Filosofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity

Autobiography is a fairly tricky genre because it is supposed to be true and reflective of a particular person and a period of time but this does not necessarily always have to be the case. When one writes about one’s own life, can the resulting writing reflect the ultimate truth? “Is a man ever in a position to see himself dispassionately?” (Grosskurth 14). The answer is - probably not. The rate of distortion of reality¹, however, equals the extent to which particular people are able to honestly and in a detached way evaluate their own decisions, faults, naivety and disillusionments. But human beings are egoists concerning predominantly the self and their own pleasure and complete detachment is not viable, at least not without the benefit of hindsight. Pretence is in human nature; and we are mostly accustomed to pretending something on a daily basis to avoid prying questions from other people. Of course, we usually pretend to be better than we really are. Waxman and Byington develop the idea even further when pointing out that autobiographies are “fictive constructs” because “life stories are shaped, events are consciously selected and selectively remembered, sometimes for conscious reasons and other times for tricks the psyche plays on us” (165). So, how can we be sure that the three memoirists did not do the same thing? The following words of Grosskurth comment on the credibility of Symonds’ memoir: “We must never forget that this is an autobiography, and what he presents, as he himself emphasizes, is his own version of himself” (24). To a considerable extent, Grosskurth contradicts herself. She criticizes Brown’s decision to publish Symonds’ biography 2 years after his death because that version of Symonds’ life contains excerpts from his memoirs and successfully avoids even mentioning of his sexual orientation, which, in her opinion, distorted “Symonds’s whole reason for writing the autobiography” (27). On the other hand, Grosskurth admits omitting one fifth of the original manuscript as well as the fact that “some of the key incidents – the Vaughan affair and Symonds’ initial reactions to his marriage, for example – are heavily scored and rewritten” (11). Her motives for doing so were not satisfactorily explained in the foreword or introduction. The reality which the three authors present in their books may be distorted; but it is distorted in accord with their desire for living such lives. So, what is more significant? How one lived or how one wanted to live? And is not the line between the two too thin to tell them apart? After finishing Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood reportedly burned his diary – the main source of information. “He used to tell his friends that he had destroyed his real past because he preferred the simplified, more creditable, more exciting fictitious past which he had created to take its place. This fictitious past, he said, was the past he wanted to “remember”” (23). On the other hand, he admits a certain degree of posing in the diary as well: “In this minor of a diary, Christopher reveals a few frank glimpses of himself. The rest is posing” (158). Schenk’s attitude towards truthfulness of autobiographies follows:

Did Xenophon or anyone else take down the exact wording of his speeches to his armies? Almost certainly not, and yet when his hoplites shouted, “Thalassa, thalassa!” we readers are more thrilled than if we were reading an adventure novel. Why? Because we know the event was both true and artfully re-created to Xenophon’s satisfaction. (475)

Perhaps, it is really more significant how we remember an event than how it exactly happened because sometimes the impression or atmosphere of an occurrence reflects the reality more than bare facts.

Autobiography is an even trickier genre when it captures the life, or a part of the life, of a homosexual. With this information, everyone becomes curious about sex and nearly every heterosexual reader will expect passages of detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse, unusual sexual practices, or something scandalous, shocking, disgraceful and animal-like. ”Love is love. It does not go without tenderness and softness” (Warren 50). If the reader does not have any previous experience with gay autobiographies, he or she might be disillusioned because homosexual sex is not so much different from the heterosexual intercourses - only the vagina is exchanged for the anus, and the authors are usually, similarly to their straight counterparts, reluctant to convey too much of private matters. After finishing the book, one may ask oneself what the ‘big’ taboo thing connected to homosexual sex resides in? I mean the thing which prevented legal authorities and the common sense of thousands people from regarding love-making of homosexuals as natural for many decades. And I can answer: ‘in nothing reasonable’.

Packard presents the idea of Whitman and Hartland “that the “main matter” of literature ought to be sex” (92). Sex is still widely considered a private matter belonging only to the bedroom of two people and nowhere beyond. Consequently, it is also a topic that attracts people’s attention because it is an intimate act and most people are not courageous enough to convey its details to the world. When someone is, everyone else is usually interested because it is not a common subject of conversation. Generally speaking, people are usually reluctant to talk about their own sexual issues but are eager to hear about other people’s. Perhaps, it is because of its former stigma of something impure and indecent, whose reverberations are still evident among certain communities and subcultures. In Waxman and Byington’s view, sex is an essential part of life and something people cannot avoid talking about it if they want to be really frank but it is not certainly the most important thing. They argue that sex and sexuality makes the story complete. “If the homophobe tells us that Shakespeare’s sexual orientation is unimportant, we miss the complexity of his love sonnets, their expression of the eroticism of male/male friendship and of romantic love” (158). The memoirists seem to hold a similar opinion, for they frequently refer to sex in context with other matters which they intend to depict. Undoubtedly, sexuality and various associated kinds of discrimination in overt and covert forms belong to the one of strong pillars of their stories. During their lives, they were unlucky enough to meet many silly and narrow-minded people who incessantly forced them to pretend. Isherwood, for instance, experienced myriads of such situations because of them. ““Pretend I’m Erich,” Viertel said, imitating the boy’s effeminate voice, and laughed heartily. Christopher laughed too, and felt ashamed of himself for doing so. Suppose Christopher had told a comparable story about the Jews – would Viertel have laughed?” (88). However, the reader who expects unusual manifestations of sexual desire will be definitely disappointed – as sex and masturbation are common matters of every male’s libido and a healthy level of sexual desire - nothing to be ashamed of.

