Somewhere between a pat and a lash
Andro Linklater
BILLY by Pamela Stephenson HarperCollins, £17.99, pp. 291, ISBN 000711091X Pamela Stephenson is a psychotherapist who has written a biography of her husband, Billy Connolly. This makes it a particularly interesting book to review, because in their approach to their subjects, biographers tend to become either sadistic or masochistic. The former beat and lash their subjects until they submit to whatever interpretative fancy gives the writer satisfaction — thus Lytton Strachey dolling up General 'Chinese' Gordon into a brocaded, evangelical poseur, or Nigel Hamilton's recent Full Monty which zipped Field Marshal Montgomery into a homosocial rubber suit. The latter abase themselves in order to glorify the greatness of those they feel privileged to write about, with Boswell the coruscating best, and the worst, any celebrity toe-sucker, from Frank Sinatra: An American Legend to Robbie Williams' Somebody Someday — the modern equivalent of those Victorian hagiographers who prompted Carlyle's mordant aside, 'How delicate, how decent is English biography, bless its mealy mouth.'
In this case the subject is a Clydeside welder turned 1960s folksinger, who then became a comedian notorious for his outrageous material — the quintessential Connolly joke is about the wife murdered by her husband and buried with her bottom sticking out of the ground so that he has somewhere to park his bike — and is now court jester to Hollywood's 'A' list. He was also deserted in childhood by his mother, sexually abused — mutual masturbation by implication — by his father at around puberty, and as an adult became an alcoholic, a drug abuser and prone to physical violence, before eventually straightening Out. In a husband, this sounds like the makings of hell, although the author offers tittle clue to her marital emotions, but to a biographer and to a therapist it should be pure gold. The question is how to handle it in a book, in particular whether to whip or be whipped.
As author, Pamela Stephenson superficially seems to opt for showbiz masochism. Hollywood names are dropped in snobbish abandon to illustrate his rise 'from tenement to "tinsel town" in five extraordinary decades'. Faults are lovable, failure a step forward, and no success is small. 'As a result of Pocahontas and Muppets' Treasure Island', she writes of his roles in two cartoon films, 'Billy has become a firm favourite of six-year-olds around the world.' Against this sugary backdrop, his manager's cold character assessment comes as a shock: 'He's the most gregarious person I've ever met ... yet he barely has a friend in the world, and sits alone in his hotel room.'
The underlying structure, however, comes from Stephenson as therapist, and here she takes firm control, briskly explaining his behaviour in passages such as this:
He does not process information the same way that many others do. Psychologists currently ascribe diagnoses such as 'Attention Deficit Disorder' or 'Learning Disability' to such a way of thinking ,.. In addition to having a learning difference, however, Billy is and was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a person suffering from past and present trauma.
Inevitably, this approach leads everything back to the childhood scars, but at the cost of leaving the 'poet and dreamer' (if that is what she really means) unexplored. Watching him perform, she exclaims, 'there is always such a peace for him out there in that spotlight, probably the only place he's truly happy', but the key to his manic, liberating, occasionally tedious, stage performances, and the moving, untrained film roles, as in Mrs Brown, remains hidden.
The drawback to the therapeutic vision is that it turns the subject into a victim rather than an autonomous, creative being. Thus there are only bland references to the pain his truncated emotional development has caused others, some throwaway remarks about his tortured religious feelings, and a screaming silence about what it is like to live with him. Had she exhibited his destructive side, given something more of herself, and set all this against the clowning, clamorous figure on stage, a truly moving, Gothic portrait of a sacred monster might have emerged to illuminate his wayward genius. But to do so would have required a biographer crueller than a caring wife should be.
Previous page
