By the time I reached my teens, I was taken with the idea of writing a fictionalized autobiography, but as my college roommate, Barry, observed, no one will want to read my autobiography if I have led a dull life. He was right, of course, but I had already considered that problem and thought I had solved it with the novel—if overly precious—notion of setting my autobiographical account in the nineteenth century even though I lived in the twentieth. This would have required historical research to figure out what would be the same and what would be different if I had lived in the previous century. But the advantage would have been that I would be using the familiar framework of my life.
The main problem in an autobiographical novel is what to include, and what to leave out, only creating a narrative out of the more entertaining bits. So far, I have not written that autobiographical novel, but I have admired those willing to attempt such a daunting project. Vardis Fisher is a writer who did it. Born in Idaho in 1895, he wrote more than forty books, many of them historical novels set in the western United States and telling of trappers and settlers, and their conflicts with Native Americans. (The 1972 movie Jeremiah Johnson is partly based on Fisher’s 1965 novel Mountain Man.)
Orphans in Gethsemane, published in 1960, is a 988-page autobiographical novel, a fictionalized memoir covering several decades of Fisher’s life, travels, and three marriages. His first wife committed suicide and Fisher blamed himself, perhaps rightly to some extent, but throughout the book, I have the impression that he went out of his way to be hard on himself. For example, toward the end of the novel, his alter ego and his third wife come across the word “suspirate.” His wife asks him what it means. He says that when he tried to read the entire dictionary, years before, he never reached the letter “S.” There is something disagreeably flippant about his alter ego’s attitude here, but it occurred to me that if this conversation really took place, he could have looked up the word while writing this novel (the word means “sigh”), and made himself look good. Instead, he deliberately portrayed himself as a jerk.
When Fisher died, he was planning to write a nonfiction biography. One of his fans, wondering what differences might have stood between the novel and the unrealized autobiography, interviewed James H. Gipson, a printer and friend of Fisher whose identity is thinly disguised in the novel. Drawing the printer’s attention to the chapters based on Fisher’s stint as director of the Idaho Writers’ Project during the Great Depression, he asked Gipson about a particular incident.
In the novel, an official from the Washington, DC headquarters of the Federal Writers’ Project arrived in Idaho to make sure that Fisher’s alter ego, Hunter, was following national directives. Jealous of his independence, Hunter and the printer got the official drunk and poured him onto a late-night train headed back East. Asked whether this had really happened, Gipson said that, indeed, it had.
It seems obsessive to collect the details of one’s life and work them into an extended narrative. It also seems either courageous or foolhardy. How do I know which of my life events will be as fascinating to potential readers as they are to me? Will they buy your autobiography, fictional or not, 900-plus pages or not? A large ego is required to believe that the market will bear any of a writer’s works.
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