The Self-Consciousness of the Modern Mind

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS NARRATIVE*

By ALFRED KAZIN

EFORE he died, Ernest Hemingway big green autobus at the terminal ana the left a memoir of Paris in the 1920's, Cafe des Amateurs was crowded and the B A Moveable Feast, that is just now windows misted over from the heat and the published. Anyone who grew up with Hem­ smoke inside." Anyone who knows his Hem­ ingway's writing, as I did, and who has al­ ingway will recognize in these artful repeti­ ways valued his early short stories in par­ tions, these simple flat words shaped like the ticular for the breathtaking clarity and design in a painting by Braque and gray as a beauty with which he could develop his ef­ Paris street by Utrillo, Hemingway's most fects in this miniature and subtle form, can­ familiar touch. And most astonishing, in not help reading Hemingway's memoir with what is after all presented as a memoir, there amazement. For line by line and stroke by are conversations with Gertrude Stein, Ford stroke, in the color of the prose and the Madox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, that are as shaping of the episodes, Hemingway's auto­ witty and destructive as those dialogues in biography is as beautiful in composition as Men Without Women or The Sun Also Rises Hemingway's best stories, it is in subject that Hemingway used, in exactly the same and tone indistinguishable from much of way, to get the better of the other speaker Hemingway's fiction, and it is full of dialogue in a dialogue with the hero who in Heming­ as maliciously clever as Hemingway's fiction. way's fiction is called Nick Adams or Jake He begins here, as his stories so often do, Barnes or Frederic Henry. Ford Madox with the weather, the color of the weather, Ford comes on the young Hemingway the tone and weight of the weather in Paris. quietly sitting in a cafe, sagely observing life There was the bad weather that would come in Paris, but Ford is described as "breathing in one day when the fall was over-"We heavily through a heavy, stained mustache would have to shut the windows in the night and holding himself as upright as an ambu­ against the rain and the cold wind would latory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead." strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Ford is shown as a heavy, wheezing, dis­ Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the trustful, and confused presence; he scolds rain and the wind drove the rain against the waiters for his own mistakes and, as if he were a fat actor playing Colonel Blimp and not the almost over-subtle writer that Ford ALFRED KAZIN, born in Brooklyn in 1915, Madox Ford actually was, he pronounces critic, editor, and author, Guggenheim and Rocke­ feller Fellow, distinguished Professor of English that "a gentleman will always cut a cad." at the State University of New York (Long Island Hemingway plays it cool. "I took a quick Center), has demonstrated the power of autobiog­ drink of brandy. 'Would he cut a bounder?' raphy in his own' sketches of Brooklyn boyhood I asked. 'It would be impossible for a gentle­ and youth, A Walker in the City (1951). This pres­ man to know a bounder.' 'Then you can only ent essay is his Hopwood Lecture at The Univer­ sity of Michigan, May 1964, delivered at the an­ cut someone you have known on terms of nual Hopwood Awards, just before some $17.000 equality?' I pursued. 'Naturally.' 'How would in prizes was distributed to winning writers of es­ one ever meet a cad?' 'You might not know says, novels, stories, plays, and poems. it, or the fellow could have become a cad.' * Copyright 1964 by the Regents of the Uni­ 'What is a cad?' I asked. 'Isn't he someone versity of Michigan. that one has to thrash within an inch of his 210 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS NARRATIVE 211 life?' 'Not necessarily,' Ford said. 'Is Ezra a the greatest narratives in world literature. gentleman?' I asked. 'Of course not,' said But the kind of autobiography I am discuss­ Ford. 'He's an American.' " ing here is autobiography as fiction-that is, This is of course standard Hemingway as narrative which has no purpose other than dialogue-it is literary in itself, and it is a to tell a story, to create the effect of a story, burlesque of the pretentious or false civili­ which above all asks (as the books by St. zation that Hemingway always portrayed as Augustine, Rousseau, Thoreau, and Henry the enemy. Yet this artful mixture is pre­ Adams do not) to be read for its value as sented as autobiography, and it must be narrative. Of course it is ironic to find that taken in some measure as a truthful account some of the greatest narratives in autobiog­ of Hemingway's relations with Ford. To raphy have actually been written by people suppose-and who can help it-that Hem­ like Benjamin Franklin, who thought that ingway was reshaping the facts many years he was setting himself up as a model for after the encounter in that cafe, is to miss emulation. James Baldwin, in