Books in Canada

PHYLLIS GROSSKURTH'S FIRST BOOK, JOHN Addington Symonds -- one of the first frank biographies of a homosexual -- won the Governor's General's Award for non-fiction in 1965. The Observer called Grosskurth's book one of the three best of the year (Sartre and Hemingway wrote the other two). Since then Grosskurth has gone from triumph to triumph, with Havelock Ellis, the biography of the sex researcher, the widely acclaimed Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work, and, in 1991, The Secret Ring, which exposed Sigmund Freud the man to be a controlling, manipulative father figure to his inner circle of male acolytes. Secure in her position as one of the best biographers this country -- or any other -- has produced, she is now at work on a major new biography of Byron, The Eternal Exile, slated for publication in 1996. Her research for this book has taken her to England and Italy. Nancy Wigston spoke with her at her home in Toronto.

Books in Canada: Let's start with the obvious question. You've written about the psychoanalytic movement with such success; you've taught courses not only on biography but also on psychoanalytic thought; you've lectured to huge audiences -- often made up of professional analysts -- all over North America and Europe. Why the change of focus? Phyllis Grosskurth: The Secret Ring, which I found very distressing to write -- I was filled with great sadness when I finished that book -- exhausted my interest in pursuing the history of psychoanalysis. It didn't mean I had lost interest in psychoanalysis or its efficacy, but I did not want to pursue that line any longer, because it no longer held an exciting challenge for me. I don't see it as a Freud-bashing book the way some of the critics have, but, on the other hand, it did have a profound effect on me, in that I felt that I'd got fight back to the origins of psychoanalysis, and the challenge was met. And it took me a long while to find another subject that really satisfied me. I had to think very long about this, because I'm not as young as I used to be and I can't afford to waste valuable time. For quite a long while I've been interested in the phenomenon of exile, so at first I started to write a book on various exiles and I was going to model it on Eminent Victorians, and then, through my friend William St. Clair [author of The Godwins and the Shelleys] I began to see that it would be more effective to concentrate on a single, quintessential exile, and, as William emphasized to me, the last major biography of Byron had been written in 1957, and a lot of material has become available which Lesley Marchand [author of a three-volume 1957 Byron biography] didn't have access to at the time he wrote his book.

BiC: Why would more Byron material now become available?

Grosskurth: Well, this is the thing about biography. Biography is a genre, there is no definitive biography, biography is constantly in process. What happens, and what has happened in this particular case, is that families with papers in their own possession have released some of this material to various libraries. They do this out of a sense of conscience.

BiC: Why does the "phenomenon of exile" attract you? Is it a romantic part of yourself?

Grosskurth: It must be. I'm very fascinated by what "home" means to people, and having been sort of an expatriate myself for some years, I'm interested in that twilight way of living, and what draws people to it, and what draws people away from it. And how some people seem to be born for it, and other people can't adjust to it. Byron is fascinating because I think it was something that he was compulsive about. I would call him a compulsive exile.

BiC: What parts of his life need re-examining? I'm thinking of Byron the romantic hero, the legend -- he's wounded, he's somewhat rude, but he's a very potent sexual symbol -- or Byron the poet, who, I suppose, isn't much read today?

Grosskurth: Well, he's very complex, there are so many layers, and I subscribe to the theory that's been advanced recently about him as a manic-depressive, with cyclical changes that were held in check by his creativity. That pathological aspect of his nature interests me. Then I am not interested in Lady Caroline Lamb. I have just finished that chapter. That has been so overworked and so overdone -- do you know, it lasted only four months at the very most and that's stretching it.

BiC: But she had such a great sound bite: "mad, bad, dangerous to know."

Grosskurth: But, you know, that's not in writing anywhere. She told someone, "This is what I put in my journal," but that's not in writing. A lot of this stuff -- "I awoke and found myself famous" [attributed to Byron] - is just part of the mythology. So that's another aspect -

BiC: You're debunking some of the mythology.

