Life Writing

human affairs this is an infinite pursuit. The answer to ‘No single account
canbe the whole truth’ is not to give them all up in despair, but to read,
andwrite, more of them. And the hope of every life writer is not to give the
singleright account. It is to research (or remember) and reflect so well that
one’s vision will continue to fit the facts – even new facts – and to
be illuminatingand as close to human truth as possible, for a long time. It is a
high hope,but more than can be achieved with mere facts, however true. That
is the theoretical problem of truth; there are also practical ones. Allwe can
unearth, as we have seen, are clues; and clues can be
conflicting,ambiguous, missing. Victoria Glendinning has also
compared the life writerto a detective, whose whole case can go
wrong because of a missingclue. She describes (or invents) an old
man who believed that geraniumslived on bread, because when he
sprinkled crumbs on a geranium bed,they always disappeared. ‘There
was a piece of information, about birds,that he did not seem to have,’
she notes. ‘Quite often, the biographer, ingood faith, must be making
the Geranium Mistake.’
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Even when we know about birds, we are not safe. Memory is
unreliable– both our own and our informants’. It is no more an
objective recordingmachine than we are; it is a living thing that
changes with us. Memoriesdecay, are repressed and forgotten. They
are replaced by the stories wehear and tell, and the photographs we
see. They depend as much onwhat we know as perception itself,
which is equally subjective (I am not acamera). Memory, like
perception, is a survival mechanism: it interprets ourexperience in
ways that help us to go on living.Some life writers flee, therefore, into
the archives, and put their faith indocuments instead. But documents
can be equally ambiguous, misleading,or missing. Medical records
are closed, birth certificates (eg, Jean Rhys’s)disappear in
hurricanes and fires, people burn letters, lose them, promiseto get
them down from the attic but never find the time. People lie
toregistrars and census takers as well as to us; they write letters and
evendiaries for all sorts of purposes and in all sorts of moods. There
is no suchthing as final, foolproof evidence; something else can
always turn up.Once again, however, we shouldn’t despair, and stop
believing everythingon the grounds that nothing can ever be certain.
Some things can be more