Nilanjana S Roy: The authorised subversion

SPEAKING VOLUMES

"I prefer my subjects dead," Fred Kaplan told Gore Vidal, when he was asked to write Vidal's biography. Though Kaplan eventually agreed to do the Life and Work, it wasn't easy""he and Vidal had several stormy exchanges before the book was "authorised".

Kaplan's morbid prejudice in favour of dead biographical subjects is merely commonsense advice to future literary biographers. Among all the trades you could ply in the world of arts and letters, their calling must surely be the most fraught with perils. Good biography requires time""four to eight years is not considered an excessive period for research and writing.

If your subject is alive, you must deal with their prejudices, with the natural human urge to censor the nastier bits of our lives, and often with hostility. If your subject is dead, you deal with survivors who guard a writer's personal life like living dragons.

If you're dealing with a great writer, your work will always be compared to the writer's work. And, as Barry Unsworth chronicled in Losing Nelson, there is nothing like sifting through a favourite hero or heroine's life to dislodge the halo and instil a healthy loathing in the biographer.

Ronald Suresh Roberts began work seven years ago on the authorised biography of Nadine Gordimer, Nobel laureate and pioneering South African author. This week, he told the papers that Gordimer read the final draft and exercised her contractual right to withhold approval from the biography. Roberts' publishers, who are also Gordimer's publishers, have regretfully declined to publish No Cold Kitchen.

The Guardian report quoted Roberts as saying: "She is supposed to represent freedom of speech but she wanted complete control, tsar-like, which would have turned the manuscript into pious crap." Gordimer objected to the inclusion of incidents like her sniping at Doris Lessing, and letters such as the one where she wrote of anti-apartheid activist Ruth First: "I keep thinking of points to score off the silly bitch."

Roberts told the media: "She wanted to appear without vanity or blemish. I resisted and she emerges in rounded, human terms. It's just that she is unaccustomed to being written about in ways over which she has no control." Gordimer's perspective is different. She said in a statement: "Objections which were raised by me in March 2003 have received no response. There has been no question of my opposing publication of the book, only of the portions of the text that have not been agreed with by me in terms of my agreement with Mr Roberts."

Roberts' rage is understandable: he's looking at seven years of his life going down the drain. But Gordimer's reaction is not inexplicable, either: she's looking at eighty years of her own life, now laid out in cold print. Given her consistent defence of her privacy, it's hard to imagine any version of her life that she might have approved.

The late Ian Hamilton faced a similar situation when he set out to write a biography of the extremely private J D Salinger. Salinger gave up writing for a public audience, speaking in public and indeed, any form of public interaction, years ago. He filed a legal suit against Hamilton, who was forced to withdraw the biography. Only briefly, though: Hamilton turned his fraught quest for the author into a book, In Search of J D Salinger, which did very well when it came out in 1999.

The problem that authors like Salinger and Gordimer face are shared by most great writers. Gordimer told the Guardian some time ago that she would never write her autobiography: "I am much too jealous of my privacy. It's all one has, in the end, whereas anyone's biographer has to make do with what's somehow accessible, by hook or by crook."

The reflex that urges writers to destroy their work goes deep. Patrick White wrote, in response to a library's query about his papers: "I can't let you have my 'papers' because I don't keep any. My MSS are destroyed as soon as the books are printed. I put very little into notebooks, don't keep my friends' letters as I urge them not to keep in mine, and anything unfinished when I die is to be burnt."

White's story also illustrates the other side of the equation: the impossibility of completely erasing the tracks of one's life. His friends kept enough letters for them to be collected in a 600-page publication. In the war between privacy and posterity, it's surprising how often posterity wins out.

This could change for the email generation: there is already a debate over who will "own" the contents of a deceased person's mailbox, for instance. Given the nature of email, it might seem that the future will have far fewer records; but people print out their letters, or save them to disk, and in our age, even authors who are meticulous about preserving their personal privacy leave behind a far greater public legacy in the way of interviews and television appearances than their forebears. Very little is completely erased.

But what should be included? And whose version of a life should be allowed to stand""the version of the biographer or the version of the writer? After the death of poet Anne Sexton, a controversy was raised when her psychiatrist released tapes of her private sessions to her biographer. Many felt that this crossed the last bastion of privacy. Letters take you into a writer's head; therapy sessions breach the unconscious.

To ask full co-operation from a writer may be to ask the impossible. Kaplan described Gore Vidal's attitude as: "More than prickly. Evasive, distortive ..." In Vidal's own memoir, Palimpsest, Kaplan said, there was a great deal of revisionism. But his task as Vidal's biographer was different. "As Gore's biographer, it was important for me to see how he looked at the world then, how he looks at it now, but also to see what the facts are. What do the documents that establish the record reveal? The biography presents his view of things, but also provides a check against his revision of the past."

Biographers ask of writers that they become characters in a story to be written by someone else. I have little doubt that Roberts will ultimately have his Gordimer biography published, despite her objections. What she's giving voice to is the eternal lament of the writer: how can this be my life when I haven't written it? And what he's saying is the eternal response of the biographer: but this is your life, whether you like it or not.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com