Biographer believes in reticence

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32972, 19 July 1972, Page 6

Biographer believes in reticence

In an age of instant electronic exposure, the public has become accustomed to biographies that reveal all. It is a development that does not particularly please Dorothea Turner, whose recent biography of the New Zealand author, Jane Mander, has been much acclaimed.

Lady Turner, wife of Sir Alexander Turner, a judge of the Court of Appeal, believes there may be a case for opening up the lives of those who seek public office to close scrutiny—although she is not sure .even of that. But she is quietly adamant about the writer’s right to privacy. The Mander family had strong principles about privacy, and Jane Mander destroyed all her private correspondence. For this, Lady Turner is both admiring and grateful. “I was fortunate to be dealing with a family of very much the same reticence as I was used to,” she said in Christchurch yesterday. “SOME EXCESSES” The biographer must, she believes, consider the degree to which the writer has exposed his or herself. Having books published should not lay an author open to be completely explored as a private person. “Some literary people, of course, write every letter with a view to having it published, but others do have a personal life,” Lady Turner said. The present popularity of biographies has led to some excesses, in Lady Turner’s opinion. “One’s entitled to be a novelist without being pursued,” she said. “Biographers

have to be careful not to frighten off new authors. In America, J. D. Salinger has been forced into hiding. Although she says it is difficult to estimate just what one may have missed in something one has not read, Lady Turner does not feel she was handicapped by not having Jane Mander’s private correspondence to study.

The book, about which Lady Turner is lecturing at a course at the University of Canterbury this week, took several years to research and write. It involved, she says, a lot of leg-work as well as book work. Jane Mander’s father was a sawmiller who eventually became owner of the “Northern Advocate,” and spent 20 years in Parliament. Her early years were spent moving from house to house in the North Island, covering countryside now often drastically altered. SOCIAL COMMENTARY A lack of records of those times caused most of Lady Turner’s difficulties. And yet she believes it contributes much to the social commentary of the book. “Of course, there are terrific gaps, and I hope I’ve shown where they are,” she said. “But that in itself tells something. I was concerned to give a picture of her en-

vironment. The family lived in houses often nothing more than sheds—as did many New Zealanders then—and the visual landscape and everything about them was quickly destroyed.” Of Jane Mander’s life in the United States, where she went at the age of 35 to study at the Columbia University’s School of Journalism, Lady Turner was able to find much material. Lady Turner’s biography of Jane Mander, who is known as one of New Zealand’s greatest novelists and a life-long debater on women’s place in society, is her first book. In writing it, she followed a natural bent. She is a sister of the late John Mulgan (perhaps best known for his work “Man Alone”), and her father, the late Alan Mulgan, was between 1905 an 1916 a journalist on “The Press.”

After graduation from the University of Canterbury, Lady Turner intended to become a teacher, but turned to journalism. After marriage and motherhood, Lady Turner returned to the “Auckland Star” as a music critic and interviewer in the 1950 s when the arts page was expanding its scope.