In fact, Peter Ackroyd, of course, is not a biographer at all: all the biographies he wrote (not excluding even the monumental ones about the city of London and the River Thames) are rather impressionistic essays, focused not so much on an object or person, but on their reception personally by himself. Ackroyd. In this sense, the biography of director Alfred Hitchcock is no exception: two hundred and fifty pages, an infinite number of adjectives, an arbitrary selection of facts (of course, the selection of facts in a biography is always somewhat arbitrary, but here it does not even pretend to be objective) and branched multi-step guesses starting literally from out of nowhere.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Did Hitchcock cry as a child? This is because he was terribly intimidated - once the father asked a policeman friend to lock little Alfred in a prison cell as punishment for a minor offense. Was he alone at school and hardly played with his peers? Of course, that is why in adulthood he hated little boys and tried to harm or frighten them at every opportunity. From a young age, Hitchcock was worried about the imperfection of his own body - round and short? Needless to say, it is here that one should look for the roots of his painful obsession with sex and the eternal obscene jokes that so shocked Ingrid Bergman. Well, and of course, through all of Hitchcock’s creativity (what is creativity - through his whole life) Ackroyd persistently pulls the thread of painful, relentless fear that filled the director himself and generously distributed by him outside, and when there are suddenly not enough bricks for this semantic highway, in the course goes literally anything.
Conscientiousness is not Ackroyd's forte at all: despite the impressive bibliography at the end, there is clearly only one (no doubt, the most important) source in the text - the famous dialogues of Hitchcock and Truffaut. It is to them that the author appeals most often and invariably agrees with them in all difficult cases. But with great pleasure Ackroyd uses the material accumulated in the course of his own research for other books: if the name of the London district of Limehouse flashes in the text (the Hitchcock family lived there for a short time after the birth of Alfred), wait for a detailed quote from Ackroyd's novel The Golem of Limehouse. If there is even the slightest chance to talk about Victorian London, believe me, Ackroyd will not miss it.
However, there is something in Hitchcock's biography that does not allow her to be easily dismissed, writing down in the category of a banal day job. In all of his historical books (and almost all of Ackroyd's books, both fiction and non-fiction, are turned to the past), the writer performs the same trick, both fascinating and annoying. By changing and manipulating the facts, transforming reality in accordance with the narrator's own momentary needs, he at the same time enters into an outlandish resonance with the described object - to some extent he himself becomes this object. And from this chemistry, from this strange and exciting reincarnation, the effect of a miracle is born, a strange inner glow, which in the case of Akroyd for some reason turns out to be more important than historical truth, or, rather, successfully replaces this truth. And although in each subsequent text of Ackroyd the magic light bulb built into it shines dimmer than in the previous one (still, one cannot write so much and in such a variety of ways - the quality cannot but suffer), in Hitchcock its light is still quite distinguishable.
This article was sponsored by Martin Kuklinski
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