Already a subscriber? Log in
We can all see that many novels which don’t appear to be autobiographical may nevertheless have been born in their author’s fantasy life. Ian Fleming never had James Bond’s adventures, but Bond is surely a projection of Fleming as, in certain moods, he would have liked to be. Anyone seeking a real-life model for Bond other than Fleming himself is surely wasting their time.
On the other hand, novelists resent, quite naturally, the suggestion that they draw only from their own lives. It’s patently absurd. Nobody, after all, supposes that a crime novelist like P. D. James or Ruth Rendell is a murderer, however many corpses litter their novels. It would be ridiculous to suggest that any of these murders represented some sort of wish-fulfilment, or ‘displaced activity’. Likewise, it would make little sense to identify Lady James with Adam Dalgliesh or Lady Rendell with her Chief Inspector Wexford.
In one of her novels — Loitering with Intent or A Far Cry from Kensington, I can’t recall which — Muriel Spark has her narrator remark that, while some people say that nothing happens to them, everything happens to the novelist. Taken literally, this is nonsense. Nothing happens to most novelists a good deal of the time. They sit at their desk, a notebook in hand, or before a typewriter or computer, and, if work is going well, may not even look out of the window to observe life going by. Novelists, by and large, lead retired lives, and, if they don’t , then they usually write fewer and probably worse novels. What happens to them happens in their mind, their memory and their imagination.
And this surely is where we return to Borges. Novelists certainly draw on their experience, and that experience includes their observation of other people. Such observation leads to speculation. V. S. Pritchett would look at a couple and ask himself, ‘what does she see in him?’, and from the question, a story would be spun. But it would be Pritchett’s story, made in his imagination from a brief glimpse of the material offered him. The couple in question might never recognise themselves.
Experience is itself of two sorts. There is the experience we have lived in what we call ‘real life’, though this will usually be altered or amended in memory. Then there is the alternative experience, the route which we did not take, but might have taken, the fork in the road we turned aside from. We can imagine that journey and make fiction of it. The novel that emerges may be considered a piece of counter-factual autobiography. We explore the past we turned away from.
Borges may have meant something simpler. If you want to know a novelist — or poet or playwright — read his novels or poems or plays, not a biography. This makes very obvious sense. Even the best biographies track the man or woman revealed in their social life, a being very different, as Proust argued in his reproof of the critic Sainte-Beuve, from the one who wrote. In discussing Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve made much of the memories of those who had known him. Proust found this absurd. ‘For those friends, the self which produced the novels was eclipsed by the other, which may have been very inferior to the outer selves of many other people.’ What the writer gives to the world is, Proust thought, ‘the secretion of one’s innermost life, written in solitude’.
And it is this secretion of the writer’s innermost life which makes literature autobiographical. You come to know, say, Graham Greene much more fully, and truly, from reading Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter or The Honorary Consul than from the fat volumes of Norman Sherry’s biography, which offer the fruit of years of assiduous research. Equally, Dickens is brought to life in Great Expectations much more vividly than any biographer has ever managed to do. It couldn’t, really, be otherwise.
Because you read about letters
Also by Allan Massie
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in