his powerful the point of what makes Hemingway's book book of essays, Notes Of A Native Son, so remarkable a piece of writing. For Hem­ writes as if his only aim were to shame the ingway uses the convention of autobiography white middle class and to arouse it to the -real names, dates, places--entirely for his plight of the Negroes. But his book is most imaginative purpose as a creative artist ex­ felt as autobiography, and succeeds as a actly as a statesman will use autobiography kind that only a practiced fiction writer could in the interest of his historic reputation. have created. General Eisenhower's memoirs of his first There is in fact a kind of autobiography, term, Mandate For Change, probably con­ very characteristic of our period and usually tain as many retouchings of the original facts, written by novelists or poets, that has no whatever these may have been (and Eisen­ other aim, whatever the writer may think'he hower was probably the last to know), as do is doing, than to be enjoyed as narrative. Hemingway's. But Eisenhower's intention in And books like Hemingway's A Moveable writing autobiography is to present a public Feast, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, image of himself for the history books. And Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh, while Hemingway's aim is phychologically Colette's My Mother's House and The Blue no doubt the same, Hemingway cannot think Lantern, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Den­ of Paris in 1921 without making a picture of ton Welch's Maiden Voyage, are so charac­ the city and a narrative about his friends; teristic of the use that an imaginative writer Eisenhower, by contrast, stuffs his memoirs can make of the appearance of fact in auto­ with documents of the period in order to biography that they make us think of how persuade the reader that his decisions were cleverly the imaginative writer exploits "real made on the basis of the information re­ facts" in novels like Sons And Lovers, A corded in these documents. The artfulness of Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, this does not make Eisenhower's autobiog­ Ulysses, Remembrance Of Things Past, raphy a work of art. Journey To The End Of The Night, Good­ Autobiography, like other literary forms, bye To Berlin, Tropic Of Cancer. Even to is what a gifted writer makes of it. There is mention Henry Miller among such novelists great autobiography that is also intellectual and storytellers is to recognize that there is history, like The Education Of Henry a kind of narrative in our day which is fic­ Adams; great autobiography that is equally tion that uses facts, that deliberately retains theology, like the Confessions of S1. Augus­ the facts behind the story in order to show tine; autobiography that is desperately in­ the imaginative possibilities inherent in fact, tended for understanding of self, like Rous­ and yet which is designed, even when the seau's Confessions; autobiography that is ac­ author does not say so, to make a fable of tually a program for living, like Thoreau's his life, to tell a story, to create a pattern of Walden. These are all classics of autobiog­ incident, to make a dramatic point. raphy, and the stories they tell are among Hemingway begins with the weather; 212 THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW

Dahlberg opens the naturalistic poem that or short novel, which usually obeys canons he makes of his life by intoning that "Kansas of poetic form rather than of the realistic City is a vast inland city, and its marvelous novel. There is a correct and self-limited kind river, the Missouri, heats the senses; the ma­ of fiction that Eliot and Pound have made ple, alder, elm and cherry trees with which an esthetic standard in our time, and the kind the town abounds are songs of desire, and of art in autobiography that I am discussing only the almonds of ancient Palestine can usually has the tension and manipulated tone awaken the hungry pores more deeply." that we associate with such modish fiction as Robert Lowell says that "in 1924 people still Salinger's stories. lived in cities," Colette in My Mother's Autobiography as narrative obviously House invokes her mother's cry, "Where Are seeks the effect of fiction, and cannot use The Children?" Edmund Wilson begins his basic resources of fiction, like dialogue, with­ memoir of Talcottville, in upper New York out becoming fiction. Yet if Hemingway had state, with a sentence that more immediately wanted to write the story of A Moveable recalls the spirit of fiction in our day than Feast as fiction he would have done so; in­ does the flat account of the hero's beginnings deed, several incidents and characters in this in eighteenth-century novels like Gulliver's memoir were used by him as fiction. And Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Here is Wil­ Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh actually re­ son-"As I go north for the first time in lates as autobiography material that he had years, in the