Authorized Biographies Are for Chumps, Anyway

As readers who get around the bookblogs know already, Ronald Suresh Roberts has run afoul of Nadine Gordimer for certain passages in No Cold Kitchen, an "authorized biography" which UK and US publishers are now declining to publish since she's withdrawn her approval. He told the Johannesburg Sunday Times he thinks it's because he wrote she should be more pro-Palestinian.

Shaun de Waal makes a good case for understanding Gordimer's rejection of the book in context, rather than jumping to the "censorship" conclusion straight away. Gordimer's friends are also putting in their two cents' worth and, frankly, the more Roberts opens his mouth, the more he sounds to me like a petulant crybaby looking for attention. It's interesting in that regard that Jonathan Galassi at FSG should frame that house's rejection of the bio by citing "the meandering quality of the narrative and the author's gratuitous insertion of himself into it."

Now, I'll freely admit that I haven't read No Cold Kitchen, but I have read a couple celebrity biographies recently that were marred by the biographer's gratuitous presence in the narrative. Personally, when I read about someone's life, I don't necessarily care about the subjective opinion the biographer has of his or her work, especially when I find it perversely wrongheaded. Nor do I care to be reminded that the biographer is running around interviewing everybody he can find, or rummaging through all the archives, through constructions like "so-and-so said to me." Unless, of course, the biographer can do these things in an interesting way. But not everybody can write The Quest for Corvo or Shelley: The Pursuit, and quite a few people should stop trying.