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Browsing the Sunday newspapers in London recently my eye
was caught by a profile on Gitta Sereny by the novelist Will
Self, a writer I look upon as an intelligent barometer of
turn-of-the-century morality. I was intrigued by the mixture
of awe and revulsion which coloured his take on Sereny. Self
was asking about her latest controversial book, Cries
Unheard,concerning Mary Bell, a woman who murdered two
small boys when she was herself a child, thirty years ago.
The book has caused an uproar in England, partly because of
the outraged response of the victim's families, who were
alerted by advance media reports. In the resulting media
frenzy, the whereabouts of Mary Bell and her young daughter
– who had known nothing of her mother's past –
were publicly revealed. Self writes that the debacle
"could only destroy what rehabilitation Bell had
achieved, wreck her daughter's life and wrench open the
wounds inflicted on the families of the murdered boys".
Sereny can rightly protest that this is hardly her fault; it
is what happens once a book, however well-intentioned, falls
into the clumsy maws of the mass media. "There has not
been a day… when I have not asked myself whether
writing this book was the right thing to do", Sereny
wrote in her introduction, "for Mary Bell from whom,
with great difficulty, agonisingly for her, I extracted her
life; for the family of the children she killed and for her
own family, above all her child who is now her
life…" For myself I do not believe in writing books about
immediate traumatic events; too much raw pain, too much
potential damage. As a writer of investigative contemporary
history, however, I have learnt to be alert to the moral
responsibility of writing a book which impinges on the
lives of strangers who are inevitably touched and pained by
the events in my narrative, even when the central characters
are long since dead and gone.
Dogs in the Graveyard
Cassandra Pybus
this paper has been divided
into parts one & two
What Self finds chilling is Sereny's tacit admission that
her book did harm Mary Bell, not so much the media beatup as
the actual process of Bell exposing her life to a writer. As
Sereny says "she should have done this with someone
qualified because it needed to go on much longer and… I
had reached the [here she pauses, as if aware of the
enormity of what she is saying]… my purpose was
fulfilled", she lamely concludes.
To what extent does the writer have a responsibility here,
Self wants to know. As I do. In that intense time she spent
with Bell, what purpose was Sereny fulfilling? A different
purpose for each participant, most certainly. Sereny was the
detached investigative writer. Mary Bell, I suspect, thought
the relationship was of another order. "After a few
months I was finished", Sereny says, "apart from
checking the facts". Will Self is right, this is a
chilling admission. It is also a statement of writerly
sensibility; writers are always moving on, using up and
discarding the last object of fascination. Sereny protests
that Mary Bell still has her interest, but a writer's
detached interest is not what this damaged woman needs, nor
was it ever what she needed.
There are all kinds of writerly moral dilemmas revealed
here, just as there were when the first book of this genre,
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood,came out to astound us
some thirty years ago. Recently George Plimpton's book on
Truman Capote reignited the debate around that book when it
was alleged that Capote, said to have been in love with
Perry Smith, one of the murderers, had gained intimacy with
Perry and his pal in order to get the story, and then not
lifted a finger to save them from the electric chair. At the
time I remember Capote protesting that there was nothing he
could do about the executions. It was equally true that he
was saying that once he had the story his mission was
fulfilled: the non-fiction novel was born and a couple of
psychotic misfits got to ride old sparky. As they were
always going to do.
In her book The Murderer and the JournalistJanet
Malcolm, doyenne of investigative journalism, has a fairly
brutal take on the moral position of this genre: "The
story of subject and writer is the Scheherazarde story with
a bad ending, in almost no case does the subject…manage
to save himself". A writer in this genre Malcolm says,
"unless he is too stupid or too full of himself to
notice what is going on, knows what he does is morally
indefensible." Well, yes.
Take the Orr case.
Why, knowing something of the pain attached to this
particular story of sexual harassment and intellectual
outrage did I write a book about it? As Professor
Alan Gilbert observed at the launch of Gross Moral
Turpitude,the Orr case is "a modern tragedy of
unrelieved sadness". Yet we all know that tragedy is
the most powerful narrative force of all, since it is in
conflict and suffering, in human failure and unhappiness, we
most perceive the frailty of the human condition. A powerful
story of tragic conflict is irresistible. Add to that the
spice of sex and intrigue and you have the ingredients of
classic drama. This much was clearly apparent to the
American and Australian film producers who took the bare
bones of the popular myth about Orr – radical professor
destroyed by vengeful, disturbed girl student – and
fictionalized it as a sex and violence thriller, a piece of
prurient trash which was a total failure at the box office,
I am pleased to report. It was knowledge of this impending
film, the offensive screenplay of which I had been shown,
which impelled me to write Gross Moral Turpitude
rather than "leave well enough alone" as I had
been repeated advised.
While I claim integrity and genuine open-minded inquiry in
my construction of the Orr narrative, I would have to say
that the writer in me could not resist the dramatic lure
inherent in a story about sex, intrigue and betrayal.
Moreover, in previously unseen archival material I
encountered an absolutely riveting tale about intellectual
chicanery, while the detective work of uncovering the false
trails laid over the intervening years was ready made for
the storyteller. And that is how I saw myself: a
storyteller.
