A couple of years ago the taste in publishing was for the self-lacerating memoir. Many writers set out to put the raw facts about their lives on the page. Now the game has moved on to memoirs by relatives, friends, former lovers – people with secrets that the subjects of those memoirs might have preferred to keep hidden – and the battle lines are being drawn over whether such ”truth-telling” is legitimate.
The recent furore over the film Hilary and Jackie, the tragic story of the celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pr, has focused the debate about what is permissible. It is based on the book, A Genius in the Family, by Jacqueline’s siblings, Hilary and Piers, which revealed intimate family details that some critics thought should never have been made public, in particular the affair between Jacqueline and Hilary’s husband, Christopher ”Kiffer” Finzi.
Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline’s former husband, has maintained an angry distance from the Du Prs’ version of events and refused to allow recordings on which he holds copyright to be used in the film. ”Couldn’t they have waited until I am dead?” he said when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival. ”A private life is private.”
A Genius in the Family begins with a disclaimer: ”These are our memories. This book is not a biography nor an account of Jackie’s career. It is simply what happened. We offer … the story of our family, from within.”
Barenboim’s equally simplistic formulation – ”A private life is private” – has been given support by John Updike, who in the New York Review of Books condemns what he christens ”Judas biographies”. He is thinking primarily of the rash of lid- lifting memoirs of writers in the past few months – notably Paul Theroux on VS Naipaul, Claire Bloom on Philip Roth, Joyce Maynard on JD Salinger, Lillian Ross on New Yorker editor William Shawn and Rosemary Mahoney on Lillian Hellman.
Updike is worried about who might be sifting through the contents of his own trash can. ”I don’t want somebody … disturbing my children, quizzing my ex-wife, bugging my present wife, seeking for Judases among my friends … and getting everything slightly wrong.” Like Barenboim, he appears to accept that after death he is fair game; but that doesn’t appear to have reduced the intensity of the argument over Du Pr.
Most of the books singled out by Updike are reckoned to be born of malice. Betrayal, revenge, score-settling and character assassination are the order of the day, creating a new type of writing that Judith Shulevitz, an editor at the online magazine Slate, calls ”spiterature”.
Theroux’s grisly but fascinating Sir Vidia’s Shadow, in which he marked the painful end of 32 years of friendship with VS Naipaul by cataloguing the older man’s faults, certainly falls into that category. The rift between them opened up when Naipaul remarried and his wife sold off first-edition Theroux novels that Theroux had given to his former mentor. Theroux received a rude reply to the fax he sent asking why his gifts were for sale. Theroux fought back with an elegant literary hatchet job.
Two eerily similar books about love gone sour, Mia Farrow’s What Falls Away and Claire Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House, veer suddenly from celebrity gush into sustained, venomous attack. Farrow takes aim at Woody Allen, accusing him of molesting their adopted children. Bloom’s bte noire is her ex-husband, Philip Roth, in her eyes a mean, paranoid philanderer. There is no mistaking these for friendly books, andno attempt has been made to prettify the assault.
Some of the other titles pinpointed by Updike are less openly aggressive, but still well spiced with nastiness. Rosemary Mahoney’s A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman is the revenge of the hired help – Mahoney was the late Hellman’s housekeeper for a season. Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World reveals the intimate details of her affair with the reclusive JD Salinger. Maynard claims that she never stopped loving Salinger, yet presents him as a dirty old man who seduces young girls.
Then there is Margaret Cook’s A Slight and Delicate Creature, which leaves no stone unhurled in its pursuit of her former husband. This is a spouse’s revenge at an operatic pitch, with Margaret painting Robin as a foreign secretary with an intense interest in sex, not to mention his careerism, drunkenness and impotence. Oddly, though this expos is perhaps the most brutal of all, it has generated the least controversy. Her right to expose the most intimate facts of her marriage has not been questioned. Perhaps it is reasoned that one betrayal deserves another: he dumped her, so why shouldn’t she dump on him?
So which contention should we support: ”A private life is private”, or ”It is simply what happened”? Their privacy may have been compromised, but we now know a little more about Salinger, Roth and Naipaul; we may not like what we have discovered and we distrust the motives of the memoirists, but sometimes vengeance can be the servant of truth. We have, in the case of Robin Cook, a portrait of a disintegrating marriage rather than a picture of a man. As for Du Pr, we have a tragic story of an extraordinary talent and a fight for the right to tell the ”truth” about Jackie.
Updike calls the writers of such books Judases, and hopes to avoid their kiss. But if Updike’s trash can was raided, if we were offered the chance to look beyond that polished exterior, would we resist it? Is there perhaps a touch of the Judas in all of us?