This is persecution," says one of the characters in Alan Bennett's play, Kafka's Dick. "No it's not. It's biography," replies her husband.
Bennett is right. Biographies have become a strange kind of modern persecution. Who has emerged unscathed from the recent wave? Eric Gill, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Dennis Potter and now Arthur Koestler have all had their reputations damaged, perhaps irreparably, by their biographers.
This is how we like our biographies now. As Bennett's character says: "Fame is a continuing offence. It leaves you open to trial at any time." Put this new wave of biographies together with television series such as BBC2's Reputations and Channel 4's Secret Lives and you sense a culture impatient with hagiography-or indeed the idea of heroes or great people at all.
But there is something else going on here. Take the new biographies of Potter and Koestler. Both attracted a flood of comment, but not because of any new consideration of the work. No one read Humphrey Carpenter's book on Potter and then re-evaluated his plays or his standing as a writer. Similarly, none of the articles about David Cesarani's account of Koestler paused to think about Koestler's achievements. What people wanted to read about, and certainly what journalists wanted to write about, was sex. How many young actresses did Potter sleep with? Whom did Koestler rape ?
When the Daily Telegraph serialised the Koestler biography, the articles were subtitled "Koestler and his Women." The first was called "The rape of Jill Craigie," and the second "Abortion and Elizabeth Jane Howard." Little wonder that Michael Ignatieff's excellent biography of Isaiah Berlin was never serialised. A sleepless night talking with Anna Akhmatova is hardly bodice-ripping stuff.
This has little to do with the biographies themselves. Both the Koestler and Berlin books are long, serious pieces of work. It is not the biographers who are trivialising their subjects; it is us, the readers, who want the sex and gossip. We read a biography of the author of Darkness at Noon as if it's Hello magazine. The Telegraph began its serialisation: "Arthur Koestler was a cultural beacon in the post-1945 world. Along with Sartre, Camus and Orwell he helped to shape the ideas of today." There follow a few more paragraphs of similarly pious stuff: "search for meaning, identity and belonging.... Zionism, communism, anti-communism, science..." But then the pretence is dropped: "love and lust, seduction and violence," "the wives Koestler betrayed," Koestler in a hairnet...
The Telegraph pieces provoked a wave of interest but not a single article about the importance of Koestler's anti-communism. Nothing about Zionism versus assimilation. No one made the connection between the biographies of Koestler and Berlin, two east European Jewish ?migr? intellectuals with passionate views about Stalinism and Jewishness. Instead, we got "Koestler's forgiving women."
What is most striking about this is the sexualisation of our culture. Our culture is obsessed with sex. Politics on both sides of the Atlantic are about sexual scandal: Clinton, Huffington, Ron Davies. The fascination with Diana and now, again, Charles; the endless articles about Viagra, all provide opportunities for discussing sex as scandal, as medical problem, but, above all, as the subject of our culture.
Nothing is safe. In mid-October the Sunday Times ran a front page story: "Sex and Nazi death camp book earns fortune for Oxford don." The article goes on to say that the historian Niall Ferguson "is writing a book that explores the subject of sex in Nazi concentration camps" and has "clinched a record ?600,000 advance for three books." Of the books which Ferguson has signed up to write, the one which caught the attention of the Sunday Times is Ethnicity and Sexuality.
The late 20th century, at least in the west, considers itself to be sexually liberated. No more repression and inhibition. But there is another way of looking at this freedom. Haven't we discovered that there is actually something rather enslaving and unfree about the obsession with sex that liberation seems to have released?
One definition of pornography is not just that it is about sexuality or portrays sex. Rather, it reduces everything to sex. The sad readers' letters to porn magazines or the writings of De Sade have this in common: they have no room for anything but sex. In our culture it is not only Hollywood starlets and television celebrities who become part of the "sexual fix." Now it is writers and intellectuals, once- serious newspapers, and prisoners in death camps.
What the response to these new biographies or to Ferguson's book deal suggests is not just that our society is becoming more trivial, debunking or even concerned with sex. It suggests that we are living in a pornographic culture in which thinking about sex displaces other kinds of thinking. If our culture were an individual you would recommend psychiatric treatment. But what kind of treatment can you recommend for a culture?
