On autobiography

Sunday, January 17th., Cadogan Square, London.

I had a letter from one of my readers asking me if "Clayhanger" was autobiographical. Well of course it was! All literature is, more or less.

The main question for the author is how to get the semblance of life down onto the page before the eyes of the reader. The novelist has selected his subject and drenched himself in it. He has laid down the main features of his design. The living embryo is there and waits to be developed into full organic structure. Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which must be his or her material? The answer is that he digs it out of himself.

First-class fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical. What else should it be? The novelist may take note of phenomena likely to be of use to him. And he may acquire the skill to invent very apposite illustrative incident. But he cannot invent psychology. Upon occasion some human being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for his craft; female confidences are especially useful for a male writer. From outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology of others and he may use a real person as a helpful basis for each of his characters, but all that is really nothing! When the real intimate work of creation has to be done - and it has to be done on every page - the novelist can only look within for effective aid, Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he accomplish his end.

An inquiry into the career of any first-class novelist invariably reveals that his novels are full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every good novel contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could reveal. Episodes, moods, elements of autobiography can be detected and traced to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may not be detected. In dealing with each character in each episode the novelist must, if he is to convince, interrogate that part of his own individuality which corresponds to the particular character. Effectively he asks: "Now, what would I have thought or done?" Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.