Princeton University Press

Chapter Title: Confessions and Autobiography

Chapter Author(s): Stephen Spender

Book Title: Autobiography

Book Subtitle: Essays Theoretical and Critical
Book Editor(s): James Olney
Published by: Princeton University Press. (1980)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7ztmtj.9

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 Confessions and Autobiography

Stephen Spender

The dictionary definition of the word Autobiography is: "the story

of one's life written by himself." This starts a train of thought in
my mind. "One's life written by himself"—-just as if himself were
A, B, or C, or some other writing his biography. Of course, the
dictionary is right, but there is a world of difference in that "him­
self." Brown's Life written by Brown is—to my mind—a different
proposition from Brown's Life written by Jones or Smith. At all
events, it is a different proposition in the mind of Brown when he
takes up his pen, remembering himself: though, in fact, he may
well decide to pretend that he is Smith, writing his life as though he
were another person. He may say: "What is significant about me in
the minds of others is that which Jones or Smith would write as my
biography. So let me pretend that I am Jones or Smith, and enter
into a neighbor's-eye-view of myself." Yet in saying this, isn't
Brown taking a tremendous step? In deciding to write his own
biography as though he were Jones or Smith, isn't he excluding a
whole world that is himself as he appears not to Jones or Smith but
to himself?
Perhaps I overdramatize the affair: generals, statesmen, and big-
game hunters—to take some random examples—may really appear
to themselves exactly as they appear to other people. To themselves
they are historic forces giving orders on battlefields, making
speeches in Parliament, or moving through forests armed with
guns like sticks, which they point at lions, tigers, and elephants. If
there is anything left over from all this that is themselves, it is either
unpublishable or else a charming proof to others of their humanity.
For in the case of public personalities, humanity seems to begin
where eccentricity appears, when they think or act in a way that is
inconsistent with being generals, statesmen, or big-game hunters.

"Confessions and Autobiography" by Stephen Spender originally appeared in The

Making of a Poem by Stephen Spender. Copyright (C) 1962 by W. W. Norton & Co.
Reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters & Co., Ltd.

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 ί ί <5 StephenSpender

Yet unless one is to oneself entirely public, it seems that the prob­
lem of an autobiographer, when he considers the material of his
own past, is that he is confronted not by one life—which he sees
from the outside—but by two. One of these lives is himself as
others see him—his social or historic personality—the sum of his
achievements, his appearances, his personal relationships. All these
are real to him as, say, his own image in a mirror. But there is also
himself known only to himself, himself seen from the inside of his
own existence. This inside self has a history that may have no sig­
nificance in any objective "history of his time." It is the history of
himself observing the observer, not the history of himself observed
by others.

We are seen from the outside by our neighbors; but we remain

always at the back of our eyes and our senses, situated in our
bodies, like a driver in the front seat of a car seeing the other cars
coming towards him. A single person, instead of being a tiny little
automaton in a vast concourse of traffic that is the whole of hu­
manity, is one consciousness within one machine confronting all
the other traffic. From this point of view, being born into the world
is like being a rocket shot onto the moon. And who knows whether
being projected onto the moon would actually be so very different
from being born into the world? At first one would perhaps feel
very strange. But soon, one would—in the manner of all men—
take one's own presence on the moon for granted, just as one takes
the world for granted and accepts oneself as one of the others.
To feel strange, to retain throughout life the sense of being a
voyager on the earth come from another sphere to whom every­
thing remains wonderful, horrifying, and new, is, I suppose, to be
an artist. Artists—whether they are writers or painters—are people
who continue throughout life to realize that every experience is a
unique event in time and space, occurring for the first and last time.
It might seem then, that autobiography was the most stimulating
of forms for a writer. For here he is dealing with his life in the raw
at the point where it is also his art in the raw. He can describe,
through the history of his meeting with the people and things out­
side him, those opposite beings whom from the back of himself he
sees coming towards him, the very sensation of being alive and
being alone.
Yet, just because a writer is so rawly and newly in contact with
his material—even because in his writing he draws so much on this

