Writing of, or from, yourself

‘All literature is, finally, autobiographical’, said Borges. ‘Every autobiography becomes an absorbing work of fiction’, responded H. L. Mencken, though not, you understand, directly. Certainly the fictional element in autobiography is evident; Trollope thought that nobody could ever tell the full truth about himself, and A. S. Byatt has said that ‘autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction’. An exaggeration, perhaps, but one with a kernel of truth.

Borges’s remark must, however, set any novelist pondering. In the most immediate sense it appears to be untrue. ‘What about invention?’ we may cry, ‘what about the imagination?’ Moreover, we have all read, and delighted in, novels that seem to have had no connection with the author’s life. Yet one should never discount sense in any observation from Borges. So what did he mean?

We can all see that many novels which don’t appear to be autobiographical may nevertheless have been born in their author’s fantasy life. Ian Fleming never had James Bond’s adventures, but Bond is surely a projection of Fleming as, in certain moods, he would have liked to be. Anyone seeking a real-life model for Bond other than Fleming himself is surely wasting their time.

On the other hand, novelists resent, quite naturally, the suggestion that they draw only from their own lives. It’s patently absurd. Nobody, after all, supposes that a crime novelist like P. D. James or Ruth Rendell is a murderer, however many corpses litter their novels. It would be ridiculous to suggest that any of these murders represented some sort of wish-fulfilment, or ‘displaced activity’. Likewise, it would make little sense to identify Lady James with Adam Dalgliesh or Lady Rendell with her Chief Inspector Wexford.

In one of her novels — Loitering with Intent or A Far Cry from Kensington, I can’t recall which — Muriel Spark has her narrator remark that, while some people say that nothing happens to them, everything happens to the novelist.