These days, if you've appeared in the public eye for longer than a day or two, you've probably written an autobiography. You've also probably written it long before your life is likely to be over. Drew Carey has written one.
Anyway, contemplation of the huge number of celebrity autobiographies at every bookstore persuaded NEW IMPROVED HEAD to investigate the genre. Its investigation consisted of comparing a contemporary celebrity autobiography to two of the great autobiographies.
The contemporary autobiography selected was Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry . Mr. Fry is an intelligent, amusing, and elegant writer, and the department figured there was a very high probability that he had written his book himself rather than through spectral agency (the title of Mr. Fry's book is taken from Psalm 108:9, of which "Moab is my washpot" are the first four words and The last five are "over Philistia will I triumph"). The two great works with which it was compared were An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope and I, Claud (1967 edition) by Claud Cockburn.
While Mr. Fry is best known as an actor he is a literary figure as well, a novelist and a newspaper columnist. A comparison of his autobiography with those of two other British literary figures who also came from the upper reaches of British society therefore seemed highly appropriate.
In fact, although Mr. Fry's book concerns only the first twenty years of his life, it has elements in common with the older works. In particular, all include an account of British prep school and public school life. The importance of school life is an enduring component of British upper-class myth, and Mr. Fry and Mr. Trollope seem determined to attach great importance to their school lives. Trollope's account of his misery at Harrow is of course renowned, while part of Mr. Fry's account of his misery at Stouts Hill has been published in Reader's Digest as an illustration of the wholesome and helpful influence of teachers.
The difference between the two men is that while in his account Trollope is concerned to restrain his admirable and obviously considerable resentment at the people he considered responsible for his unjust persecution at school, Fry is concerned in his account chiefly to explain how his misbehaviour at school does not demonstrate an unforgiveable or incorrigible defect of character (a possible ulterior motive will be discussed later).
Fry was a thief. He stole money from his fellow students. The culmination of his adolescence was a spree of fraud using a credit card stolen from a family friend. He constructs an elaborate theory whereby his thieving is explained as the result of an unrequited longing for love and of a feeling of inability to join in with other people. He also notes a professional opinion from his boyhood that his problems were due to emotional immaturity. While Mr. Fry protests ad nauseam his shame at and repentance of the crimes of his youth, he ignores the obvious explanation of them.
The obvious explanation is that he stole because it was profitable. Stealing is immediately reinforced by the procurement of the stolen item and, often, by relief of boredom, something which appears to be in no small supply in the educational establishments of the British upper classes. People steal because it gets them stuff and because it's exciting, not because they long for love. Mr. Fry's spree of fraud ended in arrest and conviction, and he was arrested because he failed to take adequate precautions against being arrested. However, his failure to take precautions seems to have been simply the result of incompetence rather than of any possible unconscious recognition of his guilt and a consequent desire to be punished for it.
Trollope's account of his suffering at school is presented as an explanation of the difficulties of his young manhood. However, these difficulties, according to Trollope, disappeared on the day he moved to Ireland to take up a new assignment for the Post Office, and they never returned ("from the day on which I set my foot in Ireland all these evils went away from me"). It is therefore difficult to attribute any real influence over the course of his adult life to his persecution at school. The persecution seems to be recounted chiefly so Trollope can get his own back.
P. D. Edwards has noted the robust strain of resentment in Trollope's autobiography. Trollope clearly believed that others had been unwilling to acknowledge his abilities, and a large part of the book is given over to the admirable undertaking of getting even, as a large part of his life seems to have been. Among other things, he notes that he may have run for Parliament on the off chance that his dead uncle, who had mocked his parliamentary ambitions, might learn of his nephew's victory through whatever channels exist to the afterlife (Trollope lost, although the results were eventually overturned and the borough disfranchised).
The resentment is part of a larger goal of self-justification. For example, Trollope obviously was driven to write, and he seems to have felt a need to justify his writing as something more than the result of an obsession. Much of one chapter is taken up with his arguments for the nobility of novel-writing, and his famous accounting of the income from his books is clearly intended as an argument for the respectability of his craft. Trollope also devotes considerable space to the superiority of his ideas about running the Post Office, where he worked for many years, to Rowland Hill's.
Anyway, Trollope's school days seem to have been recounted just so an important score could be settled. And what of Cockburn's school days? This least conventional of the three men recounts a childhood full of able people who recognized his ability.
Cockburn's account is also strikingly devoid of feeling compared to Fry's and Trollope's – of course, Cockburn had the most aristocratic lineage of the three and may simply have been much more the proper British gentleman (you read it here first – this is probably the first time Cockburn's ever been accused of this). Nevertheless, Cockburn clearly was not using I, Claud as a means of dealing with self-doubt, as Trollope and Fry seem to have been using their autobiographies.
Cockburn is also much more entertaining and informative than the other two men. I, Claud is full of colourful, amusing, and informative anecdotes of colourful, amusing, and important people. Al Capone tells Cockburn that his rackets are run along strictly American lines, while Charles De Gaulle plays an amusing and dangerous practical joke on him (a joke which gives Canadian readers a new perspective on that Québec libre remark). Cockburn also retails anecdotes told him by others. Some (or many) of the anecdotes may have been embroidered a bit (or a lot), but none is probably any less true than it needs to be.
