A Little Candour Is A Dangerous Thing

It takes a confirmed optimist to expect more than just the polite truth from biographical or autobiographical accounts written by Indians. The ones that aren't outright sanitised versions tend to retreat into discretion at just the point where the reader might want valour, as with Shobha De's otherwise entertaining but accurately titled Selective Memory some years back. And even those intrepid souls who decide to tell (almost) all end up merely settling scores rather than shedding a great deal of light on their lives or those of their subjects.

In the West, where autobiographical or biographical candour is practically a requirement, the going isn't necessarily smoother. The problems here are caused by excess rather than restraint, with subjects who are under pressure to either tell the stories of their lives or have it told for them, where issues of privacy rise from time to time even between old friends. Somewhere, there has to be a middle path between the Occidental and the Oriental biography, but as these examples will illustrate, it's not going to be easy to find.

 

The biggest problem any writer in these genres faces is the question of how much to tell. I find it both touching and revealing that so many members of the Delhi social scene are hoping that M F Husain will mention them in his forthcoming autobiography. It has clearly not occurred to these fellow artists, former female muses or sundry hangers-ons that if Husain chose to be completely honest about their role in his life, the consequences might be unpleasant for some.

Not that honesty is always the best policy, when it comes to telling the truth about other people's lives. Recently, Saul Bellow has been in the news for outing American thinker Allan Bloom in a roman a clef, Ravelstein that is part-memorial, part-tribute. Ravelstein is a warmly affectionate and semi-fictionalised account of the longstanding Bellow-Bloom friendship that also touches on Bloom's apparent homosexuality. (Bellow, in case you're wondering, is a staunchly hetero survivor of four marriages.)

Though Ravelstein is about far more than Bloom's sexual identity, many of the academician's friends object to Bellow revealing facts about his life that Bloom himself insisted were strictly private domain. It's a fine line to draw, since none of Bellow's critics object to his fictionalisation of other characters, or indeed to the basic fictionalisation of Bloom himself. The issue here is simply the unwarranted invasion of privacy. And, perhaps, Bellow should have been more discreet _ though his fictionalisation is far warmer and kinder, he's been the target of the same literary technique himself. Philip Roth was the perpetrator, cariacaturing Bellow in The Ghost Writer as a successful author who lived in the "egosphere".

Unlike Bellow and several other writers, detective fiction diva P D James has sidestepped the pitfalls and occasional tedium of the tell-all approach with a fairly unusual semi-autobiography. Time to Be In Earnest is the moderately entertaining account of one year in her life, allowing ample scope for musings on the past. It's a neat, if restrictive solution: I don't see anyone other than diehard James fans enjoying Time to be In Earnest.

The fact that an autobiography of sorts exists, however, may not prevent a determined biographer from persevering with an account of her chosen subject's life, as another writer has discovered to her cost. Doris Lessing has sniped waspishly, but with some reason, at a biographer who assumed that the author would be delighted to co-operate in what Lessing saw as an intrusion on her time, her space and her peace of mind. Lessing refused firmly, pointing out that since she'd already written an autobiographical account, she believed she'd said as much about her life as she intended to. The biographer continued undaunted, and has come up with a version of Lessing's life that differs sharply from the facts. It's a no-win situation for the author.

Not that you need to be a biographer in order to perform reality distortions. One of my prime contenders in this category hails from Indian shores.

In Ipsita Roy-Chakravarti's autobiographical Beloved Witch, the lady cheerfully suggests that her husband comes from royalstock, being the illegitimate offspring of a king and a commoner who was discreetly handed over to a foster family. This piece of news has caused a great deal of suppressed amusement among people who knew her husband's family in Orissa. Of course, they are now at liberty to wonder whether the strong physical resemblance the beloved witch's husband bears to his "foster" mother, father and brothers is merely a consequence of dastardly plastic surgery carried out by the king's minions in order to further obscure his identity!