Memoir vs fiction, by Y S Lee

Over the past two years, I’ve been reading memoirs from survivors of the Pacific War – that is, the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. Nearly all of them are awe-inspiring, and I’ve already blogged here about Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral and Nona Baker’s Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker.

Refresher: historical sources are typically divided into two categories: primary (artifacts from or documents created during the time of the events in question) and secondary sources (an item that interprets and analyzes the primary sources). It’s a broad-strokes sort of distinction that makes putting together a bibliography more straightforward. Although memoirs are typically written after the events in question, they are generally classed as primary sources because their authors were involved in the relevant events.

However! Having recently read a fair amount of memoir, I’ve come to distrust its simple categorization as a primary historical source. This unease began with my first Pacific War memoir, Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral (1949). It’s a brilliant book, packed with adventure and anthropological insight. Freddy’s voice is distinctive and charming, and while he shies away from emotional and psychological insight, I finished the book with a strong appreciation for his character (possibly too strong: my husband took to calling him "your historical boyfriend”).

Freddy Spencer Chapman

Still, I wondered how Freddy could possibly recall the terrifying and chaotic events of his three years in the Malayan jungle in such impeccable detail. This is a challenge in all memoirs. I am hard-pressed to remember what I ate for lunch three days ago, and in times of conflict or high excitement I often question, after the fact, my memories of what went down. Yes, Freddy kept detailed diaries while he was in the jungle, but on several occasions he was forced to destroy them because they were at risk of falling into enemy hands. His surviving diaries are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but they cover only a portion of his time in the jungle.

After reading Freddy’s memoir, I turned to Brian Moynahan’s recent biography of Freddy, Jungle Soldier: The True Story of Freddy Spencer Chapman, for context. Moynahan is a biased biographer – a longtime fan of Freddy who wants to burnish and prolong his hero’s fame. Even so, at one point, Moynahan points out a significant discrepancy between Freddy’s surviving diary and an event he describes in The Jungle is Neutral.

For publication, Freddy altered the event, probably in order to make it feel more dramatic. Moynahan disagrees with this decision, believing the original diary entry to be superior in terms of tension and the sheer danger of the situation. Either way, though, we now have a primary source (diary) imperfectly converted to a memoir - which is still technically a primary source. Yet we already know that it’s been corrupted. And if we have evidence of this with just one of Freddy’s surviving diaries, how many other events have been elided or embellished or just imperfectly reconstructed? We’ll never know.

This question becomes even more complicated when memoirs are written long after the events they describe and are mediated through others. Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker was first published in 1959, fourteen years after Nona Baker emerged from the Malayan jungle, contributed source material to Freddy Spencer Chapman’s official report on local Communist organizations, and returned to England.

Nona Baker is not credited as the author of her memoir!

Baker doesn’t mention keeping a jungle diary. Her narrative voice is quiet, wry, self-deprecating. She doesn’t in any way seek to portray herself as a heroine: rather, she insists that she was only “busily saving [her] own skin”. Perhaps this is why it took her fourteen years to produce a memoir, and why she distanced herself from the story even further: even though her narrative is written in the first person, the book is officially "by" Dorothy Thatcher and Robert Cross. To what extent is Baker’s voice really her own, here? And what sorts of artistic license have Thatcher and Cross taken with the shape of the story?

My last example today (though I have many more!) is actually a novel by Han Suyin (best known for her 1952 novel A Many Splendoured Thing, which was filmed as Love is a Many Splendored Thing and was also later adapted as an American soap opera). And the Rain My Drink is set during the Malayan Emergency of the early 1950s – the last days of the British empire in southeast Asia.

Han Suyin, the pen name of Elisabeth Comber

While And the Rain My Drink is technically fiction, Han Suyin inserts herself (using a name that is itself a pseudonym) into the novel as a character. This is a postmodern move which ought to undermine the ideas of narrative voice and the conceit of “truth” throughout the work. But the character Suyin tells her story in the first person, in conventional and realist terms. Because of this, and since the character Suyin’s biographical details map directly onto those of the author Han Suyin, the whole novel reads instead like a memoir of Han Suyin’s time in Malaya, with a few imaginative excursions. It presses the genre of memoir into the services of fiction - an act that points up the highly contrived nature of memoir itself.

Perhaps this is only appropriate – that we should end up in such an ambiguous tumult. A wide view of history will always include competing voices, and the line between fact and fiction begins to blur immediately upon examination. I’m thrilled to be feeling my way, step by careful step, in the company of such splendid adventurers.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/The Agency Quartet (Walker Books/Candlewick Press).

