David Baddiel on the curious incident of Russell Brand and the ghostwriter
30th November 2007
www.thetimes.co.uk
I'VE WRITTEN HERE BEFORE ABOUT erfolgstraurigkeit, or “success-sadness”, a word I made up to mean the flip side of schadenfreude. Where schadenfreude is joy at someone else's failure, erfolgstraurigkeit would be despair at someone else's success. One version of erfolgstraurigkeit is the tired old journalistic trope where a hack waxes lyrical about their subject's beauty/riches/talent/lifestyle, before ending: “Don't you just hate her/him?” I would never use that trope. But if I did, it would be about Russell Brand.
From my point of view, he's an obvious candidate. He's younger, hipper and better looking than me. He's taken that rock'n'roll comedian thing once ascribed to Rob Newman and myself, and made it flesh — a hell of a lot of flesh, as it turns out, judging by the absurd number of women throwing themselves against his bedpost, desperate to make another notch. So, if in some kind of terrible self-defeating self-esteem challenge, I was to put my life up against his, the thing I might cling to is writing. Where, I might say, are his writing chops? C'mon, get your books out on the table and we'll see, would be the cry, much as Alan Mullery once challenged Rodney Marsh after an argument on Gillette Soccer Saturday (except using “caps and medals” instead of books). Sadly for me, however, he could now slap down on that imaginary table his autobiography, My Booky Wook.
And even more sadly — were I to continue the face-off, which, by then, frankly, would be starting to look a bit stupid — My Booky Wook turns out to be really good: a Tourette's-honest, laugh-out-loud funny, rabidly well-written story of Brand's journey out of the badlands of Essex astride a fame-targeted rocket fuelled by narcissism, alienation, desperate, soul-crumbling hedonism, and — the key to his appeal — an always foregrounded vulnerability.
At this stage, perhaps I should be upfront that I know Russell, as last time I wrote a positive piece about a book by someone I know — David Thewlis — a blogger on The Times website wrote bitterly: “And of course, he's a mate.” So, yes, the same is true of RB, and those of you for whom that means any opinion I may have of his work should now be discounted, please go ahead. But mate or not, the truth is — as ever when the person who might cause me erfolgstraurigkeit is actually doing something worthwhile — I don't hate Russell Brand. One person I think might, though, is whoever was originally his ghostwriter. According to Russell, when he gave in the material recorded for the book, it came back from the publisher typed up like his own life “written by someone who hates me”. Using the comedian's own tendency for nodding and winking Dickensian asides, the ghostwriter had apparently added a commentary to Brand's exploits, but usually in the negative, à la “So I slept with her again (like the stupid a***hole I am)” or “Then I went back on heroin (what a pathetic idiot, I hear you cry!”). This led to a parting of the ways between the owner of the life and its compiler.
This has clearly been a positive for Brand because, having got down to the job himself, the book is now written entirely in his distinctive comic voice; which does mean, of course, that you have to put up with his tendency to describe crack-ingestion and record-breaking promiscuity in the idiom of a Victorian chimney-sweep, but I've always rather liked that incongruity. It makes me wonder, however, whether dislike of the subject is always a potential trap for the ghostwriter, or indeed for the biographer. In the introduction to The Life And Death of Peter Sellers, Roger Lewis describes how writing the book led him to despise his idol. Lewis takes the high moral ground on this, based on Sellers' various domestic and professional transgressions, but it's hard not to wonder if his dislike isn't something to do with him being — and there's no nice way of saying this — the parasite on the back of the star. Compulsive hero-worship often goes hand in hand with hero-loathing, and it's made much worse if week in, week out, you're sitting at home collating into print the experiences of someone who has lived a much more exciting, glamorous and successful life than you. Even if — as in the case of Sellers and Brand — that life has had its appalling comedowns, because, from where the writer's sitting, even the comedowns are no doubt pretty glamorous.
Basically what I'm saying is, don't be a ghostwriter, or even a biographer, unless you are absolutely convinced that the person you are writing about hasn't lived a life that will make yours look shite by comparison. Or unless you are utterly untroubled by erfolgstraurigkiet.
