This is a piece I wrote some time ago, indeed it was intended initially as a prologue to my biography of my father. However, I then decided the 'biographer' didn't deserve the oxygen. He died in November last year.
THE BIOGRAPHER & THE WIDOW
My memory may be blurred but it seems to me that I was fielding
telephone calls from publishers asking about a biography not days but within
hours of the news of my father’s death on 14 March 1986 (my sister Megan’s 23rd
birthday). I suppose it was
understandable. Huw Wheldon was a man
popular, widely experienced, significant and eloquent. He had himself always refused the
blandishments of publishers. He was
going to be “the one television executive who did not write a book”. This was a shame because, in the first place,
he was naturally at home with words - they held no fear for him - and in the
second place it meant that his life ended up being written by a journalist
singularly ill-equipped to do the job and determined to paint his subject on a
flat canvas by pseudo-Freudian numbers.
This is the story of how that came to happen and the consequences.
Paul Ferris was recommended to my mother by Kingsley Amis. Amis
had appeared on the first ever edition of my father’s arts magazine programme Monitor and the two men had become
friends. They greeted each other in
clubland style as ‘Aims’ and ‘Welding’.
“Ah, Aims!”, “Ah, Welding!”. My father
never much cared for Oxbridge, and I don’t think Kingsley did, either, though
of course Amis was a graduate of St John’s College, Oxford.
Ferris was one of
Kingsley’s many Welsh connections (as a young lecturer Amis had taught at
Swansea and maintained an infamous love-hate relationship with the
principality). He had written biographies
of Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas. He
had also edited Thomas’s letters. After he had finished with my father he wrote
a biography of ‘Dr Freud’ (the archness of the title suggests both familiarity
and contempt). He had also, it seems, written novels, though none had found
their way onto the Wheldon bookshelves. I read the Thomas biography, which
seemed competent enough. The truth is that I read without due critical
intelligence – I was too excited by the idea of a biography of my father, whom
I loved, missed and revered. I liked the idea of the reflected glory I would
bask in. Most of all, however, I thought my father had lived a life that
deserved to be recorded. To my loving eyes and ears he had been overwhelmingly
a source of delight, a father very much present in my life, and disposed to
paint the world wide and glorious for his children. The thought of anyone writing anything mean
of him simply did not cross my mind. My
father’s greatest gift was as a celebrant, chiefly of life itself; how could a
life of the man not also be celebratory?
Initial contact must
have been made with Ferris by way of Amis or through the publisher, Michael
Joseph.
No documents appear to have
survived from before May 1988, though I do remember seeing a letter in which
Ferris, having looked into it, apologised for not being able to take the
project on. But by May he had changed his mind. Why he had changed his mind is
one of the questions that drives this essay.
The first written evidence that the project was on again was in a letter
in which Ferris reported to my mother that he had been listening to a BBC oral
history tape in which Frank Gillard was interviewing former BBC Director
General Alasdair Milne
[i].
They shared a memory of my father – his
often-hissed invective “the sodding governors”.
I don’t think my mother had much liked the joshing tone of the
conversation, though it was really only an example of affectionate male
comradely banter.
In July, Alan Brooke,
from the publisher Michael Joseph, wrote to Ferris expressing concern about
“the question of copyright on the papers and letters belonging to Lady Weldon
[sic]”
[ii].
Ferris photocopied the letter and sent it on
to my mother with a handwritten card attached referring to “a legal department
creating a sense of its own importance”
[iii] as
though such matters were beneath writers and seekers after truth such as
themselves (my mother was a published novelist and her ferocious intelligence
would have been obvious to Ferris as soon as pleasantries had been got over
with – but she was not worldly, or rather she had very little cynicism).
“To keep them happy a note to me from you
saying something to the effect that I have your formal permission to quote from
letters and any other material of Huw’s in which you hold the copyright, would
be the thing.” The tone is informal, but I believe this permission was
something Ferris wanted very badly.
This
is almost the only hand-written missive from him in my mother’s papers.
He added at the end a further sweetener: “I’m
only just beginning to fully appreciate what a rich store of material I’m going
to have…” The question is: had he already come upon the bundle of letters that
would eventually form the basis of the thesis that informed the whole
biography?
