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Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography
Author(s): Francis R. Hart

Source: New Literary History , Spring, 1970, Vol. 1, No. 3, History and Fiction (Spring,
1970), pp. 485-511
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468268
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Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography
Francis R. Hart
FI OR whatever reasons, autobiography has become a flourishing

and sophisticated art, and literary critic and theorist alike
pay it increasing attention. The new sophistication of the
artist has modified older expectancies and methods; and pre-
dictably, the new critical apologists divide into traditionalists, who
seek to regularize what they take to be a "genre" with a hereditary
essence - "true autobiography," Gusdorf's "autobiographie propre-
ment dite," and relativists such as Alfred Kazin, who begin with what
looks peculiarly new and postulate that "autobiography, like other
literary forms, is what a gifted writer makes of it."
Both sides are continually preoccupied with a question which,
while inescapable, is in part a pseudo-problem: the relation in auto-
biographical writing of the fictive and the historical, "design" and
"truth," Dichtung und Wahrheit. But two other questions also persist.
The evaluative question of formal consistency and integrity provokes
theorists to specific judgments that are conventional and premature.
Moreover, analytic surveys of the question of autobiographical inten-
tion become rigid and exclusive, identifying "autobiography proper"
with a single "form" or intention, and excluding works that differ in
formal perspective, dramatic focus, or rhetorical end. The questions
are neither improper nor irrelevant. But if their answers are not to
be narrow or premature, they had best be considered first in light of
the wide plurality of mimetic and formal value of which autobiog-
raphy has proved capable. Following is a brief contribution to such
an anatomy, focused on the three preoccupations I have singled out:
the mimetic question of the interplay of history and fiction, the formal
question of the tension between purposive form and experimental
development, and the generic question of intention, of the autobio-
grapher's fluctuating idea of his purpose and of the reader he would
1 Kazin, "Autobiography as Narrative," Michigan Quarterly Review, III (1964),

210-16, page 211; Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions et limites de I'autobiographie," in
Formen der Selbstdarstellung, ed. Reichenkron and Haase (Berlin, 1956), o10-23.

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486 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
reach. The present state of such qu

pioneering works of Shumaker, K
Sayre, Morris, and Mandel.2 Noti
my own less prescriptive approach
modern autobiography. The formu
able body of possible - and cont
equally controversial assumption
two centuries ago, I shall limit the
successors.
On the first question, Rousseau sounds the keynot

to his kind "a portrait in every way true to natur
"in simple detail all that has happened to me, al
all that I have felt," and, says Stephen Spender, "o
does not tell the truth. There is a lie concealed
method" (70). Truth is a definitive but elusive
intention. John Morris is right: "autobiography
history - a narrative of events occurring in tim
the Bergsonian Gusdorf, "l'historien de soi-meme"
"le pech6 original de l'autobiographie ... revenant
propre passe, il postule l'unite et l'identite de son e
confondre ce qu'il fut avec ce qu'il est devenu"
Renan was right, too, when he reflected on Goeth
poesie for him), "Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours p
be history, autobiography must be fictive. The pag
strating this truism might be better spent explorin
Gusdorf and Kazin both contradict themselves on it. Gusdorf
observes that in autobiography we are given "le temoignag
homme sur lui mrme . . . la recherche de sa plus intime fid
that the search itself is (like the mirror in a Dutch interior) a d
sion of the life imaged; and then he pronounces surprisingly t
matters little if the picture (the mirror!) is full of errors, omi
lies: "fiction or imposture, the value of art is real"! Kazin o
2 W. Shumaker, English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, an

(Berkeley, 1954); S. Spender, "Confessions and Autobiography," The Mak
Poem (London, 1955), pp. 63-72; also, World Within World (pub. 1951; c
below), the Introduction; R. Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography
bridge, Mass., 1960); Gusdorf and Kazin (1956 and 1964), above; R. F. Say
Examined Self: Franklin, Adams, James (Princeton, 1964); J. N. Morris,
of the Self (New York, 1966); B. J. Mandel, "The Autobiographer's Art,
XXVII (1968), 215-26. Among the few older works many suggestive insi
still to be gleaned from A. M. Clark's Autobiography: Its Genesis and P
(Edinburgh, 1935).
3 Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore, 1953).

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NOTES FOR AN ANATOMY OF MODERN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 487
that Hemingway, Nabokov, Dahlberg, and others like them are auto-
biographers who simply use the appearance of fact to produce enjoy-
able narrative, "designed, even when the author does not say so, to
make a fable of his life, to tell a story, to create a pattern of incident,
to make a dramatic point." Yet, he acknowledges, the creative writer
"turns to autobiography out of some creative longing that fiction has
not satisfied," and finds there "some particular closeness and intensity
of effect" that he values, some "felt relation to the life data them-
selves" (211-12). Autobiography, then, whatever the reader's response,
must be a profoundly different activity. But perhaps the contradic-
tions - or paradoxes - of Gusdorf and Kazin are truer than the
categorical insistence of Shumaker that the autobiographer invariably
"wishes to be understood as writing of himself and as setting down
. . nothing that is not literally and factually true" (105), or the
shifting rigidity of Mandel (220): "the autobiographer . . . may
never falsify his facts for a fictional purpose without giving up his
claim to the name of autobiographer"; he strives "to sound as truthful
as possible"; he gives what he "wishes to be taken as true about his
life." The truism that in autobiography history and fiction are inten-
tionally distinct proves too slippery to hold.
Nevertheless, such theorists are on the right track. The autobiog-
rapher knows there are differences and struggles with them. Edwin
Muir wistfully speaks of the freedom of fiction: "I could follow these
images freely if I were writing an autobiographical novel. As it is, I
have to stick to the facts and try to fit them in where they fit in."4
Spender wonders in retrospect "whether I would have done better to
write my autobiography as a novel," without "the immediacy of the
writer who says: 'the hero is I,' " and then replies to his own doubts.
He could not give "the truth about himself within the decent and
conspiratorial convention of contemporary fiction"; that would be
offering both reader and writer "avenues of escape from the glaring
light of consciousness of him who says: 'I am I' " and would there-
fore defeat his confessional purpose.5 Nabokov, for whom the tracing
of images into intricate harmonies is what autobiography does, never-
theless (like Goethe and other artist-autobiographers) deliberately
writes to repossess the realities of his past from the sterile fictive world
to which he has sacrificed them. "The man in me revolts against the
fictionist" is both a theme and a motive of Speak, Memory6 (as of
many autobiographies). The historicity of the recreation is impera-
4 An Autobiography (New York, '954), p. 174.

