There is no life so in significant, which cannot be the subject of an autobiography. May be your life story will never be printed, but the adventure of its writing will do you immense good to tone up your living and make you better sad saner person than you normally are.
One need not be old to write an autobiography. Beverly Nichols wrote his when he was 25; Halliday Sutherland was near 70 when he wrote his ‘ The Arches Of The Years’. There is something in every life young or old which is always worth telling. Trifles and small things take shape and get their particularity as one commences the business of writing. Even the first awareness of a cow, for example as Wyndham Lewis writes in The Writer And The Absolute, will admit verbal access to it, provided one excites one’s insight to see the white Rhine, for instance, on green pastures or dreamily in the pastures of heaven.
If one is in want of such an experience he can always get it in town or country. Henry James, the novelist, once went looking for objects for the front piece of the New York edition of his works. He went about London with a photographer seeking the object which could best express himself- an object which could be a symbol or an echo of what he had to say in his novels. The result of his search is exhilarating; objects became vivid and leaped to intensity as they came nearer and nearer to his central purpose. James Joyce’s STEPHEN HERO had a similar perception of the “whatness� of thing as he told Cranly “the clock of the Belfast Office is capable of an epiphany’.
You can see your own life better than any one else can do. Perspectives are at your disposal and you can glance through one avenue of the yours till you came to a turning point, and glimpse through another. Thomas Merton’s ELECTED SILENCE is written in that manner Merton studied in England and America. He taught literature, got hectically worldly, smoked, drank and had his affairs. He eviscerated all his capacity for good and refused to pay any attention to moral laws. Then came the great crisis in his life in 1942 when he perceived American civilization as a mad dollar race and the modern mind over-reaching itself in vain philosophies. One day, an Indian Brahmachari, met him, spoke to him of religion, and gave Merton his first “experimental contact with God�. Merton changed, he became a better man each day till finally he gave himself up to a life of contemplation and prayer in a lonely Trappist monastry. His white monk’s cowl now burst into a thousand tongues proclaiming the glory and wisdom of God in good writing. ELECTED SILENCE earlier titled THE SEVEN STORY MOUNTAIN is on of the greatest autobiographies of our time.
To write Merton is not easy. Apart from the gift of language which he possesses, it is not difficult for people to cry out their sins from the house-tops. Perhaps there are some people equally candid and humble as Merton. Peter Howard is one who makes no subterfuge of himself as he writes of his pride and changes in IDEAS HAVE LEGS, a great M.R.A. personal document.
The bric-a-brac of life can be collected in an autobiography. Your reading, for example, no matter how wide it is or how narrow. Sheila Kay Smith analyzing her life found that books alone mattered to her as she writes in ALL THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE, posthumously published in 1956. Books were to her either knowledge or entertainment which ever they were, they meant much to her, as she summed it up in exquisite imagery: “Certain of them have marked my life like milestones and others have lit up like lamps.�
Anecdotes can fill pages of your book- school boy memories or the thrills of adolescence. You can remember your teacher as a student did when he told me this. The history teacher was unusually cheerful and beamingly expansive. He asked his class one day, in all seriousness, to write the names of the five living and great historians of the modern age. “Put my name first� he said,�and think of the other four.� You can give your variants of “THE CONSTANT LOVER� as you found yourself when you first outpoured your love, an as the song goes she replied with side eyed innocence. “I think, we are going to have some rain�.
Every great work of literature has a motif or one dominating impulse or idea. Your autobiography can be written in this manner to communicate your wisdom or your experience. You can be quite serious, profound and poetic as Nehru in his “Autobiography� where he presents the struggle of India in the crystal glass of soul. One can be an “Unknown� Indian but one can always use the backdrop of history to figure out and classify the parts one plays on the stage life. Winston Churchill, C.R. Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, get the meaning of their lives as they watch the flotsam and jetsam on the sea of current history. Even Gandhiji remembers his country’s malaise as he depicts his interior life in “My Experiments with Truth�.
The commoner too can purvey some precious wisdom got in privacy or beaten out on the anvil of his soul. Jack Lawson, was a minor and wrote A MAN’S LIFE depicting his grim boyhood and his discoveries of the toughness of life and social values. You may have done nothing else in life but watched cricket and yet you could drawn from that lessons of cheerfulness, in a drab world as does Neville Cardus in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Every man pivots his life on a though- like the teacher who spent his life on the advice. “Enjoy your teaching� or the small trader who was always kept doing as his belief what once was written in a gift Calender, DO IT NOW OR NEVER.
Prof Colin O’Brien is a visiting professor in the English Department, Manipur University.

Related Stories

Tell a Friend | Printable version | Post a Comment

COMMENTS ON THIS ARTICLE

mongolianindian :mayamda eina langjakhiba eral pumnamak ngakpiyu haina khurumjari. Kasubigi macha ama oirubana tak shi kha shi su khangja ...

mongolianindian :Your Uncle Tongue ...

enough is enough :Is it your father tongue then??? Fuck off...and eat shit!!! ...

mongolianindian :Hallo mr. enough is enough, your meiteilon seems to be very limited. Anyway, its O.K. After all meiteilon is not your mo ...

>> More Comments