The cozy living-room in the Toronto Cabbagetown house of author Phyllis Grosskurth has a festive look, not just for the hot pink colour of its walls, but the numerous birthday cards perched on the dark wood shelves of the tall bookcases. A generous bouquet of pink lilies on the side table sweetly perfume the air as we sit close together on her country style sofa.
At seventy-four, Grosskurth is trim and petite in a light aqua pant suit, her hair in short blond curls, delicate oval-frame glasses on her cameo face. Soft-spoken, she corrects me gently when I remark she's had two careers, as a teacher and a prize-winning biographer:
"Three," she says, "as a mother and wife too."
Grosskurth confides that since retiring from the University of Toronto, and publishing her latest book, Byron: The Flawed Angel, a biography of nineteenth century poet Lord Byron, she has been writing a memoir. This strikes me as exciting news: Grosskurth's life has been turbulent and eventful, rivalling any of her subjects.
She tells me she has finished the "easy part," her childhood. Born in Toronto, she grew up mostly in the Carribean. Her father, Milton Langstaff, an insurance executive, relocated the family there after a business failure during the Depression. Her mother, Winifred, wanted her younger sister, Joan and her, to have "extraordinary careers", so she decided to return them to Toronto as the jungle of Trinidad had no adequate schools.
Her husband, Grosskurth says, now helps her write the "hard part," her adult years. He is Robert McMullan, a slim man with a shock of white hair, who greeted me with a firm handshake, and fetched me a glass of soda water before discreetly disapearing up the stairs. Although they married nearly ten years ago, Grosskurth still has a newlywed glow when she speaks of him:
"He will give me good advice. I express to him my concerns about the sensitive issues that arise, and he suggests ways to get around them."
There is much to be sensitive about as Grosskurth has made a "nuisance of herself" whenever she came across discrimination. This soon happened after her first marriage, to Robert Grosskurth, who was a fellow student at the University of Toronto. He joined the navy as an engineer and was posted to England.
Being a naval wife was like a career in the fifties. Grosskurth raised their children, Christopher, Brian and Anne, and read all the time, as she felt the conventional life was "paralyzing her mental powers." When she decided to return to college, she was considered an "eccentric" by the others on the base.
Her career as a controversial biographer had its beginning while she researched her PHD thesis on the Victorian critic, John Addington Symonds. She discovered a cache of autobiographical papers that described his secret homosexual life. A publisher offered her a contract, and within nine months, Grosskurth wrote John Addington Symonds: A
Biography, which won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction in 1965. Sadly, it didn't win her father's approval: in an angry letter, he accused her of disgracing the family.
In Ottawa, where her husband had been relocated, there were fewer opportunities for literary activity than in London, so Grosskurth began to teach at Carleton University. When her marriage ended, she moved with her children to Toronto. She was hired as the first woman professor of English at University college, University of Toronto.
This proved to be a mixed blessing:
"Year after year, I saw men get promoted," she says. "I was quite a shy person. I just got mad at the way I was being treated because in the navy, which is very chauvinistic, the wives were just second-class citizens. I had left that to find fulfillement, and here I found myself in another environment where the women were being put down, and I'd just had enough."
She took a "terrific chance" and confronted the chairman of the department. Her financial situation soon improved.
That was an easy challenge compared to what she had to endure in 1979 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Separated from her second husband, Mavor Moore, the theater manager and actor, she was on a sabbatical in England, working on a biography of the sexologist, Havelock Ellis. A first surgery was botched:
"They made a mistake. They left in the carcinoma and only took some fatty tissue out.," she explained. "I sued for malpractice."
Back in Toronto, her family helped her through a second operation. Grosskurth then chose against any chemotherapy or radiation treatments:
"I knew that if I got chemo," she confides, " I would become weak and wouldn't be able to work."
She still hadn't forgotten how much her doctor pressured her and insisted she was committing suicide.
She returned to England and her work, but the cancer was detected again. She had to have four more surgeries before she fully recovered.
"I prayed a lot," she commented on this period. Raised in the Church of England, Grosskurth found her faith a resource in her life: "I really believe there is a divine power and spiritual forces in the universe."
In a humble manner, she quickly added that her husband is a far better Christian, for he is more active in the church.
Their relationship is worthy of a story book. They first met in the late forties on the campus of U of T, and fell in love. It was wartime, and McMullan, an Englishman, joined the army. They lost touch. What reunited them was a fan letter that McMullan wrote to her in 1979, upon the publication of her biography of Havelock Ellis. They were amazed to find they were neighbors in London and they became inseparable after a date at the local pub.
At this time, Grosskurth had become interested in psychoanalysis as a result of writing the biography, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work, about the pioneer children's psychoanalyst.
It is her favourite book:
"Melanie Klein helped me to develop as a person. She spoke to me as a woman, she enabled me to understand the mother-daughter relationship, she enabled me to understand the origins of depression."
When the couple moved back to Toronto in 1982, Grosskurth sought out a psychoanalyst who had been recommended to her. "He transformed my life." and confides she still seeks his care.
Boldly, Grosskurth researched and wrote The Secret Ring a book about the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and his inner circle. It proved controversial and was severely criticized. Yet Grosskurth remained fascinated by the subject and organized, along with two colleagues at the University of Toronto, an interdisciplinary program on the history and theory of psychoanalytic thought.
It was late in the evening and Grosskurth needed her rest. Though retired, she was busy, not only with the writing of her memoir, but with other activities such as a lecture tour in Italy, and local readings.
When she showed a maternal concern for my safety, I reassured her that someone was waiting for me in a car outside, and she hugged me goodbye. As I walked into the dark, the golden glow from her living-room window illuminated the path through the garden, to the street.
Postcript: Phyllis Grosskurth's memoir was published as Elusive Subject: A Biographer's Life in 1999.
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