By November my mother
had evidently not written the “note” to Michael Joseph, for Ferris asks “Did
that fussy Michael Joseph request about copyright permission (needing a bland
affirmative from you) ever surface on your desk?”
[iv] Then in January (the next surviving letter
from Ferris): “Do you remember – you hardly will – a card I sent you in July,
with a letter to me from Michael Joseph, saying bureaucratically that they
‘would be most grateful if you could give us your confirmation that you have
written permission from Lady Wheldon…’”
[v] So
Michael Joseph’s legal department had now been described as having a sense of
its own importance, of being fussy and of being bureaucratic.
Ferris was experienced enough a biographer,
surely, to know that these matters were very far from minor.
By May 1989 he was
beginning to burrow into my father’s sex life.
I have four drafts of a letter my mother wrote to him at around this
period that are in response to suggestions he made about my father being
impotent and having to see a psychiatrist about the difficulty.
She was very concerned about the direction of
Ferris’s interests;
“it would be a
serious solecism to see Huw’s life as ‘impotence overcome’, or indeed to see anyone’s
life in terms of his or her sex-life.
It
leaves out character, upbringing, principles, dispositions, rationality, taste,
and everything else that makes people different from each other.”
[vi] Already the argument was not wholly about my
father specifically, but also about the very nature of biography, indeed the
very nature of life.
My mother once said
that she was interested in “the idea of God as profound experience”
[vii].
While Ferris indeed wrote a poor book, it is
unlikely that anyone bar a writer little short of genius could have written a
biography of my father that would have entirely satisfied her.
It would have needed a Leon Edel or a
Nicholas Boyle or a Ray Monk (all of whom had written biographies – of Henry
James, Goethe and Wittgenstein respectively – that my mother admired).
Ferris was very much below that rank.
The mere comparison is fatuous (not that I am
comparing my father with their subjects).
My mother obviously
did eventually find a form of words because Ferris responded furiously (8 June
1989): “It disturbs me that you think I would be so crass as to write a book
that saw ‘mere sex’ as the root of behaviour,” he wrote.
In a later paragraph he says, “I can talk to
a hundred people and read a million words, but in the end I have to sit down
and write the best book I can.
On my
own.”
[viii]
What Ferris could not
understand was why my father had not married one of the three women with whom
he had more or less serious affairs before he met my mother; and my mother
could not understand Ferris’s bafflement.
She knew about all these women.
Through one of them, with whom she was friendly, she had met her
husband. She also provided quite
straightforward contexts that explained why they had not married my father (of
the three one he romanced as a student, one was married, and one – my mother’s
friend - was a Turkish Jew who spent her holidays with her family in
Istanbul). Ferris was also baffled as to
why my father did not “write”. His
bafflements were baffling.
My own personal
suspicions of Ferris as a trustworthy biographer were based on two
conversations.
On one occasion he had
told me that he couldn’t “get a handle” on my father, as though life was a safe
that needed to be cracked.
My own
inexperienced notion was that a ‘Life’ should be built up of a variety of
impressions hung upon a skeleton of fact, that there would, of course, be
contradictory bits of evidence; that these should add, not diminish or
confuse.
But Ferris was clearly
unhappy.
This conversation must have
taken place early on in proceedings, before the discovery of the letters, but I
cannot put a date on it. We walked on Richmond Hill, past Sir Joshua Reynolds’
house and the house that John Mills had sold to Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood (now
there
was a subject Ferris could have got his Freudian teeth into). The second
conversation was on the day of my sister Sian’s wedding (29 July 1989), when he
commended me on the speech I had made.
He said words to the effect that I was a chip off the old block, that it
was amazing how fluently I could speak “off the cuff” (I believe that was the
phrase he used).
I said thank you, but
actually I was dismayed because the speech had been anything but “off the
cuff”.
I had honed, refined,
practiced.
It had been work. Ferris
clearly thought that my father’s facility with words was equally a simple, even
glib gift.
He was wrong about both of
us, and his wrongness made me see him as glib, and glib he proved to be.
