Lyndall Gordon at The Hudson Review:
If you’re eccentric, you’re all right.” This is how Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Benjamin Britten, explained the British character to me as an expatriate South African. It was 1993, and we were sitting at the table in my Oxford kitchen with a microphone between us. My role, as a fellow biographer, was to ask Humphrey questions, and his answers, he hoped, would provide material for an essay. Along with other speakers at a biography conference, he’d agreed to contribute a piece to The Art of Literary Biography (due to be delivered to Oxford University Press), but Humphrey had a problem. His confiding after-dinner talk had brought up the issue of fraught relations with a subject’s family.
The talk, entitled “What Discretion Forbids,” had been about his involvement with the Tolkien family, who had authorized a biography back in the seventies. This book, a bestseller, was not the one Humphrey wrote initially. A protective family had refused to accept his version of Tolkien’s life.
more here.
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