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PARTISAN REVIEW
who is recording every word you say, but the article or interview always
has several major errors of fact. But less and less do facts matter, partly
because writers are like pegs to hang people's fantasies on. If writers do
care that what is written about them should somewhere connect with the
truth, does that mean we are childish? Perhaps it does, and certainly I feel
every year more of an anachronism. Returning to Paris after a year's in–
terval, I was interviewed by a young woman who had done me before. I
said her previous article had been a tissue of invention, and she replied:
"But if you have to get an article in to a deadline, and you didn't have
enough material, wouldn't you make it up?" Clearly she would not have
believed me if I had said no. And that brings me straight to the heart of
the problem. Young people brought up in today's literary climate cannot
believe how things were. You get skeptical looks if you say something
like this: "Once serious publishers tried to find serious biographers for
their serious authors." Now everyone takes it for granted that
all
they are
concerned about is to publish as many biographies as possible, no matter
how second-rate, because biographies sell well. Writers may protest as
much as they like: but our lives do not belong to us.
If you try and claim your own life by writing an autobiography, at
once you have to ask, But is this the truth? There are aspects of my life I
am always trying to understand better. One - what else? - my relations
with my mother, but what interests me now is not the narrowly personal
aspect. I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember any–
thing, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a
kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have
to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable? Now I see her
as a tragic figure, living out her disappointing years with courage and with
dignity. I saw her then as tragic, certainly, but was not able to be kind.
Every day you may watch, hear of, some young person, usually a girl,
giving parents, often a mother, such a bad time that it could be called
cruelty. Later they will say, "I am afraid I was difficult when I was an
adolescent." A quite extraordinary degree of malice and vindictiveness
goes into the combat. Judging from histories and novels from the past,
things were not always like this. So what has happened, why now? Why
has it become a right to be unpleasant?
I have a woman friend who in the Second World War went to New
York with her young child, having no support in Britain, her home. She
earned her living precariously as a model for artists, and sometimes
modeling clothes. She lived in a small town outside New York. She was
poor, isolated, and being twenty years old, yearned for some fun. Once,
just once, exactly once, she left the little boy with a friend, spent the
evening in New York and did not get home until dawn. I used to listen
to this boy, now adolescent, accuse her most bitterly. "You left me alone
