Lost in Pretension

IN her essay on Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, Alice Walker writes of the disillusionment she faced in reading the "false-sounding" memoirs of her idol's life.

Writes Walker, "For me, the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote is her autobiography. After the first several chapters, it rings false. But this unctuousness, so out of character for Zora, is also a result of dependency, a sign of her powerlessness."

Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American

Autobiography

By Herbert Leibowitz

Alfred A. Knopf

386 pp., $24.95

It is exactly this problem--the contradiction between stories told and those omitted--which Herbert Leibowitz poses in his study of American autobiography, Fabricating Lives.

Painted against the backdrop of a national cultural identity constantly changing its definitions, Leibowitz's extensive investigation of Americans' personal style and all the misrepresentations and half-truths contained within is justifiably ambitious.

THE first chapter, a masterful exploration of style and autobiography, is so comprehensive it could stand on its own. From Walt Whitman's "The Song of Myself," to the autobiography of a performance artist, circa 1980, Leibowitz calls on his encyclopedic knowledge of the literature of personal history to expand on his thesis.

Again and again, he reaches for the bon mot, the stylistic inflection to convince his readers, as autobiographers have shown theirs, of "the authority of style, [and] not self-revelation."

It is in this approach, though, that the book ultimately founders. The canon, it would seem from reading Leibowitz's digressions on everything from Paul Valery to obscure ancient Greek dramatists, is alive and well--and certainly formative in most Americans' sense of themselves.

Perhaps this was the case for the select group Leibowitz has chosen to study. It includes such quintessential Americans as noted socialist-anarchist Emma Goldman, novelist Richard Wright and architect Louis Sullivan.

In fact, the eight autobiographies seem to have been chosen more for their diversity quotient than for their relevance to the style-versus-truth dichotomy which the author has posed as his central question.

And as public figures, all eight autobiographers present an equally intractable set of questions about their public, as opposed to private, identieis which Leibowitz seems reluctant to answer. The book should--and does not--acknowledge the relevance of the writers' public status in disguising the personal "revelations" of style.

IF style is Leibowitz's rationale for this book, then it seems an unfortunate consequence the turgid, academic prose he has chosen to express his own. Between the pages of plot summary, the endless intellectual bragging and the almost repetitive invocations of some nebulous American national "identity," Fabricating Lives gets lost in its own pretentiousness.

By the end of the 328 pages of text, there is certainly no need to read the footnotes: the book itself is an extended citation of Leibowitz's Ph.D coursework.

Still, it is an interesting and provocative set of considerations which Fabricating Lives offers. Just as the vast panorama of American experience represented in the lives of autobiographers traces at once a personal--and a societal--odyssey, so does the book attempt a scope of analysis impressive only for the brashness of it.