Critics are divided on whether literature should be analysed through the prism of the writer's life and psyche or should be read without reference to its author purely in its own terms. I would like to vote for Plan B.
Harvard University is going for A. Its library missed out on the papers of its illustrious alumnus Norman Mailer, who sold them to the University of Texas while still alive in 2005, including numerous novel typescripts, what in publishing goes by the wonderfully redolent name 'foul matter'. So Harvard has bought the papers of Mailer's lover instead.
Foul matter indeed. Her professional acme a bit part in The Stepford Wives, Carole Mallory must have long anticipated the day last November when her lusty paramour of 10 years finally packed it in. Cheerfully conceding: 'I knew they were valuable and I wanted to have some more money', she's been amassing not only photos and letters from her affair with Mailer, but her own journals and amateur short stories, as well as notes from the writing lessons he provided before they hit the sack. Considering the precious tips she has shared with the press - e.g. 'Stay away from adverbs' - Mailer got the better end of the deal.
The big tee-hee: Ms Mallory's seven boxes of confessional memorabilia include one 50-page autobiographical sex scene and an unpublished memoir called Making Love With Norman.
Now, who should be embarrassed here? Not Ms Mallory ('I don't believe in shame'), who cannily assessed that she'd a better chance of selling her novel, a riveting tale about an Arab with 20/20 vision who wears an eyepatch to get attention, to Harvard's archive than to HarperCollins.
Mailer was an exhibitionist, crafting his own highly public life with greater care than his latter novels, the last of which was so atrocious that I was actively relieved when the writer died, for I would be spared reviewing his planned sequel to The Castle in the Forest. So Mailer would not likely have the good sense to be posthumously embarrassed either.
No, he'd eat this stuff up. But perhaps Harvard should be embarrassed. Imagine its curators painstakingly maintaining the proper temperature and humidity for the preservation of some minor actress's unpublished wannabe short stories.
I find contemporary absorption in authorial tittle-tattle perplexing. As a reader, I do not care what sort of rogue or philanderer wrote the books I love. The experience of delving into Mailer's magnificent The Executioner's Song is not enhanced by envisioning its author sneaking away from wife #6 to bonk his mistress for the real-life equivalent of 50 pages.
In fact, I do not especially care to know anything about the novelists whose work I admire, for I've found that meeting most writers distracts, if not detracts, from their work. As a whole, we authors are a disappointing bunch.
Thus I've never understood why any of my readers would want to meet me, either. My favourite colour should have no bearing on my novels, which you like or you don't. Moreover, the whole concept of publication - I thought - was to draw a hard line between the public and private. To publish is to offer up a set of pages to strangers and to subject them to public assessment, which is why writers have no right whingeing when published work is trounced in the press. You asked for it.
Yet all writers do not ask for snooping into their private lives. Now that Harvard has archived Ms Mallory's appraisal that as a lover Mailer 'knew what he was doing', Norman may be chuckling in his grave. But an author's welcoming of prurient extra-textual inquisitiveness must be rare.
My small experience of public curiosity about matters that are no one's business but mine has quickly slid from merely baffling to disagreeable. Indeed, I did one event last year whose moderator squandered the hour on pressing me to come clean on my relationship with my mother. It was the most mortifying exchange I have ever conducted before 300 people, not only because my mother is alive, but because I was horrified by the arrogant imputation that I imagined anyone else might give a hoot about how I got on with Mom.
When I mentioned idly to my publicist recently that I'd kept a journal from age 12, she asked if I'd like that archive accessed posthumously, and I blenched. Had I known what was good for me, I'd have scurried home and burnt every last notebook in the back garden.
Can we return to the days when writers had mystiques? Behind which we can hide the fact that Norman Mailer's flamboyant extroversion was the exception to an occupation that mostly involves sitting in a chair and is secretly the dullest job on the planet.
· Lionel Shriver's latest novel The Post-Birthday World is now out in paperback
