Wells of silence

Someone has gone to a lot of trouble choosing the jacket cover of Robert Hilburn’s authorised biography of Paul Simon (reproduced right). It is both flattering and enigmatic, which is entirely appropriate, given its contents. Half of Simon’s features are lost in a shadow cast across his face — again, entirely appropriate, as Simon wrestled with Hilburn for more than two years, determined to ensure his true self remain partly or wholly in the shadows.

One can’t help wondering why thesinger-songwriter even agreed to sit for what the jacket copy assures us was 100 hours of interviews; or, indeed, what happened to the other 99. For Simon’s voice barely rises above a whisper in a book apparently designed to counteract the impertinently unauthorised portrait painted by Peter Ames Carlin in his workmanlike Homeward Bound, published in 2016.

Hilburn — the Los Angeles Times’s chief pop critic for more than 30 years — has been obliged to write a biography of a 60-year career with one hand tied behind his back. The biographer’s job is to delve and to pry, to lift lids living artists would prefer stayed battened down. When Bob Dylan told a mutual friend he found my biography of him ‘too personal, too probing’, I couldn’t have been prouder. So when I heard that Hilburn, a writer I greatly admire and the author of a fine biography of Johnny Cash, was tackling the prickly Mr Simon, I was intrigued.

As with any deal with the devil, the devil is in the detail. As one of those annoying people who read the acknowledgments first, I immediately noted a gaping chasm: no Art Garfunkel. Given that Art needs money, it’s no great surprise that he was threatening to write his own memoir (and did), so would not talk.