Beware anyone who insists they have the whole story
Most of us are lucky enough to go through life without attracting the attentions of a biographer. An unfortunate few attract swarms of biographers, all eager to portray their subject’s life, all with a point of difference sufficient to sell more copies.
Reading the wickedly good biography of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown, I found Brown readily admits to the problems and shortcomings of biography.
He gives an example of two reports of an argument between HRH and her then husband ‘‘Tony’’ Snowden. In both accounts Snowden is flicking lit matches at his regal wife. She complains that he could set fire to her dress, to which he retorts that he never liked that ‘‘material’’.
In one account she is reported as saying, ‘‘Material is a word we do not use,’’ and in the other account, ‘‘We call it stuff.’’ Professor of career education at Australian Catholic University
After examining the credibility and background of the tellers of these competing tales, Brown then considers in detail everything from linguistic royal style to the etymology of the words ‘‘material’’ and ‘‘stuff’’ (apparently an even older word once meaning fabric).
Or was it an unconscious influence of her Germanic routes, with stoff being the German for material?
Brown concludes that biography ‘‘is always set to expand, like the universe itself or in more graspable terms like a cheese souffle’’.
The point is that it is impossible to tell one story about a person or even about oneself with any credible claims to it being comprehensive, exact or worse ‘‘true’’.
Critics of the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody point to many untruths in the film (for instance Queen had been on the road playing in the months preceding Live Aid and not as presented in the film). Others were concerned with the tame depictions of Freddie Mercury’s sexuality.
Another excellent recent film, Stan & Ollie provides a storyline loosely based on true events, that sees comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy arguing over involvement in solo projects. Did that ever happen?
If you are not royalty, a rockstar in a regal band, or one of the greatest comedians of the 20th century, these may seem arcane matters. However, increasingly in the world of work, we are encouraged to ‘‘tell our story’’, ‘‘own our story’’ and even ‘‘live our story’’. Narrative counselling has been embraced sometimes uncritically as the most effective and personally relevant methods.
Yet we are all past masters of telling ourselves lies, papering over the cracks and smoothing out the lumps and bumps in our career stories, just as we are in our family stories.
If you ever want to get competing accounts of the life of a parent, just ask partners, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles.
There will be points of overlap and points of total inconsistency to the point of impossibility between the accounts.
Stories are thumb-suckingly seductively devices to convey both facts and fictions. But beware of anyone who tries to tell you that they have the whole story. –Sydney Morning Herald