15

Memory

This chapter derives from one of four lectures on autobiography delivered at Yale University in 1994. A much shorter version of it appeared in Index on Censorship, January 2001, an issue that had memory as its theme.

The pages on ‘forgetting’ are older, having been written around 1988. If they served any particular occasion I have, appropriately, forgotten what it was. On reflection I thought the interest of the topic would excuse the somewhat inchoate character of these pages, and for the same reason I appended a set of notes I seem to have made when contemplating an extension of the piece. I have not tidied them up, hoping that in their present form they may be as suggestive as they must have seemed at the time.

 

Whether it is a question of a single person, or a multitude of persons falsely represented by the self-biographer (selves-biographer?) as one, there is no avoiding the question of memory, as Augustine was the first to understand. We are warned that he used the term in a much wider sense than we do. For him it was the very instrument of personal continuity, the basis of self-identity, and ‘the stomach of the mind.’¹ And it was also the means of access to grace. Since his narrative is of a delayed self-opening to grace, memory is in every sense the basis of it. The importance of Augustine’s placing God and his actions in the human memory is that it situates God ‘at the very foundations of the person’, it ‘finds him at the very root of memory’; and it does so without resorting to the Platonic notion of prenatal knowledge. We can search to know ourselves because we have an innate disposition to understand ourselves; we look within for the means to progress to self-knowledge, and that means is, like God, to be found in the memory. The path to above is through within.² So, as Charles Taylor remarks, ‘in Augustine’s doctrine, the intimacy of self-presence is, as it were, hallowed, with immensely far-reaching consequences for the whole of Western culture’; as Augustine expresses it, God is ‘the power which begets life in my mind and in the innermost recesses of my thinking’³ which makes it possible for me to know what I seek and ultimately what I am.

Memory also offers the clue to the way the world at large functions, for the world is also fallen into materiality and sense, so that its redemption must be a matter of history, of a cosmic memory. One sees why Augustine follows his autobiographcal narrative with the philosophical enquiry into memory that occupies the tenth book of the Confessions. Here are some of the famous words:

 

I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasuries of all kinds of objects brought in by sense perception. Hidden there is whatever we think about, a process which may increase or diminish or in some way alter the deliverance of the senses and whatever else has been deposited and placed on reserve and has not been swallowed up and buried in oblivion. When I am in this storehouse, I ask that it produce what I want to recall, and immediately certain things come out; some require a longer search, and have to be drawn out as it were from more recondite receptacles. Some memories pour out to crowd the mind, and when one is searching and asking for something quite different, leap forward into the centre as if saying, ‘Surely we are what you want?’ With the hand of my heart I chase them away from the face of my memory until what I want is freed of mist and emerges from its hiding places. Other memories come before me on demand with ease and without any confusion in their order. Memories of earlier events give way to those which followed, and as they pass are stored away available for retrieval when I want them. And that is what happens when I recount a narrative from memory. (X.viii)

 

This is a simple model, basically rather like a library, and it does distinguish easy access books from books on reserve. However, the books interact. What the senses have collected and stored is modified by association with ‘whatever we think about’. Some items come easily, even too easily, so some must be waved away. Some are deep in the stacks or in special collections. The section that follows describes a sort of cataloguing system, in which acquisitions are organized according to the sense that introduced each of them: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Access to these resources enables one to enjoy and compare images of the world: ‘I distinguish the odour of lilies from that of violets without smelling anything at all’ (X.viii). And in these halls of memory ‘I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it’; moreover, with those recollections other images less immediate to that selfmeeting may in their turn be blended and combined.

Augustine’s meeting of himself reminds us once more that in a sense all autobiographers take on the properties of doubles, acquiring a sort of personal ambiguity; it is worth inserting here an observation of Jean Starobinski’s:

 

The difference established by autobiographical reflection is … twofold: it is both a temporal difference and a difference of identity. The personal reference (the first person, the ‘I’) remains constant. This constancy is ambiguous, for the narrator then was different from what he is today. But how could he fail to see himself in the other person he once was? How could he refuse to accept responsibility for his errors? … The invariant pronoun is the vector, as it were, of this permanent responsibility: the first person is the basis both of present reflection and the multiplicity of bygone states. Changes of identity are indicated by verbal and attributive elements.

