Munro's own childhood was brutal. The abuse she suffered was ritualized and sadistic. That doesn't forgive or excuse the harm she caused her children but it does contextualize it. Humans are flawed and resilient and messy and shameful and heroic. I hope we can keep finding room for the complexity.
Thank you for this context. I don’t boycott artists on the basis of their messy personal lives. I appreciate authors and filmmakers who are able to craft and share with us powerful stories exposing their intimacy with the dark side of humanity.
It is indeed interesting that she is being treated as if she directly abused her daughter when her daughter didn't disclose it until she was an adult. Her reaction then was not how i would expect myself to respond as a mother, but then i didn't grow up in the era that Munro did when women's position in society was even more rubbish than it is today and domestic abuse was normalised.
At what point is it no longer a problem? Her daughter revealed what had happened and her mother did nothing about it. In fact, the daughter says her mother likened the abuse to an affair. And continued her relationship with her daughter’s abuser. That’s how I understand what happened. I consider that emotional abuse from Alice. Others may see it otherwise. I should add that I am a huge fan of Alice Munro's writing and have been since the day i first read Walker Brothers Cowboy. I have studied her and written papers about her writing. I still read her. I don't boycott her. But I now have knowledge that I didn't have before, and there's nothing i can do about that. It changes the way I read her and think of her. It all makes me very, very sad.
I didn't say it wasn't abusive as a mother to fail to support her daughter at that point, but my point is that she is being treated as if she failed to protect a child from sexual abuse, when she didn't know about it at the time, and yet her ex husband was told by his daughter and did not intervene. It's just about the different ways women are judged when they do less than millions of men do every day and the complexity and context of such reactions. She is not a child abuser as far as we know, she may be a crap mother, a failed mother, a misguided mother, a selfish mother, but she is not in a position to answer to these crimes. I completely understand her daughter's position - believe me i understand it - but i also know from my own relationship with my mother of a similar generation the complexity which surrounds such women's reactions. Second wave feminists may have started 'banging on' about child sexual abuse in the 70s and 80s but it only started to be taken seriously and believed more widely, along with domestic abuse, in more recent decades. It was extremely common place to distort the narrative based on what the culture around us tells us about such things.
My understanding was that she was under-age when she disclosed it, but regardless, Munro favoured the abuser over her daughter and was well aware that he continued to abuse other girls.
I was never comfortable with the way she wrote abuse - the passivity of the victim, no effect or consequence - and now I know why.
This was from The Guardian "Skinner wrote that she first told her mother about the abuse in 1992, when she was in her 20s" and why i thought she was an adult.
Tessa.. what a delight to find you here. “Flawed, resilient, messy, shameful, and heroic”— We all faced this first hand working to finish “Five Wives,…”
Many survivors choose to reflect on the effect abuse has had on their lives rather than enabling abusers, rather than supporting the abuser over their children, rather than writing about abuse in a cold disappassionate way.
I'm thinking about the story "Vandals" (which I'm sure other people are thinking of, too). I did reread it after I learned about Munro and her daughter, and I don't think it's hazy or avoidant. I don't think that the reason Munro writes so well about betraying trust is because she betrayed the trust of a child--I think it's because she would have written well about any experience she'd had. I mean to say that I don't think dark experiences are necessary for writers (although experiences with high stakes probably are). There's a line in that story where the character, Bea, thinks that, "she could have spread safety" ... for the children who are molested by her lover--a character whose name (a smart friend pointed out) is almost an anagram of her actual husband's name. Bea could have, but she didn't. I remembered that line recently when I was working with a student who was writing an essay about an abusive parent, and so I repeated it to her. She understood it immediately. It's not that it helped the situation--but we don't really rely on stories for that. I think we rely on them to clarify our experience. That student didn't know about Alice Munro's family history, and most likely she never will. If the line stays with her in a clarifying way, then maybe the story is doing its job, in spite of the reprehensible actions of its author.
I completely agree. Both in that and other stories that seem to engage Munro’s daughter’s experience, Munro is pitiless with her stand-ins. I think fiction was the way she could reckon most fully with the decisions she made—that in her life she felt helpless not to make.
I can (sort of) understand not wanting to put money in the pocket of a living author you find morally reprehensible by purchasing their book. But if financial considerations are removed (you borrowed the book from the library, the author is dead, etc.), I simply don’t understand why you would refuse to read an author because you don’t like something they’ve done. I guess the reasoning could be, I dislike the author so intensely that I wouldn’t be able to overcome my dislike to take anything positive from the book. But how do you know unless you give it a shot?
Your first line is the, well, red line for me. It's much easier to get over the transgressions of the dead I find. Caravaggio was a thief and a murderer and, maybe it's a terrible thing to admit, but 400 years on I find that knowing these things about him somehow adds to his art if anything.
On the other hand, while I'll happily watch Rosemary's Baby whenever it might appear on TV, there's no way I would ever buy a ticket to a Roman Polanski film at the cinema, not while he's still alive, because I don't want to give that man a penny given the things he's done.
During the aftermath of the Alice Munro revelations and cultural blowback in 2024, I shared some thoughts about "art monsters" at my Substack (which prompted a comment from a Munro family member: I won't reveal any details but will include a link for anyone interested: https://murphlaw.substack.com/p/alice-munro-and-art-monsters). My .02, excerpted, below:
My "take" (and I'll insist I don't and never had a specific take, each situation needing to be addressed and assessed on a case-by-case basis) has mostly been: the moment we begin judging the art (on the page, on the screen, on the record) by the actions of the artist, it becomes the rare instance where the odious (if cliched) invocation of slippery slopes applies. Who gets to determine which art should or must be discarded? Which offenses qualify? Where do we draw historical and cultural lines? In other words, if certain behaviors, understandably intolerable to contemporary sensibilities, were culturally and societally accepted decades or centuries ago, is it fair or even responsible to retroactively apply such standards? Do we at least recognize that we're in collective denial by targeting the artists whose biographies we know and tacitly giving a pass to those who biographies we don't? Do we reserve the right, as individuals or groups, to litigate a legacy once disgusting acts come to light? Where to begin? Where does it end? This is what I mean when I say, sincerely, that this is complicated.
If writers ranging from Melville to Hemingway to Raymond Carver were inadequate, negligent, or at times absent husbands and fathers, does it lessen the humanity, pathos, and insights some of their work provides? Does the fact that someone reading "Bartleby the Scrivener" or "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" or "Cathedral" might conceivably pay heed, be in some way transformed, and possibly become a better human being than they might otherwise be offset the collateral damage they did during the times they wrote their masterpieces? What is the human calculus to measure the direct impact of bad behavior vs. redemption (itself impossible to quantify or graph on a universal human scale), and who dares to assume they are in position (intellectually, morally) to adjudicate?
It’s complicated. And it should be complicated, and messy, and disconcerting to grapple with in a mature, measured way.
This, of course, is all ground that has been covered, for centuries, and I personally believe the plain fact that it's a perennial topic of discussion (discussion that ranges from being necessarily heated, myopic, revealing, subject to constant revision, and so on) is itself a statement and speaks to our humanity in all its good, bad, ugly ways. It’s complicated because human beings are complicated.
Thank you, Sean. I love that you are looking into all the cracks and crevices involved with this question. One of the greatest things about art, for me, is the ability to explore, in depth, rationalizations, bad decisions, indifference, and all their consequences. And then there is the possibility of redemption, through a flash of empathy, by being able to finally change one’s thought process or behavior.
PS I love “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” for many reasons, not least that Hemingway seems to be taking aim at his own failings (although possibly some of that vitriol was aimed in the direction of his peers).
I think Hemingway is an ideal example: he *was* a toxic male (though they weren't called that, then) but he also knew, all along, how "wrong" that usually was (even in his infamous letter where he describes beating up Wallace Stevens, he's mostly boasting, but he also seems to realize what a boor he was). I think as early as "The Sun Also Rises" he was grappling with the tough guy mythology and how damaging (to others, to oneself) it was.
Definitely, David! It's a whole other topic, but I think it's fair to suggest some (many?) writers have grappled with their demons & inadequacies more successfully via their work than in their own lives. It can be tragic (for them and their loved ones) but in a weird trade-off, a transcending work by someone that may have been an unsavory figure (think of Tolstoy!!!) can transform myriad lives. That is the power of art.
Thanks for mentioning Tolstoy. Thinking of his wife and how beleaguered she was by his neglect of family. It shows how harms that may have been more socially acceptable in their day still caused hurt. How unusual it is that her complaints became well known. And yet his writing had its place in the context of history and his larger society.
I exist very comfortably (or am comfortable with the uncomfortable reality), acknowledging that while we can and probably always should separate the art from the artist, it's also misguided and in some ways disrespectful to not concede that even the bravest writers benefit from uncelebrated acts of generosity (and more) from family, friends, teachers, etc.
I find it almost impossible to put the tuna back in the can once I learn that an author or artist has abhorrent views. I will never buy my grandkids the harry potter books, for instance. They are permanently stained. For me, it all comes down to how "bad" I personally find an author's behavior/views (and I always wish I just hadn't heard about it in the first place). It's interesting to find out what one's own standards are. I can't read an anti-semite's work without remembering they are an anti-semite--just can't get past that piece of knowledge. I'm looking at you, Roald Dahl. I find it hard to watch a Woody Allen movie, though Annie Hall was always a favorite and still is. I just can't get it out of my head--the accusations against him. Alice Munro was my favorite writer and I still love her stories. Unfortunately, now that I know the way she did not protect her own daughter--well, I find it hard to read her anymore, which makes me sad. But Munro's inability to do the right thing is--to me--a different story from those who hold hate in their hearts, or whose views disgust me (though I stand by their right to hold such views). I have pushed aside the little I know about Sherman Alexie's past behaviors, though others have not. His misjudgments don't bother me terribly. Can't explain it except to say that everything is on a continuum, and I just don't think he's a bad guy. I'm sure there are plenty of women who would disagree with me, perhaps vehemently. David Foster Wallace? I can't read him without thinking of Mary Karr, but I can still read him. Why? I don't know. OY! It's all so complicated! I guess what I'm saying is that I can't always separate the art from the artist even when I wish I could. The info is in my brain and can't be ignored. This is why i like to read fiction where I can freely judge the characters in stories or books--where I am allowed to do such a thing and no one is harmed by my judgment (including me).
