ON PARNASSUS FOR 15 MINUTES

Considering that writers are basically people who sit alone in a room somewhere, there's always been a surprising appetite for their life stories. Lately readers don't even demand major flameouts like Ezra Pound or best sellers of yesteryear like Dickens. Relatively few people now read, say, Jean Stafford except under professorial duress, yet trade publishers have issued two Stafford biographies since 1988. Maybe it's just another sign of the times. On the supply side we've got an academic world in which criticism has been shanghaied by post-structuralist and p.c. crazies, leaving biography as a vehicle for rational literary discourse. On the demand side we've got upscale ex-college students, conditioned by the culture's obsession with celebrity gossip, who'd rather read about writers than confront their actual writing. Of course, it never hurts if a biographer's subject boozes and ... whatever the non-gender-specific equivalent of "wenches" is.

In this fall's glut of literary biographies sex or substance abuse spices up most of the lives: even poor old Henry James's homosexual yearnings again come under scrutiny. But the appeal of these books isn't just the hot skinny on Denis Diderot's mistresses and marital rows, Evelyn Waugh's nth alcoholic embarrassment or what Allen Ginsberg did in bed with Neal Cassady 45 years ago. Nor is it just the weird little factlets: that Waugh aspired to be a cabinetmaker, that Stephen Crane's funeral was covered by cub reporter Wallace Stevens, that art critic Harold Rosenberg (Mary McCarthy's Partisan Review colleague) created Smokey the Bear and that Ginsberg spent a month as a NEWSWEEK book reviewer. No, we read these books the better to understand the creative process. Don't we, class?

But do we need all these books? Certainly Martin Stannard's Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years, 1939-1966 (523 pages. Norton. $29.95) and Christopher Benfey's The Double Life of Stephen Crane (294 pages. Knopf. $25) are amply justified. Waugh's previous biographer, Christopher Sykes (1975), admitted his work wasn't definitive. Crane's first biographer, Thomas Beer (1923), invented episodes and even forged letters that he passed off as Crane's; such successors as John Berryman (himself the subject of two biographies) trusted Beer too much. In his preface to Diderot: A Critical Biography (528 pages. Knopf. $30), P. N. Furbank disarmingly admits he doesn't know as much about his subject as Arthur Wilson, whose "magnificent" two-volume biography appeared in 1972; Furbank focuses more on the work than on the man.

Not all biographers are so forthright. Neither Michael Schumacher in Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (769 pages. St. Martins. $35) nor Carol Brightman in Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (684 pages. Potter. $30) wastes words over earlier, less complete biographies; their silence may be benign neglect. But crank-'em-out biographer Jeffrey Meyers (Hemingway, Conrad, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis ... ) ought to have told what his Edgar Allan Poe (348 pages. Scribners. $30) adds to the work of his 20-odd predecessors-including Kenneth Silverman, whose splendid life of this most tormented of literary souls appeared last year. Instead, in his bibliography, Meyers refers us to his review of Silverman's book in the Virginia Quarterly-where he called it the best of a bad lot, and coyly noted "there is still room ... for a shorter, less psychoanalytical, and more dramatic narrative of Poe's fascinating life."

Nervier still is Fred Kaplan, whose Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (620 pages. Morrow. $25) has no introduction at all, and neglects to mention anywhere in the text the definitive five-volume biography by Leon Edel, completed in 1972, then condensed and revised in 1985. Only Kaplan's flyleaf attempts to justify the book's existence: not on the grounds that anything new has come to light but because it's the first James biography "conceived in the light of twentieth-century attitudes about feminism and homosexuality." Take that, Leon. In fact, Edel presents unjudgmentally much the same material Kaplan does to demonstrate James's homoerotic sensibility and his apparently chaste crushes on younger men. Why Edel should be deemed insufficiently feminist is anybody's guess.

Kaplan's passing reference to Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Gold Bug" as "ghost stories" makes us wonder how careful he's been with less peripheral facts. (Well, it's better than Meyers's calling the hero of "Treasure Island" Johnny Tremaine.) Yet his view of James as a lonely, good-hearted man who lived for his work is the James we know from Edel (and from R.W.B. Lewis's 1991 "The Jameses"). Kaplan's fanciest move is to catch James in unintended double entendres. (". . Don't, oh don't, my dear boy," he wrote one young man, urging informality, "insert the hard wedge of 'Mr'--as if for splitting friendship in twain.") Benfy contrast, saddles his Crane biography with the overelaborate thesis that Crane "lived his life backwards": writing its events, then acting them out. When Benfey gets fancy, look out. Crane, who'd been involved with women named Cora and Dora, is shipwrecked aboard a vessel called the Commodore; Benfey tells "it was as though a pun hidden in three names had been worked out: Cora is like Dora. Cora como Dora. Commodore." Oh wow.