5 World Within World (Berkeley, 1966), p. 310.
6 Speak, Memory, the revised edition (New York, 1966).

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tive, even though the autobiographe

that historicity. "I have changed
Yeats, "and yet it must be that I h
my knowledge."7
But when George Moore insists
O'Casey from the outset implies
autobiographical novel, or when D
that time in my life when it is a
good memoir,"8 or when Heming
"If the reader prefers, this book m
is always the chance that such a boo
on what has been written as fact"9
the signals are distinctively (and
Mailer, for example, scrupulously an
the structural principle of Armies o
There is, as Norman Holland obs
graphical passage itself to distinguis
determined strictly by the expec
autobiographer who supplies ambig
(for whatever reason) on a basis
reader is of course free to respond,
or historical signals, as if the autob
of narrative invention, and "unders
standing fiction one seeks an imagin
in understanding personal history
hension of another's historic ident
not the same kind of reality and d
has no obligation to a fantasy. Holl
he nothing affirmeth, and therefo
the continuation to mean that wh
imaginations are liberated to carry
There is - or should be - no such f
access or response, for either writer
transaction that is autobiography.
is a cone of darkness at the cent
inescapable condition, not a rhetor
intention, is a problematic goal to
7 The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats (N

8 Because I Was Flesh: the Autobiograph
P- 4-
9 A Memorable Feast (New York, 1965),

io The Dynamics of Literary Response (N

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the joys of reading autobiographies," says Pascal, is watching "a
wrestling with truth" (75). The reader who treats the conditional
effort as mere fantasy or free creation, or who uses the published vul-
nerability of another historic person as mere signals from one fantasy
world to another, is repudiating the basic human implication that is
the inescapable condition of his access to the autobiographical situa-
tion.
Critics such as Gusdorf and Pascal recognize this. But the recogni-
tion has not yet had much effect on considerations of autobiographical
form and intention. Neither can be thought of as having the auton-
omy or rhetorical accountability of form and intention in a purposive
fiction; each may or may not reach a final state of articulation, for
each must be experimental, dynamic. Yet even the best theoretic
discussions of autobiography seem committed to forms that are
"unified" and "appropriate" and rhetorical ends that are "achieved."
The most comprehensive survey of autobiographical "forms" is
Shumaker's chapter on "Shape and Texture," filled with useful, if
schematic, hypotheses, and yet chained to the deduction that form
must be an achievement of unity, that the means of achievement is
the selective principle appropriate to a certain autobiographical
"kind," that the autobiographer must find or achieve his form, but
that, alas, "autobiography is especially prone to impertinency" and
we must be prepared "for the discovery of imperfections" (141) -
surely a disconcerting way to look for what actually happens during
an autobiographical "wrestling with" form. Shumaker's disciple
Mandel forges himself the same critical situation. The critic must first
seek an "organizing principle" or "purpose," ask "to what degree does
[the work] reveal organic unity based on a defined sense of its own
end?," expect "the conscious shaping of a whole life for one informing
purpose," demand that the autobiographer as artist "be in control of
the way in which he selects and presents" the "ambiguities of his
nature" even though he "may not be able" to fathom them, and
of course expect some autobiographers to create "dangerously pro-
tean" structures and many autobiographies, however impressive, to
suffer from a lack of consistency and control (221-4). Such is the
restrictiveness of a rhetorical approach to autobiographical form.
Pascal, in a sense the follower of Gusdorf, goes to an opposite pole
and makes a prescriptive position out of a "process" view of form
and an existentialist view of process. Where there is no voyage of
genuine - hence unanticipated - self-discovery, we feel "a partial
failure at any rate." The "act of writing [autobiography] is a new
act of the man . . . it leaves the man different" (182-3), and pre-
sumably where this happens and the autobiographical self reaches the

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completion of therapeutic
dramatic phase of self-for
feel "a partial success at any
emerged out of formal ch
unsure in what direction his
of finding out that I am n
[The Buried Day] through ag
that my earlier selves - th
man - had collaborated in
Imperatives of exploration h
deliberate sense impossible -
biography; but to elevate th
"true autobiography" is narr
Form in an autobiographica
tuation of both control and
often generates a variety of
inner and outer, man and m
stylistic and modal counte
the journey, the penetration
therapeutic forms; anti-f
playing against conventional
experimentally in the emerg
life. Others appear in the d
recovery, the autobiographi
recognizes, interrelates, and
or integrity his relationships
or technical options, and wi
tions. Any description of fo
in both its narrative momentum and its dramatic evolution, as well
as the degree to which one or the other prevails. Or to use Shumaker's
terms, every autobiography necessarily moves on "two temporal
planes" juxtaposed, narrative past and dramatic present. It is tempt-
ing to insist (as some autobiographers do) on the primacy of the
present act, hence dramatic form or "process." Dillon Johnston rightly
notes: "The autobiography, more than any literary genre, tends to
talk about itself: the development of the subject matter is so depend-
ent upon psychological theory and ideas about documentation .
that a discussion of the formation of autobiography almost always
becomes part of the subject matter."13 But not always; such a devel-
11 Spots of Time (New York, 1965), p. 1o.

12 The Buried Day (New York, 196o), p. 240.
13 The Integral Self in Post-Romantic Autobiography, unpub. Ph.D. diss.,

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opment is a formal option; and autobiography is not "process lit

ture" because it does not imitate the creative process enacting it
it is a recreative act. The occasional primacy of the dramatic pr
should not be elevated into a formal criterion.
Formal principles in autobiography evolve and fluctuate as au

biographical intentions interact and shift; a formal problem or opti
often refocuses the autobiographer's intention or even redefines th
nature of his truth. Such is the relation of form to intention. It is
not reasonable for the interpretive critic of autobiography to deman
or expect unity and consistency of intention. It is certainly not saf
to suppose that intention will always be explicit or that intentio
are independent of their dramatic locations. No autobiographer wri
without reasons for writing or readers to reach, but none has singl
reasons or readers, and the identification of reasons and readers is
itself an experimental feature of the evolving autobiographical situa-
tion. Shumaker is far righter in theory than his rage for critical order
allows him to be in application: "one has not the right to suggest that
some ways of reliving bygone experience are more legitimate than
others .... At any rate, a study which is meant to be inclusive must
accept its materials as they are found" (52) - and this means recog-
nizing distinct intentions for what they are and proceeding to identify
and interpret their correlations and fluctuating predominances in
individual autobiographical works.
Traditional terms will serve, so long as we understand them in
their characteristic post-Enlightenment connotations. "Confession" is
personal history that seeks to communicate or express the essential
nature, the truth, of the self. "Apology" is personal history that seeks
to demonstrate or realize the integrity of the self. "Memoir" is per-
sonal history that seeks to articulate or repossess the historicity of the
self. "Confession" as an intention or impulse places the self relative
to nature, reality; "apology" places the self relative to social and/or
moral law; "memoir" places the self relative to time, history, cultural
pattern and change. Confession is ontological; apology ethical; mem-
oir historical or cultural. As these or any comparable definitions
suggest, such intentions must overlap; one can hardly appear in total
University of Virginia, 1969, p. 178. I am generally indebted as well to the unpub.

dissertations of two other former students: J. M. Firth, O'Casey and Autobiog-
raphy, U. Va., 1965, and an excellent discussion of Moore's Hail and Farewell as
autobiographical novel in C. P. White's diss. on George Moore (U. Va., 1970). It
is impossible now to particularize my gratitude to the members of English 285,
U. Va., Summer, 1969, who helped me formulate these ideas, but I should single
out H. H. Sherrill for his study of Wells, B. H. Stone for his analysis of Cleaver
and of Mailer's Armies of the Night, and F. H. Martz for his discussion of Wright.

