The New Model Autobiographer

Abstract

SHERE ARE SMALL but crucial grammatical differences between biographer and autobiographer: the two words do not work in quite the way. Biographer can be used predicatively of someone to say what it is that does; autobiographer cannot. The distinction holds good in life and even more sharply in death. Biographers, when they die and get an obituary, will hope to be commemorated at the very least as a (or better, provided they have worked hard and successfully, as the) biographer. Autobiographers are only incidentally the authors of an autobiography, and no rational necrology will describe them as an, let alone as the, autobiographer; instead, they will be classified by whatever else it is they have done or written-their prime ministership, it may be, or their poetry-which was their cue for writing an autobiography in the first place. Biography, in short, is a trade, autobiography a subsidiary and unrepeatable event; not even Rousseau made autobiography his profession. It is the regulars, the biographers, who have established the conventions not only of their own practice, of biography, but of autobiography too. The usual objective of the autobiographer is to be his own biographer, the narrator of his life story in the first person. The near totality of autobiographies can fairly be called pseudobiographies, formally distinct from their model only by having I where it has he or she. This is not to say that, as readers, our anticipations are the for autobiography as for biography. We expect autobiography to be less cluttered with data, more intimate, more speculative, perhaps less single-mindedly retrospective than the same life story (meaning the life story of the person) told from outside. But the outside and inside stories have something in common: they are both stories. The shift from one perspective to the other is a surface one; it has no effect at all on the deep structure common to biography and autobiography. The relation that ordinarily exists between the two forms stands out clearly and rather comically in the account of how the Autobiography of T. H. Huxley came to be written. This is, to put it mildly, a short work, occupying only nine pages of the recent reprint which it shares with the Autobiography of Charles Darwin.I It is short because Huxley wrote it with reluctance, in order to forestall a biography of himself: it is a