Leaving aside questions of greatness for the moment, these are comforting words for anyone involved at a professional level in talking or writing about history, or, more specifically, attempting to recreate the ‘actual life’ of historical figures. Biography may never have been more popular than it is now with the public, but in some academic circles biographical approaches to history or literature or art are still suspected of a lack of conceptual or ‘methodological’ rigour.

We can make allowances for the way Gilbert’s pronouncements here tend to contradict his own suspicions, voiced earlier on:

every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography … We are overrun by a set of people who, when the poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as mutes.

Gilbert, after all, is nothing if not perverse; contra diction and self-contradiction are part of his rhetorical armoury. And there remains a part of him – the larger part, as Wilde represents it – that clearly recognises and eloquently affirms the special challenges, burdens and capacities of the historical or cultural explicator vis-a-vis the historical or cultural actor.

Hooray for Gilbert in this mode, I’m apt to say, having just embarked on a study of the life and times and work of an artist (Donald Friend). But I also feel daunted by the difficulties to which he adverts, and my apprehensions have not been eased by the experience of reading a recently completed biography of an artist who lived through much of the same period as my own subject.

Darlene Bungey’s chronicle of the life and times and work of Arthur Boyd (1920–99) expressly attests to the difficulties involved in such an exercise. Biography in general, her ‘Prologue’ announces, is ‘based on distortion; the most brilliantly shining facts always clouded by perception, time and place’. In the case of a major and prolific artist, such as Boyd, any kind of study aspiring to comprehensiveness will have to contend with the magnitude of those ‘facts’, not to mention the cacophony of competing ‘perceptions’ that form part of the context. Commenting on the protracted delays in the production of the first full-length study of Boyd, by émigré scholar Franz Philipp, Bungey reports: ‘apparently no one realized how mammoth was the task of detailing Arthur’s already vast output.’ This was back in the 1960s. By 1986, she subsequently reports, ‘the art publisher Tom Rosenthal had expansively suggested it would take an art historian more than ten years to do a catalogue raisonné of Arthur’s work’. And Boyd was to live on for a further thirteen years, working with, if anything, increased urgency for at least half that time.

‘The way Arthur sometimes painted, completing a canvas 14 feet by 11 feet within two days, demanded exceptional stamina,’ Bungey remarks at another point, with due awe. Yet this leads one to reflect on the stamina and patience required of the biographer expected to come to terms with such an output over decades and decades, to put it in a range of contexts – social, intellectual, financial, psychological, as well as artistic – and to serve all this up in a palatable form for the general reader. These demands are due their own kind of awe.

Or they are if they are properly and consistently met. The scale of Bungey’s book looks heroic, but my heart started to sink not far into its 630 pages, and barely recovered thereafter. Any close reading makes it increasingly evident that the author has not sufficiently heeded the warnings found in her own text about the difficulty of the enterprise, that her publishers have been largely indifferent to these, and that critics and reviewers have to date remained mostly insensible to the blunders committed as a result.

While much of a biography may be ‘based on distortion’, it is hardly illuminating for the biographer simply to yield to the fanciful, and there is no licence for compounding such distortions with fact-obscuring ‘perceptions’ of his own. In its literary style and capacities for empathy with its ‘characters’, biography as a genre is a ‘cousin to the novel’, as one of its most distinguished practitioners, Michael Holroyd, has astutely classified it; but this doesn’t mean that it is as free as fiction to engage in flights of fancy, unsupported by corroborative documentary evidence. Conversely, it demands of its authors an especial care and flair for language.

Bungey isn’t wholly derelict in these matters, and we can absorb from her tale a great deal of fresh, revealing and pertinent information on numerous aspects of her subject: his tortured, complex, far-from-anodyne personality (though there persists an air of the faintly saintly through all the warts); his prodigious output and its varied sources in mythology, history and personal pathology; his intersecting circles of friends and fellow artists in Australia and overseas; his sometimes torrid family life and generally tranquil marriage (though not so perfect as to exclude protracted affairs on both sides). The telling of this tale is mercifully innocent of academic jargon, and more than workmanlike in its ambitions. Bungey makes a concerted effort to engage and move us, as fiction writers do, at every point of the narrative, and to provide a succession of atmospheric landscapes or backdrops for the personal portrait that remains the focus. For what more could we ask?

The problem is that, in many respects, the style and scholarship are also less than workmanlike. There is abundant evidence of the author’s energy and diligence in these departments, but little of any discipline or discrimination. Scarcely a page goes by that is free of some infelicity, whether it be a misprint, a misspelling, a split infinitive, a failure of agreement between subject and verb, a malapropism, a solecism, a cliché, an archaism, a euphemism, a needless repetition or a mixed metaphor. In this last category my favourite is the image of Arthur’s wife, Yvonne, at once putting him through the ‘wringer’, acting as his ‘buffer’, and playing ‘ferryman’ to his emotional energies. Some of the unmixed (well, less mixed) metaphors wax even more poetical: ‘talk had ebbed on into nights so studded with stars that the glow from the Chinese lanterns couldn’t hold a candle to them.’

The largely chronological narrative contains all too many brutal or clunky non sequiturs, though segues, when attempted, are sometimes clunkier because strained. Hyper bole blends effortlessly with bathos (we find Cynthia Nolan at a funeral ‘resplendent in a pillbox hat’), and there is a melodramatic reductiveness about much of the historical scene-painting, notably with reference to wartime events (‘yet the horror rolled on’, ‘madness was rife’).

