IIOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
105
course of his life. In general, the writing of an autobiography is under–
taken at a rather advanced age. If the writer were to sincerely attempt
to tell "the whole truth" about every transaction or experience in his
long life which he can recollect, the result would be insufferably prolix,
confusing, and tedious.
So the memoirist is forced to select from the experiences of his life
those which are meaningful, and this is where the difficulties and ambi–
guities begin.
The first difficulty concerns the actual working of memory. A person
ma y genu inely forget tra nsactions of wh ich he is su bconsciously
ashamed. As friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "My memory says I did this.
My pride sa ys I did not. My memory yields."
And as it happens an example of the working of Nietzsche's Law is
unconsciously provided by Freud. When Freud first offered his own the–
ory of memory and lapses of memory, he was reminded that Nietzsche
had got in there first, more than a decade earlier in r893. Freud then
claimed he had never read Nietzsche's maxim. If Freud had never read
it he would have been unique among the educated reading public in the
Germany of his day where all ietzsche's utterances were closely stud–
ied. So freud was unintentionally providing a striking personal example
of the force of Nietzsche's Law which freud chose not to know about.
Unconscious editing is the most subtle of the traps facing the mem–
oirist. There are others, more blatant, but no less formidable. A great
body of memoirs-probably the great bulk of memoirs-have been pro–
vided by soldiers and politicians. Almost invariably those memoirs will
be cleansed to protect the writer's place in history and to rebut charges
being pressed by his rivals. Such a memoir is an
apologia pro vita sua,
as Cardinal Newman put it.
When I received my first lessons in historiography from the late great
T.
W. Moody of Trinity College, Dublin, my supervisor for my Ph.D.
thesis, he told me of the low value proper historians attach to memoirs
as a source of historical information. Memoirs are essentially pleadings
by interested parties and therefore inherently subject to distortion. The
historians must distrust especially persons concerned about their place
in history, and so, liable
to
edit their narrative with a view to ensuring
that their place will be as high as possible. The material the historian
most prizes is that written for a known, immediate, practical purpose,
and without any thought at all for such a remote consideration as a
place in history or an impact on posterity.
Of course, I fully accept Moody's verdict concerning the lowly place
of memoirs in the hierarchy of historiographical materials. It is a lowly