 

Starobinski goes on to describe these indications, by which it is possible to treat the first person as ‘a quasi-third person’. One, available in French, is to use the aorist tense to assign ‘a certain coefficient of otherness to the first person’.⁴ There are others more generally available for the description of such self-encounters.

To see what Augustine meant by self-exploration amid the contents of memory one needs to reflect that it is not merely sensory images that are collected and combined. Ideas are stored in the memory before one has learnt them. As in Plato’s Meno, though with the important difference that Augustine doesn’t admit prenatal knowledge, learning is remembering. Similarly stored, part of the original deposit, are ‘the affections of my mind’. Thus the rememberer can identify affective experiences when he or she has them later; but as preserved in the memory and reported to the enquirer, they may differ strangely from what they were as primordial experience; and here the doubling effect is obvious: ‘I can be far from glad in remembering myself to have been glad, and far from sad when I recall my past sadness. Without fear I remember how at a particular time I was afraid … I remember with joy a sadness that has passed and with sadness a lost joy’ (X.xiv).

This is far from all that should be said about Augustine’s memoria, but here it will be enough to add only one or two points of importance. First, forgetfulness is treated as a feature of memory: ‘memory retains forgetfulness … So it is there lest we forget what, when present, makes us forget’ (X.xv). I must remember forgetfulness, even though it destroys what I remember. One further point: how is it possible to aspire, as everybody does, to a felicity which, though we have the idea of it, we have never actually experienced? We have no memory, in the ordinary sense of the word, of any earlier happiness on which to model such hopes. Yet where else can they come from, if not from memory? The notion of happiness must be there, put there by some prior agency, innate. God, too, is in the memory, but by his own intervention, to be found there perhaps very late, when fascination with his creation gives way to love of him. Here comes the requirement of continence, a degree of abnegation, achievable only by grace. Da quod iubes. God must give the continence he commands. Only then will he be found, and the enquiring spirit enabled to meet itself.

From this remarkable passage we can derive the idea of a necessary doubleness, and also the notion that the experience as remembered is not, affectively, of the same quality as the experience itself; or, as one almost needs to say, the experience as remembered is not the same as the experience remembered. Here is another aspect of difference in doubleness. A pain recalled is recognized as a pain, yet it may be recalled with pleasure; a past joy can be remembered with intense sadness (a point perhaps remembered by Dante, in a famous passage, as well as by Wordsworth). Augustine is sure, as many of his successors have been, that what memory celebrates is not, in tone or significance, identical with the actual moment remembered. For, as he remarks in Book XI. xviii, meditating on past and future, ‘the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them, which they fixed in the mind like imprints as they passed through the senses … when I am recollecting and telling my story, I am looking on its image in present time …’ This image belongs to what he calls ‘the present of things past’. Other memories have worked on the image – and Augustine here anticipates the Freudian Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action⁵; forgetfulness affects memories, of course, but memories can do the work of forgetfulness by modifying the original deposit, which is further changed when the product of time and much reworking must suffer a translation into language.

For Augustine any such translation must be a fall. Language, in its nature successive, is part of the fallen world, the world of time. He sets the word against the Word; the Word belongs to the simultaneous present, the nunc stans, of eternity. It came and dwelt among us, but the words it spoke in human language, in time, dropped, syllable by syllable, into the past. The general idea is echoed by Rousseau when he says that ‘the supreme intelligence has no need to reason. For it there exist neither premises nor consequences nor even propositions. It is purely intuitive. It sees both what is and what can be. All truths are for it but a single idea, all places but a single point, all times but a single moment’.⁶ An autobiographer learns that he is in his own way simulating that integrity.

In a famous passage (XI. xxviii) Augustine speaks of reciting a psalm. Before he begins to do so he has an expectation directed toward a whole. Verse by verse, as he recites, it passes into memory; so there is a blend of memory and expectation. But his attention is on the present, through which the future passes into the past. As he goes on, memory expands and expectation diminishes until the whole psalm has been said, and all is in the memory. The same action occurs in the life of the individual person, ‘where all actions are parts of a whole, and also of the total history of the “sons of men” (Psalms 30:20) where all human lives are but parts’. So one’s life, in this respect like all other lives, passes into memory and has a typical near-completeness which, so long as we remain alive, we can seek in the memory; always remembering that when we report it in words we have in some measure to undo that completeness, both because we are using words, and because memory always entails forgetting.