The imperative for a writer like me is narrative. In
constructing the narrative what is of uppermost concern is
not the moral responsibility for the tale, rather it is the
integrity of the sentences; the way the words are placed on
the page. One of the first things that you discover as a
writer is that the process of forming and shaping inevitably
renders what you write different from what you expected, or
even intended. I think it was E M Forster who said
"how do I know what I think until I have seen what I
have written". It is not that the process of writing
reduces the authenticity of the tale, rather it refines and
focuses it. Nevertheless, as we struggle to make sentences
with the right cadence, in a solipsistic engagement with the
computer, writers are prone to a certain myopia about the
pain we may be about to inflict.
Maybe what is necessary for the investigative non-fiction
writer is kind of internal monitor – something like a
spell check – which can prompt you to ask yourself :
What will be the impact of this when it is in the public
domain?In the case of Gross Moral Turpitudemy
monitor was somewhat underdeveloped. I had not appreciated
the full impact of my having plunged into the heart of this
long simmering trauma. It all happened forty years ago, I
told myself, failing to see that it was still very much
alive in the hearts and minds of some people.
I now have to face up to the unpalatable fact there are
those who believe I have profoundly wronged their dead loved
ones. In this matter the children of Sydney Orr present me
with a particularly intense moral burden, since I have told
the world that the father who died when they were very
young, was a morally corrupt liar and a fraud. Equally,
Suzanne Kemp, the young woman in the case, had to endure a
public exposure of the somewhat sordid details of her sexual
encounters. In order to refute the accepted wisdom that she
had framed Orr, I felt it necessary to bring into the light
a malicious subterranean story, put about by the Orrites, of
an incestuous relationship with her father. If that were not
damage enough, she has had to re-run the terrible media
intrusions of her youth, with every media outlet in the
country wanting to interview her when my book came out. I
feel badly about it and I can understand that she has no
thanks for me.
Whether I liked it or not, my book, which I saw as a
terrific story, wrapped up between covers and sold to the
public, became part of a forty year process of grief or
shame or anger, and I was expected to become part of that
process too. I was not going to be permitted to slip away,
even though my head was already in the steamy, spicy
atmosphere of 19th century Sarawak by the time the
manuscript was in the post. When Gross Moral
Turpitudewas published lots of people came out of the
woodwork to tell me their part of the story, as if I would
be incomplete without these memories. Even these six years
later I still get phone calls and letters about the Orr
case. How do I tell these bitter, angry, people that this
was just a story to me. I am long since finished with it.
Dynastic intrigue within the White Rajahs of Sarawak looked
a pretty safe bet as an antidote to the emotional upheavals
of the previous book. Now I hear from Brooke descendants
that the surviving members of the family are horrified by
revelation that the swashbuckling Rajah James Brooke was a
pedophile. Of course, everyone in the know was well aware of
that at the time, nevertheless generations of compliant
historians have drawn a veil over James Brook's sexual
transgressions, preferring to see his life long bachelorhood
as the result of a supposed war wound to his private parts,
and his fondness for village boys and midshipmen a sign of
his boyish exuberance. They conveniently ignore the love
letters to boys, the blackmail letters from boys, and the
lunatic decision to declare one of his live-in boy lovers,
Reuben Walker, as his illegitimate son.
I included a brief exploration of James Brooke's
relationships with boys in White Rajah: A Dynastic
Intrigue,to illustrate the poignancy of this broken old
man whose boys always grew up and left him, who tried to
legitimise his relationship with the stable boy Reuben by
declaring him to be his long lost son. In so doing he set in
train a family tragedy which saw the anti-hero of my book,
Charles Brooke, become the second Rajah in a will which also
bequeathed him all his uncle's ruinous debts and forced him
to provide for several of his uncle's boys. To discharge his
obligations and still hold onto his beloved Sarawak, Charles
Brooke was driven to the expedience of taking an English
heiress as his wife, discarding his Malay wife and so,
inevitably and tragically, casting-off his first born son,
Esca. It's all of one piece: a poignant tale of
disappointment, conflict and betrayal spanning three
generations.
When I stumbled upon the story of Esca, the skeleton in the
closet, the usurped first son, I presumed that his
descendants would be delighted to have legitimacy and status
conferred upon them. When my book was published in the US
and Canada in 1997 I was disconcerted to be sent emails and
letters from elderly grandchildren of Esca Brooke who were
angry and hurt at my revelation that he had lived as the
dependant of a rich businessman, unable to make a life for
himself. For at least some of his grandchildren, this
revelation was a matter of personal humiliation which
mitigated any pride I may have been able to foster by
declaring their grandfather to have been a legitimate Malay
Rajah. So retreating to the first half of the 19th century
in faraway places did not alleviate the problem of
inflicting pain on strangers. There is no safe place, it
would appear, from which harm will be done.
