M. A. Newton Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and Betrayal in Antonia White’s

Form and Theory of Autobiographical Novel (on Personality)

Following the publications of White’s short stories ‘The House of Clouds’ and ‘The Saint’ in Life and Letters in the late 1920s, Antonia White’s eldest daughter, Susan Chitty, remarks, ‘Two stories written from personal experience had been taken by a prestigious review. It was hardly surprising that she started to favor autobiographical fiction…. A letter from Desmond McCarthy still exists, asking permission to say that the writer is describing an actual experience’ (25). Similarly, reviews on Frost in May indicate how critics related to the novel in connection to real life. For example, the portrayal of Nanda's father in such a damning light horrified reviewers: ‘All refused to believe in his terrible verdict’ (25). One critic who was particularly disturbed by how the nuns treated Nanda vowed that he would never send ‘any child of his to a convent’ (25; emphasis in original).

Whilst White bathed in the wonderful reception of her early work in the 1920s and 1930s, by the 1950s, reviews had become more critical. In a diary entry dated 21 August, 1954, White paints a less vibrant picture:

Once again the same contradictions in the reviews. I’m too emotional or too cold and detached. The stories are straight from life or they ‘creak mechanically’. I need to ‘go into training’ or I have ‘brilliant technique’. I am constantly accused of inventing graphic reports of experience. I am said to have a ‘hard, bright talent’, a ‘creepy’ one, to be ‘entertaining’, to leave an indescribably nasty taste in the mouth. One critic dismisses ‘The House of Clouds’ as ‘fantasy’ having no relation to clinical madness! … What always hurts me is when I am accused of ‘faking’. (281)

As illustrated, reviews of White’s work have shifted from a mere appreciation of her testimonial experiences in her autobiographical novels to reviews that also include sceptical responses with regard to aesthetic values and authenticity of experience. While White is evidently upset by the later reviews, she has already acknowledged the difficulty of writing a testimony of her life as a work of art. In a diary entry dated 30 December, 1940, White describes her authorial intention: ‘My job in life is to be able to give a form of writing to certain experiences…. It’s a kind of testimony, if you like, and difficult to make both honest and at the same time a work of art, something consistent with itself and complete and not just “reporting” or “a slice of life”’ (The Hound and the Falcon 38). It is interesting that White felt the need to balance her testimony with aesthetic values because it indicates an awareness of the critical literary climate at the time, well before the later reviews came out.

In Now to My Mother (1985), Susan Chitty’s memoir on White, she remarks that ‘Antonia White’s four novels were largely autobiographical, so much so that some might question the necessity of writing anything more about her. But the novels ceased when Antonia (Clara) was still in her early twenties, newly released from a lunatic asylum. And there is anyway no such thing as an autobiographical novel. The author is bound to bend events to conform to some design and even invent material to “liven things up”’ (xiv). There are inventions in White’s autobiographical novels. In a diary entry dated 27 August, 1951, shortly after the publication of The Lost Traveller, White reflects on what she terms a ‘hybrid’ piece:

Lots of it I had no control over. A lot invented. Isabel and Callaghan. The odd intrusion of Charles’s death. Then all that trouble over the end…. This one [The Sugar House] should be simpler … undoing what I did in The Lost Traveller and getting the marriage on again. What I have got to face and interpret now is all that queer, horrid Chelsea time leading up to the asylum – a time which seems particularly unreal and fantastic. And I have to simplify it quite brutally. (235)

Given the genre in which White is writing, the words autobiographical (real) and fiction (imaginative) present the reader with an oxymoron. How can readers identify aspects of White’s autobiographical novels that are testimonial in nature and aspects that are fictional? When White was publishing her autobiographical fiction, predominantly between the 1920s and 1950s, the term ‘autobiographical novel’ had not yet been invented. In the introduction to The Sugar House, Elizabeth Bowen refers to White’s work as ‘personal novels’ (qtd. in Callil, Introduction). In his essay ‘The Autobiographical Pact’,²⁹ Lejeune suggests that clear parameters should be established to distinguish between the autobiographical novel and the autobiography proper. According to Lejeune, an ‘autobiographical pact’ can be established in one of two ways: 1) there is an implicit understanding between reader and author that the ‘I’ in the title or at the beginning of the work refers to the author, even if the author’s name is not mentioned in the text; 2) an explicit understanding is that the author, narrator, and protagonist share the same name, and the text is written in the first person. If either criterion can be established, a book can be defined as autobiographical (12-14).

The autobiographical novel, however, requires a more complex evaluation. According to Lejeune, the autobiographical novel differentiates itself from the purely autobiographical by not being a ‘retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’ (4). Lejeune suggests that the autobiographical novel does not fulfil the requirements of the autobiographical pact because the ‘I’ cannot be established literally between author, narrator, and protagonist. An autobiographical novel functions by ‘degrees’ (13; emphasis in original). In other words, there may be some slight resemblance between the author and the main protagonist, or there could be what appears to be a much closer resemblance that would make readers suspect that the author and main protagonist are one and the same person, but neither scenario can be proven. The key word here is suspect because without the author using his or her name directly in the autobiographical novel, the reader cannot reasonably claim that the two personalities are the same person. The author can choose to deny the similarities in personality and experiences. Lejeune clearly states, ‘Autobiography does not include degrees: it is all or nothing…. The hero can resemble the author as much as he wants; as long as he does not have his name, there is in effect nothing’ (13). For Lejeune, the autobiographical novel generates a ‘fictional pact’ between author and reader in a mutual understanding that readers do not expect to hear the truth (16).

In ‘The Autobiographical Pact (bis)’ published eleven years after the original essay in 1975, Lejeune reflects upon his earlier statements, oscillating between self-criticism and justification. For example, with regard to his dogmatic definition of autobiography as it should be—a prose narrative written about the self’s history by the self—Lejeune confesses that he is guilty of blending ‘theoretical hypothesis’ with ‘normative assertion’ (120). He had not intended his theories to become, as they have done, rules to follow, but rather points of discussion. That being said, he has no regrets because he justifies his ‘authority’ on the subject of the autobiographical genre as one that ‘corresponds to a need’ (121). He was the man who cut the ‘Gordian knot’³⁰ of autobiographical definition (121). And yet, it seems to me that Lejeune’s definition of what autobiography should be is restrictive. Emphasising problems of ambiguity is valid; however, Lejeune makes no attempt to reference complex underlying psychological issues that may contribute to, for example, an ambiguous author-protagonist relationship, which is imperative in an examination of trauma narratives.

There was a time when the autobiographical novel would have been accepted as a valid means of recounting one’s life. Lejeune quotes Gustave Vapereau, who wrote the following definition of autobiography in the Universal Dictionary of Literature, 1876: ‘AUTOBIOGRAPHY … literary work, novel, poem, philosophical treatise, etc., whose author intended, secretly or admittedly, to recount his life, to expose this thoughts or to describe his feelings’ (qtd. in Lejeune 123). Similarly, in his essay, ‘Autobiography and the Cultural Moment’ (1980),³¹ James Olney’s response to Nietzsche’s comment that ‘Little by little it has become clear to me that every great philosophy has been the confession of its maker, as it were his involuntary and unconscious autobiography’ and to Paul Valéry, who claimed that his poem, La Jeune Parque, was autobiographical, Olney writes, ‘It leaves us at least with the perception that what is autobiography to one observer is history or philosophy, psychology or lyric poetry, sociology or metaphysics to another’ (5). Moreover, as illustrated in this example here, one’s autobiography can be known or hidden, even from the writer. Olney goes on to suggest that even the literary critic is ‘a closet autobiographer’ (5).