slow, the constantly stopping, presented in his novels Bottom Dogs and milk train-which carries passengers only in From Flushing To Calvary. When a good the back part of the hind car and has an old novelist relates as fact what he has already stove to heat it in winter-I look out through used as fiction, it is obvious that he turns to the dirt-yellowed double pane and remember autobiography out of some creative longing how once, as a child, I used to feel thwarted that fiction has not satisfied. One can hardly in summer till I had got the windows open reproach Hemingway, Nabokov, Colette and there was nothing between me and the with lacking imagination. On the contrary, it widening pastures, the great boulders, the would seem that far from being stuck with black and white cattle, the rivers, stony and their own raw material and lacking the in­ thin, the lone elms like feather-dusters, the vention to disguise or use it, they have found high air which sharpens all outlines, makes in the form of autObiography some particu­ all colors so breathtakingly vivid, in the clear lar closeness and intensity of effect that they light of late afternoon." Robinson Crusoe is value. The "creative" stamp, the distin­ more prosaic: "I was born in the year 1632, guishing imaginative organization of experi­ in the city of York, of a good family, though ence, is in autobiography supplied not by not of that country, my father being a for­ intention, but by the felt relation to the life eigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull." data themselves. The esthetic effect that Obviously the creation of mood in Wilson's gifted autobiographers instinctively if not al­ opening is more in accordance with what we ways consciously seek would seem to be the think of as the concentration of effect essen­ poetry of remembered happenings, the in­ tial to fiction, and Defoe's opening is in the tensity of the individual's strivings, the feel leisurely chronicle style suitable to a time of life in its materiality. Henry James ex­ when novelists wrote masterpieces without pressed it perfectly when he said in tribute being self-conscious artists in the style of to Whitman's letters to his friend Peter Flaubert. This self-consciousness is by no Doyle that "the absolute natural," when the means a proof of talent or the style of gen­ writer is interesting, is "the supreme merit ius; Defoe and Fielding did not have to try of letters." In Whitman's material, James so hard as Flaubert to create masterpieces, recognized "the beauty of the natural is, and they were actually more successful. But here, the beauty of the particular nature, the art is no longer easy, in the sense of being man's own overflow in the deadly dry set­ comfortable, and autobiography as narrative ting, the personal passion, the love of life is as artful as the contemporary short story plucked like a flower in a desert of innocent, AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS NARRATIVE 213 unconscious ugliness .... A thousand images an experiment in surrealism. And it can be of patient, homely American life, else un­ shown, I think, that the creative indecisive­ distinguishable, are what its queerness­ ness that is so marked in fiction today can be however startling-happened to express." traced to the fact that power is now felt to Of course, autobiographical writing, even lie everywhere but in the individual's own when it assumes the mask of sincerity and judgment. He gets to feeling smaller, more pretends to be the absolute truth, can be as self-conscious, more uncertain of what he fictional as the wildest fantasy. Obviously, thinks and believes; it is then that the novel autobiography does not appeal to us as read­ turns into a document of the thwarted in­ ers because it is more true to the facts than dividual will. But this is not a natural sub­ is fiction; it is just another way of telling a ject for the novel, which takes its very en­ story, it tells another kind of story, and it ergy from the life of society. uses fact as a strategy. When Nabokov in Autobiography is properly a history of a Lolita writes a formal fiction, with made-up self, and it is this concern with a self as a incidents and farcical episodes that dip into character: as an organism, that makes auto­ surrealism, what he is in effect saying to the biography the queerly moving, tangible, vi­ reader is: This could have happened, and bratory kind of narrative that it can be. my effort is to persuade you, through the Everyone knows that the emergence of the concentrated illusion of my fiction, that it is self as a central subject in modem thinking happening. But when Nabokov describes his and modem art is no proof of individual younger self hunting butterflies in the Cri­ power or freedom. Shakespeare, of whom mea, in that other Russia that vanished after we know so little as a person, left a fuller rec­ 1917, his whole effort is to communicate to ord of the effect of human experience on a the reader the passion and tone of the young single mind than we get from