Loving or hating your subject

Allan Massie on Life & Letters

‘Reviewing two books about Hemingway in The Spectator (19 August 2006) Caroline Moorehead asked: ‘How far is it right for biographers to write about subjects they so patently dislike? Hemingway is portrayed as bullying, narcissistic, foul-tempered, slovenly and miserly.’ No doubt he was all these things, some of the time anyway, but the question remains a fair one. In his defence, the author of the book in which Hemingway is so portrayed, Stephen Koch, might argue that all these epithets might also be applied to the Hemingway depicted by his widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, and by his admiring friend or, in some people’s opinion, sidekick, A. E. Hotchner. The difference of course is that in their books we are also given the attractive, life-enhancing side of Hemingway’s character. If Hotchner’s Hemingway often seems boring and boorish, it’s also clear that till near the end Hotchner loved the company of his hero; and there is tragic pathos in his detailed account of Hemingway’s descent into depression and paranoia as he lurched, lost and bewildered, towards his suicide.

Doing a demolition job on the dead, especially the recently dead, may be profitable. It’s also usually unattractive. One of Graham Greene’s biographers, Michael Shelden, presented him, according to Piers Paul Read, as ‘a selfish shit and bogus Catholic’. Many who knew Greene, as his biographer didn’t, found the book repulsive. Shelden’s Greene wasn’t the man they had known. One might answer Caroline Moorehead’s question by saying that if you want to write a hostile biography, pick a subject who is still alive, and in a position to hit back. At least that takes rather more courage.

Things can be more complicated, however.