Olney’s position on the relationship between autobiography and fiction is developed in his book, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (1981). He suggests that what is needed are not definitions but examinations into why autobiographical narratives are written. He believes that it is ‘the vital impulse to order that has always caused man to create and that, in the end, determines both the nature and the form of what he creates’ (Olney 3). However, for Olney, all writing is autobiographical because whatever form it takes, writing ‘will express and reflect its maker’ (3). In other words, one cannot separate the writer from his personality.

Lejeune understands that reading a work that may be secret has a limitation of ambiguity, and yet the possibility of opening up a new space for the reader’s interpretation, as well as, and perhaps most importantly, ‘new strategies of writing’ for the author (124). In other words, as Lejeune himself admits, there does not need to be an ‘explicit contract’ (126). Lejeune identifies the autobiographical novel as a paradox: ‘to be at the same time a truthful discourse and a work of art’, a point that White had already figured out (128). This statement leads me to conclude that Lejeune does not regard the autobiographical novel in terms of an unworkable contradiction, but as a genre that can be approached from one angle or the other if the reader is given more interpretive license and the author a space to explore feelings outside the textual application of ‘I’. This position does not negate the fact, however, that Lejeune is at his most comfortable when he can place genres into neat categories. Where to place the autobiographical novel has proven to be a perplexing task for him.

How to make a distinction between truthful discourse and fiction is a concern that Elizabeth W. Bruss explores in her book, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (1976). In her pursuit of ‘literal identity’, Bruss discovers that it is culture that determines how autobiographical narratives are written and perceived by others. Citing Psalms as an example of ‘a personal history’, Bruss writes, ‘The distinction between an idealised individual narrator and a particular, identifiable speaker is alien to the psalmist…. What is autobiography for us may have originally been only the by-product of another act’ (6). In other words, autobiography is what a particular culture makes of it. For me, this raises a question: how does a particular culture determine what separates fiction from non-fiction or, more specifically, the author from his or her protagonist? I would like to take a moment to put these views into historical perspective because White was writing in a literary period in which the relationship between author and protagonist was most subject to scrutiny.

There are two main competing axioms in early twentieth century literary criticism: the author’s protagonist reflects the author’s personality and experiences, opposed to the position that the protagonist does not reflect the author’s personality and experiences because the author aspires to larger universal ideals and consciousness. This debate is most aptly demonstrated in the engaging intellectual fencing match between C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard in The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939) about the poet’s relationship³² with his work.

Romantic critics like William Wordsworth, whilst acknowledging the impossibility of mimesis,³³ sought to bridge the gap between the feelings of the poet with his poetic speaker and, at the same time, appeal to aesthetic values. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), Wordsworth writes,

However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a poet, it is obvious that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it will be the wish of the poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him by a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. (308)
In an attack on Romantic critics like Wordsworth, in The Personal Heresy, C. S. Lewis coined the term ‘personal heresy’ and is of the opinion that ‘the real poet is a man who has already escaped from … emotion sufficiently to see it objectively…. The man who cries out with pain is not the same as the man who vividly expresses to us the blood-curdling nature of the cry’ (9-10). While this comment does not necessarily provide a clean rebuttal of Romantic views on the poet’s relationship with his speaker, C. S. Lewis stipulates the need to separate the artist’s personality from his art:

My objection to the poet’s personality is that it is an intruder in this imagined world―an intruder, I may add, from a much higher realm―and that his presence amidst his own creations, if it occurred, would demand from me, at the same moment, two incompatible responses. For Shakespeare was a real man. My response to the real both is and ought to be quite distinct from my response to the imaginary. (61)

One could deduce from Lewis’s comment that art does not contain a real personality. In a way, he would be right because fiction, whether intended to be based on lived experience or not, is still an artistic creation. It is a nod to the school of New Criticism³⁴ that fuels Lewis’s literary conviction on personality. T. S. Eliot, a leader in what is perceived as a modern ‘formalist’ way of thinking about criticism in relation to a focus on the language of the text itself, reinforces the need to move away from the personal with a higher aim in mind.³⁵ In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Eliot asserts that what makes a writer ‘traditional’ is the capacity to have an historical awareness of his craft. A writer uses his historical awareness to symbolize his contemporaneity. To elaborate upon this point, Eliot suggests that the poet needs to develop a consciousness of the past in an awareness of the poetry that has come before as a poetry that is living and existing simultaneously in the present. Timeless and temporal consciousness is transformed into a state of mind in poetry and is more important than the individual poet’s consciousness. The poet’s poetry becomes part of a larger developing consciousness.