Grosskurth: Yes. Then I'm very, very interested in the marriage: why it took place, what it was like for that year, and why she left him. And that is the major new material. More material is available on this breakup than on any marriage in history -- it's just incredible. Then I'm interested in the whole cult of celebrity, how people project certain characteristics onto a figure, which is what happened to him. He is really the first cult celebrity figure, he is. You just think back -- who was there before Byron? And then you look at the first manifestations of it. Well, the first manifestations were what you described a little while ago about the erotic aspect -- the mournful, isolated, suffering hero. But that doesn't explain the fact that he had this tremendous impact on all of Europe. So that he, more than any figure, stood for the focal point of a new sensibility that swept Europe. Why was it? What was there about this man? And I think the reason is that for ideas really to crystallize they need a focus, they need a figure on whom people can project aspirations. Byron stood for a lot of things: he stood for humanitarianism, he stood for revolt against tyranny, he stood for heightened sensibility and sensitivity to nature, he stood for the importance of the expression of emotions that had been held in check. He really created a whole new sensibility. It's quite extraordinary.

BiC: He became a sort of icon for romanticism?

Grosskurth: Well, Childe Harold was 1812. That was the beginning of it, but this swept through Europe, and of course it was closely allied to Napoleon, it certainly was a very vital force in Europe for at least 60 years. And you keep seeing the word "byronic" -- the word alone is supposed to conjure up a whole amalgam. What is interesting too is Byron as a celebrity -- people don't allow celebrities to last long. They exult as much in their falI as they do in their rise. You see it in all kinds of rock stars and so forth.

BiC: Rock has created -- because of its sexuality, its innate appeal -a kind of outsider aristocrat who is, of course, Byron. But don't you run into a few problems, because here he is the focus for the projection of a lot of ideals, then there's his treatment of Allegra, his illegitimate daughter by Clair Clairmont, whom he stuck in a convent and never even visited, until she died of a fever at four?

Grosskurth: It's not uncommon for people to have great humanitarian feelings for he suffering of society at large without seeing what's happening to those people closest to them. And he could show enormous kindness to individuals.

BiC: And dying at Missolonghi? Did this one last act redeem him?

Grosskurth: Absolutely. It is just impossible, really, to think of him growing old. The only person I can think of, he'd be something like Marlon Brando -

BiC: Oooh. Yes. Some people aren't meant to grow old.

Grosskurth: Yes. I can't imagine Keats or Shelley old.

BiC: So he'd become a sort of caricature -- as Brando has -- of his youthful self.

Grosskurth: And the young Brando looks remarkably like him, too.

BiC: And has that same raw, poetic appeal, a genius thing -

Grosskurth: And also a sort of detachment about him that people found attractive.

BiC: But he isn't a man you can completely idealize. He was a womanizer -

Grosskurth: He wasn't a womanizer. Women threw themselves at him. I have yet to find a case where he pursued women.

BiC: Bisexual?

Grosskurth: Oh, definitely bisexual. That's part of the complexity that makes him interesting.

BiC: And he exaggerated a bit?

Grosskurth: That's mainly when he was in Venice, and he led a very dissolute life. That is kind of interesting, because by then the idol had been thrown off his pedestal. So then Byron started to act like the false hero: he reacted to people's expectations and became the kind of person whom they were creating. And he was very anxious that word of these affairs and this life he was leading in Venice got back to England.

BiC: He wrote it himself in his letters

Grosskurth: He had been used to being the darling of society and now he was the devil of society, but that was fame too, so he played up to that.

BiC: What about the scandal of the incest with his half-sister?

Grosskurth: Well, that happened.

BiC: Is that why he left England? Or was it because of the divorce?

Grosskurth: That story is not too convincing. That's why I call him a compulsive exile. He did not really have to leave, you see, it was a sort of role-playing. If he was going to be a fallen hero, a fallen hero must be exiled. So he exiled himself. No one forced him to leave.

BiC: Mary Shelley wrote, "No action of Byron's life, scarce a line he has written, but was influenced by his personal defect" -- meaning his lame foot. Do you agree with that?

Grosskurth: Oh yes. I go into that in great detail, and that is very much tied up with the phenomenon of compulsive exile. He saw himself as a fallen angel, with some sort of malignant spell cast on him. All he had to do was look at that foot and substantiate it. As for the poetry -- people don't read it. Even at the college I've talked to a lot of students who've read major things but never read Byron, because people don't know where to place him, with the Augustans or the Romantics, and he did have a hard time finding his own voice. Because he became famous with this romantic stuff, he went on churning it out, but it was only in his last years that he found his real voice, which was a voice that was comical, satirical, and raffish.

