Big scandal - novelist invents his own life

Novelists are odd, randy, dysfunctional, at least compared to the blameless lives of their biographers

An undisputed master of that important literary sub-genre, the press interview, Martin Amis can be relied upon to come up with at least one quotable soundbite per profile. Sometimes these insights have a certain worked-over quality – his remark about Britain leading the world in nothing but decline was deemed to be so neat that it was trotted out in several interviews – but, more often than not, they say something interesting about the peculiar life of writers.

At a time when he was in a bit of a bait with Eric Jacobs, his father's biographer, Martin had a pop at the currently fashionable industry of literary biography. Its main attraction, he said, was that "it allows Second XI types to act superior to the knights of the First XI." While novelists were aristocratically stroking the ball around the field of literary endeavour, those who wrote about them were grubby mediocrities languishing in the pavilion.

It is a somewhat arrogant view (no prizes for guessing which team Martin would see himself as playing for) but increasingly it also seems a rather perceptive one. Over the past few years, Graham Greene has been variously portrayed as a serial shagger, with a particular penchant for behind-the-altar action in churches, a spy, a closet bisexual and an accomplice to murder.

Then there are the writers who, while not actually guilty of doing beastly things, can be fingered as liars and fantasists. Laurens van der Post was duffed up along these lines a few months ago, and now it is the turn of Anthony Burgess. A biography to be published later this year will claim that the more lurid details of Burgess's two volumes of memoirs were invented.

The inspiration for A Clockwork Orange was not, it is alleged, the rape of his first wife Lynne by American soldiers in London while Burgess was away serving in the army, because it probably never happened. The stuff about his suffering from a brain tumour and being given a year to live was invented, too. As for the various erotic adventures and visits to brothels around the world, mentioned in passing in the memoirs, those too, we are authoritatively informed, were made up.

The biographer who has managed to discover all this intimate material has been leaking copiously to the press in advance of publication of his book. "Burgess's real life was very dull," says Roger Lewis. "The sex, incest and sado-masochism in his books and his stories were a substitute for a life he might have had and never did." With the confidence of a man privy to the every thought and desire of his subject, he adds, "Burgess was turned on by the pornography of violence. There was a lot of pent-up violence in him."

Oh, and he was also thoroughly money-minded, choosing shamelessly to use the National Health service when he was dying, in spite of the fact that he would leave around £2m in his will.

Something considerably more interesting than a career biographer puffing his own work is going on here. The various aspects of a novelist's life that are most likely to cause resentment among journalists and jobbing non-fiction writers are neatly on display. The writer as self-aggrandising fake is there, as is the writer as bug-eyed pervert and as frustrated loser. And, of course, most unforgivably of all, there is the writer who actually makes money from his novels.

Why on earth should anyone want to read about all this? Indeed, apart from the need to make a quick, unseemly buck (an active interest in money being entirely acceptable among biographers), what on earth would possess someone to spend time researching it and writing it down?

For, in spite of the best efforts of an eager, wet-lipped biographer, it is all supremely unsurprising. The real life of a novelist was rather dull: wow, hold the front page! Fiction seeped from his novels into his memoirs: what a shock! His inner desires were expressed through his fiction: blimey, who had have thought it?

As it happens, few novelists have been more candid about the seedy aspects of writing fiction than Anthony Burgess. This was the man, after all, who said that "most artists find that when they're writing something, they become sexually excited", who once startled a BBC interviewer by claiming that writers were compulsive onanists and were, as he put it, "at it like monkeys".

So it seems that yet another literary biography is about to reveal, with suitable exclamations of scandalised horror, that serious novelists are odd, randy, dysfunctional and emotionally out of whack. At least, that is, compared to the blameless lives of professional biographers.

terblacker@aol.com