Rachel Cusk and George Orwell: Transitions to…where?

(Click the image to find Transit on Amazon, click here to find Coming Up for Air)

As I walk into my local Waterstones, the first thing that catches my eye, straight ahead at one o’clock as it were, is three bookcases labelled NEW BIOGRAPHY. Other key subjects are ranged all around, but none of them has three cases. Biography, one would surmise, is the growth area of British publishing. Last year, indeed, Biography outsold History.

But a closer look reveals that two-thirds of the books in these cases are autobiographies, most often of living celebrities, plus various forms of memoir of experiences lived through by their authors. These memoirs must be autobiography in the strict sense, as they are told in the first person, but many of the autobiographies that are so popular were perhaps wholly ghost-written, so are they really biographies, since these ghosts are actually writing about another person (he/she, a ‘third person’), though disguising him/her as ‘I’? Meanwhile, the biographies in the strict sense, i.e. narratives about real people’s lives told in the third person, are mainly of already famous, or well-known, long- dead people: Liszt, Mandela, Marx, James Joyce, Philip Sassoon, Olga Ivinskaya…

Of course, I can understand why all of these genres are lumped together in a bookshop under Biography: the shop needs a simple collective term. However, it is still distorting the meaning of an English word, and when it comes to reviewers and even other writers referring to autobiographies as biographies, one begins to sense muddle and even dilettantism. For true separation of the genres, we need a collective such as LIFE STORIES, embracing all the discrete genres from biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, to literary portraits, people directories and even obituaries.

It is not at all that I object to the mixing of genres as a way forward, of innovating in biography for instance. But by and large people need to know what a thing really is, and it’s a plain philosophical fact that one thing cannot be a substitute for another. If people feel, for example, that they are being asked to accept that a book is autobiography and biography simultaneously, or that a biography is a work of fiction, they suspect fudgery. Worse, they suspect that the author doesn’t know the difference and is a dilettante.

The really interesting statistic, though, is that two thirds of the NEW BIOGRAPHY in Waterstones is autobiography. Obviously, this still sends a strong message that we are interested in other people’s lives, but we are interested in those people’s lives in a special way — as ‘I’s’, when in reality they are as much ‘he/she’s’ to us as Mandela or Ivinskaya. Why is this? Could it be that the ‘I’, and particularly the ‘Ego’ of celebrities, is far more exciting than the ‘he/she’? Again, why? Are we all wannabes really and therefore can identify so much more closely with the ‘I’s’ of once-wannabes who have made it? Is the popularity of autobiography natural in the age of the selfie? Are we living in the most narcissistic period of our nation’s history? Meanwhile, many of the recent autobiographies I have looked inside practise the most blatant self-censorship: they are simply not going to address certain areas of their lives, e.g. their marriages. There is a loss of objectivity in the autobiographies of living people, then, compared with the biography written by an outsider, and I feel that many people have lost sight of that fact.

I am also intrigued by the slide to the first person in fiction. A very high proportion of the short stories I read in magazines or collections are monologues. It is some years since I had anything to do with creative writing courses, but I sense they teach that it is ‘easier’ to write if you ‘identify’ with your hero in the first person; if you ‘become’ the ‘I’… And students find it is indeed ‘easier’, as they already have an ‘I’. But it is not inherently better. And now we have the complication that the fictional first-person narrative is termed ‘autobiographical’ in the sense of actually about the author.

The very interesting writer Rachel Cusk has principally been a novelist. However, in 2001 she brought out her memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother and in 2012 another memoir, entitled Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. Both were publicly savaged for their personal, i.e. autobiographical, revelations, and Cusk went into Writer’s Block. According to The Times, summarising an interview that Cusk gave, ‘after the memoirs, she found she had written herself into a corner, having run out of autobiographical steam’, but ‘feeling that the only viable form of literature nowadays is autobiography [my italics]’, she decided that the solution to her writer’s block was to ‘attempt […] fictionalised life-writing’ (not, note, ‘autobiography’!). The result of that decision is her ‘novel’ of 2014, Outline, and now Transit, which came out this month.

As followers know, these posts about modern biography are not meant to be reviews, so I will merely say that Transit is well worth buying;  it’s been described as ‘middle-aged, middle-class chick lit.’, but Cusk’s writing is in a category far above the three classic chick lit. novels I have ever read! It is often icy cool, frequently downright hilarious. My reason for mentioning it here, though, is that since the first-person narrator is a woman trying to put her life together after a divorce, every reviewer I have read assumes that this novel is still autobiography, and Cusk has encouraged that herself with her preposterous statement that autobiography is ‘the only viable form of literature nowadays’. Actually, this claim is another of those self-referential paradoxes like ‘This statement is not true’, because ‘the author — the person creating — cannot be created in the sphere in which he/she is themselves a creator’ (Mikhail Bakhtin). Cusk is confused about her narrator.

At the same time, I have been reading what I think is the only novel of George Orwell’s that I had never read before — Coming up for Air (1939). Like Transit, this is a first-person narrative. Digressing because I can’t resist the temptation, I was even struck by a grammatical and tonal similarity between the two opening sentences:

An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. (Cusk)

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. (Orwell)

The ‘idea’ of Orwell’s first-person hero, George Bowling — and Cusk’s heroine reveals her name only once in the novel, by the way — is to escape mentally and physically from the wife-, dole- and war-threatened present to the village of his Edwardian childhood and the idyll of childhood fishing. Orwell’s evocation of that period and its state of ecological innocence is simply masterly. However, the common critical response to Coming up for Air has been well summed up by his 1991 biographer Michael Shelden:

The one serious defect in the novel is Orwell’s attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman, and the book is at its best when Orwell is ‘out-of-character’, speaking in a voice which is recognisably his rather than an imitation of ‘Fatty’ Bowling’s.

It is, of course, nowhere near as easy to write a novel or long short story in the first person as Dostoyevsky or Chekhov may make you think. Cusk has — deliberately? — confused her real-life, autobiographical identity and a fictive identity; Orwell is held to have failed to identify perfectly with his fictive identity, and to have let his own (autobiographical) perceptions and anxieties intervene.

I strongly believe that biography, autobiography and fiction should be kept apart. They are massive enough creative challenges as it is, without muddling them up or trying to pass one off as the other. Both Cusk’s novel and Orwell’s novel are flawed, therefore. But you still feel that the experiment they are attempting is worth it, because it is taking you somewhere else; because these works feel ‘transitional’, or as people say today ‘transgradient’, to other forms, genres, works. In Orwell’s case I would say Coming up for Air is transgradient to his political satire and particularly 1984. In Rachel Cusk’s case, I hope Transit is moving away from ‘autobiography’ and back to real creative fiction.