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Private Lives Revealed: Letters, Diaries, History

Only What's Private Matters / David Marr

[David Marr]Biographers are in the Frankenstein business: we make human beings. We put them together out of odd bits and pieces, not salvaged body parts now but scraps of information. The more private these facts, the more likely this cadaver of words will, one day, if we fit all the pieces together, sit up on the slab and breathe.

We're driven to scavenge almost anywhere for what we need in the lab. We will talk to wives estranged; we'll talk to widows and jilted lovers; we'll talk to colleagues betrayed; we'll talk to servants, paid and unpaid; we will struggle with the fantasists and the Alzheimered to find what we want. Of course, we gather scraps of paper: address books, diaries and, above all, letters, any letters. Private letters are the ones that we trust most. I don't mean by that that they are necessarily true, that the sentiments they express are necessarily true, that even the facts they express are necessarily true, but it's in private rather than public letters that gold is most likely to be found.

Reading other peoples letters is not polite behaviour and can't be judged by the standards of Emily Post or even Lady Troubridge, if any of you know that remarkable guide to etiquette.[1]This business of biographers going through people's private papers is, I like to think, the professional organisation of that widely condemned, but almost universally practised, pursuit of gossip. We talk, now, a lot about the 'information economy' and I think it's a wonderful expression. I'd argue there is a black economy and an official economy in information: the official economy is history and biography, the black economy is gossip.

Gossip is a matter of ethics. I believe there is such a thing as ethical gossip; we call it 'good gossip' day to day. Good gossip is accurate. What gives gossip a bad name, I think, is not the betrayal of privacy so much as lies and inaccuracy. One definition, I think, of great biography is gossip we can trust. But biography, contemporary history and gossip are all doing the same thing: trading in privacy.

Privacy is itself a most mysterious thing. I am told—and I have deliberately done no research on this point because I'd hate to be told otherwise—I am told the Russians actually have no word for it, which is, if true, a further insight into the remarkable soul of Russia. No two people and no two races, no two religions, no two decades can agree on what actually is private.

To me one of the astonishing things about privacy—and I'd pursue this point further except it only came to me this afternoon—is how deeply 'private' we consider things about ourselves which are quite widely known, and how we think them hardly less private though we know they're known to just about everybody. Secret and private are not the same thing at all.

Often where it matters most we have to decide for ourselves what's private and what's public—and the boundary between the two is something a biographer has to map because it's one of the most defining things about us. As we read a biography we should be able to see where that line crosses the landscape of the life of Curzon or Warhol or Martin Boyd. It's not an iron curtain. As boundaries go it's much more like a Balkan mess: uncertain, mixed lines over which wars are fought. Occasionally it follows a mountain chain or a river but for the most part in our lives it's difficult and therefore interesting to trace.

A lot of the time the boundary of privacy is an index of shame and therefore vividly revealing of character and class and time and place. Let me give you an example of this. Garfield Barwick was by any standards a prolific correspondent. Now I'm glad, in fact, that I had no access to that correspondence; I would probably still be writing that life now and it would not have been worth my time. But that correspondence would have saved me from making mistakes.

I discovered in the course of researching his life that his parents for a good deal of the time lived apart. In fact, at one time in the electoral rolls they even had separate addresses: one up in the mountains and one down in the city. I was curious to find out about their marriage because of this. I knew that Barwick was devoted to his mother and I asked around—all I could do to find out what the situation was. I was met by curious evasion and I made a big mistake: I interpreted the addresses and that evasion to mean his parents were estranged and I wrote in the biography that his parents' marriage was unhappy. This was not the case—the latest edition notes this in a scholarly preface added by me.

In fact his mother had TB and in that time and in that class to admit to TB was a deeply shameful thing and the members of that family and friends of that family would not tell me the simple fact that Sir Garfield Barwick's mother had TB, which went on to explain why this most uncharitable of men served for so many years on the board of the Royal Price Alfred Hospital in Sydney: because it was in one of the hospital's sanatoria that his mother recovered fully from TB and lived to a great and extremely strong old age. Knowing that now absolutely clearly puts the Barwick family and the Ellicott family—to which they were intermingled—into their time and their class.

Another example, a less serious example, is that when Manoly Lascaris came to read the manuscript of the biography I wrote of Patrick White—it had by that time already gone to the publisher but Manoly was reading it—he begged me to remove a detail. The detail was this: that in 1918 when travel was again possible at the end of the First World War his mother, an American, left Egypt for America and his father, a Greek, left Egypt also for America. They left separately: his father with his Romanian mistress. Manoly said to me, 'Oh, David, do you think you could please remove the detail about the Romanian mistress?' I said, 'Manoly, it was 1918.' He said, 'Oh, David, it is still a matter of considerable pain in the family.' Now, as the detail was trivial and as I had come to love Manoly I cut that tiny reference.

