As a rule, Irish authors do not offer public access to their more intimate moments. Nor do this country's critics attempt to investigate beyond what is provided to them in print. This lack of personal information would not seem to hamper either book sales or readers' appreciation of work. Compare circumstances here with those in Britain, where authorial reticence over personal matters scarcely exists any longer. Instead, a series of recent books - including Kathryn Flett's The Heart-shaped Bullet - suggest emotional striptease has now become a feature of the British literary world. Aside from a desire to deprive therapists of work, there can be little explanation for cathartic work of this kind.
Its origins lie in the tell-all biographies of writers first produced more than 30 years ago by the likes of Michael Holroyd in which research is a substitute for analysis. An early low point in this genre was Nigel Nicolson's 1973 dissection of his parents, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, in Portrait of a Marriage. As neither person was a writer of any great consequence, the only explanation for such revelations was public titillation.
Among more recent examples, Brenda Maddox appears to be promoting her new biography of W.B. Yeats primarily on its salacious details about the poet's private life. Such books are regularly justified on the grounds that their contents help to provide a greater understanding of the subject's work, although it is worth pointing out that, even deprived of knowledge about Yeats's extra-marital affairs, contemporaries had no difficulty appreciating his poetry.
Similarly, admirers of this country's present generation of writers are unlikely to have learnt much about the latter's private lives. However on the other side of the Irish Sea, authors seem not to care if the details of their domestic circumstances appear in print; indeed, many of them either provide the information to journalists and critics, or themselves write tell-all works.
One explanation for this development may be the diminishing number of deceased subjects whose private worlds have not yet been raked over. With the dead thoroughly covered, the living have been called upon to provide fresh material. Almost invariably, they respond with alacrity because at the heart of every revelatory outburst is a substantial measure of self-aggrandisement, a belief that what is being told will be of interest and concern to every reader. It is as though the author's work alone no longer has sufficient merit and must be supported by a tawdry assortment of personal details - the state of Martin Amis's teeth, for example, or of Hanif Kureishi's marriage.
Twenty years ago, in an attack on the self-preoccupation of British culture, Edward de Bono coined the phrase Quaint Enclave to describe a society within which self-regard and self-promotion were dominant characteristics. According to de Bono, "than the literary enclave nothing is quainter". There can be little difference between the discussion of an author's private life and that of a footballer or a pop star; the only distinction is that whereas the latter will be found in a tabloid newspaper, the former customarily turns up in the British broadsheets. The intention remains the same: to elevate the subject to the dubious realms of celebrity by regarding the specifics of his or her existence as being of widespread interest.
Back in 1857, Flaubert wrote that the artist should be invisible like God; "one must sense him everywhere but never see him". This is advice British writers might like to follow.
