Читать книгу Picasso: A Biography - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 6

SINCE this life of Picasso was written several other books have appeared, some on particular aspects of his work, some on the artist as a man; but none has raised such an outcry as Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s Picasso, Creator and Destroyer (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1988), nor has any been more strongly condemned since Françoise Gilot published her Life with Picasso in 1964.

For my part I felt the general indignation very strongly and I had hoped that the timely re-issue of this book would allow me to utter a counterblast to Huffington in the form of a preface. I wrote one with some care, and Tom Phillips, who felt even more indignant if possible, very kindly said that I might use his much-admired review in The Independent, a strongly-worded criticism in which he, as a painter, dealt with some points far better than I could. Altogether it was, I thought, a good foreword, a thorough-going, heartfelt counterblast. But as a matter of routine my publishers showed it to their lawyer for a libel-report and to our astonishment he said it was actionable.

It was actionable because I too had written a book on Picasso and therefore I could be looked upon as Huffington’s trade-rival, a rival actuated not by honestly-held beliefs but by sordid malice. If I had produced a book on white mice it would have been actionable if I had said that another book on white mice was ill-informed, ill-written and ill-natured. And in this case, believe it or not, it was also dangerous to quote from Tom Phillips’ review, thus giving it a more lasting form than it had in a newspaper.

That, according to the company’s expert, is the state of the English law; and since Coke defines law as the perfection of reason, one can but bow with all the respect due to perfection, whatever shape it may assume.

PATRICK O’BRIAN

1989