BiC: But he denied that he was a romantic?

Grosskurth: Oh yes. He didn't like the Romantics. But you know there are some poems that are really marvellous. "Darkness" -- he wrote that just after he went into exile, in Switzerland. It is an amazing poem: a vision of the universe in which there is absolutely no light.

BiC: That doesn't fit with satire -

Grosskurth: But there are all these different sides to him. I'm going a lot into the social history. I get sort of sad, especially in this country, that everything has to be about the present. And, I don't know, I love living in another world, too, because that world is just as alive. Have you noticed this? Very few people write about the past.

BiC: I think I know what you mean. Things get dated, we talk about decades as if they're completely different - the '60s, the'70s, the'80s, and now people are saying "It's very '90s."

Grosskurth: I was much very aware of this in Italy too. I think it's because we don't have the past side by side with us.

BiC: You said, before the Freud book came out, "Enough's enough." You were not going to write any more about psychoanalysis. Still, you were attacked by critics in some really mean-spirited reviews. How do you withstand the criticism?

BiC: And dying at Missolonghi? Did this one last act redeem him?

Grosskurth: Absolutely. It is just impossible, really, to think of him growing old. The only person I can think of, he'd be something like Marion Brando -

BiC: Oooh. Yes. Some people aren't meant to grow old.

Grosskurth: Yes. I can't imagine Keats or Shelley old.

BiC: So he'd become a sort of caricature -- as Brando has -- of his youthful self

Grosskurth: And the young Brando looks remarkably like him, too.

BiC: And has that same raw, poetic appeal, a genius thing -

Grosskurth: And also a sort of detachment about him that people found attractive.

BiC: But he isn't a man you can completely idealize. He was a womanizer -- Grosskurth: He wasn't a womanizer. Women threw themselves at him. I have yet to find a case where he pursued women.

BiC: Bisexual?

Grosskurth: Oh, definitely bisexual. That's part of the complexity that makes him interesting.

BiC: And he exaggerated a bit?

Grosskurth: That's mainly when he was in Venice, and he led a very dissolute life. That is kind of interesting, because by then the idol had been thrown off his pedestal. So then Byron started to act like

the false hero: he reacted to people's expectations and became the kind of person whom they were creating. And he was very anxious that word of these affairs and this life he was leading in Venice got back to England.

BiC: He wrote it himself in his letters

Grosskurth: He had been used to being the darling of society and now he was the devil of society, but that was fame too, so he played up to that.

BiC: What about the scandal of the incest with his half-sister?

Grosskurth: Well, that happened.

BiC: Is that why he left England? Or was it because of the divorce?

BiC: Mary Shelley wrote, "No action of Byron's life, scarce a line he has written, but was influenced by his personal defect" -- meaning his lame foot. Do you agree with that?

BiC: But he denied that he was a romantic? Grosskurth: Oh yes. He didn't like the Romantics. But you know there are some

poems that are really marvellous. "Darkness" -- he wrote that just after he went into exile, in Switzerland. It is an amazing poem: a vision of the universe in which there is absolutely no light.

BiC: That doesn't fit with satire -

Grosskurth: But there are all these different sides to him. I'm going a lot into the social history. I get son of sad, especially in this country, that everything has to be about the present. And, I don't know, I love living in another world, too, because that world is just as alive. Have you noticed this? Very few people write about the past.

BiC: I think I know what you mean. Things get dated, we talk about decades as if they're completely different -- the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, and now people are saying "It's very '90s."

Grosskurth: I was much very aware of this in Italy too. I think it's because we don't have the past side by side with us.

Grosskurth: Those reviews really hurt, and I was quite taken aback by their virulence. It's a funny thing, people either love or hate that book. A critic faxed me a review yesterday in which he was ecstatic about the book. I read the review by Adam Phillips, I thought, This is masochistic -- but it didn't affect me one speck, that's God's truth. I thought, This is so shallow, he's not even talking about what the book is about. He's just talking about me. [laughter]

BiC: But you knew this was going to happen?

