BECAUSE THE STAKES ARE SO SMALL:

Betjeman biographer confesses to literary hoax (Richard Brooks, 9/03/06, Sunday Times of London)

“IT’S a fair cop.” With these words, the writer Bevis Hillier confessed that he was the Betjeman hoaxer who duped the poet’s latest biographer into publishing a spoof love letter.

The Sunday Times reported last week how AN Wilson had included in his new book a letter purportedly written by Sir John Betjeman to a mistress.

The biographer had failed to notice that the first letter of each sentence spelt “AN Wilson is a s[**]t”. Hillier was the main suspect, but until now has denied being the hoaxer.

The letter was the culmination of a sharp feud with Wilson, mainly pursued over the pages of bitchy book reviews.

Hillier, who spent 25 years researching and writing his own magisterial three-volume biography of Betjeman, finally decided to act when Wilson managed to bring out his book not much more than a year after his publishers had announced it. “When a newspaper started billing Wilson’s book as ‘the big one’, it was just too much,” said Hillier, 66.

Betjeman's jilted lovers: Biographers should stop squabbling over their subjects - dead poets cannot be owned (Kathryn Hughes, August 30, 2006, The Guardian)

As the whole sorry business suggests, there is no literary spat more hateful than that between two biographers working on the same subject. Novelists may flounce over shortlist tampering, historians may get shirty about mutual accusations of political bias, but biographers will tear each other to death rather than give up their subject to a rival.

It's a rancour that I understand only too well. In 1993, shortly after beginning a biography of George Eliot, I discovered that a rival writer was also on her trail. My feelings of shock and nausea were like discovering that your husband has been having an affair. Suddenly, it seemed, Eliot and I were no longer exclusive and never had been. Rather than me being the one true biographer, it transpired that this rather earnest Victorian novelist had been sneaking out after dark with another suitor.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2006 8:43 AM