No checks in the Post
From Mr Christopher Booker
Sir: I fear that J.D.F. Jones, in his letter (27 October) defending himself as the biographer of Laurens van der Post, displays that same compulsion to give a venomous spin to everything which makes his book so singularly unattractive. As I said in my review, it is interesting that an author so determined to blacken his subject as a 'compulsive liar' should get his own facts so consistently wrong.
He claims to have spent 'countless hours' interviewing Sir Laurens's family and friends. That is not the recollection of most of them, either in England or South Africa. It is also malicious of him to insinuate that Lucia van der Post was given £10,000 for 'authorising' him to write her father's biography. He does not explain that this payment to Laurens's literary estate (which has several beneficiaries) was only made after it belatedly came to light that the publisher had always intended that part of the advance should go to the estate, for access to Sir Laurens's archive.
It is quite untrue that I myself ever 'aspired' to write Laurens's biography. I did discuss with him the possibility that I might one day write a personal book about him, and, so grotesque a hash has Mr Jones made of his biography, that the urge to do so may now be even stronger, But this would not be because, as Mr Jones so charmingly puts it. I was Laurens's 'sycophant'. It seems he cannot grasp that two people may simply be friends. Poor old Jonesy; what he has missed!
Christopher Booker
Bath From Mr Ralph Tinley
Sir: I am bewildered by Christopher Booker's furious review of J.D.F. Jones's Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post (Books, 20 October). One year after Sir Laurens's death, Booker in an interview (in the Guardian) described the Afrikaner charmer as an 'old fraud',
Are there two Christopher Bookers or has he changed his mind?
Ralph Tittley
Malvern, Worcestershire
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