Although he stresses certain dualisms in the action of memory Augustine does not doubt the continuous individuality of the ‘I’ which is doing the remembering and the forgetting. Nevertheless he sees his life, and the life of all the fallen, as a collection of scattered fragments. But he is far from wanting to represent the memory-image and his own report of it as such; for in achieving closure, totality, it has taken on a kind of intemporality, it imitates the eternal Word. His story is in fact of the unification of those fragments by his conversion, the terminus of his narrative, the conquest of division. So in this matter of fragmentation and dispersal of the self you could say he is aware of the problems of memory and subjectivity, but not that he would have recognized his problem as expressed in the language of Nietzsche or that he could have accepted the rhetorical and formal solutions offered by Barthes or Valéry in the Cahiers. Augustine recognizes fragmentation but his whole drift is to mend it. He is thus antithetical to these writers, and also to Henry Adams, who expressly wanted to deny the illusion of unity in his life, to bring it back ‘from unity to multiplicity’. This is the counter-Augustinian trend in modern autobiography. But the Augustinian strain remains strong.

 

Our modern assumptions about memory are likely to derive in large part from traditions unavailable to St Augustine, as his are unavailable to us in the full philosophical context to which they originally belonged. We are likely to refer more directly to the Freudian tradition. In a recent paper called ‘Freud and the Uses of Forgetting’ the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips begins by remarking that ‘People come for psychoanalytic treatment because they are remembering in a way that does not free them to forget’. Symptoms are involuntary and disguised memories of desire, unsuccessful attempts at self-cure. Those memories need to be forgotten, but desire, for Freud, is unforgettable. Repression is simply a way of seeming to get rid of things by keeping them. There is no cure for memory, though we try to use it to forget with, as in screen memories - devices designed to enable us to forget memories of a forbidden desire. Psychoanalysis attempts a cure by inducing the kind of remembering that makes forgetting possible. The only certain cure is death.

Here are paradoxes on remembering and forgetting that represent the two as a doublet and in that respect are faintly reminiscent of Augustine’s; but the differences are at least as marked. Phillips can think of the logic of Freud’s psychoanalytical process as being the reverse of what we take to be the autobiographer’s: ‘Either the most significant bits of one’s past are unconscious, and only available in the compromised form of symptoms and dreams: or the past is released through interpretation into oblivion.’ Forgetting is the only way to remember; remembering is the only way to achieve benign forgetting. The product of analysis is not autobiography but evacuation. And Phillips finds in the analyst’s ideal state of ‘free-floating’ or ‘evenly suspended attention’ a parallel use of forgetting; the analyst must learn not to mind not having things in mind, he works by not trying to remember. This is not, to most people’s way of thinking, at all like the practice of attentive reading (though it is sometimes held to be the correct practice, as in the writings of André Green and some others⁷).

So the concept of memory offered by psychoanalysis is at first sight hostile to the truth of autobiography. What we profess to remember is what we have devised to protect us from the truth; and this will be the case even when, or perhaps especially when, the attempt to hide nothing is exceptionally strenuous and well advertised, as with Rousseau. The concept of Nachtraglichkeit explains how a past is recovered in a distorted form; a childhood memory becomes a trauma, a trauma not directly associated with a ‘real’ childhood memory. Memory invents a past. Its reworkings defend us against the appalling timelessness of the unconscious. What we remember we may remember because we are forgetting in the wrong way; our remembering then takes the form of repetition, of acting out. If the analyst cures this repetition by fostering ‘the work of remembering’ he is not doing it because the memories thus elicited are valuable, but because he wants to dispose of them as bad for the patient, as what he needs to forget.