If I were a philosopher, I would be able to give you some kind of principle, some calculus to guide us through the difficulties of what is private and may be published and what is private and can't be. If I were a philosopher you'd get your money's worth, but I'm afraid I'm not and I can only offer you this rough conclusion I've come to out of my own experience, that pain is the key to what can and can't be published. Writers of contemporary history and contemporary biography inflict pain. Any who deny this are lying, and any biographer of the contemporary, any historian of the contemporary who believes they can write without inflicting pain is a fool. You can't. If there were an absolute requirement that no pain be inflicted, we would be silenced.

Pain happens—and if there's the risk of pain our job is to ask if publication of this fact or that fact is worth it. That's not easy to judge. I've worked out a few guidelines for myself, but as I take you through them I should alert you to the fact that I can't be trusted. Deep down I want to publish everything.

When I grew up in the 1970s we used to say 'the personal is political'. It was a cliche but nevertheless it contained, as cliches usually do—because that's how they survive—an important truth, and it was a mark of a time where we believed that much of what was individually personal needed nevertheless to be discussed and examined in public.

In the last two decades there has been a gentle tide change on this question, not only in Australia but even more markedly in the United States where so many of these drifts of thought begin. In the 1970s scrutiny was respectable; in the 1990s privacy is regarded as decent in itself in a way survivors of the 1970s don't, I think, recognise and don't automatically respect.

Coyness, public and private, is on the rise—private coyness of course is with us always, especially in this vast country town that we call Australia. How much we should be persuaded by the pain of those who do not want even to be mentioned in print is a question that biographers must face. For me I face it quite squarely: I think that people must understand that one of the dangers of being alive on the planet is that they may one day be mentioned in print.

To cries of pain that are absolute bullshit I think we must be really strong in denial. When I was editing the book of Patrick White's letters, Harry Miller, first in person and then through increasingly hysterical lawyers' letters, argued to me that it was breach of his privacy to mention that he had aided and abetted the theft by his company, Computicket Pty Ltd, of large sums of money from the Australian Opera and others and that he had gone to gaol for this and that he had not, though he has since grown rich, ever repaid the money. This was necessary to footnote a letter of Patrick White's, which I take to be one of the most splendid letters in the book.

Harry, writing from prison, had said that he had seen the light, he understood that his past was in many ways shabby but that he was from this point a changed person and would Patrick and Manoly have lunch with him once he got out of prison. Patrick wrote back and roughly he said, 'Harry, good to get your letter. Good to hear that you've changed in this way but I do not understand why people do not expect you to make monetary reparations. When you have paid the money back I will have lunch with you.' I had good lawyers, my publishers were firm and those letters about Harry Miller went in.

A cry of pain is not the end of the matter. Many would say it should be, I argue that it's not. Take for instance the deposit of letters in the National Library by Cynthia Nolan, including the letters written to her and to Sid Nolan by Patrick White. As I understand it, Cynthia Nolan, who at the time was very unhappy, deposited the letters here on the condition they have a very long embargo—how long it is I don't know, but it's very long and I don't think I will actually live to see all that collection. But, by the intervention of Cynthia Nolan's daughter Jinx, I was able to see at least the letters of Patrick White.

Now, Cynthia Nolan had said that the letters she deposited contained revelations so astonishing that people would commit suicide if the letters ever saw the light of day in these people's lifetime. Now, I have not read them all, I have only read the letters of Patrick White. There is nothing to make anybody take a knife to themselves, let me assure you. There's nothing there to cause much distress at all. The claim of pain and the claim of privacy because of that pain, certainly in so far as the Patrick White letters go, was wrong.

This week there has been some publicity because letters by Henry Handel Richardson held in the Mitchell Library for 50 years have now been released. These letters were deposited by Olga Roncoroni who was Richardson's companion, friend, secretary and keeper of the flame after death. She deposited them with an extraordinary 50-year embargo to save the living from pain.

Now, I haven't read them—I've read only the press reports—but I know the Mitchell Library well enough to know that when the time came, the release would be attended with the most publicity: they would lead with the best of the letters, those laden with the dramatic indiscretions we've waited 50 years to read. But there was nothing, nothing worth waiting for.

The claims of pain from keepers of the flame have to be very very carefully monitored by historians and biographers. Let me give you an example. There is a phrase in a letter of Patrick White's which I had to argue extremely long and hard to have in that collection. It's not the time to talk about who the argument was with, but in the business of collecting letters of course you collect letters from all sorts of places and they come to you under all sorts of different obligations. This letter was written in 1939 or 1940, in the summer of that time, written in New York to a previous lover of Patrick's, Spud Johnson, who lived in New Mexico. Patrick wrote, 'That little G-string you presented me with last year is a great help in a New York heat wave. I wear nothing else about the house'.

