Blogs I've written on the New Welsh Review website.
When is a
biography not a biography? (August 2009)
Answer – when it’s a metabiography.
I’ve been thinking about how to write a biography of a woman whose major
claim to fame (or, in her case, infamy) is that she was briefly married
to a man who has, at my last count, generated fifty seven different
biographies, one autobiography and countless newspaper inches and
television documentaries. Typing his name into ebay reveals one thousand
and forty five items currently up for grabs. That’s forty odd pages of
talking birthday cards, T shirts, thimbles, mousemats, cuff links and
fully poseable action figures (with ‘real-like heads’) – never mind the
ubiquitous dvds, posters and photographs. The man isn’t an actor, he is
a manufacturing business like no other! I wondered about who in Wales
might be metabiographical material. Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas, of
course, spring to mind, but the ebay test disappointingly throws up only
six hundred and eleven items for Burton (some of which are actually for
the other Richard Burton – translator of the Kama Sutra) and four
hundred and twenty for Thomas. There are no thimbles or mousemats and
certainly no fully poseable action figures with ‘real-like heads’ -
definitely a gap in the market there! In fact the items are almost all
DVDs (Burton) or books (Thomas). Of course – one was an actor, the other
a writer. Yet although entire, industrial-sized, myths have also grown
up around these two, this is not reflected in wider popular culture - as
in the case of the man who was once married to the woman I’m writing
about. My final, deeply scientific, bit of research was checking out the
Brontes on ebay. This is largely because the current trend of
metabiographies includes the acclaimed
The Bronte Myth by Lucasta
Miller (as well as The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell. Marilyn on
ebay - don’t even go there! A whopping five thousand and twenty seven
items including ballpoint pens and pillow cases. I myself bought a pair
of Marilyn flip-flops
from a charity shop in Newmarket last weekend which, come to think of
it, I could now sell on ebay thereby upping the count to five thousand
and twenty eight!). Back to the Brontes. For all that they are now
collectively known as a phenomenon, they could only rise to one hundred
and seventy six items. Interestingly, these were largely books
about them rather than
by them – meat and drink for
the metabiographer of course, with multiple representations galore!
Up Close and Personal
(September 2009)
A couple of weeks ago I went to the launch of
Blown, a new magazine for the
culturally intelligent (or so it says on the tin) in the National Museum
in Cardiff. Ric Bower, the editor, had commissioned me to interview
Sarah Waters and while I liked the idea of meeting her again
(the last time was a while back when she was writing
Nightwatch) I
didn’t want to repeat the process I’d gone through before...
re-read the previous novels and discuss her approach to the current one.
So, Ric suggested I try writing it ‘Gonzo-style’ – an idea I found
simultaneously terrifying and intriguing.
After my usual period of procrastination, I decided to invite
Sarah to the movies. In retrospect I should have had the guts to go to
Leicester Square and see The
Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2 or even something sensibly
gripping like Burn After Reading, both of which were out at the time, but I lost
my nerve. Instead we met up at the BFI and watched a motley selection of
films made by the GPO. My plan had been to have an intelligent
conversation about what we’d seen and then write up the interesting
bits. Okay, not that Gonzo but hey – it was a Friday night out in London
- that counts for something, doesn’t it? Things didn’t go quite to
plan... By the time I met Sarah late last September (we’d made the
arrangements in June) the wheels were coming off bits of my life and
instead of conducting a clever discussion about the merits of pre-war
short films, we drank campari and soda and then we drank a bit more.
Luckily I remembered to switch the recorder on at some point or the
whole evening would have turned into
The Lost Weekend. Which brings
me to my point. How much of yourself should you reveal when interviewing
someone or writing a book about them? What is appropriate or, more
importantly, vaguely interesting to the reader? I confess to being torn
between irritation and curiosity when I watch Nick Broomfield’s
documentaries, for instance, but am
always desperate to know more
about the writers I love. Reading Simon Gray’s
The Smoking Diaries led me back to his plays with more enthusiasm
than I had for them in the first place and, Susie Boyt’s
My Judy Garland Life (purchased purely for the title) has given me a
somewhat unhealthy obsession with all thing Susie. Reading the article
in Blown, nearly a year after I wrote it, felt a bit like hearing a snatch of
a song that once meant something, almost visceral yet strangely remote.
