The Treacherous Imagination

The Treacherous Imagination The Treacherous Imagination INTIMACY, ETHICS, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION Robert McGill THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS ■ COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGill, Robert, 1976– The treacherous imagination : intimacy, ethics, and autobiographical fiction / Robert McGill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1231-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9333-1 (cd) 1. Autobiographical fiction—History and criticism. 2. Ethics in literature. 3. Sexual ethics in literature. I. Title. PN3448.A8M43 2013 809.3'82—dc23 2013011171 Cover design by Mary Ann Smith Type set in Adobe Sabon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Bruce, David, and Marcy McGill Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION 1 Infidelity, Fiction, and Desire 3 Defining Autobiographical Fiction 5 Treacherous Ethics 11 1 A SHORT HISTORY OF TRANSGRESSION 20 Early Libels and Denials 22 The Private Life of Novels 26 Nineteenth-Century Publicity 31 Modernism and the Confessional Age 35 The Scandal of Confessional Poetry 41 2 BiOGRAPHICAL DESIRE 47 Elizabeth Smart and Confessional Culture 50 Intimacy with the Absent Author 60 Biographical Reading as Play 66 Philip Roth’s Fictional Selves 70 Moralizing Confessional Culture 76 viii ■ Contents 3 FICTIon’s BETRAYALS, INTImacy’s TRIALS 83 Mortification and Uncanny Doubles 86 Family and Fantasy in A. S. Byatt’s The Game 89 Authorial Detachment and Impositions 95 Metafiction’s Turn of the Screw 100 Hanif Kureishi and the Trouble with Intimacy 106 The Problem of Rebel Privilege 112 4 IN BED WITH AN AUTHOR 117 Alice Munro and the Hazards of Protest 120 Claire Bloom and the Public Machine 129 How to Use People 133 Reshaping Intimacy, Rebelling Together 137 An Ethics of Uncertainty 145 CONCLUSION 150 Works Cited 155 Index 168 Preface All writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it. —J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point 18 Giving the public details about oneself is a bourgeois temptation that I have always resisted. —Gustave Flaubert (qtd. in Barnes, Flaubert’s 94) few weeks after beginning to work on this book and think more carefully than I had about the ethics of authors drawing on private life in fiction, I awoke one morning to find a single phrase Ascrawled on the notepad beside my bed: “The pleasures of infidelity.” The words were in my handwriting, although I did not remember recording them. Apparently an idea had occurred to me in the night, but I could not be entirely sure that the phrase referred to my research. Even if it did, I was not reassured by the possibility that overnight my brain had been mulling the question of fiction’s treacheries. I was skeptical about the soundness of insights emerging from dreams, with their blend of fantasy and facts as well as their betrayal of unconscious desires. If this was to become my method for generating ideas, I worried, my work on autobiographical fiction might end up speaking autobiographically in unintended ways. Staring at the note, I also wondered whether my partner, arising earlier, had seen it, and if so, what she had thought. As I understood things, we were in a monogamous relationship, yet anyone who saw such a note on my bedside table could be forgiven for wondering otherwise. In ix x ■ Preface Louise DeSalvo’s Adultery, the author warns her audience that they may find themselves having unfaithful thoughts after reading her book; she observes that people can go through a “cycle of reading about adultery, and committing adultery, and writing about adultery” (4). The phrase on my notepad similarly suggested that I was treading dangerous ground by taking an interest in fiction’s betrayals. But as the following chapters show, it can also be dangerous to ignore the possibility of infidelity and avoid exploring the connections between reality and imagination. Those who insist on maintaining a strict border between the two are bound to end up confused and distraught as fantasy irrupts in their lives, not least when it is channeled through novels and short stories. Such people are also apt to become incensed when others traverse the border that they themselves adamantly defend. As I began my exploration of this border, I had the impression that fiction offends authors’ closest relations with some frequency. Neverthe- less, discussions of actual cases seemed relegated to the back corner of literary studies, with brief references made to examples such as Charles Dickens’s fictionalization of his friend Leigh Hunt as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. When I told acquaintances what I was doing, I discovered that at the level of gossip, things were different. Everyone knew some- body in Hunt’s position, and everyone was ready to tell me the story of what had transpired. If I had a predilection for real-life case studies, I would find no lack of examples from which to choose, no scarcity of people eager to describe scandalous fictional appropriations. This revelation was both exciting and worrisome. I was glad that my chosen terrain of inquiry was so fertile, but I was less than pleased at the notion that I might become a vessel for all these stories. Despite my interest in the ethical issues involved, I also held the belief that talking about authors’ personal lives in relation to their texts was unseemly. This belief was not due to any particular allegiance to New Critical or poststructuralist tenets. Rather, it was paradoxically out of deference to what I took to be the preferences of authors: surely, I thought, they would want people to study their fiction, not their lives. However, the work of writers such as Alice Munro, Henry Miller, and Philip Roth suggests that the very opposition of life to fiction is unstable and that there is a vital, unavoidable relation between authors and their texts, especially in the present day. As I argue in the following pages, it is hard to imagine a literary culture in a liberal, capitalist society that does not link authors’ names to their writing or their personal lives to their literature, and it is even harder to imagine how such linkages could fail to create ethical complications. Preface ■ xi On those occasions when I disclosed my research topic, people’s desire to read fiction biographically became amply evident, and not simply in virtue of the tales they offered about authors’ iniquities. Rather, those who knew that I had recently published a novel, The Mysteries, were not afraid to ask whether my interest in fiction’s ethics emerged from the experience of writing that book. In fact, I had decided to investigate the subject before conceiving of The Mysteries, but my lines of inquiry quickly developed in conjunction with the novel’s reception. For instance, although the plot and characters of The Mysteries are invented, the small town described in the novel was inspired by the village of Wiarton where I had grown up, and the topographical resemblance caused problems. Some readers familiar with Wiarton took the resemblance to signal that the book was a roman à clef, while others were unsettled by the fact that I seemed to have denuded a Wiarton-like place of its real inhabitants and replaced them with various unsavory characters. My mother, still living in the area, worried that the book offered too negative a portrayal of the region. I responded that it was a novel about a fictive place, not a tourist brochure for Wiarton. She agreed that it was certainly not the latter. In the end, various Wiartonians did identify parallels between The Mysteries and real life, but they were not parallels I could have predicted. For instance, people told me how accurately I had portrayed the new owner of a local convenience store, although in fact I had not known there was a new convenience store owner. There was also an argument among my extended family members about whether the blurry photograph on the novel’s cover was of my mother or my cousin (in fact, it was of neither of them). My father, appreciating the humor in such referential scaven- ger hunting, reminded me that his childhood nickname had been “Tiger” and declared himself the model for the tiger in my book. A friend of mine who is a champion whistler—yes, there are such championships—wondered whether a short reference to a character whistling in The Mysteries was a nod to him. And at readings that I gave, the most common question asked of me was: “Is your novel based on real people?” There was usually an air of disappointment when I said no. In retrospect, a more interesting response on my part would have been to ask in turn: “Why do you care?” That question, posed not rhetorically but genuinely, and applied to biographical curiosity about fiction more broadly, is one of the present book’s impetuses. It has often been said by authors that they write the kinds of stories they would want to read. This book sets out to be one I have wanted to read as a critic of novels and a writer of them; as someone who guards his privacy but has published fiction about private life and, for that xii ■ Preface matter, is not above reading about literary scandals involving other people.

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