is what threatens self-definition’ (quoted in Couser 1997, 288). Couser thus invokes the hermeneutics of suspicion to understand the social context in which illness occurs. Nevertheless, when he reads particular narratives he strives to avoid interpretation (unlike Wiltshire or even Frank). Couser follows Susan Sontag’s injunction in her 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’ to ‘show what [a text] is rather than show what it means’ (Sontag, 2001, 14). In doing so, Couser anticipated many of the key moves made by the advocates of ‘surface reading’ (Best and Marcus 2009). If there is a guiding preoccupation that links major works published in the 2000s it is those aspects of illness which lie beyond words. Scholars

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

398

398 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

neil vickers

have attacked this problem in different ways. Perhaps the most sophisticated book from a literary-critical point of view is Einat Avrahami’s The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies (2007). Avrahami reads first-person accounts of what it is like to have a terminal illness to challenge the Foucauldian idea that the bodily experience is discursively constructed. Like Couser, she is interested in the ethical and cultural work performed by illness autobiography. But where Couser was wary of memoirs with artistic aspirations, Avrahami only reads works exhibiting a high degree of literary complexity. She was perhaps the first scholar to suggest very bluntly that telling the truth about an illness might require a great deal of literary or artistic sophistication. She also argued that the writer of an illness memoir likewise might also need a sophisticated reader or interpreter to read between his or her lines: to grasp what is shown rather than told. This brings us up against a possibility that literary students of illness memoir have been loath to think about in public: some illness memoirs won’t have much to tell us. Another important intervention is Kathlyn Conway’s Illness and the Limits of Expression (2007). Writing from a phenomenological standpoint, Conway argues that the dissolution of the self, characteristic of deep illness, resists verbalisation. She nevertheless believes that this very failure is salutary in that it ‘allows us to approach the ground of desolation, where consolation will or will not come to each of us in our own time and in ways of our own making and unmaking’ (Conway 2007, 16). Lisa Diedrich’s monograph Treatments (2007) makes a similar claim in different language: that illness narratives invoke forms of affect that are beyond linguistic representation. Diedrich exhorts scholars of illness narrative to emulate the best clinicians in being open about what they do not know. This ground of unspeakability is the most productive area for dialogue between autobiographical theorists and anyone interested in the clinical sphere. Ann Jurecic’s recent Illness as Narrative (2012), like Avrahami, Conway, and Diedrich, also stresses the value of empathic scepticism. She takes from Joan Didion the idea that every life feeds off certain ‘necessary fictions’ and that a degree of auto-fiction is an inevitable feature of every illness memoir. Jurecic believes that the future of scholarship in this area lies in developing methods of reparative reading of the sort advocated by Eve Kosoksky Sedgwick (ultimately grounded in Melanie Klein’s idea of ‘wiedergutmachung’). In some respects Jurecic’s prescription is similar to the kind of ‘formulative’ reading promoted by Hawkins, but it brings the critic’s own fragility centre stage and makes it available to the reader as an object in its own right for further critical dialogue. Jurecic’s stance is thus entirely

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

399 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

Illness narratives

399

consonant with Frank’s ideal of criticism as a form of dialogical ‘destabilisation’. The landscape surrounding illness narrative has changed almost beyond recognition since Hawkins published the first edition of her seminal work in 1993. The ill are less marginalised as a group today. The Western public is more willing to see illness as having social, psychological, and political dimensions than it once was. And literature scholars are more open to the specific challenges to life-writing theory posed by illness. In the immediate future, illness narrative and disability studies are likely to develop in tandem. A special number of New Literary History devoted to the ‘Biocultures’ project urged such a realignment (Davis and Morris 2007). The representational study of illness now is globally focused, and younger scholars especially are producing important work on the representation of health emergencies in the developing world and of indigenous medicine. Even today, much remains to be said about HIV in Africa. It is also possible that the study of illness narrative will become more medically focused. As epigenetic and epidemiological research continues to point to the primacy of early experience in determining health outcomes, scholars may turn to illness narrative as a source of information concerning the interplay of the psychological and the physical at the level of lived experience. This in turn may revive and reinvigorate the two theoretical paradigms from the humanities, which have recently fallen into abeyance but which were for long central to the medical humanities, namely psychosomatically inflected psychoanalytic theories and phenomenology.

Notes 1. The difference between the two terms is small. Broadly speaking, pathography explicitly gives a central role to pathological processes and dysfunction. Illness narrative, by contrast, need not pay any attention to the biological aspects of the illness’s experience.

Bibliography Avrahami, Einat. 2007. The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Bauby, Jean-Dominique. 1997. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Translated by Jeremy Leggatt. London: Fourth Estate. Bayley, John. 1998. Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. London: Duckworth.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

400

400 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

neil vickers

Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. 2009. ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’. Representations 108: 1–21. Bion, Wilfred R. 1983 [1962]. Second Thoughts. Karnac. London: William Heinemann Medical Books. Conway, Kathlyn. 2007. Illness and the Limits of Expression. Ann Arbour, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Couser, G. Thomas. 1997. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Cousins, Norman. 1979. Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived By the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration. London: Norton. Davis, Lennard J. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso. Davis, Lennard J. and David B. Morris. 2007. ‘Biocultures Manifesto’. New Literary History 8: 411–8 Didion, Joan. 2011. Blue Nights. London: 4th Estate. Didion, Joan. 2005. The Year of Magical Thinking. London: 4th Estate. Diedrich, Lisa. 2007. Treatments: Language, Politics and the Culture of Illness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony : Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. London: Routledge. Frank, Arthur W. 1991. At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. Boston, Massachussetts: Mariner. Frank, Arthur W. 1994. ‘Reclaiming an Orphan Genre: The First-Person Narrative of Illness’. Literature and Medicine 13.1: 1–21. Frank, Arthur W. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, Ethics. 2nd edn. 2013. London: Chicago University Press. Frank, Arthur W. 2000. ‘Illness and Autobiographical Work: Dialogue as Narrative Destabilization’. Qualitative Sociology 23.1: 135–56. Freud, Sigmund. 1995. Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. Vol. 11. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 57–138. Edited by assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson in collaboration with Anna Freud, translated by James Strachey. 22 vols. London: Hogarth Press. Frey, James. 2003. A Million Little Pieces. London: John Murray. Gilbert, Sandra M. 1994. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 3 vols. London: Yale University Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 1994. ‘The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography and Genre.’ In Autobiography and Postmodernism, 3–18. Edited

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C27.3D

401 [388–401] 21.10.2015 3:23PM

Illness narratives

401

by Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters Amherst. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press. Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. 1999. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathology. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery. 1991. Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge. London: Princeton University Press. Jones, E. M., and E. M Tansey, eds. 2015. The Development of Narrative Practices in Medicine c.1960–c.2000. Vol. 52. London: Queen Mary University of London. Jurecic, Ann. 2012. Illness as Narrative. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press. Kaysen, Susanna. 1993. Girl, Interrupted. New York: Turtle Bay Books. Kleinman, Arthur. 1988. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books. Levinas, Emanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. Lifton, Robert J. 1991. Death in Life: The Survivors of Hiroshima. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lorde, Audre. 1980. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco, California: Aunt Lute Books. McCrum, Robert. 1998. My Year Off. London: Picador. Rose, Gillian. 1995. Love’s Work. London: Chatto & Windus. Roth, Philip. 1991. Patrimony: A True Story. London: Simon and Schuster. Sacks, Oliver. 1984. A Leg to Stand On. London: Duckworth. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. ‘White Glasses.’ In Tendencies, 252–66. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Sontag, Susan. 2001. ‘Against Interpretation’, 3-14 in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Vintage. Styron, William. 1990. Darkness Visible. London: Pan. Updike, John. 1989. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. London: Penguin. Wiltshire, John. 2000. ‘Biography, Pathography and the Recovery of Meaning’. Cambridge Quarterly 29.4: 409–22. Wiltshire, John. 1998. ‘The Patient Writes Back: Bioethics and the Illness Narrative.’ In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, 181–98. Edited by Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winnicott, Donald. 1986. Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of An Analysis. Edited by M. Masud and R. Khan. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

