Volume 26, Number 15 · October 11, 1979
Cheerful Chronicle
By J.M. Cameron
Confessions of a Conservative
by Garry Wills
Doubleday, 231 pp., $10.00
Confessional literature is an established tradition of which Augustine and Rousseau are exemplars. What distinguishes such kinds of writing from mere autobiography or from memoirs is that a confession is the story of a soul. It is an invitation to enter into a degree of intimacy with the writer that would in many circumstances be embarrassing. Indeed, one can be the recipient of confessions that are unwanted, indelicate affronts to one's sense of decorum. A set of confessions designed for common circulation will triumph, if it does, through its style, through the unifying passion that fills the writing. This is so with Augustine and Rousseau, with Pepys and Boswell and Newman and Kilvert and parts of Mill's Autobiography and, now and then and always enigmatically, in A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother. It is true that Pepys and Kilvert had no notion they would ever be published; but each was in himself a perfect audience. Confessions of this order are works of art, and this is why they don't violate our sense of decorum. And they may be concerned not simply with inviting us into the penetralia of the soul but also with explanation, accusation, and defense.
Review, 2315 words
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