Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography

Timothy Dow Adams

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469639406
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

All autobiographers are unreliable narrators. Yet what a writer chooses to misrepresent is as telling -- perhaps even more so -- as what really happened. Timothy Adams believes that autobiography is an attempt to reconcile one's life with one's self, and he argues in this book that autobiography should not be taken as historically accurate but as metaphorically authentic. Adams focuses on five modern American writers whose autobiographies are particularly complex because of apparent lies that permeate them. In examining their stories, Adams shows that lying in autobiography, especially literary autobiography, is not simply inevitable. Rather it is often a deliberate, highly strategic decision on the author's part. Throughout his analysis, Adams's standard is not literal accuracy but personal authenticity. He attempts to resolve some of the paradoxes of recent autobiographical theory by looking at the classic question of design and truth in autobiography from the underside -- with a focus on lying rather than truth. Originally published in 1990. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

INTRODUCTION 1
Design and Lie in Modern American Autobiography

Autobiography is stranger than fiction which as everybody knows must be stranger than life.—Jane Lazarre, A Slight Distortion of the Truth

The modern era in autobiographical theory began in 1960 with the publication of Roy Pascal’s now classic Design and Truth in Autobiography. Since then, virtually all autobiographical theorists have arranged their arguments within a complex, interconnected spectrum based on the terms in Pascal’s title. Design has been treated under such headings as genre, form, mode, and style; truth has been handled in a bewildering variety of ways, including its relation to fiction, nonfiction, fact, fraud, figure, memory, identity, error, and myth. The word autobiography has frequently been analyzed in terms of its three separate components: autos or self, bios or life, and graphe or writing.

The consistent attempt to write about autobiography by working with these terms has produced, in the thirty years since Pascal’s bench-mark, a multitude of scholarly activity—books and articles, including bibliographies, collections of essays, special issues of journals, and journals devoted to the topic (Biography, Prose Studies, and AIB: Auto/Biography Studies); the formulation of both the Modern Language Association Nonfictional Prose Division and the Modern Language Association Autobiography and Biography Discussion Group; and conferences papers delivered at conferences, followed by entire conferences and symposia devoted to particular aspects of the subject. The latter include Black Autobiography (College Language Association—hosted by Fisk University and Tennessee State University), the Self and Other (University of Louisville), Women’s Autobiography and Biography (Stanford University), Symposium on Canadian Autobiography (University of Ottawa), the First International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Study (Louisiana State University), the Autobiography Conference (University of Southern Maine), and Autobiography and Avant-garde (Johannes Gutenberg University).

What this critical outpouring of over a quarter century has produced is a paradox—an astonishing ability to generate lively and valuable commentary on and ingenious and helpful readings of an enormous variety of autobiographical texts, despite a general agreement that autobiography cannot really be defined. As early as 1965, William Spengemann and L. R. Lundquist defined autobiography by its indefinable quality: “The modern autobiographer needs an especially flexible form, one that can always outrun attempts to define it.”¹ And by 1979, autobiographical criticism had reached such an impasse that Paul de Man described it as nearly pointless.

The theory of autobiography is plagued by a recurrent series of questions and approaches that are not simply false, in the sense that they take for granted assumptions about autobiographical discourse that are in fact highly problematic. They keep therefore being stymied, with predictable monotony, by sets of problems that are inherent in their own use. One of these problems is the attempt to define and to treat autobiography as if it were a literary genre among others.²

No matter how complicated or complete our attempt, creating an airtight definition of autobiography is virtually impossible. The word under which all of this critical work has been done, however defined, has produced a variety of positions, ranging from those critics, such as Mutlu Konuk Biasing, who would collapse the boundaries and expand the canon to include anything with an autobiographical feel to those, such as Barrett John Mandel, who argue that autobiography and fiction are completely separate genres and that a line of demarcation between them should be drawn.³ For Paul de Man, the solution is to think of autobiography, not as a genre, but as “a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts.”⁴ According to Avrom Fleishman, we should begin, not by asking “what is autobiography?” but by questioning “how the age-old activity of writing life stories has organized itself at various periods of literary history.”⁵ Despite his exhaustive scholarship and sophisticated arrangement, Fleishman’s emphasis on the life-writing process rather than on the outcome, the autobiographical act over the autobiographical corpus, results in his analyzing David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, and Sons and Lovers as though no distinctions exist between “The Autobiographical Novel and the Autobiography,” which is the title of Roy Pascal’s initial foray into autobiographical theory in 1959.