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 ConfessionsandAutobiography 117

new experience of ever first-seen life—autobiography may be espe­

cially difficult for him. For in this work, the expression of such
naked solitude may be just what he wishes to avoid. He uses his
observation in order to relate one thing to another, not to state ex­
periences that are unrelated. Until his subjective experiences have
become objectified—have become of a kind that he can identify and
project into life outside himself—they are no use to him for his art.
The essence of art is that opposite is related to its opposite. The sub­
ject has to be made object, the chaotic the formal, the unique the
generally shared experience. Thus, although for a writer his auto­
biography is the vast mine from which he smelts ore to put into his
works, it is also his aim to convert this ore into forms that are out­
side the writer's own personal ones.
In literature the autobiographical is transformed. It is no longer
the writer's own experience: it becomes everyone's. He is no longer
writing about himself: he is writing about life. He creates it, not as
an object that is already familiar and observed, as he is observed by
others, but as a new and revealing object, growing out of and
beyond observation. Thus characters in a novel are based on the
novelist's observation of real people and of himself. Yet they would
not be "living" if they were just reported. They are also
invented—that is new—characters, living in the scene of life that is
his novel, independent of the material of real observation from
which they came.
Thus autobiography does set the autobiographer a very special
problem. The theme of his book is himself. Yet if he treats this
theme as though he were another person writing about himself,
then he evades the basic truth of autobiography which is: "I am
alone in the universe." There may of course be many good reasons
for refusing this truth. It may not be the writer's purpose to deal
with it at all. He may be writing about himself because he is a part
of history and his own best historian. Perhaps he thinks that the
contribution he has made to politics or thought in his time should
be recorded and that, being closest to it, he is the best person to
record it. Thus we have in our time, by Albert Schweitzer, Freud,
and Croce, excellent examples of objective, depersonalized autobi­
ography. Then also there are reminiscences, like Sir Osbert Sit-
well's volumes that are revealing of his family but tell us little about
what it feels like to be in Sir Osbert's skin.
All this is perfectly justified. One does not have to defend it. In­
deed, what one has to defend is the autobiographers who write

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 ίί8 StephenSpender

about the intimate experience of being themselves. They are indis­

creet, they are too interested in themselves, they write about things
that are not important to others, they are egomaniacs. The nature
of the inner human personality is such that if they tell what it is like
to be themselves, they are immoralists, exhibitionists, pornog-
raphers. The inner voice of self-awareness is no respecter of human
institutions, betrays other people, and reveals oneself as base.
Maine de Biran—about whose Intimate Journal Mr. Aldous Huxley
has written—expressed a doubt that the portrayer of the intimate
self also feels. After discussing all his weaknesses, he reflects that
perhaps the worst crime is all this interest in oneself.
Self-revelation of the inner life is perhaps a dirty business. Never­
theless, even in its ugliest forms we cannot afford altogether to de­
spise anyone who—for whatever reasons—is the humblest and ug­
liest servant of truth. Human beings are instruments crawling
about the surface of the earth, registering their reactions to one
another and to things. Some of them are very crude instruments,
others exact and sensitive. A human instrument is most exact about
objective things when it is most detached from them. The effort to
create form and objectivity in literature is detachment: and who­
ever writes of that which is most close to him—himself—is un­
likely to achieve detachment.
Nevertheless in a day of pseudoscience when sociologists and
psychologists are forever measuring the behavior of their neigh­
bors, there is a justification for the autobiography that reminds us
how lacking in objectivity human beings who set themselves up as
observing instruments really are. The self-revelation of the experi­
ence of the self is a measuring of the human instrument by itself.
The observer is self-observed.
The instrument, whether it is Rousseau in his Confessions , Restif
de la Bretonne in his extraordinary outpouring Monsieur Nicholas,
or Mr. Henry Miller in our own day, records without apparent re­
gard for what, to all appearances, is objectively and historically
most interesting, that in himself which is significant to himself. His
purpose is to tell the exact truth about the person whom he knows
most intimately—himself. His only criterion is naked truth: and
usually his truth is naked without being altogether true.
The autobiographies of such self-confessors show pictures of
themselves that if they had not been self-portrayed would certainly
be unsuspected by their neighbors who only see from the outside
the philosopher Rousseau, the journeyman printer Restif, the

