Perhaps everyone has a memoir in them. But can everyone get it out? A memoir requires memory and experience. It also requires writing. Those who are known for their writing thus seem qualified for the genre. They provide the subject of the present chapter: the recent history of the literary memoir. That term can be understood in terms both of provenance (the memoir of the writer, the person from the world of literature) and of form (the memoir as literary art). A working assumption is that the two senses connect: the practising, and practised, writer is the most likely to produce a memoir that might be deemed literature.

But the literary memoir also raises an immediate paradox. Writers may be the best qualified to write memoir, but they may also be among the last people who should write it, as their lives have been composed primarily of writing. Henry James thematised this very duality in the uncanny story ‘The Private Life’ (1891), where a writer needs one self to live and another to write. In modern autobiography, this corresponds to the actual practice of ghostwriting. The self who has experienced but cannot write can be voiced through the conduit of the self who has not had the experiences, but has the craft to convey them.

Some writers resolve this issue through having specific, exceptional bouts of experience which are worth recounting. Exemplary here is Salman Rushdie, whose Joseph Anton (2012) centres on his uniquely dramatic experience of hiding from assassins. More common is the production of a memoir that centres heavily on the early years before the writer truly became a writer: years that may be formative and are also, in effect, pre-literary. Thus the first half of J. G. Ballard's Miracles of Life (2008) is devoted to his upbringing in Shanghai, and John McGahern's Memoir (2005) is largely ‘the story of my upbringing, the people who brought me up, my parents and those around them, in their time and landscape’ (McGahern 2005, 260). More specifically, a memoir may explore a particular trouble in the writer's past or family.

In 2004 Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. The book's reconstruction of London life in the 1980s focuses on the household of an ambitious Conservative politician. On the morning of the 1987 General Election, his dissident daughter and lodger discuss the effects of the last eight years of Conservative government. They conclude on this note:

Catherine is psychologically unstable, and the drizzle has perhaps come out in sympathy with her. She means that the decade's end is still not in sight; that the world it has announced seems without end; that she can see little prospect of the downfall of the father she resents, and the views and interests he represents. But the line suggests a slyer significance too. Looking back from seventeen years later, Hollinghurst is playing with hindsight. In one sense he gently mocks and frames the feeling that the 1980s would last for ever, from a moment when they are long gone. In another, he leaves the post-millennial reader to wonder if they have ever ended. Readers may reflect that the world around them is the product of the 1980s, or at least that it shows profound continuities with that decade. They may also feel that the very act of writing this novel, and its critical and public success, are signs of an inability fully to leave the 1980s behind, or leave them alone.

Cinders in a Riddle

Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain was staged at the National Theatre in Autumn 1980. It became notorious for a scene in which a Roman soldier rapes a young Celtic druid. Reports of the scene raised the ire of Mary Whitehouse, who since the 1960s had become a prominent conservative campaigner against obscenity, sex and violence in the media. Police scrutinised the play, and the director Michael Bogdanov was unsuccessfully pursued through the courts under the Sexual Offences Act. But the controversy distracted from the play's subject. Brenton's play is a vision of British history that swoops from one period to another, juxtaposing and sometimes overlaying different times. In 54 BC, two Irish vagrants happen upon a tribe of Celts in southern England; one vagrant is gleefully killed by the Celtic boys. The Celtic tribe in turn is massacred and ruined by the invading Roman army of Julius Caesar. In ad 515, a century after the Romans have departed, the Celts are in fear of a Saxon army. Another 1,400 years on, at the end of the 1970s, the British Army are on patrol in Northern Ireland, where an undercover British officer, Thomas Chichester, is discovered and shot by Irish Republicans. As the play develops, the gaps between these moments become smaller: different historical moments quickly alternate, cover the same patch of ground, and echo each other.

Brenton has at times written agit-prop, but this play's exact intent is not self-evident. As it jumps between epochs its characters offer various conclusions, which relativise one other. A character who seems set for a major part in the acts to come is often abruptly, brutally dispatched a moment later. In fact this is central to the play’s sense: that the history of the British Isles has resounded with brutality, from one age to another; that there are no necessary heroes or happy endings, nor any absolute monopoly on violence.

Added Up on a Balance

Sheet Among the most celebrated fictional retrospectives on the changes wrought in British society in the 1980s is Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up! (1994). Its protagonist is the stalled author Michael Owen, who in September 1990 visits his former publishing house for the first time since 1982. In the early 1980s, ‘Long years ago’, Michael was considered ‘one of their most promising young writers’ by this ‘small but well-respected imprint which had run its business, for most of the century, from a Georgian terrace in Camden’. But Coe's fictional press has had to face new realities: ‘recently it had been swallowed up by an American conglomerate and relocated to the seventh floor of a tower block near Victoria. Something like half of the personnel had survived the change’, among them Patrick Mills, the editor who had handled Michael's fiction (Coe 1994: 94).

