Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears — which dilate on anorexia, alcoholism, cruel bereavement. When is a life worth telling? B.S. Johnson, the London-born novelist (and tireless chronicler of himself), put the most revealing sexual details into his autobiographical novels of the 1960s. They might have amounted to mere solipsistic spouting, were the writing not so good.
James Rhodes, a 40-year-old classical musician, was repeatedly raped at his London prep school in the early 1980s. In his memoir, Instrumental, Rhodes tells how he found salvation in music and became one of our leading concert pianists. Written in faux American hip-jive slang (‘fuck-bucket’, ‘I shit you not’), the book is an attempt, among other things, to give the author’s damaged life justification and meaning. Instrumental may be crudely written, hyperbolic and gruelling to read, but Rhodes’s is a life worth telling all right.
Sexual abuse, previously disregarded, is the child protection issue of our time. Rhodes’s rapist, a school boxing coach named Peter Lee, was traced to Margate and charged, but he died of a stroke before he could stand trial. Many others have been wrongly accused. Not long ago, friends of ours were raided by the Metropolitan Police, who impounded laptops and computer storage devices on suspicion of paedophile activity. The couple had neglected to secure their wireless network with a password but still the police needed to make sure that the modem had indeed been ‘compromised’. After eight weeks, the computers came back with no evidence on them of child pornography. In all likelihood a perfect stranger — a man like Peter Lee — had parked his car outside their house and, using a smartphone, hacked into their Wi-Fi system.
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