Here the timeless is not, as in Augustine, eternity, but the unconscious, and we struggle against its forces, using substitute memories, writing about what ought to be disposed of precisely because of its inauthentic link to the unconscious. There are deposited anterior memories, and Augustine had those, but his were related to felicity and to God, not to incest and murder. Augustine needs access to the timeless, but our need is rather to forget it as totally as possible. We achieve access to its contents by the dual imaginative activity of the transference, but we do so with the object not of verifying them but of destroying them: to remember them, or even seem to do so, is a stratagem to relinquish or dispose of them. But Augustine needed them alive, because he sought the timeless for reasons having nothing to do with destruction; he wished to account for his life as a whole, given shape, like the psalm, made so by the action of memory and the timelessness into which it passes when it is finished.

There seems little doubt that the dominant myth of autobiography is still Augustinian rather than Freudian. Of course it may be that all autobiography is in Freudian terms defensive or resistant, that to totalize, to close, to advertise a psychic structure that cannot on a strict view be authentic, is false and evasive. But it seems to be true that what excites many writers is to achieve some measure or simulacrum of closure, and thus a substitute timelessness; they seek it, sense it, even when, like Ruskin or Henry James, they cannot finish the book, even when, like James once again, they eschew all devices of presentation that signal closure; even when they revise and revise over years, seeking a truth and a plenitude that the mere passage of time continually erodes. Rousseau is in hot pursuit of a closure to be achieved by leaving nothing out, by inserting, and then later supplementing, innumerable bits of truth and leaving the reader to make them a whole. Tolstoy got over being impressed by the Confessions when he decided that far from demonstrating the love of truth Rousseau lied and believed his lies,⁸ which of course made him incapable of the truth to which he claimed to aspire. Rousseau himself admits that he left things out – from very pure motives – and occasionally made things up. Nabokov’s artful autobiography is full of elegantly rendered and various detail, but, as he once remarks, what gives such a work its formal value is thematic repetition. He illustrates the point with an anecdote of a general who amused him as a little boy by playing tricks with matches. Years later this general turns up, dressed like a peasant in a sheepskin coat. He stops the boy’s father, now in flight from the Bolsheviks, and asks him for a light. While hoping that the general also escaped Soviet imprisonment, Nabokov adds: ‘but that was not the point. What pleases me is the evolution of the match theme … The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.’⁹ It is a way of offering the reader the possibility of closing the book for him. And readers, animated by the same myth, will certainly help; they will find some way to totalize even the episodic, unreflective Cellini, for instance; for certainly one derives from his autobiography a powerful impression of its writer as a single person, a vertical man, and of the book itself as simple and single.

This is a point taken up by John Sturrock in the conclusion to a book that studies autobiography from Augustine to Michel Leiris, his greatly favoured model for modern biography. Sturrock allows for the changes modern literary theory has brought to our understanding of autobiography as a genre in which truthfulness is a problem differently seen, where the relation with fiction is differently understood, and so on. But he makes a plea on behalf of the Common Reader, who, however limited as to theory, is capable of deriving so much pleasure from the reading of autobiography. There is, says Sturrock, ‘an urge to autobiography within any individual, seeking expression at every level from the loosely and ephemerally conversational to the enduringly artistic. And following on from that, we may suppose that there are drives and thematic configurations whose combination in a text is specific to autobiography …’¹⁰ These configurations are supplied by the author and understood, possibly on occasion supplied, by the reader, each knows the rules of the game. Of course this common knowledge is of the sort Barthes used to call ‘endoxal’, and those who, like Plato, reject doxa as an enemy of the truth will have nothing to do with it.

Sturrock is especially interested in the phenomenon, so often repeated in autobiography as to be endoxically recognizable, of what he calls the ‘turn’ – the point of epiphany or conversion, seen as the moment when the person under description individuates or selves himself, as it were, finds the point from which all can be seen to cohere, and so achieves a kind of closure. This moment is easily detectable in Augustine or Newman, but is present in some form virtually everywhere. It draws on or constitutes the memory of a deviance, often apparently quite slight, from some norm of experience or behaviour, a deviance that makes the writer, in his own eyes at any rate, worth writing about as a single person. In the process he cannot avoid providing relevant material on what he takes himself to be deviating from, so that autobiography appeals to our notions of normality as well as to our interest in the myriad possible deviancies; and to our interest also in wholeness, a quality we seek when recounting to ourselves our own lives. Everybody takes these things for granted, and if they want confirmations they will look for their best expression not in the narratives of analysands, which require a different and specialized form of attention, but in the works of people who understand the conditions of art: say, in poets, such as Wordsworth. For to communicate persuasively the experience of the turn it is necessary to practise an art.

