This Feminine World

SHALL autobiography concentrate on ‘life and times’ or inner experience? Must the subject stand in a north light, or shall the warm blaze of a primitive interest in oneself play upon the model? Shall a woman’s autobiography be written differently from a man s, or shall it merely be judged differently? Are written words to defer to the same standard of taste and manners as spoken ones? And is that standard to be Mrs. Grundy’s, Mrs. Luhan’s, or the autobiographer’s own? Is truth nothing without the whole truth, or are facts ‘only an inferior form of fiction’?

To consider the latest examples, Memories of My Childhood, by Selma Lagerlõf (Doubleday, Doran, $2,50), is a simple account of life on a remote Swedish country estate sixty years ago. Its charm lies in vividness of character and detail, and the sharp-edged quality of a child’s recollection. Miss Lagerlõf has resisted the besetting temptation of autobiographers to explain, interpret, and romanticize generally; her skill as a novelist is betrayed only by the arrangement of the small bright pictures in an order that allows the reader’s comprehension to supplement the child’s observation. The child Selma is neither more nor less tenderly drawn than Aline the governess or Germund the well-digger; behind them all are the order and strength, the generosity and disciplined thrift, that have maintained the manor of Mârbacka for generations. Even without the atmosphere of dreams and wraiths that in Mårbacka brought the mediæval North so close, these are recognizably the descendants of Burnt Njal and Bergthora, and the Heimskringla jurls and bonders. Miss Lagerlöf’s great quality is a directness that no discordant tenses and uneasy idioms of the translator’s can mar; the nearest English parallel to this book is Frank Kendon’s Small Yeans.

Edith Wharton’sBackward Glance (AppletonCentury, $3.00) is autobiography of a more conventional order. Born into the New York society of The Age of Innocence and Old New York, she was educated in its somewhat narrow tradition of ‘modern languages and good manners’ — which she champions only halfheartedly, in spite of her loyal contention that ‘cold storage has done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education.’ Education was fortunately amplified in her case by travel and by an excellent library; to an omnivorous reader, Isaiah and the Duchess of Malfi furnished such stimulation that before she was sixteen she had made her literary début in the Atlantic. Her parents — more alarmed, apparently, by the nature of her talent than by its precocity—accelerated a more conventional début, into the mild festivities that constituted New York and Newport seasons of the eighties. Her daily round of drives and calls has the languid elegance of Constantin Guys’s drawings; we should like equally detailed pictures of the archery meetings on Mrs. Belmont’s lawn, the Monday evenings at the Academy of Music.

It was not until after her marriage that Mrs. Wharton began to write again. Her work is discussed in an admirably unselfconscious chapter; she is interested in the process of creation rather than in her own accomplishment, and on the firm ground of a common taste for books at all stages of development she relaxes something of her faint distrust of the reader. This defensiveness was early acquired: ‘None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books, either to praise or blame . . . the subject was avoided as though it were a . . . family disgrace.’ No wonder that she soon abandoned ‘the watering-place trivialities’ of Newport for the ‘real country’ at Lenox, where she could devote herself to her books and her friends.

Chief of these was Henry James, whose sensitive appreciations, prodigious conversation, and inadaptability to the mechanics of life she records with admiration seasoned with gentle malice. Next to Lamb House in charm is Queen’s Acre, where Howard Sturgis, on his sofa littered with embroidery silks, took an artist’s pleasure in combining people harmoniously; conversation at Qu’acre deserves a book to itself, and we hope, with Mrs. Wharton, that it may yet be written. Compared to that warmth of intimacy, the salons of Paris are austere indeed; despite the appreciation with which Mrs. Wharton explains the rules of that inaccessible society, and sorts and labels its distinguished habitués, the reader occasionally has a bafflea feeling that the party is going on behind shut doors — a conviction, in fact, of his exclusion. But here Mrs. Wharton is dealing chiefly with living people, and since her foreword warns us that she does not consider it an autobiographer’s first duty to expose her friends, we are grateful to her for recording so much as she has of a generously filled life.

No one has ever accused Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford, of exaggerated regard for other people’s feelings, and More or Less about Myself (Dutton, $4.00) is an uninhibited complement to the Autobiography and Octaria. A writer, she points out, ‘should not be reticent if he wishes to be readable,’and this haphazard gathering of sketches and reflections is distinctly readable. Though her candor and her grammar are equally calculated to make Mrs. Wharton wince, there is something exhilarating in the eagerness and vitality with which she swoops from conclusion to conclusion: five hours’ sleep is ample, America suffers from moral vulgarity, young women of the eighties excelled us in intellectual ambition, Protectionists are ‘profoundly antiChrist,’lavish entertaining in the upper classes promotes enthusiasm in the lower (though happily ‘the men and women most worth meeting can always be entertained at small cost’). Her portraits may lack completeness, but we do enjoy finding out what books Balfour kept beside his bed and why Lord Curzon apologized to the footman, and how the redoubtable Lady Ailesbury avenged the biscuit poised on her chignon at Althorp. And the chapter on bad temper in high society should not be missed.

The appreciation of personality that sharpens Lady Oxford’s social judgments unfortunately weakens her political dicta (though the estimate of Lloyd George is interesting); on the other hand, it gives special flavor to her self-analysis, whether she is discussing her moral restlessness, her religion, her dislike of other people’s reading aloud (‘but to read myself to a cultivated man has always been a pleasure’), or the impulse that urges her ‘never to remain a spectator.‘

The imaginative insight that Lord Oxford valued salts these pages; a characteristic example is her comment on Rosebery: ‘The danger of dramatizing yourself is that when the audience ceases to be affected by the drama the principal character is very much alone.’ And this not unfamiliar truth points the Common Reader to at least one conclusion: autobiography, whether it depends, as in the Rosebery-Bashkirtseff school, upon the relation between author and reader, or, as in the Tour-du-Pin-Lagerlöf school, upon that between author and background, requires reality of intercourse. Unlike the diarist, the autobiographer cannot afford to be alone.

MARIAN VAILLANT