402 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

chapter 28

Breaking the pact Contemporary autobiographical diversions Roger Luckhurst

In late 1971, an extraordinary publishing event was announced. After fifteen years as a recluse, communicating nothing to the outside world, the billionaire Howard Hughes, maverick aircraft and movie mogul, inventor, and designer of a cantilevered brassiere for Jane Russell, had decided to publish his autobiography. It would correct the rumours about his bizarre, obsessive-compulsive behaviours, the sealed world of his Las Vegas penthouse. ‘It would not suit me to die without having certain misconceptions cleared up and without having stated the truth about myself’, Hughes explained (Irving 2008, 5). The publishers McGraw-Hill paid a $750,000 advance to Hughes and his co-writer, the journalist and novelist Clifford Irving. Irving had been chosen by Hughes because of his recent biography of the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory called Fake! Irving first telephoned and then organised several clandestine meetings with Hughes in Mexico and Puerto Rico, where he recorded many hours of interviews. Irving’s editors read the transcripts amazed at the revelations. The authenticity of the details was confirmed by Noah Dietrich who had served as Hughes’s assistant for years. At a certain point in the writing process it was agreed that the biographical interview would be lightly re-edited into a continuous first-person account with minimal interventions: it became a ghosted autobiography. This was scrupulously explained in Irving’s introduction: ‘I have related my part of the tale in the interests of clearing up the mystery of how the autobiography came to be and dispelling the inevitable gossip concerning authenticity’ (Ibid., 24). Serialisation was internationally syndicated. Immediately upon publication another extraordinary event took place: someone claiming to be long-silent and elusive Howard Hughes began to place phone calls to prominent journalists denouncing the book as a fraud. This person eventually persuaded a conference call of journalists that he was the real Hughes. Irving convincingly defended the book for weeks, 402

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

403 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

Breaking the pact

403

since he had accumulated a vast archive of unpublished sources on the life of his subject. Quite quickly, however, a Swiss bank informed his publishers that the account of ‘H. R. Hughes’, opened to pay Hughes his advance, was being accessed by Irving’s wife. The Irvings confessed to the fraud at the end of January 1972. Irving was sentenced to thirty months in jail; his wife received six months. Having featured in Orson Welles’s documentary, F for Fake (1974), Irving published Project Octavio in 1977 (‘Octavio’ was the code name for Hughes in communications with McGraw-Hill), a memoir about how he had concocted the fraud with another writer, Dick Suskind, and his wife. Bizarrely, the entirely invented claim in the book that Hughes had secretly supported Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968 for hundreds of thousands of dollars turned out to be true. The fake but true claims in the Autobiography of Howard Hughes had stoked the paranoia in Nixon’s camp and helped foster the conditions where his team thought it a good idea to burglarise the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building in Washington. In 2006, Project Octavio was filmed as The Hoax, with Richard Gere as Irving. When the memoir was re-issued as a movie-tie in, Irving’s preface had the temerity to warn that ‘it’s important to realize that the movie doesn’t tell the story of what actually happened’ (Irving 2007, 7). The fake truth had been truly faked. Autobiographical discourse is meant to convey the authentic, unequivocal truth, a contract that writing as a medium is not particularly well suited to handle. Language inherently errs, its ambiguities proliferating meanings and foiling even the best of intentions long before the technologies of print and the industry of publishing stretches the gap between authors, implied authors, narrators, protagonists, publishing houses, publicity machines, reviewers, and readers, all of which multiplies the chances of mistake, misidentification, or deliberate fraud. Because autobiographical status cannot inhere in the text but can only be guaranteed by a complex array of what Gerard Genette calls ‘paratextual frames’ (external genre markers, covers, blurbs, prefaces, and so on) the discourse of self-confession has always been open to misdirection and deceit. Confabulations that reflect back the narcissistic fantasies of their community of readers are already halfway to being accepted as the truth, and this has been the case from the medieval travels of Marco Polo or Sir John Mandeville all the way to the breathless confessions contained in The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836), a heated fantasy of Catholic life for a paranoid Protestant readership fully trained in generic Gothic conventions. Cases of fakery and the contest of autobiographical

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

404

404 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

roger luckhurst

truths increased as the nineteenth century generated the conditions for a mass print culture on an industrial scale. In the 1970s, however, the inherent crisis of truth in autobiographical discourse was redoubled by sustained pressure on the very concept of the self from socio-political, cultural, and philosophical sources determined to interrogate the foundational premise of a humanistic self as author to itself. The furore around The Autobiography of Howard Hughes might thus be read as a symptom of something rather grander and more structural about the fate of the genre in the West. Scholars and theorists presented a diversity of ways of understanding and responding to autobiographical texts. On the one hand, American critic James Olney was stating his faith in the autobiographical ‘I’ to command a meaningful retrospective narrative pattern on life, the expression of a ‘vital impulse to order’ (Olney 1972, 3) that articulated ‘the isolated uniqueness that nearly everyone agrees to be the primary quality and condition of the individual and his [sic] experience’ (Ibid., 20–1). Through the early 1970s, Philippe Lejeune theorised le pacte autobiographique as an ‘all or nothing’ contract that identified author and narratorprotagonist, thus guaranteeing its truth and specifying penalty clauses for transgression (Lejeune 1989, 13). Perhaps it was symptomatic of uncertainty, though, that Lejeune conceived the reader of autobiography as always driven by the hermeneutics of suspicion: ‘Confronted with what looks like an autobiographical narrative, the reader often tends to think of himself [sic] as a detective, that is to say, to look for breaches of contract . . . When we think we have discovered something through the text, in spite of the author, we always accord it more truth and profundity’ (Ibid., 14). On the other hand, Roland Barthes published Roland Barthes (1975), a teasing act that promised self-disclosure only to disclose that the self had been dethroned in any adherence to post-Saussearean linguistics: ‘He wants to side with any writing whose principle is that the subject is merely an effect of language’ (Barthes 1977, 79). Barthes was later invited to review the work: ‘Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes’ by Roland Barthes merely emphasised the endless dispersal of the self in the circulation of language, the self as after-effect of the signifying chain. In a very different way, Michel Foucault historicised the ‘procedures of individualization’ that had made ‘Western man’ become ‘a confessing animal’ in his Introduction to his History of Sexuality, first published in 1976 (Foucault 1981, 59). Foucault suggested that what the confession or autobiography most valued was less the authentic inner self, the last hidden truth, the most personal secret, than a series of implantations of legal, medical, biological,

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

405 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

Breaking the pact

405

ethical, and social ‘problems’ that are subject to disciplinary transformation and change: there was no inner self not already the subject of power. Barthes became most commonly associated with his 1968 manifesto statement ‘The Death of the Author’: ‘We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (Barthes 1977, 146). Foucault responded with a different but equally dethroning gesture in his essay ‘What is An Author?’ (first delivered as a lecture in 1969). Both were received as attacks on the self-authoring, autobiographical humanist self. Another French theorist, Jacques Derrida, also often identified in broad brush-strokes as a post-structuralist, spent much of the 1970s deconstructing the power of the authenticating signature (‘Signature Event Context’ in 1972) and putting pressure on the textual frames that separated genres, philosophy and literature, truth and fiction, text and context. Derrida later wrote ‘Circumfession’, a band of text designed to run underneath, to exceed and literally outflank, an explanatory, biographical study of his work, at once a gesture of ‘confession’ and its refusal. Derrida steadfastly opposed the self-identity implied by the concept of self-life-writing in auto-bio-graphy, and insisted on thinking the self through the other and the debts to the other, and so coined rival terms ‘hetero-thanato-graphy’ in The Post Card (1980) and ‘otobiography’ in The Ear of the Other (1982). The autobiographical demonstration, Derrida insists, has always to be routed through the other, which forms the self by deforming it: ‘I must ask you to shift its sense a little and to listen to it with another ear’ (Derrida 1984, 5). These theoretical moves aimed implacably to undermine every element of Lejeune’s attempts to shore up an authenticating ‘autobiographical pact’. These are perhaps arcane matters, long buried with the academy’s Theory Wars that animated the humanities in Britain and America a generation ago. And, indeed, it could be argued that the social crises of the 1970s contributed much more immediately than linguistics or philosophy to the dissolution of the authority of the autobiography, particularly when the autobiographical act was used as a weapon of denunciation or exposé. ‘Identity politics’ was centred on the idea that ‘identity itself – its elaboration, expression or affirmation – is and should be a fundamental focus of political work’ (Kauffman 2001, 23). In the 1970s, politicised autobiography used the model of the testimony, the record of wrongs recorded as a witness in quasi-juridical terms. Civil rights campaigners and the Black Power movement had the model of the slave testimony, but also a strong sense that testimony or confession was bound up with legal

