There is no Alice Munro story titled Complicity though complicit characters are common in her stories. Often women are complicit in their own oppression. The many ways women are complicit never escapes the scrutiny of Munro’s gaze. That’s the biggest irony.
When Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s son, the author Mukoma wa Ngugi revealed that his father beat her mother, I was shocked but not incredulous. ‘Great’ men with moral lapses are rife. From Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso to Woody Allen to Roman Polanski. Powerful intimidating men misbehave in ways that are almost expected and routine. I have never had trouble digesting the news of their lapses – the silence is around which is often driven by self-preservation and fear.
When the author is a beloved woman author – Alice Munro – who is the soul of humility and self-deprecation, whose work has resonated and kept thousands of readers company through their confusions, humiliations and personal turbulences, the feeling is less rage, and more hand-wringing anguish tinged with disbelief.
A day ago, Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, revealed that though she told her mother many times that she was being sexually abused since nine years of age by her step father, Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin. Munro chose silence.
Since the essay came out, a wretched sense of how this can even be possible has pervaded in literary circles. This was an open secret in Canada, apparently. In her devastating essay in Toronto Star Andrea reveals the occasions and all the opportunities down the years that she gave her mother to acknowledge truth. And how, not just Munro, but the whole family got co-opted and became a part of this circle of silence. Every occasion of speaking up turned into something either about Munro’s ‘needs’ or about poor Gerry who ‘might commit suicide.’
Can it really be possible that the magnificent empathy in Alice Munro’s fiction was just for the sake of fiction? That outside the pages of her books she was more flawed than the countless flawed mothers her stories portrayed? That she was as prone to moral blindness and misogyny as the characters in her stories displayed? That in her own family she perpetuated the same dysfunctional power dynamics that her stories expose, which prevent a woman from standing up for her children in face of obvious abuse by a man? Can such complicity be a fount of magnificent prose?
Did Munro behave much like the oblivious and self-absorbed Bea Doud in her story ‘Vandals’ (in Open Secrets) who turns a blind eye to her partner Ladner’s prolonged exploitation of a couple of neighbourhood children? In the story, Bea clearly knows about Ladner’s abuse but refuses to accept that she knows. The apparent generosity she shows towards Liza by funding her college education comes from a place of guilt. Bea thinks that pay-off is enough reparation. But Liza’s uncontrollable frenzy at the end of the story as she vandalises Bea and Lardner’s house where ‘it’ happened, suggests that the damage felt by an abuse victim whose very life has been vandalised, can never be compensated. How can it be that what was apparent to the author Munro, was lost on the wife Munro? Or if not lost, what combination of fear and social pressure forced her to put a lid on a horror within her own house?
Also read: The Difficulties of Remembering Alice Munro
Another Munro story ‘Silence’ from her 2004 collection Runaway dwells on the anguish of a famous, highly well-regarded woman Juliet, who now leads a reclusive life and is trying to connect with her grown-up daughter Penelope who has disappeared since many years from her life. The daughter sends unsigned generic cards on the mother’s birthday and from the postmark the mother traces the religious retreat where she expects to find her. However, the lady in charge, a priestess like gatekeeper, is hostile and sarcastic and denies that Penelope is there. The story does not lead to any reconciliation but only circles around Juliet’s anguish and the thought that her daughter had no use of her. The mother keeps hoping she would find the daughter ‘but not too strenuously.’
Often Munro’s female characters go from not knowing the implication of their ironical life choices to gaining insight. They keep marriages with iffy men at enormous cost to themselves. Under some sort of social pressure and self-delusion, they take enormous risks to get or to keep a man. What gives weight to a Munro story is the emotional complexity of details that make the lousy choices totally understandable. How can such enormous empathy, put in making fiction like life, not percolate down to the creator’s personal behavior? That’s why her stance towards her daughter’s revelations sticks in the gullet.
Yes, it does matter if the way a beloved writer acts outside the pages of a book. It does matter when her choices do not match up to the morality her creations throb with. It hurts more when the author is a great woman writer. I love talking to writers, to hear them talk because of a peculiar faith that listening to them would show a better way to be. That the author must know the right path because she has exorcised her own ghosts. That writing has forged her character and somehow cured her of frailties and flaws that rest of us are susceptible to.
Also read: Finding Saint Munro
Does Munro’s personal folly cancel her literary greatness? I don’t think so. Like in her stories, her death does not end the puzzle of her life but creates new complexities, a new point of view emerges and brings another angle, another layer to what the reader till now had been led into thinking happened.
Now her life’s story will open to multiple interpretations. Right now, the colossal irony is this: the story of her life is a straight line of moral failure: Alice Munro chose her husband over the daughter he sexually abused. Like her fiction, nothing in the life of Alice Munro can be easily processable. As at the end of many of her stories a sense of astonished sadness lingers. Complicity, the story she never wrote, will write itself now.
Bio: Varsha Tiwary is a Delhi based writer and translator. She has recently published 1990, Aramganj, a translation of the best-selling Hindi novel Rambhakt Rangbaz.
Note: This article has been edited to correct an incorrect reference to Mukoma wa Ngugi as Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s daughter. Mukoma is his son.