This discussion brought to mind the book “Monsters” by Claire Dederer. It really is all so complicated… used to love some of Woody Allen’s movies, and now I’m repelled by him. But other transgressions? People who had affairs with other adults? Meh. Not my business. People making clumsy passes? Meh. Artists who turned in other artists during the McCarthy years? Yikes.
I feel the same way. I draw the line at abusers. I don't buy their products. I personally have taken action against some in my own personal way because I am a survivor and I stand with survivors. The art does feel contaminated to me, I can never see past that. Ronan Farrow's 'Catch and Kill' is a brilliant exposition on the way abusers still control the narrative in the literary and cinematic world. Entertainment - it figures.
Ronan Farrow’s book and the documentary is brilliant, I agree. I mean, there are so many incredible artists, you can easily skip over the abusers. And you’re right it does contaminate everything.
I'm just the opposite... Maybe because I loved Polanski's early movies (Repulsion, The Tenant, Rosemarys' Baby, Chinatown) so much.. and whereas I like Allen's early movies, it seems like he makes way too many, and the more recent ones really don't say anything new..
Not to be flippant, but Is Rowling really worth reading? Would we want to offer the Potter books to a child who was beginning to read, whatever the author's public utterances?
To take another "craze", LOTR. I gave my granddaughter The Hobbit about 15 years ago. It didn't work for her. I looked at it again (count 40 years since I'd gobbled up Tolkien's fantasies) and I found it clumsy, turgid, not at all enchanting. No problem, "I loved this when I was young" can surely be set aside.
My kids just loved the Harry Potter books and devoured them. I read the first one out loud to them, but they couldn't stand the way I read the character's voices with British accents, etc. After that, i didn't have to read them the rest! They read them on their own! Yes, I think they are/were "worth reading" because they get kids to read and to love the act of reading. But they are dead to me now. And like you, I will always love Annie Hall.
Agree 100% on Harry Potter books. My granddaughter is only two at the moment, but I've got Ursula Leguin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea' waiting on my bookshelf for when she's old enough to read it. Far better story, far better person.
Ursula LeGuin did not live to see modern trans politics but if you've read "The Left Hand of Darkness" you know that she understood trans sensibility almost to the point of having created political space for it. No one ever did more to dissolve the gender binary.
You can't assume, and maybe if Le Guin had had to use a women's refuge when young she might have shared some, if not all, of Rowlings concerns about the law change in Scotland, although hopefully without the level of rabidness Rowling has escalated to, but i guess being threatened with rape and murder only narrowed her thinking.
But from what i have read Munro did not fail to protect her own daughter, she didn't know about it at the time, she failed to support her daughter as an adult when she disclosed the abuse. Still not good, but not quite the same thing as actively exposing her when she knew, don't you think? Her real father knew but failed to protect his daughter.
By staying with her daughter’s abuser and protecting him, Alice failed to protect her own daughter. It is emotional abuse to choose your child’s abuser over your child. That’s my take.
Putting the Munro thing to one side because we are talking about child sexual abuse being reported to her post childhood, i lived in an abusive household until I was 14, i also worked in women's refuges for women fleeing domestic abuse for most of my twenties, and i don't agree that staying with an abusive partner makes you an abuser. That is such a simplistic and polarised take on it. Once upon a time women in violent relationships weren't believed or domestic violence was seen as common place and ordinary, and the courts did not think children were even affected unless beaten themselves (in the uk there was no law against raping your own wife until the 1990s) nowadays women have their children taken away from them for 'not protecting them' when living with a violent or abusive partner, even though in theory we know more about how domestic abuse operates to destroy a woman's sense of self and autonomy and arguably sometimes 'care' is much worse than being with your mum, even if there is violence in the home. I witnessed my father try to murder my mother when i was 7, she never left him. Yes my family was dysfunctional and i would not inflict that behaviour on myself ket alone my child, but i do understand why my mother didn't leave 50 years ago and i am also very glad i was not taken into care at the age of 7 because my mother's love has, despite everything, given me so much more to make me into a happy person today than i would ever have got from the care system. I just think these things are very complex, families are very complex and we are making judgements about people without utilising our ability to think from all sides. It is for Munro's daughter to speak her truth, and work through what happened to her and her relationship with her mother. I just know that if someone called my mum an abuser because she was for a whole raft of complex reasons unable to leave my father i would think she was being very misjudged, especially if the person had never even met her.
I understand how you don't want anyone to judge your mother. I also feel very protective of my own damaged mother. I know personally of emotional and sexual abuse, and I stand by my view that to stay with her daughter's abuser was clearly harmful to her daughter, and can be called emotional abuse, regardless of the times or society or Munro's own upbringing and complexities. It was a choice that Munro made and she chose her husband--a man who had sexually abused her daughter--over her daughter. I stand with the daughter in this case. I know many people here in Story Club shy away from making judgments about the behavior of others. The judgments I make exist only in my head and I am always open to changing my views. I don't think i'm harming anyone with my take on this. My take is simply supporting a hurt daughter. You can call it simplistic and polarizing--it may very well be.
I'm with you. Munro never supported her daughter. She was intelligent and insightful and she enabled an abuser. Criminal in my view. No Munro in my house and I now understand why my stomach turned at the depiction of the girl being abused by a man on the train - it wasn't even depicted as abuse. He might have been helping himself to a glass of milk from the description. Far too often abuse is minimised or described from the pov of the predator. Rarely is it shown from the perspective of the victim/survivor. Congrats to Munro's daughter for showing that abuse has devastating consequences. Munro's writing might have been far better if she had taken the perspective of her daughter, incorporated that into her life, but we will never know. Being a good mother, standing by my sons, and being a humanitarian matters far more to me than being an author whose books sell well.
I didn't say your opinion was harmful, Munro is dead after all, and i too stand with her daughter in speaking and being heard and acknowledged. I'm not sure, from what i have read, that she asked anything more of anyone in relation to her mother.
I agree with what you say about the father’s silence, but when your own daughter cautiously explains the sexual abuse she experienced as a NINE year old and you assert she must have seduced your husband, there is something deeply wrong and quite disturbing.
The past is another country, they do things differently there. I wonder if everyone older than 40 could put their hand on their heart and say they were always enlightened human beings about LGBTQ issues, gender, race, disability, or are so sure they are even now totally on it regarding the experience's of the oppressed?
Thank you, as ever, Mary. You echoed my thoughts perfectly (oy and all). I realised part of what makes me so uncomfortable about Munro/Rowling/Dahl/Woody Allen (when they used to mean a lot to me/my kids) is that their views do, to an extent, creep into their work. Munro - enough said; Manhattan is appalling now; and there's a lot of meaness and punching down in both Rowling and Dahl that now feels darker. It's when I see those flashes that I struggle to divorce art from artist. And why I still feel okay about enjoying a Caravaggio but won't pay to enter a Picasso museum.
Oh, I’m very aware, and I’ve wrestled with that a lot. Caravaggio was the first painter who made me feel a deep, visceral lurch, and I questioned whether I could (and should) give him up. The question I hold on to when considering people who’ve been found to do bad things is ‘Is this a pattern, and did they atone?’. In other words, did they every try to change their behaviour, and do we ever see a sign that they knew what they’d done and wanted to be forgiven? We can never know what’s in someone’s soul (sometimes even when they’re alive) so we can only read their actions and what they’ve left behind. There aren’t a lot of historical records of Caravaggio once he went into exile, but his painting style certainly changed - his work became dark, sad, contemplative. I don’t know what was in his soul, but I see someone wrestling with anguish rather than anger. I don’t see this same kind of change in, say, Picasso - as a man and as an artist he continued deconstructing and dismantling the women he supposedly loved right up until his death. I have had to sadly place Alice Munro in this camp too. Yes, she learned of her husband’s abuse after the fact. And she stayed with him - through other court cases and allegations of abuse against other children. She used her fame to shield him. A vast network of publishers and literary elite colluded to hide all this in order to dampen the shame that Alice mined (very effectively) for her work. To paraphrase Mary, I can’t unlearn what I’ve learned. When there’s a pattern of behaviour and that leaks into an artist’s work, I can’t unseen that. Their artistic well is poisoned for me, and I can’t enjoy their artistry anymore.
I think GS is correct that ultimately we each have to draw our own line in the sand. I would just prefer to prioritise looking at the men who carried out the violent and abusive behaviour, those who had the ultimate choice as to whether it happened or not. Why women collude with male violence is a very complex subject. And as for going back to the past and deciding who is worthy of their artistry being appreciated or not, i find it hard to believe there are many men with unblemished records. Think of all the rock stars, are there any men who didn't take advantage of young women fans? Etc. whose music do we listen to? Was mozart a saint? bach? We know so little, but i think its safe to assume their behaviour was moulded by and to the culture of women being less than, or black people, disabled and LGBTQ being okay to abuse, exploit and oppress. And what about our own travk records of understanding other oppressed groups and how we contribute toward that?
I also think that as writers one of our challenges is to get behind the eyes of another human being. In my novel one of the main characters is Assia Weevil who is blamed for splitting Plath and Hughes up and ended not only her own life but her young daughter's. It is easy to judge her from the outside, but when I started to walk in her shoes and see her life through her eyes i found i could easily understand that final decision she took, and i don't judge her for it.
With all these things for me it is about having discussions, being allowed to voice and disagree with opposing views and thinking about those views. In some quarters there is no tolerance for nuanced discussion and so i really appreciate everyone who has taken part in this one with such respect for each other. Thank you.
