RonPrice
Mannikin
By the age of 60 I had a strong desire for things not to intrude on and violate my consciousness. I did not need the darkness that Edward Allen Poe required to be at peace. But I did require quietness, an absense of conversation and interruption and in the evenings and at night a bright light at my desk. I like to think of autobiography like a house. A house is a kind of autobiography: a text, a story, a system of signs, a way of organizing relations into comprehensible patterns. The house I live in and the houses I’ve lived in can often furnish a language through which I can express my values for this new age, this New World, as opposed to the Old. Houses, buildings in general, can serve as a device for introducing the comparisons that constitute a persistent international theme. I have yet to use this device to any extent.
I do not use houses and buildings with anything like the same ability as the American writer Henry James. Each of James’ houses reflected the moral attitudes, political orthodoxies, structures of social intercourse, and notions of privacy and public life that most define the differences among cultures. Mine, as yet, don’t do much reflecting. The house of my autobiography has not one window but a million. This house is an extension or shell of the self that "grows up" around me, its inhabitant, and this house participates in my attributes. In the same way that the novel is an extension of character—an unfolding of the logic of character--this autobiography is an extension of my character. The elder Dumas enunciated a great principle when he said that “to make a drama a man needed one passion and four walls.”[1] With many passions and many sets of four walls this autobiography is the scene of many dramas. Alfred Kazin once claimed of writers, "One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper." And so, here, we have many dramas and one home.[2]
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[1] Willa Cathar in Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, Marylin Chandler, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.
[2] Alfred Kazin in Willa Cathar in Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, Marylin Chandler, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.
I do not use houses and buildings with anything like the same ability as the American writer Henry James. Each of James’ houses reflected the moral attitudes, political orthodoxies, structures of social intercourse, and notions of privacy and public life that most define the differences among cultures. Mine, as yet, don’t do much reflecting. The house of my autobiography has not one window but a million. This house is an extension or shell of the self that "grows up" around me, its inhabitant, and this house participates in my attributes. In the same way that the novel is an extension of character—an unfolding of the logic of character--this autobiography is an extension of my character. The elder Dumas enunciated a great principle when he said that “to make a drama a man needed one passion and four walls.”[1] With many passions and many sets of four walls this autobiography is the scene of many dramas. Alfred Kazin once claimed of writers, "One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper." And so, here, we have many dramas and one home.[2]
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[1] Willa Cathar in Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, Marylin Chandler, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.
[2] Alfred Kazin in Willa Cathar in Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, Marylin Chandler, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.
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