In his brief remarks of gratitude for being
invited to the wedding, he remarked on the absence of “everyday media folk”. To
whom would that refer? In the same letter (6 August 1989) he wrote, “If I seem
to be hammering away at the private and personal, it is not through lack of
concern about the public and professional”.
[ix]
He must have got over
his difficulties without too much ado because by 21 November he had finished
the book.
A letter to my mother of that
date opens “I want to quote briefly from three of your letters in the
book.
Also I’d like to use a couple of
hundred words from your embryonic ‘journal’ of 1970”.
[x] Is he asking for permission or providing
information?
He does write ‘Please let
me use it’ of the journal.
Mum asked for
one change in the following extract: “Huw is, in many ways, wonderfully fresh
& loving for a man so driven by [“anxieties” crossed out and “problems”
substituted] that they take from him sometimes preoccupation which it would be
better for him to be able to place elsewhere among us, his own family, or to
his own pleasures in which he is very abstemious.”
[xi] My
mother asked for the bracket to be removed, remarking to Ferris that “I only
make Freudian slips on purpose” and that it was she who had anxieties, her
husband who had “workaday problems”. Ferris made no change.
And indeed my mother
was full of anxiety as to what the finished book would contain.
On 30 November she wrote to my father’s
sister, Mair Rees, warning her of Ferris’s intention of stating that my father
suffered from “a florid father-fixation” and in the early 1950s had sought the
attentions of a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst.
My mother made it clear that she had argued with Ferris, “to no avail”,
on several points: “why Huw did not marry until a late age, why did he not
‘write’, why did he not marry two early suitable candidates?
All these facts and questions settle
comfortably into the psychological ‘explanation’ for Paul, quite regardless of
circumstances, and character, and choice.
I am appalled and disappointed… I am aware that you and Nans [Mair’s
sister] may be disturbed in the book by what I regard as specious revelation
and interpretation”.
She was also
beginning to feel the horrors of what she came to see as her own awful
treachery: “All I know for sure is that were the boot on the other foot, Huw
would
never have allowed anyone to get the wrong idea about me; and I am
aware that no-one who loved him will forgive me.”
[xii]
The last letter from
Ferris came on 17 May 1990 and it accompanied his book.
“So at last here it is, the first of the
finished copies.
I send it to you with
affection, with my gratitude for the help you gave me, and in the hope that you
will like it”
[xiii].
All is sunshine. Any arguments as between the
biographer and the widow seemed to have been resolved.
I was horrified. I could
not bring myself to show the thing to my mother. It was entitled Sir Huge: The Life of Huw Wheldon. Clive James had called my father
‘Huge Welshman’, but no one had ever called him ‘Sir Huge’. Ferris claimed that the term was David
Attenborough’s and I can imagine David using the phrase in a
hail-fellow-well-met sort of a way (he once asked me if I was “still
Scrutoneering” because I had for a very brief period been Managing Editor of The Salisbury Review, a journal edited
by the philosopher Roger Scruton). The
real ‘Sir Huge’ had been Hugh Carleton Greene, the Director General of the BBC
in the 1960s. So ‘Sir Huge’ as a title
immediately signalled that the book was to be about someone with whom we were
unfamiliar. It was a crass, vulgar
mistake.
On the inside blurb
the first paragraph reported that “Behind his [Wheldon’s] bold front was
another, darker side that clouded his earlier life, and left him aware of an
‘abyss’ that had once threatened his wellbeing”.
This is melodrama.
And the second paragraph of the book proper
begins “People plan their lives without meaning to”
[xiv].
Once one has overcome the glibness of this
sentence, its meaning is revealed: the biographer knows the subject better than
the subject knew himself.
It is a
promise of revelation.
And the inference
is that we who have loved and been loved have been taken in.
It is a sentence of breathtaking arrogance,
surely the very opposite of the humility that the biographer requires in the
face of the absolute unknowability of a person’s whole life and character.
I read it through
once, and then again.
On 27 May I wrote
to one of my father’s oldest friends, Sir Paul Wright: “Mum has not read a
word.
Not even looked at it… What is
most provoking is the tone.
It is
cynical, envious… I think the book is reductive, mean and small-minded.
I have found out what the legal position is
(there isn’t one), so there’s nothing to DO.”
