Is It Autobiographical?

...It is autobiographical...

...They are diligent, sober-minded, responsible liars, who will do anything to make a work seem true, including telling a piece of the truth if it happens to be convenient...

...Arthur Mizener writes, in his recent life of Ford, The Saddest Story (the original title for The Good Soldier), that the novel "depends for its 'heart' on the fact that Edward Ashburnham is the 'hallucinated' [or fantasizing] Ford's passionately sympathetic, idealized conception of himself...

...Many of the things Edward does Ford only dreamed of doing or imagined he had done...

...if they are to stand for something to the world at large, they must be organized out of fantasized fact and the facts of fantasy into new experience...

...But what is the literary value of transformation...

...In the second part of the book, the protagonist is rehabilitated to a significant degree...

...In this classroom occur things that never happened but have been imagined into a reality that reads like accurate retelling...

...Passages of unconsidered experience can surprise the writer by appearing on the page...

...My second novel is about a famous playwright, an airline stewardess, a Chinese filmmaker, an Indian architect, and all are me...

...My first novel concerned a young man, Eric Green, who broke his neck in a fall down a flight of stairs while tearing after his girlfriend, who had walked out of an argument...

...But those scenes were so real...

...The force of The Good Soldier depends largely on the author's calculated objectivity toward its agonized, subjective mminations...

...In writing new lives, the novel rewrites other lives as well...

...I loved Edward Ashburnham [says Dowell] . . . because he was just myself...

...violence and its causes, including literary ones...

...The last one occasionally comes in the startling variant, "Do you write under your own name...

...Exact detail was always imperative to him, to be sure...

...Actual groups in our society whose real purposes vary ironically from their stated purposes have become one group that will resemble none of them but suggest them all...

...And: "Dowell was an American that is, a very naive—version of Edward Ashburnham...

...shame never occurs to them...

...In either form it is irritating and flattering at the same time...

...I could have given him more, but that would have cost the book its theme of punishment...

...Some of the most personal novels we have, certainly those of our century, are the more personal for being the more objective...

...Another character looks something like David Susskind but doesn't talk like him because the way Susskind looks helps the novel but the way he talks doesn't...

...Yet neither is or can be the main cause of successful transformation...

...Similarly, almost everything in my novel is distorted, or made up whole, for the sake of theme and unity...

...There are occasional traces in the novel of the actual circumstances of his life that he is translating into the terms of its story...

...The writer of fiction is constitutionally forced to transform (Freud compared his need to change reality with the psychotic's...

...One reason is tact, toward oneself and others...

...Explicitly so when Mann, worried over a premature announcement of its publication, writes, "The book contained too much of my life, too many of my secrets...

...The supposition that there is anything like a clear difference between the real real world and the author's made-up real world ignores the effort of imagination and control the writing of a novel should require...

...I related my developing characters, created in part by the requirements of my evolving plot, to our society as it existed in 1970...

...or that she did not lose her virginity in summer stock or her grandmother in a drowning accident...

...such as: "The episodes in my first, autobiographical, novel aren't literally true, but I couldn't have written the book without having had certain experiences in my life...

...He was notorious, though, as Robert Lowell put it in his poem on Ford, for telling in daily life "lies that made the great your equals...

...The essential reason and value, as I've already suggested in passing, lies in the making public, available, symbolic, what has been intimate and fragmentary...

...or "Do I stand in a real world or a made-up one when I read your book...

...I know another who has written a book about a political leader of another country and another century, and yet it is intimately about the novelist...

...Anovelist's life cannot as a rule be accurately known through his work...

...Its leader has Agnew's face, the vocal temperament of a pompous rabbi, a Quaker background...

...Write what you know...

...Meanwhile, the useful turns in one's personal plot are redrawn as if by the novel itself, by its imagination...

...Classrooms I've taught in have been dovetailed into one classroom in a nonexistent university with a real campus discreetly designed for the novel's purposes...

...Don't you find it hard to discipline yourself...

...and the novelist generally loves getting his facts (though not his facts) straight, gaining a firm context to manipulate, or within which to manipulate...

...Or else, organized around a symbolizing theme of one's experience that is shaped Richard P. Brickner, author of The Broken Year and Bringing Down the House, is a teacher of writing...

...or that he grew up in California, not New York...

...And Dublin, of course, while remaining itself, was transformed into Ulysses' ancient route...

...Is it autobiographical...

...The increasingly populated and busy plain of this novel is the result of a dreamed pistol shot which spoke, in effect, like a starter's gun...

...Writers sometimes say they do not want to go near such and such a place for fear the actual sight will ruin their conception of it...

...Is it autobiographical...

...Once a stretch of one's life has been manufactured, privately, into a visible sequence, pattern or symbol, it becomes useful to fiction for its finally fixed and organized quality, and its consequent susceptibility to being arranged into broader, richer symbolic meaning...

...Thus a literal reader of an autobiographical novel may be surprised to learn that the author has a mother or brother or sister, because the writer will kill them off if he needs to...

...writing, shooting and sex...

