142
PARTISAN REVIEW
1980s that would have astounded Scott himself. His work brought him
little success in his lifetime. The partition of India in 1947, the appalling
carnage between Muslims and Hindus that followed the hasty (and
humiliating) departure of the British rulers, all made the public look
away. Readers did not want to think about these things, let alone face
making the uncomfortable moral and political reckoning that Scott was
almost unique in attempting in Britain in the
I
960s and 1970s.
Ten years after Scott's death, when I set out to write his life, I found
a parallel blankness in India. There seemed to be little or no obvious
remaining trace of the former empire. Many of the young Indians I met
had only the vaguest impression that the British had once ruled their
country. So far as they were concerned, the whole affair was ancient his–
tory. Scott himself had always insisted that the past remains unfinished
business. He was pilloried for it at the time. But subsequent events in
India and Pakistan have repeatedly proved him right when he insisted it
was a dangerous mistake to pretend the past had never happened, or to
try to sweep it under the carpet.
In
Matisse's case, the skeleton under the carpet turned out to be a
major politico-financial scandal that rocked the country and very nearly
brought down the French Government at the turn of the century. The
Humbert Affair, following immediately after the Dreyfus Affair, was
hushed up so successfully at the time and afterwards that it barely rates
a mention in histories or memoirs of the period. Nor was there any ref–
erence in published or unpublished accounts of Matisse's life to a
national and international scandal that turned his own and his family's
lives upside down.
It
had traumatic personal consequences, and it has
distorted his public image ever since.
It
exp lain s why there has been no
biography until now.
It
was in large part responsible for that famous fig–
ment-the tame, dull, solemn Matisse-who turned out to be almost the
opposite of the bold, passionate, warm-hearted, humorous, and anar–
chic unknown Matisse I found myself writing about.
This is where I rest my case, with neither muckrakers nor hagiogra–
phers. Whichever goal they pursue, whether they want sensational rev–
elations or a decent cover-up, both parties know precisely what they
are looking for from the beginning. I belong to a third party of biog–
raphers who set out with no notion of where they are going, who work
without preconceptions, and whose sole aim is to discover what actu–
ally happened. Uncertainty is our basic working principle. And the
nearer you get to the present, the more uncertain you inevitably
become. For it is a disconcerting rule that, the closer your focus, the
more blurring and distortion surrounds the image, and the harder it is
