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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Of what use is autobiography to history? At first glance, autobiographies would seem invaluable to historians. After all, no attempt to reconstruct or understand the past would seem complete without a sprinkling of quotations from some form of “eyewitness account.” Among the various forms of such accounts available to historians, the formal autobiography often provides the most comprehensive and comprehensible account extant of the personal experience of historical events. Yet even so strong an admirer of the genre as Allan Nevins was forced to admit that very few autobiographies were ideally suited to the traditional historian's purpose. Most, he conceded, were “imperfect” historical documents at best and could prove “far more deeply misleading” than many other historical sources.
1 In speaking of “the formal autobiography,” I seek to distinguish, à la Marc Bloch, between those autobiographical texts clearly intended for a public and frequently posterior audience, hereafter “formal autobiographies”; and those eventually published texts that were originally intended for more private purposes. (Postmodernist critics should note that my use of the word “formal” is not to be considered identical to current usage of the word “performative.” For what it's worth, I consider all texts performative.)
2 Nevins, Allan, “The Autobiography,” collected in Allan Nevins on History, compiled and introduced by Billington, Ray Allen (New York: Scribners, 1975), 237–38Google Scholar. For a good example of Nevins' earlier praise of the genre, see Nevins, , The Gateway to History (1938; rept. New York: D. Appleton & Century, 1938), 323.Google Scholar
3 Young, G. M., Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936; rept. London: Oxford University Press, 1960), viGoogle Scholar. On the idea of “historical experience,” also see: Gay, Peter, General Introduction to The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud, in Gay, Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 9–16Google Scholar; Bailyn, Bernard, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 1–24, esp. pp. 18–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Williams, Raymond, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 185–92.Google Scholar
4 Fisher, David Hackett, “The Braided Narrative: Substance and Form in Social History,” in Fletcher, Angus, ed., The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), esp. 123–26Google Scholar; and Levin, David, In Defense of Historical Literature: Essays on American History, Autobiography, Drama, and Fiction (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967)Google Scholar, esp. Chs. 2 and 3. On these issues and their relation to the current vogue of cultural history discussed below, cf. LaCapra, Dominick, “Is Everyone a Mentalitè Case?” in History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 71–94.Google Scholar
5 Oakeshott, Michael, “Historical Continuity and Casual Analysis,” collected in Dray, William H., ed., Philosophical Analysis in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 207Google Scholar. On this point, also see the essays by Hempel, Carl and Donagan, Alan in Dray's anthology, as well as Hexter, J. H., “The Rhetoric of History,” in The Rhetoric of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 15–76.Google Scholar
6 Bloch, Marc, The Historian's Craft, tr. Putnam, Peter (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 61, 62Google Scholar. For further illustrative examples of these objections, see: Nevins, , Gateway, 318–32Google Scholar; Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (1946; rept. London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 295–96Google Scholar; and Carr, E. H., What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 16–20.Google Scholar
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8 For LaCapra's ideas on the historical uses of rhetorical analysis, see “Rhetoric and History,” in History and Criticism, 15–44Google Scholar; and History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), passim.Google Scholar
9 Beach, Sylvia, Shakespeare and Company (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956)Google Scholar; Callaghan, Morley, That Summer in Paris (New York: Coward, McCann, 1963)Google Scholar; McAlmon, Robert and Boyle, Kay, Being Geniuses Together (1968; rept. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Stearns, Harold, The Street I Know (New York: Furman, 1935)Google Scholar; Josephson, Matthew, Life Among the Surrealists (New York: Holt, 1962)Google Scholar; and Munson, Gorham, The Awakening Twenties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
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For more on the problematic state of these three texts, and how it has affected several of my readings, see Dolan, Marc, “‘True Stories’ of ‘The Lost Generation’: An Exploration of Narrative Truth and Literary Meaning in Three Memoirs of the Lost Generation” (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1988), 171–72, 199–206, 282–93.Google Scholar
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12 On this general point, see Wohl, Robert, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, passim. The translation of the phrase “lost generation” from Pfemfert's Aktion article of: 11 12 1912 is Wohl's (p. 45).Google Scholar
13 To avoid confusion, I have adopted the device throughout this essay of referring to protagonists by their given names and authors by their surnames. Thus, in this case, A Moveable Feast is a book by “Hemingway” about “Ernest.”
14 Fitzgerald, , This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner's, 1920), 282.Google Scholar
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17 The classic summary of the “protomyth” is in Campbell, , The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 245–46Google Scholar. For the extent to which temporal and regional variations can affect its narrative contours, see also Campbell, , The Masks of God, 4 vols. (New York: Viking Press, 1959–1969)Google Scholar; and Campbell, , Historical Atlas of World Mythology, 5 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988–1989).Google Scholar
18 It should be noted that all three authors provide their readers with explicit warnings that their texts should not be taken at face value. The most blatant of these is Hemingway's posthumously edited remark, in the Preface to the published edition of A Moveable Feast, that “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction” (MF, p. ix)Google Scholar. The author is even blunter in most of the surviving manuscript drafts of this passage, simply writing “This book is fiction” and leaving it at that. Less overt but no less significant are Fitzgerald's admission that “it all seems rosy and romantic” in his account of the period (CU, p. 22)Google Scholar, as well as Cowley's climactic invocation in the revised text of Exile's Return of “the children in Grimm's fairy tales” (ER, p. 288)Google Scholar as analogues to his protagonists.
On “narrative truth” vs. “historical truth,” see in particular Spence, Donald, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 292 and passim.Google Scholar
19 See, for example, Jones, LeRoi, Blues People (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1963)Google Scholar, Chs. 6–10; and Schuller, Gunther, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), passim.Google Scholar
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For Thomas' argument, see “The Uses of Catastrophism: Lewis Mumford, Vernon L. Parrington, Van Wyck Brooks, and the End of American Regionalism,” American Quarterly, 42 (1990), 223–51.Google Scholar
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23 For these specific issues, see Susman, , “Culture Heroes: Ford, Barton, Ruth,” in Culture, 122–49; and May, Ch. 5.Google Scholar
24 Michaels, Walter Benn, “The Vanishing American,” American Literary History, 2 (1990), 238CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Susman's interpretation of the interwar years, see the essays in Part III of Culture, especially “Culture and Civilization: The Nineteen Twenties,” “The Culture of the Thirties,” and “Culture and Commitment,” pp. 105–21 and 150–210.Google Scholar
25 Greenblatt, Stephen, “Towards a Poetics of Culture” and Louis A. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” both in Veeser, H. Aram, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1–36Google Scholar; Williams, , Novel, 192.Google Scholar