Authors, claims Alan Bennett in his latest section of the enthralling landscape of his life, can feel threatened by their biographers, be they official ones or unofficial - and maybe rightly so, it is tempting to add.
As attitudes to biography change, and modern biographies tend to grow longer and longer, the need for such outsize books - just look at the size of some of them - seems conspicuously to lessen, their existence increasingly a matter of self-indulgence on the part of the biographer and publisher. Who is reading them and why? What makes them seem threatening? Somerset Maugham famously said that modern authors led dull lives, unworthy of biography, and he sternly resisted the idea of a biographer writing a book about him book about him.
So when a distinguished living author responds to his official biographer, as John Le Carre has just done, by writing an answer in the form of a witty and artfully structured autobiography, you begin to wonder what is going on.
Has he been taking humorous revenge on his widely admired but clearly serious official biographer, who was commissioned to write a substantial book about him to which he himself presumably gave his blessing? Did he secretly dislike the finished product?
Being an alert and long established novelist, and as a one-time British spy, Le Carre has more than once proved prickly, but whether his biographer has displeased him in some way is hard to say. I have refrained from reading the official biography because it has not grabbed my attention strongly enough. There are other books I have been more eager to read recently than this one, including Le Carre’s own very funny and enjoyable response to it.
As a music critic, however, I remain on the fringe of the debate. Music critics are seldom themselves the subject of official biographies and never has one been written, or likely to be written, about me. In such a situation I am a bystander seeking a message. Do I get it from Alan Bennett in his admirable new diary? Entitled Keeping On Keeping On, this is certainly something I can recommend, which does not shrink its responsibilities.
As a music critic, it is true, I have responsibilities of my own. What about these? I do not give interviews. Biographers do not write about me. Once, having a drink with a Glasgow magazine editor, I found myself chatting to him about my critical philosophy, taking my customary care to be guarded. But not guarded enough. A month or so later a printed interview appeared in the magazine in which not a word was accurate.
“Silly ass” I said to myself, to have let this happen to me. “Should I I have expected otherwise?” But, though it was a long time ago, and was no more than a minor irritation which cost me an hour of my time it only cost me a tiny prick of annoyance and an hour of my time, I took pains to ensure it did not happen again.
When the same happens to a celebrity like Alan Bennett, who gives interviews frequently, there are various ways he can deal with it, as he does in his latest diary, in broadcasts, in books and plays and sermons, or simply by clenching his jaws to modify its effect on him.
“Modifying the effect” is perhaps not a bad way of describing it, whether it is political, as it is quite likely to be, or quietly despairing. Though he can be repetitious, which irks some of his readers, I do not find this bothers me greatly. We are all repetitious in our own ways and Bennett’s repartee, even if familiar, can be something to savour.
So I don’t count it against his new book that he sometimes seems to lay himself open. When Edward Heath, on the other hand, wrote his musical memoirs some years ago, I can remember an altercation in which, in my review,I accused him of telling the same anecdote twice in the same book. He was clearly displeased, though I am not sure with whom, when he found out and reacted instantly, demanding that his publisher remove the offensive repetition. The publisher wrote to me and The Scotsman about sorting it out. Where exactly had the mishap happened? I scanned the book and drew a blank.
Realisation slowly dawned. The repetition was not there. Were Heath’s anecdotes so dull that I imagined I had read this one twice? Would I find it somewhere i a different book? Was he accusing me of falsehood? Had I been careless in my reviewing of the irascible prime minister?
I never discovered. He never wrote to me personally. Maybe he was too busy. Maybe he found his answer. But it was a reason to remember that references need to be checked. It just seemed a pity that it had to be Edward Heath. Music critics have to be wary.
What might Alan Bennett have done? Though I do not think he knows much about music - a common failing among authors - the question has not reduced my liking for his admirable new book.
11 November 2016
