The Best Australian Essays 2015 (31 page)

Perhaps the status of autobiographical fiction today can be understood in relation to the dominance of photorealism in painting in the 1970s, which was a response by visual artists to the encroaching attractions of photographic media, an attempt to undermine and outdo the photographic image by producing a ‘realer than real' effect in painting. Could this be what autobiographical fiction represents in an age of oversharing? Robert McGill thinks so: it is now considered normal, he says, that ‘people are publicly disseminating personal narratives all the time'. He sees the currency and power of contemporary autobiographical fiction as resulting less from its revelations and more from its ‘strategic ambivalence: the simultaneous disguises and confessions it offers reproduce a broader social ambivalence about public disclosure and private life'.

This ambivalence might also be a result of literary theorists and critics being out of touch with the realities of the commercial world of book publishing and the expectations of lay readers. The critic Kate Douglas points out that several generations of literary theorists have been raised on the notion that the biography of the author is irrelevant to the text, yet in the contemporary publishing world authors are expected to cultivate a personal brand by putting out endless performative and promotional ‘paratexts' (the French theorist Gérard Genette's term) in the form of interviews, profiles and public appearances, which readers often avidly consume alongside the book. In a networked world of mass and social media, it is difficult to read a work of fiction without knowing something of the private life of the author. Literary fiction in particular is now more often than not read autobiographically, whether or not the author intended to write autobiographical fiction.

So is autobiographical fiction a critique of our confessional culture – and the kind of extreme narcissism it expresses – or merely a symptom of it?

For McGill, the ethics of autobiographical fiction are unquestionably related to its erotics. He sees this kind of fiction as mediating an intimate relationship of mutual desire between author and audience. Authors who are prepared to ‘cheat' on their real-life intimates by betraying them in their fiction invite the reader into a love triangle of sorts. There is a thrill, but also suspicion on the part of the reader that if the author is prepared to cheat
with
you, he may also be prepared to cheat
on
you. His affections are unpredictable. Above you, above everything, he values his freedom of expression, his right to say whatever he likes – and to question that hierarchy of values would make you as reader seem petty and moralistic.

Authors tend to make grand claims about the subversive power of fiction, and insist on their status as iconoclasts, refusing in and through their fiction to be bound by conventional ethical codes. Yet sometimes that means they are blind to the powerful and privileged position they occupy in having the means to publicly disseminate their words. As McGill warns:

Knausgaard has variously been described as revolutionary, subversive and heroic. The narrator Karl Ove says, ‘Ibsen [was] right … relationships were there to eradicate individuality', and Knausgaard as author heroically asserts his freedoms as an individual by ripping out the foundations of those relationships – relationships that constitute his most valuable sources as a writer. He laments his status as a domesticated twenty-first-century male, but takes advantage of it too. The apparent rebellion in his writing feeds on precisely that against which it rebels.

Coetzee has noted that as readers we like to think ‘we admire a writer because he opens our eyes, when in fact we admire him only because he confirms our preconceptions'. Our literary culture admires male writers who rebel against domesticity, who cheat on or publicly punish those close to them, who tell us how they really feel, while women who do the same are judged by a different standard. To me, what is truly radical about Helen Garner's decision in the '70s to start to write about her own life in her fiction is not that she was prepared to betray her intimates. It was that she was daring, as a woman, to ask readers to pay attention to fiction based on how she really felt, and how she experienced her life – to claim and hold their interest without apology. In
The Spare Room
, there is a powerful moment where the dying friend, Nicola, bursts into tears, unable to keep up her brave front, and admits to the author-protagonist, Helen, ‘But you see, all my life I've never wanted to bore people with the way I feel.' I have to admit this is another component of my reluctance to write autobiographical fiction: a lurking fear that my life and thoughts as a woman could not possibly command anybody's interest, a terror of being found boring. I'm not sure that even the most forward-thinking of the New Men existentialists like Knausgaard understand this inherited burden many women writers carry, whether we want to or not.