Pervading the whole book, such defects and excesses in the style make it as difficult to trust the tale as the teller: at times you feel (or at least I felt) that the genre here is more closely related to ‘true romance’ than to the novel, to television-magazine journalism than to any kind of history or art history. For all the extra, spicier detail it provided me about the subject’s life, I felt that if I wanted to be on surer ground about the contexts of Boyd’s work, I would be better off going back to the austerities of Franz Philipp’s seminal study, rereading Janet McKenzie’s beautifully economical mono graph of 2000 (with its additional ravishment of full-page colour plates), or relishing again the poised, elegant restraint of Brenda Niall’s family biography, The Boyds (2002).

Does Darlene Bungey trust her own tale? When the narrative contains so many rhetorical questions of just that kind, it doesn’t suggest a great deal of confidence on her part. Her continual recourse to such constructions as ‘would have’, ‘may have’, ‘must have’, ‘seems’, ‘is highly likely to’, ‘is possible that’ is no more reassuring. ‘Perhaps’ figures so persistently that at times you catch yourself dreamily humming the old Nat King Cole tune ‘Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps’.

There are other respects in which the book suffers from the overconfidence of the author (if that’s how to explain her cavalier way with evidence and its presentation). She provides endnotes, lots of them, but there is no apparent rationale as to when she will use one to support an observation or give the source of a quotation. As often as not, readers are left without any way of checking her information or her interpretations and without any guidance as to how to follow up any of these things for themselves.

More disconcertingly, the end notes are occasionally used for floating some of the more sensational speculations – though admittedly about relatively minor characters. It is here that we learn of reports of the suicide of Arthur’s novelist uncle, Martin Boyd (there’s a tantalising but vaguer reference in the corresponding text to Martin’s body being broken in a fall from a hospital window). It is in the endnotes, too, that rumours of a complicated suicide pact between those two grand panjandrums of the Melbourne art scene, John and Sunday Reed, are idly retailed and presented as fact. The only authority given for each of these claims is anecdotal, indirect: what someone heard from someone else and then told the author. In the absence of any further investigation or checking by the author herself, this looks less like the conveying of information than the spreading of gossip. It saps confidence in the reliability of much of the infor mation she presents on the major players.

‘A fully footnoted PhD thesis is available from the British Library, London,’ Bungey explains right at the end of the book. But that’s hardly helpful for busy scholars elsewhere in the world, let alone for any curious casual reader. It is no excuse either for the inadequacies and flaws in what passes for a scholarly apparatus in the published version of her work: the absence of any clear guide in the endnotes section (say, in running heads) to where the notes correspond to the pages of the main text; inconsistent as well as incomplete citations of periodical or archival sources; needless duplication in the notes of passages from the text; awkward supplementary lists of ‘quotes not footnoted’ and ‘Newspapers and Periodicals not footnoted’ (why not?); and various misplaced or missing entries in the index.

If authors don’t have an instinctive ear for language, I doubt there is much you can really teach them; but in the case of this book, if only its author had been provided with, or had properly availed herself of, sustained editorial assistance, she could have been saved from some, even most, of the stylistic, technical and scholarly deficiencies that mar her narrative. The book might have taken another couple of years to produce, but (as we know Bungey knows from the experiences and observations of others she reports in the text) that is as nothing in the scales of such an ambitious enterprise, and it could have helped her achieve her ambition so much more effectively.

‘An immense achievement’ is how Patrick McCaughey summed up his judgment on this book in his review in the Monthly. Immense it is, but an achievement is precisely what it is not. McCaughey notes a handful of misspellings and factual inaccuracies, but that is the sum of his criticisms; he commends the book on its lucidity and places it in the highest (Australian) ranks of its genre. It is a mystery to me how such a practised and polished art critic could ex pend such superlatives on this lustreless publication. Yet he is far from being alone. Several other big guns have been rolled out to salute the book: leading art historian of the period, Richard Haese, who launched it, and placed it in the same league as David Marr’s masterpiece, Patrick White: A Life (1991); David Marr himself, who is quoted on the cover as calling Bungey’s book ‘a treasure trove’ (if his comments were solicited from the publisher, I would be curious to know what else he said to them; a trove still requires a dis criminating hand to sort through it if the treasure is to emerge in its full glory); Barry Humphries, whose ‘review’ in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald consisted of three flattering lines about the book set amid a much longer and exquisitely written memoir of his own times with Arthur Boyd from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Other notable critics in the press (Sebastian Smee in the Australian Literary Review, Sasha Grishin in the Canberra Times) have expressed this or that reservation about Bungey’s book, but generally pronounced it a triumph of scholarly research and popular appeal. Again, I find it difficult to believe that we have been reading the same work or attending as closely to the same things in it.

The heedless rush to publish and promote this book, I can’t help concluding, is a disturbing symptom of the extent to which our literary culture is being subjected to pressures that have more to do with quick profitmaking and easy sensation-mongering than the production of responsible, enduring scholarship. Even in this age of rampant deregulation, we would not allow an aeroplane to take off in such an ill-prepared state, let alone applaud its bumpy, rickety, reckless course. Air safety is a life-and-death issue, of course; but so, literally speaking – or more so than in the case of other literary or scholarly genres – is biography. Whether as writers or reviewers of biography, as editors or publishers, if we show ourselves to be unconcerned about professional standards, we all risk becoming just chatty undertakers, if not Judases.