Cardinal rule of writing about writers

I think most writers would agree with this. Even Hemingway. Maybe especially Hemingway. There have been writers who’ve said there’s no need to write their biographies because they had already written them themselves---and they’ve pointed at their books and poems and plays. Most readers of biographies of writers, though, probably read them to see the reverse done. We like to gossip and spy:

The cardinal rule is this: the work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical. The novelist Bernard Malamud’s biographer puts it well: the first aim of an authentic life of a writer is ‘to place the work above the life…’

---Jonathan Bate in his new biography of the poet Ted Hughes, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life.