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

406

406 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

roger luckhurst

systems that needed to be challenged and overthrown. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) might have been narratively shaped by the novelist Alex Haley, but was primarily intended as a weapon to raise consciousness. Second-wave feminism similarly built on a century of testimony and resistance, but was also more avowedly transgressive in giving utterance to women’s everyday, structural experience of rape, incest, and sexual violence. Florence Rush’s denunciation of psychiatry’s suppression of rape as a structural presence in 1971 was premised on a public account of her childhood experience of repeated rape by her father. Susan Brownmiller witnessed Rush’s public act of defiance and collected more accounts for the book that would become Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), by which time Rape Speak Out sessions became a model for the public, collective utterance of what had been silenced as a private personal shame. The gendered premise of the autobiography itself required feminist critique, too. Shari Benstock dismissed the triumphant selfauthoring ‘I’, with its presumption of self-knowledge as a masculine construct. She suggested that this was something that women’s autobiographies deliberately side-stepped: ‘The self that would reside at the centre of the text is decentred – and often absent altogether – in women’s autobiographical texts’ (Benstock 1988, 20). What emerged in the 1970s as a consequence of the shift towards ‘identity politics’ was the category of the survivor, which has had a major impact on the genre of autobiography. An important influence on the development of this new kind of personhood was the New York psychologist, writer, and campaigner Robert Jay Lifton, who ended his book built on the testimonies of those who lived through the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima with a long section entitled ‘The Survivor’, which declared that ‘the holocausts of the twentieth century have thrust the survivor ethos into special prominence, and imposed upon us all a series of immersions into death’ (Lifton 1968, 479). Lifton’s term was almost immediately picked up and transferred by his fellow psychologist William Niederland, who coined the term ‘survivor syndrome’ for the ‘emotional disorders of survivors of Nazi persecution’ (Niederland 1968, 8). The ‘Holocaust survivor’ was thus named relatively late, and was consolidated by the cultural impact of Bruno Bettelheim’s autobiographical essay called ‘Surviving’, on his experience of detention in Dachau, which appeared in the New Yorker in 1976 and prompted a major debate on whether ‘survivors’ were being overlooked or forgotten. By the end of the decade, the Holocaust survivor had become a heroic, visionary figure, having, in Terence des Pres’s words, ‘a heroism

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

407 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

Breaking the pact

407

commensurate with the sweep of ruin of our time’ (Des Pres 1980, 6). ‘The survivor is a man or woman who has passed through the “crisis of civilisation” we talk so much about . . . He is the first of civilised men to live beyond the compulsions of culture; beyond a fear of death’ (Ibid., 207). Lifton was also a pioneer in treating the psychiatric disorders prevalent amongst soldiers then returning from Vietnam. Lifton formed impromptu ‘rap groups’ in New York, where veterans could share their experience in a loose group therapy framework. ‘All Americans are survivors of the Vietnam holocaust and are faced with the task of recognizing and bringing significance to their death immersion’, Lifton argued (Lifton 1973, 305). He considered that the restoration of mental health in Vietnam veterans was partly about a social and political acknowledgement of their experience as much as a narrow psychiatric working through of extreme experience. Public confessions and autobiographical writings of traumatic war experience became central to this movement. Lifton’s mix of advocacy and treatment also found favour with feminist campaigners, who argued that the medical profession had refused to acknowledge the devastating impact of incest or rape. Women in patriarchy, they argued, might best consider themselves – of necessity – to be ‘survivors’ of a structurally sanctioned violence. In 1980, Lifton’s psychiatric model of death immersion and survival was at the heart of an alliance of advocates in the psychiatric profession that successfully campaigned to get diagnostic recognition of a new psychiatric condition: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This term marked the recognisable dawn of contemporary trauma culture (see Luckhurst 2008). What has been called ‘memoropolitics’ reconvenes the self around traumatic memory and survival; it follows that what is valued in the contemporary autobiography has shifted its focus. The most overt product of this new dispensation, the result of two decades of the accounts of Holocaust survivors, survivors of sexual abuse, and the memoirs of traumatised war veterans, was the rise of the misery memoir, commonly said to have crystallised as a genre with the international bestseller by Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (1997). British bookshops followed this trend by displacing fiction shelves with memoir and life-writing shelves. Martin Amis declared at the start of his own memoir: ‘It used to be said everyone had a novel in them . . . Just now, though, in 1999, you would probably be obliged to doubt the basic proposition: what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel, but a memoir’ (Amis 1999, 6).

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

408

408 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

roger luckhurst

Trauma is diagnostically defined as an event outside the range of normal experience, initially associated with actual or threatened death or serious injury (such as close involvement in an accident, violence, or on the battlefield), but since 1980 it has been extended to cover a manifold number of stressor events. The diffuse term ‘cultural trauma’ has further extended this to include all manner of depredations to the integrity of the self. Even the clinical symptom clusters for PTSD can seem strikingly contradictory. On the one hand, hypermnesia, too much memory, leaves the trauma too present, too insistent to process in memory, with sufferers persistently re-experiencing the event through flashbacks, intrusive images, recurring dreams, or repetition compulsions of various uncontrolled kinds. On the other hand, trauma can also result in amnesia, too little memory, a persistent avoidance of actions, thoughts, or feelings associated with the event, and a mental editing or even entire eclipse of any recall of the event at all. Because trauma is understood in these terms as a problem of memory, something that profoundly disrupts or even shatters the potential for configuring a life narrative, it has had some odd effects on autobiographical narrative. Perhaps the strangest phenomenon of life-writing under the trauma paradigm was the idea that the most traumatic event was the one most likely to be completely repressed, meaning that a life narrative might be determined by traumas that had left absolutely no trace in conscious memory. ‘Recovered Memory Therapy’ flowered in the late 1980s to offer the promise that hypnotic regression could retrieve these ‘lost’ memories in pristine form and finally restore a self as once more identical to itself. Thus a formative feminist memoir, Sylvia Fraser’s My Father’s House, about the process of recovering repressed memories of her father’s systematic sexual abuse in her childhood, starts with an apparently self-cancelling Author’s Note: ‘The story I have told in this book is autobiographical. As a result of amnesia, much of it was unknown to me until three years ago’ (Fraser 1989, x). With this process of recovery underway, Fraser returns to her conscious childhood memories, but can now amend recalled scenes with italicised additions, the hidden history of abuse that can fill in the whole picture belatedly: ‘In the cloakroom I teach the other kids to tie their shoelaces in a double bow just like my daddy taught me. My daddy plays with my belly button, my daddy plays with my toes as he did when I was little . . . Something hard pushes up against me, then between my legs’ (Ibid., 8). There seems little reason to doubt the sincerity of this project, or the pact that the reader is asked to sign, even though the identity of author and narrator cannot be asserted in any straightforward way. Critics

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

409 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

Breaking the pact

409

of the techniques of recovered memory have also long argued that hypnotic memories are not as fixed and pristine as advocates argue, but are extremely mobile and open to suggestion and elaboration (see Loftus and Ketcham 1996). When Whitley Strieber underwent regression hypnotherapy to recover instances of amnesiac ‘lost time’, he recovered, in astounding and compelling detail, a secret history of systematic kidnap and sexual abuse throughout his life by ‘greys’ – aliens from Zeta Reticuli who beamed him into their space-ships and then used powerful post-hypnotic suggestion to cover their tracks. There is no reason to doubt the absolute sincerity of Communion: A True Story (1987), either. The trauma paradigm is a very particular understanding of how memory works (or fails to work), but also significantly transforms what is most valued in life narrative and thus changes the shape of contemporary autobiography. Extremity of experience is obviously given heightened value: in a crucial way, the rise of the term ‘memoir’, implying less life narrative than focus on heightened punctual moments within a life, supports this shift (see Couser 2012). Categories of survival memoir have consequently been extended, with whole new sub-genres of pathography (the writing of illness, a term coined in 1991, a genre Neil Vickers explores elsewhere in this volume) or intensifications of older ones about loss (memoirs of dying, death, and the mourning process) or the survival of traumatic events (huge selling books about being held hostage to those detailing involvement in large-scale disasters, accidents, or more collective events known by their abrupt dateline short-hands, 9/11 or 7/7). Some of these genres become over-determined by the imperatives of identity politics. Pathographies by those dying with AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for instance, served a purpose of rendering visible a group suffering from chronic underfunding of medical research and government inertia. At a time of crisis, pathographic writing focalised community activism (see Chambers 1998). In the rather familiar jeremiads against what Christopher Lasch called ‘the culture of narcissism’, in which the dominance of a ‘therapeutic ideology’ could be evidenced by this confessional turn in public culture (Lasch 1979, 98), it is easy to forget the valuable political function deliberately transgressive confession can serve. The cultural value accrued to the confession of the traumatic fracture of identity in autobiographical narrative has raised the stakes about the truth value of such utterances. Far from the autobiographical pact disappearing into postmodern relativism, where truth and fiction are indistinguishable and no-one particularly cares, the most literal and naive version of the pact has become rigorously – even hysterically – policed.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

