Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography by Timothy Dow Adams (review)

248Rocky Mountain Review TIMOTHY DOW ADAMS. Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. 205 p. Working from a critical commonplace of the last thirty years—that autobiography is inherently unreliable because writers cannot avoid selectively shaping their own pasts—Timothy Dow Adams argues that literal inaccuracy in autobiography may serve as "one of the most powerful avenues into the self-identity ofthe writer" (170). Adams treats five twentieth-century American writers who were labeled liars by their contemporaries and whose works blend the genres of autobiography, biography, memoir, and fiction: Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Lillian Hellman. Focusing on a writer's pattern ofdistortion in autobiography, Adams maintains, can provide insight into his or her search for a personal myth, a coherent identity shaped by necessarily selective memory. "Personal authenticity," he argues, should be the final test of autobiographical value, not literal truthfulness, for "lying" in autobiography (either deliberate, subconscious, or some combination of both) can be a vehicle for rigorous metaphorical truth. None ofthis seems particularly new to me (Adams, indeed, repeatedly cites previous critics to paraphrase his points, especially John Paul Eakin and Roy Pascal). The text itself also sometimes lacks cohesive focus. Adams argues, for instance, that Gertrude Stein takes on the persona of Alice B. Toklas for a variety ofreasons, some ofwhich seem at least potentially mutually exclusive: she wants at once to reflect "the specific atmosphere of bohemian Paris" (22) and to present herselfas a "great American folk-hero" (37); she wants to conceal her homosexuality yet embody the nature of her relationship with Alice B. Toklas; she wants to mythologize herself as an artist and to employ the deliberately exaggerated tone ofthe tall tale. On a macro-level, one might also ask why Adams focuses on these five writers in particular, since a variety of hypotheses are posed for their tendency to tell lies in their autobiographies, including time and place (Stein, Hellman), childhood circumstances (Anderson, McCarthy), race (Wright), personality (Hellman), and religion (McCarthy). One rhetorical quibble deserves noting here, too: Adams sometimes makes points simply by reporting that a passage, understood by previous critics to be straightfaced , is actually ironic; or by arguing from his own simple assertion of the text's content ("By these statements, Stein meant ..." [35]). This reader, at least, would like more demonstration of how Adams knows these things—for Telling Lies itself elsewhere argues convincingly that writers themselves may not always know "the truth" about their meanings. That all said, Telling Lies does draw together a wide range of sources, and some individual chapters and individual points are provocative. The chapters on Richard Wright and Sherwood Anderson, in particular, are well argued, unified, and insightful. Students ofthe other three writers, too, ought certainly to read Telling Lies, for the work demonstrates the interesting questions and hypotheses that may be raised about familiar works by recent autobiographical theory. Readers familiar with that theory may not be all that much more enlightened by Telling Lies, and they may, like this reader, come away with questions that trouble them (I wonder, for instance, whether Adams would argue that lies in autobiography always function as metaphors, or just the Book Reviews249 lies in the works ofcanonical, professional writers). Still, Telling Lies is worth a look for students of autobiography as well as for students of the writers in question, if only to remind one of the many-layered complexity—and the dangers—involved in interpreting the story of a life. SUSAN H. SWETNAM Idaho State University NINA AUERBACH. Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. 132 p. Readers ofNina Auerbach's work expect her to deliver, with verve and grace, some striking aperçus into nineteenth-century literature and culture, and her new volume does not disappoint. Private Theatricals takes a less exclusively feminist approach to its subject than her earlier works, Woman and the Demon: The Life ofa Victorian Myth and Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, and its uncovering of further unexpected links between Victorians' lives and their art is, perhaps as a result, all the more insightful. Auerbach's thesis here is...