In an essay focusing on James Olney’s Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Jonathan Loesberg nicely summarizes the impasse of the 1980s in autobiographical theory: “Critics seem to wind up either playing fast and loose with genre in order to protect the most fundamental aspects of autobiography or insisting on maintaining generic distinctions in fairly rigid ways in order to call into question the bases of that genre.⁶

In a 1980 essay “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” Olney points out the immediate paradox of dealing with autobiography critically: the danger, on the one hand, that we will define autobiography out of existence is counterbalanced with the tendency, on the other, to see every text as a form of autobiography.⁷ This paradox is complicated by the assumptions that all readers instinctively know the difference between autobiography and other genres and that all of our critical energy has been wasted on an issue that would not matter much if it could finally be resolved. What Olney saw as particular to the cultural moment in which he wrote his essay is actually a recurring pattern; we are still at work trying to resolve the particular paradoxes of autobiography, wrestling with the same questions asked by such classic autobiographers as Rousseau and Augustine.

What power exists within or behind the complex arguments formed by repeatedly examining autobiography in terms of design and truth? How can we proceed when our best theorists argue that autobiography is not really a genre, not finally distinct from fiction, not even definable—a narrative that pretends to be written by a self-conscious self who is actually only a linguistic construct? Like the profound novels and valuable criticism produced since the celebrated “death of the novel” or the exhaustive list of new fiction written in the twenty years since John Barth published his well-known essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” autobiography, as well as its theory, thrives precisely be-cause of its paradoxical position.

Whether the key terms around which this chapter is organized are taken individually or together, the inescapable conclusion is that each word is complicated, ambiguous, inseparable from other terms, and finally paradoxical. Design, truth, and autobiography collectively name the autobiographical paradox. This form of writing, which may or may not be a genre, possesses a peculiar kind of truth through a narrative composed of the author’s metaphors of self that attempt to reconcile the individual events of a lifetime by using a combination of memory and imagination—all performed in a unique act that partakes of a therapeutic fiction making, rooted in what really happened, and judged both by the standards of truth and falsity and by the standards of success as an artistic creation.

Although I believe that these paradoxes are essential to autobiography and that any attempt to resolve them completely would destroy the compelling charm of the form, I also believe that behind the confusions they represent lies one unstressed problem, a problem that calls for the addition of one more key term to the original three—lying. Virtually all of the discussion about autobiography I have been summarizing focuses on truth. Throughout all of the critical efforts to sort out these paradoxes, few theorists have dealt with lying itself, despite the fact that autobiography is synonymous with lying for many readers.

For the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt, on the one hand, to resolve some of autobiography’s paradoxes by the introduction of lying as a key term and, on the other, to argue that the paradoxical ambiguity of autobiography—the impossibility of ever completely separating or refining either the word itself or the terms used in discussing it—is in a sense both its strength and its most defining characteristic.

Design

If consciousness were not a liar, it would have no problems. … It could not lie to itself, since it would not be aware of what it had to lie about.—William Earle, The Autobiographical Consciousness

Most theoretical arguments about design are really about genre. Our difficulties with defining autobiography have caused more than just a bemused embarrassment for literary historians; questions about autobiography as a genre have implications wider than mere academic classification. For example, Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman were embroiled in a lawsuit involving charges and countercharges of lying, based—as I show in chapter 6—in part on misunderstandings on both sides of questions of genre. Although the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Black Boy is named Richard, some of the events Wright attributed to this character’s life actually happened to other people, a fact he justified by calling his book Black Boy rather than “The Autobiography of Richard Wright.” And yet Janet Cooke, a reporter for the Washington Post, lost her Pulitzer Prize, her job, and her reputation when she invented a young black boy called “Jimmy” to stand for thousands of black children whose lives have been blighted by poverty, racism, and drugs. Sherwood Anderson was notorious for creating false backgrounds for his own family members and for inventing myths about himself, all of which he recorded in his autobiographies despite the fact that they often contradicted each other. In contrast, Michael Daly, a writer for the New York Daily News, was fined for having invented “Christopher Spell,” a typical British army soldier in Belfast.

