“Ah, so you’re the fellow who thinks literary biography is a waste of time!” It was with these words, or words to this effect, that my neighbor at dinner hailed me the other night. I wouldn’t have minded, normally. Indeed, I’d have been rather flattered that my name had meant anything at all to someone I’d never met. Except that in this case my neighbor was Michael Holroyd.

You know, Michael Holroyd? Author of a magisterial four-volume life of George Bernard Shaw and two magisterial volumes on Lytton Strachey? Author of a magisterial book on the art and craft of biography? President of the Royal Society of Literature, etc., etc.? Of all the luck. Actually, he was very charming, but it was a bit embarrassing. A couple of days previously, I had written an article for the Evening Standard in which it did look a bit like I was saying exactly that.

The piece followed a weekend in which sensational revelations about the private lives of writers had been sprouting like an outburst of Japanese knotweed from the pages of the Sunday papers. The origins of these stories were new biographical books, which were not in themselves sensationalist or silly. Quite the opposite, in fact. One was Paula Byrne’s fine book on Evelyn Waugh, Mad World, which traced persuasively and with original research how Brideshead Revisited had grown in Waugh’s imagination from his friendship with the Lygon family of Madresfield Court. One was Roland Chambers’s The Last Englishman, a well-written life, albeit an oddly-shaped one, of Arthur Ransome, author of the Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books. (Asinine stuff, if you ask me, but beloved the world over.) Another was John Carey’s authorized biography of the Nobel Laureate William Golding of Lord of the Flies, The Spire, and The Inheritors fame. This one I have yet to read, but Carey—chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times since the time in which The Inheritors was set and emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford—comes recommended.

Yet out of these subtle books had sprung, in rough order, the headlines that Evelyn Waugh had homosexual affairs at Oxford—this probably isn’t news, technically, but newspapers have short memories—that Arthur Ransome had been a Russian spy (possible), and that William Golding had once made a ham-fisted attempt to rape a 14-year-old girl.

What this pointed to, I suggested, was that, high-minded though the endeavors of all these biographers were, from the point of view of their publishers they might as well have been at home whittling if they weren’t able to unearth some secret shame that would make a biff-bang serialization in a Sunday newspaper.

This serialization is, to mangle metaphors horribly, at once cash cow and megaphone. If all goes well, it will earn a fee that—depending on the contract—will either directly defray the publisher’s costs or do so indirectly by supplementing the author’s pitiable advance to a level on which he can live. And it will give the book a shout at being talked about and perhaps even bought.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this is getting to be an integral, necessary part of the deal. And the problem is that this serialization simply will not materialize if the writer lived what someone—was it Kingsley Amis?—once said would be the ideal life of any writer: “He sat at his desk and wrote.”

The newspaper editor, presented with a manuscript, will leaf through page on page of a writer’s lonely agonies in his study, his quiet fidelity to his wife, his accumulation of prizes and gongs, occasional disappointments, and the sunlit uplands of a late-career blossoming, before asking, “Where’s the beef?”

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion,” I wrote, “that a literary biography without a sex-Nazi, child-slavery, and/or hamster-rape angle is now dead in the water as a publishing proposition.” Mr. Holroyd, who dabbles as little as he is able in the murky waters of sex-Nazis and hamster-rape, was understandably pained by this. But he was prepared to concede some of the point.

The shrinking market for serious, canonical biography is increasingly constrained—more in the UK than in the States, it should be admiringly noted—by the need for bankable scuttlebutt or pop-cultural razzle-dazzle. As the satirical magazine Private Eye recently joked, it can’t be long before an official biography of T.S. Eliot will be titled The Man Who Wrote “Cats” or Ted Hughes recast as “Poetry’s Heathcliff.”