I haven’t watched The Wire for
a year now either.
For more information
visit
www.blownmag.com
Questions of Identity
(OCTOBER 2009)
I’m writing a biography
of a woman routinely described as Welsh and sometimes, more
specifically, Cardiff – as in ‘Cardiff girl’, ‘Cardiff actress’ etc. To
be fair she has also, occasionally, been described as Irish – but my
point is, she is rarely identified by the nationality she actually
holds. She is now seventy five years old and a full sixty nine of those
years have been spent outside Wales - including the first fourteen of
her life. This makes me think long and hard about what qualifies you
(aside of the Vinnie Jones rule) to be claimed as Welsh. For instance,
at the other end of the spectrum, the distinguished writer Penelope
Mortimer was born in Rhyl - yet there is no mention of her in the
New Companion to the Literature of
Wales or in the Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales. She does, however, make the
following appearance in the Oxford Companion to English Literature:
‘MORTIMER, Penelope Ruth, nee Fletcher (1918...) novelist, born in North
Wales & educated at London University; her works, with their emphasis on
frankness about female experience, contributed to the development of the
woman’s novel in the 1960’s.’ Her career as a writer was actually far
broader than this entry suggests; as well as publishing nine novels, a
collection of short stories, two volumes of autobiography, a travel book
and (bizarrely) a biography of the Queen Mother, she was also film
critic for the Observer, an Agony Aunt for the Daily Mail and adapted
Nigel Nicholson’s, Portrait of A
Marriage, for the BBC in
1990. With her then husband, John Mortimer, she wrote the screenplay for
the Otto Preminger film Bunny Lake
is Missing and in 1974 the New
Yorker printed her novel Long
Distance in its entirety – the first time they had done so since JD
Salinger’s Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction a
decade earlier . Hard to know
then, given all that, why she has been wiped from the Welsh literary
canon. She, of course, may not have identified herself as ‘Welsh’ and
she certainly didn’t set any of her novels here. She did however write
about her childhood in Rhyl and the clergyman father who had lost his
faith and used the parish magazine to celebrate the Soviet persecution
of the Russian church. She also wrote about the universal experiences of
women in the post war world of illegal abortions, illicit affairs and
paralysing marriages – experiences which were as familiar to Welsh women
as they were to their English and Scottish counterparts. It’s ten years
ago last month since Mortimer died – time perhaps to acknowledge her
existence?
To Reveal or Not to
Reveal? (November 2009)
These days it seems like any old celebrity can get a
book deal to write their autobiography (as Eva Wiseman, assistant editor
of Observer Woman magazine, put it recently, ‘I’m a celebrity – get me
on the bookshelf’) but if they want it to become a best-seller, they
really have to come up with an attention grabbing scandal: abuse,
incest, shoplifting – that’ll do for starters. Now, even literary
biographies are getting in on the act. In the last few months alone, a
series of heavyweight books has revealed that William Golding despised
both himself and Lord of the Flies, Diaghilev was a ‘sexual predator’ and Alison
Uttley hated ‘The Blyton’. As Kathryn Hughes remarked in her review of
the Uttley biography ‘whether we really benefit from learning that the
creator of Little Grey Rabbit
was actually a prize cow is another matter.’
I’m
not sure what I think about this. For me, biographies
ought to reveal information of a deeply personal nature – why else
would I take the trouble to read them? I’m not interested in a glossy
skate across the surface of someone’s life; I am interested in trying to
put together the bits where the work came from in the first place - that
doesn’t mean that they have to be prurient. Recently, I read Hermione
Lee’s Biography A Very Short Introduction, published earlier this year, which looks at what literary
biographies do and how they work. She is fascinating on the ‘fear and
loathing’ that revelatory biographies can inspire in both the reader and
the subject. She cites Justin Kaplan, the American author of biographies
on Twain and Whitman amongst others, who maintained that ‘by current
standards, biographies without voyeuristic, erotic thrills are like
ballpark hot dogs without mustard.’ (he was referring specifically to
Kitty Kelley’s sensational 1991 book on Nancy Reagan – which he said was
‘essentially a drive-by shooting’) and Germaine Greer, who described
biographers of living writers as ‘the intellectual equivalents of
flesh-eating bacterium’.
