A singularly plural life

If nothing else, this biography has to be a candidate for the Title of the Year prize. The fact that it’s about Willie Donaldson gives it a good shout, too, at Subject of the Year.

Just amble through the CV: feckless squanderer of inherited shipping fortune; impresario of Beyond the Fringe; ponce (though he was frequently and, he felt inaccurately, described as a pimp); submariner; author of the Henry Root Letters; lover of Carly Simon and Sarah Miles; unsuccessful glass-bottomed boat entrepreneur; geriatric crack-fiend; self-confessed pervert; corrupter of innocence; balletomane; Old Wykehamist.

‘Disgraceful’ he frequently was. The tone of Terence Blacker’s book — somewhat too personal and too partisan to be a proper biography, yet more than a memoir — is captured by the way that word is used in the title. Blacker approaches Donaldson — a friend and collaborator for many years — as many seem to have done: the vocabulary is of disapproval but the effect is of congratulation.

There’s room for both. Donaldson was a brilliantly gifted comic writer, and a man who lived his life with an indifference to received opinion that, Blacker suggests, adds up to some sort of existential heroism. From another angle, though, he was a selfish shit: a man in perpetual flight from responsibility. He lived in several social worlds, and several moral worlds, at once. His was a singularly plural life.

As a memoirist, Donaldson was alternately self-excoriating and self-exonerating, and the holes and contradictions in his story are considerable. Blacker has patched some; others (as he admits) gape. As Donaldson put it, ‘I’ve always taken it as axiomatic that the truth should never be allowed to stand in the way of a huge, life-enhancing joke.’

Donaldson’s story lurches from triumph to disaster — he recognises both as imposters, but tends to greet the second as an old friend.