Recently, Alastair Reid was castigated for creating composite characters and locations in his New Yorker pieces about Spain. Joanne Lipman, a New Yorker staff writer, says Reid “took disparate elements from different places—a bar here, a bartender or television speech there—and moved them around and put them in a whole different place and made a poetic whole.” According to Lipman, Reid used real people but also “‘disembodied voices’ asking ‘the questions that a lot of people in Spain were asking at the time’ [1982], as did Hemingway in numerous stories that served both for journalism and for fiction.”⁸ However, the New Yorker, which prides itself on meticulous research and absolute separation of fact from fiction, has in the past allowed the use of composite, semifictional autobiographical pieces by Frank Conroy and others, including Mary McCarthy, that blend fact and fiction.⁹

Clearly, freelancer Christopher Jones was being dishonest to plagiarize portions of André Malraux’s novel The Royal Way (1930) in a documentary that appeared in the New York Times Magazine about Jones’s supposed journey inside Cambodia, and most commentators seemed to agree that Clifford Irving deserved a prison sentence for having made money from Howard Hughes’s autobiography, which Irving himself wrote. And yet Gertrude Stein adopted a similar tactic in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as did Margaret Foster who wrote Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman by William Thackeray, or William Styron in his The Confessions of Nat Turner, or Danny Santiago, the putative author of Famous All Over Town, who turned out to be a seventy-three-year-old Anglo named Dan James.

All of these instances involve some controversy and a charge of fraud, as is the case with all of the books I treat in detail in subsequent chapters. Although it is tempting to treat these cases as problems of New Journalism or anomalies of autobiography, eventually it be-comes apparent that virtually all autobiographies are anomalous and that the world of autobiography is replete with similarly problematic cases.

D. H. Lawrence might have been thinking of American autobiography when he wrote that “Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning. They revel in subterfuge. They prefer their truth swaddled in an ark of bullrushes, and deposited among the reeds until some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe.”¹⁰ The history of American autobiography is filled with generic confusions bordering on fabrication. Such originally nonfictional autobiographical forms as the Indian-captivity narrative and the slave narrative quickly gave way to fictional versions, and early American literature is characterized by works that combine travel writing, almanacs, journals, diaries, and fiction in ambiguous proportions. The early blend of journalism and the tall tale, whose importance for Gertrude Stein will be discussed in chapter 2, can be exemplified by the case of Davy Crockett, celebrated hero of 200 books—including three autobiographies, none of which he wrote himself—and of a recent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. American autobiographical writing from Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and James to the present is constantly ambiguous in terms of genre, with both historical authenticity and deliberate confusion between fiction and nonfiction, between literal and fictional prefaces, as constants.

Research has revealed more and more the problematic, generic confusions of many classics of American nonfictional prose. Mary Chesnutt’s A Diary from Dixie, which was assumed for years to be an authentic Civil War diary, has lately been revealed to be a fictionalized version, which was written after the war was over, of a real diary, whereas James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, a novel, was so often taken for a real autobiography that the author was forced in compensation to write a nonfictional account of his life.

By the late 1960s, the acceptance of New Journalism and the nonfictional novel, the relaxing of libel laws, and the spirit of social revolution had combined to produce autobiographies that deliberately flaunted whatever conventions of the genre remained. From their titles and subtitles alone, we can see basic problems inherent in such books as Herbert Gold’s Fathers, subtitled A Novel in the Form of a Memoir; Gore Vidal’s Two Sisters, subtitled A Memoir in the Form of a Novel; Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, subtitled A Fictional Memoir; Rosellen Brown’s The Autobiography of My Mother; Toby Olson’s The Life of Jesus, an autobiographical novel; and Michael Anania’s The Red Menace, advertised as “a memoir in the form of a novel.” In addition, the authors of numerous autobiographical books have deliberately taken a stand on the border between traditional autobiography, autobiographical novel, and fictional autobiographies—stories in autobiographical form of fictional people...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dediacation
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION Design and Lie in Modern American Autobiography
• 2 GERTRUDE STEIN “She Will Be Me When This You See”
• 3 SHERWOOD ANDERSON “Lies My Father Told Me”
• 4 RICHARD WRIGHT “Wearing the Mask”
• 5 MARY MCCARTHY “I Do Believe Her Though I Know She Lies”
• 6 LILLIAN HELLMAN “Are You Now or Were You Ever?”
• 7 CONCLUSION “You Must Remember This”
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index