Does it matter if authors make up their memoirs?
Long before the rise of “autofiction”, and the contemporary wave of authors drawing from their own lives for their novels – Rachel Cusk, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner and others – many writers in the first half of the 20th century were experimenting with the limits of autobiography. Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, HG Wells, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf: all wrote memoirs as inventive, in different ways, as their novels (which were often themselves very autobiographical). And that list is only the tip of the iceberg.
The novelist’s memoir is a fascinating subgenre, if a slippery one when it comes to the truth. Writing autobiography, like all self-portraiture, is an art, even if it can be very lifelike. Novelists, whose daily craft involves making things up, know this all too well. So many different elements pull against the memoirist’s obligation to veracity – not least privacy, style, and the vagaries of memory – that some fiction is inevitably woven in. As the biographer Leon Edel writes, a biography (and the same is true of autobiography) “cannot imitate life … it rearranges its material; it tells a flowing continuous story – something our lives never were”.
The line between fact and fiction in the autobiographies of novelists is often wafer-thin. In his 1906 memoir The Mirror of the Sea, Joseph Conrad slips at many points into outright fiction. Writing of his early years in Marseille, he narrates gun-running episodes in a boat called the Tremolino, which Conrad scholars have never been able to trace, and which was most probably fictional. Conrad tells of the death of a certain “Cesar Cervoni” who was pushed overboard – but a real-life Cesar Cervoni lived on long past these events. Conrad’s 1912 follow-up A Personal Record came closer to the truth of its author’s life – he declared it “absolutely genuine” – but self-reflection made Conrad so uncomfortable that the book’s real genius is found in its omissions.
Do authors always rewrite their lives in their memoirs? Is it all a question of degree? Henry James has long been criticised for reworking documentary materials, slightly retouching letters he quoted in A Small Boy and Others, and Notes of a Son and Brother. In a review of Flaubert’s letters, James himself argued that “some day or other surely we shall all agree that everything is relative, that facts themselves are often falsifying, and that we pay more for some kinds of knowledge than those particular kinds are worth”.
Incredible facts … Alice B Toklas (left) and Gertrude Stein in 1944. Photograph: Granger/Rex/Shutterstock
Such a subtle argument doesn’t always convince the people depicted. Gertrude Stein’s brother Leo, after reading The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, was incensed, in a way that many others set down unwittingly in other people’s memoirs might have been: “God what a liar she is! … It’s the first time I ever read an autobiography of which I knew the authentic facts and to me it seems sheerly incredible.”
Ford Madox Ford’s reminiscences are perhaps the most notorious for making things up – but he never pretended otherwise. “This book … is full of inaccuracies as to facts,” he declared in Ancient Lights, “but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute”. Ford’s Return to Yesterday and It Was the Nightingale are extremely entertaining blends of fiction and memoir, with the author playing fast and loose with fact to depict people he knew. This wasn’t always received positively. HG Wells, one of Ford’s subjects, called the latter’s autobiographies “imaginative reminiscences”. This wasn’t a compliment – Wells was alarmed about what stories Ford might spin about him next.
What’s omitted from autobiographies is often as important as what’s made up: Edith Wharton carefully erased her ex-husband Teddy from her life in A Backward Glance. Wells, in his Experiment in Autobiography, performed his own sleights of hand when depicting his love life, leaving out many of his affairs to focus on his two marriages. He later wrote a more candid volume: HG Wells in Love, with the stipulation it would be published posthumously. Appearing in 1984, it revealed his relationships with Violet Hunt, Dorothy Richardson, Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, Odette Keun and Moura Budberg – among others. Its frankness highlights how much was previously evaded.
Rather than forming a binary opposition, fact and fiction often move on a sliding scale. Sometimes, the only way to know whether to read a book as memoir or novel comes down to what the author says it is – and here, we ask for honesty. We read differently according to the expectations raised.
WG Sebald, a master of making books out of facts, with curlicues of invention, thought that “fact and fiction are, as it were, both hybrids. They are not alternatives. They are both hybrids with the constituent parts in different measure”. As Sebald found, there are subjects that demand precision and utter objectivity to do justice to their actuality. We should never deny the importance of facts. But even the selection of facts is artful, and sometimes subjectivity is more real than assumed omniscience.
“In a work of non-fiction,” writes the New Yorker critic Janet Malcolm, “we almost never know the truth of what happened”. For many memoir writers dealing with the near or distant past, what is remembered becomes half-imagined. Autobiography is a kind of reclamation, yet so much remains lost. In her fragmentary autobiography Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf captures this beautifully. Writing of her mother, she exclaims: “How difficult it is to single her out as she really was; to imagine what she was thinking, to put a single sentence into her mouth! I dream; I make up pictures of a summer’s afternoon.” As she had argued years earlier, there is the “granite” of fact and the “rainbow” of personality, and even though Woolf had thought them incompatible, they are not – and can lead us to a different kind of truth, in their own way.
Jerome Boyd Maunsell’s Portraits from Life is published by Oxford University Press (£20).