[xv] The book was to be published on 28 June and
there was to be a party hosted by Brenda Maddox and her husband John, to which
we were all invited.
We all declined.
Close friends such as the Cassons and the Wrights and the Charltons also
declined the invitation. The recently knighted Sir Kingsley Amis went and
reportedly spent the evening miming laryngitis. Shame takes many forms.
I am not sure whether he and my mother ever
spoke again.
Eventually my mother
read the book, and came upon, for the first time since she had received them,
more than thirty years before, letters to her from my father in America
describing his sexual longings and the way in which he felt diminished by them.
Ferris had used these letters as the
centrepiece of his thesis (his chapter on them, ‘Letters from America’, takes
up pages 115 to 140 of 272 pages of text – I don’t want to get all
numerological, but that is almost the precise middle of the book).
A part of this thesis was that only in his
forties, with marriage to my mother, could my father “be himself at last, as he
had failed to be in his earlier relationships.”
[xvi] The degree of emphasis put upon one’s
attitude to sex as a gateway to the ‘self’ (whatever that may be) is
breathtaking. It says very much more about the biographer than about the
biographee.
And what it says is that the
biographer, apart from the fact that he was interested in sex to the exclusion
of other kinds of motive and cause for action and behaviour, was very much more
interested in presenting his subject as a fiction than as a fact:
“a character in a cheap novelette,”
[xvii] wrote
Paul Wright.
My mother was shocked
by the publication of these letters, not because she was ashamed of them – as
one reviewer pointed out, my father’s writing rather showed up Ferris’s for the
pedestrian hackery that it was – but because the biographer had not had the
good manners to inform her that he had found them and was going to use
them. The reason he had not done so, of
course, was that she would not have allowed him to use them. In other words he
knew that their publication would hurt her. But without them… well, exactly,
without them he would not have had his “handle”.
So what would Ferris
have done had he not had those letters?
What kind of book would he have written?
Would it have been impossible for him to write a biography of my
father? No, it would not. And how does a biographer know that there are
not other letters, other pieces of evidence that point in entirely different
directions? To have used these letters
in the way in which he did assumed a universal knowledge of his subject that no
biographer can have. The arrogance of
that early “people plan their lives without meaning to” was playing to the top
of its pitch. Had my mother gone through
the ‘papers’ she would have removed these letters and they would have ceased to
exist. I don’t think my father would
have been any less interesting a subject for biography.
Had the book been a
better book, had its author been the equal of its subject, perhaps the
deviousness could have been excused, except that a better book would not have
required such deviousness. Ferris was more a journalist than a novelist,
sucking out the small where he might have breathed the big. He was treacherous and devious.
My mother’s first
concern was to assure my father’s family and his friends that she had not
knowingly consented to the use of these letters.
With their publication the strange
(“baffling”) discussions that she had had with Ferris during the writing of the
book lost their mystery.
He had been
pursuing the sex life of his victim in order to create the nest in which he
could place these delicious relics (letters, writes Janet Malcolm “are the fossils
of feeling. This is why biographers prize them so”
[xviii]).
All those long letters she had written, all
those conversations, had been had while Ferris was holding back information
about what he had found among “two massive loads of unsorted papers”.
My mother’s anger was extreme but her sense
of her own “inexcusable treachery” was shattering.
The reviews of the
book were bad. Denis Forman, in the Sunday Telegraph (1 July, 1990), wrote
that the book was “wholly unworthy of its subject”. Brian Wenham, in the Financial Times (30 June), dismissed the book as “tiresome,
meretricious and – unforgivably – boring”.
Paul Fox wrote directly to Ferris that the book “misses the man
entirely”; Melvyn Bragg, in The
Independent on Sunday (8 July) wrote that “This
interpretation posing as Higher Journalism but in fact having a foot in the
gutter and a nose in the trough misses every point about Huw Wheldon as I, and
I would guess dozens of his friends, knew him.” “How
sad: a life devoted to public service and your biographer ends up discussing
where you put your hand while you worked,” wrote a diarist in the Sunday Times (8 July).
