They mock them up, your mum and dad. Frieda Hughes has objected to an impending movie about her parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. We don't yet know her view of Wintering, a novel published next week by Kate Moses, which fictionalises the same period as Sylvia and Ted, but the book might add to Ms Hughes's worries about her mother being treated as a "Sylvia Plath suicide doll".
Philip Larkin, for reasons explained in his most famous line of verse, has no kids around to complain about the television drama that's being made about his life - or about Pretending To Be Me, the West End play in which Tom Courtenay plays Larkin - but it's clear that the lives of writers (especially those who lived in England) are suddenly being greenlighted for plays, films and novels.
Virginia Woolf, another writer who killed herself, is portrayed by Nicole Kidman in The Hours, which opens next week. Dead Poets' Society is already the title of a film but, given all these projects, it could also be the name of a dining club for producers, directors and writers.
At their first soiree, they should hear a speech from Richard Eyre, whose fine film about Iris Murdoch encouraged this cinematic rush to the bookshelves. It's no disrespect to say that Frieda Hughes's objection to Ted and Sylvia is a specialised one - only she and her brother could suffer the precise pain she objects to - but the growing genre of lit-pics raises a wider concern. Can famous writers work as fictional characters without the fictional characters getting in the way of their work?
Dramas about authors are encouraged by the high sales of biographies and tend to concentrate on their lives rather than their writing. But this isn't just because of a cultural preference for gossip over substance, fact above fiction. The process of turning thoughts into prose is passive and private, and the metaphors for it - balled-up foolscap, scrunched-up brows - have rightly become derided movie cliches.
The act of composition only works dramatically when the circumstances are abnormal: such as the moment in Iris when Murdoch's brain betrays its secret softening by failing to give her the word she seeks. In The Hours, Virginia Woolf, sitting with an exercise book on her knee, is only shown writing one sentence, which is then picked up and echoed in places decades and thousands of miles away in a relay which instantly distracts from the impossibility of showing how a book comes into being.
The bigger difficulty is that the genre does not put a writer's life before their work but their death. So Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath become poster girls for the Samaritans, while Iris Murdoch raises awareness about senile dementia. By succumbing to the more common malady of cancer, Philip Larkin avoided the chance of the dramas about him being flagged in NHS leaflets. But the fictionalised biographies concentrate on his sex life and his temper, confronting audiences with a figure somewhere between Victor Meldrew and Leslie Phillips.
The post-Iris boom in author movies inevitably encourages a diverting game for readers in which we imagine which current bookish figures may one day be represented at the multiplex. The Pinters have already had to endure jokes from friends and enemies about Harold and Antonia. And, as it will presumably seem even odder to the next generation than to this one that a novelist could have both dated a supermodel and been sentenced to death by Iran, Rushdie seems a certainty one day, perhaps directed by Oliver Stone's grandson. Equally, any charismatic would-be actor concerned that he's not growing as fast as the other boys has the consolation that the role of Martin Amis will one day be his in a movie, with the most powerful father-son stuff since Star Wars and the most terrifying dentistry scene outside of Marathon Man.
The Amis children might want to give that one a miss, just as it's easy to understand why the Hughes offspring object to Ted and Sylvia. And yet, while clearly distressing to relatives, author movies are unlikely to damage an author's reputation. Under English law, the only action a relative could hope to bring against a biographical movie would be the charge that the commercial value of the writer's estate had been damaged. Suppose, for example, that a book or film alleged that a famous children's author had been a paedophile and this led parents to boycott the books.
It seems to be the case so far that, no matter what a biopic says about a writer, the release of a film or play increases sales of their books. Many of those who buy tickets for The Hours will later purchase the Michael Cunningham novel on which it is based, but others will sit down with Mrs Dalloway, probably for the first time since college. Sales of Ariel and Birthday Letters will rise when the film about Hughes and Plath is released.
The obvious risk of the lit-pics is that Woolf and Plath will soon be best known as the writers of suicide notes, while Iris Murdoch becomes forgotten for everything except forgetting. But the evidence so far is that these films keep both work and life alive. A Hollywood movie of Mrs Dalloway would be an improbable project, but The Hours does the same work in disguise, just as Sylvia and Ted will be the best thing to happen to the Faber and Faber poetry list since Cats.