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independence of the others. I

or conflict with each other. E
and usefully be viewed as in s
its dramatic intentionality is a
ical situation for the interpre
What, then, does the interpr
distinctive truth, form, and
search of an evolving mixtu
discerned in the life recovere
the self or "versions of self" t
the recovery process. The tot
activity and pattern is what i
seeks to identify. What follow
made of nearly forty extrem
and inclusive of those of Rousseau, Franklin, and Gibbon. Their
validity remains undemonstrated and controversial; they are offered
simply as the kinds of observations I believe one needs to make and
test before historical generalization and critical judgment are possible.
We begin with the question of truth, the first relation of which the
autobiographical situation is made, the relation between the auto-
biographer and his personal, historical subject. The relation has
various elements. To seek the personal focus of an autobiographical
truth is to inquire what kind of "I" is selected, how far the selected
"I" is an inductive invention and how far an intentional creation, and
whether one single or one multiple "I" persists throughout the work.
Moreover, the autobiographer's relation to the pastness or historicity
of his selected "I" involves his sense and manipulation of the problem
of continuity and discontinuity of identity and perspective. Again,
perspective implies access, and the autobiographer's limited and erra-
tic access to the past and present of that ambiguous "I" implies the
problem of the form and authority of personal memory. In practice
such selections of personal focus are numerous, fluctuating, and often
mixed; and the interpreter has no business assuming that certain
types and persistences of "I" are more "truly autobiographical" than
others. I am not sure there is justification even for Mandel's reason-
able postulate that "an autobiographer of great ability will select one
aspect of his total personality to stand for the complex whole" (223).
The selection of "I" is made and remade according to such criteria
as naturalness, originality, essentiality, continuousness, integrity, and
significance. By whatever criteria chosen, the selective "I" plays one or
more of a number of structural roles: the "I" that has been hidden
or misconstrued; the "I" that has been lost, or gained, regai

sought after in vain; the "I" that has been cultivated, imposed,

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served, developed. The fate of the selective "I" is bound

central concern, but the several elements of a multiple "I" m
diverse fates, or a single fate may have various explanations,
fate or fates may occasion various attitudes: comprehension or
erment, celebration or lamentation.
Some autobiographers intend at first to delineate an "I" that is
comprehensive, essential, total, while others intend initially only a
partial personal truth, chronologically or analytically restricted. Such
initial intentions may prove unstable or illusory, and the autobiog-
rapher's idea of what is total or essential - of the personal truth that
matters - may not persuade or satisfy the reader. Moreover, the
"total" autobiographer often discovers motives for restriction or refo-
cusing that he had not anticipated. Rousseau would like "in some
way to make my soul transparent to the reader's eye," to let the
reader notice all of its movements (169), to recount faithfully the
"succession of feelings" that constitute "the history of my soul" (262),
and thus let the reader discover the "principle which has produced
them." But that history becomes the lamentable record of how the
perversities and contradictions of his nature have been exploited by a
false and cruel society to prevent his becoming what nature intended
him to be. The pervasive longing throughout his true history for the
true self he could be only in rare intermittences of idyllic timelessness
- with his cousin, with "Mama," with Therese - is, in a sense, the
essential, if thwarted, Rousseau. Newman sets out in the Apologia'4
to show "what Dr. Newman means," to give "the true key to my
whole life," to be "known as a living man," by showing historically
how "the concrete being reasons; . . . the whole man moves" (136).
Many readers miss "the whole man" in the history of opinions, and
are puzzled to find at crucial points - the illness in Sicily, for instance
- that it is a divine mystery what Newman meant, that the meaning
of Dr. Newman may in fact be comprehensible only when it has
been sacrificed to the divine meaning - the principle of the Tracts:
"we promote truth by a self-sacrifice." The essential or selective self
of Ruskin's Praeterita is the youthful visionary, and the autobiog-
rapher imaginatively recovers identity with that lost self, but falls into
confusion when trying to relate to and account for the fallen selves
that replaced it after 1850. The selective "I" of Goethe's Dichtung
und Wahrheit'5 might be equated with the "daemon" that drives
him ohne hast ohne rast on to some mysterious destiny, or with the
14 Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. D. J. DeLaura (New York, 1968).

15 The Oxenford trans., pub. as Autobiography. The Truth and Fiction Relating
to My Life, 2 vols. (New York, 1903) -

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passion for experience, the c

contributed to my own cul
which I seized the world," th
poetic power, the "tendency
thing that delighted or tro
235), or most likely with tha
tion of self-concentration a
The selves that undergo c
Autobiography, and the A
duplicity wherein a disinte
somehow leaves a hidden or
is somehow a transcendence of both. In their brave Rousseauistic
candor, setting out to confess shy, unconventional selves, Gide a
Spender (in If It Die and World Within World) 17 both struggle w
the secrecy of their moral natures, their backgrounds in a puritan
horror of intimacy. Both find it impossible to describe openly w
really matters; both discover what Gide calls "the fear of being l
on to say too much" (213); and both rest finally in the accept
of their own intimate complexities, which prevail over any ultim
articulation of a selective "I." The "spiritual and intellectual a
biography" of Cleaver, Soul On Ice,18 begins in the sense of
identity - a common starting point for the autobiographical situ
- and moves on experimentally into several new identities - a
uncommon direction for the situation to take. But which is the
genuine Cleaver, the one who tells Beverley Axelrod he has
sense of who he is, or the one who says this is false - he knows
who he is - he is a vain deceiver and an egoistic prophet of d
The "autobiography" of Edward Dahlberg, Because I Was Fle
projects as strident a single rhetorical self as the most stride
Cleaver's rhetorical selves. Yet Dahlberg's autobiographical voice
in Boswellian bewilderment, how many contradictory and un
selves can a man contain?
The autobiographer provokes a distinct expectation if he initially

restricts the "I," analytically or developmentally. The autobiograph
16 The Prelude in the Oxford Standard Authors Poetical Works of Wordsworth;

Mill's Autobiography (New York, 1960); The Autobiography of Malcolm X [w
Alex Hayley] (New York, 1966).
17 If It Die [Si le grain ne meurt], pub. 1920o, trans. D. Bussy (New York, 19
Spender above.
18 Soul On Ice (New York, 1968); the descriptive phrase is not Cleaver's.
19 Note 8 above.