While I was reading Knausgaard, I tried to keep in mind Garner's explanation that she started writing about her own life ‘helplessly' – explaining what she meant by citing an aphorism attributed to the painter Georges Braque: ‘One's style is one's inability to do otherwise.' In other words, the art wants what the art wants. But I kept being distracted by my own horror at what Knausgaard was doing, slashing away at his world, and by the overwhelming feeling that it would cost him too much as a human being. I googled his wife, his uncle, his mother, even his children, fixating on the walking wounded surrounding the living author. And I kept returning to the unfashionable but affecting words of Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst and essayist, in a recent interview in the
Paris Review
:

The Monthly

The Meeting that Never Was

Matthew Lamb

1.

One day in February 1945, in Paris, George Orwell waited at the cafe Deux Magots, where he was to meet Albert Camus for the first time. But Camus, suffering from tuberculosis and exhaustion – because of which he was currently on leave from his editorship of the resistance newspaper
Combat
– didn't show up. They would never again have the chance to meet each other. Five years later, Orwell died, in England – from an illness related to his own tuberculosis.

This may very well be one of the great missed opportunities in twentieth-century European letters. But although Orwell and Camus were two of the most intriguing political and literary figures of their time, they are rarely considered in relation to each other, and when they are, it is usually not to any great depth. There are superficial similarities between them that tend to distract from looking for deeper affinities, albeit buried beneath significant antimonies. Although, politically and intellectually, they drew many of the same conclusions, these were, more often than not, arrived at from very different starting points, or via different routes. And that is, ultimately, why Orwell and Camus are so interesting to consider together. In a sense, the life and work of each man acts as an independent variable to confirm the truths and the doubts revealed by the life and work of the other.

Even their similarities, if prodded gently, reveal telling differences. Take, for example, the most iconic, albeit the most superficial, similarity between Orwell and Camus: their obsessive cigarette smoking. Orwell rolled his own cigarettes, from the cheapest shag tobacco he could find – the type used by the British working class. Camus smoked Gauloises, a pre-packaged, unfiltered cigarette, very popular among the French intelligentsia and artistic community. For each man, their preferred cigarette was a symbol for the world they tried to inhabit, but which was never really their home. For Camus, it was the French intellectual scene, a far cry from his poor Algerian origins. For Orwell, it was the British working class, very different from his middle-class upbringing, his public schooling, and his service in the Imperial Police. Each cigarette they smoked was both an act of solidarity and a calmative against not entirely fitting into their chosen worlds.

They entered each of these worlds as writers, however. But they had very different approaches and attitudes toward writing. They both considered writing as a vocation. Yet Orwell also saw it as an occupation. For him, to be a writer meant earning a living from your published work. This is why Orwell early on set himself a goal of writing and publishing one book every year. It is also why he wrote so many articles, and did so many book reviews (and later film reviews, even though he hated doing so). His freelance writing was to support his book writing. And his book writing was to support his living.

Camus also made a decision early on regarding his own career. But he felt that writing was not an occupation. It was not something to earn a living from, and so he sought out other employment. In his youth, he was struck by the romantic argument that money tainted art. But as he got older, and his romanticism faded, he worked more out of necessity. His university education was geared toward him becoming a schoolteacher, but his tuberculosis made him ineligible for the role. He had tried various odd jobs, both during and after his university study. He was a meteorologist assistant, for example. An uncle even wanted him to take over the family butcher shop, and to teach him the trade. But Camus eventually fell into journalism. Even here the writing aspect was always only a part of other more menial tasks, like typesetting, or more laborious roles, like editing and proofing or seeing someone else's work through to print.

Orwell and Camus also approached their own writing differently. Orwell was only able to work on one project at a time. So when he had reviews to write, or a series of commissioned articles to complete, he would put aside his book manuscript, sometimes for months at a time. Even on those rare occasions when he did have a job – such as in the mid '30s, when he briefly worked in a London bookshop, or when in the late '30s he and his wife, Eileen, opened a village grocery shop in Hertfordshire – he made the job fit around his writing, and always saw it as something secondary. Running a grocery shop didn't, for example, stop Orwell from travelling to Northern England to research his book on working-class life, or to Spain to fight against the fascists. But when a job became all-consuming – such as when he worked for the BBC during the war, and then as literary editor of
Tribune
– his own writing all but stopped. Starting in 1933, Orwell published one book every year up until 1939. His next book,
Animal Farm
, was not published until 1945. He would look back on these years in between as wasted.

