 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 February 1999 Issue No. 417 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 February 1999 Issue No. 417
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
The fickleness, voyeurism and vulgarity of biographies written about celebrities in the fields of art and literature is a subject I have raised before. In doing so, I have always questioned the immoral tendency of biographers to drag skeletons out of the cupboard -- in most cases, skeletons that were either previously non-existent or, if real, then best forgotten. Indeed, it often seems as if most of the biographies we are asked to read nowadays are simply trying to prove that the subject of their work had a foot, if not two feet, of clay.
Why? I would ask people. Some of them answer that it is the right of readers and admirers to know the truth about their heroes or heroines. But what interest could I, or anybody else, possibly have in knowing that Wordsworth, for instance, was a spy, or that Byron had an incestuous relation with his sister? What matters to me, as to any reader, is the poetry of these famous poets.
Recently there has been a flood of books written by spouses, lovers or friends about their companions. It seems that people are always on the look-out for a scandal, always glad of an opportunity to reveal intimate details about their wives or hubbies. Perhaps Terence Blacker of The Independent was right when he wrote, "The rise of the Judas biography was inevitable, as there is a hunger for tales of hurt and damage."
This kind of biography is, to my mind, a betrayal of confidence. It is as serious a crime as passing confidential information to the enemy. It is also something quite new. Past biographies always strove to be objective, concentrating on the consensual life and works of the author/artist.
The new Judas genre owes its existence in part to the development of means by which privacy can be easily breached. Whether they like it or not, public figures and celebrities will always be an irresistible subject for those who insist on seeking out the sensational or "dishing the dirt". I have just read the serialised instalments of a memoir by the ex-wife of the current British Foreign Secretary. Of course, I was shocked. But now it seems, as Blacker puts it, that "part of the deal of being a celebrity [is] that where there [is] an ex, there [will] soon be an expose." In this age of public intimacy, it is not surprising that ex-wives or cast-off lovers want to "share their pain with a bracing course of hardback therapy."
Thus, we find the well-known actress Claire Bloom denouncing her ex-husband, the novelist Philip Roth, who had himself previously recounted the more painful moments of their relationship in only lightly fictionalised form. Even the revered V. S. Naipaul is not safe, as the recent vitriolic attack by his former protégé and recently ex-friend Paul Theroux proves.
Explaining this unfortunate tendency, Blacker says that the rise of the Judas memoir and biography is due to two powerful cultural impulses of the moment: "the interest in writers' lives, as evidenced in the boom of literary biographies, and the vogue for the confessional memoir." But of course, it is always a pleasure to read about others' misfortunes, "and if the villain of the piece happens to be a previously revered and haughty public figure, so much the better."
Yet the question that I would really like an answer to is, How far do such damaging biographies affect our relationship with a writer's literary work? Do revelations really help the reader fathom the author's inner feelings? Do they shed light on the otherwise incomprehensible? Are we any further forward, for instance, if we conclude that Shakespeare must have been a homosexual, to have addressed so many love sonnets to a man?
Perhaps, confronted as we are with the "decline of fiction", these sensational biographies in some way plug the gap. Perhaps they themselves are the novel of our age, and it is the "real" novels which are actually superfluous to requirements. After all, as someone once remarked, you can find material in police reports that is much more interesting than most of what passes for "fiction".