For Eliot, in order to embrace a collective vision, a process of depersonalization must occur. The poet must continually surrender the self to a more significant consciousness than his or her own, which requires ‘self-sacrifice’ and the ‘extinction of personality’ (500). Eliot seeks to achieve this objectivity by way of the ‘objective correlative’, a mechanism used earlier by the metaphysical poets to express emotion in the form of art via imagined sensory impressions. The evoked emotion correlates to an appropriate external factor, such as a situation or a series of events. The function of the objective correlative suggests that the poet is also the ‘catalyst’ of the poem, the external factor that manipulates feelings and emotions in order to fuse them and create a new combination. So, what we learn is that each work of art, therefore, should be ‘objective and impersonal, and yet profoundly moving’ (500). Virginia Woolf expressed a similar sentiment in her writing. In a diary entry dated November 18, 1920, she asserts that writing ‘must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for, if one lets the mind run loose, it becomes egotistic: personal, which I detest’ (321).³⁶

In retort to this literary mindset, Tillyard makes a pertinent observation that speaks to the larger implications of this debate:

And [Lewis] comes to the conclusion that for the poet the mind of Europe and of his own country is much more important that his own private mind. Now these sentiments are not only close to Mr. Lewis’s but they agree with a strong modern tendency … to belittle the individual in comparison with the race…. Whatever the fate of this tendency―it may peter out in a few years for all we can tell―at the moment it is modern, and the opposite tendency to cling to the personal, even if fated shortly to prevail, just fails to be modern. (32)

Tillyard does concede that ‘the mixture of biography and criticism, even when most justified by the nature of the author, has its besetting danger: it is all too easy for the reader to use biography as an illegitimate short cut into the poet’s mental pattern as revealed in his poems’ (43). In a likeminded vein, C. S. Lewis admits, ‘Nor do I deny that there are borderline cases―things which might plausibly be reckoned either as imaginative literature or as instances of that truly personal writing which is but talking at a distance’ (61). However, these caveats became lost in a growing surge of attention paid to the negative impact of taking seriously authorial intention.

Consistent with Eliot’s assertion about the impersonality of poetry in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s essay, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946), addresses the limitations of authorial intention and provides a recommended role for the critic. Wimsatt and Beardsley put forward the argument that the work of art itself should be interpreted and not the intentions of the artist, which are hidden from us and no subject for our concern. Wimsatt and Beardsley ask: ‘How is [the critic] to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem’ (749). Wimsatt and Beardsley believe that if judgment is to be aesthetic, it must concern itself with the given object; the meanings that we attribute to the object are those that we see in the text, regardless of what the artist may or may not have intended. What matters is that the poem works like a ‘pudding’ or ‘machine’ (749).

Wimsatt and Beardsley do warn the reader of the danger of confusing the ‘personal’ with ‘poetic studies’ (753), which is a sentiment later shared by Paul de Man in ‘Autobiography as De-facement’ (1979):

By making autobiography into a genre, one elevates it above the literary status of mere reportage, chronicle, or memoir and gives it a place, albeit a modest one, among the canonical hierarchies of the major literary genres. This does not go without some embarrassment, since compared to tragedy, or epic, or lyric poetry, autobiography always looks slightly disreputable and self-indulgent in a way that may be symptomatic of its incompatibility with the monumental dignity of aesthetic values. (919)

There is no guarantee that those who aspire towards that ‘monumental dignity’ successfully produce a fictional piece of work of any merit, while others who put their lives, relationships, and emotions openly on display—because all fiction to some extent is self-indulgent—do so with poetic sophistication, like White.

