Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  As it happens, Woolf, the tentative memoirist, met Freud, who wouldn’t dream of writing one, when both were nearing the end of their lives; Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell reported that the psychoanalyst presented the novelist with a narcissus. Whatever Freud may have meant by the gesture, it nicely symbolizes the troubling association between creativity and narcissism, an association that is nowhere as intense as when the creation in question is memoir, a literary form that exposes the author’s life without the protective masks afforded by fiction.

  Such self-involvement, as Ben Yagoda’s fact-packed if not terribly searching book Memoir: A History reminds you, is just one of the charges that have been leveled against memoirs and their authors over the centuries, the others being the ones that Freud was so leery of: indiscretion, betrayal, and outright fraud. But it’s the ostensible narcissism that has irritated critics the most. A decade and a half ago, the distinguished critic William Gass fulminated against the whole genre in a scathing Harper’s essay, in which he asked, rhetorically, whether there were “any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To halo a sinner’s head? To puff an ego already inflated past safety?” The outburst came at a moment when a swelling stream of autobiographical writing that had begun in the late 1980s was becoming what Yagoda calls a “flood.” By the end of the 1990s, a New York Observer review of one writer’s first book, a memoir, could open with an uncontroversial reference to “this confessional age, in which memoirs and personal revelations tumble out in unprecedented abundance.” (The memoirist in question was me; more on that later.)

  By now, the flood feels like a tsunami. Things have got to the point where the best a reviewer can say about a personal narrative is—well, that it’s not like a memoir. “This is not a woe-is-me memoir of the sort so much in fashion these days,” the book critic of The Washington Post wrote recently in an admiring review of Kati Marton’s Enemies of the People, an account of how the journalist’s family suffered under Communist rule in Hungary. But as Yagoda makes clear, confessional memoirs have been irresistible to both writers and readers for a very long time, and, pretty much from the beginning, people have been complaining about the shallowness, the opportunism, the lying, the betrayals, the narcissism. This raises the question of just why the current spate of autobiography feels somehow different, somehow “worse” than ever before: more narcissistic and more disturbing in its implications. It may well be that the answer lies not with the genre—which has, in fact, remained fairly consistent in its aims and its structure for the past millennium and a half or so—but with something that has shifted, profoundly, in the way we think about our selves and our relation to the world around us.

  It all started late one night in 371 AD, in a dusty North African town miles from anywhere worth going, when a rowdy sixteen-year-old—the offspring of an interfaith marriage, with a history of bad behavior—stole some pears off a neighbor’s tree while carousing with some friends. To all appearances, it was a pointless misdemeanor. The thief, as he ruefully recalled some thirty years later, was neither poor nor hungry, and the pears weren’t all that appealing, anyway; after a couple of bites, he and the others tossed the whole lot away for some hogs to eat. He stole them, he later realized, simply to be bad. “It was foul, and I loved it,” he wrote. “I loved my own undoing.”

  However trivial the crime and perverse its motivations, this bit of petty larceny had enormous consequences: for the teenager’s future, for the history of Christianity and Western philosophy, and for the layout of your local Barnes & Noble superstore. For although the boy eventually straightened himself out, converted to Christianity, and even became a bishop, the man he became was tortured by the thought of this youthful peccadillo. His desire to seek a larger meaning in his troubled past ultimately moved him to write a starkly honest account of his dissolute early years (he is disarmingly frank about his prolific sex life) and of his stumbling progress toward spiritual transcendence—to the climactic moment when, by looking inward with what he calls his “soul’s eye,” he “saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind.” The man’s name was Aurelius Augustinus; we know him as Saint Augustine. His book was called Confessions.

  As Augustine, a teacher of rhetoric, well knew, there had long been a tradition of biographies of accomplished men—Plutarch’s Lives, say, written at the end of the first century AD—and of autobiographical accounts of daring military escapades and the like. (Xenophon’s Anabasis, for instance, written in the fourth century BC, recounts how he and his troops managed to make their way back to safety after getting trapped behind enemy lines deep in what is now Iraq.) But Augustine was the first Western author to make the accomplishment an invisible, internal one, and the journey to salvation a spiritual one. The arc from utter abjection to improbable redemption, at once deeply personal and appealingly universal, is one that writers have returned to—and readers have been insatiable for—ever since. Augustine of Hippo bequeathed to Augusten Burroughs more than just a name.

  To be sure, the autobiography as an entertaining record of hair-raising or merely risqué scrapes has also proved resilient, from Benvenuto Cellini’s ribald Autobiography to Errol Flynn’s outrageous My Wicked, Wicked Ways. (“I played regularly—or irregularly—with a little girl next door named Nerida,” the actor reminisced about his childhood in Australia.) But the memoir’s essentially religious DNA, the Augustinian preoccupation with bearing written witness to remarkable inner transformations, remained dominant during the sixteen centuries from the Confessions to Burroughs’s Running with Scissors. Among the earliest vernacular memoirs in the post-classical tradition were so-called “spiritual autobiographies”: Saint Teresa of Ávila composed one in Spanish, as did Saint Ignatius Loyola. A fifteenth-century woman named Margery Kempe, whose autobiographical journey included some rather less exalted matter (not least, how she negotiated a sexless marriage with her avid husband), gave us what is considered to be the first memoir in English.

