De-authorising a Biography: Suresh Roberts versus Gordimer.

Lenta, Margaret

Abstract

After authorising Ronald Suresh Roberts to write her biography and giving him access to her papers in order to do so, Nadine Gordimer changed her mind and withdrew the authorisation, apparently because he refused to make the changes for which she asked. The South African press made the most of this quarrel, and Gordimer was accused of refusing to allow Suresh Roberts the freedom of speech which she has always claimed for herself. Her de-authorisation caused the London and New York publishers who had agreed to bring out the book to withdraw. When, more than a year later, the book appeared, Gordimer claimed that it contained further changes and breaches of confidence. It is in fact a biography in which the biographer's own opinions and interests are always preferred to those of his subject, and I am concerned to ask what role this biographer plays in the work and what is the effect of his strong and opinionated presence within it.

 Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself on the subject of
 Shakespeare, or Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe--subjects that offer
 me a beautiful opportunity. (Anatole France, "The Adventures of the
 Soul")

The term 'authorised biography' usually implies that the biographer has been granted access to the papers, family and intimate friends of the biographical subject, and in the case of a living subject, to his or her interpretations and memories. Such a work may be written either during the life of its subject or after his or her death. Whether or not it implies an endorsement by the subject or her heirs of the biographer's opinions and judgments within the work is less certain and may presumably be a point of negotiation. Matters seen as discreditable or private may be withdrawn from the archive which is made accessible to the biographer, and there may be a contract, explicit or implicit, between the biographical subject or her heirs and the biographer relating to the degree of control retained by each over the final version of the biography. This contract, however, may be altered, or one or the other may wish to alter it, in the process of research and writing which precedes publication.

This, it seems, is what occurred in the case of Ronald Suresh Roberts's biography of Nadine Gordimer, No Cold Kitchen (2005), as is made clear by newspaper reports in the period in which it appeared. Gordimer, who had authorised Roberts's project to the extent of allowing him access to her correspondence and other private papers, as well as granting him extensive interviews, eventually decided to withdraw her approval.

No full account of Gordimer's reasons for de-authorising the biography is available, though she has mentioned "the substantial number of inaccurate and in some cases untrue statements" (Schoonakker 2004) and has said "My idea of biography is concentration on the work" (Carroll 2004). Suresh Roberts is quoted in an article in the Sunday Times as alleging that Gordimer "constantly interfered" with Bloomsbury's editing of his manuscript, insisting that aspects of her private life be left out (Schoonakker 2004).

Edwin Naidu claims that Gordimer praised parts of a draft made available to her in January 2003. He alleges further that she "sent notice of her objections to Roberts in March 2003 but received no response". He quotes her as claiming that "[t]he book as published contains changes including highly offensive additions in breach of her right of final review" (2005). Here she is on shaky ground, since the right of final review was one of the conditions for the publication of an authorised biography. By the time that No Cold Kitchen appeared, the authorisation had been withdrawn long ago and Gordimer had done her best to prevent publication.

Suresh Roberts began his work in 1997 (2005: 642), and a shift in his attitudes seems to have occurred at a late stage in his biographical work, which probably came to an end late in 2004. Nic Dawes (2005) makes a perceptive comment on it:

 No Cold Kitchen is a deeply ambivalent book, which is no bad thing
 in itself. The debates to come will concern where the ambivalence
 shades into polemic, and what sometimes seems a lack of rigour on
 the part of the author and his editors in managing the material.

 There is a good deal of brilliant biographical criticism
 here--not in the vulgar sense that the life explains the work, or
 reduces it to a symptom, but in the sense that the letters, diaries
 and interviews create a rich, complicating context for Gordimer's
 fiction.

The ambivalence of which Dawes writes is largely in the attitudes of the biographer, who is always critical of his subject and gradually becomes condemnatory. The movement "into polemic"--"shading" seems too moderate a word--occurs in Part 6, when Suresh Roberts embarks on a series of tirades against Gordimer's behaviour and writings in the 1990s and 2000s. So extreme are some of his condemnations that it is difficult not to believe that this part of the book was written and some of the rest revised after the break in relations between Suresh Roberts and Gordimer had taken place.