Yes. Lest we forget that Wallace suffered from depression that eventually took himself out💙💙💙 while he undeniably abused Karr he was a deeply disturbed & addicted person. Karr, too, was addicted & overcame the addiction to be a better person/ fine writer. I believe when people are under the throes of mental illness coupled with addiction their behavior then is colored by their mental states. The fact that DFW wrote what he did under so much duress is a testament to endurance & his brilliance. He did hurt others. That is terribly sad. Then he hung himself. That is unspeakably sad too. Yet his language lives on & there in shines the good IMO.💙❣️
I know people love him. Doesn’t change the fact of his abuse of Mary Karr. My point being that I can’t read or think of him without also knowing that history of him. It permanently colors him and his writing for me.
Hello George. I am of the same mind as you. I want to read writers I can learn from but also those who weave a compelling emotional story. For example Elena Ferrante, I love her work, but none of us know who she is. Her true identity doesn’t take away from the fact that she has a keen ability to explore the dynamics of women caught in a patriarchal society. I was so disappointed when I heard about Alice Munro but the simplicity and depth of her work continues to resonate. In film, I abhor what Roman Polanski did, but I’m still mesmerized by his work, by his ability to have the camera reveal subtext. It’s a dangerous thing to idolize an artist. And even more dangerous to curb artistic endeavors because of morality or political correctness. People are people. The work is what matters. Thank you.
One of the things I like to think about: none of us can lead perfect lives, much as we may want to. I wonder if the art of people who have become infamous was in no small part an attempt to connect with their better angels? Or perhaps we all Jekyll and Hyde, and everything in between.
I have not read Elena Ferrante, but a friend recommended her (and the HBO show based on My Brilliant Friend) after I told her I enjoyed the movie The Lost Daughter.
The older I get the harder it is finding things to read. That is, work that holds my attention and gives me pleasure or a thrill or something. Because, frankly, I've more experiences and insights than many people, and writers, at this point. But not for any reason other than for having been on earth almost eight decades. But I'm a little odd too. I can't stand Shakespeare, and the Bible turns my stomach. It's beyond me why the writing within these works is so revered, but I have nothing against William, or the authors of the Bible, whoever they are. If I find work that resonates for me, I don't care about the writer's life. I don't think. We're human beings and complex. Maybe one of the carpenters who built your house was a rapist. Are you going to sell your house? What if your lawyer lies to his wife every day about his schedule to cover up an affair. Will you hire a new lawyer to rewrite your will? What if the politicians that run your country routinely lie, cheat, and steal from you? Then what? I think an artist's character is worthwhile knowing, and taking into account, if only to deeper inform their work. I've often been inspired by Story Club stories to go read about the writer's lives. Because of course, it's all of a piece.
Great answer. Like you, I’m old and odd & it definitely influences my ability to read a lot. I regularly stop reading books because I’m bored by the presentation. That and I can figure out where the story is going. At this point, I’m reading for the thrill & entertainment ‼️🎶🕶️
I don't finish most books I start. They just don't hold my attention, for whatever reasons. The most recent book I finished, and read closely, was "Landscape Turned Red," by Stephen Sears. A history of the Battle of Antietam, in which my great grandfather fought for the Union and was wounded. Among many fascinating parts were the discussions of politics, which, if you changed some names, sounds eerily similar to our times. Over 60,000 books have been written about the Civil War. The details available are astounding. I'm working on a piece about it all.
60 K books. Wow! I've never read one book on the Civil War. J. Davis was my multiple gt grandfather. His favorite nephew Isaac Davis Stamps who died at Peach Orchard, shot through the bowels, just days prior to Gettysburg, was my multiple gt grandfather. His wife, Mary Humphreys, got permission to have his body exhumed a year later, and went to retrieve his body but the train broke down. She got a horse and buggy & wrapped in her husband's Confederate coat drove his body and sword (given to Davis by the CSA) back to Woodville, MS for burial. That sword I sold to pay for my MFA where I finished my memoir that took me 20 years to finish. I fled the south, its convoluted cruel history not unlike the family who didn't raise me. So, I think I kind of lived the Civil War and will not read about more of it. One of the reasons I bought GS's book Civilwarlands in Bad Decline was because the title made me laugh. 💙❣️🦷 Look forward to your post about your CW adventure.
That's some story, Lucinda. I'm pretty comfortable with, and even proud of my ancestors. GG Grandfather Charles Cheney moved to Ohio from Connecticut in the 1830's and his farm was a station on the Underground Railroad. G Grandfather Frank, as a boy up to age 16, was involved and went along on many night time buggy trips transporting people to the next station on the way to Canada. At the time it was a federal crime to aid and abet runaway slaves. Charles was politically active, and helped form a Liberty Party locally because he felt the two major parties were dragging their feet on the slavery question, even in the North.
Fascinating. I'm very proud of Mary Humphreys. She went on to open a school for girls in New Orleans. She was the daughter of General Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, a plantation owner. He was forward thinking and had her educated and trusted her to oversee the plantation when he went out of town. She taught the slaves to read and write and when her father asked her why she said, "Because they need language." She even fired a foreman who was accused of beating the slaves over her husband's objections. She believed it was the women, not men, who would see to the peace after the war. Today it feels as if we are sliding back to the Confederacy. That was supposed to be a white heart emoji not a tooth👀🕶️ but maybe it was a Freudian emoji as I get reactive thinking about my family.
Right, well the country's always straddled the line, ever since day one. For some time in our lives it tilted the "right" way. But it will always be a struggle it seems. One thing about hearing family histories like this is you get the sense the mainstream history story doesn't get it right. It's so often skewed one way or another to fit someone's biased narrative. I just read a memoir of my great aunt Dorothy who volunteered to be a translator/nurse in France in WW1. I've never read of such service or heroism. And she was an amazing writer besides.
It's a fascinating question, I think - and not in the sense of being a curious intellectual plaything, but in pushing us as readers to a real moral depth. I agree with everything you have written, and that's also the position from which I attempt to read as widely as possible, regardless of the transgressions in the life of individual writers. But. I believe it also behoves us as readers (and reader-writers) to take the question seriously, and to take the writers' transgressions seriously. Not to say, 'well, I separate the art from the artist, so it's fine to read them', nor to implicitly dismiss the transgressions as less serious than they are so that we can turn without guilt to our reading (I am not for a moment suggesting that you're doing this!).
There's a moral weightiness in saying, for example, 'I will continue to read Alice Munro, and I will also allow myself fully to comprehend the seriousness of the damage her choices inflicted on her daughter (as far as I am able to know them as a mere reader).' Similarly, 'I will continue to read antisemitic writers, and racist writers, but I will endeavour to realise the weight of damage those writers' antisemitic and racists views inflicted even in a society in which such views were the norm.'
It's about an expansion of our awareness, I think - an ability to hold in mind not only the intellectual breadth of a situation, but also the full emotional and full moral breadth - to hold it, without flinching from all the realities.
(I'd argue the repeated practice of doing that makes us not only better writers, but better people, as well.)
I also wonder why we ask that question NOW; what it means about society that we are sort of obsessed with categorizing everyone, including artists. My daughter, who has boycotted J.K. Rowling, would say it means we are more enlightened, but I don't agree.
I think morally ambiguous people have produced and will continue to produce great art. Maybe we have to be a little ambiguous to access certain things. I also think it's not always easy to know at the time whether one is making the correct moral decision or not- a lot easier to tell in retrospect.
GS says in "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain" that he likes himself better when he writes. That resonated with me.
I also think this compulsion with judging has sort of gotten us into the current Presidential situation. Trump is by every measure a morally corrupt person, and yet his supporters don't care. I think they feel freed from liberal judging- and I say that as a proud liberal.
I think art and politics are different though. I may judge Alice Munro as a person, but her art stands separate from her personal life in my mind. The President, on the other hand, is our leader, and he represents our nation. I don’t expect him (or her, someday!) to be perfect, but to have someone so cruel, venal, and corrupt acting on our behalf is not a good look, to say the very least.
I think how we live, how we learn, how we educate ourselves (or not) and how we behave in our relationships influences our writing.
Being aware of ourselves as humans being helps us relate to characters and develop them.
Writers can observe and even understand the complex motiviations and skewed behaviour of characters who behave badly but in their own lives they can make different choices and access the means to choose to live differently.
Most of the writers described here were not poor and oppressed, they were privileged. They could have made choices to influence positive change rather than to continue negative cycles.
Personally I see imperailism, colonial settlerism, and all forms of exploitation as inherent in this system of damage. I explore this unequal unfair society to find the fodder for my writing as Steinbeck did, as other great writers do now.
We live in a materialistic world where the focus is on objectifying others and self objectification. We can honour our characters and their very real struggles. We can also choose to live our best lives.
I choose therapy to deal with the abuse I have experienced, to release the hurt and the anger about that harm. Breaking the cycle is powerful and beautiful, and I do think it has helped my writing.
Susan- This is along the lines of my own thinking. Not only are we self righteous about every choice we make, but are obsessed with the lives of others because we can- social media and every life on display. Frankly, it’s exhausting and illogical- just like the political climate we’ve created.
Yes- I know it's not in keeping with the times, in a way, but I agree it's exhausting. And I wonder why so many of us who are not necessarily moral philosophers need to apply moral judgments even when it is not relevant.
I don't think we want people who've mistreated children teaching in schools, or embezzlers as town clerks or bankers. But I'm tired of seeing people fall off pedestals and then offer up the insincere but necessary apologies. And I think there are a lot of people in glass houses throwing stones.
I find it quite interesting that despite all the rhetoric about being so non-judgmental that we are constantly handing down judgments and punishments to complete strangers. And without any redemption or forgiveness. It’s all rather childish and brutal. Let the book be the book. Let the art be the art. Move on.