The main purpose why people write memoirs, which are mostly derived from their personal diaries and journals, is the process of healing substituting for therapy. Symonds points out that one writes a diary merely when depressed to relieve oneself and, therefore, “it gives one a one-sided view of one’s life, and that the morbid side. For when one is happy one does not write” (161). Nevertheless, memoirs manifest the power of personal transformation, mental restart, and liberation from herd-like thinking processes commonly found in society, which are all achieved through writing. And if you are a writer, the writing style of your diary is an artistic form of self-expression as well, and you might later feel that it could be in vain if not published. A diary is especially significant for people who cannot, for one reason or another, speak out. Speaking about the 19^th century, Robb suggests that diaries and memoirs “were a means of coming out to oneself and to the future. For people who had no access to homosexual groups, a relationship with posterity was better than no relationship at all” (Robb 135). Symonds, for instance, points out that writing of his erotic sonnets and “poems was a kind of mental masturbation” (189) and that “the habit of writing rendered [him] independent, and sustained [his] spirits under circumstances which would have been unutterably depressing to a barrister or merchant checked in his career” (239). Grosskurth sees the main reason why Symond’s decided to write own memoir in “an acceptance that his suffering had some meaning in it” (18), which he eventually reaches via former writing processes. Monette suggests a similar therapeutic reason for writing his memoir: “What if we got it? […] Mention the unmentionable and it will go way, like shining a light around a child’s bedroom to shoo the monster” (9). Isherwood points out that “his diary keeping was a discipline designed to shame himself out of giving way to panic-depression, sloth, overdrinking, oversmoking, masturbation, and nervous pottering around” (175). Waxman and Byington maintain that the “common aims” of autobiographies are: “to justify the authors’ own lives, to create new directions in their lives, to argue for their own politics, to pay tribute to people who were important influences in their lives, to criticize those individuals and institutions that misunderstood them” (165). We can also add Suh’s idea to the enumeration. She argues that “the diary as self-writing became a means for the writers to record the details of their existence in the midst of a mass politics that attempted to nullify their individuality” (47). Also, a possibility to look back and summarize one’s life in retrospect is invaluable for a personal self-reflection. In the three memoirs, we can find evidence of all above mentioned reasons of authors.

