Sin & Sentence
In the aftermath of an unexpected ending
Our editors are mostly finished with reading the 800-odd submissions that came our way for Issue 58 (publication date: August 15). We’ve begun to send out updates to all our beloved writers. We’ll complete that process by August 1, at the latest. Once the pleasant or unpleasant update is digested, writers can get back to what truly matters: writing or translating or thinking about the next story or poem. It’s what we do.
Perhaps we should no longer be certain —quite so certain— about what writers will do. What else can we conclude from the recent turn of events regarding Alice Munro? In her short story “Too Much Happiness”, Munro has her mathematician-heroine Sophia Kovalevsky receive a letter from her lover —former lover— Maksim, which “ends with one terrible sentence”. And what is that sentence?
"If I loved you I would have written differently."
Alice Munro knew how to write good sentences. They are good and right the way the cells of a living thing are good and right: the cells make the being that make the cells. Some authors are able to write themselves into being. So what do we do, now that we are here, contemplating the ruins of a great reputation, trying to make sense of the mismatch between sin and sentence. As we were wondering whether we had anything to say worth writing, Rebecca Mathai’s essay reached us. We chose to see it as a sign. A magazine makes space for voices to be heard. Why not our little substack?
We’d published Rebecca Mathai earlier. Her story The Thicket appeared in Issue 51. It’s a fine story, and we encourage you to read it. It deals with family secrets, sexual abuse and silence. In the bio Rebecca supplied for her story, she wrote: “I read and write fiction and Alice Munro is my hero.”
In her essay, Rebecca deals with that statement and its ruins.
Colophon: A Writer’s Debt To Her Readers
REBECCA MATHAI
Zoning out from the shrill pitch on Alice Munro after the news broke out, I retreat to my table with a question in mind, as vexed as it seems, which is “what does a writer like Munro owe to her readers?”
That Alice Munro is not just another acclaimed writer or a Nobel Laureate is evident from the calamitous fall from grace now. As for me, she was always a hero, the inspiration behind why I took to writing in the first place. Her influence went beyond writing to how I look at the world and negotiate with it. In her stories, I have found an artistic exploration of the many conflicting thoughts for which I had no words; the emotional complexities that lay deeper than I could fathom; indignities suffered in relationships or my unrealised dreams, caught up as I have been, like other women of my generation— between places, between attitudes and ways of being.
The condemnation of her moral failure is unanimous. And caught in this conflagration are her publishers and literary giants of Canada—Margaret Atwood included, apparently—who as it now turns out, were complicit in keeping it out of public eye even after Munro’s husband Gerry was charged of indecent assault of her daughter by the local police. Those who weren’t in the past in Munro’s thrall, like Mukul Kesavan, manage to pull up a shuddering conviction when he declares that a writer’s imagination doesn’t buy her transcendence and that he wouldn’t read more of Munro because “life is short and there are a thousand unread authors who aren’t sociopaths”. That Kesavan feels for the rest of us who have worshipped her, is of no help to me.
Having loved her work, it is hard to resist the temptation to be apologetic about Munro even while whole-heartedly acknowledging the depravity and the pain that Andrea endured. My default response is to frame Munro as a flawed being. Flaws, ugly and fatal, that bring down our idols and nevertheless offer to a writer, the kernel of her work. Although that too is tough: Munro’s self-deprecatory persona held as much allure to me as her stories. This despair returns me back to my original question: what does a writer like Munro owe to her readers? Returning to her stories, I hope, could provide the clues as to why her legacy is so dear to me, women like me.
Through her first marriage with Jim Munro, the demands of housekeeping and raising kids, Alice Munro stole away moments to do what she yearned for: to write the stories that “desperately consumed” her, even as she had begun to see that writing “was a much, much harder job than she had imagined”. In her story, ‘The Office’, a budding writer feels compelled to rent an office to write. For unlike a man whose work 'exists’ and the house rearranges itself to accommodate the work, a woman “is not someone who walks into the house to make use of it and walk out of it. She is the house.” This decision for an office isn’t an emphatic affirmation of the narrator’s calling as it would now seem. This is “a new kind of woman who grew up under one set of rules and then found she could live with another.” When home alone, the narrator felt a “fierce and lawless quiver of freedom” but also a loneliness too harsh for her to bear. “Then I knew”, Munro writes, “how the rest of the time how insistently I am warmed and bound.” The household, however encumbered, provides the narrator a shelter that is warm and bound, even as its demands force her to tamp down the flight of her dreams. The ‘Office’ is one of her early stories that would go on to build her stature in the literary world, admired for the close attention that she paid to life which “blurs the line between living and reading and the lives of those characters are no more insoluble than mine, and no less, either” (Yiyun Li)
By the time Munro divorced Jim Munro and married Gerry (Gerald Fremlin), she was already at the cusp of her fame as a writer. She was now free of being a full-time mother (the custody of children being shared), her time (her most precious resource) not mostly to be dispensed for her family but to herself, her writing. Perhaps, in her new home, there was a study where she would be left undisturbed and when she stepped out of it, she would find Gerry willing to take charge of the rest? An avenue that is made naturally available to men, but one that women enjoy only with gnawing doses of guilt. To an aging Munro, did Gerry whom she called the love of her life, extend a hard-won and attentive promise, pressing against the demands of her filial responsibilities?
After all, writers too live the stories they imagine. In ‘Simple Passion’, Annie Ernaux writes of a 50-ish woman, a writer, who lives out an all-consuming passion. When the affair comes to an end, Ernaux writes “I discovered what people are capable of: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others.” She acknowledges that it helped her close a frontier that separated her from others by letting her experience that singular life-force: a passionate love with its gifts and indignities.
