In four biographies published during the past two years, the life and character of one famous 20th century historical icon and those of three outstanding literary writers have undergone major reappraisals that border on the shocking.
In Jad Adams' book released this month,
Gandhi: Naked Ambition (Quercus, 288 pages), the great advocate of passive, non-violent resistance and acknowledged “Father of India’s Independence” is revealed to have been intensely preoccupied not only with Indian nationalism but also with bizarre sexual experiments. The book details how the naked Gandhi, to test his self-avowed chastity and spiritual fortitude, would sleep with naked nubile women—among them his very own nieces—and how his open avowals of these socially deviant acts made one former minister of pre-independence India call him “a most dangerous, semi-repressed sex maniac.” According to Adams, in the midst of the inter-communal violence that marked the run-up to India’s independence from British rule, Gandhi called for his 18-year-old grandniece Manu to join him—and sleep naked with him. “We both may be killed by the Muslims,” the biographer quotes Gandhi as telling Manu, “and must put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start sleeping naked.”
On the other hand, in “Good Writers. Bad Men. Does It Matter?” in the
In Character website, Sam Schulman reviews recent biographies of the famous Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, the American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever, and the Nobel Prize-winning literary writer V. S. Naipul that show them to be less than exemplary individuals. In Michael Slater’s biography of Dickens,
Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (Yale University Press, 720 pages), the famous writer is revealed to have been an extremely cruel husband who, at 45, declared to his wife that she no longer deserved his love and threw her out of the family home when their children were only 9 and 6 years of age. In Brad Bailey’s biography of John Cheever,
Cheever: A Life (Knopf, 784 pages), one of the greatest short-story writers of modern times is revealed to be a legendary alcoholic afflicted with bisexual priapism. And in Patrick French’s authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul,
The World is What It Is (Knopf, 576 pages), the celebrated writer who was born in India but who grew up in Trinidad is revealed as an extremely selfish, mean-spirited person who ruthlessly used and later abandoned his women, his own family, and his acquaintances in various parts of the world in the pursuit of his literary career.
Read Sam Schulman’s “Good Writers. Bad Men. Does It Matter?” in In Character now! RELATED READING:In “The Dark Side of Dickens,” an article appearing in the May 2010 issue of
The Atlantic magazine, Christopher Hitchens explains why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men.
Read Christopher Hitchens’s “The Dark Side of Dickens” now!
