At the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, of Oracle
fame, there was an inscription of the Ancient Greek maxim “Know Thyself” (γνώθι ςεαυτόν). Its precise meaning is much debated
but I take it to mean that Man is more complete if he is self-aware, with a
good understanding of his strengths and weaknesses. In fact the Greeks and
Romans were then, and remain, notably deficient in such modest introspective
virtues – they prefer self-glorification and are not in the least
philosophically self-critical.
One figure in the Ancient world tried to write about his
inner life up to the age of 40 – St
Augustine of Hippo in Roman
Africa described his early life in his Confessions
in 397 AD. Although born a Christian he converted to Manichaeism and lived
it up among the fast set in Africa and Rome. He seemed to have had a good time,
prompting him famously to pray “Grant me
Chastity and Continence, but not yet!”
After 40, he became an eminent Christian theologian and reading about his
agonised struggles to understand God is much less fun.
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| A reformed St Augustine |
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| St Teresa in religious ecstasy by Bernini |
Fast forward to the 16th century and that curious
Spanish Carmelite nun, later St Teresa
of Avila (1515-82). A religious enthusiast par excellence, she wrote her
Life of Herself but her experiences are
not the kind one can share. She
had a mystical vision of a visit from a heavenly seraph;
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point
there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times
into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed
to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God.
The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness
of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...
These days, such a
vivid experience by a spinster lady would be meat and drink for the remedies of
the psychoanalyst’s couch; the rather besieged 16th century Church instead
canonised her.
By contrast her
contemporary Benvenuto Cellini
(1500-71), inspired Florentine goldsmith and incurable blow-hard, gave
autobiography a bad name writing certainly the most entertaining but also the
most incredible tale of his Renaissance life. His rise to artistic fame, his
exploits in love, his bravery as a soldier, even his 4 casual homicides and his
many brushes with the authorities are recorded and much exaggerated. There are
wild supernatural claims including his head being surrounded by a golden halo
on his release from prison! Cellini warns us that autobiographies can easily be
platforms for lies and distortions.
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| Cellini's famous golden salt-cellar |
But the age of more genuinely revelatory autobiography was
soon upon us. Michel de Montaigne, (1533-92),
meditating in the security of his tower, set out in his Essays his views on the world and especially on education. Hazlitt
praised him: “He was the first who had
the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man….”
The 17th century saw the wonderful Diaries of Samuel Pepys, although they only cover the years 1660-69. They are
entirely candid, recording his financial worries, his quarrels with his wife,
his various amatory episodes (normally with servant girls), his busy naval
office duties, his love of music and his vanity about clothes and possessions.
The diaries were not intended for publication but they build up a vivid picture
of Pepys the man and of his world.
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| Great Diarist, Samuel Pepys |
Another superlative diarist emerged in the 18th
century, but Scotsman James Boswell’s
Journals from 1760-95 were not wholly
uncovered until the 1930s. Never was a man more aware of his frailties (though
he did little about them), never was a man more self-obsessed, good-humoured, pushy,
intrepid, unwise, drunken and debauched; he made the acquaintance of some of
the great minds of Europe but won immortality as the recorder of the
conversation of his close friend Dr Samuel Johnson and that of his glittering
London circle. We can all know and understand Boswell, even if we do not
unreservedly admire him. Although a prey to melancholy, he was the most
sociable of men: “There is nothing worth the wear of winning, but laughter and the love
of friends”
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| James Boswell |
The Catholic Church
is occasionally a wise institution and over the centuries it has maintained the
Sacrament of Confession, while most other sects have abandoned it. Man loves to
talk about himself and confessing one’s sins must be (I do not know as I was reared a Scots
Presbyterian) wonderfully cathartic. The Catholic priest sensibly does not get
involved in trying to solve the penitent’s problems but winds up the
proceedings by granting absolution accompanied by formulaic prayers and
incantations. If more people confessed in this way, there would be fewer
dangerous buttoned-up maniacs lurking behind our hedges.
By the middle of the 19th century a more profound
understanding of the workings of the human mind was emerging. R. L. Stevenson’s novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde brilliantly
described the split personality, while Oscar
Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray depicted
the vicious reality behind the smooth mask. Nothing in the human persona is quite what it seems. The dam
of reticence finally broke with the writings of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who introduced to us the whole apparatus
of the unconscious, repression, the Oedipus Complex, dream interpretation and
the rampant libido. Analysing a
succession of mainly Viennese Jewish neurotic ladies in the 1910s, his
psychoanalytic method was most enthusiastically embraced by the ever-loquacious
Americans who to this day yak away about their lurid fantasies on their weekly
visits to the shrink’s couch. Do they end up Knowing Themselves better? Maybe
not, but at least they are unburdened.
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| Sigmund Freud in 1926 |
Freud’s liberation brought with it a torrent of seamy
confessions of which Irish-American bounder Frank Harris’ My Life and
Loves (1927) stands as an example. His chronicles of his various alleged
intimacies ultimately bore, as nothing is more unattractive than a braggart
lover. We are back in Benvenuto Cellini country.
More literary confessions cannot be overlooked. The common
enough conflict between parent and child was beautifully caught in Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), when an agnostic son clashes with a devout
Plymouth Brethren father. Later leonine and poetic Robert Graves movingly described the trauma and self-loathing which
resulted from his time in the Western Front trenches in Goodbye to All That (1929). Bertrand
Russell also enthrals (and sometimes repels) in his Autobiography (1951-69) stating:
Three passions, simple
but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the
search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These
passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward
course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
We love the self-revelation of Tory grandee “Chips” Channon in his sparkling Diaries and in volume after volume of
catty and well-connected James
Lees-Milne’s. Yet they both conceal much, as both were lively homosexuals
and draw a discreet veil over that important side of their natures. No doubt
unexpurgated versions of their diaries will eventually emerge. No such
discretion restrained gay playwright Joe
Orton, indeed Orton strays to
the wilder shores of confession and perhaps says too much. Finally I think we
get an accurate view of debonair Alan
Clark (1928-99) in his scintillating Diaries.
Rich (son of Kenneth “Civilisation” Clark and grandson of a Paisley thread
millionaire), failed Tory politician but great admirer of Margaret Thatcher,
car enthusiast, military historian, adulterer and lover of the Scottish Highlands, we come to know
Alan Clark pretty well and, even in his arrogance, he knew himself too.
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| Alan Clark |
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties, in form and moving,
how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension,
how like a god!
SMD
23.07.14
Text copyright ©
Sidney Donald 2014