Coe registers some of the changes in the book business that we have just surveyed: mergers, acquisitions, the rationalisation of publishing along more strictly commercial lines. When we meet Patrick Mills, Coe describes a straitened situation for the fiction editor: ‘even more depressed than I remembered him’, in ‘a tiny office, done out in an impersonal beige, with a smoked-glass window offering a partial view of a car park and a brick wall’ (Coe 1994: 99).

‘We are at the end of an age. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is nearly over.’ The words were spoken in the 1980s, but refer to the 1960s. The stoned prophet at the end of Bruce Robinson's film Withnail and I (1987) notes that the decade has just ninety-one days to run. The imminent ending is not merely calendrical. The commercial appropriation of the counterculture – ‘they're selling hippy wigs in Woolworths’ – signals to him the close of an era.

The 1960s is the most fabled of all decades. Ian Jack (2009) considers that the potency of that decade's projections of itself has determined our entire contemporary tendency to slice time in ten-year cycles. The mythologies also produce mourning. Few decades have been publicly reviewed so often. We observed in the Introduction that the New Right defined itself against the 1960s, as an era whose permissiveness needed to be revoked. Among those with a more positive stake in the 1960s, the decade also provokes regret; not that it happened, but that it had to end. This can involve pure nostalgia for a lost garden of youth and innocence. Or it can more ambivalently register the failures of the decade, as Withnail's hippy does, positing the end as the time when the decade went wrong. Joan Didion, who had made much of her reputation as a chronicler of the era, could write in the 1970s about ‘the morning after the Sixties’, and debate whether they had ended in 1969 with Charles Manson's murders, or in 1971 when, less traumatically, Didion moved house (1979: 205, 47).

In Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958), Raymond Williams identified the Industrial Novel as a subgenre in its own right: a place where social conditions, indeed the condition of England, were discussed.

Williams' last phrase remains a useful way of describing imaginative responses to social change. But where Williams identified a literature of industrialisation, in reviewing the Britain of the 1980s we can more plausibly seek a literature of de-industrialisation; and of the landscape, social conditions and identities associated with that process. In the Introduction we considered the culture of public relations and consumption as central to the experience of the decade. But the process of deindustrialisation and mass unemployment was as central to many people's lives. The two processes stood as contrary aspects of contemporary Britain. To an extent they could be distributed geographically. Finance, service industries and increased disposable income were centred primarily in London and the South-East. The industries of coal, steel and shipbuilding were concentrated in the North of England, Wales and Scotland.

If one cultural label held sway in the late twentieth century anglophone world, it was postmodernism. And if any one decade must be named as postmodernism's temporal heartland, it is arguably the 1980s. Major theoretical formulations of the term were in place by the start of the decade. The single most cited work on the subject, Fredric Jameson's essay ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, also became one of the most cited works on any subject in the humanities, following its initial appearance in New Left Review in 1984. By 1990 the British theorist Kobena Mercer, in an essay subtitled ‘A Postscript to the 1980s’, could declare that the term, as the ‘prevalent name’ for the decade's ‘vertigo of displacement’, had ‘already been and gone as a best seller ideology’ (2000: 285). That was premature: Jameson's book-length Postmodernism, for instance, would not appear until the following year, and he would still be reflecting on the term two decades on. If there was any truth in this entire body of theory and analysis, as an account of an epoch, then it could not disappear as swiftly as that. Yet Mercer at least demonstrates that, among intellectuals and writers, the term had thoroughly entered regular parlance by this point; so thoroughly that it already risked expiring from its own buzzing fashionability. The term had years of life left, whether among those who had not yet heard it or those who, like Jameson, considered it not merely a glib tag but a way of naming an important truth about the present.

Common Parlance

‘It is 1988 and I no longer feel I know what “feminist” means’: thus Gillian Allnutt commenced her selection of ‘quote feminist unquote poetry’ in the crowded, four-part anthology The New British Poetry. The hedging section title tries to have it both ways, announcing feminism as the guiding theme but casting doubt on it in the same breath. Allnutt worried that the word that ‘has been part of common parlance in this country for the past twenty years’ has now lost its status, becoming an embarrassment even on the political Left (1988: 77–8). She registered a historically specific impression, in which feminism was beginning to be presented as part of the recent past, with the present defined by ‘post-feminism’.

Writing at the same time, Cora Kaplan also recognised feminism as already a historical matter. If the second wave of the women's movement had begun in the late 1960s, it was now twenty years old. The conservative political climate of the 1980s, Kaplan proposed, was not congenial to celebrating this history. Some of the connections between imaginative writing, cultural criticism and practical politics that were naturally made in the 1970s had now diminished (Kaplan 1989: 22–3). As Lynne Segal had written, the women's movement of the 1980s had lost some of the purposive unity it had known in the previous decade (1987: xii).

Yet none of these writers was ultimately out to concede defeat. Feminism might be declared an anachronism by the 1990s, but this rhetorical tactic was largely a way of denying its unsettled claims.