Six Men [antikvár]

A Note on Fame and Friendship More than a century ago, in his Mirrors of Downing Street, a collection of what were then called "character studies" of men in power, Harold Begbie put the quandary of the memoirist very succinctly: "Public men must expect public criticism, and no criticism is so good for them, and therefore for the State, as criticism of character; but their position is difficult, and they may justly complain when those to whom they have spoken in the candor of private conversation make use of such confidences for a public purpose." In our day, the marketing of confidences "spoken in the candor of private conversation" has become a big and frequently disreputable business. An outraged victim can expect little balm from the courts, since the courts have decided that almost any act of Hcense— from a scurrilous biography to filmed close-ups of writhing genitalia —is just what the Founding Fathers had in mind to defend when they wrote the First Amendment to the Constitution. Anyone who has been subjected to press interviews or, worse, to profiles "in depth" (usually composed on the basis of a two-hour conversation) knows that only very rarely does the printed piece approximate to a plausible account of the subject's views, let alone to a recognizable sketch of a character that is not a stereotype. The intelligent complaint is not that the subject's vanity has been punctured, or—what as a general proposition is always true-that he dislikes being disliked. The flattering pieces are, in my experience, as unsatisfactory as the denigrating ones. Not from the