Princess Diane

Penny Boumelha

• Diane Arbus: A Biography by Patricia Bosworth
  Heinemann, 367 pp, £14.95, January 1985, ISBN 0 434 08150 7
• Inside the Onion by Howard Nemerov
  Chicago, 63 pp, £8.45, April 1984, ISBN 0 226 57244 7

In Sartre’s Les Mots, there is a mise-en-abîme in which he writes of his youthful fascination with a volume on the childhood of illustrious men: in each life-history – as here in his own autobiography – there is a point at which the apparent banality and contingency of their ordinary life becomes illumined with the significance of destiny, as the ‘great man’-to-be fuses momentarily with the child. These moments, for Sartre, bestow a vertiginous god-like sensation upon the reader, who is thereby placed in a position to exchange knowing looks and indulgent smiles with the author over the heads of the characters. Patricia Bosworth seems to have learned much of her method from the unnamed author of Sartre’s boyhood reading. She is prodigal with knowing looks, though reading the book did little to make me feel like a divinity.