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 Confessions and Autobiography 119

robust yet neighborly Mr. Henry Miller. Yet their books, although
contesting defiantly the historical view of oneself, by oneself or by
anyone else, have yet become a part of history—in Rousseau's case
even a revolutionary part.
The sum of such works certainly makes one suspect the truth—
even the historic truth—of official biography. If all men really have
a point of view that looks from inwards outwards, then the true
history of the world would be perhaps a sum of autobiographies,
and not a sum of those biographies that are written by a man look­
ing at another man from the outside. This is not quite true, because
there is an objective life of society that in our public actions drives
us along, disregards our subjective nature, and makes a philoso­
pher, a printer, a writer, where the autobiographer says "this
unique and unknown I." Yet Rousseau and the others make us sus­
picious of historians who offer as explanations for the crimes called
history motives that are nearly always external, impersonal ones.
Explanations so familiar that when we stumble on personal
motives—such as Henry VIII's matrimonial reasons for precipitat­
ing the Reformation—we are rather at a loss, because they seem by
their nature unhistoric. Perhaps they would seem less so if we knew
more about the personal motives of other men in Henry VIII's
time.
Restif de la Bretonne's Monsieur Nicholas is the autobiography of
a journeyman printer who was born in Burgundy in the year 1734.
His autobiography claims to be an entirely truthful account of more
than sixty years of his life. It is in great part an account of the sexual
exploits of a kind of plebeian Casanova. It purports to be written
with the motive of revealing the exact truth about one human
heart. Of course it has other motives: one is boasting; another is to
make out that Restif was, under all his looseness, a pious moralist
exhorting his readers to lead virtuous married lives. Yet despite his
nauseating hypocrisy, Restif's plodding determination to describe
the life he has known as seen from the very bottom of society and
in terms of his own lowest experiences, does give an amazingly
truthful picture of the eighteenth-century French lower classes.
Hundreds of people are seen living miserably and trying to wrest a
little forbidden pleasure out of life. Finally the effect is like seeing
the inside of something—the inside, say, of a sofa, or a lined coat or
a periwig. Restif's unctuous piety also serves a purpose—it is the
gilt on the gingerbread, the outside point of view to which
everyone pays lip service. Without it we would hardly recognize

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 120 Stephen Spender

the back-to-front society Restifis describing. As a whole the book

throws a rather salutary doubt on the history books' other side of
the medal. Is not history—in the minds of most contemporaries—
really something like the Lord Mayor's Show, which takes place in
an important part of a town whose inhabitants are occupied in
thinking about the furtive pleasures they may enjoy in cellars, gar­
rets, and dark corners?
Restif de la Bretonne pretends, as I have said, that the purpose of
his book is to preach a moral lesson. This brings us to another point
about confession. All confessions are from subject to object, from
the individual to the community or creed. Even the most
shamelessly revealed inner life pleads its cause before the moral sys­
tem of an outer, objective life. One of the things that the most
abysmal confessions prove is the incapacity of even the most out­
cast creature to be alone. Indeed, the essence of the confession is
that the one who feels outcast pleads with humanity to relate his
isolation to its wholeness. He pleads to be forgiven, condoned,
even condemned, so long as he is brought back into the wholeness
of people and of things.
There could be no better example of this secret motive of the
human heart than the opening pages of Rousseau's Confessions.
Rousseau, it will be remembered, starts off by saying that he is
about to undertake an enterprise that no one has ever undertaken
before: namely to tell the whole truth about himself. In an extraor­
dinary passage (which deserves to be illustrated by Mr. James
Thurber) he then conjures up a picture of himself standing before
the throne of the Almighty on the Day ofjudgment, with his Con­
fessions in his hand and reading them to the whole of assembled
humanity. At the end of the reading (which must have taken up a
good deal of eternity) Rousseau imagines himself challenging all his
fellow beings to assert whether any of them dare say that after all he
was a better man than this Rousseau, with all his sins and vices.
God, who plays a rather passive role in Rousseau's heaven, is ex­
pected to call anyone who claims to have been a better man than
Rousseau a liar.
Now what is the significance of this? Surely that the secret mo­
tive of Rousseau in undertaking that which he claims had never
been attempted before was not to prove that he is different from
other men but to prove that they are like himself. His Confessions
are an attempt to force the hands of God and humanity, to confess
that all are equally bad. Whether or not Rousseau was justified in