The conclusion I came to long ago: You can't separate the art from the artist. BUT--One can celebrate a person without having to celebrate ALL of that person. If someone has created a beautiful work, then we can celebrate that work, and we can celebrate everything in that person that contributed to that work--and, indeed, it points up to the fact that every human isn't One thing--we're many things, with some facets deserving praise, other facets less so.
Some of the comments veer on book banning. Let us all agree that everyone can read what they want but cannot prevent others from reading what they want. My granddaughter was one of the millions who loved the Harry Potter books. I would never deprive her of that experience.
I think I just found my quote of the day/week/month: "I find that my life is simplified if, when I’m tempted to have an opinion, I ask myself why I need one, and what I aim to do with it." And now I'm going to ponder, dwell, contemplate that. Yes.
In July 2016, George, you wrote the piece for the New Yorker on Trump and his supporters, and you said something which has always resonated with me, about how MAGA folk always have an opinion, and they are always keen to blurt it out: "“Above all Trump supporters are not “politically correct,” which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.” But they go right ahead and say it. They are tempted to have an opinion, and they know what they aim to do with it.
He also wrote "We seem to be losing the ability or desire to just be silent on certain questions," which gave me pause and made me wonder if I should post here. But then, he asked us what we think, so here I am. (My take is that everyone should read whatever they want to read. For me, when I learn of troublesome behaviors or worldviews, my reading is affected. I can no longer read that author from a blank slate.)
I like that quote, thanks for pointing it out. I keep coming back to a phrase from my youth: "Live and let live." You know, just abide with people if you can. I think there's a lot to that. What I'm seeing nowadays is a lot of people eager to take sides, draw lines in the sand, etc. Sometimes "keep scrolling" works in life too.
I immediately thought of my friend Robert Hunt’s warning to me when I told him I was going to start reading Proust like him. I was a freshman in high school and knew nothing about Proust, his literary standing, I just knew I greatly admired Hunt and wanted to be like him. Plus I’d read the first few pages of the CK Scott Moncrief edition and decided I loved the florid expansive discursive prose. He told me to be sure to never read ANYTHING about Proust’s life until I finished it. This would ruin the work for me. Notwithstanding it taking me ten long years of my life to finish Remembrance of Things Past (that was what we called it back in the 20th century), years of homelessness, minimum wage toil, despair, even reading it under Ead’s Bridge, I refrained from reading the Ellman biography or anything else. When I finally read it, I was grateful for this advice. If I had known anything about his life the work would have been completely different. Corrupted and perverted by speculations and gossip. My favorite writer would never have become the lifelong pleasure he is to me today.
This is not a MORAL judgment. His morality, as a sexual invert, means nothing to me. I had loved his groundbreaking depictions of sexual inversion without being distracted by how they related to him. I was able to simply live in his world.
I second the notion that the writer is not entirely the human being who writes his work. I have written all my life and the honest truth is that only the best possible self I can conjure is the me who drags the pen across the page. Even if I write as honestly as humanly possible about MY OWN LIFE I still write from this standpoint, as any autobiography will show.
Judge the writing, not the writer. But not buying books by monsters is something I can support.
I’m confused - what about Proust’s personal life would have ruined it for you? He was a social climber and a bit of a snob and yes, gay, but otherwise my general impression from the biographies I’ve read was that he was generally a decent, sensitive person?
I think he's referring to Proust being gay. [Correct me if I'm wrong, Tony, but i think you're saying that had you known Proust was gay (or, as you say, "a sexual invert), his books would have been ruined for you. Is that correct?]
I must repeat: this had nothing to do with MORALITY. This was all about being immersed in what he wrote, rather than who wrote it. In support of my cherished conviction that what we read is not the human being who wrote it. If I had read his biography first, my mind would have been consumed by the speculation and gossip of who was “really” this fictional character and what Proust may or may not have done that was in the text. These distractions are antithetical to the entire great architecture of his great message: that we experience magic in certain moments of our life that unite and exalt the human experience in our art, and this and this alone is why we must we must we MUST do it. To exalt. To bring this incredible gift to the page.
"My guess is, if we read them closely, we might be able to detect some falseness or avoidance in them – something would not ring true, or the language might go a little hazy in places. (It might actually be an interesting exercise: to try to find the “tells” in those stories, if they exist.)" That's a really interesting idea! I might try that.
I live in a neighborhood with many "little free libraries". We have one my husband made with a sliding glass door. He even hooked up a night light that charges with solar power. When the Munro situation became known, I saw many of her books out in the libraries, as if people didn't want them in their homes. The truth is, I had a few Munro books in my "to read" pile, and I ended up sticking them in our little free library after I heard that twisted story about her abusive husband. It's an emotional reaction, not a logical one, like "separate the art from the artist" which in my case, is easier said than done.
When I see a priest, I think "Child molester!" and I can't change that. I can work on it, but I don't know if that thought will ever go away, you know? Difficult stuff.
I rewatched China Town a few years ago and flinched when I saw Roman Polanski's face in that short scene. It changes my reaction to the work almost on an animal level. There are some things we cannot explain. You can still be an artist and toss out the idea that you must endure a rapist's work because "he's a genius" or whatever. Fuck that. I say, there are so many kind and wonderful people to read, to watch, to listen to, to learn from.
This is so interesting to me, I mean in a curious way, the ridding, the collective clearing out & depositing in the free little libraries, as if those neighborhood beacons of sharing & enlightenment were only dumping grounds, the work of one of the greatest writers ever. I have everything Munro every wrote that I could possibly lay hands on and it has never occurred to me to be rid of any of it. I so admire her work. Not Munro, whom I've never even met. Her work. Much as I abhor the treatment of her daughter, much as that abuse and the abuse of Munro herself may have informed her work, entwined as it may be, the person & the work are distinct, at least for me they are. Early calls for the Nobel committee to take back the prize it awarded Munro after news of the daughter's abuse broke I found so baffling. The swiftness and certainty of these calls I also found a little chilling. There'd be little art & even less human advancement of any kind if moral purity, however that is even defined, were the final arbiter. I'm no apologist for bad behavior but I do think we get into regrettable territory, do ourselves & our humanity harm with wholesale moral certitude when it doesn't apply.
I hear you. For me, as I wrote, it’s not a response I have much control over. I think her daughter feels the same way you do. She doesn’t want her mother’s work thrown out.
She didn’t know about the abuse when her daughter was a child, though. She only found out when her daughter was a young adult. Staying with a man who abused your child, effectively choosing him over her, is not cool, but different than keeping her daughter in harm’s way, at least to me.
It’s all mixed in with cycles of abuse, what people will sacrifice to avoid conflict and loss. I get that. As GS said, it is something each of us grapples with.
I read for enjoyment, but also to learn, and to 'meet' different kinds of (real and fictional) people and situations. It doesn't matter to me what good or bad things a writer may have done if I'm interested in their work. (Though there might be writers I wouldn't want to support politically or financially by buying their books). (I can't imagine anyone who hasn't done some bad things and if they are famous, it may just be more likely we'd know about those bad things.)
If someone has done something 'bad' and is writing fiction, something related to that bad thing might trickle in either consciously or unconsciously, and that might make the work more interesting. For example, perhaps a character (and/or the writer) is trying atone for something, or justify something, or deny something, or lie, or whatever. It's all part of the human experience and can make an interesting story and can provoke us to new perspectives and wonderings-- about the story and about the writer.
I would rather pay to support the survivors than buy the product of abusers. I don't seek to have their work cancelled. It is my choice not to pay for that work. I find it emplowering to stand with survivors whose stories are rarely told. The abusers so often control the narrative. That survivors of sexual abuse are still silenced or demeaned or denied in our system, doesn't surprise me, but I like to skew it in my writing. I find the survivors and free their voices.
I love and adore Dance of the Happy Shades, it is indeed a deeply "moral" story - most powerfully in its message that you can't tell a book from its cover, or more broadly, you can't tell the inside of anything by judging the outside. Munro or any of us could be, basically, the most moral person on earth, and still in a ghastly pinch behave immorally. I have been a stinker in my day. I'm writing about that, working on what made me, basically a moral person, behave immorally at this or that time. I'm a good writer, I think. An editor just responded to a submission: "You are a powerful writer." Bless her. It gives me hope. My message is this: - if the writer recommends horribly immoral acts, it disgusts me. Any writer might have been one of George's stinkers a few times. But the immoral at root somehow reveal themselves. As not just a sinner, but one whose moral compass is skewed. Celine's sass captured me too. It was worth reading, I learned from it. Like a couple of US (male) writers I can think of. Some of them I choose not to read. But when I think of Munro, I think of the pain that caused her to do whatever she did. The pain evident in most of her work, about flawed suffering humans. The work has an honesty, a purity, that is beautiful. I was a stinker out of fear. Pure deadly funk. Today I can write about that funk and hope to understand that funk, and really grieve because of it. And with hard work, I may be able to make you grieve for it, too.
Munro's own childhood was brutal. The abuse she suffered was ritualized and sadistic. That doesn't forgive or excuse the harm she caused her children but it does contextualize it. Humans are flawed and resilient and messy and shameful and heroic. I hope we can keep finding room for the complexity.
Thank you for this context. I don’t boycott artists on the basis of their messy personal lives. I appreciate authors and filmmakers who are able to craft and share with us powerful stories exposing their intimacy with the dark side of humanity.
It is indeed interesting that she is being treated as if she directly abused her daughter when her daughter didn't disclose it until she was an adult. Her reaction then was not how i would expect myself to respond as a mother, but then i didn't grow up in the era that Munro did when women's position in society was even more rubbish than it is today and domestic abuse was normalised.
