Morning:
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It has been a busy week in the debunking world of literary biography.
Evelyn Waugh, we learn, had a secret gay past (well — secret-ish). Arthur Ransome, of Swallows and Amazon fame, turns out to have been a Soviet spy. And William Golding once tried to rape an underage girl. This, most will agree, takes first prize. Defenders of Mr Golding will point out that he didn't actually succeed in raping the girl but I rather think it's the thought that counts, don't you?
Still, autres temps, autres moeurs. And the past few years have seen writer after writer having their shoes forcibly unlaced to reveal feet of clay or, in the odd case, outright cloven hooves. Arthur Koestler: rapist. Philip Larkin: racist, onanist. Dante: paedo. John Fowles: misanthrope, egomaniac. Beatrix Potter: mass-murderer. Laurens Van Der Post: paedo.
I have made one of those up, but you get the picture. The usual balls gets spouted about the “dark side of genius”, the “sliver of ice” or “demons”. But really the duty of the biographer to his publishers is to produce a news story for which a Sunday newspaper will pay: and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that a literary biography without a sex-Nazi, child-slavery, and/or hamster-rape angle is now dead in the water as a publishing proposition.
V S Naipaul — presumably on the grounds he'd hate to have anything written about him and not be able to read it — didn't even wait until he was dead before authorising a biography that made it plain that he's an ocean-going git.
Serious literary biography, as the pseudo high-minded will tend to protest, is being made impossible by all this sensationalism. But the properly high-minded position to take is, surely, that there never was such thing as serious literary biography. The work is the work, and the rest is either curtain-twitching or stamp-collecting.
And why shouldn't we enjoy curtain-twitching and stamp collecting? I love reading literary biographies, but I'd much rather read about bad writers with bad lives than good writers with good ones.
I rank Wallace Stevens rather higher as a poet than I do Charles Bukowski. But you'd have to pull my fingernails out with pliers before you persuaded me to read a biography of that docile, bourgeois insurance man. I'd take a biography of a drunken roustabout like Bukowski on holiday any day, though.
Literary biography is to literature as Heat magazine is to the telly. I shall be wolfing down these new books, in serial form if not at length, and tut-tutting with happy disapproval all the way through.
Sting's daughter is terrified by fame
Sting's singer daughter Coco, 20, gives an interview revealing — to the relief of most of us — that tales of her father's tantric sex marathons were a joke made up by Bob Geldof. As well as her famous dad and his famous friends, she talks about her famous friends such as Pete Doherty, and slags off the famous nightclub Boujis as a place for “posh people with no taste”.
The interview is accompanied by a funkily-styled photograph in which she poses with the words “fame is boring” across her front. “Just the idea of cameras and microphones scares me,” she discloses. Well, hum. Brave girl, evidently.
Tweet — it's the only way to get noticed
I like and admire “controversial MEP” Dan Hannan. He may have expressed himself a bit, ah, intemperately on Fox News — but he was trying to make his argument heard on a complex policy issue where the weather is being made by mendacious, sub-literate drivel about “death panels” and Hitler. It's a mark of how idiotic the debate has got that we now look to Twitter — a 140-character microblogging service — to provide the nuanced point of view.
It must be galling for Dan not that he is being attacked, though, but that he has so long been ignored. He has been saying these supposedly inflammatory things about the NHS for years and, poignantly, nobody noticed.
Yesterday one newspaper gave its front page to claims of a Tory party in crisis “last night after it emerged that several of [its] key shadow cabinet members put their names to a manifesto criticising the NHS”.
It emerged “last night” in the sense that it was in a book that came out in 2005. Since that went unnoticed, last December Dan published another book — co-authored with a Tory MP — that described the NHS as a “national sickness service”. Rather wounding if Mr Cameron now affects surprise at finding these eccentrics in his midst.
If you want something to remain secret, is the lesson, publish it in a book. If you want to get the attention of the Tory leader, sound off on Fox News or get twatted on Twitter.
No "Summer of Rage"
Like everyone, I have been very disappointed that the “Summer of Rage” we were promised has failed to materialise. I had been geared up for barricades aflame, eyes streaming with teargas and postmen going tonto with automatic weapons in the simmering heat: a cross between Do The Right Thing and 28 Days Later.
Instead, the anarchist menace within has spent most of the summer wondering if the weather will hold long enough to risk lighting the barbecue. Apparently, it's going to be hot on Wednesday. Come on: one last stab at the apocalypse?
Reader views (1)
Well, Sam, a life of Elizabeth Gaskell wouldn't do much for you, would it?
- Dectora, London UK, 17/08/2009 15:51
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