Customer Reviews

Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography

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"Keepers of the Flame" is wonderful, telling the stories behind literary legends. How Shelley died, whether there were many or few witnesses at his cremation on the Italian shore, despite the various renditions. How twentieth-century researchers finally uncovered Boswell's vast hoard of papers, including parts of the Johnson biography ms, in spite of all his relations down through the decades exhibiting their best Victorianisms and disclaiming him and his papers. (After all, he had over a dozen cases of self-reported venereal disease.) The importance, other than historical curiosity, is that we learn Boswell edited the famous Johnsonisms, the conversations, etc. He was much more than an eavesdropper with a fine memory; he was an artist, just as he boasted. (And did he boast! Why not? He wrote the best biography ever written.) Hamilton's subjects range from Donne to Plath and Larkin. The only reason for the 4 rating is that Richard Altick covered much the same ground fifty years ago in "The Scholar Adventurers." But Hamilton is one of our best critical ears and eyes, not to be ignored.

.. about changing notions of posterity, about copyright law, publishing, the rise of English Studies, the onset of literary celebritism. Principally, or so I discovered as I wrote, it has to be about biography, the history and ethics of. How much should a biographer tell? How much should an executor suppress? And what would the biographee have wanted -- do we know?'

In this book, published in 1992, Ian Hamilton offered 22 biographical English case studies contained within sixteen chapters. Those chapters are entitled:

John Donne the Younger

Surviving Shakespeare

Be Kind to My Remains: Marvell, Milton, Dryden

Pope's Bullies

Boswell's Colossal Hoard

The Frailties of Robert Burns

Byron and the Best of Friends

At the Shelley Shrine

John Forster, of Dickens Fame

Froude's Carlyle, Carlyle's Froude

Keeping House: Tennyson and Swinburne

Legends and Mysteries: Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James

Remembering Rupert Brooke

Authorised Lives: Hardy and Kipling

James Joyce's Patron Saint

Provisional Posterities: Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin

The book is filled with interesting anecdotes and (for me at least) little known facts about a number of literary figures I admire. But while learning about John Donne the Younger's whipping of the eight year old Humphry Dunt (who died two weeks later) and Sir William Davenant's pox-rotted nose, I wondered about the boundaries of biography. How do these facts change how we think about these people? What about James Joyce, and his `patron saint', Harriet Weaver? Do these interesting facts about the lives of publicly known figures influence what we think of (and how we value) their work? Where does privacy begin, and end? Is fifty years long enough (or too long) to embargo sensitive material about the lives of literary figures? In addition to privacy, Ian Hamilton was also concerned about literary estates and published literature as property. What happens after published literature ceases to be private property and enters the public domain? Who owns what? What is ownership?

Reading through these case studies, I kept thinking about how I'd answer some of these questions. Unfortunately, I came to no fixed or firm conclusions. As a reader I like to know as much as I can, as a family member I'd want to protect, as a biographer I'd want to write, and I certainly wouldn't wish to be a literary executor. Biography has certainly evolved over the past five hundred years - biographers now seem far more critical.

This book was first published in 1992, less than a decade before Ian Hamilton's death. I've yet to read his biography of Robert Lowell, or his memoir about trying to write an unauthorised life of J D Salinger.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith