Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  That which I myself saw and met with during the fighting I will write down, with the help of God, like a good eyewitness, very plainly, without twisting events one way or another. I am an old man of eighty-four and have lost my sight and hearing. It is my fortune to have no other wealth to leave my children and descendants except this, my true story, and they will see what a wonderful one it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Nowhere would one find the blend better blended than in autobiography. The novel sprang from the letter, the diary, the report of a journey; it felt itself alive in the form of every record of private life. Subjectivity was soon everybody’s subject.

  I do not think it should be assumed that history, which had always focused its attention upon wars and revolution, politics and money, strife of every sort (while neglecting most everything that mattered in the evolution of human consciousness, such as the discovery of the syllogism, the creation of the diatonic scale with its inventive notation, or three-legged perspective, to be for centuries the painter’s stool), had found its final relevance with the inward turn of its narrative, for it now celebrated the most commonplace and cliché-ridden awareness and handled the irrelevant with commercial hands and a pious tongue, as if it were selling silk.

  Our present stage is divinely dialectical, for we are witnessing now the return of the significant self. Prince—not a reigning prince, of course—Madonna, not a saintly mother, to be sure—stars of stadium, gym, arena, and screen, constellate our consciousness as history becomes a comic book, and autobiography the confessions of celluloid whores and boorish noisemakers whose tabloid lives are presented for our titillation by ghosts still undeservedly alive.

  If we think about composing our autobiography in any case, where do we turn but to our journals and diaries, our appointment books, our social calendars? We certainly ask for the return of our letters and review all our interviews to see if we said what we said, if we said it when they say we said it, and whose tape we may have soiled with our indiscretions.

  But what are these things that serve as the sources for so much autobiography? There are differences between diaries, journals, and notebooks, just as there are differences between chronicles and memoirs and travelogues and testimonies, between half-a-life and slice-of-life and whole-loaf lives, and these differences should be observed, not in order to be docile to genres, to limit types, or to anally oppose any mixing of forms (which will take place in any case), but in order that the mind may keep itself clean of confusion, since, to enjoy a redolently blended stew, we are not required to forget the dissimilarity between carrots and onions, or, when composing our apologia, the differences between diaries and letters and notes to the maid.

  The diary demands to be entered day by day, and it is improper to put down for Tuesday a date who closed your dreary eyes on Saturday. Its pages are as circumscribed as the hours are, and its spaces should be filled with facts, with jots, with jogs to the memory. Diary style is staccato, wirelesslike. “No call from Jill in three days. My god! have I lost he
r?” “Saw Parker again. He’s still the same. Glad we’re divorced.” “Finished Proust finally. Champagne.” And you are already disobedient to the demands of the form if you guiltily fill in skipped days as if you hadn’t skipped them.

  The journal still follows the march of the calendar, but its sweep is broader, more circumspect and meditative. Facts diminish in importance and are replaced by emotions, musings, thoughts. If your journal is full of data, it means you have no inner life. And it asks for sentences, although they need not be polished. “I was annoyed with myself today for hanging about the phone, hoping for a call from Jill, who hasn’t rung up in three days. She said she would call me, but was she being truthful? Dare I call her, though she expressly forbade it? I don’t want to lose a customer who spends money the way she does.” “Parker came into the shop, what gall! and ordered a dozen roses! I couldn’t believe it! I know he wants me to think he’s got another woman. God, he looked gaunt as a fallen soufflé. I think I’m happy we’re no longer together. He never bought roses for me. What a bastard!” “Today was a big day, a memorable day, because today I closed the cover on Proust, I really read the last line, and ‘time’ had the final word, no surprise there. I feel now a great emptiness, some sort of symbolic let-down, as if a soufflé had fallen.” You may revise what you have already written in your journal, but if you revise a passage prior to its entry, you are already beginning to fabricate.

