Behind the Books

The subtitle of Judith Adamson’s charming memoir implies that she will be imparting tips to biographers. She certainly offers a few useful reflections on the art of biography, but her main title, Ghost Stories, is more precise.

On the life-writing spectrum, Adamson veered away from the pole occupied by biographers who reveal brutal truths and toward the one where sit the amanuenses, whose job is to write what others speak. That’s not to say Adamson merely took dictation. In works on the author Graham Greene, the publisher Max Reinhardt, and the feminist writer Charlotte Haldane, she helped to shape her subjects’ stories, and her memoir features both stylish prose and attention to detail. As she explains, she began each of those projects by developing close relationships with the person of interest or their friends, and she usually wrote the version of a life that they wanted to give readers.

Adamson, who carefully erased both her presence and her own insights from her biographical works, embarked on her writing career by interviewing Greene for an article on his movie reviews and scripts. Later she produced a biography of him and went on to work with him on a collection of his writings. But only now does she reveal such delicious details as his declaration, at their first encounter, that he would talk to her only if she did not use a tape recorder. (She is convinced this forced her to listen more carefully during interviews.) She also describes her “trial by martini” at that same meeting, where Greene insisted that she down a large vodka martini and “too much wine” before she earned his trust. “He was a prankster, no question,” she writes. “He liked raw stamina. And he liked women whose beauty went before them, its recognition taken for granted.”

Adamson rarely cites dates in her memoir, but I gather her most active writing years were between 1970 or so and the early 2000s. Her best-known work is a remarkable book of edited correspondence published in 2002: the love letters that Leonard Woolf and the artist Trekkie Ritchie Parsons exchanged between 1941 and 1968. For twenty-six years, Parsons had lived half the week with the recently widowed husband of Virginia Woolf and the other half with her husband, the Chatto & Windus editor Ian Parsons.

Personal contacts were always crucial to Adamson’s choice of subjects, and she heard about Parsons through friends in Montreal. She intended to write a biography, but when she started reading the correspondence, she decided to let the late principals speak for themselves. Parsons’s executors, who guarded her reputation fiercely, gave Adamson the go‑ahead. They recognized that she would respect Parsons’s choices and not allow her to become a footnote to the Bloomsbury circus.

While Adamson was editing the letters, interest in women’s lives was exploding, and the author caught the literary wave. In her introduction and notes, she explored the conflict for Parsons between her heart and her professional life. It turns out Adamson identified with the dilemma. “I too had been stretched between loyalties to my husband and son, my students, and my desire to write whatever I was writing,” she explains in Ghost Stories. Even as she insists that she did not identify with Trekkie Parsons herself, Adamson concedes that “however much I tried to get out of the way,” the stories of her subjects “were mine on the page.” She then quotes the British writer Alan Bennett, who said in the film The Lady in the Van, “You don’t put yourself into what you write. You find yourself there.” (This may be true for Adamson, but I don’t think it is for many biographers. And I certainly don’t believe that it is actually true for Bennett, a detached and subversively witty observer of the human condition.)

Ghost Stories is a period piece. Adamson describes her childhood in Montreal and the limited professional choices then available to women; her enduring love for her husband, Alan Adamson, a history professor at Concordia University who was twenty-two years her senior; and her professional experiences, first as a nurse and then, after earning a doctorate at McGill, as an English teacher at Dawson College. Adamson’s warmth, humour, and love of gossip shine through the rather disconnected memories, whether she is writing about the stoned students sprawled on the floor outside her office or the serial monogamist in London who was infuriated when one of his conquests, the Canadian academic Phyllis Grosskurth, did not mention him in her autobiography.

In her final chapter, Adamson reflects on the fundamental challenge of biography, which bothered her for decades: “To whom do the facts of our lives belong?” Over the years, she discovered “so much about people’s secret lives that I knew was enticingly publishable.” She decided, though, that she was never going to be what the American journalist Janet Malcolm described as “a professional voyeur.” Instead, she styled herself as a “literary biographer whose job it was to understand the work’s relation to the life.” In other words, she omitted details that reflected badly on her subjects.

The approach that Adamson took has particular resonance in 2024. This is the year of Alice Munro’s death and of the revelation that Robert Thacker chose to omit from his biography of her, when it first appeared in 2005 and when it was updated in 2011: the fact that Munro’s second husband had sexually assaulted her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner. Thacker knew of the abuse because Skinner had told him about it and because he had discussed it with Munro. However, as he explained to the Washington Post in July, he decided to omit the information because “I wasn’t writing a tell‑all biography.”

It seems that Munro asked Thacker to withhold what he knew, not least because she was still living with that second husband. Ultimately, he decided that family history was beyond the scope of his book. Douglas Gibson, Thacker’s publisher at McClelland & Stewart, as well as Munro’s, also knew the story and agreed with that decision. Indeed, Quill & Quire described Thacker as “non-invasive” when his book came out — as an author “revealing little more of Munro’s life than we already know.”

Adamson too decided, on moral grounds, that she would “hold back anything that didn’t add to our understanding of literary and cultural history.” But shouldn’t a skilled biographer incorporate darker facts into a larger exploration of how artists create their most profound work? Can one ever again read Munro’s stories without knowing that the Nobel laureate drew heavily on her own experiences, that she had a gift for transforming actual misery into narrative gold? Can one really understand “Open Secrets” or “Vandals” unless one knows of Munro’s intimate relations with a pedophile?

In Thacker’s defence, his subject was alive when he published his biography, and any major revelations would have undoubtedly disrupted her private life (though it would also have been of therapeutic value to her daughter, who was traumatized by the abuse). And while Adamson suggests that protecting a subject’s privacy is morally appropriate, it is harder to defend that stance today, when the linkage between life and work is examined more rigorously and when self-revelations, social media exposés, and constant surveillance have eroded discretion. Such respect for privacy is decidedly old-fashioned. Most publishers would challenge it, and most biographers now swerve toward the brutal truth.

Ghost Stories itself is not a biography; it is a memoir covering more than eight decades. The author is entitled to include — or omit — any facts, anecdotes, and truths that she wants. This is not an essential reference volume or addition to the canon. Nonetheless, Judith Adamson has produced a lighthearted, slim book that is a pleasure to read.