But they are really history's butlers, continually absorbed by their duty of rating the events they announce in the order of conventional importance, always busy solemnly ushering in the facts, forever replete with their ceremonious duties, and eternally guarding their self-esteem, like Admirable Crichtons, by reminding themselves of their intellectual superiority from their socially inferior position when they return to their islands of Academe. Finally there is the third category, the literary or artistic biographer. Surely they are better. It is true that, like the poor, they seem to have always been with us. Ask any novelist, poet, or playwright what she thinks about such biographers and you will not have to wait long for a heartfelt answer.
Biographers are parasites.
They are Fifth Column agents within the ranks of literature, intent on reducing all that is imaginative, all that is creative in literature, to pedestrian autobiography. They are the slaves of their absurd and meager theories. And they pervert the poet's creative imagination by representing it as a mere conjuring trick. They overlook Marlowe's mighty line, and tell us with immense scholarship and at tedious length what Byron had for breakfast. They are at best superfluous, these literary biographers with their relentless, their talentless dustjacket smiles.