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that breaks off with some climactic issue from youth or early
appears to be a special problem of integrity and continuity. B
restriction may prove less real than the totality. The autobiog
whose selective "I" is a suprapersonal significance, a prin
representativeness, sets out from a different kind of restric
one equally problematic. "What interests me in any man
Malraux,20 "is the human condition; in a great man, the fo
essence of his greatness; in a saint, the character of his saint
And in all of them, certain characteristics which express not s
an individual personality as a particular relationship with the
But Malraux has already asked, "what do I care about what
only to me" (1)? And his answer is momentously personal
never really learned to re-create myself . . . . I do not find
very interesting" (2). Thus the selection of a personal represe
ness may itself be definitive of an idiosyncratic "I." George K
Memoirs21 cannot segregate the representative history of the
American diplomat from Kennan's "intellectual autobiogra
some would add, from his apology. Claude Brown proposes (in
child in the Promised Land) to "talk about the first Northern
generation of Negroes . . . about the experiences of a mi
generation"22; and Gosse, Yeats, Henry Adams,23 and othe
representative personal histories of cultural generations or
conflicts, in which the selective "I" is a struggle with histori
personal freedom and/or unity of being. Mill and Wells24
to give intellectual histories of what one calls an intellectual
"rather below than above par" and the other calls "a very o
brain." But the experimental Wells shifts focus: "Let me a
pose and the lighting of my experiences so as to bring ou
successive phases the emotional and sensual egoism rather
intellectual egoism that has hitherto been the focus of at
(349). And Mill forms his record emphatically on the princip
moral character is of far greater importance than intellectua
Wordsworth and Goethe trace the growth of a poet's mind, r
between conceptions of poet and of social or political man rem
be worked out. The restrictive idea of a public career for Fra
2o Anti-Memoirs, trans. T. Kilmartin (New York, 1968), p. 8.

21 Memoirs (1925-1950) (New York, 1969).
22 Manchild in the Promised Land (New York, n.d.), p. vii.
23 Gosse, Father and Son (Boston, 1965); Adams, The Education of Henry
Adams (New York, 1931); Yeats above.
24 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1967); Mill above.

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Gibbon, and Podhoretz25 is a topical

initial signal of selectivity.
A third kind of expectation is init
projects an "I" more true somehow
torically recoverable. Early in The W
myself; I am the giver and the gift
new creation looks back - as do G
on earlier selves that appear to hav
tures. Yeats says, "if we cannot im
what we are and assume that secon
pline upon ourselves, though we
Wordsworth is often flat and heav
has no theatrical element, it is an o
has not created" (317-18). And
Yeats's Autobiography is the histor
The autobiographer of The Prelude
to its nature and therein found the
ing temporary and unreal lapses in
real autobiographical situation of
it: "At the beginning of The Prel
the poem he writes is about the dif
always sustain his quest to link wh
of imagination, to the energy of
a created "I" must be what Wells de
his persona: "Our personas grow a
rarely if ever are they the whole ev
All sorts of complexes are imperfe
rated at all, and may run away w
manner" (9). Thus the deliberate
that of the restricted "I," is an exp
the first case the interpretive reade
as in the second case the restricti
totality with which the restricti
tension.
Some autobiographers define the truth of the "I" in terms of such
a tension. And it is tempting to single them out normatively as truer
to an existential autobiographical situation - tempting, but pre-
25 Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1950); Autobiography of

Edward Gibbon in the new synthetic "edition" of D. A. Saunders (New York,
1961); Podhoretz, Making It (New York, 1969)
26 The Words, trans. B. Frechtman (New York, 1966), p. 20.
27 G. H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven, 1964), p. 67.

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mature. Goethe's fluctuation between self-expansion and self-con

tration is such a formative tension. For Rousseau such a tension
sists between the serene and sociable "I" that should have been and
the perverse and isolated "I" that nature and society have made. F
the autobiographer of cultural conflict the tension may be of the
T. E. Lawrence describes: "The effort for these years to live in
dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me
my English self .... At the same time I could not sincerely tak
the Arab skin .... I had dropped one form and not taken on
other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our [?] lege
with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness . . . . Sometimes the
selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very
...."28 Stephen Spender postulates a tension of perspectival duplici
"An autobiographer is really writing a story of two lives: his life
it appears to himself, from his own position, when he looks ou
the world from behind his eye-sockets; and his life as it appe
from outside in the minds of others; a view which tends to become in
part his own . . . . However, the great problem of autobiography
remains, which is to create the true tension between these inner and
outer, subjective and objective, worlds" (viii).
The tension between two lives is often formative in the autobio-
graphical works we call journals. The act of journalizing intens
the conflict in any autobiographer between life and pattern, mov
ment and stasis, identification and definition, world and self. Jour
izing becomes a habit of self-collective withdrawal - for the man
action a time of retrospective stasis (Che in his jungle tree), for t
social man a time of solitude (Boswell in the wee hours or conf
by the clap), for the artist a moment of undisciplined expression.
habit becomes a problem. Scott gave up journalizing because it ma
him a solitary egoist. Otto Rank advised Anais Nin to "leave y
Diary; that is withdrawing from the world," and Henry Miller to
her it was her malady, her fear of transformation, her preoccupat
with completeness.29 The tension becomes formative in Gide's jou
nal.o3 For Amiel,31 too, on occasion, his journal "is a kind of epic
ism rather than a discipline" (468); on others, it reestablishes
integrity of the mind and the equilibrium of the conscience, tha
28 Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Garden City, 1937), pp. 31-2.

29 O. Evans, Anals Nin (Carbondale, Ill., 1968), p. 7; Diary of Anais Nin r
9r39 (New York, 1967), pp. 11-12.
30 Journals of Gide, trans. & ed. J. O'Brien (New York, n.d.), Vol. I.
31 The Private Journal of H. F. Amiel, trans. Brooks and Brooks (New Y
1935).

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one's inner health" (566). The journ
is a kind of ontologic respiration, an
itself punctuating and helping to sha
lived. There may be a reason here wh
biographers turn more to the journal
The autobiographer has always had
and whether to dramatize, the discontinuities inherent in autobio-
graphical recreation. The most basic discontinuities are the intermit-
tences of memory. Autobiographies are always what Morris calls "first
of all exercises in recollection - recollection in its simplest concep-
tion, as the tactic the mind employs to mitigate the destructive powers
of time" (62). But recollection in autobiography is never simple,
always the process Berdyaev describes: "Such a cognitive process is
not a mere remembering or recapitulation of the past: it is a creative
act performed at the present moment."32 And the first question is
whether to dramatize the act. Some do not. Others dramatize memory
as a characterizing power, illustrating Malraux's dictum: "One day
it will be realized that men are distinguishable as much by the forms
their memories take as by their characters. The depths vary, as do the
nets they use and the quarry they hunt" (102). It is hardly necessary
to cite the complex retrospective mode of Wordsworth's Prelude, but
equally distinctive are the forms of memory in other autobiographies.
Rousseau is as dependent as Wordsworth (or Proust) on the bino-
culars of retrospective vision. All that is left him now is memory; that
other power his "fearful imagination" has done its worst. Yet the
"sweet memories of my best years" are capricious, remind him of
painful moments when he sought in vain to recapture remembered
innocence, and lead him to chapters wherein sweet memory, like
other powers of innocence, is transformed into bitterness and pain.
The dominant memory of Nabokov's Speak, Memory is reminiscent
of Rousseau's. But it is less an ambivalent gift of nature than an
aristocratic inheritance, a well-cultivated estate. Nabokov reenters
his past. It is his - an intensely personal possession which he jea-
lously reclaims from fictional characters and worlds. Memory's
"supreme achievement" is "the masterly use it makes of innate har-
monies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering
tonalities of the past" (70) . It creates - it must create - the most
densely particularized harmonies, for "I have to make a rapid inven-
tory of the universe .... I have to have all space and all time partici-
pate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortal-
32 Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, trans. K. Lampert (New

York, 1962).