To be incredibly topical; Tiger Woods’ statement
concerning the current media blitz he is engulfed in is a salutary
insight into what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a ‘drive-by
shooting’. It includes the following: ‘No matter how intense curiosity
about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at
stake which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy.
Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a
family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.’
The problem is, that in the celebrity-eating bacterium
age in which we live, personal sins do indeed seem to equal public
confessions. I have to admit that I am now more interested in Tiger
Woods than I was before he was involved in a ‘single vehicle car crash’
because he has inadvertently revealed himself to be a rather more
complex and sympathetic character. Since there is no such thing as a
neutral biographical narrative, what I long to read is a revelatory life
story written by considerate and compassionate author.
Whose voice is
it anyway? (December 2009)
Over the past few postings I’ve been thinking about the
different elements I’ve had to consider as I write my biography of the
woman who was briefly married to a ‘Screen Giant of Electric Intensity’
(New York Times); from
questions of identity to how much a biographer should reveal of
themselves. One aspect I haven’t written about – probably because I find
it the most troublesome – is the ‘voice’.
Recently, I read some interviews with ghost-writers who discussed
how they managed to locate the ‘voice’ of their ‘ghostee’ (as they call
them); Hunter Davies (Gazza - My Story; Wayne Rooney - My Story So Far;
Prezza - Pulling No Punches) described himself as
being a ‘ventriloquist, trying to capture the character
of a person, but it doesn't have to be their exact words, just words and
phrases and a style that accords with their received image.’
Another, Pepsy Dening (Fern, My
Story, by Fern Britton; Learning To Fly, by Victoria Beckham; Extreme,
My Autobiography, by Sharon Osbourne)
said, ‘A successful autobiography is one where the
"voice" is unique, the story fresh and the emotions true. Just setting
down what the subject chooses to tell me will never achieve that.
Clichés, banality, point-scoring and psychobabble are discarded. What is
retained is detail, quirkiness, feeling and truth’.
Although I can’t help thinking you’re halfway
there if you’re literally pretending to be someone else, there is
something in the fact that you can’t simply mimic or reproduce the
language of your subject and hope that it sounds authentic – because it
won’t – as anyone who’s ever typed up verbatim conversations between
people on buses will know. There has to be something between capturing
the ‘sound’ of someone – as you must in an autobiography – and the
‘essence’ of them as you ought to in a biography. One, which I think
beautifully portrays the fundamental nature of the person by finding the
appropriate means of telling their story, is Ian Hamilton’s
In Search of J D Salinger
written after Salinger famously sued Hamilton for unauthorised use of letters in the original biography. Undeterred by the fracas,
Hamilton wrote a new version which he described as telling
you ‘just as much about Salinger, in fact more, than the earlier, banned
version did.’
It did more than that -
it
raised key questions about the whole business of 'biography' - what
is it for? Why do we write it? Why do people want to read it?
Back to the voice; what Hamilton did was to find a new
way of interpreting the material which enabled the reader to gain a
different understanding. I have experimented with several voices during
the writing of my book until hitting upon one which seems the most
appropriate way of illuminating the remarkable, much maligned, woman I’m
writing about. In the end it was
her voice which opened the door: curious, unpredictable,
intelligent, savvy and absolutely clear about who she is – Anna Kashfi,
whose major claim to fame (or in her case infamy) is that she was
briefly married to Marlon Brando.
What Lies Beneath
(January 2010)
‘Researching, like writing, is an individual, creative
process.’ So says Ann Hoffman author of,
Research for Writers, one of
the best books on the process. In fact, I would argue that sometimes researching feels
more creative than writing –
if only because you are truly able to let your mind wander in whatever
direction the subject takes you without constraint. When you are
researching you are not bound by form or narrative, your responsibility
lies in uncovering layer upon layer of a subject until you are down to
the bare bones. The creative process begins in the aftermath of your
discoveries when you begin to interpret the material, to decide which
story you’re telling and how you will go about it. But before you even
arrive at the beginning of your adventure, something has to draw you in;
something has to make you commit to a virtual marriage with your
subject.
