Let's Not Forget Gibbon's Autobiography.

[RonPrice]

THE TABLE BESIDE MY BED

 

In the last few minutes before leaving England I was able to spend half an hour in Watestone

[RonPrice]

SIXTH COMMENT ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 

"It is difficult" wrote David Hume in 1776 to begin his eleven page autobiography, "for a man to speak long of himself without vanity."1 Vanity, defined as an ostentatious display, as empty pride, as conceit, as an emphasis on personal attainments, I know there to be something of in this multi-faceted autobiography. In my poetry this vanity is dealt with more comfortably. It would seem to me impossible that these things not be present in some degree for life is, in part, "vain and empty". It is not misplaced in autobography; it is inevitable.

 

More importantly, I'd argue, there is what the autobiographical theorist Roy Pascal calls "an assertion of inner standing."2 For self and identity are not so much 'facts' as they are ways of thinking about self and others and their: actions, bodies, personalities, competencies, continuities, needs, subjectivity, space and geography, ways of pointing forward and back. As such self and identity are constructs of memory and imagination and, therefore, as I have said before in other analyses of autobiography, there is danger of falsification, of creation for defensive purposes against the encroachments of the world on the self, of a simple explaining of the self to the self and its world. There is what Lionel Trilling calls "the inauthenticity of narration". By that he means that part of life is beyond explanation, beyond narration, comprehension. We need to tell our story, to understand our life, hence our "subjective faith in continuous personal identity",3 in existence itself. Hence we invent ourselves, selves we cannot directly perceive. To read my autobiography, as any other, is to encounter me as an imaginative being.

 

There is, then, self-affirmation and self-justification in my autobiography. This would seem inevitable, indeed necessary, qualities in any autobiography. The process of writing is the process of shaping, shifting, perhaps even sanctifying, one's life. I am like the main character in a novel, my novel. The challenge of the infinite, of causality, of sheer description is perplexing in both novel and autobiography. Like Edward Gibbon I find much of the meaning and shape of life in my work, my vocation, my writing. Like many autobiographers I find much of the meaning in my religious affiliation and its related activities. Much of what could be seen as the chaos of human experience is made reasonable, explainable. There is sense and sensibility among the dark and enigmatic aspects of life's run. But the web of psychic action, of complex psychological and moral perceptions are still mysterious. Life often lacks orderly and revealing patterns. A logic of events is often just not present in the flux, the impermanence, of immediate experience. They are simply, and not-so-simply, constructed in autobiography, in my autobiography. The exercise rescues life, my life, from any incipient confusion, from the precarious, in part at least.

 

But as many autobiographers draw to our attention: words are precarious. They are undependable. They impose on our understanding. They can be changed at will. But they can be the story of the self's inner experience. This is my intent; hence my gradual turning to poetry. I articulate, again and again, some significant form for what is often simple incoherence, vague and unformed thought, a partial understanding of Providence's plan. For I am a process as much as a state of being and these are both reflected in my autobiography, in the story of my life. The form I find in poetry is an emotionally acceptable one that allows a balance between fact and interpretation.

 

My students over thirty years would, if ever interviewed, see me in a multitude of ways, as would the individuals and the Baha'i communities in which I lived and had my being since 1962. Such a process, if undertaken, might help to answer the question always implicit in autobiography: why am I worth writing about? The face presented to the world: its role, image, appearance, pose, the public self, the self as others see me, the social or historic personality, the sum of my achievements, my appearances, my personal relationships; and my personal self-image, my private self are difficult to reconcile. The teaching profession affords one of the best vocations for obtaining an assessment of how others see you in a day-to-day public sense. I have had some negative reactions to my teaching style, in the first several years of teaching and in occasional groups over the rest of my career but over the 27 years of teaching perhaps 23 or 24 were virtually free of significant negative reaction. Over this period I became the entertainer, the guy who knew a lot, the friendly Canadian.

 

Writing autobiography, writing about the self, implies profound exposures. Even disguises may often function as instruments of revelation. It is difficult to get the balance between revelation and concealment. I am more comfortable with poetry as a form to help me obtain the balance, as I have pointed out above. The unmapped territories of the imagination and feeling are more easily described in the securities of poetry's more flexible forms. "The value and truth of autobiography are not dependent on the degree of conscious psychological penetration, on separate flashes of insight;" says Roy Pascal. They arise out of "the monolithic impact of a personality (which) creates a consistent series of mental images out of its encounter with the world."4 Perhaps that is why I write here, to help create this picture because something remains unsatisfied. I want to dominate and define a life, as Gibbon did, that is impossible to do in the daily course of events. Perhaps it is the desire for intellectual companionship, a stay against confusion and drifting, a natural disposition to repose after the endless verbal and administrative rigeurs of my work as a teacher, the love of study which renews itself again and again, as it was for Gibbon,5

 

In recent years I have come to accept a certain degree of human limitation which I had hitherto not done. This has underpinned my life with a degree of comic vision to soften the sense of the tragic which operated in the early stages of my autobiographical narrative. There is some fear in me that I will be found wanting, but alas that is the lot of us all and that fear is now vague and amorphous. Perhaps, as Patricia Spacks argues, autobiography "in its essence amounts to an insistent demand for attention. Apology of one sort or another is built into the undertaking."6 There is an atmosphere of unceasing activity involved in writing. It is not just coincidental that my writing has taken place at the same time that my interest in LSA activity, going to talks, deepenings, so many forms of standard Baha'i activity has ceased, or significantly attenuated. Perhaps this writing is partly a way of keeping busy in a meaningful sense when the usual have that gave me meaning do not do so any more. There is a freedom, a pleasure, a depth, a meaning, I achieve in written reflections on my experience that I do not achieve in my several social roles.

 

Turning life into story, into poetry, provides a means to account for everything. It helps to overcome that sense of superfluity "which restlessly and uselessly torments" human beings and which they "longingly alter and realter"7 ceaselessly contesting, developing a hermeneutics of suspicion during so many of their leisure and working moments. Writing autobiographical poetry helps to define that sphere of action, of life, which has meaning and that which is, in fact, superfluous. It increases the connectedness, the coherence of the life process, the daily acts of significance and trivia. It puts them on display; they reveal uneasiness, concealment, self-justification, sincerity. I adjust my character; I define its nature not unlike a woman does before a mirror, only I deal more with the inner person than the external image. Like Boswell, I am, myself, my most significant audience and meaning is significantly expressed in the poetic. If it is not written down it seems that it will not endure.

 

Boswell describes how actively his imagination responds to the fancied demands of others and that in this sense he, and we, can in some degree be whatever character he, and we, choose. I have found this to be the case and, in fact, the possibilities of choice become virtually infinite when in the public domain. The attendant responsibilities are enormous. Social life I find is both light and frivolous on the one hand; and serious and significant on the other. The affects are, for me, punishing; they seem to deny the reality of limitation and they send me back to my study, to my privacy, for a sense of renewal.

 

 

1 David Hume in Imagining A Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth- Century England, Harvard UP, London, 1976, p.13.

2 idem

3 ibid., p.18.

4 ibid., p.93.

5 ibid., p.117.

6 ibid., p.195.

7 Thomas Harrison, Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello, The Johns Hopkins UP, London, 1992, p.8 and p.197.

 

Ron Price

13 June 1998

Charades.rtf