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ity is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradatio

cule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensa
thought within a finite existence" (297).
Like Ruskin's and Gide's, Yeats's memory is informed by an
sense of place: "I only seem to remember things dramatic in
selves or that are somehow associated with unforgettable plac
-places with human centers that exemplify proud, traditional
tary ways of life. But the formative memory of Reveries is
personal. It is fixed in local and family tradition, in legend, a
anecdotal discontinuity of Reveries suggests the effect of leg
tales. Identity is having one's story; leaving one's place is losin
story. Creating a new personality is recreating one's legend in
tion with memorable place. Gide finds in his temporal me
person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is l
think things extremely remote which on examination pro
quite near" (16). Memory fails to provide Sartre with the p
truth that matters:
What I have just written is false. True. Neither true or false, like everything
written about madmen, about men. I have reported the facts as accurately
as memory permitted me. But to what extent did I believe in my delirium?
. .. How could I determine - especially after so many years - the impercep-
tible and shifting frontier that separates possession from hamming [43-4]?
Dahlberg finds in memory his only reality. Then, as for Rousseau,

this only reality becomes a trap and a phantom. The man is prisoner
of "the phantasms of his childhood" (49-50). But "did the child who
is now the man ever live" (92) ? and "what remains of that boy who
flits like a sapless phantom through my memory? I am more familiar
with Theophrastus, Bartram or with Thoreau than I am with him"
(122). The remembered past fluctuates wildly between sole reality and
nameless phantom, and Dahlberg's commemoration ends strangely.
The mother he has confessed to, commemorated, exorcised - the
brave, fleshly lady barber portrayed by a fictive omniscience independ-
ent of the boy's present consciousness - even she, after all, is beyond
memory and understanding. She has been vividly understood, but not
by the phantom "I." It is as if the emergence of the "I" had displaced
that understanding: "Who was Lizzie Dalberg? I wish to God I
knew, but it is my infamy that I do not." Has the fictive narrator's
compassionate omniscience redeemed the phantom boy-man from his
infamy, or only deepened, articulated it?
Gosse is in an intriguingly similar imaginative paradox vis ia vis his
remembered father. Like Nabokov - "The break in my own destiny
affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick" (250) - Gosse initiates

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Father and Son in a radica

proverb" that "the child is
brief, "its impressions are so
to record its history as it w
before the wind. . . . But in
with interminable hours, h
the window pane. ... I feel
feverish heat that was prod
eye" (57) - Memory has rep
mysterious continuity of s
impression, setting its ow
ceases to be solitary, it ceas
tancing vividness wherein c
reality. But, as in Dahlberg
with an imaginative compas
We recall Sartre when Gosse remembers himself as "an adroit little
pitcher," and think, too, of the extraordinary distance from whic
Graves "remembers" the "caricature scenes that now seem to sum u
the various stages of my life" (180) ,33 moments of absurd visualiz
tion by which memory effectively bids "goodbye to all that" in th
very act of comic revocation.
Such instances of memory's forms have taken us into consideratio
of structure and method, problems of retrospective point of view a
its essential paradox in autobiography. Effective access to a recollect
self or its "versions" begins in a discontinuity of identity or being
which permits past selves to be seen as distinct realities. Yet only
continuity of identity or being makes the autobiographical act
purpose meaningful. The paradox of continuity in discontinuity
itself a problem to be experimented with, and it is a problem both o
truth and of form. Manipulation of autobiographical point of view
conditioned by the demands of the paradox, but it is also condition
by rhetorical considerations of intention and emphasis, formal and
stylistic considerations of clarity and proportion. And such deman
necessarily fluctuate as the autobiographical situation evolves.
Consider two seemingly contradictory manipulations which togeth
illustrate the paradox. Chapter One of Wright's Black Boy34 climax
a recreation of the experience and awareness of a violent, lonely bo
with a visit to the father who had deserted his family for a mistres
The scene closes. The narrator now superimposes Richard's ima
33 Graves, Good-bye to All That - the passage is only in the revised e

(Garden City, 1957).
34 Black Boy (New York, 1966).

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"many times in the years after that" on the boy's sensory immedia
Finally comes the long interpretive perspective of the man aft
lapse of a quarter of a century "during which my mind and consc
ousness had become so greatly and violently altered" that "I" th
looked at the "sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a mud
hoe in his gnarled, veined hands," with the compassion of a distan
and mature understanding. The separation that had been the fathe
moral recklessness had become a final condition of the autobiograp
er's development. The development of the artist, the tragic natura
whose emergence we trace in the next chapter, is the precondit
of the imaginative truth achieved by an intricate conflation of te
oral and psychological perspectives. Of such intermingled disc
tinuities is an autobiographical truth formed.
Or consider the middle chapters of the Autobiography of Malcol
X. The autobiographer recalls how he was saved, like Paul on
road to Damascus, by the miraculous intervention of Elijah Muham
med's Muslimism. The historic truth of influence and conversion
must be realized. Yet in retrospect the truth comes to includ
jealousy and misunderstanding that soon became part of his rela
to his leader. This too must be revealed, without compromising
moral power that Malcolm felt and the autobiographer see
convey. While editing these chapters, Malcolm was forced to see
truth; and Hayley feared that in his bitterness Malcolm would
the chapters. Malcolm admitted, "There are a lot of things I
say that passed through my mind at times even then, things
and heard, but I threw them out of my mind. I'm going to let it
the way I've told it. I want the book to be the way it was." The
is truer to the personality of Malcolm revealed in the total rem
scence: his fierce loyalty, his vigorous openness to each new
of his extraordinary career of changes. The picaresque vitality o
versatile confidence man is reaffirmed in the histrionic exuberance of
the autobiographer, recalling the early Harlem days, "scat-singing
and popping his fingers, 're-bop-de-bop-blop-bam-' " (391), or re-
creating with zest the absurdly conked and zootsuited lindy-hopper
at Roseland State Ballroom. Historical and psychological truth has
been recreated by the careful, even deceptive, manipulation of tem-
poral perspective.
The truth of a particular autobiography demands its own discrim-
ination and conflation of perspectives, and hence its own narrativ
mode. Even the diurnal unit of the journalist, from Boswell to Ch
Guevara, is an artifice of multiple perspectives - levels of retrospect
minglings of dramatic and real anticipation, operations of significant
selection. Wordsworth and Rousseau, Gosse and Adams and Nabokov,

