Whose 'life' is it anyway?

When Diane Wood Middlebrook wrote a biography of the poet Anne Sexton she obtained access to over 300 hours of psychotherapy sessions. For making this material available Sexton's psychiatrist was charged with breaching doctor/patient confidentiality before the profession's ethics committee, though once aired the charge was not pursued. The biographer was charged with nothing at all. "It seems that," writes Middlebrook, "not much by way of ethical conduct is expected of biographers anyway."

This question, of the ethical requirements of biographers, is one which is addressed in The Seductions of Biography edited by Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, who explain its title by remarking: "the attraction of biography is plural, not singular, allowing for multiple pleasures in the postmodern mode that mixes genres and strikes ironic poses".

The writers here are prepared to go beyond the narrow definition of biography as a book, and refer to such a "great biographical statement" as Rodin's "Balzac"; and the few seconds of the amateur photographer Zapruder's film of Kennedy's assassination, "the most famous piece of documentary film in American history". Other sources may be less richly rewarding. Phyllis Rose had so little source material for her life of Josephine Baker that she "spent a great deal of time looking at pictures of her...".

How much are biographers reinterpreting the lives of others in the light of their own predilections? To address a specific genre: lesbian biographers of the 1980s actually set out to "reclaim" Sapphic history through the hitherto unwritten lives of great women of the past. This was not entirely to the pleasure of some of the subjects: "We had much more fun before you young reporters insisted on trotting it all out," as one elderly subject said. For Blanche Wiesen Cook, however, there is a mission, "to understand and fully appreciate the marvellous crossroads between sex and power that haunts us all".

This seems like a biographer who is putting a great deal of herself into her work, but is this not proper? The answer to the question posed here, "Whose 'life' is it, anyway?", is that it is the biographer's. The biographer writes a creative work based on fact. The principle of informed consent does not extend to biography any more than it does to history in general, but, as in history, it is reasonable for access to papers to be denied for a period of time to protect the innocent, and the guilty.

Disclosure is, anyway, less problematic than concealment. Biographers of the black religious nationalist Malcolm X have been prone to play down his bisexuality, aware that his principal admirers are an aggressively heterosexual section of black youth. But would not over-playing this rather minor aspect of his character be committing the opposite offence: of deriding the idol because he has feet of clay while ignoring his head of gold? Firmer ground is reached when due emphasis is given by the same biographer, Bruce Perry, to Malcolm X's role in negotiating with the Ku Klux Klan. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam clearly realised that white separatists and black separatists have more in common with each other than they have with moderate society, white, black or multi-ethnic. Many of those who read and write about Malcolm X do not want to hear this, but none can deny its biographical importance.

One way of excluding the embarrassing revelation, or putting it into a containable context, is to insist on certain attributes from a biographer. Thus the notion that "no white person can truly see through the eyes of a black person", which is an attempt to discredit both biography of blacks by whites and even "ghosted" autobiographies. These "as told to" autobiographies, where often-illiterate elderly black people were interviewed so their life stories could be retained, are all held suspect because, "the most thoroughly researched ones were often done by whites". Thus what might be seen as an accolade for interracial biography becomes a principal reason for rejecting it. Where, I wonder, are mixed-race people supposed to fit in to a literary genre where colour is all?

Various such sexual and racial themes in biography are covered here in a book which will appeal to academics studying biography and to biographical professionals. The essay on "the biographical significance of bisexuality" tells how some biographers of celebrities have used it as a way of adding a frisson to their work. Among other stories it tells in various forms, the anecdote of Lord Olivier's stopover at a New York airport where a customs officer with a nearly incomprehensible accent questioned him and informed him that a body search would be required. After Olivier had been stripped and subjected to various indignities, the customs officer removed his elaborate make-up to reveal Danny Kaye, with whom Olivier had a long affair.

Olivier also makes a major appearance in the Dictionary of National Biography 1986-1990, the last in a venerable series published throughout this century, for work has already started on the New DNB which will cover national biography from the earliest records to the present in a different format. The DNB spares us the above anecdote, or any mention of Olivier's affairs, except to say he had several "with both women and men". Yet while Olivier's stage fright and memory loss are clearly of professional as well as personal importance, the bisexuality of this mercurial man seems just as worthy of comment as his illnesses: his thrombosis, cancer and muscular dystrophy. Who are we to say, moreover, that every marriage should be mentioned, however brief its duration or unequally matched the partners, while long-standing homosexual affairs between people of comparable stature should be lightly brushed over?

How "intrusive" a biographer should be in sensitive areas clearly depends on the subject: given the type of work they wrote, it is unfortunate that the DNB does not include a reference to an erotic writer like Laurence Durrell's alleged incest with his daughter (now dead); or to the "nasty" writer Roald Dahl's anti-Semitism. More egregious is the omission of information on R. D. Laing's abusive and severely dysfunctional family, which cannot but have given root to the notion he propounded, that schizophrenia is not an illness but a way of coping with the impossible strains of a "sick" family. On the other hand, the DNB's failure to say whether Arthur Marshall, the "world's first radio drag act", was homosexual, is no loss at all.