the most ten­ man's happiness in nature. That young man derly self-cherishing passages in Proust or alone is the story, and a summer day long Nabokov or Hemingway; we know very little ago is all the setting and all the plot. "On a about Shakespeare's self, and Keats's state­ summer morning, in the legendary Russia of ment sums up profoundly the creative in­ my boyhood, my first glance upon awaken­ feriority of all modem writing that turns on ing was for the chink between the shutters. the self as hero when he compares Words­ If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had bet­ worth with Shakespeare's bewildering lack ter not open the shutters at all, and so be of self. Keats says that as distinguished from spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its the Wordsworthian, or "egotistical sublime, picture in a puddle. From the age of six, which is a thing per se, and stands alone," everything I felt in connection with a rec­ the "poetical character is not itself-it has tangle of framed sunlight was dominated by no self-It is everything and nothing-It a single passion. If my first glance of the has no character.... A poet is the most un­ morning was -for the sun, my first thought poetical of anything in existence, because he was for the butterflies it would engender. ... " has no Identity-he is continually in for and The difference between formal fiction and filling some other body.... It is a wretched autobiography-as-narrative is not the differ­ thing to confess; but it is a very fact, that ence between invention and truth, between not one word I ever utter can be taken for the imaginative and the factual; the imagi­ granted as an opinion growing out of my nation is in everything that is well conceived identical Nature-how can I, when I have and written. But autobiography is centered no Nature?" on a single person, who may be related to This is magnificent in its truth about the world of nature more profoundly than Shakespeare. But it is less true of Keats than he is to other human beings-which is the it is of Shakespeare, and it does not easily story of Nabokov's Speak, Memory, as it is apply to such self-haunted writers of narra­ of Thoreau's Walden. Fiction cannot limit tive as Proust, Celine, Joyce, Nabokov, and itself to one individual's sensations, feelings, Hemingway. We cannot reflect on such key and hopes, except for reasons of satire, or as talents of our time without recognizing the 214 THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW immense role that the self now plays in fic­ that has become successively more interest­ tion. The "egotistical sublime," Keats's keen ing from age to age, and that has never in­ phrase, suggests the sublimity that the ego terested any age so much as it does ours. finds in itself, in its own strivings, as well as One reason for this is of course the so­ the sublimity that it confers upon the world licitousness for one's self that is a mark of as the object of the self's consciousness. And our culture; but the main literary reason is we all understandably disparage the egotis­ the belief, which the Romantics first pro­ tical, whether sublime or not, especially when pounded, that knowledge is attached to our­ we compare it with Shakespeare's ability to selves as children which later we lose. And enter into so many characters. it is only when a subject or interest or form But remember that Keats, who understood is associated with an advance in his creative this lack of egotism in Shakespeare, could not thinking-which is his power-that it is val­ himself write a good play, and that neither ued by a writer. No good writer chooses a could any of the English romantic poets. In form for psychological needs alone, since it our day the contemporary theater, at least in is not himself he is interested in as an artist; English, does not use poets well, does not he chooses a mask, an imagined self, for the depend on poetry for dramatic expression control it gives him over disconnected, ster­ though it may occasionally exploit and im­ ile, often meaningless facts. There is an ar­ personate poetic rhythms in its rhetoric. tistic shrewdness to the exploitation of auto­ Shakespeare's lack of personal identity is biographical devices that derives from the now a mystery, and first-rate dramatic nar­ fact that since the writer tends to be more rative is found only in prose fiction, and engaged with his self than he used to be, he prose fiction of the kind, as one can see in is also more demanding of what the self can Joyce, Faulkner, Lawrence, Hemingway, make of the world, and that he finds a power that has grown out of the egotism of roman­ in this engagement and demand. There is an tic poetry. Faulkner once told an interviewer imaginative space that every true writer seeks -"I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist to enlarge by means of his consciousness. wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, The writer seeks to press his consciousness and then tries the short story, which is the into