On the back cover of the volume, which appeared in October 2005, is a picture of the Sunday Times billboard which, on 11 August 2004, announced that "GORDIMER BANS BOOK". Below, on the same cover, is Gordimer's own comment, on 16 January 2003, more than two years before it appeared, late in 2005, on a draft of the biography:

 The critical writing--yours--about my work, its development, its
 contradictions as well as its creative solutions painfully arrived
 at, its relation, through me and my envolvement [sic], with
 politics and the history-as-politics that we call 'our times'--all
 this is outstandingly excellent. I speak of the criticism as well
 as the praise; I speak of the insights you have that are truly
 illuminating, even to me, of my own writing. Thank you!

The biography as it now stands is not entirely hostile to Gordimer. The discussions of her fiction are interesting, especially those of The Conservationist (2005: 382-7), July's People (431-5) and The House Gun (537-8). These discussions constitute the biography's major claim on the reader's attention, though they are not my subject here. Disappointingly, Suresh Roberts avoids sustained discussion of Burger's Daughter (1979), which is generally regarded as Gordimer's finest novel, though there are many short references to it, and this is the case with several of the other novels. Perhaps he lacks the strong sense of particular South African historical moments which is helpful to the reader of Burger's Daughter.

The major problem of the biography, until Part 6, is located in the commentary on Gordimer's life, which is however often mingled with discussion of the works and the historical and social circumstances in which the works were produced. At this stage it is a problem of emphasis. Suresh Roberts is always sure that his particular beliefs and loyalties are the right ones, and he is often ill-informed about the historical context in which Gordimer developed differently. In Part 6 he, and especially his opinions, have taken over the position of subject, in that he offers these opinions and his reasons for holding them at even greater length than he offers Gordimer's.

After the disagreement and de-authorisation in 2003, a year and eight months of further work on the biography, including the pre-publication processes, took place. Gordimer's approving but provisional and partial verdict quoted above is in strong contrast with her expression of anger on its publication. Naidu (2005) claims that she objected to the position on the cover occupied by her paragraph of praise, which she claimed gave the impression that she endorsed the work, whereas the short paragraph which made it clear that she did not is "in the nature of fine print". Since the replica of the billboard news flash, in large type, makes it clear that Gordimer's views have changed since her original approval, Suresh Roberts's contention, quoted by Naidu, that "[t]hese conflicts are ... well and fairly dramatised by the cover as a whole" seems just.

The withdrawal of the publishing house Bloomsbury from its contract with Suresh Roberts to publish the biography is recorded in an article by Roy Carroll in the Mail and Guardian (2004). Liz Calder, the editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury, gives as the reason that "it is no longer a publishing proposition, given the fact that it no longer has the authorisation of Nadine Gordimer". In the same article Suresh Roberts is reported as supplying "letters from the New York publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux which lavished praise on his book, but made publication conditional on the approval of Ms Gordimer". Both these publishing houses published Gordimer's novels, and it may be surmised either that Gordimer was able to put pressure on them to withdraw from their contracts or that they had entered into the contracts originally because Gordimer had persuaded them to do so, and were relieved to be able to withdraw. "This is outrageous behaviour by a woman who claims to be a champion of free speech," says Suresh Roberts.

The South African newspapers made much of the accusation that Gordimer, who had expressed indignation at the banning of her fiction (A World of Strangers, in the paperback edition, and Burger's Daughter were the subjects of temporary bans, in 1962 and 1979 respectively) was doing her best to prevent the publication of No Cold Kitchen. The work was eventually published by a small Johannesburg publisher, SIE Publishers, whose power to distribute to Gordimer's large readership in Britain and America was certainly not equivalent to that of Bloomsbury or Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Nor, apparently, was SIE able to make available to Suresh Roberts the editing skills of which he stood in need. Despite his thanks to an editor in the Acknowledgements, the book contains many slips which a good editor would have removed, and the muddled and confusing time scheme, or rather the lack of a time scheme, of Parts One and Two especially might have been systematised in some way. Lapses like the description of Soo-Yi Previn as Mia Farrow's "adopted native child" (2005:594) might have been avoided.

