A writer's true self is found only in his books

Watching the last episode of Peter Ackroyd's television series on Charles Dickens last week, I came over all queer suddenly with a thought. Not the thought that in the course of his researches into Dickens Mr Ackroyd had grown (I speak merely of appearance) to resemble someone only Dickens could have created – I had that thought the week before – but the thought that maybe we have no business being quite so curious about Dickens' or any other artist's personal life, and that historians of illustrious persons' privacy ought not to indulge or even excite that curiosity to the degree they do.

That the work's the thing, and the life a mere accidental irrelevance, is one of those truisms old fashioned academics of my sort were wont to iterate in the days before intertextuality came along, refusing to see the work for the trees, and eventually finding the trees more interesting. There was a time we would have called such a position philistinism, but we chose instead to call it theory.

Taking the critic Sainte-Beuve to task for his attachment to the methodologies of history and biography – knowing everything about the writer as necessary preparation for knowing what he wrote – the novelist Milan Kundera observes that Sainte-Beuve "thereby managed not to recognise any of the great writers of his time – not Balzac, nor Stendhal, nor Baudelaire."

"By studying their lives," Kundera goes on, "he inevitably missed their work." Since Kundera throws into the pot what Proust had to say on the subject as well, I will help myself likewise. "A book is a product of a self other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices... the writer's true self is manifested in his books alone."

Thus, while perfectly understandable at the level of gossip and idle curiosity, the impulse to unravel a work in an attempt to discover the circumstances that occasioned it – to find the truth behind the fiction – is necessarily inimical to art.

I have no such complaint against Peter Ackroyd's telly series. Telly must do what telly does. And while the base metal out of which Dickens' great novels were made was of necessity Ackroyd's subject, he never failed to marvel over the transformation. Indeed, what made me go over all queer in that last episode was more humanitarian than aesthetical, not so much the Sainte-Beuve in Peter Ackroyd as the Miss Marple – in particular the sight of him excitedly going through old ledgers proving not only that Dickens was living secretly with the actress Ellen Ternan, but that he was doing so, because he was desperate not to be discovered, under a sequence of assumed names.

What the writer has gone to great lengths to hide, let the biographer go to even greater lengths to uncover! Not on account of any sin against Dickens the novelist did that suddenly strike me as callous, but on account of the trespass against him as a man.

We do, of course, take it for granted now that the wishes of the living, let alone the dead, confer no obligation on us when we scent a scandal. And when the living are Angus Deayton it's hard to care much one way or another, as he seems not to care much himself. This being the case, what some dead writer wanted is bound to cut no ice. Did not Max Brod, faced with Kafka's dying instructions that "all this, without exception, is to be burned", refuse to commit "the incendiary act" his friend demanded of him, and is not the world a richer place as a consequence? They know not what they ask, that is our justification. We know better what will serve their memory.

A person's squeamishness dies with him – that's our assumption. Dickens did not want to be found out, for reasons of local delicacy which no longer apply. Those he did not want to hurt are dead. The morality he wished to be seen to live by has changed. Therefore there remains no reason why the facts he chose to conceal should stay concealed. More than that, applying the model of political chicanery, we believe it is in the public good that everything should come to light. We have a right to know.

But do we? Dickens has not been shown, despite the zealousness of historians and biographers, to have whispered state secrets into the ear of a Prussian spy. So what end is served by our right to know? Not any understanding of the art, we have established that. And why should our right to know enjoy paramountcy over Dicken's right to insist we don't? Who are we to deny his wishes or to quarrel with the ideal of dignity by which he tried to live? Who are we to assert that shame does not live on beyond the grave? The heart must have its secrets, DH Lawrence said.

And now it's the turn of the other Lawrence – TE. Nice, for his shade, to be reminded whenever his name crops up (forgive the "crop") of the scars across his buttocks, maybe administered, maybe not, by a Turk hell-bent on rape. Having experienced and even courted notoriety, Lawrence chose to live the second part of his life in obscurity. When a "film merchant called Korda" proposed a biopic, he did what few of us would do today, and said no.

So what to make of the sensational news that during the time he was serving in the RAF under the name first of Aircraftman JH Ross, then as TE Shaw, he paid a Mrs Bryant of Newark two of the three shillings he earned a week? A closet heterosexual after all, was he? Or just an indiscriminate masochist, not fussy who did the flogging – a glistening Ottoman on a kilim in a tent in Wadi Safra, or a powdered married lady strapped for cash (sorry about the "strapped") on the doormat of a two-up two-down semi in Newark?

Secrets of the human heart? Let the dead fret about the dead, the living don't give a damn.