This was true in the sense that Larkin may have lost those readers, and those potential readers, who want to be assured in advance that the author is a decent chap who shares their views and prejudices. Only those hardened in the opinion that the work should stand by itself and that even the best biography is likely to be distracting if not positively noxious would have remained unaffected. Distracting? Well, how about this? A play has recently opened in Scarborough called Larkin with Women. It depicts this most private of poet's relationships with three key women in his life—all of whom, incidentally, are still alive. The Times of London review ran beneath the headline "Philip's Sexual Larks Laid Bare On Stage." 

A more complex case is that of Iris Murdoch. John Bayley's Elegy for Iris has been greeted by some as a great modern love story, by others as an honorable and necessary speaking-out about the bewildering misery of Alzheimer's, and by yet others as an astonishingly blithe intrusion by a husband into his own wife's privacy. When the book came out, two longstanding friends of Murdoch's used exactly the same phrase to me on separate occasions: "Iris would have loathed it." Bayley certainly portrays his wife as a person of considerable reserve, a reserve he then violates without comment. But he also cheerfully admits that whereas Iris Murdoch was irrefutably good, he himself is "not good inside, but I can get by on being nice." I was quite prepared to dislike his memoir, and surprised to discover, despite a certain central evasiveness, a work of tender precision. Describing his wife in all her final feebleness, as a panicked, incontinent woman whose brain is overstretched by watching the Teletubbies, doesn't diminish her as a novelist; indeed, the reader's awareness that she had no decision or rights in the matter gives her a certain separateness, even dignity.