Source Material

The modern fashion for “warts and all” biographies and disclosures on famous people is a mixed blessing at best, or rather it is potentially a good servant but a poor master. In the case of novelists, in particular, I think we should be very careful not to allow details of a writer’s life to influence our judgement of a writer as a writer. A good biography can give us fresh insight into how a author came to write his or her books, and it can help us to understand the forces that shaped his way of looking at the world. In very rare cases, too, for example if the writer turns out to be a serial killer, a biography may even serve to invalidate an author’s reputation. But such cases are few and far between.

In my opinion, no amount of reading “around” an author can make up for actually reading the “source material”. This is because, whatever the circumstances of the author’s private life, he actually puts what is best and most interesting about him into his books; he puts down what he aspires to be, even if like the rest of us, he falls short of his goal. In serious fiction, in short, I don’t think it is possible to lie to oneself and one’s readers for any length of time. But I stand corrected!