Whose Life Is It Anyway? : Why one prefers a biographer of one’s own : KEEPERS OF THE FLAME: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, <i> By Ian Hamilton (Faber & Faber: $24.95; 344 pp.)</i>

What is posterity? Nothing but “an unending jostle of vanities, appetites and fears,” concludes Ian Hamilton at the end of a book that is quite surprisingly entertaining and suggestive. One might not suppose that a work subtitled “Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography” would give one cause to laugh aloud, but it does. Hamilton is a British poet, an editor and himself the biographer of Robert Lowell and, notoriously, of J. D. Salinger (well, he tried). For all his scholarship, he writes here with the immediacy, economy and ease of a witty man talking over a bottle of wine.

The “keepers of the flame” are the friends, relations, devotees, literary executors and biographers, in whose hands lies what Hamilton calls the “after-fame” of great writers. We live in an era of copious, candid and some would say intrusive, biography. The questions Hamilton addresses about the history and ethics of the genre were never more topical. “How much should a biographer tell? How much should an executor suppress? And what would the biographee have wanted--do we know?”

He proceeds chronologically, by means of case-histories, each marking some change or development in the perceived function of the custodians of greatness. This leads us into the history of publishing and of the law on copyright, into the company of some egregious crooks and creeps, and into some stimulatingly unprovable statements from Hamilton. The poet and priest John Donne (d. 1631), for example, was “the first” important writer to leave a substantial collection of letters, and his no-good son was “the first” to see that there was money to be made from a literary parent’s leavings. Edmund Curll, the 18th-Century publisher, was “the first” to cash in on scurrilous instant biographies. Robert Burns was “the first” to have his frailties exposed by a biographer (he drank himself to death). Just occasionally, Hamilton is wrong. He writes that Thackeray’s daughter “vetoed all thoughts of a biography,” thus fueling speculation about skeletons in cupboards; in fact, she commissioned Trollope to write a book about her father, which he did. Admittedly, she gave him very little material to work on.

The book is full of tasty details about cabinets and laundry-baskets of letters and manuscripts falling into greedy hands, or being used as wrapping paper for groceries. Keepers of the flame tended to be self-appointed. The poet Marvell’s landlady posed as his wife in order to get money owed to his estate. Sir William Davenant liked it to be thought that he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son. Thomas Hardy had the bright idea of controlling his after-fame by ghosting his own biography, ostensibly authored by his second wife.

The book is free from academic pedantry. Hamilton remarks that Johnson’s life of Dryden contains “the funniest and cruellest” of the “many wildly improbable” accounts of Dryden’s funeral, quoting none of them, and thus whetting the reader’s desire to find out more. Likewise, he writes of William Warburton, the adviser and editor of Alexander Pope, that Pope guided him to a rich wife “and then (via her very rich uncle) to a bishopric and a palatial estate.” Most scholars would have ruined their narrative flow by dutifully identifying, if only in a footnote, the “very rich uncle.”

Not Ian Hamilton. His pace and semi-satirical tone extract the maximum entertainment value from pompous literary mayhem. He writes with informed malice about the frequent rivalry between a dead author’s self-aggrandizing “best friends” as to who is the true keeper of the flame. Disciples are often catty about co-disciples. One reviewer of “The Life of Dickens” by his friend and champion John Forster complained that it “should not be called ‘The Life of Dickens’ but ‘The History of Dickens’ Relations to Mr. Forster.’ ” Yet Forster was cavalier about his hero’s materials. He chopped extracts out of Dickens’ letters (discarding the tattered remains) and pasted them into his manuscript, which was thrown away afterward by the printers. Boswell was the most successful flame-keeper of all time, making the relationship between subject and biographer the central pillar of his “Life of Dr. Johnson,” to the extent that Boswell is now a more lively commercial proposition than Johnson himself.

They believed in “definitive” biography in the past, and possessive jealousy such as John Forster’s found destruction preferable to the gaze of alien eyes. John Cam Hobhouse, neurotically possessive about the late Lord Byron, engineered the burning of his idol’s autobiography, unread, because it had been shown to Tom Moore and not to him. Hobhouse was uneasy lest there might be something uncomplimentary about himself in it.

When Henry James was given a private view of Byron’s scandalous private papers he was so appalled that he went home and destroyed 40 years accumulation of his own correspondence, manuscripts and notebooks, expressing an “utter and absolute abhorrence” of any biography of himself. And what was the upshot? Leon Edel’s five-volume “Life of Henry James,” and four volumes of letters.

Henry James did not have much to hide, or else it remains hidden. He is an exception. Readers are sometimes shocked when they discover that authors whose books they admire were less than admirable in private life. Hamilton poses the most difficult question that biographers and critics must address: “Does poetic genius excuse or mitigate bad conduct; does/should knowing about the life have a bearing on how we read the work?”

In the 19th Century, most spouses and devotees thought it their duty to suppress all evidence of “bad conduct.” Biographers worked “to the sound of snipping scissors and paper crackling in the grate. . . . After the funeral would come the slamming of doors, the scrubbing of marble and then, within two years or so, the emergence of what Gladstone called ‘a reticence in three volumes.’ ” George Eliot’s reputation for unrelenting high seriousness was largely established by her widower cutting all jokes and familiar turns of speech out of her published letters and journals.

The problems remain much the same today. The biographer of a modern subject is caught between wanting to tell “the truth” and the need to maintain good relations with informants and access to the archive. The eternal dispute, as identified by Henry James, between “the public and the private, between curiosity and delicacy” may have been resolved to Kitty Kelley’s satisfaction, but it still exercises most biographers.

Coming to our own time, Hamilton is sharp about the costiveness of T. S. Eliot’s widow in publishing his letters and declining to authorize a biography, while she allows Eliot’s words to be mixed with Trevor Nunn’s in the song “Memory” in the lucrative show Cats; Hamilton pays tribute to Peter Ackroyd’s subtly “widow-proof” account of Eliot’s life. Yet he shows sympathy with Ted Hughes who, as he writes, cannot even destroy any of his own private papers without being accused of interfering with “Plath Studies.”

This book was first published in Britain two years ago--before the very pertinent furor caused by the publication of the biography of Philip Larkin by Andrew Motion and of Larkin’s Letters, before the contentious overview of the saga of the Plath biographies by Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker (issued Aug. 23 and 30, 1993), before the proposal for a new and Draconian “Privacy Bill” in Britain, and before it was decided that the 50-year copyright period should be increased in Britain to 70 years, in the interests of harmonization within the European Union. It would have been helpful, in the American edition, to have had an afterword on these matters.

Hamilton’s own position is that writers must, in the first instance, be their own keepers of the flame: In other words, having read this review, you should at once burn all your diaries and love-letters. Or not; as Isaak Walton wrote in the 17th Century, a wish for self-perpetuation is “rooted in the very nature of man.” But you should never, Hamilton thinks, burn anyone else’s private papers. Larkin in his last illness requested that his diaries be destroyed. His friend Monica Jones shredded the 25 volumes within hours of his death. She did not have to. However vehement the wishes of the deceased in this regard, you are not in (British) law obliged to fulfill them.

There are evidently still moral imperatives stronger than the tug of literary history or the law of the land. But there’s little any author can do about eliminating indiscreet letters written to other people; they are probably already in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin anyway, nicely filed and catalogued. Only the law of copyright, and a stalwart keeper of the flame, can protect you. On the evidence of this book, writers should choose the keepers of their flame very carefully indeed. As Dryden wrote to his young protege, the playwright Congreve:

“Be kind to my Remains; and oh defend

Against Your Judgement Your departed Friend!”