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

by Ian Hamilton

We live in the great age of literary biography. But how much should a biographer tell? How much should an executor suppress? Does the public's right to know override an individual's right to privacy?
To answer these questions, Ian Hamilton presents a probing and far-reaching account of literary estate management and mismanagement through the centuries from Donne and Shakespeare to Plath and Larkin. In a gripping series of case studies, he recounts the battles between the protective and the curious, between the keepers of the sacred flame and those who might seek to snuff it out.
Hamilton offers a violent, lurid and hugely entertaining history of broken promises and mismanaged wills, of reputations whitewashed or maligned, of scholars and crooks, of muddle, trickery, scandal and vendetta. He includes the burning of Byron's memoir, the deification of Shelley and Henry James' attempt to "fix" his own posthumous reputation as well as the more recent controversies surrounding the Plath and Larkin estates. Throughout, Hamilton presents an array of well-meaning acolytes - admirers, best friends, widows - whose task it was to keep the flame sacred.
Offering a compelling contribution to current debate on the moral issues of biography, Hamilton writes of the "greats" of English literature with an intimacy and a subversive wit that make this book a joy to read.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Literature, Literary Criticism, Autobiography, Writing

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.

Reviews

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

'A book about literary estates has to be about many other things as well: 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

[James Klagge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really for the general reader. The literary estates covered are all British or US writers of the last few centuries. The author of this book writes in a way that assumes the readers' familiarity with the work and back-stories of these writers. The author writes in an allusive way that seems aimed more at scholars than at a general reader. Still, there was interesting information conveyed, but not much in the way of morals or large conclusions.
Here is a shorter and I think more interesting account of the archives of 2 German philosophers: https://aeon.co/essays/how-archives-c...

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic little book: very engagingly written, and a great premise: how do families, inheritors and all those around writers deal with that writer's work after their death? How strong is the impulse to re-write history, to leave a picture of an author that doesn't correspond to the complete reality? Fascinating stuff in there.