The Ghost

plastic lining, from which dangled frilly elastic bands. The contents consisted of a single large padded envelope addressed to M. McAra Esq., care of a post office box number in Vineyard Haven. A label on the back showed that it had come from the Adam Lang Archive Centre in Cambridge, England. I opened it and pulled out a handful of photographs and photocopies, together with a compliments slip from Julia Crawford-Jones, PhD, Director.
    One of the photographs I recognized at once: Lang in his chicken outfit, from the Footlights Revue in the early nineteen seventies. There were a dozen other production stills showing the whole cast; a set of photographs of Lang punting, wearing a straw boater and a striped blazer; and three or four of him at a riverside picnic, apparently taken on the same day as the punting. The photocopies were of various Footlights programs and theater reviews from Cambridge, plus a lot of local newspaper reports of the Greater London Council elections of May 1977, and Lang’s original party membership card. It was only when I saw the date on the card that I rocked back on my heels. It was from 1975.
    I started to reexamine the package with more care now, beginning with the election stories. At first glance I thought they’d come from the London Evening Standard , but I saw they were from the news sheet of a political party—Lang’s party—and that he was actually pictured in a group as an election volunteer. It was hard to make him out in the poorly reproduced photocopy. His hair was long, his clothes were shabby. But that was him, all right, one of a team knocking on doors in a council estate. “Canvasser: A. Lang.”
    I was more irritated than anything. It certainly didn’t strike me as sinister. Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape. I could see how it would have suited Lang to pretend he’d gone into politics only because he’d fancied a girl. It flattered him, by making him look less ambitious, and it flattered her, by making her look more influential than she probably was. Audiences liked it. Everyone was happy. But now the question arose: what was I supposed to do?
    It’s not an uncommon dilemma in the ghosting business, and the etiquette is simple: you draw the discrepancy to the author’s attention and leave it up to him to decide how to resolve it. The collaborator’s responsibility is not to insist on the absolute truth. If it were, our end of the publishing industry would collapse under the dead weight of reality. Just as the beautician doesn’t tell her client that she has a face like a sack of toads, so the ghost doesn’t confront the autobiographer with the fact that half his treasured reminiscences are false. Don’t dictate, facilitate: that is our motto. Obviously, McAra had failed to observe this sacred rule. He must have had his suspicions about what he was being told, ordered up a parcel of research from the archives, and then removed the ex–prime minister’s most polished anecdote from his memoirs. What an amateur! I could imagine how well that must have been received. No doubt it helped explain why relations had become so strained.
    I turned my attention back to the Cambridge material. There was a strange kind of innocence about these faded jeunesse dorée, stranded in that lost but happy valley that lay somewhere between the twin cultural peaks of hippiedom and punk. Spiritually, they looked far closer to the sixties than the seventies. The girls had long lacy dresses in floral prints, with plunging necklines, and big straw hats to keep off the sun. The men’s hair was as long as the women’s. In the only color picture, Lang was holding a bottle of champagne in one hand and what looked very much like a joint in the other; a girl seemed to be feeding him strawberries, while in the background a bare-chested man gave a thumbs-up.
    The biggest of the cast photographs showed eight young people grouped together under a spotlight, their arms outstretched as if they had just finished some show-stopping song and dance routine in a cabaret. Lang