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all seem basically to share th

associate with Thackeray and
are mimetically, as well as f
Gosse would be unsuitable for
tion with the potencies and fr
a dialogic-scenic mode. Rousse
to a totality of perspective: R
view, and Newman must be
each historic moment. The co
other temporal, however, an
walk to Vincennes demands a
tion of the illness in Sicily or
tung und Wahrheit necessar
Goethe's idea of a cumulative
prehensive than Wordsworth
and assimilation, not the suc
The Prelude. Perhaps the mos
ical narratives is in the pan
reason, since the Education is
continuity, whose rational evo
that his vision of order in hi
rule is ludicrous catastrophism
The inference is clear. The in
had best interpret its method
And the same is true of structure. The nature of an extended auto-
biographical act makes it self-defeating for the interpreter to exp
some predictable integrity or unity. Form is too experimental,
"accidental," and at the same time too inherent in perspectives stil
to be recovered or imposed by memory. Conflicts or fluctuations
perspective and intention may themselves become formative, and t
personal history that emerges may reveal variant or conflicting as
sumptions about meaningful orders in life. Furthermore, form
really a multiplicity of formative options in the simplest autobiog
raphy: options of selection and exclusion, interpretive refocus
rearrangement, conflations of historical and expository arrangemen
developmental rhythms in narrative and situational rhythms in th
autobiographer's sense of movement toward his end.
To begin with, autobiographers set out with divergent views of th
appropriateness of form. Gauguin insists his journal intime is "
a book," and Cocteau confesses in his "journal" that formlessne
may itself be an imposition: "Has the book I am writing comple
its curve? I who boast, and in its very chapters, of never being pr
occupied with it . . . . Can I still speak to you, and keep this journa

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which is not really one, in the form of a journal, based

happens to me? That would be falsifying its mechanism."3
constantly preoccupied with form in If It Die, troubled
spatial form memory imposes. He intermittently resists and su
to and justifies it, yet insists that "this is not a literary com
I am just writing down my recollections as they come to m
Boswell's passion for form leads to such finely formed continu
the London Journal36 as "the Louisa saga." He recognizes in h
a "love of form for its own sake" (128), and his repeated frus
in trying to live by a form simply lead to marvelous rational
of formal variations. The journal was "to contain a consistent
of a young fellow eagerly pushing through life," but salutary
bling divagations remind him "the hero of a romance or nove
not go uniformly along in bliss .... Aeneas met with many dis
in his voyage to Italy, and must not Boswell have his rub
The London Journal may thus have "more form" than th
proaches to the past made at distinct times in differing m
that Yeats finally titled Autobiography. The formal passion of
operates to form his autobiography, yet he evidently found f
problematic that he left six finely formed, differently focu
overlapping fragments. Henry Adams's "idol Gibbon" is reinc
in the autobiographer of the Education, who says, "From c
grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction
space, discipline through freedom, unity through multipli
always been, and must always be, the task of education" (
rich coherences, the elegant if whimsical patterning and focu
Adams's world attest to the control of the philosophical histo
relentless search of "the working of law in history" (363), dete
that "everything must be made to move together" (378), w
"hero" learns by successive false starts that Mont Blanc lik
spectacles of being is "a chaos of anarchic and purposeless
(289). The result is a curious mock-form, a study in the lu
but beautiful balancing of illusion, a protagonist who co
the solemn naivete of Rasselas (378) with the fugitive historic
Arnold's scholar gypsy, and an autobiographer who, like C
briand and Mark Twain, seems to speak from beyond the gra
35 Journals of Jean Cocteau, trans. W. Fowlie (Bloomington, Ind., 196

36 London Journal 1762-1763, ed. F. A. Pottle (New York, n.d.).
37 Ian Fletcher, "Rhythm and Pattern in Autobiographies," in An Ho
Guest, ed. Donoghue and Mulryne (New York, 1966), p. 165; contrast J
Yeats's Autobiography: Life as Symbolic Pattern (Cambridge, Mass., 1968
et passim.

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But Adams's views of for

"moment" in his history. In
position and his situation ch
1741 in the late 1760's "two
174o has a very different p
but on what has already bee
is not the same as Franklin
and such shifts, however "accidental," must be formative. Mill's final
chapter is punctuated by "In resuming my pen some years after
closing the preceding narrative" (170). A silent majority of auto-
biographers must have found themselves in the midway metamor-
phosis best described by Edwin Muir: "I finished the first part of
this book thirteen years ago. ... The generation to which I belong
has survived an age, and the part of our life which is still immobilized
there is like a sentence broken off before it could be completed; the
future in which it would have written its last word was snatched away
and a raw new present abruptly substituted; and that present is reluc-
tant now to formulate its own sentence" (194). Form in autobio-
graphy is too contingent on shifting situations ever to be interpreted
as if it might be a static integrity.
It is contingent as well on shifting principles of selectivity, any one
of which may be revised or replaced as each new stage of self-recrea-
tion forces a reappraisal of what is relevant. A static interpretation
of selectivity would cite the "spots of time" passage in Prelude XII
and suppose that events throughout have been selected accordingly.
Yet the passage with its two long associative "memorials" occurs in
the framing of the crucial moment of restoration; the moment
becomes continuous with the autobiographical present and thus re-
veals a final vision of restorative events. Events in earlier books
illustrate earlier visions of events: those testifying to the ministry of
beauty and fear, to the reality of vocation or consecration, those that
exemplify the imagination's characteristic powers and aspirations, and
man's nobility and pathos. Different principles operate at different
stages. The shape of the recovered event is the shape of recovery at
that point, the shape of the event as then recovered. As Black Boy
traces the shaping of a literary artist, we see the growth of a vision
of human events, and that vision as a selective principle necessarily
evolves. At the beginning, Yeats views events as legendary, timeless,
antithetical to the action of "inorganic logical straightness." Later
as he "must not only describe events but those patterns into which
they fall, when I am the looker-on" (221), certain places and eras
of personal development seem in retrospect to identify themselves by
a certain form or quality of event: "I see Paris in the Eighteen-nine-

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ties as a number of events separated from one another, and wit

cause or consequence, without lot or part in the logical structur
my life" (227). Ruskin in Praeterita appears repeatedly con
about what events caused the decay of his visionary power, and h
Wells locates the predominant causes of his own development fi
his own will, then in chance or destiny, and finally in history.
To trace such shifts or redefinitions of narrative selection and for-
mation is to identify one essential component of autobiographica
form. Some such refocusings are themselves illustrative of a particular
history or personality. Others reveal themselves as inherent in life
process. Nabokov recognizes that selectivity necessarily changes a
memory's focus moves from childhood to adolescence, for the details
constituting childhood's "harmonious world" possess "a naturall
plastic form in one's memory, which can be set down with hardly
any effort; it is only starting with the recollections of one's adoles-
cence that Mnemosyne begins to get choosy and crabbed" (24-5), gen-
erating new problems and possibilities of conscious selection. Gibbon
regularly discriminates between the characteristic and universal, as
his formal sophistication leads him through a succession of selective
problems. Early, "since philosophy has exploded all innate ideas and
natural propensities" (66) he must include all possible environmental
causes and conditions. Later, he is sceptical of the "explosion" (137
and may, therefore, have included irrelevancies. The "delicate subject
of my early love" reveals a new selective principle: "the discovery of a
sixth sense, the first consciousness of manhood, is a very interesting
moment of our lives, but it less properly belongs to the memoirs of
an individual than to the natural history of the species" (108) - the
same criterion by which Spender postpones recollections of early
childhood, Graves mocks them, and Wordsworth and Yeats, seeking
the sources of a natural or ancestral identity, stress them. Finally
Gibbon remembers his travels as amusing, but "the narrative of my
life must not degenerate into a book of travels" (143), a generic
scrupulousness unsuitable in autobiographers with notions of the spa
tiality or locality of personal identity - e.g., Yeats, Gide, Nabokov
Rousseau, for whom each new relocation is a personally momentous
event, or Goethe, Spender, or Adams, for whom it is a significant self
expansion or self-complication.
For all his will to explain himself, Gibbon was not troubled by
problems many post-Enlightenment autobiographers have faced. How
asks Muir, can the autobiographer exclude the experience of one-third
38 For these interpretive conclusions about Ruskin and Wells I am indebted to

Johnston, Integral Self (note 13 above), pp. 40-44, 157-66.