being-to convert his material openly most demanding form after poetry. And, and dramatically into a new human experi­ failing at that, only then does he take up ence. novel writing." Hemingway, whose first book The fascination with childhood as a sub­ was called Three Stories And Ten Poems, ject in contemporary narrative derives, I learned to write prose in rhythms learned think, from the esthetic pleasure that the from poetry. From Melville to Joyce and writer finds in substituting the language of Faulkner, the novelists in English who have mature consciousness for the unformulated come to mean most to us have been those consciousness of the child. Joyce in the be­ associated with just the kind of self-insisting ginning of A Portrait Of The Artist As A and self-exploring romanticism that Keats Young Man tries to express the smells, deprecated. And in the most interesting nov­ sounds, textures, and pleasures of the cradle. elists who have come up since the Second Lawrence in Sons And Lovers tries to re­ World War, like Malcolm Lowry and Saul create Oedipal experiences with his mother. Bellow, one feels that the egotistical sublime Proust, in the "Overture" to Remembrance has been their key to the chaos of the con­ Of Things Past-and this opening section is temporary world. Perhaps it is when the world the classic expression of this use of child­ becomes a screen for the selfs own discov­ hood in modern fiction-describes his earli­ eries and imaginings, when the self becomes est impressions in sentences that affect us as a passage to some mysterious collective truth if no one before him had ever found the that waits upon the self to be revealed. that words for these intense experiences. The cre­ gifted writers turn to autobiography as artis­ ative rapture of Proust's own slowly discov­ tic strategy. And of course the ideal subject ering genius becomes the theme of the salva­ for such purposes is childhood-a subject tion through art; language can shape and re- AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS NARRATIVE 215 create the dead memories that weigh us said to have thought before. What interests down, language can raise us from our bond­ the contemporary critic is usually not litera­ age to self and to the past. ture as a guide to belief, or conduct, or ac­ In this power over his past is the writer's tion, but the forms or myths or rituals that key to such immortality as we can ever he can uncover in works of literature as uni­ achieve. Proust's rapture has little to do with versally recurring traits of the imagination psychology itself, for it is not a condition that itself. No one turns now to novels for a key Proust is writing about but the recapture of to the society in which we live; we expect life and of true meaning. The rapture cele­ that of the sociologists. The only novelists brates the artist's present consciousness, his who seem truly creative to us now are those creative power. In all these great autobio­ who command the language to interest us; graphical narratives of modern literature, more and more in the last few years the stim­ from Wordsworth's Prelude through Whit­ ulating new novelists have been those, like man's great songs of himself to the implanting J. P. Donleavy and William Burroughs, who of the romantic consciousness as a metaphor start from the stream of consciousness and and technique of twentieth-century fiction, stay inside this world. Such writers protest the only hero is the writer; the epic he writes that the outside world is simply insane, but is the growth of the writer's mind, his rejoic­ what they really mean is that it is boring ing in his conscious gift. Of such classic compared with the farce that is played in­ modem books as A Portrait Of The Artist side the mind. A book like Naked Lunch is As A Young Man, Remembrance Of Things an experiment in consciousness, like taking Past, Journey To The End Of The Night, drugs. Sons And Lovers, as of Moby Dick, It is to this pride in consciousness as cre­ Walden, and Song Of Myself, one can say ativity that I attribute much of the idolatry that the subject is the triumph of the crea­ of art in our time-the idea of art now tive consciousness in the hero. Creativity has means more than the concrete works of art. indeed become a prime virtue in our culture The self is inevitably the prime guest at this -and it is this pride in consciousness for it­ party of celebration. And in the high value self and of itself that has marked the litera­ that we put now on artistic consciousness I ture we most admire. see a key to the character of literature in our Consciousness, in this literary sense, is day. When we look back at Hemingway's not so much consciousness that powerfully A Moveable Feast, we can see why Hem­ dramatizes an object as it is an awareness of ingway, for all the radiant and unforgettable oneself being conscious. One sees on every pages he created out of his struggles to be­ hand today an idea of consciousness that is come an original artist, never became a ma­ self-representative. One