Various kinds of memory are subject to various sorts of classification, but we are familiar, largely on the evidence of works of art, with the idea that there is a rough, recognizable distinction between two kinds of memory, roughly voluntary and involuntary. Proust and Beckett alike sought explanations of these phenomena in Bergson; Beckett’s little book on Proust is a youthful exploration, somewhat affected in manner, of the Proustian version, and he doubtless had in mind the relevant pages of Joyce. The psychological study of memory has grown more refined, and an adhesion to Bergson dates the adherents as merely Modernist. But perhaps it does not greatly matter where the philosophizing comes from; when de Man and Derrida discourse on memory they have nothing to say about the unfashionable Bergson, yet they sometimes seem to be talking about approximately the same things. Those ‘turns’, those hinges or fulcra on which a whole narrative depends and which justify the very existence of the narrative, are a very conspicuous, very ‘placed’, treatment of involuntary movements of consciousness momentarily present in some more accessible area of the memory, brought, as Augustine might have said, from special collections to open shelves, and then displayed against a background of simpler recollection. Now, their subtly fine bindings gleaming against the drab covers of commonplace recollections, they stand out, and seem worth recounting. Though they are the sort of thing that can, perhaps does, occur to everybody, these privileged moments are not easy to put into words; they are not only what the author is really about but also a test of whether he ought to be an author.

Instances of the largely secular ‘turn’ are Rousseau’s ‘illumination’ on the road to Vincennes (Starobinski remarks that it is hard to believe he did not have Augustine in mind¹¹) and his decision not to return to Geneva when the gate was closed against him. Sturrock mentions these contingencies as having ‘a determinant role in his story’ as if, like Wordsworth later, he were having vows made for him.¹² There is Mill’s crisis and the moment of its Wordsworthian solution; Newman’s Sicilian experience; Mark Rutherford’s finding a copy of The Lyrical Ballads and comparing the experience to Paul’s on the way to Damascus;¹³ Henry Adams’s slightly ironic epiphany, induced by the dynamo in his twenty-fifth chapter. Even Gibbon, who would hardly admit that his life was dictated by external agency or involuntary choice, speaks of the discovery at Lausanne of his statue in the block of marble; he meant that an educational process had revealed what was already there – stored, as Augustine would say, in the memory – the figure of a historian of great gifts. The discovery changed nothing, as he insists; yet it takes its place in his narrative as a critical moment, an emblematic moment.¹⁴

Here I will borrow from Barrett J. Mandel a neat little illustration from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. The author describes it as one of the many ‘trifling things’ that make up a life, but still ‘a landmark’. The boy’s fundamentalist father wanted him to decline an invitation to a party, and suggested that he pray for guidance from the Lord as to whether he should go. Asked what the Lord’s answer was, the boy, well knowing his father’s confidence that God’s response would favour his own view, nevertheless replied, ‘The Lord says I may go to the Browns.’ The father ‘gazed at me in speechless horror’ and left the room, ‘slamming the door’. Mandel admires this and calls it genuine autobiography, but adds that the writer Gosse knows more about the father and his thoughts than the boy Gosse can have done, and for that reason is able to pinpoint this moment as one of significant rebellion, a type of such resistance, and set it in a larger context that explains why it was significant, a landmark and not a trifle; by an author who wishes us to understand that he can now see how things hang together in a larger view of his remembered life. It is the mature, hindsighted record of an important stage in the widening gulf between father and son, part of a narrative designed to chart that process. We allow without demur that Gosse could not possibly be remembering his father’s precise words; we already know, from our own memories, the nature of the relation of such a moment to truth and memory. As Mandel expresses it, the author is saying to the reader: ‘“My life was as this tale I am telling”.’¹⁵ This is a satisfying formula, and it implies a claim that in this form (as this tale) it will have power to indicate landmarks and confer meaning on what would otherwise be mnemonic trifles.