Ferris responded to
Forman’s hatchet job by exhibiting the intimate letters on television. He also wrote to the Sunday Telegraph (8 July) suggesting that Forman was a Wheldon family
friend (he wasn’t). He made clear that
“written permission to use Huw Wheldon’s
‘papers, letters and other writings’ was given to me by Lady Wheldon”’
(remember: “a bland affirmative from you” was what he had asked for) and left
it at that, as though there was no moral case to answer. He adds, finally, that
“she accepted my right to pursue the matter” of my father’s sexual nature. The truth is that as soon as those letters
had come to hand the pursuit was done.
He had only to round up the hounds and trot home.
Ferris also took
issue with Melvyn Bragg (
Independent on
Sunday, 15 July), quoting verbatim a conversation they had had about
Wheldon in which Bragg had used the word “abyss”.
To a Freudian like Ferris such words fall
like the gentle rain of heaven.
It is
the very same ‘abyss’ that turns up on the blurb of the book. Ferris, not
Bragg, chose to see the ‘abyss’ as a dark sexual cleft
.
In a private note my
mother wrote: “acting as Showman-Pornographer the author, secretively, took
love letters without the permission of the recipient
as recipient, and drew from them the veil of their private-personal
nature where they resided in a context of a very limited time, special place
and circumstances, past history of talk in a private language, and in revealing
them at length to public gaze, turned them into an obscene spectacle, turning
the writer and recipient of them into obscene objects, turning the public
readers of them on the printed page, including family and children, into
voyeurs of an obscene spectacle.”
She
then asks what the biographer’s purpose must be for such a public display and
answers: “the titillating temptation of a thesis with sexual basis, saving very
much trouble since all evidence not supporting this thesis could be, and was, ignored.”
[xix]
She wrote in more
moderate terms to the Sunday Telegraph (22
July) in somewhat reluctant response to Ferris’s own act of self-defence. It was cut in such a way as to render the
most important sentence somewhat opaque.
I therefore quote from the original:
My express permission as the recipient of these letters was
not given. My general permission to use
my husband’s papers of which among very many others these letters were a part,
was. That is not quite the same thing in
my opinion. No-one is suggesting that Mr
Ferris behaved unprofessionally, far from it; or illegally, quite the
reverse. I do not question his claimed
rights, I question his charity.
The facts are that
he removed two massive loads of unsorted papers from my house. He did not know what was in them. I did not know. When he discovered this small number of
letters, he did not tell me, far less show me, which they were. As I now see it, they became from the first
the ground of a simple thesis which he appears to have pursued with
single-mindedness in his researches.
Consequently all the discussions, one of which he refers to [in his
letter of 8 July], baffled me. I now
understand why.
Had I been
consulted, I should have asked him not to print these letters, solely because
they were intended to be read by me alone and a full public printing would pain
me. It would have been a question of
honour for me.
Although I should
have preferred that the letters were not published, they are by no means the
only or even the chief cause of my disdain for the book, though Ferris would
like to believe that they are.
In fact,
reading them and remembering them again after all these years, I am proud of my
husband’s candour, humour, good writing and integrity.
I am proud of him.
[xx]
The very day that this appeared in the
Sunday Telegraph, a piece by Ferris entitled ‘In defence of a trade
in insights’ turned up in the
Observer (22
July)
[xxi].
This was an extended defence of his interest
in the sex lives of others, because he laboured under the impression that it
was the “sexual aspect” of his book about Dad that was “the raw nerve”.
“Disclosure can be embarrassing”, he wrote,
betraying his own vulgarity.
I certainly
felt no sense of embarrassment about the letters whatsoever, nor do I think my sisters
did.
My mother felt ashamed of having
let Ferris anywhere near my father.
Ferris’s idea that the harm he inflicted on my mother amounted to no
more than mere embarrassment is indicative of the level of intelligence and
sensibility he brought to his work.
He
goes on to wonder what can justify all this (illusory) embarrassment.
Well, it is the worker at the coalface of
course: “The only answer I can give is that the trade of biography seems to me
to demand a certain rigour in its pursuit”.
This is rich indeed (especially when combined with the false humility of
“trade”), as the family’s objection to his book was precisely that its “certain
rigour” was restricted to just one area. My father could quote Rilke in German;
he knew his Whitehead and Collingwood. At Mount Carmel, in what was then
Palestine, he had lectured on Plato. Tolstoy was his favourite novelist. He had
a lot of time for Samuel Beckett as well as Dick Francis.
