We explore the past we turned away from

Writing of, or from, yourself by Allan Massie in the January 30th, 2010 Spectator. An essay on literary autobiographies.

'All literature is, finally, autobiographical', said Borges. 'Every autobiography becomes an absorbing work of fiction', responded H. L. Mencken, though not, you understand, directly. Certainly the fictional element in autobiography is evident; Trollope thought that nobody could ever tell the full truth about himself, and A. S. Byatt has said that 'autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction'. An exaggeration, perhaps, but one with a kernel of truth.

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Experience is itself of two sorts. There is the experience we have lived in what we call 'real life', though this will usually be altered or amended in memory. Then there is the alternative experience, the route which we did not take, but might have taken, the fork in the road we turned aside from. We can imagine that journey and make fiction of it. The novel that emerges may be considered a piece of counter-factual autobiography. We explore the past we turned away from.

Borges may have meant something simpler. If you want to know a novelist - or poet or playwright - read his novels or poems or plays, not a biography. This makes very obvious sense. Even the best biographies track the man or woman revealed in their social life, a being very different, as Proust argued in his reproof of the critic Sainte-Beuve, from the one who wrote. In discussing Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve made much of the memories of those who had known him. Proust found this absurd. 'For those friends, the self which produced the novels was eclipsed by the other, which may have been very inferior to the outer selves of many other people.' What the writer gives to the world is, Proust thought, 'the secretion of one's innermost life, written in solitude'.

And it is this secretion of the writer's innermost life which makes literature autobiographical. You come to know, say, Graham Greene much more fully, and truly, from reading Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter or The Honorary Consul than from the fat volumes of Norman Sherry's biography, which offer the fruit of years of assiduous research. Equally, Dickens is brought to life in Great Expectations much more vividly than any biographer has ever managed to do. It couldn't, really, be otherwise.