Perfectly Human

Jenny Diski

  • Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals by Laura Beatty
    Chatto, 336 pp, £20.00, March 1999, ISBN 1 956195 13 0
  • Véra (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage by Stacy Schiff
    Random House, 456 pp, US $27.95, April 1999, ISBN 0 679 44790 3

Whatever the truth of the appealing though dubious proposition that by forty everyone has the face they deserve, it looks as if getting the biographer you deserve post-mortem is pretty much pot luck. Here are two beautiful, displaced, canny women with a powerful sense of their own purpose. For Stacy Schiff, the Véra Nabokov she introduces is ‘the figure in the carpet ... Hers was a life lived in the margins, but then as Nabokov teaches us – sometimes the commentary is the story.’ Laura Beatty, however (including the word ‘Morals’ in the title for more than mere alliterative satisfaction), prefaces her tale of Lillie Langtry with the following deadly judgment: ‘Motivation is the key to character, and Lillie’s reasons for doing the things she did, range through panic and muddle to greed and plain wrong-thinking. She was after all seduced, and it will not be possible to exonerate her from the ultimate charges of corruption and betrayal of self ... The genius is the only type of human whose agenda is pure enough for his [sic] motives to be incontrovertible. Lillie was not a genius.’

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Vol. 21 No. 13 · 1 July 1999 » Jenny Diski » Perfectly Human (print version)
Pages 13-14 | 3281 words