At what point is it no longer a problem? Her daughter revealed what had happened and her mother did nothing about it. In fact, the daughter says her mother likened the abuse to an affair. And continued her relationship with her daughter’s abuser. That’s how I understand what happened. I consider that emotional abuse from Alice. Others may see it otherwise. I should add that I am a huge fan of Alice Munro's writing and have been since the day i first read Walker Brothers Cowboy. I have studied her and written papers about her writing. I still read her. I don't boycott her. But I now have knowledge that I didn't have before, and there's nothing i can do about that. It changes the way I read her and think of her. It all makes me very, very sad.
I didn't say it wasn't abusive as a mother to fail to support her daughter at that point, but my point is that she is being treated as if she failed to protect a child from sexual abuse, when she didn't know about it at the time, and yet her ex husband was told by his daughter and did not intervene. It's just about the different ways women are judged when they do less than millions of men do every day and the complexity and context of such reactions. She is not a child abuser as far as we know, she may be a crap mother, a failed mother, a misguided mother, a selfish mother, but she is not in a position to answer to these crimes. I completely understand her daughter's position - believe me i understand it - but i also know from my own relationship with my mother of a similar generation the complexity which surrounds such women's reactions. Second wave feminists may have started 'banging on' about child sexual abuse in the 70s and 80s but it only started to be taken seriously and believed more widely, along with domestic abuse, in more recent decades. It was extremely common place to distort the narrative based on what the culture around us tells us about such things.
My understanding was that she was under-age when she disclosed it, but regardless, Munro favoured the abuser over her daughter and was well aware that he continued to abuse other girls.
I was never comfortable with the way she wrote abuse - the passivity of the victim, no effect or consequence - and now I know why.
The irony of my position is that i don't think i have even read a Munro short story, so it's not that i am advocating for her work over her actions.
Here's the first story I ever read by her, if you are interested (no pressure!): https://rowangrowingup.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/munro-walkerbrotherscowboy.pdf
Now i'm in a moral quandry 😉
This was from The Guardian "Skinner wrote that she first told her mother about the abuse in 1992, when she was in her 20s" and why i thought she was an adult.
Tessa.. what a delight to find you here. “Flawed, resilient, messy, shameful, and heroic”— We all faced this first hand working to finish “Five Wives,…”
Many survivors choose to reflect on the effect abuse has had on their lives rather than enabling abusers, rather than supporting the abuser over their children, rather than writing about abuse in a cold disappassionate way.
I'm thinking about the story "Vandals" (which I'm sure other people are thinking of, too). I did reread it after I learned about Munro and her daughter, and I don't think it's hazy or avoidant. I don't think that the reason Munro writes so well about betraying trust is because she betrayed the trust of a child--I think it's because she would have written well about any experience she'd had. I mean to say that I don't think dark experiences are necessary for writers (although experiences with high stakes probably are). There's a line in that story where the character, Bea, thinks that, "she could have spread safety" ... for the children who are molested by her lover--a character whose name (a smart friend pointed out) is almost an anagram of her actual husband's name. Bea could have, but she didn't. I remembered that line recently when I was working with a student who was writing an essay about an abusive parent, and so I repeated it to her. She understood it immediately. It's not that it helped the situation--but we don't really rely on stories for that. I think we rely on them to clarify our experience. That student didn't know about Alice Munro's family history, and most likely she never will. If the line stays with her in a clarifying way, then maybe the story is doing its job, in spite of the reprehensible actions of its author.
Lovely to see you here, Nell Freudenberger! I love your writing!
Thank you, Mary!
Exactly, Nell.
I completely agree. Both in that and other stories that seem to engage Munro’s daughter’s experience, Munro is pitiless with her stand-ins. I think fiction was the way she could reckon most fully with the decisions she made—that in her life she felt helpless not to make.
I can (sort of) understand not wanting to put money in the pocket of a living author you find morally reprehensible by purchasing their book. But if financial considerations are removed (you borrowed the book from the library, the author is dead, etc.), I simply don’t understand why you would refuse to read an author because you don’t like something they’ve done. I guess the reasoning could be, I dislike the author so intensely that I wouldn’t be able to overcome my dislike to take anything positive from the book. But how do you know unless you give it a shot?
Your first line is the, well, red line for me. It's much easier to get over the transgressions of the dead I find. Caravaggio was a thief and a murderer and, maybe it's a terrible thing to admit, but 400 years on I find that knowing these things about him somehow adds to his art if anything.
On the other hand, while I'll happily watch Rosemary's Baby whenever it might appear on TV, there's no way I would ever buy a ticket to a Roman Polanski film at the cinema, not while he's still alive, because I don't want to give that man a penny given the things he's done.
Yeah, Polanski is another one... terrific director, shit human being.
During the aftermath of the Alice Munro revelations and cultural blowback in 2024, I shared some thoughts about "art monsters" at my Substack (which prompted a comment from a Munro family member: I won't reveal any details but will include a link for anyone interested: https://murphlaw.substack.com/p/alice-munro-and-art-monsters). My .02, excerpted, below:
My "take" (and I'll insist I don't and never had a specific take, each situation needing to be addressed and assessed on a case-by-case basis) has mostly been: the moment we begin judging the art (on the page, on the screen, on the record) by the actions of the artist, it becomes the rare instance where the odious (if cliched) invocation of slippery slopes applies. Who gets to determine which art should or must be discarded? Which offenses qualify? Where do we draw historical and cultural lines? In other words, if certain behaviors, understandably intolerable to contemporary sensibilities, were culturally and societally accepted decades or centuries ago, is it fair or even responsible to retroactively apply such standards? Do we at least recognize that we're in collective denial by targeting the artists whose biographies we know and tacitly giving a pass to those who biographies we don't? Do we reserve the right, as individuals or groups, to litigate a legacy once disgusting acts come to light? Where to begin? Where does it end? This is what I mean when I say, sincerely, that this is complicated.
If writers ranging from Melville to Hemingway to Raymond Carver were inadequate, negligent, or at times absent husbands and fathers, does it lessen the humanity, pathos, and insights some of their work provides? Does the fact that someone reading "Bartleby the Scrivener" or "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" or "Cathedral" might conceivably pay heed, be in some way transformed, and possibly become a better human being than they might otherwise be offset the collateral damage they did during the times they wrote their masterpieces? What is the human calculus to measure the direct impact of bad behavior vs. redemption (itself impossible to quantify or graph on a universal human scale), and who dares to assume they are in position (intellectually, morally) to adjudicate?
It’s complicated. And it should be complicated, and messy, and disconcerting to grapple with in a mature, measured way.
This, of course, is all ground that has been covered, for centuries, and I personally believe the plain fact that it's a perennial topic of discussion (discussion that ranges from being necessarily heated, myopic, revealing, subject to constant revision, and so on) is itself a statement and speaks to our humanity in all its good, bad, ugly ways. It’s complicated because human beings are complicated.
Thank you, Sean. I love that you are looking into all the cracks and crevices involved with this question. One of the greatest things about art, for me, is the ability to explore, in depth, rationalizations, bad decisions, indifference, and all their consequences. And then there is the possibility of redemption, through a flash of empathy, by being able to finally change one’s thought process or behavior.
PS I love “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” for many reasons, not least that Hemingway seems to be taking aim at his own failings (although possibly some of that vitriol was aimed in the direction of his peers).
I think Hemingway is an ideal example: he *was* a toxic male (though they weren't called that, then) but he also knew, all along, how "wrong" that usually was (even in his infamous letter where he describes beating up Wallace Stevens, he's mostly boasting, but he also seems to realize what a boor he was). I think as early as "The Sun Also Rises" he was grappling with the tough guy mythology and how damaging (to others, to oneself) it was.
Definitely, David! It's a whole other topic, but I think it's fair to suggest some (many?) writers have grappled with their demons & inadequacies more successfully via their work than in their own lives. It can be tragic (for them and their loved ones) but in a weird trade-off, a transcending work by someone that may have been an unsavory figure (think of Tolstoy!!!) can transform myriad lives. That is the power of art.
Thanks for mentioning Tolstoy. Thinking of his wife and how beleaguered she was by his neglect of family. It shows how harms that may have been more socially acceptable in their day still caused hurt. How unusual it is that her complaints became well known. And yet his writing had its place in the context of history and his larger society.
I exist very comfortably (or am comfortable with the uncomfortable reality), acknowledging that while we can and probably always should separate the art from the artist, it's also misguided and in some ways disrespectful to not concede that even the bravest writers benefit from uncelebrated acts of generosity (and more) from family, friends, teachers, etc.
I love that, thank you.
I find it almost impossible to put the tuna back in the can once I learn that an author or artist has abhorrent views. I will never buy my grandkids the harry potter books, for instance. They are permanently stained. For me, it all comes down to how "bad" I personally find an author's behavior/views (and I always wish I just hadn't heard about it in the first place). It's interesting to find out what one's own standards are. I can't read an anti-semite's work without remembering they are an anti-semite--just can't get past that piece of knowledge. I'm looking at you, Roald Dahl. I find it hard to watch a Woody Allen movie, though Annie Hall was always a favorite and still is. I just can't get it out of my head--the accusations against him. Alice Munro was my favorite writer and I still love her stories. Unfortunately, now that I know the way she did not protect her own daughter--well, I find it hard to read her anymore, which makes me sad. But Munro's inability to do the right thing is--to me--a different story from those who hold hate in their hearts, or whose views disgust me (though I stand by their right to hold such views). I have pushed aside the little I know about Sherman Alexie's past behaviors, though others have not. His misjudgments don't bother me terribly. Can't explain it except to say that everything is on a continuum, and I just don't think he's a bad guy. I'm sure there are plenty of women who would disagree with me, perhaps vehemently. David Foster Wallace? I can't read him without thinking of Mary Karr, but I can still read him. Why? I don't know. OY! It's all so complicated! I guess what I'm saying is that I can't always separate the art from the artist even when I wish I could. The info is in my brain and can't be ignored. This is why i like to read fiction where I can freely judge the characters in stories or books--where I am allowed to do such a thing and no one is harmed by my judgment (including me).
