Life writing, overwriting and the scandal of biography.
Reflecting on the Gordimer-Roberts affair: Biography, 41:1 (2018). Abstract.
Letter from Nadine Gordimer to an ‘importuning friend - or at least acquaintance’ (1973):
About our longstanding but tenuous relationship. You know, Ben, we have never been intimate friends. My intimates are very few indeed, and as time goes by and life gets shorter and art runs tantalisingly ahead and can't ever be firmly grasped, I see even my intimates more and more infrequently. And I don't make new ones. As for coming out to lunch with you, I can tell you again quite honestly that I never go out to lunch with anyone. It upsets my whole day. In the morning, I am conscious that at 12:30 I must go and change and paint my face; and in the afternoon, I'm drowsy from the luncheon wine or distracted by the talk. I've had to fight to keep myself to myself - after all, I've lived for more than twenty years in a family surrounded by husbands, children, and the need to consider and feed and listen to them. I've had, perforce, to create a self-discipline. And now I can't live any other way. That's how it is. You seem to have some sort of social inferiority complex (God knows why) that makes you believe that I snub you or don't like you. This is not the case at all, but I am embarrassed by your persistence in wanting to claim more from me than I am prepared to give. I don't want heart-to-heart talks, I don't want to be analysed and assessed, even though some might find that sort of close interest flattering. I don't want to enlarge the very small circle of friends for whom, once in a long while, I must take the trouble to cook dinner. So forgive me and accept our old, friendly acquaintance for what it is.
‘Nothing is worse than persistent hospitality’, Gordimer once joked, having believed herself to have committed precisely that error, ‘[I] must have sounded terribly fulsome.’ Like [Ben], the biographer is inevitably a kind of importuner. But rather than friendship, worthwhile biography seeks intimacy without loyalty, proximity laced with dissent.
Ronald Suresh Roberts, No Cold Kitchen (2005).