The DNB is famously circumspect about the moral failings of its subjects, though such matters as Boothby's 35-year affair with Dorothy Macmillan finds a place in the entries for both noble lords. Perhaps now few consider marital infidelity and homosexuality to be failings, but Lord Boothby's relationship with the gangster Ronald Kray rather strains liberal tolerance. John Grigg in his article on Boothby thinks it "fair to assume" that had his subject known more about Kray, "he would have had nothing to do with him". From general knowledge of such relationships, it also seems fair to assume the opposite: that a relationship with a working-class man gave Boothby a bigger thrill than if it had been someone of his own status; the fact that he was a thug made it better; and that he was a criminal was a pure delight.

Biography is often covert autobiography, and biographers' insights are drawn from their own lives. If Russell Harty was never short of sexual partners, Alan Bennett writes, "it was because they knew there would always be laughs, sharing a joke being something rarer than sharing a bed", a remark of wistful sadness. Bennett protests too much and for too long, however, about the tabloids' hounding of Harty, a man who sought celebrity as hard as anyone ever did, but then suffered intrusions into his privacy which a man who had never been famous would not have attracted.

DNB entries are now often written by (and the book advertised on the basis of) "celebrity" writers, where in the past the biographer's name would be marked by initials with a list of contributors at the back. I suspect it is hard for an editor to alter the copy of people chosen because of their eminence and familiarity to the public. Lord Blake's views on privatisation should properly be reserved for his own DNB entry, rather than added to his comments on Harold Macmillan's principled criticism of the policy, as we have here in his piece on Macmillan. But which editor would want to beard him to tell him that?

In general the DNB does its usual excellent job, covering entrants ranging in age from Sir Thomas Sopwith who died at 101 and Fenner Brockway at 100, to Jacqueline du Pre who died at the age of 42. It also includes for the first time some, such as travel writer Bruce Chatwin, who were cut down in their prime by Aids. Others of those featured in that curious mixture of both eminence and notoriety of the DNB are Daphne du Maurier, Henry Moore, "Kim" Philby, Sir Peter Medawar, the duchess of Windsor and A. J. P. Taylor. Both Silkin brothers, Sam and John appear, just as they both also sat on the boards of Robert Maxwell's companies, but their benefactor died just too late to be included. It is somehow sad to see how many forgettable others there are here, though some, like John Stonehouse, would probably rather not have known he was destined to be recorded for posterity as "politician and confidence trickster".

Academic questions of source and interpretation, rather than revelation are the stuff of History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales. Beales, biographer of Joseph II of Austria, is described as "the most accomplished and versatile historian-biographer of his generation" which is a generous assessment but no more than is usual in celebratory volumes. The introductory essay remarks that "Few historians today trouble themselves with large-scale, full-dress biographies", at which the names of Martin Gilbert, Alan Bullock, Judith Brown and Roy Foster spring immediately to mind, followed by innumerable others, including some of the 12 who contribute essays to this volume.

"Biography is too important to be left to the amateurs," we are told, with no debate to demonstrate that it ever was so abandoned. In fact the field of biography has always been covered by academics; popular writers of varying quality and research ability; and those with a personal interest in the subject. If there are more academic biographers now it is merely because there are more academics, and because biography is a fashionable subject, pleasing to public and publishers.

When the essayists get down to business, however, they produce the solid, detailed work expected of this genre: essays on subjects as wide-ranging as Kaiser Wilhelm II and the British monarchy, John Maynard Keynes, the rise of the first minister in 18th-century Europe, Sir Robert Peel's capital punishment policy and the weakening of the fascist will to fight the second world war. The most stimulating article is Denis Mack Smith's "Documentary falsification and Italian biography", covering the manipulation of documentary evidence to serve personal or political purposes over two centuries.

Some of these essays have little relationship to biography (meaning the history of individuals) but they have the merit of focusing attention on people as policymakers, rather than historical "trends". As Beales said in the lecture which gives the book its main title, "When a great historian can mistake a person for a trend, when it is thought more important to analyse social background than opinions, the time has come for a reaction."

To return to the DNB and its irresistible titbits of information: it is clear that one of the main joys of biography is not revelation but confirmation. It is no surprise at all to find that John Braine began his one-novel bid for the top in a family where his father was a sewage inspector and his mother a librarian: moving from the depths to the stars via books. It is also somehow wryly apt that Max Wall should have married the daughter of "a mechanical engineer who ran a sponge rubber business in Islington"; and that this greatest male interpreter of the works of Samuel Beckett should have in his last years, despite his considerable wealth, "lived almost as a recluse in bedsitting rooms in south London". Such is life.

Jad Adams, a writer and television producer, is the author of Tony Benn: A Biography (1992) and is currently working on a composite biography of the members of the Nehru dynasty.