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of his life, his sleeping experience,

experiences of all kinds may well
Furthermore, the aim of self-expla
er progressively into the dilemma o
historical focus with the claims o
and Wells, for instance, resolve th
form with final expositions of phil
ernment.
The question of the end in autobiographical form is a co

Narrative recreation and autobiographical situation someh
nate at once in a resolution of both narrative pattern and
for such pattern. Any "end" belongs to both. Goethe's Dic
Nabokov's Speak, Memory both delight in the ever-expand
ture of past worlds. For Goethe, as Pascal observes, the fo
irregularly moving expansion," an "ever-widening arc," wi
of return, because for Goethe the self is a steady assimilat
sion. But there is a counter-rhythm - or rather counte
Goethe's lifelong tendency to use his imagination to put h
rest, to see how it stands relative to the moving world, t
to fix that which is confused or unstable in himself (as h
with Werther). His love of theatre, of ritual, of festive ce
disguise and sacrament, is the love of one who finds "com
regular recurrence of external things" (II, 159). Nabok
the process of repossessing a past world as an achievemen
through form - hence, "a colored spiral in a small ball of
is how I see my own life" (275). But the stasis can only
Robert Frost called "a momentary stay against confusion.
biographical form can seem closed if, like Adams, the aut
adopts the final fiction of seeing his whole life as pa
Newman and Mill, of seeing all significant movement com
the form may "close" with the cessation of all narrative m
a climax of the autobiographical act. Sartre's lifelong f
unreal selves and spurious idealisms comes to rest in a fin
tion of self-will in the autobiographer. Podhoretz narrates
to try a personal book about the problem of "success," itse
bid for success, and announces, "I just have," throwing all
tive abruptly into the resolution of a dramatic present. Th
of Soul On Ice, a progression of distinct modes like Yeats'
raphy, move from the autobiographical loss of an old
mythical affirmation of a new, from colloquial reminiscen
portrait, through cultural prophecy, through the intimate
of the letters to Beverley Axelrod, to mythopoeic visio
sexual Jerusalem. The Prelude, too, ends in mythopoe

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vision is reached by way of an ambiguous journey backward

forwards, into "fallings away" natural and artificial, and final re
tion of a possibly waning power without whose sustaining force
journey could not have been taken. The movement of Spen
World Within World is comparably complex: a historico-cul
journey through a decade of crisis; a Conradian movement towa
dark center of an imperative personal complexity; a quest fo
"wheels within wheels," the repossessed childhood that at last aff
and encompasses the integrity of the adult. No one has unde
better than Spender the complexities of autobiographical for
its relation to the confessional intention.
So we turn at last to the question of intention, the shifting ground

of the autobiographer's form, the condition of the truth he struggles
for, itself subject to dramatic and narrative redefinition as the per-
sonal center fluctuates and formal options are seized or rejected.
Having recognized four "kinds" of autobiography - diary or journal,
confession, reminiscence, and personal history, Berdyaev declares that
Dream and Reality will be none of these: "I decided to make this
study of myself not only because I feel the need of expressing and
communicating myself (a reason for which I cannot possibly claim
the attention of the reader), but also because this may help to raise
and resolve certain problems concerning man and his destiny and con-
tribute to the understanding of our age. I also feel the necessity of
explaining the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions which have
been ascribed to my philosophical outlook .... I should like memory
to overcome oblivion in regard to all that is of value in it" (x-xi)
Thus, having disowned all antecedents, Berdyaev embraces all three
traditional autobiographical intentions: to communicate one's self
(confession); to show the integrity of one's career (apology); to repos-
sess one's past (memoir) ! Ostensibly at an opposite pole is the Gib-
bonian autobiographer, who professes that "my own amusement is my
motive, and will be my reward" (27). But such professions probably
confirm Sartre's view that "our deeper intentions are plans and eva-
sions which are inseparably linked" (120).
The list is long of autobiographers who commence, like Rousseau,
by insisting that what they seek to do is not quite what the reader
expects: "It is, I suppose, a hybrid form."39 Also long is the list of
those who periodically discriminate in their motives, reassert control
over the reader's generic expectations, and in so doing refine or rede-
fine their intentions: "this is not history but education"; rather, this
is the "long mistake" of a "search for education," "the shifting search
39 V. Sheean, Personal History (Boston, 1969); p. xvii.

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for the education he never found," rather "adventures in search of
education" (Adams, 172, 185, 162). Each new formal resolution calls
for a new justification, hence revelation, of intention; "but I do not
judge," repeats the confessor; "I simply relate" - and his protestations
accumulate with the force of a devious judicial act. Something inher-
ent in autobiographical process calls for the continuous refocusing of
expectation and intention, as each autobiographer discovers his own
fluctuating mixture of confession, apology, and memoir.
Rousseau insists on "confession" as his intention, repeatedly dis-
claims apology, yet Pascal rightly argues that the work is apology.
"Confession" is the primary motive of Rousseau's history that gives
integrity to his entire social life. The work is the confessor's character-
istic act of friendship, an apology for the confessor, intended to
achieve at last the society his life has consistently failed to achieve.
The interplay of confession and apology is definitive; so precarious
and intermittent is his repossession of a historic world that "memoir"
is almost irrelevant. Gide resembles Rousseau in his determination to
reveal the "secret" of his life as an "act of penance," but there is little
apologetic impulse, and there is, intermittently, much of the com-
memorative passion of the memoirist in distinctive interaction with
the confessional intention. Podhoretz resembles Rousseau, too, in
confessing his public life around the "dirty little secret" of the
desire for success; but memoiristic apology is strong. Like Rousseau,
Goethe finds a confessional integrity in a prevalent tendency of his
life: "All, therefore, that has been confessed by me, consists of frag-
ments of a great confession; and this little book is an attempt which I
have ventured on to render it complete" (I, 235). But this is confes-
sion to himself (or his daemon) of his creative relations with the na-
tural and historic world, confession that achieves its end through mem-
oir, the repossession of a rich and expansive experience. Spender's
World Within World is a mixture of Rousseau and Goethe. But the
apologetic intention evolves toward a confessional act of climact
political meaning. The book is as much concerned as Rousseau's with
the precariousness of friendship, but the kind of relationship it chief
defines is one we associate with memoir - personal integrity in a wor
of history, and what is confessed is a defiant personal balance
individuality and community.
Paradoxically, Newman the "apologist" writes in a situation closer
to Rousseau's than the situations of Goethe, Spender, and Gide t
"confessors." His initial intention seems closer too: he will repla
the phantom deceiver in men's imagination with his truth. But jus
as his assumptions about personality and history differ, so his confe
sional-apologetic intention must evolve differently too. What is co