Freddy Spencer Chapman, by Y S Lee

Now that I’ve wrapped up the Mary Quinn Mysteries, my quartet of novels set in Victorian London, I’ve begun researching a new book. This one’s set in Malaya (now called Malaysia) during the Second World War and it’s been a bracing change. One of my favourite historical figures so far is that of Freddy Spencer Chapman. I’d never heard of him before, and now I can’t stop talking about him or recommending his memoir to everybody I meet.

In late 1941, the English naturalist, mountaineer, teacher, explorer, and writer Freddy Spencer Chapman was sent to the British colony of Singapore. Freddy (I’m following the example of his biographer, Brian Moynahan, in calling him so familiarly) was a veteran of two polar geographical expeditions and a British mission to Tibet. Now, in wartime, Freddy taught “fieldcraft” (how to read tracks, navigate by the stars, shelter, find food, and generally survive in the wilderness) to Allied soldiers, first in Switzerland and then in Australia. With British concern mounting about Japanese aggression in southeast Asia, Freddy was the obvious choice to help lead a new Special Training School, 101 STS, in Singapore.

As sometimes happens, the British grossly miscalculated their defense against the Japanese Imperial Army, which conquered the entire archipelago in a matter of weeks. 101 STS was abandoned and the British, soldiers and civilians alike, fled the colony. As also sometimes happens, Freddy and two companions, Sergeant John Sartin and civilian volunteer Bill Harvey, got cut off behind enemy lines and left behind.

For one “mad fortnight”, Freddy, Sartin and Harvey blew up railway bridges, destroyed Japanese military vehicles, severed telegraph lines, and killed roughly 500 Japanese soldiers. According to biographer Moynahan, “the Japanese deployed a regiment to search for what they believed was a squad of 200 Australian commandos”. Sartin and Harvey were both captured; Sartin survived the war in a Japanese POW camp, while Harvey was decapitated for attempting to escape.

At home in England, Freddy was reported “missing believed killed”, until the day in 1945 when he swam out to a submarine off the coast of Malaya and, as Moynahan says, “came back from the dead”. In fact, for three years, Freddy survived in the jungle, training Communist guerrillas who resisted the Japanese occupation and later helping to plan the British attack on Malaya. His exploits sound like the purest fiction, an irresistible, real-life, Boy’s Own Adventure.

Without detracting from these astonishing accomplishments – Freddy deserves Field Marshal Wavell’s praise as “the jungle Lawrence” – I’d like to redress a consistent inaccuracy that seems to permeate the conversation around Freddy. He’s frequently described as a “one-man army”, with the suggestion that he was entirely alone in the tropical jungle. As the last few paragraphs show, this is inaccurate. And from a practical perspective, such a feat would be superhuman. Yet even Moynahan, at one point, succumbs to the sole-superhero rhetoric.

In truth, Freddy was sheltered, fed, supplied, doctored, protected, guided through the jungle, and fêted by hundreds of Communist guerrillas, and indirectly supported by tens of thousands of local civilians who quietly resisted the Japanese occupation. It’s this part of the story – the less glamorous, unfilmic aspect - that’s sometimes glossed over. Hearteningly, this isn’t something in which Freddy participated.

When he returned to England, Freddy published The Jungle is Neutral, a memoir of his time in wartime Malaya. He explains the title in this way: "the jungle is neutral. It provides any amount of fresh water, and unlimited cover for friend as well as foe - an armed neutrality, if you like, but neutrality nonetheless. It is the attitude of mind that determines whether you go under or survive". In this memoir, Freddy writes extensively about his time with the guerrillas, including brief portraits of his closest friends among them. The Jungle is Neutral might be my favourite work of nonfiction, ever, and much of this is because I really hadn’t expected to like Freddy so much.

Before reading it, I was braced for a man of his generation (born 1907): a social snob, an unself-conscious racist, an unapologetic colonialist. This isn’t the case at all. Freddy was immensely curious about the world, entirely willing to judge people on their individual merits and flaws, and endearingly passionate about food, even while suffering from bullet wounds, pneumonia, chronic malaria, ulcerated legs, blackwater fever, tick typhus, dysentery, and I-don’t-know-how-many-other ailments. Here’s how terrific this memoir is: while reading it, I followed my partner all around the house, subjecting him to excerpts. Another measure of how much I love it: before I was halfway through, I was already mourning the fact that it must end.

I joke about Freddy as my historical boyfriend, but I do think of him as singular and special in most ways. Fieldcraft and wartime exploits aside, he remained open to new experiences, new people, new ideas. He clearly valued intelligence, marrying a woman, Faith Townson, who worked for the Special Operations Executive, and whose wartime records remained sealed until this year. And it doesn’t hurt that he was excessively handsome! (Many images of Freddy remain under copyright, but click here for some examples.) For a vivid and pulse-quickening experience of a lesser-known facet of World War II, I couldn’t recommend more highly The Jungle is Neutral.