In The Art of Biography Virginia Woolf described how the
biographer must ‘detect(ing) falsity,unreality… His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe.
By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.
Jonathan Freedland in The Escape Artist, set out to do the exact opposite of what Woolf advised. Freedland was determined that the ‘true facts’ wouldn’t interfere with his narrative.
In a letter to Arnold Zweig, Freud wrote that ‘To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies.’ It was as if Freud’s prescient passage was written with Freedland in mind! ….more
