WIKI FREAK
Julian As san ge wants us to see him as a self less seeker of truth. But the reality, as his ghost writer discovered, is that he is actually gr easy, greedy, childish, secretive and‘ probably a little mad’
If ever you feel down in the dumps, the perfect way to cheer up is to remind yourself that at least you are not the Ecuadorian ambassador to the Court of St James. In what might possibly be the longest sleepover in diplomatic history, Julian Assange has been resident in the cramped Ecuadorian embassy in London for the past five years.
For all his international fame and glamour, Assange’s personal hygiene leaves a lot to be desired. A few years ago, his one-time friend and colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg wrote a memoir in which he revealed that Assange often wore two pairs of trousers at the same time, and several pairs of socks. According to Domscheit-Berg, he eats everything with his hands, and then wipes his fingers on his trousers. ‘I’ve never seen pants as greasy in my whole life.’
Apparently, he is also very greedy. ‘If there were four slices of spam, he would eat three and leave one for me.’ For the poor old Ecuadorian ambassador, it must be a bit like having Albert Steptoe to stay. Nor do Assange’s manners stretch to a proper thank you. When the distinguished writer Andrew O’Hagan went to visit him there, Assange complained to him that the ambassador was mad, and spent too much time stalking the corridor and fretting about being too fat.
At the beginning of 2011, O’Hagan was signed up to ghostwrite Assange’s autobiography, which had already been sold to publishers around the world for $2.5million. No shrinking violet, Assange had high hopes for the book. ‘I hope this will become one of the unifying documents or our generation,’ he announced on signing the contract.
Needless to say, it all ended in tears. After recording more than 50 hours of interviews with O’Hagan, Assange decided that he no longer wanted to go ahead with the project, declaring that ‘all memoir is prostitution’. On the other hand, he didn’t want to pay back his advance, either. He claimed to have already spent it on legal bills. Against Assange’s wishes, his British publishers decided to publish what they had, wittily calling it ‘The Unauthorised Autobiography’ and rushing it out without the author’s consent. In turn, Assange denounced them as ‘profiteering’ and added them to his fastgrowing list of enemies.
O’Hagan has written a delightfully beady and unforgiving account of the months he spent with Julian Assange attempting to ghostwrite that doomed autobiography. He had first encountered Assange when he watched him delivering a lecture in London, some months before. His first impressions were mixed. ‘He was really interesting but odd, maybe even on the autism spectrum.’
At their first one-to-one meeting, O’Hagan had the impression that Assange saw himself less as a campaigner than as a rock star. He found this baffling. ‘Assange referred a number of times to the fact that people were in love with him, but I couldn’t see the coolness, the charisma he took for granted.’
At this time, Assange was living under virtual house arrest in Ellingham Hall, a stately home in Norfolk, wearing an electronic tag and having to report to the local police once a day. He spent a good deal of time ranting against his enemies, many of whom – journalists at The Guardian and The New York Times – had once been his friends.
‘He had a strange inability to realise when he was being boring or demanding. He talked as if the world needed him to talk and never to stop.’ He also exhibited what O’Hagan wryly terms as ‘an unending capacity to worry about his enemies and to yawn in one’s face’.
‘He had a strange inability to realise when he was being boring or demanding’
Told to do the dishes he would say he was too busy trying to free economic slaves in China
Assange seems to have a sort of superhero complex, regarding himself as the saviour of planet Earth. His entry in the visitors’ book at Ellingham Hall, written on the day WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of leaked US embassy cables, read: ‘Today with my friends we tried to bring modern history to the world.’ It’s all a far cry from ‘Thank you for having me’.
The role of the ghostwriter is difficult at the best of times. He must conjure words out of subjects who are often too lazy or stupid to write them for themselves. If the subject is too timid, he must encourage him to open up, and if the subject is too boring, he must coax him into more profitable pastures.
From early on, O’Hagan realised that Assange only felt comfortable when delivering long-winded world overviews no one would ever want to read. ‘I was trying to get him to stop his undergraduate lecturing about freedom. I knew there was nothing I could use: it was all standard-grade Voltaire with a smattering of Chomsky.’
But whenever O’Hagan attempted to shepherd him into the details of his life, Assange would shy away. He somehow imagined he could write an autobiography without all the autobiographical bits. ‘His sentences were too infected with his habits of self-regard and truth manipulation. The man who put himself in charge of disclosing the world’s secrets simply couldn’t bear his own.’
O’Hagan rented a house nearby, and Assange would come over. His account of Assange’s piggish table manners accords with Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s. ‘I made lunch every day and he’d eat it, often with his hands, and then lick the plate. In all that time he didn’t once take his dirty plate to the sink... I found his egotism at the table to be a form of madness more striking than anything he said… If you told him to do the dishes, he would say he was trying to free economic slaves in China and had no time to wash up.’
As for the book itself, it became clear early on that Assange had no real intention of ever properly setting his mind to it. Somehow, O’Hagan was able to assemble a rough draft from 50 hours of tapes. ‘It wasn’t by any means great,’ he writes, but it had a voice, a reasonable, even-tempered, slightly amused but moral voice, which was as invented as anything I’d ever produced in fiction.’
At this point, one questions the artistic morality of ghosting a book that is so far from the truth. Was O’Hagan conniving in a lie? Does the role of ghost really remove you from any obligation towards authenticity? O’Hagan doesn’t tackle these questions, but it strikes me that he, too, may be prone to some of the self-denial of which he so sharply accuses Assange. At one point in his book, O’Hagan complains that Assange somehow ‘thought I was his creature’. But wasn’t he? Is the ventriloquist’s doll ever his own master?
Assange couldn’t get round to reading the rough draft. ‘At a guess, I’d say he had read the first three pages.’ But this didn’t stop him from declaring it unpublishable. He then began to rant against the very notion of writing about oneself, saying that ‘the art of autobiography was hateful. Men who reveal their private lives in books are weak’. Furthermore, men who write about their family are ‘prostitutes’. He then denied ever saying several things to O’Hagan. ‘I would never say my stepfather was an alcoholic.’
‘But you did say it, Julian… You said it to me in dozens of interviews. I have them all on tape.’ ‘I was tired.’
Assange wanted to turn it into more of a manifesto, less of an autobiography. He said he’d worked on O’Hagan’s draft, but then claimed he couldn’t find it. ‘There was something pathetic about the search: it was clear he had never marked up any version.’
By now, O’Hagan was at the end of his tether. ‘I’ve never been with anybody who made me feel so like an adult. And I say that as the father of a 13 year old.’ Assange’s lying finally convinced him that ‘he is probably a little mad, sad and bad’.
This vivid, damning essay on Assange takes up just under half of the book. The rest is given over to two pieces on vaguely related topics. The first is about the ease with which one can invent an alter ego on the internet, and the second tells of another doomed ghosting job, this time for Craig Wright, who claimed to be the inventor of Bitcoin. Somehow, they both feel like pale shadows of what has gone before. Who would have thought we could ever miss Julian Assange?
IT’S A FACT Among the many celebrities to visit Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy are Pamela Anderson, Eric Cantona, Lady Gaga… and Nigel Farage.