In The Idler, No. 84 (Saturday November 24, 1759), Samual Johnson writes that an autobiographer “has at least the first qualification of an historian, the knowledge of the truth.”

I disagree, because most of the autobiographies I have read (and the exceptions are very few) have been produced predominantly by the exercise of memory, rather than historical research. Biographers use documents as evidence; autobiographers use their own minds.

Memory, as we know, is unreliable, and this is why I like autobiographies. They are stories that make an extremely problematic claim to truth, and I often find that this claim complicates the act of storytelling in a deliciously infuriating way. Having just started to read Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, I note that the unreliable nature of “Mnemosyne”, as he calls her, is a fundamental concern for this autobiographer. In the Foreword to my edition, Nabokov outlines some of the problems his unreliable memory has caused him in writing an account of his life:

I was born in 1899, and naturally, during the first third of, say, 1903, was roughly three years old; but in August of that year, the sharp “3? revealed to me (…) should refer to the century’s age, not to mine, which was “4? and as square and resilient as a rubber pillow. (…) Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.

This quotation fascinates me, for it appears to reveal an attitude to autobiography totally at odds with my own. More than anything, it betrays Nabokov’s assumption that good autobiographical writing is an exercise in history: factual accuracy is paramount.

He fusses over what precise age he was at particular times. My own feeling when reading autobiographies is that what matters is not the facts, but the story. A story must have an internal logic, and must have a kind of truth in it, but for me the narrative is more important than factual accuracy. If I aimed to tell only facts when writing my own autobiographies, I would not get very far, and certainly would not be telling stories that anybody else would care to read.

What I still have not been able to rework through want of specific documentation, I have now preferred to delete for the sake of over-all truth.

This second quotation is even more alarming. Because he lacks “specific documentation” to verify certain details, he has omitted them altogether. Here, Nabokov is acting more as a biographer than an autobiographer, insisting on gaining documentary evidence for every detail he wishes to include. Especially surprising is Nabokov’s reference to “over-all truth”. What is this over-all truth? What a claim to make, that by leaving bits out, his account is more true than it would have been had they been left in! Of course, Nabokov is writing about historical truth, whereas what really matters to me when I read is the truth as conveyed by the specific text. Soon I will outline my view of the relationship between autobiography and storytelling. For now, it is enough to say that I do not see autobiographies as historical documents. They are interesting, problematic and (usually) enjoyable stories.