These issues of writerly responsibility are critical ones
right now when the literary culture seems to be turning away
from its long love affair with the novel and rushing into an
eager embrace with non-fiction of the no-holds-barred
variety: investigative reportage of the kind I have been
discussing, biography, and pre-eminently, autobiography. A
good example of the last genre is Katherine Harrison's taut
and explosive bestseller, The Kiss, an account of her
seduction and sexual subjugation at the age of nineteen by
the father she had not known as a child, who was,
incidentally, married with a second family and a minister of
religion. There are other autobiographies like this, though
perhaps not as well done. It is quite clear that writing
such books is an important act of catharsis for the authors,
part of a healing process I can have no doubt. What purpose
does it serve the reading public whose appetite for such
stories is voracious? Anything more than titillation? I
think not.
The Kissis a sexy read; saturated with longing, guilt
and transgressive passion. I refused to even look at the
book for some time, but eventually I read it, standing
rooted to the spot in the closed reserve of a university
library in a curious state of compelled horror and
admiration. I am glad I read it, however distasteful I found
it's naked solipsism, because it has caused me to ponder the
moral issues involved of baring one's soul and the inner
secrets of one's intimate life to the world at large. Is
this a legitimate literary genre, I ask, or is it on the
same level as the American performance artist who invites
her audience to watch her masturbate on stage? I would do
well not to be too intellectually squeamish about this. At
the turn of the century we now inhabit a culture which is
relentless in its examination of the sexual impulses in the
human engine. It is no longer something we can turn away
from, if indeed it ever was.
While my own venture into autobiography, Till Apples Grow on an
Orange Tree,is series of candid reflections about
my life – at times very intimate and confessional
– my intention was to use my experience as emblematic
of a particular moment; the sort of thing that Joan Didion
does absolutely brilliantly in her essay "The White
Album". The book takes its title from an account of my
loss of innocence, when my first lover ran off with my best
friend, who subsequently killed herself. It was a cathartic
piece for me and it took me nearly thirty years to find the
words to write it. I did have another purpose. I was
interested in the loss of innocence outside my own body,
represented by the assault on the body of the child of a
neighbour who went missing the same day my lover did. These
two matters were linked in my mind because for a brief
period my departed lover was a suspect in that terrible
murder. As I write:
Monday morning the police came around to see me. Just
routine, they were talking to everyone in the street.
For me that day was the day I learned, and in a way
contemporary Australia learned, more than we ever wanted to
know about pain and terror and depravity. A loss of
innocence in more ways than one. Simon Brook was at the
heart of that story and I couldn't leave him out. The use of
the Brook murder deeply worried me. I wondered if I should
write to the child's parents to say that I knew that I was
plundering their own terrible story and that I wasn't doing
so as mere literary device. I decided against it because it
would be needlessly cruel to rekindle all their pain. There
was no reason to presume they would read the book. They did
read the book. About a year after it was published I
received a remarkable letter from the boy's father which
began "perhaps you don't welcome strangers claiming
powerful bonds of recognition". I will not otherwise
divulge his communication except to say that he told me he
had found the piece personally important. Naturally I did
welcome his letter and was deeply touched by his generosity.
Had I seen anything? Could I shed any light?
I was in no good shape to be talking to them, red-eyed and
dishevelled. I had nothing to tell them.
What about your… um, boyfriend?
I said Duncan had left on Saturday. Two days later they were
back again, more insistent this time and with a great deal
more knowledge about myself and my …um boyfriend. They
were very interested in Duncan. I couldn't for my life see
why.
Their interest became clear to me when I saw the newspaper
next morning and read in numb horror that the police suspect
was a young man in his early twenties, described as being
well groomed with blond hair.
They thought that Duncan had done this horrendous thing.
Next time the police called I understood what they were
asking me.
These many years later I can recognise this experience as my
brutal rite of passage from innocence into knowledge; a
soul-searing moment that changed my understanding of the
world forever.
My trusting, bliss-filled love affair was shattered and now
I had to contemplate the possibility that the man with whom
I had explored the dizzying reaches of sexual pleasure could
be capable of raping a three year old child, systematically
mutilating him with a razorblade and stuffing wads of
newspaper down his throat to stifle his screams.
A week before I had not known such things were possible. Now
the unspeakable had come right to me; had climbed into bed
with me.
Did the monstrous lie in the deep recesses of sexuality in
any one of us?
Was this our original sin?
Continue with part two of this essay.
Dr Cassandra Pybus is one of Austrlia's most distinguished non-fiction writers.
She is the author of seven books and her latest book is acontrover
sial studyof
the poet and polemicist James McAuley, The Devil and James McAuley.Cassandra can be contacted
atcass@mail.mpx.com.au
Also on Australian Humanities Review:
Return to part one of this essay.
Works Cited
Raymond Foye (ed), The Unknown Poe: An anothology of Fugitive Writings,City Lights, 1980.
Ian Hamilton, "A Biographer's Misgivings", Walking Possession,Bloomsbury, 1994
Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer,Random House, 1990and
The Silent Woman,Picador, 1994
George Plimpton, Truman Capote,Picador, 1999
Gitta Sereny, Cries Unheard
Will Self, "A Life of Crime",The Independent on Sunday,9 May
1999
Gore Vidal, "Tennessee Williams" reprinted inUnited States: Essays 1952-1992,
Andre Deutsch, 1993
Also on Australian Humanities Review:
Return to part one of this essay.
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