The biographer's morality

Keeping secrets about Alice Munro

This week, we have learned that Alice Munro’s daughter suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her step-father, and that Munro not only ignored the problem but sided with her husband. I won’t recapitulate the facts (though I will add that the step-father wrote letters blaming the child), nor will I offer moral commentary. Others have done a better job than I would. And besides, the rights and wrongs are obvious and horrible.

But one minor matter of literary interest has arisen that I can write usefully about—how honest should a biographer be?

Talking to the Washington Post, Robert Thacker, a Canadian Academic who wrote a biography of Munro said that he had known about the abuse, but had decided not to put the information into his book.

“Clearly she hoped — or she hoped at that time, anyway — that I would make it public,” he told The Post on Monday. “I wasn’t prepared to do that. And the reason I wasn’t prepared to do that is that, it wasn’t that kind of book. I wasn’t writing a tell-all biography. And I’ve lived long enough to know that stuff happens in families that they don’t want to talk about and that they want to keep in families.”

Notice the key phrase there — it wasn’t that kind of book. There is a long-standing dislike amongst the more scholarly and serious type of biographers of the “tell all” genre that exposes secrets and scandals. It is thought to be unserious, unliterary, unnecessary. There is something tabloid about revealing such things. Too much sex draws attention away from the work itself.

What this story make clear is that these are a very confused set of priorities for biographers to work by. The long argument in the genre between telling the truth and telling a noble lie will never be resolved, but the Munro case ought to show us that not all truth telling is grubby “tell-all” biography.

The usual defence of this position is that there’s no literary purpose to such revelations. There is a difference between writing an author’s life as a way of illuminating their work and writing a “tell all” that will garner attention for itself, tuning the writing into a creature of modern celebrity, tabloid, and television culture.

This is nothing new. It is, of course, quite literally Victorian to worry about such things: Elizabeth Gaskell was carefully selective in her biography of Charlotte Brontë, knowing that revealing details of Brontë’s romantic life would give sexist critics more material with which to criticise and dismiss Brontë’s work. Several decades later, Victorian England was in a state of prolonged shock and minor crisis when the details of the Carlyle marriage were reported in James Froude’s stupendous Life of Carlyle. Some of them even worried that the revelations would undermine the institution of marriage.

In modern terms, Thacker is presumably concerned not to put himself on the same shelf as the sort of books that draw back the curtain on celebrity couples like the Beckhams or Royal biography. He was writing a work of serious academic merit, not an expose.

The trouble with this argument is that it doesn’t work, either on its own terms, or in reference to the particulars of the case. First, there is a literary reason for Thacker to have written about the abuse, as he told the Post.

According to Thacker, it was broadly understood that Munro drew from events in her life for her 1993 story “Vandals,” about a woman who represses the knowledge that her partner sexually abused children: “Those of us who [study] Alice, or have [studied] Alice, have always thought that this story directly connected to this whole issue.”

So his revealing the facts wouldn’t have been merely prurient, it could have been justified as part of taking Munro’s work seriously. And once we start following that trail, who knows what other reassessments we shall make. It wouldn’t be surprising if Munro’s work started to be read quite differently in the coming years, just as Larkin’s was once details of his personality were revealed. (I don’t at all advocate for this sort of reading, but it is inevitable.) Gaskell concealed the truth about Brontë to protect her reputation as a writer in a deeply hostile culture, knowing that the facts were not that scandalous: Munro hardly needed such favours, Nobel Laureate that she was.

That brings to us the general problem with biographical concealment. We shouldn’t need a literary justification. Such things are never simply impartial and high-minded. Look at the two statements Thacker made about why he didn’t write up the story.

“In a case like this, I wasn’t prepared to be probing,” Thacker said, later adding: “The term she used was, she was ‘devastated.’ And she was devastated. It wasn’t anything she did. It was something he did.”

And,

Others who worked closely with Munro knew about Skinner’s experience, Thacker said: “Certainly people knew there was a burden she was dealing with.”

Note how defensive Thacker is: Munro was devastated, carrying a burden, and “it wasn’t anything she did.” This is a very partial view of the case. According to the story written by Munro’s daughter, Munro wasn’t abusive but she was very much culpable for defending her husband: that was certainly something she did. Munro may have carried a burden, but so did her daughter, and a much bigger one.

Thacker didn’t choose to follow a code of biographer’s integrity but a selective morality. He was loyal to his subject. (It may be that we shouldn’t blame him for this. Who knows what the conditions of access were, or what sort of relationship he had with Munro. He is an academic, not a journalist.) But, as ever, Gaskell-esque concealments were a temporary fix: the situation is having an effect much more akin to what happened with Carlyle.

One of the questions we need to ask is why it is so seemingly acceptable for a biographer to conceal something as momentous as this. It is admirable that Thacker was prepared to talk about this to the Post; far more admirable would be for biographers to realise that sometimes telling the truth doesn’t make a biography “that sort of book” but is, in fact, exactly what the biography is supposed to do.

As I said in my review of Molly by Blake Butler, biography is always revelatory—without it, we would know little of V.S. Naipaul’s domestic violence, Iris Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s, Philip Larkin’s racism, Bloomsbury homosexuality, Charlotte Brontë’s romantic life, Thomas Carlyle’s marital bullying, and on and on. The morality of some of these revelations can be debated; many cannot.

In his essay on biography Samuel Johnson said, “If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.” In our times, and in cases like this, the same is surely true of the living. Biographers should tell the truth.