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fessed is the integrity or entelechy of that movement of his

intelligence" - the "economy" - by which divine provide
revealed the "idea" of his unique personal history. The tru
fessed is the immanent idea progressively revealed, quite bey
foreknowledge or understanding - such is "history" for Newm
in this is the apology for his life.
Malcolm X's apology is a curious analogue. Malcolm pro
his own death, and predicts that "the white man, in his press,
to identify me with 'hate.' He will make use of me dead, a
made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of 'hatred'
Malcolm has intended throughout to offer his life as a mirro
in this exemplary motive he differs from Newman. But t
personal intention has shown itself throughout in the resilien
loving man, the antithesis of hate, who has found and now r
human value and vitality in each new world or underwor
entered. The result is vivid "memoir" with apologetic force, w
course, he tries to deny: "I want to say before I go on tha
never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven
it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how
was. But people are always speculating - why am I as I am? To
stand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be r
All of our experiences fuse into our personality" (150). Th
seauistic confessional intention persists, and with it a mem
richness of reminiscence, in spite of the apologetic intention
ing witness to the power and goodness of Allah and the ex
intention of telling the white man about himself and awaken
black man from his follies.
The evolving intentionality of any autobiography is complicated

by an exemplary motive. Podhoretz's whimsical instructions to young
writers are dramatically bound up with his apologetic memoir, just
as Franklin's maxims and anecdotes mingle with other intentions: to
initiate a dynastic chronicle for his posterity, a memoir for his own
sense of achieved position, a personal history that will invitingly
illustrate the fortunes of his young country. Adams proposes to "fit
young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world" (x)
he asserts that "knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end
of political education" (180), but he has discovered human natur
to be "sheer chaos" (153). He insists the book is education (though
he never found education), not history, and not temperament (243)-
But it is evidently a vividly temperamental last adventure in search
of education, and it surely moves through and culminates in a vision
of modern history. In his exemplary life, Mill identifies three inten-
tions at the outset, confesses an ulterior propagandistic intention in a

14.139.58.50 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:57:39 UTC
letter to his wife, and perhaps

are complicated in interplay.
able education"; he will show
pressing forward, achieving in
weighs more with me than eith
edgment of the debts which m
owes to other persons" (1) - m
Mill, who exemplifies a metho
uality, and the person of Har
intellectual individuality an
aspires in vain, except insofar
other persons. Thus the comm
to overwhelm the apologetic
drama of intention the book
To put the static classificatio
a final test, consider the prese
memoir. If memoir is the per
sons, every autobiography con
autobiographical search for
scarcely avoidable. But to say
memoir to be "true autobiogr
age to Catalonia and Mailer's
personal accounts of events th
ences in historic lives, signifi
"centers its chief attention on the life of the author as it was lived"
(Mandel, 222). It will not do to insist that this "chief attention"
must slight the representativeness of the author as witness. It will not
do to object that "autobiography proper" gives the wholeness of a life;
many autobiographers do not do so, and anyway, an autobiographer
may choose to reveal or collect the "wholeness" of his life around one
central or cataclysmic event or influence or relationship. Nor can we
say that one who is the observer of, rather than a major participant
in, his personal history writes memoir rather than autobiography.
Adams's autobiography is the history of an (unwilling) observer, and
Lawrence of Arabia, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom is allegedly not
"true autobiography," could not write a personal history of a sig-
nificant segment of his life except as a confessional or apologetic
participant. Had Orwell written a "true autobiography," it would
undoubtedly have been less "autobiographical" than a "memoir" by
Spender or Newman or Mailer. What Malraux calls Anti-Memoirs is
more "memoir" than "autobiography" for autobiographical reasons,
as we have seen. George Kennan entitles Memoirs a book which he

14.139.58.50 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:57:39 UTC
then describes as "primarily . ..an intellectual autobiograph

and manifestly intends as apology.
Memoir is not a kind of autobiography, but, like confess
apology, a kind of autobiographical intention. Autobiographer
certain intentions in varying degrees and in numerous distinct
terns of interaction. Rather than deducing fixed expectations
distinctions of intentional "kind," we should try to see how
- with what effect distinct intentions evolve and interplay in
ual autobiographies. In the same way we should observe and in
dynamic distinctions of form and evolutions and conflicts of p
focus, as the individual autobiographer wrestles with options o
and integrity in the recovery of his personal history. The corr
of our observations and interpretations would seem to be t
promising way to the recognition of meaning and value. Whe
recognitions of individual autobiographies have accumula
undergone testing and sorting, then and only then will it be
to make real and meaningful descriptive generalizations ab
historical development of modern autobiography. And when,
such a "new literary history" of autobiography has been unde
then critical judgment can be other than the facile preven
appreciative understanding it often is at present.
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

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Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography

Author(s): Francis R. Hart

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468268

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FI OR whatever reasons, autobiography has become a flourishing

1 Kazin, "Autobiography as Narrative," Michigan Quarterly Review, III (1964),

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reach. The present state of such qu

On the first question, Rousseau sounds the keynot

2 W. Shumaker, English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, an

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4 An Autobiography (New York, '954), p. 174.

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tive, even though the autobiographe

7 The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats (N

9 A Memorable Feast (New York, 1965),

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11 Spots of Time (New York, 1965), p. 1o.

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opment is a formal option; and autobiography is not "process lit

Formal principles in autobiography evolve and fluctuate as au

University of Virginia, 1969, p. 178. I am generally indebted as well to the unpub.

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independence of the others. I

or misconstrued; the "I" that has been lost, or gained, regai

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served, developed. The fate of the selective "I" is bound

14 Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. D. J. DeLaura (New York, 1968).

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passion for experience, the c

The autobiographer provokes a distinct expectation if he initially

16 The Prelude in the Oxford Standard Authors Poetical Works of Wordsworth;

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2o Anti-Memoirs, trans. T. Kilmartin (New York, 1968), p. 8.

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Gibbon, and Podhoretz25 is a topical

25 Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1950); Autobiography of

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mature. Goethe's fluctuation between self-expansion and self-con

28 Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Garden City, 1937), pp. 31-2.

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32 Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, trans. K. Lampert (New

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ity is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradatio

Dahlberg finds in memory his only reality. Then, as for Rousseau,

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Father and Son in a radica

33 Graves, Good-bye to All That - the passage is only in the revised e

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all seem basically to share th

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which is not really one, in the form of a journal, based

35 Journals of Jean Cocteau, trans. W. Fowlie (Bloomington, Ind., 196

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But Adams's views of for

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ties as a number of events separated from one another, and wit