410

410 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

roger luckhurst

Even before Kathryn Harrison released The Kiss (1997), her memoir about her mother’s death from cancer and her sexual relationship with her father which commenced when she was twenty years old, this unnerving disruption to the simple dichotomies of child victim and adult predator, unsullied innocence and corrupt experience, was violently condemned (see Parker 2002). Harrison was far from shamed into silence: she went on to write two further memoirs about her mother, Seeking Rapture (2003) and The Mother Knot (2004). The vituperative attacks on her character and the distaste for the revelations were symptomatic of a culture that judged such works primarily on a juridical model, indeed actively suspecting an overly ‘literary’ style as incompatible with the authentic depiction of trauma. That passages in The Kiss were virtually identical to her earlier novels, Thicker Than Water and Exposure, were not taken as evidence of traumatic compulsion to return to events in different forms but the deliberate intent to fabricate. The same suspicion of simple literary devices, such as free indirect discourse, also put McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes under scrutiny for embellishment. Meanwhile, Constance Briscoe’s memoir Ugly (2006) had its claims actually tested in the British courts in a case brought by the author’s allegedly abusive mother, the subject of the book. Part of this newly suspicious approach to the autobiography of trauma is to do with the social credit that accrues to the survivor, lauded and feted in popular culture, expected to be the repository for narratives of supersession or redemption. In a study of Oprah Winfrey’s influence on this narrative arc from trauma to redemption, Eva Illouz argues that ‘the culture of recovery has contributed to a deep narrativization of the self through suffering. The trauma narrative is a powerful identity narrative that provides a “centre” to the self by stitching together past and present in a narrative of self-knowledge’ (Illouz 2003, 97). This is why Winfrey insisted on a full televisual confession and apology from the writer James Frey when it was established that his memoir about desperate alcoholism and eventual recovery, A Million Little Pieces (2003), was revealed to have been considerably embellished. Frey eventually revealed that the book had been rejected as a novel many times before it was re-categorised as autobiography and became an Oprah-endorsed bestseller. The revelations prompted a re-categorisation and an offer from the publisher to reimburse readers who themselves felt traumatised by this betrayal of the autobiographical pact. Frey and his first readers had been caught by the sparkle of survivor allure; in an odd way, Frey then became the true survivor of his own traumatic outing as a false one.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

411 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

Breaking the pact

411

It is this new form of cultural value that has actively fostered a consistent breaking of the autobiographical pact as people fraudulently try to assume the mantle of heroic and redemptive survival. Sue Vice, in her studies of the false memoir, has identified three categories: outright invention, with the aim to deceive; embellished testimony, where a core of authentic experience has been amplified; and more problematic cases where objective fraud is simultaneously a kind of subjective truth for the writer (see Vice 2010). Vice continually makes the point that truth and falsity cannot be simply determined internally in autobiographical discourse, and her last category reveals that any pact that relies on a simplistic divide of truth and fiction begins to unravel. The problems presented by the false memoir crystallise the foundational problem of autobiography itself. Outright frauds are many and multiple. There have long been examples of attempts to assume racial identities of others, usually by white people who envy the specificity that a burdened traumatic history assigns. In Australia, Wanda Koomatrie’s My Own Sweet Time (1996) was an Aboriginal autobiography written by the white man Leon Carmen. In America, appropriation of black history is common. Love and Consequences (2008) by ‘Margaret B. Jones’, the memoir published as the account of a mixed-race member of a Los Angeles street-gang, was written by a white woman from the wealthy Valley who had paid careful attention to inner city ghetto clichés and genres. More elaborate was the construction of the former male prostitute and transgender author J. T. Leroy. Leroy was most noted for the searing honesty of the autobiographical novel, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (1999). Leroy was not only an entirely fictional writing identity constructed by Laura Albert, but also a persona performed in public by Savannah Koop in an elaborate deception designed to work by playing on the prurience and prejudice of the reading public. There has been a long tradition of whites assuming the ‘spiritual’ personae of native peoples: in the 1970s, aside from the peculiar case of The Education of Little Tree, a sensitive account of Native American life which turned out to have been composed by the convicted Southern racist Asa Carter, the New Age culture of self-exploration was dominated by the series of books by Carlos Castaneda about his shamanic initiation, which proved to be a largely fabricated series that began with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968. These appropriations have continued into the era of trauma: three volumes of memoir by the Navajo author ‘Nasdijj’ between 2000 and 2004 were exposed in 2006 as a ‘Navahoax’ written by the white author Tim Barrus, who complained that the deception was the only way to get into print. There are now whole studies of these impostor narratives (see Rosenthal

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

412

412 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

roger luckhurst

and Schäfer 2014). Whiteness, as Ross Chambers has suggested, operates as the ‘unexamined’ racial category, ‘distributing to unmarkedness the privileges of normalcy and unexaminedness and to reserve for markedness the characteristics of derivedness, deviation, secondariness, and examinability’ (Chambers 1997, 189). As new paradigms revalue what aspects of the ‘examined life’ accrue cultural significance, the desire for some to invert racial privilege and claim to be marked by trauma is clearly a way of finally becoming a subject worthy of notice and examination. The works that arouse the most ire for any hint of breaking the autobiographical pact are Holocaust memoirs, perhaps most obviously because falsification allies in its own way to genocidal logic and the persistent revisionism that doubts the historical record of the Nazi destruction of Jews and others. Testimony here has a deeply serious, ethical imperative, and there is a conventional critical line that any form of narrative shaping or rhetorical elaboration is to be discouraged as inauthentic to the extremity of experience (see Langer 1991). There are outright fakes and hoaxes, such as Bernard Holstein’s Stolen Soul (2004), an account of escape from Auschwitz in fact written by a Catholic Australian, but more interesting are those that either embellish experience or fabricate from a position of completely sincere subjective truth. Deli Strummer’s A Personal Reflection on the Holocaust (1988), for instance, is a memoir written by a woman who spent two years in Theresienstadt, yet fabricates instead an experience of five years in Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Some prisoners at Theresienstadt, the ‘model’ concentration camp/ghetto used by the Nazis to deceive the International Red Cross in 1944 about the true nature of the camp system, feel shame. Strummer clearly projects herself into the worst places of the machinery of death to compensate for her shame and survival guilt. The same is true of Martin Gray’s memoir, For Those I Loved, which improbably heightens his already terrible war experience with sections in Treblinka probably constructed from other sources. As Sue Vice suggests, these books aim to blend the personal with the collective experience of the European Jewry, to become more representative than they can ever be in actuality. The most complex instances of Holocaust fabrication, though, are the formally inventive books, Binjamin Wilkomirsi’s Fragments (1996) and Misha Defonesca’s Surviving with Wolves (2004). Both were internationally praised, prize-winning accounts of the extraordinary survival of Jewish children in the midst of Nazi oppression; both have subsequently been exposed as fabrications; both authors continued nevertheless to claim the subjective truth of their accounts. Wilkomirski’s poetic, elusive renditions

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

413 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

Breaking the pact

413

of very early childhood memories of the camps were conveyed in shattered, hallucinatory prose. ‘Wikomirski was the embodiment of the purest form of victim: a child whose identity had been erased in the Holocaust, but who was condemned to stay alive’ (Gourevitch 1999, 50). In 1999, Wilkomirski was revealed to be Bruno Grosjean, an illegitimate child born in Switzerland in 1941 and later adopted by a Protestant family and renamed Bruno Dössekker. Despite the plain documentary evidence of his origins, Dössekker continued to claim that Fragments represented the truth of his experience. He was supported in this claim even by Holocaust survivors. Israel Gutman argued: ‘Even if he is not Jewish, the fact that he was deeply affected by the Holocaust is of huge importance . . . He is not a fake. He is someone who lives this story very deeply in his soul. His pain is authentic’ (Lappin 1999, 46). This forgiving stance is itself representative of the transformation of notions of truth and authenticity in the trauma paradigm. It is not simply that one must always affirm the subjective reality of the survivor, as so many psychiatric advocates insist (see, for instance, Herman 1994). It is also an understanding that traumatic memory is marked less by searing fixity than by a recognition that recall can be highly unstable and marked by mobile, phantasmatic investments. These autobiographies still have their pacts investigated by readerdetectives and judged as true or false in an entirely legalistic framework. However, the critic Leigh Gilmore has suggested that the risk of public humiliation or denunciation has fostered various tactics of evasion, including a deliberate confusion of fact and fiction in ways that are designed to foreground instability and confound simple judgment. In playing along ‘the borderland between autobiography and fiction’, writers work to ‘establish an alternative jurisdiction between autobiography and fiction’ (Gilmore 2001, 48, 146). The hybrid category of ‘autofiction’ allows writers to tack between different modes, foregrounding a certain selfmythologising or deliberate toying with any pact too rigidly drawn. At the fullest extent of the cultural influence of the trauma paradigm, Philip Roth presented a series of true fictions and false memoirs that set out to bewilder, including a memoir called The Facts (1988) which was attacked for its falsehoods and evasions in an appendix by Roth’s fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. In English letters, with less pyrotechnics, one of the most prominent examples was J. G. Ballard. Ballard, long considered a marginal writer of perverse techno-erotic science fiction, broke into the mainstream with his autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984). At a stroke, the book seemed to decode Ballard’s perverse career as the product of a profoundly traumatic childhood as a prisoner of war in Shanghai. As

