Dwight Garner on Richard Hell

Mr. Hell’s intellectual progress consisted of defining himself as against, rather than for, things. He scorned the Beats and their “insistence on spontaneity.” (“I’ll be spontaneous when I feel like it,” he says.) Hippies were too soft. Rock music peaked in the 1950s, he decides, “before the Beatles homogenized and corrupted everything.”

His band with Mr. Verlaine was a reaction against the downtown music scene. “We wanted to strip everything down further, away from the showbiz theatricality of the glitter bands, and away from bluesiness and boogie,” he declares. “We wanted to be stark and hard and torn up, the way the world was.”

His worldview led to philosophical vexations. “If your message is that you don’t care about things,” he asks, “how can it be delivered?”

The split with Mr. Verlaine was ugly. We read about Mr. Verlaine’s “coldness and egotism” and about what Mr. Hell calls his “globally sour” demeanor. One of the final straws, Mr. Hell reports, was when Mr. Verlaine “told me not to move around onstage while he sang.”

There is a great deal of sex in this book, some of it dire, some of it quite funny. When Mr. Hell had a fling with Patty Oldenburg, who was then separated from the pop artist Claes Oldenburg, their sex was so ferocious, Mr. Hell says, that the painter Larry Rivers, living in the loft upstairs, drilled a hole through the ceiling to watch. His nickname for Mr. Hell was “Tarzan.”

The good writing in “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp” (the title comes from a snippet of Mr. Hell’s childhood prose) can jostle against the bad or merely inexplicable. One young woman has large breasts that “looked like twin Eeyores.” About the first Central Park Be-In in 1967, he writes: “ ‘Be-In’ makes me think ‘doughnut,’ internal doughnut. The DNA of humankind as stale crullers.”

The lemony Richard Burton

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years he most assiduously kept a diary, the actor Richard Burton (1925-84) had the following pet names for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor: Lumpy, Booby, Old Fatty, Shumdit, Cantank, Old Snapshot and the Baby. She sometimes called him, who knows why, Darling Nose and Drife. They were at the height of their fame, and they seemed to speak a private language. Together they called Campari mixed with vodka and soda water, one of their favorite cocktails, a “Goop.” They referred to the act of raiding the refrigerator instead of sitting down to a proper meal as “grapple-snapping.” That’s a vivid and useful phrase I hope becomes, alongside noshing, common usage.

'A Book of Secrets' by Michael Holroyd

There’s a small, nearly perfect comic moment not far into Michael Holroyd’s new book, “A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers,” when this esteemed biographer, now in his 70s, describes being locked in a car on a research trip with a woman who drives through Italy as if she’s just robbed a bank and is being chased by carabinieri.

Mr. Holroyd is a courteous and slightly frail scholar, a man who has been ill with bowel cancer in recent years. He clutches a door handle, white-knuckled, as this woman roars down the centers of roads and, he worries, gets the car onto two wheels. To keep himself sane, the good-natured Mr. Holroyd begins to emit, like a man in the middle of baffling crazy sex, “extravagant cries of encouragement as we hurtle along.”

Here’s how he describes it: “ ‘Brilliant!’ I cry as she accidentally sounds the horn. ‘We’ve done it!’ I shout again as we overtake a stationary lorry.” Grace under pressure is a beautiful thing; wit under pressure can be better.

This moment is worth mentioning for two reasons. One, it underscores the fact that over the past decade or so Mr. Holroyd’s work has grown more personal, if rarely intimate. His new book is the third in a suite of more or less autobiographical volumes, albeit ones in which he tends to linger at the margins of the page or, like Boo Radley, just behind a door.

Two, Mr. Holroyd appears to be enjoying himself more than he once did. He takes us along on his research adventures — the book is a kind of master class — and “A Book of Secrets” frequently casts a rosy comic glow. He enjoys relating the story of the eccentric Lord Grimthorpe, whose last words were reportedly, “We are low on marmalade.” When he visits Gore Vidal in Italy, he admires Mr. Vidal’s cliffside house but also reports Erica Jong’s observation that it resembles “Hitler’s eagle’s nest at Berchtesgaden.” He gives a lecture in Italy about Lytton Strachey and, for the hell of it, decides to read all of Strachey’s words in falsetto. “Who was there,” he asks, “to stop me?”