Grosskurth: I guess I did, but I didn't know how virulent it was going to be. I had had lots of attacks on the Melanie Klein book -

BiC: By orthodox Kleinians. But you obviously admire Klein, you wrote: "This was her offence, for daring to branch out on her own paths of investigation, she was branded, vilified and mocked." Is that comparable at all to anything that's happened to you, daring to branch out on your own paths of investigation?

Grosskurth: Well, I'm on the outside, and some people very much resent that, that this outsider has got in there and gone through all their secret papers. It wouldn't have happened if one of them had written about it.

BiC: Have women have been more accepting of The Secret Ring than men? You'd think that to a lot of women, this kind of childish, male-bonding behaviour would come as no shock.

Grosskurth: I don't know. Unfortunately, most of the women who've reviewed it have been analysts, except for Rabbi Julia Neuberger. She gave it the most wonderful review in the Sunday Times. That was rare. I was so grateful to her.

BiC: We've come to this issue of telling the truth -- having the courage to tell the truth. In your book on Symonds you quote him: "To conceal the truth does credit to no one." If there's a thread running through your work this seems to be it. What about what's happening now in biography? Janet Malcolm has compared biographers to burglars, rifling through private drawers, triumphantly bearing their loot away.

Grosskurth: Well, she has got a point. Biographers have to be very nosey, and look in dark corners. But I really think she's pathologizing them. That's dreadful. First she gives these bad motives to all journalists and now she makes a blanket accusation about all biographers. You've got some really sleazy biographies, but biographies have to be intrusive to a certain extent, and it depends upon the reader. For instance, I remember speaking at Queen's University a couple of years ago, and this man was defending Ellmann's biography of Wilde despite the fact that he didn't go into why Wilde was a homosexual or anything much about that, and why did you have to? So, you see, people have different views about what is intrusive.

BiC: Do you think we demand more of that sort of information now?

Grosskurth: Yes, I do. One book that did get the truth, and yet there was a certain dignity to it at the same time, was Diane Middlebrook's on Anne Sexton. That book could not have been written 40 years ago. When you think how hypocritical people like Leon Edel were, even then, about Henry James's homosexuality -- it's not that long ago. Yet a lot of people think he was being so gentle, so tactful.

BiC: How far do you go? For instance Havelock Ellis and his curious sexual habits -- didn't you go to see an aged woman who'd been his lover? And you didn't ask her about that.

Grosskurth: Yes. And I did this with the Klein book too. There were some things that I just omitted. Her son wasn't dead, and some of the people associated with her weren't dead. I thought, It doesn't make that big a difference. But, often, when families or executors are very protective, it's their own images they're thinking about.

BiC: So the biographer's ethics obviously determine these judgement calls -your personal sense of what is enough truth. You reviewed the Peter Ackroyd book on Dickens, where he intersperses fictional chapters with biography, imaginary conversations, and so on. What do you think of that?

Grosskurth: I think that's appalling. I think it's very arrogant. I suppose he started this with the T. S. Eliot biography where he wasn't allowed to quote anything so he used other means, and he sort of liked this freedom that he had.

BiC: Whom do you admire among current biographers?

Grosskurth: For sheer writing, I admire Michael Hotroyd. I think he has a natural gift, I admire the brilliance of his writing more than I can say.

BiC: His last book was

Grosskurth: On Shaw, and he's rewritten Lytton Strachey just recently, and he's going to write the biography of Doris Lessing -- she's giving him all her papers.

BiC: So he would be your choice for yourself -- if someone were to write about you?

Grosskurth: Oh no, no, no. [laughter] I couldn't bear the thought of it, I'm not important enough in the first place. And in the second place, my poor children -- if they saw a biography of their mother. Come on. It's interesting, I have alI kinds of letters that I should destroy. As a biographer, many, many times, I've thought, How on earth has this stuff survived? This is inflammable, amazing. The reason is, people just can't bear to bum it.

BiC: It reminds me of A. S. Byatt's novel, Possession -

Grosskurth: I enjoyed that immensely.

BiC: That moment in the library when the researcher grabs something no one else has seen -- it's a detective story really -

Grosskurth: It is. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a detective when I grew up.