“Gordimer bans book”, yelled the Sunday Times posters, misrepresenting the article itself, as well as Nadine Gordimer’s actions. Gordimer is not a government — she cannot “ban” something; block it, yes, as she has done by withdrawing authorisation of her biography by Ronald Suresh Roberts (or, perhaps more precisely, she diverted it). He was contracted by her own publishers to write an “authorised biography”, and Suresh Roberts has spent the best part of the last decade on it. Now it is no longer “authorised”, and thus the contract has been cancelled.
It is nonsensical, too, to accuse her of “censorship” and, by implication, of hypocrisy based on her long, courageous advocacy of “freedom of expression”. The necessary democratic freedom to express critical views of the ruling party, say, is one thing (and Suresh Roberts, who is close to government figures such as Kader Asmal, has been a highly argumentative apologist for that party in many articles and letters to newspapers). The right to say what you like about the private life of an individual is another thing entirely. That’s why we have defamation laws along with freedom of expression.
In the case of Gordimer versus Suresh Roberts, it is simply a matter of a contract between two individuals. The Sunday Times article quotes Gordimer as objecting to inaccuracies and untruths, and it is clear that she is well within her contractual rights to refuse the biography her stamp of approval, for any reason whatsoever.
Suresh Roberts, on the other hand, has every right to publish it elsewhere, and has arranged to do so. He has already acceded to some changes requested by Gordimer, and has by no means been banned in the way the apartheid state banned Gordimer’s novels. She has not revoked permission to make use of her writings — as the TS Eliot estate did while Peter Ackroyd was writing about his life, leaving Ackroyd the unenviable task of writing a biography of a writer without being able to quote him.
What, then, has Gordimer withdrawn? What does the abstract concept of “authorisation” mean? While it puns on “author” itself, as the word indicates it is a matter of authority: an “authorised” biographer has privileged access to material provided by the subject or his or her estate. It is presumed that the biographer will be sensitive and just in his or her use of such material, and it would seem that Suresh Roberts had unique access to diaries, letters and other documents of Gordimer’s in the construction of his biography.
What an extraordinary amount of trust that must entail. It’s rather like giving someone power of attorney. The authority that resides in the subject’s own lived life and the documentation thereof is the authority of history, of first-hand experience, of the personal archive. It is the guarantor of authenticity. This authority is handed over, given in trust as it were, to the biographer. An authorised biography is, in some ways, the power to write an autobiography by proxy.
Like many subjects of biographies in the past, Gordimer must be regretting that she handed over such power — that she trusted Suresh Roberts. In such a trust necessarily lies the possibility of betrayal, and it is hard to believe that a writer of Gordimer’s sensitivity or one of Suresh Roberts’s gimlet keenness can have failed to imagine that possibility, perhaps even its inevitability.
Graham Greene, a writer almost preternaturally attuned to the whiff of betrayal, made sure that the authority he handed to his authorised biographer, Norman Sherry, was more of a burden than a boon. He asked that Sherry retrace his every step around the globe, for instance, and pointed to masses of documentation concerning himself, thus ensuring that it would take an exhausted Sherry decades to complete the three-volume work — and that its final instalments would appear long after Greene’s death. (It took him 14 years to finish volume one.) Sherry has discovered to his cost that a life can be far too full and multifarious to be encompassed in one book, or even three.
In the meantime though, while Sherry tramped across the globe and followed all sorts of obscure trails in Greene’s complex, secretive life, it was possible for Michael Shelden (who, interestingly, wrote the authorised biography of George Orwell) to whip up and release a hostile, highly selective one-volume biography that painted Greene in the worst possible light. So perhaps Greene over-played his hand. At any rate, for the biographer it is easier to take an angle and stick to it than it is to deal with real complexity.
The relationship between biographer and subject can be very complex indeed, even when the subject is dead. In the course of researching Laurens van der Post’s life, JDF Jones discovered much that entirely changed the picture we had of Van der Post, now seen to have been something of a charlatan. Or there is the case of Roger Lewis, who undertook to write the biography of Anthony Burgess, then found that the more he learned about Burgess the less he liked and admired him. The resulting tome is an absurd whirligig of hatred, as Lewis over-interprets the slightest word or gesture of Burgess’s to prove what a foul character he was. In the end one finds oneself thoroughly detesting the bilious Lewis and feeling that from such a weird caricature the real Burgess, whoever or whatever he was, has probably escaped. Even if Burgess lied or distorted in his autobiographies, as Lewis claims he did, his voice on the page is its own truth.
Despite some short pieces, Gordimer has previously declined to interest herself in writing a full autobiography. “Nothing,” she has famously said, “is as true as my fiction.” Which is to provoke an argument about the nature of truth — whether it lies in the big picture or in the details; whether it is a matter of intellectual perception or emotional and imaginative empathy. Truth is at least multiple rather than singular.
It would be a foolish biographer indeed who did not admit that a certain amount of fiction (of post-facto reconstruction, of retrospective narrative- making) must enter into the business of recounting and explaining someone’s life. Even indisputable facts can be made to indicate one thing or something different, depending on presentation and interpretation. (If many novels, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, were fake biographies, it is possible to see biographies as fake novels.) Above all, if a biography is to be successful, the chaos of the life must be shaped in the telling: a story must be told that shows why this person’s life is exemplary in some way.
That is the biographer’s contract with the reader, his or her promise of an edifying text. And, again, it is not so different from the kind of fictions Gordimer herself has written: to narrate South Africa’s peculiar problems from the 1940s to the present, she had to construct fictional individuals who were exemplars of a social group, an ideological strain, a particular class, a political dilemma or who just stood for an abstract notion such as struggle or freedom. That is the way such “realist” fiction works, and why it gives readers a strong sense of a believable encounter with the larger truths of a situation. It works best when the characters’ symbolic roles are given the texture of personal detail and even inner contradiction, which is something that Gordimer’s fiction excels at.
And Gordimer herself, insofar as she is a public figure who has espoused certain causes, fulfils this exemplary role. She provides, in herself, an “examined life” lived during an extraordinary historical era. Her own examination of that life has taken the form of fiction, an imaginative transmutation of experience, placed against an accurate rendition of historical events — though she gives considerable play to ambivalence and contradiction. The biographer’s business is to convert the stuff of imagination back into what appears to be its factual constituents, and the result may be more or less interesting than the “true” fiction. (Nowadays we seem to be more interested in alleged facts than authentic imaginings.)
At the same time, though, the biographer must turn the subject into a character, a figure who is both larger and smaller than life. A character is a fictional conjuration as well as, more colloquially, someone around whom a certain partial but compelling piece of narrative has coagulated — a person reduced to their role in an often farcical drama, like Gordimer’s character Van As in her story The Last Kiss. The old man, once a small-town mayor, is accused in gales of gossip and salacious newspaper headlines of kissing a schoolgirl on a train. “When people become characters,” Gordimer writes of the way Van As is now perceived, “they cease to be regarded as human.”
Yet the end of the story contains an odd vision of old Van As reclaiming his humanity, symbolically and almost despite himself: “It was as if the town’s only statue, a shabby thing of an obscure general on a horse, standing in a dusty park and scrawled over by urchins, were to have been observed, bleeding.”
It is good to be reminded, at least, that the national monument that Gordimer has become is in fact human, and it is to be hoped that Suresh Roberts’s biography treats that humanity in its full breadth, with all its cross-currents. It would be a great disappointment (to Gordimer too, I’m sure) if it merely polishes her plinth.