On his deathbed Thackeray had two last words for his daughters: "No biography." The novelist was less afraid of outsiders rattling the skeletons in his cupboard (a touch of clap, some funny business with his best friend's wife) than of of being plastered with posthumous whitewash. It was the nil nisi bonum that he feared - say nothing but good of the dead. The nil nisi rule still holds on the obituary pages. But in full-length biography we've come a long way from Victorian piety. Nowadays it's nothing but "sensationally sexy" about the literary dead.
On Sunday October 14, for example, it was blackwash and sex everywhere you looked. The Sunday Times ran an extract from Elaine Feinstein's life of Ted Hughes dealing exclusively with the suicide of Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill, and her murder of their daughter. Assia ensured maximum pain for the survivors by topping herself exactly as Sylvia Plath had ("She put a mattress and pillow next to the gas stove"). The implication was that the poet laureate might as well have turned the tap on himself ("When Assia had spoken to Ted on the telephone that afternoon, he failed to give her the reassurance she needed"). Cold-blooded bastard.
That same Sunday, the Observer serialised Carole Seymour-Jones's life of TS Eliot's first wife, Vivienne. The extracts concentrated on the poet's "distaste" for sex (rooted in his pathological aversion to menstrual blood) and his (implied) underlying homosexuality: "Eliot became convinced she was a polluting presence." Vivienne eventually cracked under the strain of Tom's coldness and he maliciously "orchestrated" his spouse's committal into a lunatic asylum ("She was never a lunatic", her brother later claimed). Unvisited, Vivienne died prematurely and wretchedly there. "The cause of death," Seymour-Jones writes, "was given as heart attack. But it is more probable she saved up her drugs and overdosed." What murdering (and sexually perverted) bastards those great poets are, one thinks.
The Sunday Telegraph that day ran a piece by Matthew Tynan, responding to the publication of his father's unexpurgated diaries. They are (as trailed extracts had revealed) spiced with what the tabloids call "kinky" sex - spanking hanky-panky on every other page (I can never get it out of my mind that Tynan senior liked to masturbate before writing a review; lesser writers like me merely sharpen our pencils and dust our keyboards).
Matthew suggests that his dad may have been fantasising ("How did he find the time?", he shrewdly asks). I too suspect that the diaries are the great wanker's parting joke on a British public that he despised as narrow-gutted puritans.
This appetite for depravity and literary biography reflects poorly on the reading public and on the newspapers that cater for it. The Daily Mail, for example, recently serialised Peter Conradi's life of Iris Murdoch so as to suggest - by judicious arrangement of naughty bits - that our admired philosopher novelist could have copulated for England. That demure miss (how "frigid" and stuck-up she seemed in life) made love to Elias Canetti (Nobel laureate) "often, as he preferred in an armchair". Moreover, "physically he was violent". There were scores of other lovers (one of whom, it is suspected, may have died in her orgiastic embrace). What a shameless hussy.
When one looks, however, at Conradi's biography in its 706-page entirety, the sex emerges as a rather small part of a diverse literary life (beautifully narrated, I may add). The same is true of Feinstein's and Seymour-Smith's biographies. You shouldn't, that is, believe everything you read in the newspapers: whether it's about Afghanistan or our great writers. They slant things.
There is, of course, a moral issue in this blackwash that we manifestly relish so much. Hughes's family and Valerie Eliot must suffer hellishly on days like October 14. Towards the end of his life, Stephen Spender (whose life I am writing) tried to recruit Hughes into a campaign for a biographers' code of practice. Ted was sympathetic, but declined. Life, he said, was a jungle. Wounds went with the territory - particularly if, like him, you were king of the literary beasts. Too bad about the lioness and the cubs. But fun reading for jackals like us.