This discussion brought to mind the book “Monsters” by Claire Dederer. It really is all so complicated… used to love some of Woody Allen’s movies, and now I’m repelled by him. But other transgressions? People who had affairs with other adults? Meh. Not my business. People making clumsy passes? Meh. Artists who turned in other artists during the McCarthy years? Yikes.
I feel the same way. I draw the line at abusers. I don't buy their products. I personally have taken action against some in my own personal way because I am a survivor and I stand with survivors. The art does feel contaminated to me, I can never see past that. Ronan Farrow's 'Catch and Kill' is a brilliant exposition on the way abusers still control the narrative in the literary and cinematic world. Entertainment - it figures.
Ronan Farrow’s book and the documentary is brilliant, I agree. I mean, there are so many incredible artists, you can easily skip over the abusers. And you’re right it does contaminate everything.
Thank you. X
I thought of Dederer too! Great book (as is all her work).
Agree. She lives in my town. I’ve heard she’s a great teacher as well.
I was waiting for Woody Allen to come up. For some reason I defend him but abhor Polanski.
I'm just the opposite... Maybe because I loved Polanski's early movies (Repulsion, The Tenant, Rosemarys' Baby, Chinatown) so much.. and whereas I like Allen's early movies, it seems like he makes way too many, and the more recent ones really don't say anything new..
As a former prosecutor, I reject Polanski s defense team obscuring the procedural facts and the press failing to clarify.
Jeez. It’s all so disturbing.
It might be because I saw those Polanski movies when I was a teenager in the 1970s...
Not to be flippant, but Is Rowling really worth reading? Would we want to offer the Potter books to a child who was beginning to read, whatever the author's public utterances?
To take another "craze", LOTR. I gave my granddaughter The Hobbit about 15 years ago. It didn't work for her. I looked at it again (count 40 years since I'd gobbled up Tolkien's fantasies) and I found it clumsy, turgid, not at all enchanting. No problem, "I loved this when I was young" can surely be set aside.
But I will love Annie Hall until I die.
My kids just loved the Harry Potter books and devoured them. I read the first one out loud to them, but they couldn't stand the way I read the character's voices with British accents, etc. After that, i didn't have to read them the rest! They read them on their own! Yes, I think they are/were "worth reading" because they get kids to read and to love the act of reading. But they are dead to me now. And like you, I will always love Annie Hall.
Agree 100% on Harry Potter books. My granddaughter is only two at the moment, but I've got Ursula Leguin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea' waiting on my bookshelf for when she's old enough to read it. Far better story, far better person.
Out of interest do you know what Ursula's opinion on modern trans politics was?
To tell you the truth, I've never read anything by her on the subject. I'd like to think she had a more reasonable opinion than JK Rowling
Ursula LeGuin did not live to see modern trans politics but if you've read "The Left Hand of Darkness" you know that she understood trans sensibility almost to the point of having created political space for it. No one ever did more to dissolve the gender binary.
You can't assume, and maybe if Le Guin had had to use a women's refuge when young she might have shared some, if not all, of Rowlings concerns about the law change in Scotland, although hopefully without the level of rabidness Rowling has escalated to, but i guess being threatened with rape and murder only narrowed her thinking.
But from what i have read Munro did not fail to protect her own daughter, she didn't know about it at the time, she failed to support her daughter as an adult when she disclosed the abuse. Still not good, but not quite the same thing as actively exposing her when she knew, don't you think? Her real father knew but failed to protect his daughter.
By staying with her daughter’s abuser and protecting him, Alice failed to protect her own daughter. It is emotional abuse to choose your child’s abuser over your child. That’s my take.
Putting the Munro thing to one side because we are talking about child sexual abuse being reported to her post childhood, i lived in an abusive household until I was 14, i also worked in women's refuges for women fleeing domestic abuse for most of my twenties, and i don't agree that staying with an abusive partner makes you an abuser. That is such a simplistic and polarised take on it. Once upon a time women in violent relationships weren't believed or domestic violence was seen as common place and ordinary, and the courts did not think children were even affected unless beaten themselves (in the uk there was no law against raping your own wife until the 1990s) nowadays women have their children taken away from them for 'not protecting them' when living with a violent or abusive partner, even though in theory we know more about how domestic abuse operates to destroy a woman's sense of self and autonomy and arguably sometimes 'care' is much worse than being with your mum, even if there is violence in the home. I witnessed my father try to murder my mother when i was 7, she never left him. Yes my family was dysfunctional and i would not inflict that behaviour on myself ket alone my child, but i do understand why my mother didn't leave 50 years ago and i am also very glad i was not taken into care at the age of 7 because my mother's love has, despite everything, given me so much more to make me into a happy person today than i would ever have got from the care system. I just think these things are very complex, families are very complex and we are making judgements about people without utilising our ability to think from all sides. It is for Munro's daughter to speak her truth, and work through what happened to her and her relationship with her mother. I just know that if someone called my mum an abuser because she was for a whole raft of complex reasons unable to leave my father i would think she was being very misjudged, especially if the person had never even met her.
I understand how you don't want anyone to judge your mother. I also feel very protective of my own damaged mother. I know personally of emotional and sexual abuse, and I stand by my view that to stay with her daughter's abuser was clearly harmful to her daughter, and can be called emotional abuse, regardless of the times or society or Munro's own upbringing and complexities. It was a choice that Munro made and she chose her husband--a man who had sexually abused her daughter--over her daughter. I stand with the daughter in this case. I know many people here in Story Club shy away from making judgments about the behavior of others. The judgments I make exist only in my head and I am always open to changing my views. I don't think i'm harming anyone with my take on this. My take is simply supporting a hurt daughter. You can call it simplistic and polarizing--it may very well be.
I'm with you. Munro never supported her daughter. She was intelligent and insightful and she enabled an abuser. Criminal in my view. No Munro in my house and I now understand why my stomach turned at the depiction of the girl being abused by a man on the train - it wasn't even depicted as abuse. He might have been helping himself to a glass of milk from the description. Far too often abuse is minimised or described from the pov of the predator. Rarely is it shown from the perspective of the victim/survivor. Congrats to Munro's daughter for showing that abuse has devastating consequences. Munro's writing might have been far better if she had taken the perspective of her daughter, incorporated that into her life, but we will never know. Being a good mother, standing by my sons, and being a humanitarian matters far more to me than being an author whose books sell well.
I didn't say your opinion was harmful, Munro is dead after all, and i too stand with her daughter in speaking and being heard and acknowledged. I'm not sure, from what i have read, that she asked anything more of anyone in relation to her mother.
I agree with what you say about the father’s silence, but when your own daughter cautiously explains the sexual abuse she experienced as a NINE year old and you assert she must have seduced your husband, there is something deeply wrong and quite disturbing.
The past is another country, they do things differently there. I wonder if everyone older than 40 could put their hand on their heart and say they were always enlightened human beings about LGBTQ issues, gender, race, disability, or are so sure they are even now totally on it regarding the experience's of the oppressed?
Thank you, as ever, Mary. You echoed my thoughts perfectly (oy and all). I realised part of what makes me so uncomfortable about Munro/Rowling/Dahl/Woody Allen (when they used to mean a lot to me/my kids) is that their views do, to an extent, creep into their work. Munro - enough said; Manhattan is appalling now; and there's a lot of meaness and punching down in both Rowling and Dahl that now feels darker. It's when I see those flashes that I struggle to divorce art from artist. And why I still feel okay about enjoying a Caravaggio but won't pay to enter a Picasso museum.
Thank you, Annemarie. I cannot erase what I know, and therein lies the problem with their works.
Caravaggio murdered someone. 🤷♀️
Oh, I’m very aware, and I’ve wrestled with that a lot. Caravaggio was the first painter who made me feel a deep, visceral lurch, and I questioned whether I could (and should) give him up. The question I hold on to when considering people who’ve been found to do bad things is ‘Is this a pattern, and did they atone?’. In other words, did they every try to change their behaviour, and do we ever see a sign that they knew what they’d done and wanted to be forgiven? We can never know what’s in someone’s soul (sometimes even when they’re alive) so we can only read their actions and what they’ve left behind. There aren’t a lot of historical records of Caravaggio once he went into exile, but his painting style certainly changed - his work became dark, sad, contemplative. I don’t know what was in his soul, but I see someone wrestling with anguish rather than anger. I don’t see this same kind of change in, say, Picasso - as a man and as an artist he continued deconstructing and dismantling the women he supposedly loved right up until his death. I have had to sadly place Alice Munro in this camp too. Yes, she learned of her husband’s abuse after the fact. And she stayed with him - through other court cases and allegations of abuse against other children. She used her fame to shield him. A vast network of publishers and literary elite colluded to hide all this in order to dampen the shame that Alice mined (very effectively) for her work. To paraphrase Mary, I can’t unlearn what I’ve learned. When there’s a pattern of behaviour and that leaks into an artist’s work, I can’t unseen that. Their artistic well is poisoned for me, and I can’t enjoy their artistry anymore.
I think GS is correct that ultimately we each have to draw our own line in the sand. I would just prefer to prioritise looking at the men who carried out the violent and abusive behaviour, those who had the ultimate choice as to whether it happened or not. Why women collude with male violence is a very complex subject. And as for going back to the past and deciding who is worthy of their artistry being appreciated or not, i find it hard to believe there are many men with unblemished records. Think of all the rock stars, are there any men who didn't take advantage of young women fans? Etc. whose music do we listen to? Was mozart a saint? bach? We know so little, but i think its safe to assume their behaviour was moulded by and to the culture of women being less than, or black people, disabled and LGBTQ being okay to abuse, exploit and oppress. And what about our own travk records of understanding other oppressed groups and how we contribute toward that?
I also think that as writers one of our challenges is to get behind the eyes of another human being. In my novel one of the main characters is Assia Weevil who is blamed for splitting Plath and Hughes up and ended not only her own life but her young daughter's. It is easy to judge her from the outside, but when I started to walk in her shoes and see her life through her eyes i found i could easily understand that final decision she took, and i don't judge her for it.
