DORIS LESSING
547
blobs of colour move all the time, because the sun is moving outside."
True. Move they do. You forget . You remember. As I brooded over
the material for this book, faces and places emerged from the dark. "Good
Lord! So there you are! Haven't thought about you for years!" Not only
the perspective but what you are looking at changes.
When you write about anything - in a novel, an article - you learn a
lot you did not know before. I learned a good deal writing this. Again
and again I had to say, "That was the reason was it? Why didn't I think of
it before?" Or even, "Wait ... it wasn't like that." Memory is a careless
and lazy organ, not only a self-flattering one. And not always self-flatter–
ing. More than once I have said: "No, I wasn't as bad as I've been think–
ing," as well as discovering that I was worse.
And then - and perhaps this is the worst deceiver of
all -
we make up
our pasts. You can actually watch your rrilnd doing it, taking a little frag–
ment of fact and then spinning a tale out of it. No, I do not think this is
only the fault of the story-tellers. A parent says, "We took you to the sea–
side, and you built a sand castle,
don't you remember?
-
look, here is the
photo." And at once the child builds from the words and the photograph
a memory, which becomes hers. But there are moments, incidents, real
memory, I do trust. This is partly because I spent a good part of my
childhood "fixing" moments in my mind. Clearly I had to fight to estab–
lish a reality of my own, against an insistence from adults that I should ac–
cept theirs. Pressure had been put on me to admit that what I knew was
true was not. So 1 am deducing this . Why else my preoccupation that
went on for years:
this
is the truth,
this
is what happened, hold on to it,
don't let them talk
YOll
out of it.
Why an autobiography at all? Self-defense: biographies are being
written.
It
is a jumpy business, as if you were walking along a flat and of–
ten tedious road in an agreeable half-dark but you know a searchlight may
be switched on at any minute . Yes, indeed there are good biographers,
nearly all of them in Britain now, for we are enjoying a golden age of bi–
ography. What is better than a really good biography? Not many novels.
In the year just finished, 1992, I heard of five American biographers
writing about me. One I have never met or even heard of Another, 1 was
told by a friend in Zimbabwe, is "collecting material" for a biography.
From whom? Long dead people? A woman 1 met twice, once when she
asked me carefully casual questions, has just informed me she has written a
book about me which she is about to get published. Yet another can only
be concocting a book out of supposedly autobiographical materials in
novels and from two short monographs about my parents. Probably in–
terviews, too, and these are always full of misinformation. It is an aston–
ishing fact that you may spend a couple of hours with an interviewer,
