History as Biography – According to Penelope

Calling Making It Up an anti-memoir, the author points once again to the distinction between fact and fiction in historical writing which also figures as a prominent topic in auto-/

biographical writing. “Anti-memoir” is indeed a paradoxical term expressing that a piece of writing is at once factual and fictional. This problematic relationship between fact and fiction in autobiographical writing has been taken up and analysed by Ruth Klüger who stresses the vicinity of autobiography and historiography:

Autobiographie ist Geschichte in der Ich-Form. Weil sie dank ihrer Subjektivität Dinge enthält die nicht nachprüfbar sind – Gefühle und Gedanken –, wird sie öfters und leicht mit dem Roman verwechselt. Sie ist sicherlich in einem Grenzdorf angesiedelt, wo man beide Sprachen spricht, die der Geschichte und die der Belletristik. Aber jedes Grenzdorf gehört dem einen oder anderen Staat an: und die Autobiographie gehört eindeutig zur Geschichte. Auf der anderen Seite liegen der autobiographische Roman und das historische Drama. Man kann zu Fuß von einem Dorf ins andere spazieren, sehr weit ist es nicht, und doch geht man von einem Land ins andere, und die Bewohner haben unterschiedliche Ausweise. (Klüger, 86)

Penelope Lively is conscious of this closeness of autobiography, fiction, and historiography as her novel Moon Tiger shows, which playfully depicts, contradicts and questions the conventions of these literary genres. Making It Up also stretches the already blurred borders between these genres and thus constructs a “response to that oft-asked question ‘How much of what you write comes from your own life?’” (MIU, blurb). The answer might be that her life, her history and her memories serve as prompts for Lively’s writings but are in the case of her fiction indeed nothing more than that. Quite similarly to historiographic

33 I have chosen this headline in imitation of the title of Lively’s novel According to Mark (1984), a novel that deals with the problems of a literary biographer who is in due course faced with the problem of how to write a factual biography after finding out that there is no definite version of a life. Instead, fact and fiction collide in biography: “Perhaps this accounts for the peculiarly diverse picture of him that we get from friends and acquaintances. Certainly it makes the biographer’s task a hard one – a point noted by Strong himself in his well-known essay: ‘After all, we lie about one another with as much alacrity as we lie about ourselves – lies not of malice but of incompetence. We look at each other square – head-on – we seldom trouble to walk around behind and take another view’” (ATM, 210). Lively most probably faced this same problem when writing her autobiographies and consequently played with these assumptions in Making It Up.

metafiction which questions the objectivity of historiography, Lively’s metafictional autobiography emphasizes autobiographical subjectivity, interrogates and doubts the accuracy or faithfulness of the autobiographical account. Making It Up hence forms a synthesis of three genres – the autobiographical, the historical, and the fictional.

To stress Making It Up’s fictional character I consider it helpful to first take a closer look at Lively’s autobiographies, which are highly readable examples of the intermingling of public and private history as well as illustrations of how close fact and fiction, autobiography and the historical novel, can be.

An autobiography is an immensely personal piece of historical writing. Yet, as Penelope Lively emphasizes, these private histories are also always connected with public history. The connection of public and private history is not only a widely discussed topic featuring in her novels such as Moon Tiger but it also figures prominently in her memoirs.

Whereas Lively’s first autobiography Oleander, Jacaranda (1994) deals with the author’s childhood in Egypt and the influences World War II had on it, her second autobiography displays this intermingling of public and private even more openly. Gudmundsdóttir accordingly also stresses that the “attempts at connecting the public and the private show that autobiography can be a fertile ground for writing on the individual and history, and that how one views one’s connection to public events can be a creative force in life-writing”

(Gudmundsdóttir, 54). With A House Unlocked (2001) Lively extends an autobiographical work by means of adding to it a family biography and in the context she intends to write a history of the 20^th century. She does not only afford an insight into her own past as well as into her own mind but also into that of her grandmother and her Aunt Rachel. Lively furthermore mixes those private facts of her family life with those of public history and bolsters personal knowledge with figures, numbers, and stories taken from historical accounts or memoirs as the bibliographic appendix of A House Unlocked mirrors. Penelope Lively’s mixture of private and public history closely resembles Moon Tiger’s Claudia Hampton’s attempt to write a history of the world which is in the context also her own.

Lively’s approach towards writing her history even outdoes that of Claudia Hampton since Penelope Lively has chosen to project her own history, her family’s history as well as the century’s history onto the history of a house – Golsoncott, the family home of many

years. In the preface to A House Unlocked she explains her intention to regard Golsoncott a mirror of the times:

[...] the entire place – its furnishings, its functions – seemed like a set of coded allusions to a complex sequence of social change and historical clamour.

Objects had proved more tenacious than people – the photograph albums, the baffling contents of the silver cupboard, the children on my grandmother’s sampler of the house – but from each object there spun a shining thread of reference, if you knew how to follow it. I thought that I would see if the private life of a house could be made to bear witness to the public traumas of a century. (HU, xi)

As Lively considers her history and that of her family she also embraces the general history of a whole country, of England. By doing so she furthermore intends to compare and contrast life then and life now – two different worlds she has inhabited and still does. This comparison only allows her to grasp the real impact public history has on private history – and especially on her individual history.