Owen Sheers wrote his first non-fiction narrative,
The Dust Diaries after finding
a book in his father’s study. This led him into an exploration of the
life of his great, great uncle Arthur Cripps – who happened to be both a
poet and a missionary in Southern Rhodesia. For me, two seemingly random
events collided several years apart. The first was when I discovered, by
chance, that my grandfather may have been Anglo-Indian. The second
happened when, while I was researching Welsh personalities for a
television documentary, I came across a story about an actress who
claimed to be Indian but was always referred to as having Welsh or Irish
parents. The story stayed with me while I researched other projects
including several documentaries on iconic singers - all of whom had
various complex and conflicting problems – but none of them concerned
identity. They all knew exactly who they were and where they had come
from.
When I finally got around to doing some serious
research on the ‘Welsh actress’, I began to realise it was the stories
in and around her life that were consuming me. The beauty of research is
that it enables you to ask questions obsessively:
‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘what
happened next’. Sometimes they are unanswerable and sometimes I was
unable to see what was in front of my face. But all of them led me to
what lies beneath the surface – the perils and pleasures of research
immersing me again and again in a life less ordinary than my own.
Uncovering
random pieces of extraordinary information is one of the best bits about
writing a biography – long after you’ve given up trying to weave them
into your narrative you remember them with the kind of fondness you have
for long lost childhood friends. My current favourite is discovering
that Myrna Loy, one of Hollywood’s most famous and highest paid stars in
the 1930’s was of Welsh descent. In an article first published in
Modern Screen entitled
The Truth about the Mysterious
Miss Loy, Grandmother Williams (Loy’s father’s mother) is held
responsible for that ‘Celtic something’ in Loy’s ‘calm, provocative
face’. Strange and haunting are
the tales told of Grandmother Williams, of her fascination and courage,
her Welsh wit and wisdom, the aura of mystery that always hovered over
her...
Cataloguing Lives
(February 2010)
When you’re famous and then you die, you could find
yourself in the potentially awkward and deeply invasive position of
having everything you own placed on public display, photographed,
labelled and valued in monetary terms. Each and every one of your
beloved and not so beloved possessions will then be sold to the highest
bidder. It might not be what you wanted, although chances are you’re
past caring, but for everyone else the opportunity to crawl through the
detritus of your life is invaluable. For writers I think there is
something wholly fascinating about discovering the details of other
people’s lives – and particularly which books people read. Think about
it. If you were to discover that an actor, or musician or someone whose
creativity you respected (I’m deliberately not including writers here as
it is unthinkable that they wouldn’t have a book collection) had a shelf
of books that added up to a Dan Brown, Ant and Dec’s autobiography (Ooh! What a Lovely Pair) and something called
My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle, all currently in Amazon’s top
ten so obviously sitting on someone’s shelves, I think you would be
disappointed.
On the other hand when you discover, as I did recently,
that a very famous film star’s library contained four hundred and twenty
four biographies and autobiographies (not to mention two hundred and
twenty nine books on politics and philosophy and three hundred and
thirty four books on self-help, health, psychoanalysis and psychology
amongst many others) many of them annotated by the man himself it’s both
inspiring and addictive. The items were in a Christie’s catalogue – a
tastefully produced paperback consisting of the contents of the film
star’s house at the time of death. So, what do the accumulated objects
of a lifetime tell us about the person? Graham Greene had James and
Conrad and Evelyn Waugh on his bookcase in a fairly anonymous apartment
on the French Riveria – are we surprised? Probably not. In Roald Dahl’s
writing hut in Great Missenden we can see that he wrote sitting in a
large armchair with a china pot of yellow pencils beside him – can we
imagine him conjuring up the world’s he invented? Sort of. Visiting the
houses in which writers lived and work is a popular leisure activity and
across Britain; we can walk where Dickens’s, Austen, Wordsworth and
Thomas once walked - these are the living catalogues. Rarely do we have
the opportunity afforded to Jay Parini, biographer of Robert Frost, who
lived in Frost’s house in Vermont for several summers and lay in the
claw-footed tub, imagining the writer in the same bath, listening to the
wind in the bushy hemlocks outside the bathroom window. But still, by
absorbing the artefacts of their lives whether it’s on-line, in person
or through the pages of a book we peek slyly (always uninvited by them)
into their private space and it’s illuminating.