LESLEY BLANCH (1904 - 2007) at home in Menton, France, May 2007
Photo credit: Eamonn McCabe
From The Guardian Profile by Joe Boyd, 2007.
Also reproduced in Caroline Moorehead's review of Anne Boston's Lesley Blanch (2010)
Times Literary Supplement, March 26, 2010

If you go to Lesley Blanch's official website you will learn that Anne Boston's new biography of the acclaimed writer and world traveler was unauthorized and is considered an "unfounded attack" on Blanch's reputation.

In similar fashion, Selina Hastings' new biography (NYT Review) of the writer William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) would almost certainly have displeased its subject.  To protect his reputation Maugham once paid his nephew Robin $50,000 not to write the unflattering biography Maugham knew his nephew would certainly be capable of producing.  Hastings' biography gives us a sense of just how unflattering, including as Hastings does the story of Louis Legrand, or Loulou, the “ravishing 16-year-old male whore” who was hired by the great author and subsequently enjoyed by his friends as well as his nephew.   

How to control the telling of a life is no easy matter.  What you want to be remembered for, what you want remembered or forgotten is not always up to you.  What is preserved and revealed for posterity may end up being out of your control.  Blanch certainly knew the challenges the biographer faces.   In The Wilder Shores of Love, (first published in 1954 and recently reissued), she writes about four women who "escaped from the constraints of nineteenth-century Europe and fled to the Middle East where they found love."  Her account of these women's lives makes for sensational reading -- I can't put the book down -- but I wonder if her subjects would have been any more or less pleased about Blanch's telling of their stories than Blanch was by Boston's account of her own.  Possibly.  Possibly not.  What exactly constitutes a true story anyway?  The lurid details?  Or the deftly applied series of broad strokes that, one after another, give shape to a portrait in words?   

So much, after all, is a matter of opinion.  In the end there's only so much you can do about the stories people will tell about you afterward. 

"What we must try to guard against," as my dear friend Sophia has observed, "should we live as long as Blanch did, is that we are never photographed wearing scarves."