Autobiography and Artistic Sensibility in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND ARTISTIC SENSIBILITY IN SAMUEL BUTLER'S THE WAY OF ALL FLESH J. W. Yarbrough One of the commonest delusions of beginning writers is that a short story or novel is merely the concrete, dramatic recollection of experience, and if these beginning writers are moderately literate, they will argue that art springs from memory and autobiographical experience. They are, of course, partly correct. For example, Charles Nolte, commenting on his play, "End of Ramadan," admits that it is partly autobiographical—"everything you write is."1 It is equally true, however, that art is design, a symbolic construction in which literal experience is shaped and selected for thematic purpose. The writers most frequently cited for transmuting autobiography into art are Thomas Wolfe and Samuel Butler. It is widely believed that both writers did little more than alter surnames and place names, and then, mysteriously as from Aaron's furnace, sprang forth those golden calves, Look Homeward, Angel and The Way of All Flesh. Of the two, it is urged that Butler had less consciousness of design and purpose and hence more reliance upon autobiography than Wolfe had. Therefore, the stronger case for the necessity of conscious artistry can be made from an examination of The Way of All Flesh. In this novel, characters are rigidly patterned to objectify values which serve as tensions in a carefully controlled fiction world; this means that they are stripped of the chaotic richness and ambiguity of actual people in order to dramatize the forces which give coherent structure to the novel. Theobald Pontifex is usually identified as the most sustained autobiographical figure in The Way of All Flesh. He has been seen as a very thinly disguised version of Samuel Butler's father, Canon Thomas Butler. It must be admitted that certain qualities of Canon Butler do appear in Theobald. Much Butler criticism has concentrated on the biographical parallels to the neglect of Butler's careful structuring of his fictional world and the patterning of his characters. For example, Butler's close friend and biographer, Henry Festing Jones, claims that the boyhood of Ernest Pontifex "is faithfully drawn from Butler's own childhood, Theobald and Christina being portraits of his father and mother as accurate as he could make them, with no softening and no exaggeration.'"2 Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill, editors of Butier's notebooks, tell us: "Butier's father and mother have achieved an unenviable ünmortaHty as Theobald and Christina Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh. His sisters' less amiable characteristics are reflected in Charlotte Pontifex in the same book."8 According to Philip Henderson, Canon and Mrs. Butler Carles Nolte, "Interview," Minneapolis Tribune (February 9, 1969), Sec. E, p. 1. 2Henry Festing Jones, cited in The Incarnate Bachelor by Philip Henderson (New York, 1967), p. 3. 3Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill, eds., Samuel Butler's Notebooks (New York, n.d.), p. 8. 22 Butler's The Way of All Flesh23 "look so exactly like Theobald and Christina in their photographs that one cannot help feeling that Butler's portraits of them were very near the originals."4 G. D. H. Cole believed that Butler's remarks in letters to Miss Savage suggested an equation of Canon Butler and Theobald, i.e., that Theobald is "a fair portrait" of Canon Butler.5 A distant relative of Butler's, Mrs. R. S. Gamett, admitted autobiographical parallels, but she was one of the first to point out the fact that in important ways the characters in the novel are not biographical. Disturbed because the fictional traits were being interpreted as factual, Mrs. Garnett asserted that "the real Theobald, Canon Butler, was not detestable at all."6 In chapter fourteen of The Way of AU Flesh, Butler through the persona of his narrator implied an autobiographical source and technique: "Every man's work, whether it be hterature or music or picture or architecture or anything eke, is always a portrait of himself. . . . I am portraying myself more surely than I am portraying any of the characters whom I set before the reader."7 It is to be doubted, however, that the power of The Way of All Flesh is dependent upon its autobiographical...