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

414

414 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

roger luckhurst

we have come to expect, the book was denounced as factually inaccurate by some of his fellow internees (Ballard edited out the fact that he remained in the camp with his parents). More bewilderingly, the ostensible sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991), was a fictional autobiography in which a character called ‘J. G. Ballard’ seemed to live out versions of the obsessions explored in his novels. The book, he said, was ‘my life seen through the mirror of the fiction prompted by that life’ (Self 1995, 360). Strangely, for a sequel The Kindness of Women rewrote and fundamentally changed some aspects of the story in Empire of the Sun, as if to re-emphasise the books as acts of self-mythologising rather than as historical fictions. Elements were rewritten again in Ballard’s last book, Miracles of Life (2008), an ostensibly ‘straight’ memoir written when he was terminally ill. The more Ballard appeared to share, the more he splintered into autofictional versions, but his readers did not jump to judgement precisely because a perverse playfulness with authorial persona was always foregrounded. As the public sphere becomes ever more fractured and disputatious, demanding a rudimentary and punitive version of the autobiographical pact and ever more transparency, the evasive tactics of autofiction seem to make perfect sense.

Bibliography Amis, Martin. 1999. Experience. London: Jonathan Cape. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Roland Barthes. Translated by R. Howard. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘The Death of the Author’. In Image Music Text, 142–8. Translated by S. Heath. New York: Farrar. Benstock, Shari, ed. 1988. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. London: Routledge. Chambers, Ross. 1997. ‘The Unexamined’. In Whiteness: A Critical Reader, 187–203. Edited by M. Hill. New York: New York University Press. Chambers, Ross. 1998. Facing It: AIDS Dairies and the Death of the Author. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Couser, G. T. 2012. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1984. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Edited by C. McDonald. Translated by P. Kamuf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. ‘Circumfession’. In G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Des Pres, Terence. 1980. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

415 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

Breaking the pact

415

Foucault, Michel. 1981. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by R. Howard. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1984. ‘What is an Author?’ In The Foucault Reader, 101–20. Edited by P. Rabinow. London: Penguin. Fraser, Sylvia. 1989. My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and of Healing. London: Virago. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gourevitch, P. 1999. ‘The Memory Thief’, The New Yorker 14 June, 48–64. Herman, Judith. 1994. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: HarperCollins. Illouz, Eva. 2003. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamor of Misery. New York: Columbia University Press. Irving, Clifford. 2007. The Hoax (reissue of Project Octavio, 1977). London: Corgi. Irving, Clifford. 2008. Howard Hughes: The Autobiography (1972). London: John Blake. Kauffman, L. A. 2001. ‘Identity Politics: The Past, the Present, and the Future’. In Identity Politics in the Women’s Movement, 23–34. Edited by B. Ryan, New York: New York University Press. Langer, Lawrence. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lappin, E. 1999. ‘The Man with Two Heads’. Granta 66: 7–65. Lasch, Christopher. 1979. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in the Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Warner Books. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography. Edited by John Paul Eakin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lifton, Robert Jay. 1968. Death in Life: The Survivors of Hiroshima. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Lifton, Robert Jay. 1973. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims Nor Executioners. New York: Simon and Schuster. Loftus, E. and K. Ketcham. 1996. The Myth of Repressed Memories: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. New York: St Martin’s. Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge. Niederland, William. 1968. ‘The Psychiatric Evaluation of Emotional Disorders in Survivors of Nazi Persecution.’ In Massive Psychic Trauma, 8–22. Edited by H. Krystal. New York: International Universities Press. Olney, James. 1972. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parker, D. 2002. ‘Counter-Transference in Reading Autobiography: The Case of Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss’. Biography 25: 493–504.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C28.3D

416

416 [402–416] 21.10.2015 4:33PM

roger luckhurst

Rosenthal, C. and S. Schäfer. 2014. Fake Identity? Impostor Narrative in North American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Self, Will. 1995. ‘Conversations: J. G. Ballard.’ In Junk Mail, 329–71. London: Penguin. Vice, Sue. 2010. ‘False Testimony’. In The Future of Memory, 155–63. Edited by R. Crownshaw, Jane Kilby, and Antony Rowland. New York: Berghahn Books. Vice, Sue. 2014. Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. 1996. Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–48. London: Macmillan.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

417 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

chapter 29

The machines that write us Social media and the evolution of the autobiographical impulse Andreas Kitzmann

Among those interested in the study of autobiography, it has become a truism, or perhaps even a cliché, to state that the need to tell one’s own story is a universal one, at least on this planet. The form and nature of this story is of course up for debate given the myriad ways in which humanity has represented individual experience over the course of millennia. Indeed, the very term ‘story’ should be framed by very large quotation marks given its associations with linearity and the primacy given to the individualised narrator. One person’s ‘story’ could very well be another’s random scribble, just as anonymous mutterings and whispers passed from one generation to the next can evolve into complex narrations of personal and collective experience. Technically, of course, the term autobiography is not only historically contingent but also frequently employed as an arguably ahistorical representative of the ‘structure of feeling’ associated with the Enlightenment and modern condition. This is particularly the case of the archetypical Renaissance ‘man’ that privileges the self-possessed individual who literally thinks him or herself into a state of being. Descartes is an obvious representative figure, notably in terms of being the figurehead for the enlightened mind and what is eventually to become the modern sensibility. Reaching back even further in time is the elevation of St. Augustine, who is granted a kind of ‘proto-modern’ status by being associated with the very first rumblings of what we now know as the literary genre of autobiography. ‘Augustine’, writes Arthur Kroker, ‘might rightly be described as the first citizen of the modern world’ whose Confessions function as a kind of founding exemplar of ‘directly apprehended experience of the direct deliverance of will, nature and consciousness’ (Kroker and Cook 1986, 37). James Olney follows suit by writing that ‘the entire justification, validation, necessity, and indeed exemplary instance of writing one’s life, of 417

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

418

418 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

andreas kitzmann

finding the words that signify the self and its history, are offered to us for the first time . . . in the Confessions’ (Olney 1998, 2). While we can certainly debate such claims, what is important to note here is not who was the world’s first autobiographer but rather what such claims reveal about perceptions of change and departure. As general umbrella figures, both Descartes and Augustine function as markers of human evolution, specifically in terms of the conceptions and practices of the self and identity. In this respect these dual figures exemplify a break in human sensibility where on the one hand there is an apparent state of being that is designated as premodern, and on the other something that we understand as modern or at least on the way to becoming modern, in terms of privileging individualism, self directed agency, introspection, and internal narration. What is also notable, especially with respect to the interests of this chapter, is how such designations of self are tied to specific material conditions and technologies of expression. In other words, the modern self is a self that writes, whereas its pre-modern counterpart is largely confined to oral forms of expression. Here we can turn to Walter Ong’s familiar ideas regarding the differences between literacy and orality, which are often summarised via the stances of performativity and introspection and the demands they make on human memory. Oral cultures tend to rely on mnemonic devices such as formulas, poetic devices, memory aids, and rhetorical rules to sustain and preserve their narratives (Ong 1982, 34–6). As such, the concepts of authorship and originality have little or no role in so much that the ‘speakers’ of a story function more as performative conduits of already wellknown tales and narrative forms than originators of something that is entirely new and derived from a wholly individual perspective. The conventional figure of the oral story teller is thus one who is dependent not only on past articulations of a particular story or tale, but also on the contextual specificities of where he or she is telling the story and who is listening to it. Again, by convention, audiences within oral cultures are imagined as active, if not interactive, and which, unlike their modern literate counterparts, are in direct contact with the ‘story teller’, who in turn is in contact with them, thereby enacting a dynamic narrative environment unlike that encountered in the printed text. Literate cultures by contrast are conceived of as being structured by the paradigms of self-reflection, interiority, permanence, and originality. Within the Western tradition, the modern conception of the writer is one of articulated authority (i.e. authorship), in so much as what is written is done so from a position of self-possessed knowledge and opinion. The written page is a stable place and conventionally linked to the individual(s)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

