Bear in mind that this is an establishment biography (Oxford University Press, 627 pages, $40). John Sutherland, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, writes in his acknowledgments:

My main debt in writing this biography is to Lady Spender. She authorized the book and allowed unfettered access to her husband’s literary and personal papers, the bulk of which are in the estate’s private keeping. She has also contributed, often in the spirit of a co-author, to the writing of the work.

Not since Anne Stevenson’s admission that Olwyn Hughes wrote part of her biography of Sylvia Plath have I read such a confession of cowardice.

After such bowing and scraping, what can it mean when Mr. Sutherland then observes that Lady Spender “at no point… imposed restraint.” Why use handcuffs when the biographer has already turned the key in his cell door and politely handed it over to the jailer? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at professor Sutherland’s inability to grasp the enormity of his defeat, since he is the author of a newspaper article titled “The Age of Blackwash,” in which unauthorized biographers are excoriated. Mr. Sutherland clearly sees himself on the side of the angels.

In 1992, Lady Spender ambushed her husband’s unauthorized biographer, Hugh David, in the Times Literary Supplement a week before Mr. David’s biography appeared. She called for a code of conduct for biographers who had, in her view, gotten out of hand. No biography should be written without the subject’s approval. She wanted it written into the law. She also wanted biographers to have two lists of acknowledgments: one that indicated which interviewees approved of the biographer and another which did not.

There were other shackles – so many that David Leeming, Spender’s second biographer, felt compelled to quote from a “Talk of the Town” New Yorker piece reporting that the hysterical attack on Mr. David had diminished the “considerable sympathy for the Spenders.” Lady Spender’s “absurd suggestion that the subject always knows better than the biographer, is so self-righteous that opinion is now drifting the other way.”

Mr. Sutherland pretends none of this happened. Hugh David appears at a few points in the biography only to be hammered once again. It is quite true Mr. David received “scathing reviews,” but they were of the “how dare he!” kind that the literary establishment has no trouble rounding up when an interloper writes about one of their own. Hilary Spurling, herself a whitewasher of Sonia Orwell, gave the David book a good thrashing, and heavyweights like Frank Kermode and Isaiah Berlin inveighed against Mr. David even before his book reached print.

Yet seven years on, when Mr. Leeming published his biography, he reports that Frank Kermode “essentially blamed Natasha Spender.” Mr. Kermode is reported to have said, “When things go wrong, she does the worrying, and Stephen goes on in his usual passive way.” But David Plante saw the Spenders quite differently, suggesting that Stephen used Natasha “as a shield for his own anger.” Stephen would say, “Oh, Natasha’s very upset,” but really (Plante insisted), “he’s the one who’s making her upset.”

So which is it? Surely the authorized biographer ought to help us out? Nothing doing. Professor Sutherland is silent about the husband/wife dynamic. And this reticence is what is wrong with this biographer – for all his precious access. He never thinks through the implications of Spender’s behavior, or explores why, for example, Spender got quite so upset about Hugh David.

The sly Mr. Leeming notes, “unfortunately the whole row gives credence to Spender’s often-expressed self-criticism that he was overly concerned with the opinions of others about his life and work.” Give me one of Mr. Leeming’s sentences for every 10 Mr. Sutherland writes. Give me even Hugh David, whose biography is no masterpiece but is certainly better than what the reviewers reviled. These two are not superior to Mr. Sutherland, by any means, but they are essential to clearing the air around the stuffy authorized biographer.

The Spenders made fools of themselves in protesting too much; even worse, they brought out the literary establishment’s forces to crush Hugh David. Ted Hughes & Co. organized a kill-the-book campaign against the publisher (Heinemann). Whatever his merits as a poet, Hughes deserves his ill repute as a foe not merely of Plath biographers but of the genre itself. Hughes proposed a mass protest of writers, calling it “pack pressure on any publisher who did what Heinemann did.”

When Heinemann refused to withdraw Mr. David’s book, the Spenders enlisted the aid of the Society of Authors, whose chairman, Anthony Sampson – “disgusted” by Mr. David’s book – tried to implement Natasha Spender’s penal code for biographers. Although there was much discussion, Mr. Sutherland reports, the society’s “‘code of practice’ proposal came to nothing.” How could it? When Martha Gellhorn tried a similar tactic against me, by ringing up the Author’s Guild, she was immediately told that the Guild could not possibly take sides against an author.

