5 - A very strange relationship: Ambition, seduction and scandal in post-apartheid life writing

Summary

Questions of autobiography and the truth of the self have occupied many writers and thinkers across the South African transition. The previous chapters addressed just a few entries in the outpouring of memoir and personal testimony that, from the late 1980s onwards, makes this country's literature a rich case study in the construction of the non-fictional ‘I’ and the limits of the confessional mode. Yet the question of biography remains curiously under-theorised in comparison, both locally and internationally, despite its high sales and strong cultural presence as a genre of trade non-fiction. Often the most far-reaching reflections on the form tend to be by practitioners: Hermione Lee's life of Virginia Woolf is often cited as a conceptually rich account of literary biography, especially given that its subject had herself thought so carefully about the form. A good biography, Woolf wrote, ‘is the record of the things that change rather than of the things that happen’ – a line that the biographers I consider in this chapter and the next will keep circling back to.

The phrase ‘life writing’, which Lee uses throughout her scholarship and has done much to popularise, was coined by Woolf to suggest a more liberated way of writing about people, one that the novelist set up in opposition to the dully informational, commoditised or pompous ‘shilling lives’ of nineteenthcentury great men. The modernist impulse of Bloomsbury and ‘the New Biography’ – to access psychological complexity, to deal ironically with selfmythologisation and to puncture biographical heroism – this finds a South African echo in William Plomer's Cecil Rhodes (1933). As a slim and bitingly satirical work modelled on Lytton Strachey's irreverent Eminent Victorians (1918), it takes aim at the hagiographic tomes that had begun to appear on the now departed imperialist. ‘As a character put faithfully into a novel, Rhodes might impress but would no doubt fail to “convince” the reviewers’, Plomer remarked, playing within the literariness of literary biography: ‘They would complain that a character must develop and it is perhaps difficult to find traces of real development in Rhodes's nature’ (46).