With all these things for me it is about having discussions, being allowed to voice and disagree with opposing views and thinking about those views. In some quarters there is no tolerance for nuanced discussion and so i really appreciate everyone who has taken part in this one with such respect for each other. Thank you.
Mary Karr broke up with DFW. He wrote much more. In sobriety he became a model of a humble morality and service to others.
Yes. Lest we forget that Wallace suffered from depression that eventually took himself out💙💙💙 while he undeniably abused Karr he was a deeply disturbed & addicted person. Karr, too, was addicted & overcame the addiction to be a better person/ fine writer. I believe when people are under the throes of mental illness coupled with addiction their behavior then is colored by their mental states. The fact that DFW wrote what he did under so much duress is a testament to endurance & his brilliance. He did hurt others. That is terribly sad. Then he hung himself. That is unspeakably sad too. Yet his language lives on & there in shines the good IMO.💙❣️
I know people love him. Doesn’t change the fact of his abuse of Mary Karr. My point being that I can’t read or think of him without also knowing that history of him. It permanently colors him and his writing for me.
Hello George. I am of the same mind as you. I want to read writers I can learn from but also those who weave a compelling emotional story. For example Elena Ferrante, I love her work, but none of us know who she is. Her true identity doesn’t take away from the fact that she has a keen ability to explore the dynamics of women caught in a patriarchal society. I was so disappointed when I heard about Alice Munro but the simplicity and depth of her work continues to resonate. In film, I abhor what Roman Polanski did, but I’m still mesmerized by his work, by his ability to have the camera reveal subtext. It’s a dangerous thing to idolize an artist. And even more dangerous to curb artistic endeavors because of morality or political correctness. People are people. The work is what matters. Thank you.
One of the things I like to think about: none of us can lead perfect lives, much as we may want to. I wonder if the art of people who have become infamous was in no small part an attempt to connect with their better angels? Or perhaps we all Jekyll and Hyde, and everything in between.
I have not read Elena Ferrante, but a friend recommended her (and the HBO show based on My Brilliant Friend) after I told her I enjoyed the movie The Lost Daughter.
I read the series before I watched it. Absolutely loved the books and felt that the filmmaker did a remarkable job.
Oh man, I love that series, and the film. The young actresses in the series amazed me.
The older I get the harder it is finding things to read. That is, work that holds my attention and gives me pleasure or a thrill or something. Because, frankly, I've more experiences and insights than many people, and writers, at this point. But not for any reason other than for having been on earth almost eight decades. But I'm a little odd too. I can't stand Shakespeare, and the Bible turns my stomach. It's beyond me why the writing within these works is so revered, but I have nothing against William, or the authors of the Bible, whoever they are. If I find work that resonates for me, I don't care about the writer's life. I don't think. We're human beings and complex. Maybe one of the carpenters who built your house was a rapist. Are you going to sell your house? What if your lawyer lies to his wife every day about his schedule to cover up an affair. Will you hire a new lawyer to rewrite your will? What if the politicians that run your country routinely lie, cheat, and steal from you? Then what? I think an artist's character is worthwhile knowing, and taking into account, if only to deeper inform their work. I've often been inspired by Story Club stories to go read about the writer's lives. Because of course, it's all of a piece.
Great answer. Like you, I’m old and odd & it definitely influences my ability to read a lot. I regularly stop reading books because I’m bored by the presentation. That and I can figure out where the story is going. At this point, I’m reading for the thrill & entertainment ‼️🎶🕶️
I don't finish most books I start. They just don't hold my attention, for whatever reasons. The most recent book I finished, and read closely, was "Landscape Turned Red," by Stephen Sears. A history of the Battle of Antietam, in which my great grandfather fought for the Union and was wounded. Among many fascinating parts were the discussions of politics, which, if you changed some names, sounds eerily similar to our times. Over 60,000 books have been written about the Civil War. The details available are astounding. I'm working on a piece about it all.
60 K books. Wow! I've never read one book on the Civil War. J. Davis was my multiple gt grandfather. His favorite nephew Isaac Davis Stamps who died at Peach Orchard, shot through the bowels, just days prior to Gettysburg, was my multiple gt grandfather. His wife, Mary Humphreys, got permission to have his body exhumed a year later, and went to retrieve his body but the train broke down. She got a horse and buggy & wrapped in her husband's Confederate coat drove his body and sword (given to Davis by the CSA) back to Woodville, MS for burial. That sword I sold to pay for my MFA where I finished my memoir that took me 20 years to finish. I fled the south, its convoluted cruel history not unlike the family who didn't raise me. So, I think I kind of lived the Civil War and will not read about more of it. One of the reasons I bought GS's book Civilwarlands in Bad Decline was because the title made me laugh. 💙❣️🦷 Look forward to your post about your CW adventure.
That's some story, Lucinda. I'm pretty comfortable with, and even proud of my ancestors. GG Grandfather Charles Cheney moved to Ohio from Connecticut in the 1830's and his farm was a station on the Underground Railroad. G Grandfather Frank, as a boy up to age 16, was involved and went along on many night time buggy trips transporting people to the next station on the way to Canada. At the time it was a federal crime to aid and abet runaway slaves. Charles was politically active, and helped form a Liberty Party locally because he felt the two major parties were dragging their feet on the slavery question, even in the North.
Fascinating. I'm very proud of Mary Humphreys. She went on to open a school for girls in New Orleans. She was the daughter of General Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, a plantation owner. He was forward thinking and had her educated and trusted her to oversee the plantation when he went out of town. She taught the slaves to read and write and when her father asked her why she said, "Because they need language." She even fired a foreman who was accused of beating the slaves over her husband's objections. She believed it was the women, not men, who would see to the peace after the war. Today it feels as if we are sliding back to the Confederacy. That was supposed to be a white heart emoji not a tooth👀🕶️ but maybe it was a Freudian emoji as I get reactive thinking about my family.
Right, well the country's always straddled the line, ever since day one. For some time in our lives it tilted the "right" way. But it will always be a struggle it seems. One thing about hearing family histories like this is you get the sense the mainstream history story doesn't get it right. It's so often skewed one way or another to fit someone's biased narrative. I just read a memoir of my great aunt Dorothy who volunteered to be a translator/nurse in France in WW1. I've never read of such service or heroism. And she was an amazing writer besides.
It's a fascinating question, I think - and not in the sense of being a curious intellectual plaything, but in pushing us as readers to a real moral depth. I agree with everything you have written, and that's also the position from which I attempt to read as widely as possible, regardless of the transgressions in the life of individual writers. But. I believe it also behoves us as readers (and reader-writers) to take the question seriously, and to take the writers' transgressions seriously. Not to say, 'well, I separate the art from the artist, so it's fine to read them', nor to implicitly dismiss the transgressions as less serious than they are so that we can turn without guilt to our reading (I am not for a moment suggesting that you're doing this!).
There's a moral weightiness in saying, for example, 'I will continue to read Alice Munro, and I will also allow myself fully to comprehend the seriousness of the damage her choices inflicted on her daughter (as far as I am able to know them as a mere reader).' Similarly, 'I will continue to read antisemitic writers, and racist writers, but I will endeavour to realise the weight of damage those writers' antisemitic and racists views inflicted even in a society in which such views were the norm.'
It's about an expansion of our awareness, I think - an ability to hold in mind not only the intellectual breadth of a situation, but also the full emotional and full moral breadth - to hold it, without flinching from all the realities.
(I'd argue the repeated practice of doing that makes us not only better writers, but better people, as well.)
I also wonder why we ask that question NOW; what it means about society that we are sort of obsessed with categorizing everyone, including artists. My daughter, who has boycotted J.K. Rowling, would say it means we are more enlightened, but I don't agree.
I think morally ambiguous people have produced and will continue to produce great art. Maybe we have to be a little ambiguous to access certain things. I also think it's not always easy to know at the time whether one is making the correct moral decision or not- a lot easier to tell in retrospect.
GS says in "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain" that he likes himself better when he writes. That resonated with me.
I also think this compulsion with judging has sort of gotten us into the current Presidential situation. Trump is by every measure a morally corrupt person, and yet his supporters don't care. I think they feel freed from liberal judging- and I say that as a proud liberal.
I think art and politics are different though. I may judge Alice Munro as a person, but her art stands separate from her personal life in my mind. The President, on the other hand, is our leader, and he represents our nation. I don’t expect him (or her, someday!) to be perfect, but to have someone so cruel, venal, and corrupt acting on our behalf is not a good look, to say the very least.
I agree there is a huge difference there that has to be considered.
I think how we live, how we learn, how we educate ourselves (or not) and how we behave in our relationships influences our writing.
Being aware of ourselves as humans being helps us relate to characters and develop them.
Writers can observe and even understand the complex motiviations and skewed behaviour of characters who behave badly but in their own lives they can make different choices and access the means to choose to live differently.
Most of the writers described here were not poor and oppressed, they were privileged. They could have made choices to influence positive change rather than to continue negative cycles.
Personally I see imperailism, colonial settlerism, and all forms of exploitation as inherent in this system of damage. I explore this unequal unfair society to find the fodder for my writing as Steinbeck did, as other great writers do now.
We live in a materialistic world where the focus is on objectifying others and self objectification. We can honour our characters and their very real struggles. We can also choose to live our best lives.
I choose therapy to deal with the abuse I have experienced, to release the hurt and the anger about that harm. Breaking the cycle is powerful and beautiful, and I do think it has helped my writing.
Susan- This is along the lines of my own thinking. Not only are we self righteous about every choice we make, but are obsessed with the lives of others because we can- social media and every life on display. Frankly, it’s exhausting and illogical- just like the political climate we’ve created.
