No man is a hero to his valet, and few enough men remain heroes to their biographers. For the most part, there is so much that is tawdry about too many people for more than a tiny few to escape the distaste which comes of close examination. And in a way, choosing a subject for a biography and committing to oneself to the project must be rather like falling in love in haste, and repenting at leisure in marriage, writes Kevin Myers
Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa. By Alex Kershaw. Macmillan, 255pp. £20 sterling
Rightly or wrongly, I sensed a growing sense of distaste for the subject of this book as the author grew to know him better and better. And the beautiful blonde who first captivates on the dance-floor, and brings that entrancement to full and glorious measure in the bed, cannot hope to live up to such radiant promise in the dreary years that might follow. So no real human being could ever have matched the iconic status that Robert Capa has been unstintingly given by the liberal/left supporters of the anti-Franco movement.
Capa was unquestionably a brave and able war photographer. He had that perfect instinct which told him when to raise his head and snap off a few quick shots. It's like the natural goalscorer, or the brilliant angler, or the intuitive tunesmith. No-one knows how it's done, and it's a skill which can't be taught.
But Capa's reputation was in part built on the fact that he chose the politically correct side in the Spanish Civil War. He served with the International Brigade. Had he chosen to serve on the opposite side, against the forces of international Stalinism, he would never have become fashionable. And as Alex Kershaw correctly points out, he steadfastly ignored the astonishing atrocities perpetrated by the side he was supporting.
In that sense, he was more agitprop than true journalist; and questions must remain too about the most famous war photograph of all, that of the falling soldier. I have never understood why that is hailed as such a fine photograph - if it is of a soldier dying, then it is clearly a lucky shot. But even if it is what it is said to be, it tells us nothing more than that shot men fall. Most of us know that.
In fact, there's every reason to believe the photograph is not genuine, and that the story that it was real grew too large for Capa to kill. Certainly, he was a tireless self-advertiser, and his autobiography has long been a by-word for what was clearly a self-serving and highly imaginative ego. In that regard, he was well matched by the company he kept - Gellhorn, Hemingway and the others of that chic and unbearably self-regarding crew.
He was truly a self-invented man, a Hungarian Jew who was born Andre Freidman, and who in time became the most famous war photographer in the world. He was courageous, but it is a conceit of war photographers that they are the match of soldiers. They are not. Capa would travel 60 miles from a luxury hotel in Valencia to film action shots of the front before returning to his comfortable hotel bed (where women, food and drink were plentiful), while back in the trenches, hungry men were freezing half to death amid their own filth.
And he stayed on the beach at Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings in 1944 for at most 90 minutes - probably far less - before he scrambled back aboard a returning landing-craft and headed for safety. Any soldier who tried to escape like that would have been shot out of hand by an NCO or subaltern - and many were.
This cannot gainsay the risks he took: he parachuted into Germany during the Rhine crossing, and that took real guts, and his love of manageable dollops of danger began to dominate his life, as it still does for many war-junkie journalists. They abandon all other great interests - love, family, home - for the adrenaline surges of being in action, and then go back to their hotels to talk war and pretend they are soldiers, which they are not.
Capa was killed in action in Vietnam in 1954. It was the best death he could have had. He was already a chronic gambler, and he was not a talented enough photographer to have made a good living with more conventional, peaceful material. He was already a boaster and a drinker and a bore. Ahead would have lain neglect, failure and, worst of all, a public discovery of how bogus he really was.
This is a fair biography of a man who, like most of us would, fails the demanding tests of mythology; but it has not been well-served by the apparent refusal of Time-Life to ease its copyright stranglehold on Capa's photographs. And a book about a photographer without any of his pictures is like a radio programme about a singer without any of his songs.
Kevin Myers is a novelist and an Irish Times journalist