Now, I was begged not to include that in the collection because, and I quote roughly from memory, 'Every journalist in the world will pluck it out and quote it. It will be headlines and it will be used to mock the memory of Patrick White.' I argued that that was unlikely to happen—and it has not happened—and I also argued that the memory of Patrick White could take it. And though I didn't say so, because this is a hard thing to say to people but it's true, you cannot inflict pain on the dead. Privacy and the need to guard privacy is a measure of actual pain to living people, it is a measure of hurt: people when they're dead don't hurt.

There's something else to remember about the pain of violated privacy—you get over it. I was going to do a big flourish at this point and read to you a passage from a novel published three or four years ago by Sacha Soldatow called Mayakovsky in Bondi. At the end of that extremely intimate passage I was going to reveal that it was about me and clearly about me and that it caused me great pain when it was published. Now you'll notice I haven't read the passage. I looked at it last night. It's still too painful to stand here and recite, but I have got over the pain of the publication—it helped, I suppose, that nobody faced me with what they learnt there—and Sacha and I are talking again.

If I were a lawyer I'd have issued threatening letters like a shot. Suspicion and professional mistrust would have been ground enough to begin a defamation action. The privacy of no class in Australia is as specially privileged as that of lawyers and their families, those who can, at minimum expense, work the immensely complex machine known as the libel laws. But I'm a civilian. I hate the libel laws. And, in any case, I'm, committed to the rights of artists to plunder the experience round them for their work—painful, of course, but that's how it's always been. Look at what Henry Handel Richardson did to her family and Patrick White did to his friends. They might not be grateful but we are.

The defamation laws are one of the reasons we're not absolutely free to deal with the living. There are also the bargains we strike in order to get hold of the material we wish to use. The most astonishing bargain I was ever asked to agree to was by the Methodist Library in Sydney while researching the life of Garfield Barwick. I had this bee in my bonnet to find the results of his Sunday school Scripture exams, and I did, and I discovered—this is perhaps a Methodist principle that I don't understand—in one of those exams he got a hundred per cent and came second—I think an experience that marked him for life.

Anyway, before I could have access to the materials in the Methodist Library I had to sign an undertaking that nothing I published as a result would ever 'embarrass' anyone. I signed the undertaking because I thought 'embarrass' a rather woolly concept ...

But the thing that most guards the privacy of those who assist us in a biography is the friendships we make with them. It's rather fashionable at the moment to say 'The biographer at work ... is like the professional burglar'. [2]Well, that's absolute nonsense. For the most part the problem is not what you can carry away in a sack late at night through a window, the problems are what you can publish because what you have learnt you have learnt from people who have become intimate friends.

I made no cuts in my Patrick White biography for Patrick White—he didn't ask for any; that's a measure of the scale of man he was, but Manoly asked me for some cuts and I did, for his sake, make half a dozen tiny little cuts to the text and a couple of changes to expressions. He said, 'David, if you put that in people will think I'm a name dropper.' Well, Manoly is a splendid name dropper—names from Egypt and Greece, from all kinds of places. But I did make a couple of little snips: they were for him because I had come to love him. And also because this book represented, in any case, a stupendous violation of the privacy of a very private man.

After all I've said about cries of pain that can be ignored or read down or pain that can be coped with in time, after all that, there are, I know, privacies too painful to justify publication now. But please don't ever burn the evidence. Put letters and diaries in an envelope, even give them to a library with a 50-year embargo. But you must understand that by doing that you risk making as big a fool of yourself as Olga Roncoroni looks this week because what you've suppressed for all of those years only turns out to prove that the subject you were seeking to protect was a human being and that of course is the purpose all along of this whole biographic enterprise.

So, here I am, one of the Drs Frankenstein—they are honorary doctorates, I think conferred by La Trobe—and before me are jars of body parts in formaldehyde and I have to decide what to use and what not to use, what to keep and what to reject. Well, what do I reject: nothing essential; what do I use: everything I need to bring this thing to life. This is not how we were brought up to behave. It is a breach of decent privacies, it inflicts pain, but all of that you will forgive me only, but at once, if that cadaver does sit up and breathe. Even against your will you'll find yourself on my side; you might even applaud.

Notes

  1. Laura Troubridge, The Book of Etiquette. Surrey: World's Work (1913) Ltd, 1926.
  2. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Australia: Picador, 1994, p. 9.

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