Shaun de Waal in an article in the Mail and Guardian (2004) takes up the question of whether Gordimer had the right to intervene to prevent publication. He points out that defamation laws prevent a biographer from "saying what [he likes] about the private life of an individual", which seems to mean that defamatory interpretations of the actions or statements of the biographical subject are actionable. "It is presumed that the biographer will be sensitive and just in his or her use of ... material, and it would seem that Suresh Roberts had unique access to diaries, letters and other documents of Gordimer's," De Waal writes. The difficulty is contained in the terms "sensitive" and "just", which imply a responsibility resting on the shoulders of the biographer, but do not make clear where the authority rests to decide whether or not he has exercised that responsibility. De Waal's conclusion, that Gordimer had every right to withdraw her authorisation, even though this meant the publishers' withdrawal from their contracts, and that Suresh Roberts had an equal right to seek publication for his book on the new basis of its being unauthorised implies that the biographer and the biographical subject should negotiate agreement in this area, and that when they fail to do so, what has happened in this case is likely to occur.

Nic Dawes (2005) has pointed out the likely effects of the original authorisation and its withdrawal:

 [Suresh Roberts] was now in a remarkable position: he had had all
 the privileges of Gordimer's initial cooperation, but the
 constraints of her authorisation had been removed. It seems the
 ideal basis for a genuinely interesting biography, deeply informed
 but capable of sustaining a certain distance from its subject. It
 was an ethics of reading that Roberts would now have to negotiate,
 rather than the force of any contract (expressed or implied) with
 Gordimer or her publishers.

This "certain distance" would presumably include the right to judge adversely as well as to approve.

At the beginning of the biography, Suresh Roberts seems to be trying to use his knowledge of the political climate of Gordimer's youth as well as the insights of his own period. The problem is that in his exploration of Gordimer's youthful opinions and actions, while he is often willing to correct her by offering his own view, he is not always informed as to the conditions in which she acted or sympathetic to her inexperience. When, at the age of sixteen, she comments that Gone with the Wind "cannot fairly be placed in any category" (2005:61), he interjects "Why?", a question which could easily be answered by reference to her age and educational stage. His description in the Preface of her writing life as "formidably single-minded" is one which professional women will resignedly recognise, as they will the implications of his statement that "Gordimer's study door was always closed till lunch-time and Oriane recalls the hellfire that descended on some unfortunate friend or domestic employee who dared to disturb Gordimer at work" (2005: 192).

When she is reluctant to admit to part-ownership of a house in the south of France, Suresh Roberts comments, "Why the fuss?" (2005: 204), to which a South African resident in the period might have given a complex and an extensive answer, involving both the law and public opinion, to both of which Gordimer was vulnerable. When she comments on the death of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli who was attempting to blow up an electric pylon, that he was "a brilliant man but a hopeless romantic", Suresh Roberts interjects, "Was this radical chic?" (2005:287). Of Edward Said and Amos Oz Gordimer claims "They had more in common than in conflict with one another"; Suresh Roberts pipes up to correct her: "Wrongly" (2005:581).

These and other similar interjections sound like addenda inserted into a manuscript too near completion (and in any case far too long) to allow for the production of the evidence and argument which might render them substantial. The objections are often based on ignorance of the situation or of what it was possible for Gordimer to know in a particular period. "So Gordimer ends on a false note" (2005:228) Suresh Roberts comments at the end of her discussion of events in the Congo in 1960 and the analogies which could be made with the South African position. Using Suresh Roberts's own mode, the present-day reader might interject, "Too easy a condemnation."

Knowledge of the South African situation, from Gordimer's birth in 1923 to the present day, is not a simple matter, but some historical inaccuracies within the biography have serious consequences. Suresh Roberts refers ironically to Alan Paton's "emotive anti-apartheid novel" (2005: 65) and later to his "famously anti-apartheid novel" (2005: 160), the irony directed at a man who did not at that stage believe in universal suffrage, which Suresh Roberts seems to believe was seen as the alternative to apartheid. Cry, the Beloved Country had no possibility of being an anti-apartheid novel: when it was completed, the National Party which, by means of a long series of laws in the 1950s and 60s was to legalise apartheid, had not been elected to power. This seems to be unknown to Suresh Roberts, yet an exact historical time line is crucial to the understanding of Paton's and Gordimer's work as well as to the climate of white liberalism in which she matured.