Although she considers her life relatively unshaken by the political turbulences and upheavals of the 20^th century, the great historical events of this eventful century, she admits that cultural and social changes often gone unnoticed have deeply affected her whole life as she remarks:

When I take the central event of my own life, significantly placed in the middle of the century, I realize that right there is a potent indicator of a much more seismic disturbance. Marriage. Quite simply, the marriage of two people who could never have met in a previous age. In 1957 I married Jack Lively; a girl from the southern gentry, a young man from the northern working class.

We met in Oxford, in the clear blue air of higher education, both of us freed from the assumptions and expectations of our backgrounds. At the time, it all seemed a purely private and personal matter; only subsequently can I see what we owed to a stealthy revolution, and be grateful. (HU, 221)

Despite its emphasis on the relationship between public and private history, this memoir also deals with the perception of memory just as its predecessor does. Penelope Lively’s first autobiography Oleander, Jacaranda, is indeed a theoretical treatise of that topic as well.

The title A House Unlocked does obviously not only refer to the actual house, Golsoncott, as such but rather serves as a synonym for Penelope Lively’s memories which she describes as a “mansion in the mind, with its many rooms, each complete with

furnishings – pictures and vases and pin-trays and the contents of drawers” (HU, ix).³⁴ Just as distorted by the wisdoms of maturity” (OJ, vii) and have thus lost their originality. Her adult mind has obviously altered her childhood memories.

A child generally perceives the world differently than an adult. Its experiences remain therefore “immediate and personal. It is only much later that the dark forces at work become apparent” (HU, 107). As a child one sees a great deal but does often not understand; connections between private and public history are not made since everything seems to be personal. Until reaching a certain age, children seem to inhabit a world of their own thus naturally perceiving the world outside, or the world of adults, differently.

Experiences and events of childhood thus appear in retrospect, when looking at them from an adult point of view, often in another light: “Memory is always a product of circumstances, experience, the passing of time, memory’s public aspects, its connection to other people, and the changing perspective of the remembering self” (Gudmundsdóttir, 54). The innocence of the child is replaced by life experience and gained knowledge, what the child has seen now “requires explanation and discussion” (OJ, viii). Therefore the past, even the

34 In her essay ”Sich verlieren, um sich wiederzufinden: Weibliche Identitätssuche in Doris Lessings ’To Room Nineteen’” Annemarie Döhner examines Lessing’s short story and points to the notion of the house as a symbol of memory and the female psyche. In this context Döhner mentions Sigmund Freud and states that “[d]ie Innenräume können im Sinne Freuds interpretiert werden, der eine Korrelation zwischen dem Symbol Haus und der weiblichen Psyche entwickelt hat. Bei Lessing besteht beinahe immer eine Verbindung zwischen dem Seelenleben ihrer Charaktere und den sie umgebenden Räumen, die man als „Seelenräume“ bezeichnen kann.

Erlebnissubjekt und Raumobjekt bilden eine Einheit. Die Raumsymbole korrespondieren mit den Ebenen intrapersonaler (Zimmer), interpersonaler (Haus) und sozialer (Stadt) Erfahrung“ (Döhner, 141). These analogies can be drawn between Lively, Golsoncott and the author’s house of memory as well. The same interrelation between a house and the concept of memory becomes obvious in Esther Freud’s novel Summer at Gaglow which I am going to examine in the conclusion.

35 In her novel Family Album (2009) Lively once more occupies herself with the concept of memory and how

the view of the past changes with the individual looking at it. And again the memories and the history of a family centers around a house, a family home. “And the smell takes her to a more intimate Allersmeade, to the Allersmeade-in-the-head, to a raft of private moments that come swimming up from the long darkness of the years, the strange assortment of glimpses that are known as memory. All of these are tacked to Allersmead; in all of them Allersmeade is the backdrop – its rooms, its stairs, its furnishings, the deeply known places in its garden, the secrets of the cellar, where presumably the Daleks still roam.” (FA, 256)

personal past, can suddenly be regarded in a totally different light. Lively consequently states that the true “experience of childhood is irretrievable” (OJ, vii).

With Oleander, Jacaranda Penelope Lively nevertheless tries to uncover the experience of her childhood. She reconsiders her memories and examines them very closely to strip them of their strata and eventually find their core – the “raw stuff” (OJ, ix), the

“anarchic vision of childhood” (OJ, vii). To this core and her “childcentred perception” she adds what she calls “the reality” (OJ, viii) – the historical facts and her adult knowledge on Egypt, Palestine and the Sudan (comp. OJ, viii) and generally on the times she grew up in.

With her autobiography she therefore creates not only a picture of Penelope Lively as a whole by seeing herself as both child and adult, by combining her fractured identities, but also gives a picture of history that is both public and private. Penelope Lively furthermore suggests that memories are always subjective. Memoirs and autobiographies, both expressions of a personal history, can therefore not completely be trusted or relied upon since they were filtered by an individual’s mind. What really happened in the life of an individual can hardly be judged. Memory’s verifiability is therefore doubtful. Fact and fiction are consequently a topic in autobiographical writing just as they are in all historical writing.

Doris Lessing, when writing the first volume of her autobiography, even concluded “that fiction is better at “the truth” than a factual record” (Lessing 1993, intro, ix). And Penelope Lively suggests a similar attitude when pointing out that novelists, in contrast to historians or biographers, “have absolute control over their material – what to put in, what to leave out, how people are to behave, what is to happen. [...] the writer is able to impose order upon chaos, to impose a pattern. Real life is quite out of control” (MIU, 2).