Mr. Holroyd is best known for his biographies of Strachey, George Bernard Shaw and the painter Augustus John. He is an institution in Britain, where he was knighted in 2007. He is married to the novelist Margaret Drabble, now Dame Margaret Drabble. In Britain the best writers collect titles the way American ones collect Charlie Rose interviews.

“A Book of Secrets” is the final volume in a series that includes “Basil Street Blues” (2000), a memoir, and “Mosaic” (2004), a blend of biography and autobiography. The author refers to these books as “the confessions of an elusive biographer.”

If one can sometimes compare a biography to a novel, “A Book of Secrets” reads like a series of linked short stories. At its heart it weaves together the lives of several not-especially-well-known women, around whom more famous men (Lord Randolph Churchill, Auguste Rodin, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster among them) sometimes revolved. These women tended to “exist on the fringes of the British aristocracy,” Mr. Holroyd writes, and “were not wholly protected from the hardship and tragedy that, in other classes and a more familiar form, were to fuel the feminist movement.”

Among them is Eve Fairfax, a muse of Rodin, who was abandoned by her fiance and never married. By the end of her long life she was an impoverished, homeless and eccentric supertramp (“a genteel tragedy,” one writer called her), living off the generosity of wealthy friends and carrying around an outsize visitor’s book in which she collected autographs and keepsakes.

Another central character is the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, who was married to the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson. Mr. Holroyd is most interested in Sackville-West’s feverish lesbian relationship with Violet Trefusis, who was also married, and who easily becomes this book’s most fiery and complicating character. Sackville-West referred to her, accurately enough, as an “unexploded bomb.”

Trefusis was so intense that she appeared in many other people’s books, including those by Cyril Connolly, Nancy Mitford and Harold Acton, as well as Sackville-West’s and Nicolson’s. She was an excellent writer herself. A biographer of Nicolson likened her letters to “those flaming yellow bulldozers which one meets tearing up road verges, hedgerows, concrete walls, asphalt roads and any and every obstacle that lies in their path.”

Trefusis was also a novelist, and it is among Mr. Holroyd’s missions in “A Book of Secrets” to revive interest in her novels, which he deeply admires, agreeing with the critic Lorna Sage that they should be discussed alongside those of Edith Wharton, Christina Stead and Jane Bowles. “Violet’s own novels are scattered over Europe like a leaderless and dispersed army,” he writes. “They are written in French or English as if she is vainly trying one key, then another, to set herself free.”

Place is a resonant character in “A Book of Secrets.” Much of the action revolves around the palatial Villa Cimbrone, located on a hill above the Italian village of Ravello, where many of these women visited. Mr. Holroyd refers to it, a bit melodramatically, as “a place of fantasy that seems to float in the sky,” a spot that “answers the need for make-believe in all our lives.”

Mr. Holroyd is an impeccable writer and researcher, a man whose books are packed with intricate detail yet retain a buoyancy. They are aerodynamic; they run as silently as gliders. Yet I have sometimes pushed back against them. They are bespoke but can be bloodless, like lesser Merchant-Ivory films. Their good taste can drive you a bit mad.

“A Book of Secrets” didn’t just overcome my reservations; it buried them under a landslide of deftly deployed fact and feeling. This book is a richly marbled meditation not only on the lives of several remarkable women but also on the art of biography itself.

George Painter, a biographer of Proust, once compared the experience of reading Violet Trefusis’s prose to “being driven at 90 m.p.h. over an ice field, by a driver who knows how to skid for fun.” Mr. Holroyd isn’t that kind of writer. He’s cautious, buttoned down, collar turned up against the wind. But his new book contains many fine moments during which, holding on with white knuckles, you might hear yourself cry, “Brilliant!”