  After the Reformation, the Protestants took up the form, partly in response to the Puritan call for “a narrow examination of thy selfe and the course of thy life,” as the sixteenth-century divine William Perkins put it. The memoir as a negative examination of the self, a form in which to showcase our reasons to be, in John Calvin’s words, “displeased with ourselves,” indelibly marked the Anglophone autobiographical tradition thereafter—as did a certain resultant vaingloriousness about the extent of one’s waywardness. The title of John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), a masterpiece of the conversion narrative, is an allusion to an epistle of Paul: “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” The emphasis on bearing personal witness to spiritual struggle opened up the memoir to people of all classes (“farriers, tailors, farmers, tinkers, and itinerant preachers,” Yagoda points out); the perverse allure of wanting to demonstrate one’s unholier-than-thou bona fides culminated in the memoirs of abjection with which we are surrounded today. These include, but are by no means limited to, Kathryn Harrison’s memoir The Kiss (1998), in which the novelist wrote about her incestuous relationship with her father; Burroughs’s best seller Running with Scissors (2002), which recounts the Gothic excesses of a childhood and adolescence tormented by abuse, madness, homosexuality, rape (statutory and otherwise), and which ends with its hero leaving the scene of these crimes to become a grown-up in New York City; Toni Bentley’s The Surrender (2004), about the author’s penchant for anal sex; and perhaps most notoriously, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), his (as it turned out) semifictional account of the horrors he endured on the road to recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol. The flesh, in these tales, is weak, or bruised, or lacerated—Frey’s book memorably begins with an image of the blacked-out author coming to in an airplane, his front teeth missing, his cheek split open, his body covered in vomit and urine—but the spirit yearns for, and inevitably receives, ab
solution.

  The crucial moment in the evolution of the suffering-and-redemption memoir from its religious origins to its profane zenith (or nadir) today occurred as the Age of Faith yielded to the Age of Reason. Yagoda rightly emphasizes the importance of Rousseau’s Confessions—published in 1782, four years after the philosopher’s death—for the secular transformation of the genre. (The Confessions marked the beginning of a boom in memoir-writing that some found deplorable; by 1827, John Lockhart, the biographer of Sir Walter Scott, could rail against “the mania for this garbage of Confessions, and Recollections, and Reminiscences.”) Rousseau’s work is striking now less for its frankness, which left little of the memoirist’s life to the imagination, than for the way it anticipates the present in its representation of memoir-writing as a kind of therapeutic purge. One of the most interesting passages in the Confessions mirrors Augustine’s Confessions in recounting an ostensibly minor youthful infraction; in Rousseau’s case, it was the theft of a bit of ribbon in the house of the family he worked for. Rousseau’s crime had more serious immediate repercussions than did Augustine’s: when the theft was discovered, he blamed a young woman who worked as a cook in the same household. Forty years later, the only way he could ease his guilt was to write about it:

  This burden, then, has lain unalleviated on my conscience until this very day; and I can safely say that the desire to be in some measure relieved of it has greatly contributed to the decision I have taken to write my confessions.

  For better or worse, Rousseau gave impetus to the transformation of “confession” into a public and purely literary gesture. He understood that this secularization was a step “without precedent,” as he writes at the beginning of the Confessions. In the hands of a great thinker the form could yield profound insights; but few of us are Rousseau. Once the memoir stopped being about God and started being about Man, once “confession” came to mean nothing more than getting a shameful secret off your chest—and, maybe worse, once “redemption” came to mean nothing more than the cozy acceptance offered by other people, many of whom might well share the same secret—it was but a short step to what the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani recently characterized as the motivating force behind certain other products of the recent “memoir craze”: “the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art.”

  Virtually at the time that Rousseau was writing, redemption was being redefined on this side of the Atlantic, too. There was, above all, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, first published in French in 1791, a year after his death. An edifying tale of a resourceful young boy’s remarkable victory over poverty, of improbable success achieved and enduring international fame won—written not to alleviate the author of any grave psychological burden but to provide a sensible practical model for others—it gave the familiar Augustinian salvation narrative a distinctly American, materialistic twist. “Fit to be imitated,” as Franklin put it, and imitated it was: the banker Thomas Mellon, who read it at the age of fourteen, later described it as “the turning point of my life.”

