"Every great man has his disciples," said Oscar Wilde, "and it is always Judas who writes the biography." Kipling regarded biography as a form of "higher cannibalism", Henry James railed against "postmortem exploiters", Nabokov called them "psycho-plagiarists", and Joyce had a horror of the "biografiend".
Many have tried to have the last word on their posthumous reputations, the most popular method being to make a bonfire. James once reported, "I made a gigantic bonfire and have been easier in mind since", but the most persistent arsonist was Sigmund Freud, who began burning his personal papers tat 29. "As for biographers," he said, "I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray."
Michael Holroyd cannot condone such behaviour. In Works On Paper he puts the case for the prosecution before entering a passionate plea for the defence. The best biographer, he tells us, is neither a hagiographer nor a "body-snatcher", but is motivated solely by love. The finest biographies are collaborations with the deceased. It is an odd sort of person who craves intimacy with the dead, and this may be why the conventional image of the biographer is of someone lacking in self-esteem, a shadowy figure feeding off another's life.
Works On Paper gathers together some fine pieces on biographers (Richard Holmes, Hesketh Pearson, Elizabeth Longford) and autobiographers (John Stewart Collis, J R Ackerley, Richard Pennington), as well as George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, Harley Granville-Barker, William Gerhardie, J L Carr, Patrick Hamilton, the Bloomsbury group, the Sitwells, and a lively introduction to Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant. Some of them are rather slight, but an unexpected talent for aphorisms is apparent in the best essay in the book, a diatribe against the United States: "American politeness is so polite that it has become one of the chief causes of American violence", or: "Americans resemble their machines in much the same way as Englishmen are said to resemble their dogs."
As Susan Sontag tells us in her new collection of essays, Where The Stress Falls: "What's thought to be typically American is brash, broad, and a little simple, even simpleminded." One of the most principled intellectuals writing today, she has consistently looked to Europe for "liberation from what passes for culture in America".
Her first essay collection, Against Interpretation (1965), heralded a new sensibility, "defiantly pluralistic" and as willing to discuss Camus as the meaning of camp. Thirty-five years later she appears to denounce the unfortunate fruits of that project. By embracing popular culture she had not meant to "conspire" with postmodernists in the "repudiation of high culture". If Against Interpretation was a defence of pleasure, her new collection is a heartfelt defence of "moral seriousness".
The best piece here, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes", might have been left over from Against Interpretation, but there is much else to admire. Essays on neglected writers such as Glenway Westcott, Machado de Assis, Adam Zagajewski and Danilo Kis, on W G Sebald and Witold Gombrowicz, on garden history, dance, photography, travel, and an account of a heroic visit to Sarajevo in 1993 to stage Waiting For Godot all testify to her ideal of a writer as someone possessed of "endless curiosity and energy and countless enthusiasms". The 21st century will test us in many ways, she cautions, but let us hope that the intellectual standards she espouses survive.
Umberto Eco would seem to embody Sontag's ideal of a cultivated, fastidious European intellectual, but in Five Moral Pieces he reminds us that freedom can never be taken for granted. At the age of 10 he won first prize in an essay competition. The subject was "Should We Die for the Glory of Mussolini and the Immortal Destiny of Italy?" "My answer", he tells us, "was in the affirmative. I was a smart kid." In 1945 his home town was liberated, and his mother sent him to buy a newspaper. For the first time in his life he read the words "freedom" and "dictatorship". "By virtue of these words", he says, "I was reborn as a free Western man."
It is no surprise, then, that here he laments the declining standards of the press. In a rush to compete with television, newspapers are filled with tittle-tattle at the expense of international current affairs. This "ideology of entertainment", he warns, is in danger of creating a class of "information subproletarians" ignorant of the rest of the world.
These brief essays are packed with ideas and move at an impressive pace. In "When the Other Appears on the Scene" he outlines how we might construct a natural ethics without recourse to God (respect the "rights of the body"); and in a lecture he draws up a list of characteristics of "Ur-Fascism", pausing only to wonder why fascism became a synecdoche for totalitarianism.
"Reflections on War" was published during the Gulf war, but seems prescient after September 11. In the modern world, says Eco, war can no longer attain its objective, but is condemned to be a series of protracted and inconclusive interventions. Multiculturalism means that "everyone has the enemy behind the lines"; modern communication ensures that flows of information cannot be checked; and images of bloody corpses on TV shake the public's faith in any conflict waged in their name. Most importantly warfare leads to a loss of revenue in the tourism, entertainment and advertising industries that multinational capitalism is unlikely to tolerate for ever.
