Similarly , when the poet Richard Aldington , one of the original imagists , became the biographer of T . E . Lawrence , he confronted an opposition just as malevolent as the Carlyle defense group , who organized a campaign of negative reviews of Froude ’ s book . In Aldington ' s case , however , the biographer approached his subject ’ s life from the outside as an unauthorized biographer . The term , if taken seriously , puts the independent biographer at a disadvantage , since unauthorized implies some kind of ethical breach , an act of theft , the product of a vigilante sort of mentality belonging to one who has no pedigree , no standing , no certification — in short , no authority . The unauthorized biographer is engaging in the impermissible and the unsanctioned — the latter word evoking an irreligious act , performed by one indifferent to what is godly and deserving of reverence . And make no mistake : Carlyle and Lawrence were revered , the former as a sage , the latter as the epitome of the author engagé , the artist as man of action . The literary establishment went out of its way to malign Froude and Aldington . 2
Not much has changed since Froude and Aldington were traduced . The terrain of modern biography is strewn with carcasses of unauthorized biographies . These books were dead on arrival — dead , that is , to reviewers who begin with the premise that something unseemly had been done to literary figures who ought to be left alone to write their books . Doris Grumbach , a respected novelist , suddenly became a horror when she decided to write a biography of Mary McCarthy . Mark Harris , rebuffed by Saul Bellow , persisted , only to suffer buffets from critics 2
For details of the attacks on Froude and Carlyle , see Rollyson , A Higher Form of Cannibalism ?, pp . 116 – 27 , 129 – 50 . For a discussion of unauthorized biography , see Rollyson , Biography : A Reader ' s Guide , 288 – 94 ; Reading Biography , pp . 1 – 16 , and Essays in Biography , pp . 1 – 4 .
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