Autobiography and the Intellectual

This chapter reveals how Keith Vaughan reconfigured his wartime journal-writing as a comprehensive autobiographical project that would record his memories and experiences and transform them into a creative product. Having declared a policy of full disclosure and a commitment to resist self-censorship, he embarked upon a programme of self-education, redolent of Bildung, that made his journal the record of a developing mind and that allowed him to fold influences from literature, philosophy, and modernism into his own writing. The first section of this chapter describes how Vaughan’s journal became a consciously literary autobiographical project concerned with time and memory, regarding the third volume as a distinct milestone wherein Vaughan first articulated his desire to write autobiography and began to fully recognize (and experiment with) the possibilities of life-writing. The second section focusses on Vaughan’s autodidacticism, which encompassed the reading of other life-writers and his discovery of seminal works (by such key figures as T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust) that greatly influenced him and helped him to identify, albeit precariously, with Oxbridge intellectualism. The third section confirms the enduring importance of Vaughan’s journal as a continuous autobiographical document which he could refer back to and re-evaluate during periods of duress.