  Virginia Woolf’s Diaries are therefore misnamed. We can see, in her case, as in that of Gide’s, the tyranny of the journal, when, like a diary, it wants to have its day-to-day say, and we are led to imagine its keeper asking from life only something worth writing about, living through the light for the sake of a few evening words, and worrying whether her senses will be sensitive, her thoughts worthwhile, and a few fine phrases turned during yet another entry.

  With the notebook we break out of chronology. Entries do not require dates. I can put anything in I like, even other people’s thoughts. The notebook is a workshop, a tabletop, a file. In one of mine you will find titles for essays I hope one day to write: “The Soufflé as a Symbol of Fragile Expectation.” Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge are misnamed, for the language is far too polished, the episodes are too artfully arranged, the perceptions are too poetically profound, and there is not nearly enough mess; however, if his fictive Notebooks really resemble journals, Henry James’s Notebooks are the real thing: a place to plot novels, to ponder problems, to consider strategies and plan attacks.

  All three—diary, journal, notebook,—are predicated on privacy. They are not meant to be read by anyone else, for here one is emotionally naked and in formal disarray. Unlike the letter, they have no addressee; they do not expect publication; and therefore, presumably, they are more truthful. However, if I already have my eye on history; if I know, when I’m gone, my jottings will be looked over, wondered at, commented on; I may begin to plant redemptive items, rearrange pages, slant stories, plot small revenges, revise, lie, and look good. Then, like Shakespearean soliloquies, they are spoken to the world.

  None of these three—diary, journal, notebook—is an autobiography, although the character of each one is autobiographical. A memoir is usually the recollection of another place or personality, and its primary focus is outward bound: on the sudden appearance of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Ithaca, New York, for instance, or how Caesar said, “You too?” before he fell, or what it was like to go to bed with Gabriele D’Annunzio. Even when the main attention of the memoir is focused inward, the scope of the memory tends to be limited (how I felt at the first fainting of the queen) and not wide enough to take in a life. Lewis Thomas takes the seventy-year life with which he assumes autobiography concerns itself, and first removes the twenty-five in which he was asleep, and then subtracts from the waking hours all the empty and idle ones, to reach a remainder of four thousand days. By discounting blurred memories, self-serving reconstitutions, and other fudges, his count comes down a good deal more. The indelible moments left will most likely be found to occupy thirty-minute bursts. Such bits, he says, are the proper subject of the memoir.

  What gets left out? that I read the papers. What gets left out? that I ate potatoes. What gets left out? that I saved my snot for several years. What gets left out? my second attempt to circumcise myself. What gets left out? the shops in which I purchased shoes, my fear of the red eyes of rabbits. What gets left out? what demeans me; what does not distinguish me from anyone else: bowel movements, movie favorites, bottles of scotch. What is saved? what makes me unique; no, what makes me universal; what serves my reputation; what does not embarrass the scrutinizing, the recollecting, self.

  And if we make a collection of such memories, they will remain like unstrung beads, because an autobiography has to rely on what cannot be and is not remembered, as well as on what is: I was born; I had whooping cough before I was three; my parents came to Sunnydale from Syracuse in an old Ford sedan. Edward Hoagland’s piece “Learning to Eat Soup” captures this feature perfectly, composed as it is of paragraphs made mostly of memories: balloons into which the past has been breathed:

  My first overtly sexual memory is of me on my knees in the hallway outside our fifth-grade classroom cleaning the floor, and Lucie Smith in a white blouse and black skirt standing above me, watching me.

  My first memory is of being on a train which derailed in a rainstorm in Dakota one night when I was two—and of hearing, as we rode in a hay wagon toward the distant weak lights of a little station, that a boy my age had just choked to death from breathing mud. But maybe my first real memory emerged when my father was dying. I was thirty-five and I dreamed so incredibly vividly of being dandled and rocked and hugged by him, being only a few months old, giggling helplessly and happily.

  A good deal of what we remember is remembered from paintings and plays and books, and sometimes, as above, these are themselves memories, and sometimes they are memories of books or plays or paintings … whose subject is the self.