He was descended from Robert Jones, Rhoslan,
author of the Welsh classic of historiography
Drych yr Amseroedd (A Mirror of the Age, 1820).
He had played rugby for London Welsh B; he
played the piano badly but with gusto; he loved the music of Poulenc. He liked
walking up mountains. He was funny. All this and much more fed into the way he
thought and behaved.
Nor did Ferris’s
“certain rigour” extend to a single speech or lecture that my father made. None
are quoted, nor even mentioned in the bibliography. These were the places, after all, where my
father articulated his understanding of the public service ethos, of television
as a serious medium. I very much doubt
Ferris read them. He was not interested
in this public domain material that any Tom Dick or Harry could get to – he
wanted the private stuff, the stuff that he and he alone was privy to. And that meant keeping his discoveries secret
from my mother. It meant choosing to
hurt her; it meant choosing to dishonour her.
His Observer article finished with what
amounts to a confession that his book “rests” on the “insight” that the letters
gave him into my father’s character.
Apparently this biography “rested” on nothing more than one diary entry
for a visit in 1953 to a psychiatrist in Harley Street (a man who later treated
Albert Speer, apparently – these hacks are good for something), somebody called
G. perhaps bumping into my father at 9.00 am in the morning coming out of a
house where she was going to see a psychiatrist herself, the telephone evidence
of a rejected lover forty years after the events, several letters confessing to
pornographic fantasy, and, er, well, that’s it, as they say.
There were one or two
more mentions in the press about the role of the biographer and so on and so
forth, but the public debate was now over, and my mother began to think about
ways in which she could make up for her “unspeakable treachery”.
There were a number
of schemes, including collections of essays by divers hands, a memoir, but what
she felt drawn to was ‘the biography of a biography’. She spoke with agents about it. They seemed keen.
In a notebook she
wrote: “Today when there are too many books published for criticism to cope
with, when reviewing has little to do with literary values, but is so often
politicised or bent to the purpose of a one-value cause or addressed by academics
to academics, or is put into the hands of what have been called Famous Friends,
or is an adjunct to advertising, it is perhaps futile to treat a second-rate
book designed for popular consumption to a serious critique of its methods,
literary manners, style (and so on) except for one fact: that I, personally,
asked for it to be written, and that in defence of it the author wrote a short
essay on the biographer’s rights and duties for a Sunday newspaper.
I believe that what I have to say raises certain
matters to a general level of public interest.”
[xxii]
It was a good start.
In his article Ferris had quoted A J P Taylor to the effect that the
biographer’s duty was to the reading public not the family. My mother pointed
out that no such duty existed: “No
public asked for it to be written”.
“There is only the duty,” she went on, “of telling the truth, as you
think it, without unthinkingly, or purposefully, inflicting damage upon persons
irrelevantly”. At this point, in this
notebook, and in many more and on thousands of bits of papers, my mother
started to write in notes and short snatches – she writes on bestsellerdom, on
obscenity, and begins to look into the nature of sexual desire. In short, characteristically, she lost sight
of the road, so taken was she by the forest and its wonders. She was also suffering, physically and
mentally, bowed down by the failure to finish her own gargantuan novel, by the
deaths of her mother and her husband, and by the sense of moral catastrophe
that Ferris had visited upon her. Later
on she acquainted herself with the history of the Calvinistic Methodists in
Wales, with a view to what would have been an enormous straight biography, but
her energy was gone.
Ferris was under the
impression that his critics disliked his book because he had printed intimate
letters, but he was wrong. People
disliked the book because it wasn’t very good work. The author had been mean about a generous man
with many friends, yes. He had
consciously caused hurt to the subject’s widow, yes. But it was the failure of the book as a book that was most painful. At very best it is lazy biography to impose a
theory on a life. Life is excluded by theory. At worst it is mendacious. Sir Huge: The Life of Huw Wheldon, is,
in fact, the long lie of an indolent, incurious, jobbing hack.
My mother died of
cancer on Midsummer’s Day 1993.
