Whenever you listen to Terry Gross on NPR, you'll hear her say: "Next on Fresh Air, such-and-such a celebrity will join us to talk about her (or his) new memoir."
A memoir, it seems, is a very specific genre. Instead of waiting, like Benjamin Franklin or Henry Adams, to write a full autobiography or a Bildungsroman-like narrative (I have in mind here The Education of Henry Adams), people today write memoir after memoir: the memoir of the first ten years of my life; the memoir of the "lost years"; the memoir of last week.
This is not entirely new, of course. In his autobiographical trilogy Leo Tolstoy highlighted first Childhood, then Boyhood, then Youth (1852-56). And here, I suppose, I am approaching my subject: the mixing of fact and fiction.
Tolstoy named the hero of his book "Nikolenka," little Nikolai -- not Lyovushka. So while he was basing some of the events, and certainly many of the emotions and thoughts, on his own experiences growing up, Tolstoy was distancing himself from his own memories. Serialized in The Contemporary under the initials L.N., this work was not presented as a memoir, or even an autobiography per se. We talk about it as Tolstoy's "autobiographical trilogy," but we consider it to be fiction.
Tolstoy was influenced by, among others, Ben Franklin himself -- although Franklin had called his own work "memoirs" and originally written them primarily for his son William, not for his admiring public. Unlike Tolstoy, Franklin did not publish his Autobiography in his lifetime, and the complicated publication history in the end involved various manuscript versions, translations into French and back into English, etc.
But Franklin's work was at least an autobiography as we think of it -- covering much if not all of his life and, importantly, not an auto-hagiography but rather a record of both positive and negative impulses and events.
After writing the above, about Franklin's influence on Tolstoy, I went to check and found a significant literature debating whether or not Tolstoy read the Autobiography, particularly whether he read it as a young and impressionable man. (And now I have to violate blog protocol and give a footnote... see below.)
Regardless, we know that Tolstoy admired the work and the man.
My students and I spent last week thinking about the "New Biography" -- the new direction in anti-Victorian biography started by Lytton Strachey in 1918 with his Eminent Victorians. In the "New Biography," characters sometimes speak, and biographers usually take the opportunity of having access to letters and/or memoirs to choose the subjects' own words, to allow the subjects to speak for themselves.
This gives the feeling of authenticity -- a feeling that echoes how we respond to autobiography or memoir. If the hero of a biography said something him/herself, then it must be true, right?
Or not. I've asked my students to try and focus all semester on biography -- rather than memoir or autobiography -- and we continue to add to our list of questions in order to figure out the parameters of this genre, from ancient times to the present. So far the consensus is that biographies "feel" authentic when we know that they are based on primary sources, including documents, letters, and even memoirs. Strachey's bibliography for each of his biographies made us think about how he was using and recasting his sources.
But yesterday a friend sent me a copy of a "new memoir" by Vladimir Kantor -- a Russian writer and philosopher who visited Ohio State in 1995, when I was a new assistant professor. And let me tell you -- though there is photographic evidence of our meeting, the stories Kantor tells of our mutual adventures are mostly fictional.
His memories don't correspond to ours, and his memoirs are not "true." We can "read" some actual people and events in what he has to say; other events and places seem completely made up.
Barbara W. Maggs, "The Franklin-Tolstoy Influence Controversy," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society vol. 129, no. 3 (Sept 1985) pp. 268-277.
A memoir, it seems, is a very specific genre. Instead of waiting, like Benjamin Franklin or Henry Adams, to write a full autobiography or a Bildungsroman-like narrative (I have in mind here The Education of Henry Adams), people today write memoir after memoir: the memoir of the first ten years of my life; the memoir of the "lost years"; the memoir of last week.
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| Tolstoy with his grandchildren circa 1909 |
Tolstoy named the hero of his book "Nikolenka," little Nikolai -- not Lyovushka. So while he was basing some of the events, and certainly many of the emotions and thoughts, on his own experiences growing up, Tolstoy was distancing himself from his own memories. Serialized in The Contemporary under the initials L.N., this work was not presented as a memoir, or even an autobiography per se. We talk about it as Tolstoy's "autobiographical trilogy," but we consider it to be fiction.
Tolstoy was influenced by, among others, Ben Franklin himself -- although Franklin had called his own work "memoirs" and originally written them primarily for his son William, not for his admiring public. Unlike Tolstoy, Franklin did not publish his Autobiography in his lifetime, and the complicated publication history in the end involved various manuscript versions, translations into French and back into English, etc.But Franklin's work was at least an autobiography as we think of it -- covering much if not all of his life and, importantly, not an auto-hagiography but rather a record of both positive and negative impulses and events.
After writing the above, about Franklin's influence on Tolstoy, I went to check and found a significant literature debating whether or not Tolstoy read the Autobiography, particularly whether he read it as a young and impressionable man. (And now I have to violate blog protocol and give a footnote... see below.)
Regardless, we know that Tolstoy admired the work and the man.
My students and I spent last week thinking about the "New Biography" -- the new direction in anti-Victorian biography started by Lytton Strachey in 1918 with his Eminent Victorians. In the "New Biography," characters sometimes speak, and biographers usually take the opportunity of having access to letters and/or memoirs to choose the subjects' own words, to allow the subjects to speak for themselves.
This gives the feeling of authenticity -- a feeling that echoes how we respond to autobiography or memoir. If the hero of a biography said something him/herself, then it must be true, right?
Or not. I've asked my students to try and focus all semester on biography -- rather than memoir or autobiography -- and we continue to add to our list of questions in order to figure out the parameters of this genre, from ancient times to the present. So far the consensus is that biographies "feel" authentic when we know that they are based on primary sources, including documents, letters, and even memoirs. Strachey's bibliography for each of his biographies made us think about how he was using and recasting his sources.
But yesterday a friend sent me a copy of a "new memoir" by Vladimir Kantor -- a Russian writer and philosopher who visited Ohio State in 1995, when I was a new assistant professor. And let me tell you -- though there is photographic evidence of our meeting, the stories Kantor tells of our mutual adventures are mostly fictional.
His memories don't correspond to ours, and his memoirs are not "true." We can "read" some actual people and events in what he has to say; other events and places seem completely made up.
I'm not saying that anyone will write Kantor's biography, or mine, based on these or any other memoirs. But if they do... the "sources" will be fiction, not fact. Since I was there, I think I know.
What's more, as we contemplate biography, we notice that biographers utilize certain quotes or anecdotes to support their understanding of their subjects, to "prove" that their portraits are true. In this course of his memoir (In the Midst of Time, or a Map of my Memory), Kantor uses his stories of me and other women he met at Ohio State to elaborate his thesis of the "naif" or ingenuous American, and I don't mind at all. But I do remember some of the gentle falsehoods I told him at the time (after all, this Russian acquaintance of mine had no real need to know all the details of my life). And I wonder just who is the "naif." Following the map of Kantor's memory, you might just manage to get lost.
Barbara W. Maggs, "The Franklin-Tolstoy Influence Controversy," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society vol. 129, no. 3 (Sept 1985) pp. 268-277.
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| From Maggs's article |
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