Richard Bradford

Telling tales | 29 November 2018

‘It is quite something to have a biographer even more hostile and mendacious than the tabloid,’ Martin Amis told me

Germaine Greer described biographers as ‘vultures’. I prefer to think of myself as a version of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade: vultures hunt by instinct but the two private investigators went after secrets with deliberate foolhardy masochism.

It’s human nature to want to know more about the writers we admire — but what you discover isn’t always pleasant.

Most recently, I completed a life of Ernest Hemingway. It was a joy to write mainly because after reading thousands of unpublished letters I felt relieved at having been spared an encounter with the living ‘Papa’. I knew of his reputation as a fibber but I was astonished to find that from his teens onwards he was pathologically incapable of distinguishing fantasy from truth. He entertained friends and family, wives included, with stories of his heroics as a member of the crack Italian regiment the Arditi on the Austrian front at the close of the first world war. He’d volunteered for frontline service after his horrible injuries while serving with the American Red Cross; despite having one leg almost shredded by machine-gun bullets he’d rescued several injured Italian infantrymen. For this act of gallantry he had been presented with the nation’s highest military honour, in the main square in Milan, by a member of the Italian royal family. He had made much of it up and he continued to embellish the fables for decades. Other biographers had treated his inclination to lie as something that affected Hemingway just a little more than it does the rest of us, and they did their best to sideline it. Aside from this he was above average in terms of anti-Semitism, arbitrary vindictiveness, egomania, racism and misogyny.

Time spent in the company of dead literary heroes is often a bracing business.

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