We are all celebrity cultists. There’s no escape. It’s the culture of the West, part of the great dim-witting, entertainment replacing solid information. In the Middle Ages it was saints. Now it’s outsized media figures that fill our minds. Musing to ourselves, our dialog with them is livelier that ever it was with our uncles or aunts. But the glory of these big beasts is fragile. The media that made them also sees to it that one day they come tumbling down. It’s the golden rule of schlock drama that a good show calls for a final car wreck.
Alice Munro was no exception. The great Canadian short story writer, Nobel Laureate 2013, died at 92 on May 24 after a dozen years of dementia. Her postmortem downfall came almost immediately on July 7. Andrea Skinner, her daughter by the first of her two husbands, published an article in the Toronto Star. Andrea said that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, started to abuse her sexually in 1972 when she was nine and stopped only when she reached her teens. In 1992 she told her mother about the abuse, and Munro left Fremlin for some months. But she told Andrea that she loved him too much to give him up for good.
Fremlin’s predilection for children was common knowledge. In 2005 he pleaded guilty to sexual assault and received a suspended sentence and probation. Looking back then at his stepdaughter Andrea’s accusation, he said airily that the nine-year-old had come to him seeking a sexual encounter. Perhaps in those years it was less preposterous to attribute adult impulses to a nine-year-old.
The celebrity cultists would get their schadenfreude in spades. They may have been witless worshippers, but, in the end, along with the tabloid press, they managed to come out on top as righteous moralists. Gerald Fremlin died in 2013 at 88, still brushing off accusations as the foolish overreaction of the virility deficient.
Munro had known about Fremlin, just as Grace in the Runaway story ‘Passion’ knew about Neil:
“Passion….was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him…. What she had seen was final. As if she was at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing it was all there was.”
Munro’s need (“love”) for Fremlin had led her to accept his ways. This was precisely what her stories since the 1960s had warned women against. Whether in 19th Century Ontario or in British Columbia in the 1980s, they had to fear falling into subjection to bumptious males. Their generosity is their weak point, a dangerous indulgence she called love. The women are sharp, sometimes satirical, even cynical, about their situation. They are quick to point out the limits of their particular social grouping. However, their vulnerability remains. Despite self-imposed guardrails, they can fall, just as Munro herself did. Her falling, though, did add a touch more of humanity to a writing life already rich in it.
This side of Munro dealt with, we can move on to cover the larger one and ask just why Munro is a great writer. How to approach her is the question. That her stories are short doesn’t mean that summing them up isn’t like reducing a mountain range to slogan size. In desperation we can choose to close in on one volume, the stunning Runaway of 2006. It included the introductory essay by the prominent American novelist Jonathan Franzen that did so much to bring Munro to international attention. Franzen got much right. Munro’s storytelling brought serious pleasure because it was full of ordinary people that she managed to show as fascinating. Her craft was peerless. She could handle double-barrelled suspense, the first blast silenced by a second that brought still greater surprise. Her invention of story form using one period in a character’s life, often out of chronological order, to shed light on another was magical. It gave us a life story, which we thought only the novel could do, in a new, incisive form. She did all this, said Franzen, without talking about herself.
But Franzen got that wrong. As a novelist he has to hide behind the pretence that authors can avoid basing their fictions on themselves. To admit the contrary would expose him to self-consciousness and the danger of what some have called writer’s block. Painful but true, the great Gustave Flaubert said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Munro, in her betrayal by love in tolerating Fremlin, was one with, in Flaubert’s sense, her vulnerable women characters, young and old.
Franzen also made the mistake that seems inevitable for American writers. They see their best Canadian colleagues, as wannabe members of their own sprawling republic, as honorary co-citizens, eager to join in a rousing Star Spangled Banner. In Munro’s case this ignores the fact that one of her principal accomplishments was to put her native Ontario on the map every reader carries in his skull. This is not only a question of geography. By setting some stories back in history, she shows what sort of society shaped her 20th Century Ontarians.