art critic has admir­ ture novelist or a novelist of mature life­ ingly said of action painting that the painter we can see why fascination with the tone deliberately engages in a struggle with the and color of his own growth actually re­ painting in order to release the fullest pos­ placed many other interests for him. When sible consciousness in himself, that the paint­ we look back at Nabokov's Speak, Memory, ing is the occasion of his self-discovery as we can see why this writer, who is so gifted an imagination. And perhaps this trait, this as a fantasist and inventor, nevertheless growing celebration of one's own powers, makes us feel that his is the only active voice can be found among pure scientists as well; in his novels. Nabokov has even written a Heisenberg has said that to the farthest lim­ book on this theme called The Gift; when­ its of outer space man carries only the image ever I read even his best work, I seem to of himself. The more one studies the mind hear Nabokov saying to the reader-"How of contemporary literature, the more one talented I am!" Proust is the only writer of sees what Poe, who fancied himself a uni­ his time I can think of who used autobiog­ versal savant, meant when he said that this raphy to create a classic novel. Proust w~s is emphatically the thinking age; that it may a child of the great French literary tradition, be doubted whether anyone can properly be deeply rooted in and concerned with French 216 THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW

aristocracy, French politics, French man­ and Joyce made half a century ago. ners; Proust wrote his novel out of a pro­ The story of the artist as a young man has found intellectual faith that the past is not become tiresome, for all such artists tend to merely recovered but to be redeemed as a be the same. But this is by no means the only key to immortality. The imagination, thought story that autobiography has to tell. Sartre Proust, makes all things immortal in the said that during the occupation of France, kingdom of time-and it was this immortal­ Proust made him think of a lady on a chaise ity that Proust celebrated, not himself. When longue putting one bonbon after another into the writer affirms that his resources of con­ her mouth. One can easily sympathize with sciousness alone save him from the abyss of this impatient radical feeling that Proust is non-being, which is what writers mean when not for an age in which we all feel that we they say that the outside world now is crazy, are being overrun by politics. Society is no autobiography reduces the world to our­ longer a backdrop to anybody's sensitivity. selves and the form has reached the limit of It is ferocious in its claim on our attention, its usefulness. and so complex as at times to seem a bad StilI, autobiography as narrative is usually dream. We have all suffered too much from of intense interest-intensity is indeed its society, we are now too aware of what it may mode, for nothing is more intense to a per­ do to us, to be able to dispose of it as litera­ son than his own experience. This is also its ture. But correspondingly, the new novels of esthetic dilemma, on which contemporary society may come from those who can dem­ fiction is often hung up; for autobiography onstrate just how much the individual is un­ deals with a case history, not with plot; with der fire everywhere in today's world. Auto­ portraits, not with characters; it fixes the re­ biography as narrative can serve to create lation between the artist and the world, and the effect of a world that in the city jungle, so fixes our idea of the world instead of rep­ in the concentration camps, in the barracks, resenting it to us as a moving, transforming is the form that we must learn to express power. It may be that the great social epics even when we have no hope of mastering it. of the past are impossible to duplicate to­ We are all, as Camus showed with such ex­ day because the plot in such books really emplary clarity in his first and best novel, hung on an argument about how society func­ strangers in our present-day world-and as tions; today the novelist has no such argu­ strangers, we have things to say about our ment of his own, or is not convinced that experience that no one else can say for us. such argument is the final truth. But it is also In a society where so many values have been clear that the exploration and celebration of overturned without our admitting it, where individual consciousness represented an ef­ there is an obvious gap between the culture fort to find a new intellectual faith through we profess and the dangers among which we psychology, and this faith has not been forth­ really live, the autobiographical mode can coming. The stream-of-consciousness novel be an authentic way of establishing the truth is as outmoded as the old realistic novel of of our experience. The individual is real even society, for it has become a way of perform­ when the culture around him is not. ing and repeating the discoveries that Proust