A comparable error appears on p 163, where Suresh Roberts reproaches Helen Suzman because the party which she represented in parliament "remained closed to black members until 1986". He apparently does not understand that it was the law of the land which decreed that it should remain closed to them. It is true that Suzman never overtly demanded universal suffrage, and would almost certainly have lost her parliamentary seat if she had done so, but her work for political prisoners alone indicates her commitment to justice.

In two areas of the biography, that in which Gordimer and her husband Reinhold Cassirer consider leaving South Africa to settle elsewhere, and that in which her son Hugo Cassirer's obligation or lack of it to do military service is considered, Suresh Roberts's interpretations of their desultory thoughts--common in the period to most whites who had alternatives--are particularly obstructive to understanding. "The Cassirers really might have left the country, a fact that cuts radically against the grain of all Gordimer's later roots talk," he writes (2005: 202), and he later claims that "in 1963 Nadine and Reinhold actually began to pull up stakes" (2005: 203). At this point we are told that Gordimer, in the list of her objections sent to Suresh Roberts in March 2003, claimed that she and her husband got no further in their plans to leave South Africa than talking about a move to Zambia, where Cassirer had business interests. The letter quoted in rebuttal of Suresh Roberts's claim simply says "we were thinking we'd leave the country and then we stayed put" (2005: 203). More important than the identity of the country to which the Cassirers may have considered moving is their decision to stay in what they had decided was their home. "Gordimer's later roots talk" is surely the expression of an important discovery about herself, that she belonged in South Africa. And Suresh Roberts knows that no decision was right or wrong except in an individual case: he has written earlier of Gordimer's partisans claiming that "she never took the chicken run", whilst Doris Lessing's take pride in the fact that "she never stayed in that awful country" (2005: 200).

Suresh Roberts is equally contemptuous of the Cassirers' behaviour concerning their son Hugo's military service. "[I]t ought to be obvious that he would--that she would let him--go nowhere near it," (2005: 372) he claims, clearly ignorant of what it is possible and proper for a parent to decide for an eighteen-year-old. Hugo's army service took place in 1973, when the Soweto uprising and the strife which continued until the end of the 1980s were still in the future. Suresh Roberts fails to take into account Gordimer's statement, which he records as having been made seven years later, that "your only options are to leave the country or go to prison" (2005: 376). She is recognising that the army is now being put to different uses, and the choices which face conscripts are more extreme. The more serious matter is that the biographer is not concerned to understand the attitudes of his subject, but to explain what she ought to have felt and how she should have acted.

Liberals are uniformly demonised in the book, with no sense that the term has many meanings in South Africa, or that the meanings of the word 'liberal' have changed over time. Gordimer sees her political development as a movement away from the liberalism of the forties and fifties, which implied a confidence in the ultimate benevolence of white authority and a conviction that understanding of the aspirations of black people would bring about their admission into public life. Occasion for Loving (1963) is the first fictional evidence of her disillusionment with liberalism as it existed in that era; The Late Bourgeois World (1966) is evidence of her understanding that the roles of whites in the struggle are likely to be secondary to those of blacks, and Burger's Daughter (1979) makes it clear that black people, though prepared to accept the ancillary presence of whites, have taken matters into their own hands.

Paton's novel Too Late the Phalarope (1953) shows a similar movement away from belief in the goodwill of whites in general and disillusionment with the idea that goodwill and rational argument will prevail over inherited prejudice, though he does not in his later fiction abandon the idea that a multiracial society is possible. But despite the return to popularity of liberalism in the South Africa of the 1990s, together with the ideal of multiculturalism and multiracialism, Suresh Roberts can only see liberalism as vacillation and slack optimism at best.

Laurice Taitz quotes Suresh Roberts as saying that "[w]orthwhile biography demands intimacy without loyalty" (2005), and his "ethics", as Dawes puts it, at least after his decision to ignore the objections sent by Gordimer in March 2003, seem to have included a conviction of his right to exploit to the fullest his privileged access to her archive and photostating machine. Gordiner's statement to Naidu that "the book as published contains changes, including highly offensive additions" (Naidu 2005) implies that she believes that, freed from the need to secure her approval, Suresh Roberts has inserted material of which he knows she is likely to disapprove.

