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Howells here reinforces the link between memory and storytelling, implying that our “individual” memories are nothing more than a collection of secondhand stories handed down to us as we grow up. Later in his autobiography, he reiterates this social character of memory:
The dependence on others to remember and the inability to distinguish collective and individual memory continues with Howells acknowledging that while memories can never be completely unearthed, an individual account of the past can also be useful to challenge dominant metanarratives: “[I]f he is fortunate, [the youth] gathers some inspiration for a worthier future…In his own behalf, or to his honor and glory, he cannot recall the whole of his past, but if he is honest enough to intimate some of its facts he may be able to serve a later generation” (153). If we see Howellsian realism as memory work, he is talking here about his hope that his memories will counterbalance the romantic, false memories being proliferated, and that his memories will help readers cut through the deception to get at a true sense of the nation’s past and defining character apart from “official,” politically motivated accounts.
Yet, because memory is a process of selection and editing, Howells ultimately admits the conflation of remembering and forgetting with storytelling and fiction. In a celebrated passage of the autobiography, Howells states, “No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real face or the will behind it. For this reason the only real biographies are the novels, and every novel if it is honest will be the autobiography of the author and biography of the reader” (57). Though John Crowley uses this passage as the springboard for many of his incisive psychological/biographical readings of Howells’s late fiction, I want to keep the focus on the social aspects of memory suggested in all of these quotations.