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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 September 1999 Issue No. 447 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 September 1999 Issue No. 447
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Profile Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Nowadays, it seems, shame is hardly a primary consideration for the public. In the past, at least, people tried to cover up their faults and weaknesses. A private life was really private. Love affairs and escapades were kept strictly secret: they were neither spoken of, nor written about. Scandal rarely went beyond the furtive whispers in the club foyer.
At present, however, it is no longer the same. A whole wave of confessional writing has swept the scene. Biographies by ex-wives of unfaithful ex-husbands, and vice versa, are in vogue. Respectable women are confessing to affairs with writers and poets in public, while male writers excel in glorifying their homosexuality -- as I said, not an iota of shame. On the contrary people talk openly about things which less than a decade ago would have been punishable by law.
According to one British publisher, biographies and auto-biographies are becoming best-sellers, their authors among the best paid. Commenting on this tendency, an English critic expressed the opinion that more and more people are becoming voyeurs -- peeping Toms who delight in getting a glimpse of what lies behind the high, thick walls of fame, discovering what such and such a famous personality has done wrong. They no longer care about the quality of well-known writers' work, for example. They are interested, rather, in the most recent love affairs and the unusual interests they develop. Readers enjoy discovering that their heroes have feet of clay.
The last example of this unholy trend is a book by Emma Tennant, described in The Sunday Times as "the scion of a long line of rich, extravagant eccentrics." She is also a novelist of some repute with 20 books to her credit, and the founder of a literary magazine called Bananas.
In the third volume of her autobiography, entitled Burnt Diaries, Tennant writes about her love affair with Ted Hughes, the British poet laureate who died a year ago. I enjoyed Hughes's poetry and was intrigued by the life of his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963, after Ted Hughes left her for another woman, Assia Wevill, who also committed suicide. It was a great scandal and women's movements branded him a murderer. The last collection of Hughes's poetry was dedicated to Plath and was a kind of apology; at least that is how some critics describe it.
The Sunday Times published excerpts from Tennant's book. It also published an interview with her in which she openly gives her opinion of the great poet. She talks about the myths that surround him: "First he was a murderer, now he has been canonised, he's a saint. I just hope that my account is a valuable part of putting together the Ted Hughes jigsaw."
Tennant tries to defend her decision to talk about her relationship with Hughes. She says that their affair is, first and foremost, part of her own autobiography and not just a biography of the poet. She had intended to ignore that part of her life but, she realised, "it was dishonest, wrong, because the relationship was a very important part of those years even though it was so on and off. And for a writer, the most important thing is to tell the truth." Going through that excerpt in The Sunday Times one gets the impression that the poet laureate was talented, charismatic and irresistible, but also deeply selfish, and according to Tennant "with little or no consideration for the feelings of others."