...An automobile accident would not have helped my novel, which was to be about falling and rising...

...as "What kind of geography do you place me in, literal or imaginative...

...Why is raw material not used as such...

...D. H. Lawrence was not...

...I know a writer, married, with two children, living in New York, whose novel concerns a married woman with two children, living in New York, and it is not about her or her family...

...Figures like Mann's creation, the composer Adrian Leverkiihn, come to be magnetic cloaks for their authors, who seek metaphors behind which they may develop and protect intimate fantasies...

...Author-like, 1970 has helped both to delineate and to fill the novel's shape: Fads, styles, events, movies, the very calendar of the year have stimulated and controlled the movements of characters and plot...

...another is the legal liability...

...It was in May of that year that the four students at Kent State were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen...

...we try to imagine them...

...One tries to answer with something more or less expansive?depending on mood, situation, etc...

...Afew weeks before the publication of my second novel, which was socially critical and hoped to be irritating, I began having nightmares and fantasies of being shot...

...Novelists are not "shameless liars...

...The chief characters are Ford himself, transformed into John Dowell (narrator and victim) and Edward Ashburnham (the leading figure in Dowell's narration...

...That fiction writers are inherently forced to transform is a given: I know of one who, in babyhood, would dismay his mother by jazzing up lullabyes as she crooned them to him...

...I started collecting episodes of potential or actual violence from my own life and fantasies (and from the lives and fantasies of others), and transmuted them into plot...

...If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did.' " Ford didn't do what either of them did...

...he must be alert to such surreptitious invasions, then decide whether or not the invasion is in fact disguised support...

...Ulysses is a classic example, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier another...

...Read Thomas Mann's The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, and the intensely personal nature of this late masterpiecee—a work of the most extremely external complexity—will become plain...

...I was describing someone else to the extent that, for example, I gave Eric Green less physical renewal than I achieved...

...An author might reply, "Yes, of course, inevitably, but it is not me...

...Now it happens that I, too, sustained a broken neck and was rehabilitated to a significant degree, but my injury occurred in an automobile accident...

...Do you always make an outline before you start...

...In fact, the kind of assurance the inquirer wants is unavailable...

...I was willing to un-derrepresent my own quite dramatic recoveryone I possessed in a stranglehold of pridebecause I was writing a novel, not an autobiography...

...The question intended, I suspect, is not so much "Do I learn personal things about you from your book...

...to the presumably coherent, dramatic requirements of the book, and thereby altered...

...James Joyce, on the other hand, compulsively familiar with every address in Dublin, did not use his first-hand knowledge of his city to write Ulysses, a work famous for its factual accuracy, but rather his interior intimacy...

...These episodes were often so vivid that they would cause me to flinch...

...Nevertheless, Lowell was able to call The Good Soldier "The best French novel in the language"?French" meaning here lucid, objective, Flaubertian...

...The book is, except for a few small moments, untrue enough in a literal way to have been made up by someone else...

...Much of the time, however, as in so many of Ford's anecdotes, the facts of Edward's situation have been changed, but the conception of Edward's self is an exact representation of Ford's conception of himself...

...pens and guns...

...A real love affair from college days has been done over into a marriage, its normal demise has become a literal and violent death at the husband's unwitting hands...

...With what haste I put the catalogue and its shocking announcement out of my sight...

...Though no one would have distorted my experience in quite the same way, it is available to any writer, crippled or not: Lord Chat-terley is paralyzed...

...The way Joyce set himself in the Dublin streets he knew and recreated so precisely was to divide this self into the persons of a precocious student and a "homeless" Hungarian Jew, an echo and a metaphor...

...Even autobiographical novels cannot be contained by literal experience...

...While Joyce's early work is unusually literal, Richard Ellmann's biography demonstrates the incessant alterations and disguises of people, events, chronology, that helped Joyce mythify himself...

...Yet it is the desire for just this clarification that makes the question irritating to the writer, since one of his struggles has been to make a made-up world real...

...I found myself thinking about the connections between writing and shooting...

...My own initial experience with a reader eager for the correct map of truth was somewhat peculiar...

...To an extent transformation simply occursthe mind acts independently on personal experience like a novelist, suppressing, exaggerating, blending and superimposing...

...The novel's hero is an echo of me, and a metaphor for me, but we have led entirely different lives, have different values of all kinds, different looks, and, except in a few instances of convenient overlap—coincidental similarities—different and often opposite responses...

...both are given dramatic, illuminating fictional circumstances...

...Further, leaving behind the transparent personae of Stephen Hero and the Artist as a Young Man, his late works moved deeper into the writer, into that interior of consciousness he strove to render while turning it inside out, into a universal mind...

...More than once I have gotten my characters' life stories confused with my own...

...What does emerge are attitudes, and they are most autobiographical...

...typewriters and machine guns...

...A novel will sometimes get stuck in a fact of the author's life and start to move again only when the impeding fact is replaced with a new truth, pertinent to the book...

...I did not, and most authors usually do not, try to duplicate experiences in writing...