Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 14: Autobiography
Winter 1984
The Americans call photography an art. But what I’m doing is not art. How can I talk of these photographs as art objects? These are real people. I have inhaled their suffering. Don McCullin, A Life in Photographs. Plus: Beryl Bainbridge, Michael Ignatieff, William Boyd, Eddie Limonov, Todd McEwen, Jaroslav Seifert, Doris Lessing, and others.
From this Issue
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Jackdaw Cake
Norman Lewis
‘My grandfather, whom I saw only at weekends, filled every corner of the house with his deep, competitive voice, and a personality aromatic as cigar-smoke.’
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Funny Noises with our Mouths
Beryl Bainbridge
‘If we went out to tea in Southport and my mother left a tip under the plate, my grandmother used to pick it up and slide it into her handbag.’
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Family Politics
Vladimir Rybakov
‘To this day, I do not know where my mother and father are buried.’
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Punishable Innocence
Breyten Breytenbach
‘Here I live now in an old house next to a mourning autumn tree. How I got here I shall never be able to explain.’
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Paramilitarism in Costa del Burger
Todd McEwen
‘So I got on my bicycle. Bicycle of Pain. I pedalled slowly agonizingly slowly away from the house.’
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Eddie-baby
Eddie Limonov
‘Usually taciturn and self-absorbed, on that day Eddie bombarded the teachers with witticisms and cheeky, caustic remarks, for which the French mistress, shaken, sent him out of the classroom.’
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Alpes Maritimes
William Boyd
‘From the small terrace at Cherry's villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbour lights and headlamps of cars on the coast road.’
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Failed Saxophonist
Josef Škvorecký
‘My initiation into jazz later proved to have been the beginning of my decisive step into literature as well. I talked my father into buying me a tenor sax, and tried my luck with several local swing bands.’
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A Life in Photographs
Don McCullin
‘What I'm doing is not art. How can I call it that? I'm stuck with a load of pictures of humanity–suffering, dying, bleeding. These pictures come from a witness.’
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The Business of Mourning
Christian McEwen
‘It is difficult to acknowledge that people have their own lives, their own deaths, their own integrity.’
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Skating with Lenin
Jaroslav Seifert
‘In the winter of 1912 a small man in a Persian lamb-skin hat was also skating there.’
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Weaning
Adam Mars-Jones
‘As he grew up he would drink, and likewise urinate, without embarrassment. Snacks, so long as they were light and informal, were liquids: casual and seemly.’
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On the Orwell Trail
Bernard Crick
‘I share Orwell's view that the masses are controlled - or that people are massified - by prolefeed.’
