Why an autobiography at all? Self-defence: biographies are being written. It is a jumpy business, as if you were walking along a flat and often tedious road in an agreeable half-dark but you know a searchlight may be switched on at any minute. Yes, indeed there are good biographers, nearly all of them in Britain now, for we are enjoying a golden age of biography. What is better than a really good biography? Not many novels.
In the year just finished, 1992, I heard of five American biographers writing about me. One I had never met or even heard of. Another, I was told by a friend in Zimbabwe, is ‘collecting material’ for a biography. From whom? Long dead people? A woman I met twice, once when she asked me carefully casual questions, has just informed me she has written a book about me which she is about to get published. Yet another can only be concocting a book out of supposedly autobiographical material in novels and from two short monographs about my parents. Probably interviews, too, and these are always full of misinformation. It is an astonishing fact that you may spend a couple of hours with an interviewer, who is recording every word you say, but the article or interview always has several major errors of fact. But less and less do facts matter, partly because writers are like pegs to hang people’s fantasies on. If writers do care that what is written about them should somewhere connect with the truth, does that mean we are childish? Perhaps it does, and certainly I feel every year more of an anachronism. Returning to Paris after a year’s interval, I was interviewed by a young woman who had done me before. I said her previous article had been a tissue of invention, and she replied, ‘But if you have to get an article in to a deadline, and you didn’t have enough material, wouldn’t you make it up?’ Clearly she would not have believed me if I had said no. And that brings me straight to the heart of the problem. Young people brought up in today’s literary climate cannot believe how things were. You get sceptical looks if you say something like this: ‘Once serious publishers tried to find serious biographers for their serious authors.’ Now everyone takes it for granted that all they are concerned about is to publish as many biographies as possible, no matter how second-rate, because biographies sell well. Writers may protest as much as they like: but our lives do not belong to us.
If you try and claim your own life by writing an autobiography, at once you have to ask, But is this the truth? There are aspects of my life I am always trying to understand better. One – what else? – my relations with my mother, but what interests me now is not the narrowly personal aspect. I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable? Now I see her as a tragic figure, living out her disappointing years with courage and with dignity. I saw her then as tragic, certainly, but was not able to be kind. Every day you may watch, hear of, some young person, usually a girl, giving parents, often a mother, such a bad time that it could be called cruelty. Later they will say, ‘I am afraid I was difficult when I was an adolescent.’ A quite extraordinary degree of malice and vindictiveness goes into the combat. Judging from histories and novels from the past, things were not always like this. So what has happened, why now? Why has it become a right to be unpleasant?
I have a woman friend who in the Second World War went to New York with her young child, having no support in Britain, her home. She earned her living precariously as a model for artists, and sometimes modelling clothes. She lived in a small town outside New York. She was poor, isolated, and being twenty years old, yearned for some fun. Once, just once, exactly once, she left the little boy with a friend, spent the evening in New York, and did not get home until dawn. I used to listen to this boy, now adolescent, accuse her most bitterly, ‘You left me alone night after night and went off to enjoy yourself.’ A small boy, the son of parents who did not approve of smacking, had his fingers smacked once when he persisted in putting them through the paper covering jam pots. This became, ‘And you used to hit me when I was small.’ These petty recollections are to the point.
For years I lived in a state of accusation against my mother, at first hot, then cold and hard, and the pain, not to say anguish, was deep and genuine. But now I ask myself, against what expectations, what promises, was I matching what actually happened? And this is the second area of my preoccupation, which has to be linked with the first.
Why is it I have lived my whole life with people who are automatically against authority, ‘agin the government’, who take it for granted that all authority is bad, ascribe doubtful or venal motives to government, the Establishment, the ruling class, the local town council, the headmaster or mistress? So deep-rooted is this set of mind that it is only when you begin to climb out of it you see how much of your life has been determined by it. This week I was with a group of people of mixed ages, all on the left (or who had been once), and someone happened to mention that the government was doing something – quite a good thing, but that isn’t the point – and at once every face put on a look of derision. Automatic. Push-button. This look is like a sneer or a jeer, a Well, what can one expect? It can only come out of some belief, one so deep it is well out of sight, that a promise of some kind has been made and then betrayed. Perhaps it was the French Revolution? Or the American Revolution, which made the pursuit of happiness a right with the implication that happiness is to be had as easily as taking cakes off a supermarket counter? Millions of people in our time behave as if they have been made a promise – by whom? when? – that life must get freer, more honest, more comfortable, always better. Has advertising only set our minds more firmly in this expectant mode? Yet nothing in history suggests that we may expect anything but wars, tyrants, sickness, bad times, calamities, while good times are always temporary. Above all, history tells us nothing stays the same for long. We expect gold at the foot of always renewable rainbows. I feel I have been part of some mass illusion or delusion. Certainly part of mass beliefs and convictions that now seem as lunatic as the fact that for centuries expeditions of God-lovers trekked across the Middle East to kill the infidel.
I have just read of a historian who claims that the distrust, even contempt, of government and authority is precisely because of the First World War, because of the stupidity and incompetence of its generals, because of the slaughter of Europe’s young men.
When journalists or historians come to ask about something in the past the hardest moment is when I see on their faces the look that means, But how could you have believed this, or done that? Facts are easy. It is the atmospheres that made them possible that are elusive. ‘You see, we believed …’ (You must have been pretty stupid then!) ‘No, you don’t understand, it was such a fevered time …’ (Fever you call it, do you!) ‘I know it’s hard to understand, without being immersed in the poisonous air of then.’
A subsidiary question, not without general relevance: how to account for the fact that all my life I’ve been the child who says the Emperor is naked, while my brother never, not once, doubted or criticized authority?
Mind you, a talent for seeing the Emperor’s nakedness can mean his other qualities are not noticed.
I am trying to write this book honestly. But were I to write it aged eighty-five, how different would it be?
A TINY THING AMONG TRAMPLING, knocking careless giants who smell, who lean down towards you with great ugly hairy faces, showing big dirty teeth. A foot you keep an eye on, while trying to watch all the other dangers as well, is almost as big as you are. The hands they use to grip you can squeeze the breath half out of you. The rooms you run about