Propaganda Biography Essay, Research Paper

Propaganda biographyThe news that Sheila Hancock, the widow of John Thaw (Inspector Morse, Kavanagh QC), is being offered a telephone number advance to write her late husband’s biography, is less astounding than her reported reason for wanting to undertake the work.Apparently, it is not the money but the desire to put the record straight that’s persuaded Ms Hancock to propose setting pen to paper. An unofficial life, John Thaw – the Biography, published three years ago by André Deutsch, is said to be so offensive to his memory that Ms Hancock, while not wanting to write what she calls ‘a luvvie biography’, feels that her work will ‘correct the tone’. No one wants to intrude on Ms Hancock’s private grief, but the news that this project has exhilarated the corporate chequebooks of HarperCollins, Macmillan, Transworld and Random House compels this column to wonder aloud at the lunatic delirium that occasionally afflicts the book business in its increasingly desperate quest for profits.I’ll come to the long-term implications in a moment, but there is a short-term commercial explanation for this fever. Big publishers need big books. They like to pretend otherwise, but the truth is that without a hardback bestseller renewing and invigorating the corpuscles of the corporate physique they are in danger of becoming extinct.Nothing is bigger than the celebrity biography, and celebrity wives writing about celebrity husbands is now about as big as you can get. Last year’s bestselling sensation (reviewed below) was Pamela Stephenson’s biography of her comedian husband, Billy Connolly. In such a climate, what Sheila Hancock is offering, an affectionate portrait of a much-loved TV star, is not merely an invitation to print money but also the opportunity to cart barrowloads of the stuff in broad daylight back to HQ.Where will it end? Are approaches already being made to Victoria Beckham for Posh on Becks? Can we expect Mrs Jamie Oliver’s account of living with the ‘naked chef’ or Charles Saatchi’s touching memoir of kitchen suppers with Nigella? Is someone going to commission Lady Runcie to ‘correct the tone’ of Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of the late archbishop? Will the family of Laurens van der Post hire some hack to airbrush the awkward and highly embarrassing truths about Prince Charles’s favourite guru? Quite quickly, the unintended logic of Sheila Hancock’s proposal takes us into the world of the twentieth-century thought police.Leaving aside the gruesome spectacle of good and sensible publishers turning themselves into the merchants of trash (nothing new there, actually), there is the larger point that writing a biography ‘to set the record straight’ is precisely not what the genre is about. The biographer has only one responsibility and that’s to serve the reader. His or her obligations are not to the family, the widow or the estate. A good biography should be as complete a dissection of what made a particular individual tick as possible.Samuel Johnson famously said that you couldn’t write someone’s life unless you had eaten and drunk ‘and lived in social intercourse’ with your subject (there, at least, Ms Hancock is well-qualified) with the firm implication that a life should not on any account be a panegyric, but should reflect the personality in all its messy, and even embarrassing, inconsistency.More, ’setting the record straight’ is precisely not what the readers of such books expect. It’s impossible to know for sure, but biographies are bought out of a simple, and quite vulgar curiosity – curiosity about other people’s lives, curiosity about the creative or the political or the domestic texture of a life in which we happen to have an interest.In other words, biographies arise out of that profoundly human instinct for gossip, for peeping through keyholes, for reading the carelessly open diary, for eavesdropping.The reading public does not like to spend its money on propaganda. It can certainly fall for something sentimental, but even sentiment must carry a whiff of authenticity. That, in fact, is why Billy has been such a hit. True to form, Connolly allowed himself to be painted, warts and all. Of course, there was an element of contrivance to that, but his wife left her bucket of whitewash at home.If the purpose of Ms Hancock’s life of John Thaw is to ‘correct the tone’ of previous versions, I can see the public, who loved John Thaw for the sense he conveyed of a man with an interesting past, staying away in droves.Then, with a bit of luck, Random House or Transworld or HarperCollins (or whosoever emerges from the current ‘bidding war’ with the right to market this property) will catch the cold of a lifetime, lose a corporate shirt or two and learn the error of their ways.

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