419 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

The machines that write us

419

who wrote it and who is thereby acknowledged and deemed responsible for its contents. The written page is also the place of reason, the place of linear thought, modern order, and form. Again, by convention, writing has become one of the dominant paradigms with which to understand and measure human thought, memory and intelligence: ‘To think is to write in the language of thought and to remember is to search the space of our memory until we find what is written there’ (Bolter 2001, 94). By extension then, the written page is the place of the self, which is to say the stable, enlightened, and self-aware individual, ‘the internal world of a single ego‘, and hence the very foundation of the modern sensibility (Bunkers and Huff 1996, 3). While admittedly brief, my summary of the general differences between oral and literate cultures is intended to draw attention to the role that the material conditions and technologies play in the articulations and representations of human experience. In other words, the material differences between the oral and the literate are such that they engender significantly different forms of being in the world – modes of expression, modes of consciousness, modes of reason and articulation. As Friedrich Kittler reminds us, ‘technology is entrenched in our history’ (Kittler 1999, 200, original emphasis). It is from this basic premise that statements regarding the impact of specific technological innovations associated with representation tend to be articulated. The printing press, for instance, has been generally acknowledged as one of the primary agents of social change (Eisenstein 1979) and the discursive engine behind the scientific and industrial revolutions and their concomitant artistic and literary developments. Similarly, electronic media have been identified as significant drivers of change that impact not only the macro structures of socio-economics, but also the very nature of the human condition. (Castells 2000). The autobiographical modes of self-expression associated with particular media technologies (the diary for print culture, the snapshot for visual culture, the Facebook page for digital culture) thus provide useful and direct insights into how we, as collectives and as individuals, begin to restructure the self in response to major technological shifts. The focus of this chapter will be specifically on how digital technology, as represented by social networking platforms, has changed the manner in which autobiographical practices are conceived and enacted in contemporary society. This leads to an urgent question: to what extent do digital forms of self-documentation engender new forms of subjectivity and identity? Arguably, there are notable differences in digital forms of autobiographical writing (however loosely

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

420

420 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

andreas kitzmann

defined) that indicate that something special is going on, something that may provide insights into an emerging and potentially very different mode of being in the world. There have been many, at times, breathless proclamations regarding the impact of digital communications technology on human society that range from the euphoric to the apocalyptic. On one end of the spectrum we have the thinly disguised neo-liberalism of Nicholas Negroponte, who in 1996 enthusiastically predicted that the ubiquitous digitisation was not only an inevitable reality but one that would ultimately make the world a better place (Negroponte 1996). Yet on the other end lie a range of glum assertions that our entry into online life is stripping us of our essential humanity, such as recent studies that claim that social networking is turning us all into selfish narcissists (Alloway 2014). However, regardless of where one chooses to position oneself, there is a general consensus that digital technology has had a profound impact on human communication and society. Much of this impact is arguably related to how digital modes of communication have changed our individual and collective experience of the spatial and temporal conditions of human society. A useful and by now classic articulation of this change is Castells’s notion of the ‘network society’, which is depicted as a society that relies on ‘knowledge-based, information technologies to enhance and accelerate the production of knowledge and information, in a self-expanding, virtuous circle. Because information processing is at the source of life, and of social action, every domain of our eco-social system is thereby transformed’ (Castells 2000, 3). As such, conventional notions of time and space, and the limits that these notions imply in terms of human agency and materiality, have been transformed into the paradigm of the always on, always connected, where everything and everyone is, at least potentially, persistently within reach. There is now the widespread expectation of near constant accessibility and possibility, which in turn leads to the social pressure of maintaining a dual existential presence, with one being online and the other in the so-called ‘real’ world, or to use the familiar SMS phrase, ‘irl’ (in real life). Social media is a form of self-documentation that both draws from earlier traditions (such as diary writing or snapshot photography) and departs from them in notable and transformative ways. Digital social media is also indebted to earlier forms of web-based self-documentation, such as personal home pages and web cams. The departures speak to not only an acceleration of previous trends in digital culture, but also point to radical new ways of conceiving the relationship between the individual, the group, the network, and the socio-economic complex itself.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

421 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

The machines that write us

421

One significant difference between a traditional, paper-based form of self-documentation such as a diary, is that the representation of a life within a social media platform like Facebook can be changed and updated at any point by not only the ‘author’ of the material, but by others as well. Paul Arthur writes that ‘there is no doubt that even this single feature, the ability to “manage” online content at will, is changing the way we see ourselves and each other’ (Arthur 2009, 76). What Arthur is getting at here is that this ability for online content to be continuously updated runs counter to one of the basic tenets of the printed text – namely its permanence and stability, at least in principle. As scholarly work on the use of annotation by readers of printed books reveals, there is a long-standing practice of books being appropriated and ‘marked up’ by readers via physical interventions into the page itself – notations, drawings, comments, scribbles, inserted pages, and so on (Sherman 2008). In this sense the permanence of the printed page is arguably over-stated. That said, books are officially updated only when authorised by way of a new edition. Otherwise they remain in their original published form, albeit potentially annotated or otherwise altered by their readers. It is in part this (arguably) contrived stability of the authorial voice that forms the backbone of the concept of the singular, stable subject that is believed to reside ‘behind’ any autobiographical representation. In contrast, the subject that is constructed within the likes of Facebook is piecemeal and fragmented. The social media self is a self that is constructed out of bits of data – status updates, uploaded photos, tags by ‘friends’, news feeds, and the implied social and cultural capital created by one’s network of friends. Again, think of the difference between a traditional form of self-documentation, such as an autobiography, and the types of self-documentation that occur within Facebook. In the former case, it is implied that the author of the autobiography is responsible for the content, giving rise to what Philippe Lejeune called the ‘autobiographical pact’. But in Facebook things are different. It is almost like a cybernetic organism that absorbs enormous amounts of data, with some of it written by the owner of the Facebook page and some of it written or contributed to by friends and strangers. According to Paul Arthur, digital forms of self-documentation will change our conception of the biographical subject, of the biographer, and of biography in ways that we cannot yet understand. I would echo this by asserting that these digital forms of self-documentation will also impact our conception of the subject or individual itself, and by extension impact the way we

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

422

422 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

andreas kitzmann

construct and express our memories and means to achieve selfunderstanding. The material effects of the digital are important here, by which I mean that the actual things and associated practices that we use to construct our life narratives have a direct bearing on the form and substance of that narrative itself. Take the smartphone, for instance, which is now almost indistinguishable from a computer in terms of functionality. Paul Arthur describes the smartphone as a biography machine, by virtue of the fact that it contains so much information about us. This information, however, is highly fragmented – a collection of data units that serve as basic descriptors of preferences, habits, and transactions. Yet this basic information is cumulative and interconnected: ‘The digital revolution has enabled information to be easily amassed and combined. Even information that is superficial or incomplete can be quite useful in obtaining more data about individuals. Information breeds information’ (Arthur 2009, 86). The digital self, the self that is manifested through digital social media, is thus a distributed one. It is a self that is partly created through the deliberate and conscious acts of an individual but it is also a self that is the result of data feeds, algorithms, and inputs from other individuals and organisations. Accordingly, as a form of self-documentation, digital social media is not something that you, as an individual, can really control, nor is it something that you have sole authorship or ownership of. It is a hybrid form that points to a new way of conceiving identity and selfhood. The terms ‘posthuman’ and ‘cyborg’ have emerged as ways with which to think about such new forms of identity within the digital sphere. According to Katherine Hayles, the posthuman offers a way to rethink subjectivity on the basis of a ‘self’ that emerges alongside changes in technology, and thus stands in contrast to conventional liberal humanism, which holds that the self emerges through reason and introspection (Hayles 1999). Similarly, Donna Haraway’s use of the cyborg points to the hybrid nature of the contemporary self – a self that is the result of ‘technologies’, whether cultural, bureaucratic, material, or otherwise. In other words, there is no essential human, but only fusions of the biological and the technological than cannot be wholly isolated from one another (Haraway 2000). What is interesting about most social media, and I’ll just limit myself to Facebook as my prime example, is that it is still based on the ‘fiction’ of the individual as an autonomous subject that is directly and almost totally in control of its representation. This idea is explored by Laurie McNeill in her article ‘There is No I in the Networ’‘. She writes:

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

423 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

The machines that write us

423

Facebook offers a compelling case study for the apparently posthuman subject that emerges in cyberspace because it has been designed to become part of users’ daily lives, and to shape their offline narratives and selves in Facebooked ways. These designs, based on software platforms and algorithmic data-crunching, show us Haraway’s cyborg in action, producing selves from a human-machine interface. At the same time, however, these programs reenact highly traditional concepts of selves and narratives, and thus throw into relief the boundaries of old and new. Facebook builds on both human and posthuman concepts of the human subject in compelling, and arguably posthuman, life narratives, as its users produce and are produced by accounts of digital life. (McNeil 2012, 67)

According to McNeil, Facebook relies on traditional ideas about the Enlightenment self by virtue of the fact that the premise of the site is based on the idea of an authentic self – a self that literally authors and authorises the content expressed within a given Facebook page. Such a view is endorsed by Mark Zuckerberg himself, who states that ‘you have one identity. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity’ (Kirkpatrick 2010, 199). This singular identity is reinforced by the requirements for creating an initial Facebook profile – a profile that encourages users to identify themselves via largely conventional ideas about what constitutes a real self (tastes, preferences, familial relationships, political and religious beliefs, photo identification, and so on). As such, the Facebook self, at least at the stage of profile creation, is in stark contrast to the so-called virtual self explored by theorists like Sherry Turkle or enacted by sites such as Second Life, which emphasise the creation of multiple selves and a very conscious and playful manipulation of identity. However, despite the initial confirmation of the single, centred self, the nature of online identity quickly changes the moment that one begins to interact with a social media network. Central to this change is the condition that individual identity is only granted meaning and significance ‘in relation to the network’, which in effect means that the ‘private, interior life of the humanist subject . . . is thrown over for the networked self’ (McNeil 2012, 72). This networked self is the result of a complex collaboration between not only the human users but also the algorithms within Facebook that work ‘together to make a self’ (Ibid., 72). This integration between the human and non-human essentially extends the construction of a life-narrative beyond the immediate contexts of a singular life and, moreover, relinquishes control of that narrative to forces that are both unseen and not necessarily understood. A key component here is connectivity, which increasingly functions as a kind of over-arching paradigm for

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

424

424 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

andreas kitzmann

the determination of legitimacy and value. As such, a life well lived is a life well connected or even rendered into connection itself. In this respect the narrative merges into what Hoskins calls ‘the connective turn’, with respect to the experience of memory in a digital media culture. The connective turn includes the enveloping of the everyday in realtime or near-instantaneous communications, including ‘messaging’, be these peer-to-peer, one-to-many, or more complex and diffused connections within and between groups, ‘crowds’, or networks, and facilitated through mobile media and social networking technologies and other internet-based services. (as cited in Ibid., 20)

The confluence between narrative and connectivity signals a shift in ‘the organization of platforms from database structures into narrative structures’ (van Dijk 2013, 5). The former is linked to the early years of web 2.0 platforms, which can be roughly contained between the years 2000 and 2009 (O’Reilly 2009), with the latter being represented, at least by van Dijk, to Facebook’s introduction of the Timeline feature in September 2011. While one may certainly quibble about the exact dates, what is notable for the purposes of this chapter is the departure from what Lev Manovich, among others, identified as ‘the distinct architectural nature of interactive platforms as databases’ that effectively ‘forced users to present information in a nonlinear, non-narrative fashion’ (Manovich 2001, 218, as cited in van Dijk). This preference for the non-linear was enthusiastically endorsed by early proponents of hypertext fiction, which effectively recast the conventional Western narrative into the database model where the ‘authorial text’ was rendered into a spatial system of information, to be accessed via multiple entry points, and with the aid of interfaces encouraged self-defined points of access and retrieval. In effect, it is the paradigm of the database that made ‘new’ media new, or at least made it different from other media that remained within the so-called narrative fold. But according to van Dijk, the return to narrative is signalled by the arrival of Facebook’s Timeline. Timeline’s format is organized as a narrative biography, a story chronicling how life has been up to the present day by rearranging bits and pieces uploaded previously. The resulting narrative is a construction in hindsight, a retroactive ordering of life events at one moment in time. Facebook’s encoded activity resembles the analogue real-life shoe box experience: people reassembling pieces from their old photo albums, diaries, scrapbook and weblog into one smooth presentation of the past. (van Dijk 2013, 6)

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

425 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

The machines that write us

425

The introduction of Timeline should be taken as symptomatic of similar changes in the digital landscape, of which Facebook is a key but not unique representative, which I would argue are born out of a collective desire and push towards restraining the inbred non-linearity of the digital cosmos. There are two main directives at work here. The first could be thought of as a regressive or even defensive move on the part of our desire to impose order and sense to a rhizomatic information system that expands at a pace and in directions too multiple to even comprehend. With each input, which now includes everything from keystrokes and image captures to data feeds provided by wearable devices and online browsing habits, the ability to understand and represent the consequences and meaning of that input diminishes. This brings me back to the earlier discussion of the function of multiple agents of identity construction that now play such an important role in online, social-media-driven platforms of self-representation. To be an individual online now means that one must be an individual relationally, which is to say as rendered by multiple composites of data entry that are made legible, linear, and understandable by the collective efforts of algorithmic masters. We are now far beyond the familiar concept of the performative self or even the fragmented, postmodern self. We are now in a place where the self is paradoxically always unfinished and about to be contributed to by multiple authors and agents, but also cloaked in the illusion of a timeline that neatly plots life according to earmarked highlights, low points, and milestones. Of course, the narrative turn within the context of sites such as Facebook is situated within a field of dollar signs. Facebook creates revenue by the data associated with its many users – data that advertisers and other companies find very useful in terms of targeting their products in a very specific and timely manner. The nature of this ‘targeting’, however, has evolved far beyond annoying pop up ads. Increasingly, the practices and choices we make as consumers – the products we buy and the services we employ – are being integrated into our life narratives and, as such, serve as markers of personal identity and achievement in the same way that conventional milestones do. Indeed, given the collaborative generation of Facebook content, the generation of promotional content has become part of the biographical machine. Among the more sophisticated (and perhaps insidious) mechanisms are the ‘sponsored stories’ created by Facebook (Fisher 2015. These ‘stories‘, which are part of the larger trend of social advertising, are essentially ads that are based on recent interactions with brands online. In many cases this ‘interaction’ can be indirect in the sense that they can be generated by any one of the most common Facebook

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

426

426 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

andreas kitzmann

actions: ‘liking’ a page, commenting on a particular post, playing a game within Facebook, sharing a website, and so on. Whatever the source of the interaction, the end result is basically the same – the insertion of branded content and logos into the regular narrative activity of the Facebook user. In addition to raising issues of privacy and unpaid ‘audience labour’ (Terranova 2004), the rise of social advertising signals not only the collaborative nature of online forms of autobiography and life-writing but also the blurred lines between self-generated and auto-generated source material which the user has no direct control over or awareness of. In addition, the infusion of branding and implied corporate loyalties into the life stories that we articulate through digital social media further disperses the figure of the self-possessed individual into a matrix of co-evolutionary forces. Autobiography thus merges into ‘automated biography’.1 It is tempting to lament such developments as further indications of how consumer culture and technology are not only taking away what real freedoms we still have but are, as Andrew Keen notes, transforming the world ‘into a winner-take-all, upstairs-downstairs kind of society’ (Keen 2015). While there are certainly many issues at stake here, I would like to end this chapter with a more neutral discussion of what recent trends in online life-writing (specifically within social media) reveal about the ‘nonhuman dimension of life itself‘, or, to put it in another way, the flattening out of ontology itself. As Bryant says, Flat ontology argues that all entities are on equal ontological footing and that no entity, whether artificial or natural, symbolic or physical, possesses greater ontological dignity than other objects. While indeed some objects might influence the collectives to which they belong to a greater extent than others, it doesn’t follow from this that these objects are more real than others. Existence, being, is a binary such that something either is or is not. (Bryant 2011, 246)

Such ideas fall broadly into what is generally known as ‘new materialism’, and in some instances, ‘object oriented ontology’. Whatever the terminology, the effect is what Rosi Braidotti has termed ‘a radical critique of anthropocentrism’ through which he ‘rethinks life not as a metaphysical privilege of human beings, but as an immanent process of variation or ‘becoming’ in which new connections between bodies, species, and technologies continuously unfold’ (as cited in van den Hengel 2012, 3). These ideas have considerable bearing on the understanding of life-writing and autobiography in so much as they signal a shift away from the individual subject as the core of what constitutes an autobiographical act. ‘A life’