Gordimer seems to have given her files to Roberts without examining them, which implies either carelessness or a belief that she would be able to censor the biography at will. De Waal suggests this was unrealistic and writes about the probability that she is now regretting that she "handed over such power" to Roberts, and points out that "[i]n such trust necessarily lies the possibility of betrayal, and it is hard to believe that a writer of Gordimer's sensitivity or one of Suresh Roberts's gimlet keenness can have failed to imagine that possibility, perhaps even its inevitability" (2004).

There is evidence in the biography that she is a compulsive preserver of documents: she retains, for example, in her old age ten of her university essays (2005: 78). Neither a naive person nor unconcerned about her privacy, she allowed her biographer access to letters in which Reinhold Cassirer reproaches her for her carelessness in failing to conceal an adulterous affair from their children, especially Oriane (2005: 558). Schoonakker in the Sunday Times quotes Suresh Roberts as referring to an affair of Gordimer's, one account of which he claims to have excised from the biography at her request (2004). Though we cannot be sure that they are discussing the same matter, the presence in the text of five excerpts from letters written by Cassirer, all evidence of his pain and distress, suggests strongly that Suresh Roberts in his final, unauthorised version wished to expose the degree of ruthlessness of which Gordimer was capable. The account of the affair is inserted out of the time sequence of the life, blurred and interrupted though that scheme is, and seems to be part of the reproaches and contradictions of her opinions which abound in Part Six.

It could have been argued that the extramarital involvement of which Cassirer's letters are evidence was part of Gordimer's growth as an artist. Suresh Roberts does make the claim that "this other man brought on board serious intellectual and creative engagements that expanded her capacity for writing and living in a relationship that lasted several years" (2005: 557). This is cursory, however, compared to the impact of the excerpts from Cassirer's letters. Suresh Roberts does not, though it would be relevant, make reference at this point to None to Accompany Me (1994), Gordimer's major novel of the reconstruction period in South Africa, in which Vera Stark, the protagonist, realises after a prolonged affair has come to an end that her tolerant, loving husband was fully aware of it--and that it caused him great pain. She speculates that her daughter may equally have known of it.

What is more serious for the quality of the biography is Suresh Roberts's determination that his shall be the loudest voice in the book, a comic but indicative example of which is the array of qualificatory phrases which precede the name of RW Johnson, a man to whom Suresh Roberts has elsewhere expressed antagonism, and who moves from being "the Oxford don" (2005: 422, 450), to "the journalist" and "the newspaperman" (2005:515), and finally becomes "the blundering neo-conservative journalist" (2005: 594), none of these terms being Gordimer's.

Suresh Roberts allocates much space to condemnation of Gordimer's opinions wherever they do not coincide with his own. The problem with this approach--that it involves a shift of subject from Gordimer to himself--is complicated by the fact that his opinions are less interesting than hers, since they throw no light on her fiction. His opinions on Israel and on Zionism in general are an example: Gordimer's understanding of the Israeli situation is more nuanced than Suresh Roberts's, and the creator of Joel in The Lying Days naturally remembers the heroic days of Zionism. No recognition of this is allowed: Gordimer "simply will not equate Israeli policies with apartheid" (2005: 585).

An extreme example of the insistence with which Suresh Roberts's own views are aired occurs in the paragraph in which Gordimer is quoted as attempting to explain her attitudes to the war in Iraq. Here he interrupts her exposition eight times and at length with his own opinions. Even more serious is the way in which he will not allow her the right to make honest judgments based on her own perceptions of the AIDS pandemic. As part of his case against her he quotes a passage in which she writes, "with sexual freedom granted by Freud, by law, by medical discoveries, we now have the ultimate inhibition, death through sex ... is it something we have done, brought upon ourselves in the way we have lived?" (Gordimer 1999: 234; 2005: 600). Suresh Roberts exaggerates and parodies this understanding as "[i]t must be our fault, in some way", which seems a simplification of the economic and social inequalities, forced migrancy of labour, and population removals which have rendered South Africans more vulnerable than others to the disease. After the knowledge of how AIDS is spread becomes general, people do have choices, as Gordimer recognises, but it is not always the case that those who have had the determining choices are the sufferers. She has shown her willingness to investigate where the determining choices are made and by whom.