  Before Franklin, there had been a strong taste in the Colonies for tales of more literal rescues and escapes—local incarnations of those old adventure memoirs. The seventeenth century saw a number of best-selling accounts by settlers who had been captured by “savages” and later escaped. (These, Yagoda intriguingly suggests, provided the blueprint for the subcategory of contemporary American memoir that includes Patti Hearst’s 1982 account of her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army.) But a hundred years later another, new kind of escape memoir began to emerge, one that combined previous strains—the memoir as a record of dangers overcome, the memoir as a road map of spiritual renewal—while giving them a powerful new political resonance: the slave narrative. Running the gamut from the several reminiscences of Frederick Douglass, which the author revised and republished a number of times between 1845 and 1892, to the 1849 life story of one Henry (Box) Brown, who escaped to freedom by mailing himself by parcel post from Virginia to Philadelphia, these autobiographies by slaves and former slaves are remarkable for being among the first memoirs that were meant to serve as politically meaningful testimony to systemic crimes against an entire people.

  As such, they anticipate both in form and in function the numerous memoirs written by survivors of the Holocaust and other government-sponsored genocides of the twentieth century. The earliest of the slave narratives were, in fact, contemporaneous with a vast body of political escape narratives that Yagoda, with his nearly exclusive focus on the Anglophone tradition, nowhere mentions: the memoirs written by those who fled the French Revolution and often landed on distant and improbable shores—one acquaintance of Marie Antoinette’s milked cows near Albany—before returning, eventually, to France. In these autobiographies, elements of both witness literature and survival epic are combined.

  What the slave narratives, the émigré accounts, and the Holocaust and genocide memoirs have in common is that, in them, the stakes of redemption are much higher than ever before. Now the “soul’s eye” that Augustine spoke of was turned outward as well as inward, documenting the suffering self but also, necessarily, recording the tormenting other. The implicit and conditional universality in Augustine’s suffering-and-redemption narrative—“This happened to me, and could happen to you, if you did what I did”—became explicit and indicative in the memoir of political suffering: “What happened to me happened to many others.” Each of these witness memoirs had to bear an awful burden, standing in for the thousands of memoirs that would never be written. As the “I” became “we,” the personal journey that had begun in the fourth century was transformed, by the end of the eighteenth, into a highly political one. The conversation between one’s self and God had become a conversation with, and about, the whole world.

  As the implications of the memoir have grown in importance, so have the seriousness, and the consequences, of another complaint made about it: what Freud called “mendacity.” The need for certain kinds of memoir to be true goes back to Augustine’s Confessions: if the anguish and the suffering aren’t real, there’s nothing to redeem, and the whole exercise becomes pointless. It is precisely the redemption memoir’s status as a witness to real life that makes the outrage so loud when a memoir is falsified; the outrage tends to be exacerbated when the book in question claims to bear witness to social and political injustice. (By contrast, if Errol Flynn bedded ten more or ten fewer starlets than he claims, you don’t feel cheated.) Yagoda, who is at his energetic best when indicting phony memoirs, gleefully recounts how a book called The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams—one of three memoirs by a Native American writer called Nasdijj, in which the author rehearses the catalog of sufferings that fueled his resentful rejection of Western ways (fetal alcohol syndrome, migrant life, homelessness, HIV infection)—turned out to have been written by a twice-married white midwesterner whose other literary output includes gay S&M erotica.

  The 1999 Esquire essay on which The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams was based was nominated for a National Magazine Award; the book itself was ecstatically reviewed in the Native American literary press. (“Raw, poignant, poetic, and painful.”) The effusiveness of the reception explains, to some extent, the violence of the reactions when such memoirs are revealed as phonies. Beneath it lies, all too clearly, a kind of shame—shame at the ease with which we have been seduced, and at how naked our desire is for certain kinds of narrative, however improbable or tendentious or convenient, to be true.

  Indeed, the reactions to phony memoirs often tell us more about the tangled issues of veracity, mendacity, history, and politics than the books themselves do. This was already true of the nineteenth-century slave narrative and the way it was sometimes exploited. One of the most interestingly convoluted cases concerns the publication, in 1836, of a book called The Slave, or Memoirs of Archy Moore—a startling account of maltreatment, incest, and revenge told by a light-skinned African
-American slave. The fact that it soon became clear that the book was a novel—by a Harvard graduate named Richard Hildreth, a New Englander who, during a stay in the South, had been deeply shocked by the treatment of black slaves—didn’t bother some abolitionist reviewers; for them, what mattered was the “terrible truths” from which Moore’s fiction had been constructed. In a letter to the Boston Liberator, the abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child went as far as to claim that Hildreth’s novel was more powerful than an authentic narrative written by a slave called Charles Ball. “The extracts I have seen from Charles Ball are certainly highly interesting,” she wrote, “and they have a peculiar interest, because an actual living man tells us what he has seen and experienced; while Archy Moore is a skillful grouping of incidents which, we all know, are constantly happening in the lives of slaves. But it cannot be equal to Archy Moore!”