  Testimonies, too, have powerful impersonal intentions. They do not simply wish to say: I was there, I saw enormities, now let me entertain you with my anguished account of them: of how I suffered, how I survived, remembered, yet went on; no—no—for they, those witnesses, were there for all of us, were we, standing in that slow-moving naked line, holding our dead baby across our chest to hide the breasts, never staring at others in the row, mumbling a prayer in a vacant way—yes—this is our numb mind, mankind’s misery, no single soul should bear it, not even Jesus, though it’s said he tried.

  The Holocaust ate lives like a fat boy on holiday.

  It is healthy, even desirable, to mix genres in order to escape the confinements of outworn conventions, or to break molds in order to create new shapes; but to introduce fiction into history on purpose (as opposed to being inadvertently mistaken) can only be to circumvent its aim, the truth, either because one wants to lie, or now thinks lying doesn’t matter and carelessness is a new virtue, or because one scorns scrupulosity as a wasted effort, a futile concern, since everything is inherently corrupt, or because an enlivened life will sell better than a straightforward one, so let’s have a little decoration, or because “What is truth?” is only a sardonic rhetorical question which regularly precedes the ritual washing of hands.

  I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are and then having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world. Anyone honestly happy with himself is a fool. (It is not a good idea to be terminally miserable about yourself either.) But an autobiography does not become a fiction just because fabrications will inevitably creep in, or because motives are never pure, or because memory will genuinely fade. It does not become a fiction simply because events or attitudes are deliberately omitted, or maliciously slanted, or blatantly fabricated, because fiction is always honest and does not intend to deceive. It announces itself: I am a fiction; do not rely on my accuracy, not because I am untrustworthy, but because I am en
gaged not in replication but in construction. There will be those who will try to glamorize their shoddy products by pretending they are true, and then, when they fail to pass even the briefest inspection, like the movies JFK and Malcolm X, dodge that responsibility by lamely speaking of “art.” Fiction and history are different disciplines, and neither grants licenses to incompetents, opportunists, or mountebanks.

  Next, in our travel across this map, we encounter the autobiography disguised as a fiction, presumably to prevent libel suits; for if the disguise cannot be seen through, what is the point of it as autobiography? and if it can, what is the purpose of the disguise? Conrad Aiken, possibly for the sake of objectivity, probably to injure only those who knew the code, put Ushant in the third person. Whether confessed to or not, many novels are autobiographies in disguise—so it is often asserted—and the chief advantage of this strategy, apart from the fact that the novelist need only remember what springs most readily to mind and can avoid all the sufferings of scholarship, the burdens of fairness, the goal of truth, is that the narrator of a novel can whine and grumble and play the fool without automatically tarnishing his author’s own character, which would otherwise be revealed to be spiteful, small-town, banal, and cheap.

  In his Memoirs, Juan Goytisolo occasionally shifts into the second person, the almost accusatory “you,” in order that he may be more lyrical, more deeply involved, while at the same time escaping the cell of himself to peer into the local hells, the personal nightmares, of others. (The italics in this excerpt are Goytisolo’s.)

  You can now evoke the time at the beginning of the sixties, when you interviewed for L’Express one of the political prisoners freed by Franco thanks to the international campaign for amnesty. Twenty and a bit years in the Burgos jail, with no horizon beyond the distant square of sky and the close, too close walls of his cell. After getting out, problems of adapting his vision to intervening spaces: dizziness, sickness, headaches behind the eyes. An even worse lack of adaptation to the new reality not assimilated in his subconscious. During the first months in prison, he had dreamt regularly of open spaces: his house, the village, people and places he knew as a free man. Then, surreptitiously, this ozone layer had rarefied until it disappeared: he stopped recalling the world outside the prison when he slept. If he dreamt about his mother, his mother was in prison. If he imagined his village, it was a village behind bars. The prison had penetrated his inner being and allowed him no escape whatsoever. The girls he had known in his youth, heroines of his nocturnal libido, always performed in a prison setting. The military tribunal’s punishment thus won after many years an absolute victory: not only a prison for the body, but likewise for mind, imagination, and fantasy.