Some ten years ago I started to write about myself partly to have something to send to my son who aged 13 was spending 6 months in France, and partly since I thought my children might one day be curious to know what sort of person their father was. Perhaps the account of my life may prove of wider interest – perhaps not.
I thought writing an autobiography would be a simple matter, as far as writing anything is simple. But I found three difficulties. Firstly, a life is not a story and secondly memory consists of vivid snapshots. I see my sons aged about five waving to me from the upstairs window of the apartment we rented in Rome as I set off to work, but not what occurred later that day or that week. So an autobiography must invent and distort if it is to be coherent. If I have invented and distorted that is not with any intention to deceive. The third difficulty arises from life running in parallel streams. As a child there is home and school and friends. These both interact and are distinct. I have as a result found myself writing about certain sections of my life and that is what I shall probably continue to do.
There is then the problem of the role of the author in an autobiography. Most political autobiographies put the author at the centre, and are designed to show how important he was and how right. They make dull reading. At the other extreme are ones that tell the life from the outside. I am now reading Humphrey Lyttelton’s autobiography but it is no more than a sequence of mildly amusing anecdotes; I know Lyttelton no more at the end than I did before I started. I suppose the ideal is to describe a world of interest and importance, and reveal the author by his actions and reactions within that world. I think I may have succeeded in doing that with my account of my years in a remote part on central Africa during the last years of Empire. My account of my time in Australia is less successful partly because it is just about me; it is putting the record straight.
I have not done anything significant that I am ashamed of but I have done much that I regret. There are some episodes of my private life that I doubt I shall write about because they seem of no importance and of no interest to anyone but those involved. They produced much happiness but much anguish.
Jan 2009