We can add that an episode of this sort could have been worked over, told and retold to the author himself and perhaps to others; as the memory of a memory, of many memories perhaps, it acquires those associations of which Augustine speaks. To give this degree of centrality, of totality, to a memory, or to ‘thematize’ in the way recommended by Nabokov, is to seek to confer on the narrative a power to eliminate the restrictions of time; to institute its own laws of causality, to endow it with totality by invoking what Yeats called ‘the artifice of eternity’. Much autobiography presumes to imitate that power.

Wordsworth also offers an account of his life as ‘this tale I am telling’, though he might have accepted both the ultimate relation of time-dispersed elements to eternity, as adumbrated by Augustine, and the apparent triviality of some of the scattered episodes in themselves. As de Man remarked, it is impossible for anglophone lovers of poetry – or autobiography – to accept the rule that excludes verse from consideration as autobiography (doubtless a lingering notion, with a long history, that poetry is lying). No doubt Wordsworth was not clear about many things – how much ordinary biography ought to be included in what was after all a preliminary poem, a prelude, how to bring the account to a satisfactory end, how far the philosophical poetry demanded by Coleridge should appear in this place rather than in the even more spacious, cathedral-like structure he planned. We know that the spectacular Snowdon passage was early designed for the climax¹⁶ and perhaps find it hollow and in a forced relationship to what precedes it. And we can agree to say of Wordsworth what Rousseau said of himself, that he was ‘painting the state of his soul twice, once as it was and once at the moment of the description’.¹⁷ Yet we do think of The Prelude as aspiring to or even achieving some sort of provisional totality; it represents the growth of a poet’s mind, and gives many indications that whatever boons the future might provide, that growth was complete, that it was accomplished with many significant vicissitudes between birth and the time of writing. As revisions and expansions follow, the sources grow more remote: the ‘spots of time’ were in the two-book Prelude of 1798, and persist in the more diffuse versions that we think of as 1805 and 1850, versions which have a little more to say about the growing inaccessibility of the spots of time. The pattern changes. It changes because the self-knowledge sought by the autobiographer grows more complex.

In the passage Wordsworth added in 1802 to the Preface of 1800 he has a dscussion of Prose and Poetry, claiming that they are virtually identical: ‘They both speak by the same organs … their affections are kindred, almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree … the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.’¹⁸ Poetry, he maintained, should speak the language of men. And so he comes to discuss the relation between men and poets (in his case, an autobiographical poet). The words are celebrated:

 

He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighted to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe …¹⁹

 

The poet is to ordinary people as poetry is to prose, but poetry and prose are kindred, and such is the affinity that his verse must be sometimes prosaic. His own difference from ordinary men is a difference only of degree; and sometimes that difference works in favour of men and against poets. But the difference of degree remains enormous; and it is calculated by the power and purpose of giving pleasure. We understand, from the passage I quoted, all that is needed for the provision of pleasure: sensibility, liveliness, enthusiasm, tenderness, pleasure in oneself and one’s passions, joy, delight; in fact powers of the sort Yeats would call ‘self-delighting’. We know about this precarious joy, so memorably evoked in ‘Resolution and Independence’, and unique to the poet, or the great poet. It is the task of the poet-autobiographer, and perhaps of all autobiographers, to acknowledge, like Wordsworth, the relation of joy – or whatever strikes him as his own singularity – to ‘the naked and native dignity of man’ and ‘the elementary principle of pleasure’.

Wordsworth talks about ‘joy in widest commonalty spread’, but must strive to show in his own life its distinctive lines of force, its swellings and fadings. It is of course his main theme, and it always marks a difference from what he rather revealingly calls (ii. 405) ‘common minds’. That is the business of The Prelude, and in some form it is the business of all autobiography. Having reverently celebrated his own endowment with genius, he is thinking of it when he declares that ‘Points have we all of us within our souls / Where all stand single’; but he must add that ‘each man is a memory to himself … there’s not a man / That lives who hath not had his godlike hours …’ (iii. 187 – 192). Godlike hours are hours remembered, by everybody, though it is the work of the self-delighting poet to record them. The ‘uniformitarian’ strain in Wordsworth is as essential to his self-understanding and self-valuation as the conviction that he stands single.

