This highly sensible and entertaining study of literary biography seems to have surprised its own author. Ian Hamilton’s prescription for approaching writers’ lives slowly and respectfully “may sound fishy,” he admits, “coming as it does from the biographer of Robert Lowell (d. 1977) and the near, would-be or failed biographer of J. D. Salinger (1919–), but there it is. We live and learn.” Indeed, those who remember the Lowell book as a repetitive, over-documented re-creation of nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown, and who followed Hamilton’s later battle over the Salinger letters, will be pleased to see how lean and writer-friendly Keepers of the Flame has turned out. Its “dozen or so case-histories” concentrate for the most part on the genre’s ethics: “How much should a biographer tell? How much should an executor suppress? And what would the biographee have wanted—do we know?”

A good portion of the book concerns last wills and testaments, whose ambiguity has always guaranteed trouble. Carlyle left behind a tangle of directives that started a war between his biographer and niece: “Froude wanted to write a Carlylean Carlyle; Mary wanted straightforward, old-style, mealy-mouthed commemoration.” A century later, Philip Larkin, ordinarily a master of plain speaking, waited until he was in the hospital and near death before signing off on a bundle of contradictions. Even when the marching orders are clear, executors have a tendency to think that they know better than the dead and are free to contradict their wishes in fulfillment of