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 Confessions and Autobiography 121

claiming all men as his moral, or immoral, equals, there is some­

thing base in the attempt to make all life condone him, and I can
understand the resentment that his name has always aroused. Soci­
ety may be bad, but it should not be a conspiracy of guilty beings
all loudly claiming that they are as bad as one another. Better than
this the secrecy of the confessional, in which each person reveals his
shame, without challenging the appearances that make up the de­
cent hypocrisy of society.
And of course Rousseau does not tell the truth. There is a lie con­
cealed within his very method. For to say to oneself: "If I tell the
worst about myself I shall only reveal that I am no worse than other
men" is dishonest. First, some men are better than others. Second,
by the worst one means worst, and it is degrading to comfort one­
self by attempting to prove that others are as bad as one's own
worst. Third, there is the real possibility that Rousseau really might
be worse than other people: there is the possibility of real moral sol­
itude, and this is precisely what Rousseau cannot face. Perhaps the
worst is the refusal to face this. Everyone is a liar about certain
things. There are crimes to which we confess because they secretly
flatter our sense of our own strength. But no one confesses to
meanness, cowardice, vanity, pettiness: or at least not unless he is
assured that his crime, instead of excluding him from humanity,
brings him back into the moral fold.
Confession must always be to a confessor. The measuring rod of
the human instrument is morality. And the human soul can only be
measured adequately if there is an adequate confessor. Saint Au­
gustine in his confessions bares his soul before a God who judges
by a more accurate measuring rod than Rousseau's democracy. For
what Rousseau is really confessing to is the spirit of democracy,
and the nature and spirit of his confession measures that egalitarian
confessor. He sees the virtues and vices as a kind of parliamentary
system of the government of human morals, and he has a vague
faith that the virtues and vices will somehow cancel one another
out, leaving everyone equally good and equally bad with everyone
else. The confessor, he claims, is also as good and bad as himself.
Even God is implicated.
Thus confessional autobiography may be the record of a trans­
formation of errors by values; or it may be a search for values, or
even an attempt to justify the writer by an appeal to the lack of
them. Saint Augustine's faults, even in the act of confessing them,
are transformed by their avowal and become a witnessing of the

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 /22 Stephen Spender

power of God to save him. Rousseau reveals not only his own
faults but also the pathetic fallacies of his belief that he is acquitted
from faults by sharing them with other human hearts.
When we look at modern literature, we see that it is swamped
with the material of confessional autobiography, though very few
intimate revelations are written. This material is diverted into
novels like Proust's or D. H. Lawrence's, or a book like Τ. E.
Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom , which is in part crypto-
confessional autobiography. When one considers the fashion for
psychoanalysis, and how intimate confessions of thousands of
people have flooded the statistics of sociologists like Dr. Kinsey,
one suspects that ours is an age where many people feel a need to
confess the tensions of their inner lives. Yet few autobiographies of
a man's two lives are written. Instead we get books like Siegfried
Sassoon's memoirs where a self-portrait verges on fiction, and
novels where fiction is really autobiography. Why is this? I think it
is because the inner life is regarded by most people as so dangerous
that it cannot be revealed openly and directly. An antidote that can
be applied at the very moment of revelation needs to be applied to
this material. The antidote was once the Church. Today it is the
vast machinery of psychological analysis and explanation.
So it is understandable that most people who write their au­
tobiographies write the life of someone by himself and not the life
of someone by his two selves. There certainly should not be many
truthful self-revelations. All the same, when an Andre Gide or a
Henry Miller comes along and says "I am I, and not a hero of fic­
tion. I have thought unspeakable thoughts and done unthinkable
things," he is measuring the capacity of human beings to tell the
truth about themselves, and indirectly, by virtue of what be re­
veals, he is commenting on the values of the age in which he lives.

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