‘The Very Complexion of the Mirror’

The introduction’s title is taken from a quote by Henry James that underlines the book’s focus on the self-theorising artist: the idea that autobiographical writing shows the author’s mirrored reflection as well as an examination of the reflective surface itself. This idea is introduced alongside other key themes of the book, including the concern with genre, especially the mixed genre of ‘creative autobiography’ and how it compares with the Künstlerroman. The choice of authors studied and their interconnections are explained. It is described how each of the works focused on is a response to the moment of its composition – to the new century, to the shock of the First World War, to the experiments in self-expression or to the uncertainty of the interwar years – making Hans Georg Gadamer’s notion of the ‘historical horizon’ important to the study. This discussion dwells on Virginia Woolf’s idea that ‘human character changed’ in 1910.

The Art of Life

In A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother Henry James depicts an apprenticeship in the conversion of impressions into art. By closely paralleling the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, James shows that the complex art of life is also a reflection of his broader artistic programme. The discussion focusses on James’s concept of the ‘fostered imagination’ – the way in which his surroundings, experience and key relationships (e.g. with the painter John LaFarge) shaped his creative development. This chapter concludes that the Bildungsreise or apprenticeship journey at the heart of James’s autobiographical volumes bears witness to and enacts the conversion of a small boy’s quiet observations into the aesthetic manifesto of the mature master. By subtly destabilising the genre with his slight deviations from the traditional model, James casts himself as an artist-hero aware of the constructed nature of personal and public identity, and he skews the focus of his narrative away from self-confession towards art. The Künstlerroman provides James with the means of reframing the increasingly problematic autobiographical premise of a knowable self, allowing him to pursue his quest clothed in the armour of poetic relations.

Reading the Writer

The conclusion considers how it is that art reveals the artist, and why the literary form of creative autobiography is especially suited to this revelation. It is argued that for each of the authors discussed in the preceding chapters, the conception of the artist that they wish to convey is encoded into the style and form of the narrative they write about themselves. This does not mean the author has ‘become’ the text, as Roland Barthes would have it, but rather the text has become a means through which the reader can commune with the author in the act of authoring. Emphasis is placed on active reading and the role of the reader in creating meaning. It is concluded that what we glean in reading these autobiographical texts is an impression of the artist and his or her art, quite distinct from a knowable persona.

An Investigation of Reality

Richardson’s fictionalised self-portrait in Pilgrimage explores the relationship between personal reality and aesthetic form. By comparing her technique with that of Gosse and James, chapter 5 reveals the extent to which Pilgrimage complementarily combines the traditional structures of spiritual autobiography and the Künstlerroman to supplement the limits of language’s ability to express the self. The discussion focusses heavily on Richardson’s use of language and form, showing how Pilgrimage bursts with fresh ideas and techniques that, ironically, were to establish a new tradition in the form of the stream-of-consciousness novel. It is shown that Richardson’s portrait of the artist lies as much, if not more, in the form of her writing as in the content, as she literally writes the story of herself, her apprenticeship, up to the point at which she begins to write Pilgrimage.

A Twofold Experiment with Time

Chapter 4 examines how Siegfried Sassoon’s deeply entrenched divided self formally and thematically shapes his autobiographical trilogy as a poet’s journey from Romanticism to Modernism. The second prose trilogy by Sassoon is ‘the story of my effort to become a famous poet’. Although more explicitly Wordsworthian than James, Sassoon’s final undercutting of the Künstlerroman form in his so-called ‘straight autobiography’ is also more drastic, revealing the impact of war on artistic identity. The chapter discusses Sassoon’s self-theorising throughout the texts and his desire to write himself into something more than a soldier poet, which these texts achieve with ease. The chapter concludes that much like poetry, the structure of the text embodies equal meaning to the words, so that Sassoon’s ‘factual’ prose works invite literary interpretation and even poetic comparisons.

The Anxiety of Inheritance

This chapter focuses on Edmund Gosse, Victorian man of letters, and his autobiography Father and Son. The book’s differences from the other works discussed in Writing Life are notable, but the very differences make Gosse’s narrative significant, for his unusual genre mixing generates a number of themes and motifs that resonate through the study: generational difference and influence; inheritance; the role of reading in shaping authorial individuality (Bloom); and a concept of autobiography as ‘fathering’ (or ‘mothering’) the self. The chapter concludes that as Father and Son subverts traditional spiritual autobiography in favour of an artist’s apprenticeship narrative, so Gosse’s struggle against inheriting his father’s religious beliefs enables his eventual individuation. Gosse is often viewed as critic rather than an author, but this chapter shows that his autobiography reveals an extremely versatile writer whose opinion mattered – and this is the persona that Father and Son projects in place of the creative artist.

The Writer Reading

Chapter 1 provides a detailed discussion of the book’s key ideas, beginning with the importance of the author’s own literary apprenticeship as a reader for the writer s/he will become, starting with the ideas of Emerson on influence and reading. The section ‘Tradition and Inheritance: the Künstlerroman’ provides an in-depth history of the German Romantic genre and its relevance for the creative autobiographies studied in the following chapters. It compares the specific form of the artist novel with the Bildungsroman and discusses the meaning and relevance of the term Bildung and the idea of apprenticeship. The section ‘Influence (Inflowing)’ explores the idea of literary inheritances and Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of influence. It examines how the German genre influenced British Romanticism and twentieth-century life-writing, highlighting the pliability of generic forms, and further how the author’s technical skill in genre mixing displays an understanding of their art form and the quality of their imagination.