During and after the war, Camus worked as a newspaper editor at
Combat
but also as a book editor at Gallimard, where he curated his own series (publishing, for the first time, writers such as Simone Weil and Violette Leduc). Still, Camus didn't let his day job get in the way of his own writing. His illness had taught him that time was short, and so he didn't waste any of it. Unlike Orwell, however, Camus would work on several projects at once. Despite his journalism, and essay writing, Camus tended to develop what he called ‘cycles' of work, based around a common theme. His aim was to write a novel, a play and a book-length essay to make up each cycle of work. Although the reality never entirely matched the plan, he kept to this method throughout his life. At the same time that he was working on his novel
The Stranger
, for example, he was also writing his essay
The Myth of Sisyphus
, and working on the play
Caligula
. Meanwhile, the seeds of his next cycle were already being sown in his notebooks, and rehearsed in his journalism and essay writing.

Part of the reason for these different attitudes and approaches to writing may be due to their different social backgrounds. For Orwell, that background was middle-class, old Etonian – even when he rebelled against it he was still inculcated by the attitudes that came with it. He had seen several of his classmates – such as Cyril Connolly – go on to become writers and editors of literary journals and newspapers, and so he was never in any doubt that a literary career was not something he could pursue. His five years in the Burmese Police were, he later said, partly an attempt to actively avoid becoming a writer – as if it was always inevitable.

Camus, on the other hand, came from very poor, largely illiterate, working-class French Algeria. There was hardly anything inevitable in Camus' becoming a writer. Growing up, there were no books in the house, and no privacy. During the school holidays, he worked with his uncles and older brother in a wine-barrel factory. His older brother didn't go to high school, but went instead to work full-time with their uncles. Camus was supposed to follow suit, but an intervention from a schoolteacher, Louis Germain – and later the encouragement of a high school teacher and then university lecturer, Jean Grenier – made Camus see new possibilities. But even here, these possibilities extended mainly to the goal of becoming a high school teacher, and the need for a steady, honest job. Writing was certainly a possibility, but it was always something besides, something you did after work hours. For a working-class family in 1930s Algeria, writing was not considered legitimate work.

Tuberculosis affected Orwell and Camus in very different ways. Orwell was often sickly, and his illnesses were always lung-related. From early childhood he had bouts of chronic bronchitis, pneumonia, and influenza, often resulting in hospitalisation. In September 1938, when he was thirty-five, he went to French Morocco to recover from his first official bout of tuberculosis, although an older tubercular lesion was also found on his lungs. He became acclimatised to illness early on, to the extent that he didn't let it get in the way of his more adventurous activities. He fought in Spain in 1936, for example, where he was shot in the throat. It was not until the Second World War that tuberculosis stopped him from enlisting. Even then, he threw himself into the home guard, and later – at the time he was supposed to meet Camus – worked as a war correspondent.

Camus contracted tuberculosis when he was seventeen, much younger than when Orwell became aware of his illness, but older than Orwell in his having to cope with illness in general. It therefore came as more of a shock to Camus when he was first diagnosed. Despite the poverty of his childhood, Camus was a robust and active child, playing soccer and swimming in the ocean. But tuberculosis, during the 1930s in French Algeria, was effectively a death sentence. Camus only received basic treatment because his father had died fighting in the First World War, which made the Camus children eligible for free medical care. The severity of the illness restricted his activities. He was unable to enlist to fight in Spain during the civil war in the mid-1930s, and later, at the start of the Second World War, he was again unable to enlist, despite repeated attempts.