Yes- I know it's not in keeping with the times, in a way, but I agree it's exhausting. And I wonder why so many of us who are not necessarily moral philosophers need to apply moral judgments even when it is not relevant.
I don't think we want people who've mistreated children teaching in schools, or embezzlers as town clerks or bankers. But I'm tired of seeing people fall off pedestals and then offer up the insincere but necessary apologies. And I think there are a lot of people in glass houses throwing stones.
I find it quite interesting that despite all the rhetoric about being so non-judgmental that we are constantly handing down judgments and punishments to complete strangers. And without any redemption or forgiveness. It’s all rather childish and brutal. Let the book be the book. Let the art be the art. Move on.
I agree.
The conclusion I came to long ago: You can't separate the art from the artist. BUT--One can celebrate a person without having to celebrate ALL of that person. If someone has created a beautiful work, then we can celebrate that work, and we can celebrate everything in that person that contributed to that work--and, indeed, it points up to the fact that every human isn't One thing--we're many things, with some facets deserving praise, other facets less so.
"One can celebrate a person without having to celebrate ALL of that person." Love this.
Some of the comments veer on book banning. Let us all agree that everyone can read what they want but cannot prevent others from reading what they want. My granddaughter was one of the millions who loved the Harry Potter books. I would never deprive her of that experience.
I think I just found my quote of the day/week/month: "I find that my life is simplified if, when I’m tempted to have an opinion, I ask myself why I need one, and what I aim to do with it." And now I'm going to ponder, dwell, contemplate that. Yes.
In July 2016, George, you wrote the piece for the New Yorker on Trump and his supporters, and you said something which has always resonated with me, about how MAGA folk always have an opinion, and they are always keen to blurt it out: "“Above all Trump supporters are not “politically correct,” which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.” But they go right ahead and say it. They are tempted to have an opinion, and they know what they aim to do with it.
Yes! Not every opinion needs to be expressed, (she, um, expressed).
He also wrote "We seem to be losing the ability or desire to just be silent on certain questions," which gave me pause and made me wonder if I should post here. But then, he asked us what we think, so here I am. (My take is that everyone should read whatever they want to read. For me, when I learn of troublesome behaviors or worldviews, my reading is affected. I can no longer read that author from a blank slate.)
I like that quote, thanks for pointing it out. I keep coming back to a phrase from my youth: "Live and let live." You know, just abide with people if you can. I think there's a lot to that. What I'm seeing nowadays is a lot of people eager to take sides, draw lines in the sand, etc. Sometimes "keep scrolling" works in life too.
So does "get off the computer and outside." Think I'll do that now! (Nice chatting with you!)
I immediately thought of my friend Robert Hunt’s warning to me when I told him I was going to start reading Proust like him. I was a freshman in high school and knew nothing about Proust, his literary standing, I just knew I greatly admired Hunt and wanted to be like him. Plus I’d read the first few pages of the CK Scott Moncrief edition and decided I loved the florid expansive discursive prose. He told me to be sure to never read ANYTHING about Proust’s life until I finished it. This would ruin the work for me. Notwithstanding it taking me ten long years of my life to finish Remembrance of Things Past (that was what we called it back in the 20th century), years of homelessness, minimum wage toil, despair, even reading it under Ead’s Bridge, I refrained from reading the Ellman biography or anything else. When I finally read it, I was grateful for this advice. If I had known anything about his life the work would have been completely different. Corrupted and perverted by speculations and gossip. My favorite writer would never have become the lifelong pleasure he is to me today.
This is not a MORAL judgment. His morality, as a sexual invert, means nothing to me. I had loved his groundbreaking depictions of sexual inversion without being distracted by how they related to him. I was able to simply live in his world.
I second the notion that the writer is not entirely the human being who writes his work. I have written all my life and the honest truth is that only the best possible self I can conjure is the me who drags the pen across the page. Even if I write as honestly as humanly possible about MY OWN LIFE I still write from this standpoint, as any autobiography will show.
Judge the writing, not the writer. But not buying books by monsters is something I can support.
I’m confused - what about Proust’s personal life would have ruined it for you? He was a social climber and a bit of a snob and yes, gay, but otherwise my general impression from the biographies I’ve read was that he was generally a decent, sensitive person?
I think he's referring to Proust being gay. [Correct me if I'm wrong, Tony, but i think you're saying that had you known Proust was gay (or, as you say, "a sexual invert), his books would have been ruined for you. Is that correct?]
I must repeat: this had nothing to do with MORALITY. This was all about being immersed in what he wrote, rather than who wrote it. In support of my cherished conviction that what we read is not the human being who wrote it. If I had read his biography first, my mind would have been consumed by the speculation and gossip of who was “really” this fictional character and what Proust may or may not have done that was in the text. These distractions are antithetical to the entire great architecture of his great message: that we experience magic in certain moments of our life that unite and exalt the human experience in our art, and this and this alone is why we must we must we MUST do it. To exalt. To bring this incredible gift to the page.
"My guess is, if we read them closely, we might be able to detect some falseness or avoidance in them – something would not ring true, or the language might go a little hazy in places. (It might actually be an interesting exercise: to try to find the “tells” in those stories, if they exist.)" That's a really interesting idea! I might try that.
I live in a neighborhood with many "little free libraries". We have one my husband made with a sliding glass door. He even hooked up a night light that charges with solar power. When the Munro situation became known, I saw many of her books out in the libraries, as if people didn't want them in their homes. The truth is, I had a few Munro books in my "to read" pile, and I ended up sticking them in our little free library after I heard that twisted story about her abusive husband. It's an emotional reaction, not a logical one, like "separate the art from the artist" which in my case, is easier said than done.
When I see a priest, I think "Child molester!" and I can't change that. I can work on it, but I don't know if that thought will ever go away, you know? Difficult stuff.
I rewatched China Town a few years ago and flinched when I saw Roman Polanski's face in that short scene. It changes my reaction to the work almost on an animal level. There are some things we cannot explain. You can still be an artist and toss out the idea that you must endure a rapist's work because "he's a genius" or whatever. Fuck that. I say, there are so many kind and wonderful people to read, to watch, to listen to, to learn from.
This is so interesting to me, I mean in a curious way, the ridding, the collective clearing out & depositing in the free little libraries, as if those neighborhood beacons of sharing & enlightenment were only dumping grounds, the work of one of the greatest writers ever. I have everything Munro every wrote that I could possibly lay hands on and it has never occurred to me to be rid of any of it. I so admire her work. Not Munro, whom I've never even met. Her work. Much as I abhor the treatment of her daughter, much as that abuse and the abuse of Munro herself may have informed her work, entwined as it may be, the person & the work are distinct, at least for me they are. Early calls for the Nobel committee to take back the prize it awarded Munro after news of the daughter's abuse broke I found so baffling. The swiftness and certainty of these calls I also found a little chilling. There'd be little art & even less human advancement of any kind if moral purity, however that is even defined, were the final arbiter. I'm no apologist for bad behavior but I do think we get into regrettable territory, do ourselves & our humanity harm with wholesale moral certitude when it doesn't apply.
I hear you. For me, as I wrote, it’s not a response I have much control over. I think her daughter feels the same way you do. She doesn’t want her mother’s work thrown out.
Happy I discovered and read quite a few Munro stories before the posthumous fall.
I wish I had! I don't expect people to be perfect, but not protecting children and sexual abuse blow my mind.
She didn’t know about the abuse when her daughter was a child, though. She only found out when her daughter was a young adult. Staying with a man who abused your child, effectively choosing him over her, is not cool, but different than keeping her daughter in harm’s way, at least to me.
It’s all mixed in with cycles of abuse, what people will sacrifice to avoid conflict and loss. I get that. As GS said, it is something each of us grapples with.
I read for enjoyment, but also to learn, and to 'meet' different kinds of (real and fictional) people and situations. It doesn't matter to me what good or bad things a writer may have done if I'm interested in their work. (Though there might be writers I wouldn't want to support politically or financially by buying their books). (I can't imagine anyone who hasn't done some bad things and if they are famous, it may just be more likely we'd know about those bad things.)
If someone has done something 'bad' and is writing fiction, something related to that bad thing might trickle in either consciously or unconsciously, and that might make the work more interesting. For example, perhaps a character (and/or the writer) is trying atone for something, or justify something, or deny something, or lie, or whatever. It's all part of the human experience and can make an interesting story and can provoke us to new perspectives and wonderings-- about the story and about the writer.
I would rather pay to support the survivors than buy the product of abusers. I don't seek to have their work cancelled. It is my choice not to pay for that work. I find it emplowering to stand with survivors whose stories are rarely told. The abusers so often control the narrative. That survivors of sexual abuse are still silenced or demeaned or denied in our system, doesn't surprise me, but I like to skew it in my writing. I find the survivors and free their voices.
I love and adore Dance of the Happy Shades, it is indeed a deeply "moral" story - most powerfully in its message that you can't tell a book from its cover, or more broadly, you can't tell the inside of anything by judging the outside. Munro or any of us could be, basically, the most moral person on earth, and still in a ghastly pinch behave immorally. I have been a stinker in my day. I'm writing about that, working on what made me, basically a moral person, behave immorally at this or that time. I'm a good writer, I think. An editor just responded to a submission: "You are a powerful writer." Bless her. It gives me hope. My message is this: - if the writer recommends horribly immoral acts, it disgusts me. Any writer might have been one of George's stinkers a few times. But the immoral at root somehow reveal themselves. As not just a sinner, but one whose moral compass is skewed. Celine's sass captured me too. It was worth reading, I learned from it. Like a couple of US (male) writers I can think of. Some of them I choose not to read. But when I think of Munro, I think of the pain that caused her to do whatever she did. The pain evident in most of her work, about flawed suffering humans. The work has an honesty, a purity, that is beautiful. I was a stinker out of fear. Pure deadly funk. Today I can write about that funk and hope to understand that funk, and really grieve because of it. And with hard work, I may be able to make you grieve for it, too.