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

427 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

The machines that write us

427

becomes ‘an affective space of becoming’, or a ‘pre-individual or impersonal force of becoming: it is life as an ongoing process of becoming’ (Ibid., 15). Van den Hengel continues, The aim of writing is not to assert an autobiographical ‘I’ over and against the world, over and against life, but to become with the world, with life: it is to empty out the self and to open it to encounters with difference, to become open to life itself as an ongoing affirmation of difference. (Ibid., 17)

In the context of digital social media, such reflections on what is essentially a form of posthumanism provide a constructive platform from which to move beyond lamentations of loss – loss of privacy, loss of self, loss of agency – and into a frame of mind that considers the possibilities inherent in a posthuman ontological world. Among these possibilities are the insights to be gained by focusing on the materiality of both the human and the non-human, and thus raising ‘questions of embodiment, ethics, and affect as they are conventionally understood in terms of individual personhood and modes of recognition that privilege the sovereign self’ (Whitlock 2010, 5). My point here is not to validate Facebook as a profound remaking of the human condition, but rather to consider aspects of the Facebook experience as symptomatic of broader ontological changes that have accompanied the integration of digital communications technology into our daily lives, especially when it comes to practices of selfrepresentation. As discussed at the very beginning of this chapter, the autobiographical act is one deeply entwined with the singular and sovereign ‘self‘. Yet within the digital sphere something else is potentially emerging – a kind of posthuman self that that exists within a condition of shared materiality and narrative making where objects also have stories and, moreover, are increasingly capable of informing and contributing to the stories that humans construct for themselves and each other. The conventional understanding of agency as associated with the sovereign self who is engaged in the act of autobiography is thus rendered into a kind of shared and sharing entity that both acts and is acted upon. A ‘new’, posthumanist self is arguably being shaped here, one that provides the ‘opportunity to reconsider conceptions of the self that have been the doxa of autobiographical narrative and critique to date’ (Ibid., 10). Of course, we must be careful to not get too carried away here. The bulk of applications such as Facebook are still rooted within the fundamentals of Western individualism and informed and energised by the paradigms of celebrity culture, consumerism, and capitalism that privilege the icon of the heroic self and the pursuit of self-transformation. However, if one looks behind

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

428

428 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

andreas kitzmann

the official rhetoric and agendas set by the various corporate entities, the actual practices within the vast and diverse spaces of social media arguably point to important changes in the nature and practice of self-narration and identity construction. One of the paradoxes here is that a significant portion of such changes are fuelled by the very material and corporately created instruments (in the form of devices, software, and algorithms) that engage with users of social media as they go about making and sharing their life narratives. On the surface this would suggest that such corporate agendas and devices are running the ‘narrative show’, so to speak. Yet this is not so clear when we begin to look behind the surface, behind the crisp interfaces and screens. The relationship between our narrative engines (whether pen, diary, camera, or Facebook page) is a co-dependent one where agency is shared and mutually constructed. As such, our life stories co-evolve with the many and countless objects around us, effectively displacing the autonomous ‘I’ at the centre of humanist ontology. As Graham Harman points out, the Western philosophical tradition champions a type of ontological hierarchy with sentient human beings at the top and inanimate objects at the bottom. He counters this view by claiming that ‘sentient consciousness, human theory and language’ can and should be added to the same list as the myriad of objects that engender change within the world – ‘the emergence of multicellular life, the beaks of birds, the domestication of cows and dogs, electricity and telephones, smart weapons, credit cards, atonal music’ (Harman 2005, 243–4). To deny humans their ontological throne is significant to this present discussion in so much that it literally ‘thingifies’ the human subject and reconfigures the humanist subject and the great chain of being into circles where each link, each ‘thing’, is as potentially relevant and capable of effecting change as the other. ‘The special features of human consciousness’ are thus ‘not built into the heart of ontology at all’ (Ibid., 243). The nature of being, reality, and existence are, to summarise Harman crudely, not subject to human consciousness and perception. We are not in any unique position, via our sentience, to determine, judge, or render into meaning any object at all for the simple reason that ‘we are one kind of object among others. It makes no difference to Being itself whether humans die off or not; the axes of the world will continue their strife long after we have all succeeded in murdering each other’ (Ibid., 245). As bleak and misanthropic as this may sound, Harman’s statements do have a measure of affirmation and positivity to them. For one, his views advocate a form of humility on the part of a self-centred, humanist subject and its imagined place in the world. As ‘selves’ we cannot claim to be the

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

429 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

The machines that write us

429

sole authors of our life stories, nor can we take total credit for them. The experiences encountered within digital life-writing effectively materialise aspects of ‘distributed notions of agency and affect’ and break the link between humanism, life narrative and the impulse towards ‘mastery’ (Whitlock 2012, xiii; Huff and Haefner 2012). Instead of mourning this as a loss of something essentially human, I would like to conclude by suggesting that we imagine what this may bring in terms of an alternative understanding and representation of the world – a world in which we as human beings considered everything as potentially relevant, and that we have no dominion over anything, including ourselves. Imagine as well a world, a state of being, in which human perception and sentience was not granted a privileged position from which to assign meaning or ontological status. And then think of a world where all things are in constant dialogue with one another and where we, as human beings, finally come to terms with the understanding that our ‘voice’ is no louder, no more crucial to the ongoing story of the universe than the ‘voices’ of my toaster or the cat across the street or a mutant DNA sequence, or the generative processes enabled by the simple act of ‘liking’.

Notes 1. In response to users concerned over privacy and the intrusion of unwanted marketing, Facebook announced that marketers will no longer be able to purchase sponsored stories as of April 2014. ‘Instead, social context – stories about social actions your friends have taken, such as liking a page or checking in to a restaurant – is now eligible to appear next to all ads shown to friends in Facebook’ (Facebook 2014).

Bibliography Arthur, Paul. 2009. ‘Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online’. a/b: Autobiography Studies 24. 74–92 Bolter, J. David. 2001. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bryant, Levi. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open University Press. Bunkers, Suzanne, and Cynthia Huff. 1996. Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

430

430 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

andreas kitzmann

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early- Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Facebook. 2014. ‘An Update to Facebook Ads’. www.facebook.com/notes/face book-and-privacy/an-update-to-facebook-ads/643198592396693 (accessed 9 September 2015). Fisher, Eran. 2015. ‘You Media: audiencing as marketing in social media’. Media, Culture and Society 37.1: 50–67. Haraway, Donna. 2000. ‘Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist– Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. In The Cybercultures Reader, 291–324. Edited by David Bell and Barbara Kennedy. London: Routledge. Harman, Greg. 2005. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago: Open Court Press. Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huff, Cynthia and Haefner, Joel. 2012. ‘His Master’s Voice: Animalographies, Life Writing and the Posthuman’. Biography 35. 1: 153–69. Keen, Andrew. 2015. The Internet is Not the Answer. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kirkpatrick D. 2010. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kroker, Arthur, and David Cook. 1986. The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics. Montreal: New World Perspectives. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McNeil, Laurie. 2012. ‘There is no ‘I’ in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography’. Biography 35. 1: 65–82. Negroponte, Nicholas. 1996. Being Digital. New York: Vintage. O’Reilly, Tim and Battelle, John. 2009. ‘Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five years On’. Web 2.0 Summit, 20–22 October 2009. San Francisco, CA. www.web2summit. com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194 (accessed17 February 2015). Olney, James. 1998. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. London: University of Chicago Press. Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Sherman, William. 2008. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/6838477/WORKINGFOLDER/SMYH/9781107078413C29.3D

431 [417–431] 21.10.2015 3:42PM

The machines that write us

431

Terranova Tiziana. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. Tracy Alloway, Rachel Runac, Mueez Qureshi, George Kemp. 2014. ‘Is Facebook Linked to Selfishness? Investigating the Relationships among Social Media Use, Empathy, and Narcissism’. Social Networking 3.03: 150–8. Turkle, Sherry. 1984. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York, Simon and Schuster. Turkle, Sherry. 1994. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. Van den Hengel, Louis. 2012. ‘Zoegraphy: Per/forming Posthuman Lives’. Biography 35.1: 1–20. Van Dijk, José. 2013. ‘You and one identity: performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn’. Media Culture and Society 32. 2: 199–215. Whitlock, Gillian. 2010. ‘Remediating Gorilla Girl: Rape Warfare and the Limits of Humanitarian Storytelling’, Biography 33.3: 471–97. Yates, Francis. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.