Take her character Juliet who appears in several Runaway stories. Juliet, first as a girl, then as a bewildered lover, and finally as a despairing mother of a daughter who denies her is the product of 20th Century Ontario society, but the roots of that society are still in the 19th Century when that vast emptiness held a bewildering variety of churches and sects. Amidst a crude and even barbarous daily life, these (mostly) different versions of Protestantism were at daggers drawn with one another. There was a competitive battle as to which surpassed which in high moralism. The result, apart from monumental hypocrisy, was a turning adherents inward to scrutinise their behaviour. This supposed spirituality was often only a raking over of trivialities and gossip.
Twentieth Century Juliet rejects religion by reading ancient Greek. However, she inherits the competition for virtue in her self-lacerating moral rat race. It alienates her daughter who breaks off contact with her mother in order to breathe freely. Juliet, grown old, resigns herself to defeat, though she doesn’t grasp that it was brought about by her moral striving.
“My daughter went away without telling me good-bye and in fact she probably did not know then that she was going. She did not know it was for good. Then gradually, I believe, it dawned on her how much she wanted to stay away. It is just a way she found to manage her life….Maybe she can’t stand me. It’s possible.”
‘Trespasses’, another Runaway story, again shows that traces of the old life can still impinge on the present. They make for confusion in an eleven-year-old when her sophisticated, urban parents plunge her back into small-town life. The differences between the two ways of living have now taken on a contrast of economic classes. Finally her mother tells her:
“You don’t deserve to have to grow up in this crappy town. You don’t deserve to end up sounding like a hick.”
‘Tricks’ in Runaway takes Munro’s master theme so far that it dissolves in the imaginary. A twenty-something 20th Century Ontarian woman full of simple virtue and ignorance imagines herself into the classic Munro predicament. She creates out of crumbs of experience her own temptation. The romance that will lead her astray is homemade, her own doing. The male she will be subject to has only a shadow of reality beyond her own mind.
No surprise that it doesn’t work. How could it? But strangely—it’s the Munro touch—the woman isn’t left empty but, in a jejune Ontario way, fulfilled.
One marvels at the resonance of ‘Tricks’, a story about just anyone, a face in the crowd. As storytelling it’s anything but ordinary. It begins with a remark that seems a mere nervous tic:
“I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready for tomorrow.”
It finishes with the same words repeated at another narrative moment and revealing their deeper meaning. It’s Munro’s way of playing with time to tell her tales, full of explosions that shake her characters but are heard by no one else apart from her readers.
‘Powers’ the last story in Runaway underlines Munro’s singularity. She’s a short-story author who tells life stories. Time and time again we begin with a character’s youth and finish with his or her old age if not death. Now the traditional short story tends to give us a flash from its characters’ lives, a glimpse that only suggests the rest. If we reflect on this, we might find it a very limited approach. What happens to these people once their brief moment of literary existence is passed? Munro tells us. She does so in a mere sixty-five pages although her story covers the years from the 1920s to the 1970s.
In fact, ‘Powers’ continues the saga of Ontario. It begins with the province no longer an uncivilised wilderness marked off by warring religions and their often grotesque church buildings. Small town life and provincial decorum have taken over. It ends with post-1960s hippiedom in Vancouver, Canada’s Pacific-shore San Francisco-plus-rain. Munro brings this off by brilliant ellipsis. She leaves the meat-and-potatoes middle years of the characters’ lives for readers to sketch in. This makes their final destiny an aching curiosity for us. When it is revealed, we realise that at last we have been treated as adults. Every life does end, and it’s childish to hide the fact.
Nancy, the sprightly young small-town belle of 1927, looks into a shop window of Vancouver forty years later and with horror sees her reflection:
“During the past ten or fifteen years she had certainly taken time out to observe her own face in a harsh light so that she could better see what makeup could do, or decide whether the time had definitely come to start coloring her hair. But she had never had a jolt like this, a moment during which she saw not just some old and new trouble spots, or some decline that could not be ignored any longer, but a complete stranger.”
Ave ate vale, Alice Ann Munro, née Laidlaw, 1931-2024
Comentarios