Finally, Cockburn is the least self-obsessed of the three men. Rather than settling scores with old opponents, he recounts how he became a fast friend of one of them (Malcolm Muggeridge). As a result of these differences in approach, Cockburn's book is easily the most intelligent. While Trollope and Fry are certainly no dunces, Cockburn just gave himself more scope to demonstrate his intelligence.
These differences between the three books probably reflect differences in the purposes for which they were written. Trollope's book was written for posthumous publication. The self-justification and settling of scores were probably an attempt to fix his posthumous reputation. Cockburn's book, on the other hand, was probably published with the simple goal of making money, a commodity of which he seems to have been in urgent need at several points in his life. Cockburn, furthermore, had other ways of settling scores and no need to use his autobiography to settle them. He therefore was entertaining, informative, and intelligent.
In additon, though, Cockburn's approach just seems more adult. Cockburn had achieved that state of maturity in which we realize that one of the conditions of life is that we make mistakes, and that these mistakes are sometimes quite serious. Cockburn realized that it is not necessary to deny one's fallibility (Trollope, for example, baldly asserts that whenever, over the course of his long career at the Post Office, he disagreed with Rowland Hill, he was right and Rowland Hill was wrong) or to explain it as the result of some unverifiable psychological hardship. You simply acknowledge your fallibility and get on with your life in the light of that knowledge. Trollope and Fry, though, want to persuade us that they did not make mistakes but instead lost battles with the superior forces of society.
Trollope's attempt to fix his reputation was subverted by his great obsession, writing. Reading between the lines, we can infer that Trollope, raised by a literary mother, simply loved to write. He persevered in writing even though his early books were not successful and although writing required great sacrifice - for example, he also had a full-time job to perform and so got up at four every morning to write.
Trollope thought everything about writing was important, and that belief, and a desire to demonstrate the rewards of writing as a career (and, as we have noted, its respectability), led him to include an account of the money he had made from every book he had written. That one page is what readers seized on. Trollope acquired the reputation of a mercenary philistine.
Fry's book seems to have a similar purpose but may have been in part intended to deal with a more immediate problem. In 1995, Fry abandoned the West End production of Simon Gray's play, Cell Mates, after bad reviews. He simply disappeared without warning, finally reappearing in Belgium. Moab is My Washpot seems to be an attempt to explain that disappearance as something other than simply an irresponsible act. It culminates in another flight, the one undertaken with someone else's credit card, and tries to explain it as the result of psychological difficulties which are clearly intended to make Fry's acts seem less criminal. These psychological difficulties, moreover, are to be considered as persisting into Mr. Fry's adulthood. So we probably are intended to conclude that when he ran away from the West End he was just coping with the thwarting of his longing for love by the critics.
While that purpose may seem ignoble, NEW IMPROVED HEAD believes that Mr. Fry did rise above it. We believe his goal was not simply to rehabilitate his reputation, but to rehabilitate it by peddling as big a load of old codswallop as he could put together. That is, Mr. Fry is probably well aware that his explanation is silly (for one thing, it's not hard to imagine his scorn at someone else's attempt to offer the same explanation), and his goal was to get people to believe it anyway. If the blurbs are anything to go by, he was successful in achieving that goal, and for that NEW IMPROVED HEAD commends him.
So once again NEW IMPROVED HEAD ends up with some anticlimactic conclusions. For example, we conclude that celebrities write autobiographies as marketing exercises. Who knew?, one might ask, except that clearly many reviewers of Mr. Fry's autobiography have not made it clear that they know it.
We also conclude that autobiographies should be judged by their ability to entertain and inform and not by the insight they supposedly provide into the life of a renowned person. For one thing, you're not likely to get insight. Cockburn remarks in his book his surprise that readers of an earlier edition had failed to see how the events recounted in it explained his decision to leave the Communist Party in the late 1940s. The chapter in the 1967 edition about this decision provides no more insight. The simple fact is that anyone's life is a complicated thing. The person living it is unlikely to understand it, and if he does he still may be unable to explain it adequately to someone who is acquainted with him only through his writing. Cockburn does us the favour of providing us with a straightforward account of his life rather than with a simplistic interpretation of it in the manner of Trollope or Fry. We reach the last page of I, Claud with no great insight into the reasons that his life turned out the way it did, but also without the sensation of having been bludgeoned by propaganda that we have on reaching the last pages of Trollope's or Fry's books. That may be a demonstration of Cockburn's greater skill as a propagandist, a skill of which he was proud, but it more likely is simply the result of a realization that a mistake, even a serious one, does not make one worthless. We also end up with as much insight into Cockburn's life as we have into Trollope's or Fry's.
Anyway, who wants insight into a renowned person's life? For example, NEW IMPROVED HEAD will continue to admire Mr. Fry's work regardless of whatever rationalizations he wants to provide for whatever acts he may feel guilty about or vulnerable over. We don't really want or need to know why he thinks he does things, or the way he would like us to think he thinks he does things.
By NEW IMPROVED HEAD's standards, Trollope's and Cockburn's autobiographies are clearly superior to Fry's. Trollope and Cockburn were important people who did important things and knew other important people. Their accounts of their lives are intrinsically interesting, and in addition they pass on valuable lessons taken from their experience. Fry's book deals mainly with his childhood and hobbledehoyhood, and is intrinsically about as interesting as anyone else's account of their upper-middle-class childhood and hobbledehoyhood would be. We are sure that Mr. Fry's further autobiographical work will be more rewarding simply because it will be more adult and about a considerable record of achievement.
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