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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
We have a saying in Arabic which can roughly be translated thus: God protect me from my friends, my enemies I can deal with. I was reminded of this when I read an article published in the Independent with the intriguing title "Enough of these betrayals by the friends of great writers." It is about the flood of confessions about and by well-known writers and artists.
I know that I have written about this before but in the face of the avalanche of books denigrating writers and artists I thought I would deal with it again.
The Independent article by Terence Blacker starts with a description of a scene. "Outside the study, downstairs preparing lunch or breakfast for you during a weekend stay may be a spouse or a lover or a friend, taking notes." If relationships go wrong in the future, or a friendship turns sour, these notes could become a book. The domestic self of the writer, with all its bad side, especially its bad side, will be revealed to the world. What is really sad is that publishers are competing to produce such scandalous books.
It is an ugly phenomenon in an age of what Blacker calls "public intimacy". The number of writers who have been publicly betrayed by their ex-wives, lovers or friends have increased enormously. Blacker believes there is a certain inevitability about these Judas biographies as their authors react to two powerful cultural impulses of the moment, "the interest in writers' lives, as evidenced in literary biographies, and the vogue of the confessional memoir." There seems to be a public hunger for scandals that damage and if the villain of the piece is a haughty public figure so much the better.
While such books damage their subjects some, it must be said, accept them as useful. They certainly generate much valuable publicity, and often lead to a noticeable increase in the circulation of the victims' books. But the most serious effects of these pseudo biographies is not really on the writers' reputation but on readings of their works, which tend to be reduced to aspects of disguised autobiography.
On the other hand there are biographies which have dealt kindly and responsibly with their subjects, one recent and celebrated example being John Bayley's memoir of his wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch. Having read her work and met her in London during one of the PEN congresses I could not help but sympathise with Bayley as he struggled to cope with the progress of the illness that had seen Murdoch, a professor of philosophy as well as one of the leading novelists of her generation, succumb to progressive dementia.
Bayley's memoirs have been universally acclaimed as being the outpourings of a good and loving husband who cared for his wife through her tragic final illness, and the story of Iris Murdoch's last years cannot help but bring tears to one's eyes. But in spite of all the kind and wonderful feelings, one critic was still moved to ask whether it "intrudes unjustifiably into a writer's private life?
Will it cast shadow over readings of the writer's work? He believes that "Iris could surely be said to be a greater betrayal than anything written by an ex-wife, lover of friend."
Yet the book has been widely praised as one of the greatest love stories to have been published in years and is short listed for several literary prizes. "It is," writes Blacker, "as if authors are now judged on their motives and behaviour and as if critics are careful to align themselves with all that is good and caring in the world, enacting a literary version of the Diana effect."