When John Haffenden’s magnificent two-volume biography of the great critic-poet William Empson came out three years ago, it was little noticed. It would barely have been covered at all—outside the literary pages, that is—had it not been for Empson’s sexual eccentricities. Empson’s private life as an adult was, it should be said, a pretty bizarre one. His beard—sprouting as it did from the neck rather than the chin and spreading over his chest like a hairy napkin—told its own story. The saving grace for Haffenden’s publishers seems to have been Empson’s perverse encouragement of his wife’s infidelity and his attachment to troilism. The author of Seven Types of Ambiguity and some of the most beautiful, difficult, riddling, and influential poetry of the last century thus became Wacky Three-in-a-Bed Perv Prof.

Even so, Haffenden is an academic. His book was published by a university press. And it’s hard to imagine it being commissioned today or it being possible for its author to have completed a work of two decades or more without the support of an institution.

But just as, for the purposes of the public prints, rock stars must “party” (i.e., ingest epic quantities of drugs) and pederasts must “smirk,” literary intellectuals must feud bitterly with their rivals and display some form or other of romantic incontinence. As W.H. Auden put it, “To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say,/ Is a keen observer of life/ the word Intellectual suggests straight away/ a man who’s untrue to his wife.”

Ted Hughes—who fitted that definition of intellectual rather well—seems to be a case in point. A year or two ago, after his death, his publisher, Faber, approached the paper I then worked for, The Daily Telegraph, with an offer of a serialization deal for his Letters.

There were, as I understand it, personal reasons that they preferred not to go with our direct rival, The Times. There were bids, if memory serves, from The Guardian also. Anyway, we landed the gig, and much of that was down to their confidence that we would present the material tastefully. The Hughes estate had made the conscious decision in advance not to go with the middle-market tabloids that would have paid more money and reached more readers, but would have treated the material more sensationally.

Above all, Hughes’s widow, Carol, thought it important that her late husband was presented in the round, with his achievements as a poet to the fore, rather than appearing once again as a sort of baleful prop in the ghoulish industry surrounding the death of his first wife, Sylvia Plath.

But there were competing interests at work. For, much as the Plath-Hughes material is only part of his story, it is a critical one in literary-historical as well as emotional terms. There is little question that the reputation of Ted Hughes, and both public and critical understanding of his work, has been substantially affected by the fuss about his private life. And as Faber and Carol Hughes both recognized, the average newspaper reader was going to be most interested in what the letters had to say about the relationship with Plath. That was, crudely, what we were paying for—it was what would sell newspapers, and what would in turn sell the book.

In consultation (through Faber) with Carol—who retained right of veto over what we did and did not use—I set about “gutting” the book for serialization over three installments. We ended up doing it chronologically, which fortunately also had the benefit of putting it in order of newsworthiness: you got Plath in the first chunk, Assia Wevill (the woman for whom Hughes left Plath and who subsequently herself committed suicide) in the second, and Hughes’s laureateship and happy marriage to Carol in the third.

My old friend Craig Raine, who had known Hughes, wrote to me after the serialization came out, and was kind enough to say he thought I’d gotten the selection right. But what, he asked, happened to that early letter—the one Hughes wrote to Sylvia about the “aching erections” he got when thinking about her? Why hadn’t I put that in? (The letter had been the jumping-off point for Craig’s long review of the letters that was to appear subsequently in the Times Literary Supplement. He thought Hughes’s priapism was central to the story and was somewhat occluded in the letters, self-excused by Hughes with a mixture of misdirection and astrological crackpottery.)

The truth was, it was self-censorship. There was another love letter, I remember, that went in, similarly passionate but less overtly sexual. I had bottled out of putting the other one in for two reasons: first, I wasn’t sure the sometimes school-marmish Telegraph would let me publish it; second, and above all, I feared the effects on Carol Hughes’s goodwill of submitting that letter for the first week of our serialization. So I didn’t even try. I can’t pretend to know how she would have reacted. Though I had been led to assume the whole thing was a dance across eggshells, she had been pragmatic and robust in the editing process, forbidding us the use of none of the letters I picked out.

