“Who live under the shadow of war, / What can I do that matters?” Stephen Spender asks in one of the most poignant and famous of his Poems (1933). It distils the emotions of a whole generation, knowingly trapped between large-scale conflicts while still entertaining hopes and heeding instincts. The poem also alludes to the previous generation, to poets dead in the Great War, and particularly perhaps Wilfred Owen, whose passionate inclusive pity and nervous insistent rhythms and assonances are real presences in Spender's earlier work.

No less memorable is the second poem of that book, “Rolled over on Europe”, a lyric crystallisation of a prose work by Rilke that surely marks the entry of the great Austrian poet into English writing. Spender was later to collaborate with J P Leishman on a translation of the Duino Elegies that has been countless English readers' way into Rilke ever since. But the poem is also a statement of the indissolubility of Europe from the young man's quest. With hindsight, this too is significant: Spender and his fellows were to write from a heartfelt involvement with European matters that distinguished them from virtually all predecessors.

You will search in vain in Hugh David's biography for any discussion of either these seminal poems or the issues they raise. Called by the author a “portrait with background”, David's book is marked by an almost breathtaking lack of knowledge of the climate in which Spender and his friends emerged as artists.

One instance can serve to show what I mean. David presents Spender's time at Oxford as similar to that described in Brideshead Revisited (indeed, the blurb refers to “Spender's Brideshead days”). In fact, Spender and his associates felt a great distance from, and a decided moral distaste for, the earlier sybaritic aesthetes. Their own ethos was utterly different, shaped by social conscience (related to the 1926 General Strike) and acknowledged class guilt.

If you can get this matter wrong, you can get almost anything wrong, and David does (see the accounts of Berlin). A portrait with such a background is, to say the least, disadvantaged, especially as David has had to rely on second-hand sources and conjecture to fill out the central figure.

David's situation vis-à-vis Spender has already acquired notoriety. Under the impression that Spender had given approval to a biography, David secured a contract and an advance from Heinemann. Spender refused to cooperate, denying David the right to quote from either published or unpublished works. Undeterred, both publisher and writer proceeded.

Spender was not allowed to see proofs, and has now made public his objections to the book's mistakes of fact and emphasis. But he has lost his battle to preserve his privacy. Was he right to have tried to fight it? How much moral weight is there in the arguments that writers should not have their lives written if they don't want it? David's reply is that since Spender's work is of such an autobiographical nature, any objections to an inquiry into the realities behind it are invalid.

To assist us with this fraught subject, we now have Ian Hamilton's Keepers of the Flame. Hamilton is an eminent biographer (of Robert Lowell), but the biographical flame has also severely singed him. J D Salinger withdrew his support for a life, while Hamilton was at work on it. Hamilton's present book describes the struggles for dominion over their own lives of many British writers from, John Donne Junior (on his father's behalf) to Philip Larkin.

I missed a strong line of development from one chapter to the next, and felt that throughout Hamilton was over-diffident about passing any judgment on the (usually fruitless) endeavours that he describes. Still, his book is extremely interesting, told with a raciness that does not exclude sympathy, and always displaying real knowledge.

What labours lost! Hardy dictating his life to his miserable second wife, continually seeing to his own elevation on the social ladder; Fanny Stevenson and Sidney Colvin banishing all sexual indulgence from Stevenson's bohemian years; Elsie Bambridge, Kipling's daughter, banning a well-written and researched life of her father by Lord Birkenhead on the grounds that: “I consider it so bad as a book that any attempt at palliative measures … is not feasible”. The effect of such cases, though, is to make one feel both that there are no satisfactory posthumous lives written with the consent of the subject (but what about Furbank on Forster or, recently, Gathorne-Hardy on Gerald Brenan?) and that unease is the only reason for not wanting one's biography done.

But almost a majority of creative writers are in this position (Henry James, W H Auden, T S Eliot). There is surely an excellent reason for it. Out of his/her own predicaments, the serious artist fashions works of objective value, even while they plunder intimate experiences. The good confessional literary creation is as much an independent artefact as the hermetic work. Authors rightly fear that if discrepancies between “life” and “art” are too much dwelled on, then the “art” over which they took such immense pains will be diminished. The “life” will ironically undo its overriding concern.

To return to Spender's case, it is manifestly stupid of David to insist that the autobiographical nature of the work gives him some automatic right to go routing about in his personal career, and even to make pronouncements on it. There is no call for highly personal poems or stories to adhere to outward facts, and to use them, as David does, as whipping-boys for their creator is peculiarly crass.

Furthermore, a writer is simply not a public figure in the way that, say, a politician or a religious leader is. If, while they or their nearest are alive, they want only their writings to be the object of attention, so be it. But it's very hard to go beyond this strong personal conviction to any legal codification.

In the matter of Spender versus Hugh David, the real villain is the publishing house. Disappointed in his loss of stature as a quasi-official chronicler, David has resorted to a vulgar diffused malice. He chooses (unconvincingly) to denigrate his subject, ascribing motives of social ambition or lust without real evidence, and twisting sympathetic sources (such as Christopher Isherwood) to suit his detracting purpose. Towards the end he relents somewhat, and bids Spender farewell in an almost kindly manner—as if to make respectable the shoddy treatment before. What were the publishers doing to allow such transparent pique to prevail, especially as it goes hand in hand with such inaccuracy and ignorance?

The answer is that they had committed themselves, feeling they had a good subject for a commercially strong biography. What matter that a distinguished man of 83, who has given his life to the service of the humanities, objected to an account which he knew would be neither truthful nor penetrating? What matter that neither politics nor literature engage this biographer, only prurient (and misheard) tittle-tattle? It's not just difficult but impossible to imagine Spender's non-British friends and peers—Octavio Paz, say, or the late René Char—being treated in this way. It seems that, here in Britain, the keepers of the flame are publishers' publicity and marketing departments.