The funny thing about Stephen Spender is that he was always bringing up other writers’ lives, spilling the beans, always telling you about how Henry James seduced His Majesty’s horse guards (Mr. Leeming heard about that one from Mr. Spender, who heard it from Hugh Walpole) or regaling listeners about Hemingway’s comic vulgarity. And like his friend Christopher Isherwood, Spender could not resist putting real people in his poems and novels. Indeed, his first novel was rejected as libelous.

Compared to this kind of frolic with people’s lives, I must say Hugh David hardly seems an object worthy of scorn. “You are taking my life and misinterpreting it and getting facts wrong” – this is the case again Mr. David – but the same case can be made against Spender.

And indeed it was. As Martha Gellhorn wrote to me, she was fed up and had decided to expose Spender’s lies about her ex-husband, which she did in a hilarious but also withering attack on Spender and Lillian Hellman in the Paris Review. She called her piece “Close Encounters of the Apocryphal Kind” and was outraged when the pusillanimous George Plimpton, fearing Spender’s reaction, refused to use the title. Gellhorn’s evisceration of both parties is so unanswerable that Mr. Sutherland simply gives ground, not contesting the fictitiousness of what Spender said about Hemingway.

The biographer tries to muffle his embarrassment for his subject by calling Spender’s recollections “some throwaway remarks” in a Paris Review interview. But that journal does not publish “throwaway remarks.” Indeed, interviewees have routinely vetted their own Paris Review interviews, making them, in effect, into autobiographies. Spender put a brave face on his prevarications, replying to Gellhorn with “some asperity” and “heavy sarcasm” – to use Mr. Sutherland’s words. But in private (and here the authorized biographer can proudly parade his treasures), Spender meditated in his journal, “Was anything he recalled about Hemingway reliable?”

From such passages it is clear that Spender had second thoughts about his memories, but what does his biographer make of his subject’s behavior? Spender – whether Natasha or Stephen – has the last word, which is fine in autobiography, but not so fine in biography. Mr. Sutherland has written a Victorian biography – very strong on facts but obfuscated by the sanctity accorded his subject.

Yet this biographer is quite wonderful when dealing with family relationships, describing how, for example, young Stephen was always a step behind his older brother, the first born and family favorite. The intricate portrait of Spender’s father, Harold, a journalist/biographer who capped a failing career by first publishing Lloyd George’s indiscreet remarks, only to be obliged to support his subject’s public denial of them, is in itself worth the cover price.

And Spender is likable. There is an ingenuousness about him that I recognized from the Leeming biography and from Peter Parker’s recent biography of Christopher Isherwood, in which Spender appears as a rather comic figure. Mr. Sutherland rightly sees Spender as having more range than his pals Isherwood and Auden. Spender found it easy to commune with all sorts, and that makes him an engaging figure for a biographer.

Spender’s reputation as a poet of the 1930s remains the centerpiece of this book. Mr. Sutherland is not out to challenge conventional wisdom, but he has a riveting story to tell: Spender’s introduction to the Isherwood/Auden gang in Weimar Berlin, his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, his role in promoting Encounter and the controversy over its CIA funding during the Cold War. The leading lights of the literary world – Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Joseph Brodsky, and many others – grace the pages of a well-wrought narrative.

This biography is far more intimate than the previous two – which seems ironic to me. Why is the authorized biographer praised for intimacy and the unauthorized biographer condemned for seeking precisely the same connection with his subject? David Leavitt fell afoul of the Spenders when the latter appropriated parts of Spender’s autobiography, “World Within World,” for his novel “While England Slept.” (Mr. Leavitt’s publisher was forced to pay the Spenders’ court costs, and the novelist was obliged to rewrite his work – he is another of Mr. Sutherland’s villains.) But why are these borrowings from Spender’s life considered blameworthy – especially when Spender not only published himself to the world but drew on the lives of so many of his friends and acquaintances in his own work?

The overlap between fiction and fact, the nexus between prying biographers and their meddling subjects, is more fraught than this biographer and the biography police seem to perceive.