Symonds and Monette’s memoirs are written in the first person narrative as it is typical of the genre, while Isherwood chose a different strategy to captivate the reader. In reference to Symonds’ memoir, Grosskurth thinks that “the inconsistency of style throughout the work” (28) is not, by any means, detrimental. He often resorts to “the tone of an intimate letter” (28), which perfectly assists him in establishing an outspoken relationship with the reader. He also brilliantly alternates lyric and epic styles, as the main body of the epic story is frequently intersected by lyric segments to supplement it and eliminate its deficiency. ”Twilight added to the mystery of the unknown, the shadow of the unintelligible sorrow I had felt. The simmer of moonlight blending with late sunset upon boughs of wild roses or spires of foxglove or hyacinths in ferny hedges […]” (36). Isherwood’s writing style is unique as the memoir is written in the third person – he, as a narrator, is both partial and impartial in the story and speaks about himself as about ‘Christopher’. Due to this fact, the memoir might be easily read like a novel. “For him [Isherwood] there was no opposition between the art of the novel and that of the memoir” (Gunn 5). The difference between an autobiography and novel is that autobiography cannot “tell the story from multiple points of view” (Eisner 219). Isherwood’s memoir makes it possible. When one is reading a novel (or any other fictional literary genre), one identifies with a main protagonist of the story in a certain way. On the other hand, when reading a typical autobiography, one expects a larger amount of emotional detachment, which can be comparable to the reading about a historical event - something that already happened and the reader cannot influence. In short, the reader of an autobiography takes up the role of an observer, not a participant. That is why Christopher and His Kind is a different type of autobiography because one simply feels that one must somehow participate in the story and root for Christopher as for a character. At first Isherwood's narration might seem fragmented - as the long objective parts that need distance and a detached view are suddenly switched to very subjective comments that can leave an impression that the narrator is either a schizophrenic or omnipresent God. Such a unique point of view and unexpected shifts of objective and subjective passages paradoxically become the most entertaining aspects of the book as the plot proceeds. A typical structure of the most subjective notions are those where Isherwood uses words like my memory, I remember or I forget: "As the huge house door boomed shut behind him, Christopher ran upstairs with his characteristic nervous haste to the second or third floor - I now forget which it was - and rang" (7). or "My memory sees them sitting together, facing each other. Christopher sits gazing at this master of their art, this great prophet of their tribe, who declares that there can be real love, love without limits or excuse, between two men" (71). Objective parts give the impression as if they are taken from the point of view of all-knowing someone else who was everywhere with Isherwood. For instance the following excerpt: "They were in the second class, and they found to their disgust that they had been given a cabin which was much too small and hadn't even a table to write on. Wystan decided that they must transfer to the first class, despite the added expense" (162). Isherwood's relatively oft and precisely structured combinations of subjective (demonstrating a present angle of view) and objective (demonstrating a distant angle of view) passages are very naturally formed and sometimes easily overlookable. "Christopher's first visit to Berlin was short - a week or ten days - but that was sufficient; I now recognize it as one of the decisive events of my life. I can still make myself faintly feel the delicious nausea of initiation terror which Christopher felt as Wystan pushed back the heavy leather door curtain [...]" (2) or “Frl. Thurau gave him the brass dolphin clockstand, holding a clock on its tail, […] It stands ticking away on my desk, as good as new, while I write these words” (74). At the moment when the reader gets used to it, such switches between the angles of view become a welcome change from typical novels and autobiographies because the plot opens up new possibilities of its further proceeding. The plot, therefore, becomes more unpredictable as well as more mentally demanding for the reader to keep pace with the author. And this is probably the main intention of Isherwood.

The problem with memoirs is the fact that an author can easily contradict himself. I believe that Symonds, Isherwood and Monette are frank - at least with themselves - on every page but as days go by, they evolve, change own attitudes, opinions, and preferences, and set different goals. The reader witnesses their mental processes in motion as well as their gradually developing awareness. It logically follows that they will subsequent contradict themselves, which is an undesirable by-product of self-evolution; but which might seem very confusing to the reader. Symonds contradicts himself chiefly as far as his marriage and scholarly ambitions and performance are concerned. At one point of his diary, he praises himself for his literary works: “It is notorious that in literature I have done a very large amount of work, not only brilliant, but solid and laborious, which has placed me in the front rank of English authors” (64). And as the memoir proceeds towards the end, he begins to severely doubt about own intellectual competence: “congenital inferiority of my brain” (216) or “I cannot learn anything systematically. Grammar, logic, political economy, the exact sciences offered insuperable obstacles to my mind. The result is that I know nothing thoroughly” (216). His self-esteem shrinks to a minimum. Symonds also claims that “life is more than literature” (240), and a few pages later, he conveys that he maintained mental and physical health because he “resolutely refused to give up study. Some hours of every day were devoted to literature […]” (262). Therefore, we can say that literature became his life. However, the most contradictory statements are associated with his marriage. Despite the fact that women’s bodies leave him absolutely cold, he manages to develop a certain relationship to Catherine, even though it is a relationship without passion because he “missed something in the music – the coarse and hard vibration of sex” (155). He considers their “union a blessed thing” (177) and “the great crime of [his] life” (184) at the same time. At first, he strives to be a good husband: “I doubted my power to server her, and support her, and to care for her” and later he completely gives up his efforts: “I began to feel morally irresponsible toward the woman [Catherine]” (261).

In the second chapter of his memoir, Isherwood displays contempt for education in general, when developing an argument that education is a tool of power when it is misused. In the following pages he makes references to world classic authors and philosophers such as Carl Jung, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, etc. “I am doing what Henry James would have done, if he had had the guts" (18). During one of his visits back to England he hopes to avoid spending much time with his mother, Kathleen²; and provokes her sets of morals connected to social appropriateness and a traditional notion of class differences by introducing his friend, a member of the working class. "Christopher told her coldly and aggressively about his life in Berlin. He made his acts of homosexual love sound like acts of defiance, directed against Kathleen" (22). Later, he writes that he himself could not have been the narrator of his novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains. The reason was that he did not want the narrator be a homosexual because “he feared to create a scandal. He even hesitated to embarrass Kathleen” (103).