At a party afterward, I was introduced to Carol and thanked her for her patience—considerable: I had made some daft mistakes that she unfussily corrected. She said something friendly. Then, a little shy and floundering for something to say, the following came out of my mouth. I think I meant it to sound light and wry and jokey, but it was so goonish and crass I still shudder to remember it. “Well, we were very lucky,” I chirped. “Your late husband led a life perfectly suited to three-part newspaper serialization.”

The ground should have opened right there. What was she supposed to say? “Yes, he’d be very pleased to know that. It’s what he was all about.” Or “two suicides and a laureateship—yes, very neat, I hadn’t thought of it that way. How clever of him.”

It was, in fact, true, though I shouldn’t have said it to his widow. The lives of the authors that commercial publishers want to publish, and that readers outside academia want to read, are the ones that are perfectly suited to a three-part newspaper serialization.

And good writers can make for bad biographies just as bad writers can make for good ones. A minor writer I admire is Ogden Nash. You know the guy–“Candy/ Is dandy/ But liquor/ Is quicker.” Googling him just now I came upon another delightful ditty I can’t resist sharing—a riposte to Dorothy Parker’s observation that men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses: “A girl who is bespectacled/ She may not get her nectacled/ But safety pins and bassinets/ Await the girl who fassinets.”

So I was very much looking forward to my task when, in 2005, I was asked by the Spectator to review Douglas Parker’s 2005 biography of Nash. If only I had known. Nash, you see, was a hardworking light versifier who sometimes lived in Baltimore and sometimes in New York, loved and remained faithful to his wife, wrote regularly for The New Yorker though he had occasional minor tiffs with them, and died at 68 leaving nobody with a bad word to say about him. Parker’s biography records all this with perfect competence—and golly gosh is it a dull read, even at its restrained 300-odd pages. Nothing happened in the man’s life. It fails, in Nash’s coining, to fassinet.

By contrast, Andrew Wilson’s recent life of Harold Robbins—one of the most inept makers of sentences the world has ever seen—was a corking read, Pelion-upon-Ossa of vulgarity, drug-abuse, and fast living. Who wouldn’t rather read a biography of Robbins than of, say, solid old Wallace Stevens—even if Harmonium is better than The Carpetbaggers?

In the Standard piece mentioned above, I wrote, freely adapting Ernest Rutherford’s line that all science is either physics or stamp-collecting, that literary biography is either curtain-twitching or stamp collecting. My idea was to make the point that to deplore the sensationalist turn that literary biography has taken was to take on a pretense of high-mindedness that the endeavor didn’t really merit. The truly high-minded position is to follow the New Critical piety commonplace since halfway through the last century: the work stands alone. Only a philistine would think Philip Larkin’s poems diminished by his racism and love of porn (“Onan The Librarian” read the best-ever headline of an article about Larkin) or Arthur Koestler’s essays diminished by his being a rapist.

Yet I don’t mean by that to pooh-pooh the activity of literary biography. Is it not legitimate to take an entirely parallel interest in the writer’s life? Nobody can pretend it isn’t fascinating to know about the personal shortcomings of the writers we admire. In caricaturing biographical study as a combination of prurience and nerdiness, I don’t mean to say that these activities aren’t worthwhile. Personally, I love that sort of curtain-twitching and stamp collecting. We’d simply get on with such biographies better, I think, if we recognized them as such. When you decouple the quality of the work from the liveliness of the life, when you cease to insist with somber piety that it is somehow “important” to chronicle the lives of major writers, as opposed to merely interesting, the field is again wide open.

Instead of trying to find a major writer with a minor vice, biographers should seek minor writers with major vices—seek not to make the important interesting but to make the interesting important. The ideal subjects for literary biography, of course, are wonderfully good writers with catastrophically bad lives. Failing that, I’ll take a bad writer with a bad life over a good writer with a good life any day. But I’ll read a book about a good writer with a good life if it’s written by Michael Holroyd.  
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Sam Leith is a former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph. He now writes a weekly column for London’s Evening Standard.

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