A splendid literary spat has been brewing for some time between Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel prize-winning writer, and her biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts. According to
The New York Times the cause of the row is not so much that classic source of biographical trouble — divergent views as to the nature of the “truth” — but tension between the need for candour and the desire for discretion. The result has been a bitter falling-out.
Now, I am in no position to take sides in this particular literary feud, but it seems to me that Gordimer should count herself lucky for she is alive and can protest. She may regret uncomfortable disclosures of matters she would rather have kept private, but she is protected by the laws of libel from lies and falsehoods. What, though, of those who are dead? They have no recourse, no matter how many distortions and falsehoods are told about their lives.
Here I must declare a personal interest. I, too, entrusted a family archive to somebody who persuaded me that he wanted to write a rounded biography of my father, the writer Laurens van der Post. He failed to tell me until well after the biography was published that he had “long ago decided that Laurens was a black sheep”. Something which I would have thought would have been more honourable to declare before the archives were handed over. Furthermore, those words are notably at odds with his statement in the biography that “When I began to write this book I was not, I believe, biased either towards or against Laurens”.
All this has caused me to reflect on how easy it is to turn the life of anybody — be they Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale or Laurens van der Post — into a negative caricature if somebody sets out to do so, and how little there is that can be done about it. Once the subject is dead, there appears to be nothing to stop anybody doing what Thomas Beer did to Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, and write what Richard Holmes* called “a whole tissue of inventions”. (It is now believed that Beer’s biography, published in 1923, invented incidents in Crane’s life and fabricated letters by him.) The more serious point is that in this manner a new “truth” that is in fact not a truth, that is false, comes to be accepted as the new orthodoxy.
Let me give just one example. Over Christmas I dipped into Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf. Leonard was a friend of my father and published his earliest books. Glendinning is a fine biographer, but she has clearly taken J. D. F. Jones’s version of my father’s life as being in every respect literally true. She writes phrases such as: “Laurens van der Post never went out on a whaling vessel.” Well, we have evidence that he did. In a taped interview a friend who had accompanied my father to the Antarctic talks about the expedition. Jones loftily dismisses this, deciding — perversely in my view — that the friend’s memory was faulty and it never happened. The problem is that this so-called “fact” — ie, that my father lied about going out on a whaler — has now, like other so-called “facts”, become a received “truth”, picked up by other biographers.
Julian David, a Jungian analyst friend of my father, posed what is surely the pertinent question: “Is it possible to write a good biography in this way? In the most empirical sense, will it work?” He concluded that it would not. “Love,” he pointed out, “deceives, too; it misses out on the shadow, but at least it sees and values what is. Malice sees only the gaps, exults in the gaps, and thereby fatally distorts the research . . . Great biographies are always written out of love, and wonder at the phenomenon that they write about, big enough to take in its weaknesses but not about them.”
This doesn’t seem to be the fashionable way. The biographer as villain or postmortem exploiter (see Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, William Golding’s The Paper Men and A. S. Byatt’s Possession) is not merely a literary construct. The late Humphrey Carpenter (biographer of Benjamin Britten, W. H. Auden and Ezra Pound) admitted that he was “always looking for idols to demolish, because I’m that sort of a person”. Freud saw in many biographers “a desire to devalue greatness, to find the feet of clay”. Julian David was so distressed by Jones’s biography of my father that he wrote: “This book feels to me on every page like an attempted murder of the soul.”
But there is another form of justice. As Shusha Guppy, the Iranian writer, put it to me recently: “I have only to read a few words that somebody has written to know the sort of person they are. I read your father and I’m uplifted and inspired.” That is my consolation. On every page of his biography, Jones’s words, too, reveal his cast of mind. And that should be Nadine Gordimer’s comfort too — let her words speak. As Tennyson put it: “The less you know about a man’s life the better. He gives you his best in his writings.”
*In an essay in The Art of Literary Biography, edited by John Batchelor, published by Oxford University Press
Are the Blairs bored with Chequers?
Musing on the best way to spend New Year’s Eve, I can’t help feeling that Tony and Cherie may be on to something. If our intrepid reporters have got it right, the Blairs spent it with their nearest and dearest, ordered in the best Chinese takeaway in town (so not much washing-up, then), and presumably, (though here our investigative snoopers failed to come up with the requisite detail), snuggled up with some well-chosen videos. But why the need to go all the way to Florida for this sort of a knees-up? What’s wrong with Chequers? It would have saved them a lot of flak and some expensive air fares and would have won them lots of carbon-saving brownie points.
Diet dilemma
Experts, experts . . . what do they know? One day the diet fundamentalists say that carbohydrates are good, the next day bad. Last week detoxing was the fashionable way to a leaner, healthier, more glowing and energised you. This week, wouldn’t you know, it’s really not worth the bother. According to the experts at an outfit called Sense About Science, it’s a waste of time and money since our bodies are perfectly designed to get rid of toxins naturally. But what have we here? Read the small print and you will find that Sense About Science doesn’t seem to be making a lot of sense. They’re busy advising us that we’d be “better off drinking tap water, getting plenty of sleep and eating plenty of fruit and vegetables”. Isn’t that what’s usually called a detox?