Even though White writes in the third person narrative in her autobiographical fiction, she is torn between not wanting to write autobiographically and admitting that her work is autobiographical. For example, in a diary entry dated 26 Jan, 1933, the seeds of an idea are put forth: ‘I am beginning to toy with the idea of doing a book about my father. I have always wanted to do a sort of memoir about him’ (20). Indeed, a large focus of The Lost Traveller is the turbulent Oedipal relationship between Clara and Claude Batchelor that draws an interesting parallel with White’s relationship with her father, a point I make and develop in Chapter One. Nonetheless, shortly before the publication of The Lost Traveller, White contemplates writing a sequel to it. In a diary entry dated 26 February, 1950, she writes, ‘There is no reason why I should not, like Proust and Duhamel continue with the same set of characters…. One immediate difficulty – it must be related to The Lost Traveller which is not of course literally autobiographical’ (218). She then goes on to say that ‘It might be possible to place the father’s death in this book which would make the Archie [a fictional Reggie] marriage more convincing’ (218-219).

When writing The Lost Traveller, White felt ill at ease writing a novel that had more fictional elements than Frost. Indeed, she lamented that she had not made The Lost Traveller ‘a proper sequel to Frost’ (235). She writes, ‘Everything that happened to Clara in The Lost Traveller is the sort of thing that happened to me, though many things are changed, many invented. I wanted The Lost Traveller to be a real novel – Frost in May was so much my own life. So I changed her name …’ (qtd. in Callil, Introduction).

Where to situate the locus of the author’s name is a controversial feature of the autobiographical novel. According to Lejeune, ‘We must not confuse pseudonym, defined in this way as the name of an author (noted on the cover of the book), with the name attributed to a fictional person within the book (even if this person has the status of narrator and assumes the whole of the text production), because this person is himself designated as fictitious by the simple fact that he is incapable of being the author of the book’ (12; emphasis in original). It seems to me that this statement provides a concrete application of the word ‘pseudonym’ that ignores any abstract notions of personality on a psychological level. Although White changed her name, with regard to the psychological impact of her relationships with others, this is, essentially, the only intentional change she made. In an unpublished diary entry dated 10 June, 1955, White states, ‘I long for something fresh, something unconnected with my wretched self. Yet I seem quite incapable of invention’ (Dunn 48). That being said, as with Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, Wimsatt and Beardsley do acknowledge that, while one should be wary of confusing personal authorial motivations with an objective study of the text, ‘the meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul’ (750). They do stress, however, that when making a connection between the ‘dramatic speaker’ and the author, it should be accompanied by some ‘biographical inference’ (750; emphasis in original).³⁷

White’s autobiographical fiction certainly ‘expresses a personality’ and ‘state of soul’. In an examination of autobiographical fiction, there needs to be a relationship between author, protagonist, and reader. At face value, this may seem like a humanistic approach to reading literature, and in a way it is, because, as a reader, I give White, for example, the right to engage in the act of self-exploration, but to do so through the agency of her alter egos and not the authorial ‘I’. Against the backdrop of her diaries and biographers’ writings, my function as reader is to listen to two voices in conversation—the one that comes from the author, and the one that comes from the protagonist—that attempt to make sense of deeply traumatic experiences in the author’s life, for example, White’s relationship with her father. Not to do so would be doing a disservice to White and effectively silence her voice. What’s unique about White’s autobiographical novels, however, is that there are multiple voices at play, and by that I mean more than one alter ego. There is, at times, an alter ego within an alter ego, evidenced in Nanda’s heroine in Frost in May, who I will explore in more depth in Chapter Three, and the presence of her psychotic content in ‘The House of Clouds’ and Beyond the Glass, two texts that capture how elusive White’s sense of identity was. Nonetheless, this content also complicates the problematic construction of identity and authenticity of experience, which raises larger issues about how we should read retrospective autobiographical narratives by writers who suffered from mental illness following traumatic experiences.