Dennis Potter & The Singing Detective: Autobiography

Autobiography

Potter discourages auto-biographical interpretation of his work. He says, in Waiting for the Boat, "one of the reasons I choose to write 'drama' rather than prose fiction is to avoid the question which has so damaged, or intellectually denuded, the contemporary novel: 'who is saying this?'". But later he describes a time in hospital with psoriasis, "unable to move much else besides my left arm and maybe my penis, in an occasional erection which imperiously seemed to take no account of my collapsed hands, caked and cracked skin and feverishly swollen joints". The comparison with Marlow is unavoidable. Many of the elements in The Singing Detective can be understood in terms of his, much reported, life story; the betrayal of the classmate and the Forest of Dean setting for example. When Dr. Gibbons reads a passage from Marlow's novel it practically paraphrases Potter's novel Hide and Seek. W. Stephen Gilbert, in his biography of Potter, says, "What writer has laid himself quite so bare, quite so unsparingly, quite so often as Dennis Potter. His work bursts with the circumstances of his own life". Peter Stead, in Dennis Potter, says though "like all writers Potter is not writing of his experiences but rather out of them".