Roy Pascal has observed that autobiography involves an interplay or collusion between the past and the present, that indeed its significance is more truly understood as the revelation of the present situation of the autobiographer than as the uncovering of his past. As readers of autobiography we ordinarily do need to be reminded of this obvious truth, even though Freud and his followers have shaken our faith in the ability of memory to provide reliable access to the contents of the past. When we settle into the theater of autobiography, what we are ready to believe—and what most autobiographers encourage us to expect—is that the play we witness is a historical one, a largely faithful and unmediated reconstruction of events that took place long ago; whereas in reality the play is that of the autobiographical act itself, in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness. This mediation of the past by the present governs the autobiographical enterprise, and it frequently supplies a frame for narrative in modern autobiography. In Henry James's autobiography this mediation is prominently displayed in the foreground of the text, and it is for this reason that James's narrative has seemed to me especially suited to an inquiry into the nature of the autobiographical act.