Autobiography As Narrative*

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.

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