Julianne (should I use Dean Allen’s interesting, but ultimately annoying word “herself” to maintain a certain level of her privacy? Should I use any sort of quaint, but ultimately diminutive name? I haven’t decided yet.) is training to be an historian, in the same sense that I am training to be a literary critic. Last night we discussed biography and autobiography, and I mentioned how much fun it would be to write an autobiography. It’s the sort of thing I can see myself doing, and it offers some interesting opportunities to be creative.
First, I think I would have to take certain liberties with my life story. I’m a creative person and creative people like to make things up (Robertson Davies once said something like, “If you ask a writer enough questions, you will start to get answers you cannot wholly trust.”), and that’s exactly what I would do. I would slip bits and pieces of fiction into my autobiography, and I would let it be known in the text that I was doing so. But I wouldn’t make it obvious at all which bits were fiction.
Of course Julianne thought this an appalling thing to do to an historian, and I suppose it is. But that doesn’t make it any less fun.
Julian Barnes, of course, has already thought of something similar. More from Flaubert’s Parrot:
You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say that it is a meshed intrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.
You can do the same with a biography. The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, sorts, fillets and sells. Yet consider what he doesn’t catch: there’s always far more of that. The biography stands, fat and worthy-burgherish on the shelf, boastful and sedate: a shilling life will give you all the facts, a ten-pound one all the hypotheses as well. But think of everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed exhalation of the biographee. What chance would the craftiest biographer stand against the subject who saw him coming and decided to amuse himself?
What chance indeed.