The frequency of contradictory utterances in Monette’s memoir is very low and they are in no way fundamental. I have succeeded in finding only a few of them to exemplify my assumption that contradictions in memoirs are not exceptional and they only prove the author’s willingness to share his/her mental processes with the reader. For instance, there are moments when Monette unconditionally loves his friend Roger and there are also the moments when they cannot stand each other. His statement “the two of us so interchangeably one” (315) contradicts the following one: “I am the weather, Roger is the climate, and they are not always the same” (65). Every relationship has its ups and downs; and Monette does not pretend that theirs was flawless. His outspokenness is exhibited via this method. The reader can easily overlook such passages because one is well accustomed and daily exposed to the emotional fluctuations of other human beings.

The memoir seems to be, in comparison with other literary genres, a little bit neglected. What a pity! A memoir has great potential, for its methods of expression are not restricted - it can cover a wide range of topics, which can be depicted in multiple literary devices and strategies. As we have seen in Christopher and His Kind, even the narrative techniques of a memoir provide a space for innovations and playfulness. A memoir is supposed to be based on real life event(s), so the reader might have tendencies to believe the author’s every word. But his words do not reflect the ultimate reality - it reflects only his angle of view. However interesting the memoir is, one must always bear in mind the fact that memoirs, “invaluable as they are, do not give us a complete picture of the man” (Grosskurth 27).

3. Main topics elaborated on in the memoirs

This chapter, the main body of the thesis, is broken down into five subchapters. It argues various concepts, which largely contributed to the formation of the memoirists’ personalities and their life attitudes. The concepts are manifested both explicitly and implicitly through their own words, deeds, relationships with other people and associations with the intellectual and scholarly tradition of modern Western society, as well as the perspectives of many scholars and historians. The chapter predominantly concentrates its effort on drawing an analogy between Symonds and Isherwood, Isherwood and Monette, Symonds and Monette and then between all three of them and on providing the reader with the framing of context referring to such aspects as ordinary factors of living and cognizance of ‘the other’ in the eras, places and societies in which they lived.

3.1 Reflections upon homosexuality

Patrick Higgins praises Aristotle for a huge variety of ideas, which are, unfortunately, mostly beyond the complete understanding of common people. Similarly to Plato’s texts,³ we can only reckon what was really meant by his words. However, Higgins interprets his philosophy as being based “on the idea that human behavior ought to be in harmony with nature” (45). ‘Nature’ is fairly a popular term among the gay community, as gay people believe that their sexual proclivities were given to them exactly by nature or that human sexuality is “a complex of processes that is mediated through the human interaction with nature” (Dannecker 43). Isherwood, along with Monette and Symonds, also demonstrates his approval of this idea in his memoir: “My will is to live according to my nature […]” (7). Nature itself is a problematic concept and its recognition as the noblest essentiality of every single human being has been a subject to countless debates, without any clear conclusion. However, the opinion that nature and instinctive conduct of the individual must be, at least in some respect, restricted for the good of society is widely accepted. This may lead to unreasonably restrictive policies, various degrees of suppressions of human rights, artificially created categories of what is still ‘normal’ or acceptable and what is not, and inadequate categorization and classification of one’s life. Hocquenghem points out that society has always had strong tendencies “to attribute a social status and definition to everything, even the unclassifiable” (34). According to these methods, the whole of life is supposed to be stuffed into charts, diagrams and graphs but - it is impossible. The consequence could be a decay of individuality and uniqueness and a creation of an obedient, easily suggestible herd, in which being a departure from the norm is a punishable act. Turiel and Wainryb maintain that “embedded in cultural practices are multiple and mixed messages for people in different positions in the society – especially for people in dominant and subordinate position” (254); and the position of homosexually oriented people has always been the subordinate one.

Generally speaking, the core of problem resides in the persuasive power of society and its sacred rules and laws. Social hegemony of the mass, in fact, provides an opportunity to accept buck passing decisions, where, in the labyrinth of manipulative devices and manifestations of control, the responsibility and original reason for a particular regulation becomes untraceable and the purpose of the principle itself may, therefore, significantly lack in relevance. In his study Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argues that society might be an initiator of a wide range of mental conditions of individuals due to the fact that “he [a man] cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals” (34). Turiel and Wainryb touch exactly the same issue when suggesting that the “main source of conflict and misery is an inevitable clash between individuals' biological makeup, in the form of instinctual drives, and the requirements of society” (250). But where is the origin of such requirements? It is in an individual as well. A primal idea is born in a single mind and then pushed through the authoritative, administrative system of a given area with the not negligible help of manipulation and categorization. There is usually merely one powerful initiator, or a little group of them, who endeavors to persuade other people about his truth and whose idea is later reflected in the legal system. So, technically speaking, the rivalry here is not between the society and an individual but rather between an individual who strives for normative parameters to be designed, approved and later applied, and an individual who wants only to live and let live. The only question which arises here is which of the individuals manages to convince more people to become his followers. Only then does the issue born in a single mind become the matter of society and its rules.