When the nine-year-old Andrea returned to her father’s home after the abuse, she told her stepmother who in turn told her father and gave the little girl a “choice” to stop her visits. Much has been written about the collective silencing in the Munro household that allowed Gerry, now 80 years old, to reframe the crime of paedohilia as one of adultery. In any case, Munro played out Andrea’s worst fears. She brushed it aside. “I can’t live without him”, Munro said of Gerry. She decried the misogyny that placed on her an expectation to leave Gerry, deny her own needs, make this sacrifice to “make up for the failings of men”.
In 1993, a year after Munro received Andrea’s letter, the New Yorker published the story ‘Vandals’ in which the author explores the predicament of a woman, Bea, in a somewhat similar situation. Bea forgives the perpetrator—her husband Ladner—or “made a bargain not to remember.” But the victim Liza, a young girl from the couple’s neighbourhood, nurses the scars deep. Now an adult, Liza returns to the site of the abuse and scours the places where she thinks “there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass”, and sets to vandalise Bea’s house. In deliberate steps Liza scoops the books off the shelves, tears them apart and tosses them on the floor and then goes out to the kitchen and yanks out drawers, slams cupboard doors, smashes dishes, empties cans of white flour on the ground. Stuff pours out of bottles—thin, splashing liquid and thick glug-glug-glugs. Liza is unstoppable in the mayhem and will rest only after she has pulled the house down to the bone. Munro, the writer, describes Liza’s rage in visceral sensorial details. It is Bea Liza is going after; Ladner is dead. Munro knows that the silence of the complicit (and the implicit condonation) is even more unforgiving than the act of abuse itself. And unlike Bea, Munro was the mother who failed to stand-by Andrea after the revelation, her silence infinitely more calamitous.
Once Munro was asked about her difficult relationship with her Parkinson’s-afflicted mother and the writer said that she loved her, but as an adolescent, she didn’t want to be identified with a person who was “maimed in some way.” The difficult love which wished away its ugly sores, came to be re-played with terrible consequences. Andrea was forced to sunder herself from the family, cut off as if she were an unwanted limb. The shadow of this estrangement seems to lurk in Munro’s story ‘Silence’ where the mother goes in search of her daughter who turns elusive (save post cards from different cities)—a half-hearted and eventually futile quest for a chance meeting. “She hopes”, Munro writes, “as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.” The mother doesn’t get remission, of course. Brutal.
Alice is now dead. So is Gerry. The surviving members of the Munro family have now come together to lend truth to Andrea’s story through an open text. Their only wish is that the world holds both the stories together: Alice the Nobel-laureate and beloved writer, as well as a mother who remained silent at the face of a daughter’s abuse. Munro’s last days were spent battling Alzheimer’s and by her children’s accounts, she longed to make amends with Andrea. The sordid affair scalped the entire family. What stands out is Andrea’s admirable courage to tell the truth, though that can’t possibly wash away the scars of the abuse or the ferocity of a mother’s betrayal. “The sexual abuse of a child”, Andrea wrote, “is a rape of the mind, in which any fledgling tools for healing are stolen.”
Munro’s stories don’t preach lessons of morality, but they invariably explored the consequences of failure to abide by them. She was categorical that this wasn’t what she set out to do, inspire people to a certain way of life, that is, as much as she hoped that we would find in them something that we could relate to. Therein lies the pain-point for a reader like me. My relationship with Munro’s work is my relationship with life. I know, on an instinct, which of her stories would help me untangle the specific emotion I am caught in. It is like a muscle memory. In the aftermath of Andrea’s revelations, my return to her stories is not so much to untangle the webs of Munros’ life as much as to restore to me, my own moral compass. The elements of this tragic saga—adult betrayals, lies that people tell themselves, abuse, transgressions—are after all “baked” into her stories. The stories that I once loved, now shape-shift when I revisit them: the spectre of the abuse and its silencing, creep in unexpectedly in ways that make me wonder if they do allow, as Joyce Carol Oates said, terrible men to be “valourized, forgiven, enabled”. Tajja Isen, in a similar vein, notes in ‘The Walrus’ that women in Munro’s stories get a glimpse of a different kind of life but eventually choose the familiar, resisting a catharsis. A passage from the story ‘Chance’ that had once seemed liberating—as if it were a permission granted to a woman to seize with all her force what she seeks desperately from life—seems to hold a dangerous portent. “Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do, you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself to be waylaid, and have it taken from you.” Riffling the pages, my fingers tremble; its centre alarmingly askew.
Her books aren’t going off my book-shelf like Elizabeth Payne’s and in the last few days, she is all I have read. It will be difficult for me to separate the shards of this dark legacy from the body of her work. Yet, this loss goes far deeper. Munro didn’t just betray her daughter; I feel betrayed too. It is that one drop of black ink in white milk which as Munro says in ‘Progress of Love’, spreads and discolours everything. Such being the power of love, the power of literature. No other writer can take Munro’s place in my life and now that place itself is dodgy, how and where can I retrieve the faith without which no writing appears possible?
——
REBECCA MATHAI was born in Delhi. After having lived in eleven cities over the course of more than three decades in the Indian Civil Service, she returned home. Her work has appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Commonwealth adda, The Bangalore Review and other magazines. She is currently working on a novel.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Banner: Abandoned residence in Kolmanskop, Namibia. Photograph by Chris Gray. Original Image. Alice Munro often compared stories to the inner spaces of houses, so this photo felt like a fit.