Inside the biography man

Biographies are usually regarded as the servant class of literature; the more they are seen and heard, the less well they must be functioning. In all but the most blatantly experimental cases, such as Peter Ackroyd's free-ranging approach to the life of Dickens, a biography loses all credibility at the first whiff of the first person. Discretion is paramount.

But there's plenty of evidence that the servants are getting restless; biography, especially literary biography, is so popular that it has begun to displace or obscure the works it purports to illuminate. Biographers have become aware of their own clout, and their parasitical relationship to their subjects, and to literature as a whole, has become a favoured theme in dozens of contemporary novels and plays, as Michael Holroyd points out in his essay Smoke with Fire.

What he seems less willing to point out explicitly, but is happy to indulge, is the successful biographer's almost ungovernable urge to put off the servant's apron and step forward to be admired in his own right; not a servant at all, but another writer all along, perhaps a better one.

Holroyd published his first collection of occasional pieces, Unreceived Opinions, almost 30 years ago and follows it now with Works on Paper, a selection of reviews, introductions and essays, mostly on biography. None of these, apart from the three opening pieces, can be said to delve very far. Some are pretty flimsy, but Holroyd writes with such elegance and adroit humour that he just about gets away with it. Sitwellism was "a cause without a rebel", Quentin Crisp is recognisable by "the roar of his amulets", the biographer of Harley Granville-Barker employed "the methods of Dr Watson at his best" to support his whackiest surmises and Katherine Mansfield's companion, Ida Baker, was "a sort of understudy, dresser and sweetly poisonous competitor to other friends". The book is also full of bon mots about biography, amusing anecdotes such as that of GM Trevelyan's wholly factual last words ( confirming the date of Peterloo) and plenty of good jokes. But some of the pieces seem dated, such as the essay on the evils of television, A Dark Adapted Eye, and Holroyd's embarrassingly nutty view of the United States in Among the Americans.

He is at his best as a raconteur of other people's lives, especially those of various literary oddfellows of the past century: William Gerhardie, Patrick Hamilton, JR Ackerley, Hesketh Pearson and JD Carr - all, as he wittily says elsewhere of Henry Green, "famous for being underrated". My favourite of his rediscoveries is Richard Pennington, the reclusive and evasive author of Peterley Harvest: The Diary of David Peterley, a fake memoir, the story of whose composition and publication provides a fine illustration of the blurability of the line between fiction and non-fiction.

But as an autobiographer, is Holroyd too charming to be reliable? His highly amusing account of his sour relations with Shaw scholar Dan Laurence seems somewhat disingenuous about his own capacity for giving offence (to which the article itself adds spectacularly, of course).

His expert placing and witholding of information in all his autobiographical pieces (particularly All Wrong on the Night) shows the constant presence of a powerfully controlling hand. One minute he is adopting the persona of prosecuting counsel (in The Case against Biography), the next snatching up the opposite brief. He's so adept at these chameleon changes that you can half believe he's not in earnest when he goes all soppy at the conclusion of Smoke With Fire and claims that: "The literary biographer can stretch out his hand to his subject and invite him, invite her, to write one more work, posthumously and in collaboration." This sort of thing keeps biography mildly ludicrous. As Holroyd himself says, only a page before this collapse: "We work in an unweeded garden."