Suresh Roberts writes of the fact that she does not conform completely to the principles of the Treatment Action Campaign, as though her support for their policies of putting pressure on government to make anti-retrovirals available to all who need them implies that her emphasis must be the same as theirs. The Treatment Action Campaign is described as "a pressure group enamoured of authoritarian tactics", and Zachie Achmat, its leader, who has for many years campaigned for the roll-out of anti-retrovirals, is the special object of Suresh Roberts's anger (2005: 594). Edwin Cameron, whose book Witness to Aids (2005) Gordimer has praised, is also attacked, and Gordimer herself is condemned for "taking at face value the self-deluding protestations of [Cameron] who sees himself in the role of an oracle" (2005: 606).

Suresh Roberts's attitude amounts to anger that Gordimer should presume to have an opinion, and above all that she should be critical of Mbeki's attitude to the pandemic, an attitude which she has termed, with striking moderation, "evasive". She has speculated that the reason for it might be "the scar of the victim itching" (2005: 598), and this Suresh Roberts terms "an unambiguously patronizing assessment", implying apparently that an assessment of the President's actions which suggests that they might be influenced by his life in the struggle is unacceptable. Anthony Butler and Mark Gevisser (whom Roberts calls "Mbeki's ostensibly sympathetic biographer") have interpreted Mbeki's statements on AIDS similarly, and are also attacked (2005: 592).

Gordimer has objected to the disclosure of intimate and personal matters. The sense that the famous have a right to certain privacies is now unpopular with biographers and readers, though less so with biographical subjects and their immediate families. Modern readers are likely to regret that Cassandra Austen, after her sister Jane's death, destroyed portions of their correspondence and excised passages from what she allowed to survive (Austen 1997:ix). The reason for our regret may be simple curiosity, but it may also lie in the emphasis now placed on the close relationship between the private and public selves of the individual, and on youth, even extreme youth, as a formative period. It is easy, however, to understand Cassandra's action: her sister wrote in a period when critics censured with great freedom the behaviour and attitudes of women writers. But times have changed: revelations that family relations were not idyllic and that friendships were stormy or interrupted by shifts in the interests of the persons involved are unlikely seriously to trouble a reader. The fact that Gordimer's daughter Oriane at times resented her mother, or that Gordimer hoped for satisfactions from her son which were different from those which she actually received will not be a subject for scandal.

There is also the fact that Gordimer, after a lifetime of hostile criticism from people whom she did not respect, as well as constructive criticism and accolades from those she did, can be expected to be indifferent to comments that she was at times a remote parent, or that she could find her mother-in-law irritating. There are limits to this kind of tolerance, and the excerpts from the Cassirer letters which I have mentioned may have exceeded those limits. The Sunday Times article quotes her as accusing Suresh Roberts "of dishonouring a 1997 agreement about a book on her life and 'artistic development'" (Schoonakker 2004). Does this imply that Gordimer was only prepared to authorise discussion of her life as it impacted on her work? We cannot know for sure.

A feature of some biographies, including this one, is a movement of focus in the text between the biographical subject and the biographer. Many biographies may have as co-subject the biographer, when, as has frequently been the case, the biographer is the spouse, child or other close relative of the declared biographical subject. This, as Judith Lutge Coullie (2006) has pointed out, is the case in the biographical works of Teresa and Anna Campbell, which tell the story of their father's life from the point of view of daughters who witnessed it at close quarters. Their own lives are necessarily part of this story; their authority in the biographies depends on the fact that they shared the conditions under which Roy Campbell lived, and they are obliged to tell their own stories as they tell his. Suresh Roberts however only occasionally has the position of witness, and his purpose in his many interventions is not to correct mistaken or falsified versions of Gordimer's life, but to assert his own opinions.

A more famous case is Boswell, in his Life of Johnson (1973 [1791]), in which, as Catherine N Parke points out, Boswell's own ambition to be recognised as the major biographer of the great man from time to time preoccupies him (Parke 2002: 41) and he cannot refrain from emphasising his own importance in Johnson's life. John J Burke claims that "he ended up combining biography with autobiography" (Jolly 2001: 124), which implies a legitimisation of his presence in the work similar to the positions of Roy Campbell's daughters.

