Customising Biography

Iain Sinclair

• Blake by Peter Ackroyd
  Sinclair-Stevenson, 399 pp, £20.00, September 1995, ISBN 1 85619 278 4
• Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Jerusalem edited by David Bindman and Morton D. Paley
  Tate Gallery, 304 pp, £48.00, August 1991, ISBN 1 85437 066 9
• Vol. II: Songs of Innocence and Experience edited by Andrew Lincoln
  Tate Gallery, 210 pp, £39.50, August 1991, ISBN 1 85437 068 5
• Vol. III: The Early Illuminated Books edited by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi
  Tate Gallery, 288 pp, £48.00, August 1993, ISBN 1 85437 119 3
• Vol. IV: The Continental Prophecies: America, Europe, The Song of Los edited by D.W. Dörbecker
  Tate Gallery, 368 pp, £50.00, May 1995, ISBN 1 85437 154 1
• Vol. V: Milton, a Poem edited by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi
  Tate Gallery, 224 pp, £48.00, November 1993, ISBN 1 85437 121 5
• Vol. VI: The Urizen Books edited by David Worrall
  Tate Gallery, 232 pp, £39.50, May 1995, ISBN 1 85437 155 X

A recent episode in a jobbing writer’s life found me interviewing Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg) in her comprehensively occupied Belsize Park flat. The unreality of this situation – talking, shoulder to shoulder, with one of the Beat Generation’s best-preserved icons – was ameliorated by the fact that our paths had crossed a number of times over the last fifteen years. (Once, during a strained public conversation in Waterstone’s, Charing Cross Road, we had been interrupted by a foam-flecked out-patient yelling: ‘How often do you sleep with prostitutes?’) But even now, at some level, I couldn’t accept it: that this courteous and sharp-witted lady was the one who had been, rather reluctantly, photographed with Neal Cassady, and who had herself been responsible for some of the most familiar images of Kerouac and Cassady in archetypal buddy-buddy poses. I guess that I’m temperamentally ill-equipped to deal with these confusions. Fiction, biography, journalism: they will insist on muscling in on territory that doesn’t, strictly speaking, belong to them. Carolyn, in stately exile in North London, calls into question the eternal present-tense rush of On the Road. They can’t both be true, not at the same time. That plural consciousness is too much to accept. But Carolyn is, self-evidently, very much alive, and feels obliged, as a duty, to swoop on inaccuracies perpetrated by career biographers, manipulations that nudge her out of the official portraits. Biography is serious business these days. It underwrites the republication of a sanctioned backlist. It provokes movie deals that, in their turn, create a climate of excitement which finds Johnny Depp paying $ 15,000 for what purports to be Jack Kerouac’s old raincoat. The vendor cursed himself for letting the relic go so cheap: a soiled handkerchief was subsequently found in the pocket which could have been sold separately, or used to bump up the price tag by another couple of grand.