Tuberculosis shaped Camus' life more so than it did Orwell's. The latter often treated his illness as an annoying aside, something he acted in spite of. It helped that his brother-in-law, Laurence O'Shaughnessy, was a leading thoracic surgeon and attending doctor at the sanatorium where Orwell would often stay in the late 1930s. Although it could be argued that Orwell's pervasive pessimism – especially in his final novel,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, written when he knew he was dying of tuberculosis – could, in part, be due to his own sense of mortality, illness never really became a prominent subject for his writing (his essay ‘How the Poor Die' being a notable exception).

Camus, on the other hand, constantly referred to tuberculosis in his writing, both explicitly and implicitly. In the original version of
The Stranger
, for example, the protagonist dies from tuberculosis. Although by the time he reworked the material into
The Stranger
, he had removed overt references to the illness, the mood pervades. The description of Meursault on the beach, for example, moments before shooting the Arab, was the same as his description of tubercular fever found in an earlier draft of the novel – but also the same as in his own notebooks, when describing his own experience. One of the earliest existing prose pieces by the young Camus, from 1933, soon after his first stint in hospital, is a piece called ‘The Hospital in a Poor Neighbourhood'. Like Orwell, even in his own suffering Camus becomes aware of the suffering of others, and the cumulative effects of poverty and illness on the mind:

When Camus wrote of the question of suicide in
The Myth of Sisyphus
, it was not therefore a theoretical or rhetorical problem he was raising, but a practical and personal one. Later, in
The Plague
– Camus' fictional equivalent of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
– the pervasive metaphor of illness is used to describe the same totalitarian atmosphere that Orwell described in his own novel. The aetiology of the plague in Camus' novel is conspicuously ambiguous, however, although the symptoms are remarkably similar to those of his own tuberculosis.

2.

February 1945 was a significant moment in the life and work of both Orwell and Camus, regardless of them not actually meeting. Even had they done so, it is unlikely they would have been aware that their individual actions over the previous months would have great consequences for each of them. The previous February, Orwell had finished
Animal Farm
, but was unable to get it published, because of its literary style, its political implications – even because of a wartime paper shortage. It is the novel that, when finally published, would make him immediately famous across the world. But by the time he was supposed to meet Camus, the novel remained in manuscript form, its potential unknown, even to Orwell himself.

Camus was already famous for
The Stranger
(1942). But since late August 1944, his renown had steadily grown, as he was also famous for being the editor of
Combat
. Since the liberation of Paris in late August the previous year, when
Combat
began publishing openly, the fame Camus had previously known as a novelist had been compounded by his journalism: he was now a public intellectual. Yet his general exhaustion, the liberation and subsequent purge of collaborationists, had taken its toll on Camus' already weakened health. It was in January 1945 – the month before he was supposed to meet Orwell – that the most significant event occurred, although it was not considered so at the time. Even Camus needed a longer period to reflect on its significance.

Camus was initially in favour of the purge trials, but he quickly became disillusioned by the arbitrariness of their application. The turning point came when he was asked to sign a petition to commute the sentence of Robert Brasillach, a notorious collaborationist journalist. After a sleepless night on 25 January 1945, Camus signed the petition. It was not successful, however, and Brasillach was executed. It would not be until November the following year – in a series of eight articles published in
Combat
under the title ‘Neither Victims nor Executioners' – that Camus would publicly write about the ideas that were born from this moment, particularly to do with his rejection, on principle, of the death penalty. This series would rehearse the basic arguments that Camus would later expand in his book
The Rebel
, completed in 1950 – several months after Orwell's death – and published in 1951.

For Orwell, the most significant event occurred in March 1945, the month after his failed meeting with Camus. It is perhaps the reason why they never managed to reschedule. Orwell was also ill at this point, and in March he entered a hospital in Cologne. The seriousness of his condition is accounted for by his writing, for the first time (on 31 March), instructions for his literary executor. What he didn't know at the time, but found out almost immediately afterward, was that two days earlier in England, on 29 March, his wife, Eileen, had died undergoing routine surgery. When he found out, although still deathly ill, he hurried back to England. The death of his wife numbed Orwell, and he threw himself into his work. By April, he had returned to Europe to continue his war correspondence, but by this stage the Allies were already into Germany and Austria, with Orwell trailing behind.