In his final decade the novelist, biographer, and poet William Plomer attained the kind of recognition generally conferred on establishment literary figures: he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, a Commander of the British Empire, and president of the Poetry Society, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and an honorary doctorate of letters from Durham University. But in At Home, his 1958 autobiography, Plomer had disclaimed any desire for a high-profile career: "My temperament and talent did not impel me to try and make a living by writing books; they impelled me to write books only when I wished and only whatever kind I wished. . . . Literature has its battery hens; I was a wilder fowl."

Plomer gained notoriety at the outset of his career as a novelist by deliberately offending the establishment. Hurling a bomb titled Turbott Wolfe (1925) at his fellow South Africans, Plomer...