‘Not used / To make a present joy the matter of my song’ (i. 55 – 6): the plan of this autobiographical poem is to range from the origin, through the refinement, loss and recovery, by the action of memory, of the primal distinguishing joy, the gift that called the author to be ‘a dedicated spirit’. One remarkable thing about Wordsworth is that such scenes as the theft of the boat or the bird, which for Augustine would have been testimonies of shame and unregeneracy, become part of the necessary and benign education of the spirit; he is more like Rousseau when he says ‘Though mean / My object, and inglorious, yet the end / Was not ignoble’ (i. 339 – 41), and he congratulates himself (very splendidly, it must be said) on having acquired from ‘discordant elements’ ‘one society’ (i. 354 – 5), and a ‘calm existence’ (360).

Certain elements in this exercise in self-distinguishing are worth further mention. Like Rousseau, Wordsworth is aware of the double consciousness all autobiographers must contend with. Childhood days have ‘self-presence’ in his mind (ii. 30 – 32); but more generally it is the present consciousness that speaks of a remote past recreated, remembered sometimes without his being able to give simple reasons for the memory. The most memorable of these memories, I suppose, are those spots of time: the gibbet, the girl with the pitcher, the bleak music of an old stone wall. These are the memories that count, and they count because the language that expresses their freight of emotion is, so to speak, adequately inadequate: it cannot verbalize what was not verbal, and so devotes itself to mystery and even discomfort. Wordsworth is sometimes in a corner, as with the lines on the crossing of the Alps, when it seems that as he was writing he was expecting some grand climax; but he cannot find it while remaining faithful to the recall of the original experience, and so goes off instead into a Coleridgean apostrophe to Imagination. Or, speaking of having seen a ‘froward Brook’ tamed in a garden, he admits that he did not then respond to it as he does now: moreover that he can now see that the brook was an allegory of himself, tamed by the forms imposed on the powers of life and true anamnesis by the light of common day (iv. 40 – 55).

There are other escapes; one of the great things about Wordsworth, as with Augustine, is that one sees them as constituents of that calm society he could, at the end of this story, with pained rejoicing, detect in himself. There are displacements: of the Annette Vallon episode on to ‘Vaudracour and Julia’, and, more nobly and splendidly, of the poet himself on to the boy of Winander, the old soldier, the blind beggar in The Prelude, the Old Cumberland Beggar and the Leech-gatherer. These are doubles, and have all the eeriness of doubles. They bear premonitions of loss, of privations to which the only defensive response (in normal life) must be stoic, though there is another answer, the poem. For loss, and these insistent premonitions of further loss, he needs consolation, a word that occurs, in company with a ‘strength’ that endures, as early as The Prelude (1805), iii. 108 – 9. Yet the fulcrum, the moment of illumination, comes a little later, when, after a night of dancing, he moves through ‘a common dawn’ and recognizes, although making no vows, that nevertheless ‘vows were then made for me’; that henceforth he would be, ‘else sinning greatly, / A dedicated spirit. On I walked / In blessedness, which even yet remains’ (iv. 337 – 45).

This kind of experience, here so delicately rendered, recurs in most autobiographies, always as a claim to distinction, to the stigma of individuality, of election, though as a rule far less distinguished. For in the end what distinguishes is not the experience itself but the force and authority of the language claiming it. The religious tone is unmistakable, the sense of involuntary vocation, calmly accepted; the boldness and pathos of that ‘even yet remains’. It is, we say, pure Wordsworth; and we say the same again, a little later, of the meeting with the soldier. The poet arrives in a receptive mood, in a solitude that encourages contact from ‘some distant region of my soul’ – images modified by association with ‘a consciousness of animal delight’, as if the scheme of Augustine was working here, the contents of deep memory passing through, and modified by, more accessible memories of what the senses deliver; and then, suddenly, the emblematic figure encountered on the road, the discharged soldier, still, almost silent except for murmurs of complaint, until on request he tells his tale; and the poet moves, with a ‘tall / And ghastly figure’, a strange double, at his side, towards a labourer’s house where the man can shelter. As they walk the soldier speaks:

solemn and sublime

He might have seemed, but that in all he said
There was a strange half-absence, and a tone
Of weakness and indifference, as of one
Remembering the importance of his theme
But feeling it no longer.

