When Sigmund Freud was asked by his friend, German novelist Arnold Zweig, for permission to write Freud’s biography, Freud replied:
No, I am far too fond of you to allow such a thing to happen. Anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn’t be used.
Truth is unobtainable; humanity does not deserve it, and incidentally, wasn’t our Prince Hamlet right when he asked whether anyone would escape a whipping if he got what he deserved? [Hamlet to Polonius: “Use every man after his own desert, and who should ’scape whipping?”]
Freud did not—as far as we know—feel the same antipathy to autobiography, but surely, when writing about one’s own life, the author is likely to be tempted by the same lies, concealments, hypocrisy, and flattery. Yet in a new memoir from a distinguished black American scholar, the author claims to have cut through these thickets and given the world something like the truth of his life, and the results are often embarrassing or worse.
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