Folk devils and chandeliers, someone always disappears

[sovay]

For one thing, [the premise . . . that the private can account for the public, that the subject's accomplishments map onto his or her psychic history] leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others. A letter discovered in a trunk, or an entry in a personal notebook, trumps the public testimony of a hundred friends and colleagues. Biographers go into a professional swoon over stories that some famous person has made a bonfire of a portion of his or her correspondence, or that notebooks in an archive are embargoed until the year 2050. That stuff must explain everything! Why should we especially credit a remark made in a diary or a personal letter, though? The penalty for exaggeration and deception in those forms is virtually nonexistent. People lie in letters all the time, and they use diaries to moan and to vent. These are rarely sites for balanced and considered reflection. They are sites for gossip, flattery, and self-deception. But diaries and letters are the materials with which biographies are built, generally in the belief that the "real" person is the private person, and the public person is mostly a performance.
—Louis Menand, The New Yorker

And on the same day as Bergman, Antonioni. It's like losing architecture.

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Thanks for quoting this.

Biographers go into a professional swoon over stories that some famous person has made a bonfire of a portion of his or her correspondence, or that notebooks in an archive are embargoed until the year 2050.

I think that, in the unlikely event that I were to become famous, I'd make a point of leaving a big box in my attic marked "Private! Burn to ash without examination within the week of my death, or my dying curse will rest upon you!"

It would contain, of course, nothing but old takeaway menus, grocery lists, and other meaningless truck. That way, there would be a mystery for biographers to ponder even if someone cheated and had a look at it.

I've heard tell of an elderly lady from a distinguished family, a pillar-of-the-community type, who left such a box which, when it was burnt in the garden of her country house, proved to contain fireworks. That strikes me as a bit much, but this allegedly took place in the Twenties, and pranks were more vigourous then.

I admire her spirit, even if she was an urban legend. ;-)