This has real psychological force – a projection that works, even discharging the radical panic of autobiography, the forgetting why it is important – so that the poet can pass on ‘with quiet heart’ (The Prelude, 1805, iv, 504). And we recall that ‘The Discharged Soldier’ was an independent poem, only later worked into The Prelude, and roughly contemporary with The Ruined Cottage, in which the ‘aged man’ who tells the sad tale of Margaret can end by saying ‘I turned away / And walked along my road in happiness’ (524 – 5; Gill, p. 44). These anecdotes are purgative. To provide authentic accounts of the passions of others was, as Wordsworth remarked in the 1802 ‘Preface’, a distinguishing mark of the poet; and we understand these doubles as testimony to that distinction as well as to all that the poet must have in common with widow and vagrant before these transferences of pain or anxiety can work. They speak for the poet himself; we can infer that their place in an autobiography is owed entirely to that creative force, though we may feel we have to seek an explanation of why this autobiography deals with the memory of guilt and sorrow by such displacements. The word ‘dream’ occurs in both passages, and they are like dreams in their reinterpretations of memory; they also represent some kind of absolution. They have dealt successfully with some profound remembered anxiety. So it is with other passages, such as that of the drowned man in Book V, an image of terror that the nine-year-old poet, as memory represents him, can see as beautiful.

The pattern of the poem is made up of such moments, and of reminders that at this or that stage – say in the Cambridge years – the gift, ‘the morning gladness’, was still active – and may, at four and thirty, still be so (vi. 55 – 60). The hope recurs in the woods at Lake Como (end of vi); in the dead child spared the ‘distress and guilt’ of the world (vii. 395ff), in the instructive sightless eyes of the beggar (vii. 61off) and the shepherd, alarming doppelgänger, looming hugely with his dog, ‘His sheep like Greenland bears’; but it is radiant in the setting sun, an allegory of mist and light, an image of that which penetrates and magnifies the mere reports of the senses and keeps the poet’s face ‘towards the truth’ (viii. 397 ff). Some memories become ‘divine’, he says, ‘only now’, as he writes about the weight and shapes of London (viii. 710) he hardly knows what to do with them (‘Alas, I feel that I am trifling’ (iii. 706 – 7)), as if only now they came near to making the kind of sense he wants. Tears now start into his eyes, though they did not do so on the remembered occasion in France when they might have been appropriate (ix. 273ff). As for Vaudracour, his fate was to be silent – a fate Wordsworth could not contemplate in his own person, so wished it on to his surrogate; the fictive hero suffered for the poet, as so many others have done.

Like Augustine’s story, this narrative features two Helpers, contributors to his preservation or restoration. They were his sister – he apologizes for giving her insufficient attention in ‘this biographic verse’ (xiii. 341), and Coleridge; the ‘spots of time’ passage was written when they were around. Now, by their help, he can call himself ‘A meditative, oft a suffering Man’, but he at once adds, ‘And yet, I trust, with undiminished powers’ (xiii. 126 – 7). The helpers are again admitted at the very end of the poem. Once more, in the Snowdon passage, light has penetrated the mist. There have not been many other named persons in this autobiography; it has been an intensive investigation of one mind, that which displays, against a background of common humanity, a splendid singularity.

The Prelude is the greatest and most original of English autobiographies, but it is so not because Wordsworth’s intention is so different from most others. What we see particularly clearly in his prose is his desire to break through the assumptions and habits controlling or limiting normal introspection, as they limit poetry. The forces that break through, and enable deeper self-examination, are all anterior in origin to the formation of customary and habitual behaviour, shades of the prison-house; they are deep in the memory and hard to reach because of the distracting mist and clamour of ordinary life. But the memory, for a time at any rate, is accessible, its records can be reached, brought up from the deep store. It is not surprising that Wordsworth used the Platonic trope of anamnesis, for, as Augustine also knew, the memory contains what seems not to have been put into it by the senses. Probably many vocations are discovered by some such process. These deep, vertiginous mnemonic plunges most of us know about from literature rather than from ourselves – not because we are denied them, but because they have to be given appropriate expression or enactment.