There are however occasions when Boswell disagrees strongly with his subject, and when, though his respect for Johnson as well as his biographical method causes him to give Johnson's opinions in full, he is determined to record his own different views and to argue for their correctness. After recording Johnson's abolitionist views on slavery, for example, Boswell turns aside from him to address the reader and argue at length that the latter was wrong in his condemnation of the Slave Trade (Boswell 1973: 146-8). The effect is that for the period in which he is addressing the reader and refuting Johnson's opinions, he is a usurper within the biography. It is a short period, and even when his opinions have worn as badly as have those on the Atlantic Slave Trade, his reader is generally prepared to regard them as interesting historical curiosities. And his enormous biography is so filled with records of Johnson's own conversations and letters that his subject seems more present to the reader than do most biographical subjects.

In the case of No Cold Kitchen, the biographer is continually present to correct his subject, and in Part 6 has entered on what Dawes accurately calls a "polemic" against her. It is true that any biographer at a distance in time from the events which he is narrating will understand outcomes of actions and subsequent events in a way that the biographical subject cannot. Stephen Clingman, for example, writing in the late 1990s of Bram Fischer's continued support for Soviet Communism even after Stalin's paranoid and murderous antisemitism in the 1950s, knows that Fischer was mistaken (Clingman 1998:210-11). He can also see that the presentation of Russian actions by western governments and media during the Cold War was often distorted, and that Fischer was sincere in his dismissal of the accounts which reached him. This kind of double vision implies that a biographer has the ability to understand the pressures and influences of two periods: that in which his subject acted, and that in which he himself and his readers live and judge. Suresh Roberts, in his determination to reveal what he believes to be true, has failed in this respect.

A biographer must be willing to make a degree of imaginative surrender to the biographical subject, considering actions and opinions sympathetically and with a will to understand them, even when it is apparent that they were disastrous or seriously mistaken. This imaginative surrender may involve a temporary setting aside of the biographer's own loyalties and convictions, and where this is impossible or the biographer is unwilling that it should take place, there must be awareness that the work has turned, either temporarily or permanently, into a hostile biography. It is easy to cite examples of the monsters of history, of whom only hostile biographies are likely to be written, but such a biography is likely to define its subject as detestable, and the kind of interest which the reader is likely to take is not one which can lead to sympathetic understanding of the subject.

There are, of course, biographies in which without being uniformly hostile to their subjects, the authors, though they may have begun their work feeling a neutral or friendly interest in their subject, find themselves increasingly disapproving of, even disliking their subjects. A substantial biography will generally be a task which occupies years, and this was the case of No Cold Kitchen. Discoveries may be made which make it impossible for the biographer to remain approving or even neutral. The process of research and writing may create a weariness, tending towards intolerance, in the biographer, which must affect his or her attitude to the subject. Something of this kind may have happened in the case of Suresh Roberts, but it seems more likely that the crucial change in his attitude took place in 2003, when Gordimer demanded changes and excisions and, presumably when they were refused, withdrew her authorisation.

Gordon Bowker, considering Sonia Orwell's long resistance to the idea of authorising a biography of her husband George Orwell, or even allowing access to his archive to a would-be biographer, understands that to authorise a biography is to consent to the intermixing of the biographer's character with that of his subject:

 Any given biography will embody the vision, prejudices, literary
 and research skills, stock of knowledge and critical disposition of
 the biographer, often revealing as much about him or her as about
 the subject. On this view, no biography can be "definitive" in the
 sense of "final" ("authoritative" is another matter of course). As
 a figurative form, biography stands closer to portraiture than
 history. (Bowker 2006:15)

In Bowker's understanding, then, there are always two major subjects in a biography, and one of them must be the author. His analogy with portraiture is apt for his theory, since a portrait is more likely to receive consideration, from all but its subject, as the work of an artist than as a picture of a particular person. But at this stage we must turn back to the term 'authorised biography' and ask if it does not imply that some degree of authority over the text is exercised by the subject or her executor. Suresh Roberts's No Cold Kitchen implies a model in which the subject becomes merely biographical material and the biographer is the focus of interest. It is hard to argue that his opinions as biographer justify such exposure.

References

Austen, Jane. 1997. Jane Austen's Letters. Edited by D Le Faye. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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