Beware of hero worship

It's not that it's a big surprise when a someone you admire turns out to be a behind-the-scenes POS. 

For me, the someones I admire are usually writers.

I'm an admirer of the work of James Joyce, especially his early works. The short stories in The Dubliners are beyond brilliant. Has there ever been a short story written in the English language that can surpass "The Dead," which I reread every year (generally during a snowstorm, while drinking a cup of Barry's tea)? But I also know that, in order to fuel his genius, Joyce exploited those who loved him, namely his lover (later wife) Nora Barnicle and his brother John Stanislaus. Someone's gotta worry about buying the toilet paper and boiling the potatoes while genius is at work. 

I just don't let knowing that Joyce was an often nasty exploiter prevent me from loving his work. (Although I will say that I found reading Ulysses a slog, and for the life of me, Finnegan's Wake is just incomprehensible. I just don't understand how someone who doesn't know Ireland and the Irish, didn't grow up Catholic, doesn't have a smattering of Latin, French, German, etc. and a bit-een of the ol' Irish - all of which I possess - can even begin to get Finnegan's. And yet it's even been translated into Japanese and Hungarian. For me, I've read dribs and drabs, and making my through it in its entirety is on my bucket list. I should probably get cracking. (Forgive a Joycean pun: get craicing?))

Anyway, in addition to Joyce, there are two other members of my pantheon of short story writers. One is the Anglo-Irish writer William Trevor. I wasn't wild about his novels, but, man, could he pack a novel into a short story. As could my other short story writer, Alice Munro, at whose writing altar I have long worshipped. Her stories were/are just gems. 

I'm a reader, but I don't typically hang on to books after I've read them. I give them away to fellow readers, or drop them off at the free book cabinet outside of the Walgreen's that years ago replaced a truly wonderful Borders, where I bought an awful lot of books.

But damned if I haven't hung on to my Alice Munro's.

And they're not going anywhere. I'm not one to re-read - other than my annual stationary pilgrimage with "The Dead" - but once in a blue moon, I pull out a volume of Munro and read a few of her brilliant works. And, while I was not especially happy to learn that her personal life left a great deal to be desired, I won't be dumping her - or jettisoning my opinion of her talent.

If you haven't been keeping up with the story behind the stories, Alice Munro was divorced from the man who had fathered her three daughters, and took up with Gerald Fremlin, a man she was with for 40 years (up until his death). Fremlin was a terrible man.

This July, two months after Munro’s death at the age of 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her. In the summer of 1976, Andrea wrote, she went to visit Munro and Fremlin at their home in Ontario. (According to her parents’ custody agreement, she spent the rest of the year in Victoria, British Columbia, with her father, Jim Munro, and his new wife.) One night, while Munro was away, Andrea awoke to discover that Fremlin had climbed into bed next to her. He was rubbing her genitals and pressing her hand over his penis. She was 9 years old.

Fremlin warned Andrea not to tell her mother: The news would kill her, he said. Andrea obeyed... (Source: NY Times)

But on her return to Victoria, she told her stepbrother, and word made it's way back to Andrea's father. And what did Jim Munro do? Concerned that the revelation would kill Alice's new relationship and that he would be blamed for the failure, he told the family to stay mum. When the girls went back to spend the next summer with their mother and Fremlin, Jim Munro told one of Andrea's older sisters to keep an eye on the situation. 

Andrea did what a lot of children who are abused did. She tried to keep her distance from Fremlin, making sure they were never alone. 

...but she had to balance her fear against a competing imperative: to shield her mother from the truth. Munro knew that Andrea loved to swim, so on the occasions when Fremlin offered to drive her to a nearby river, it felt impossible to refuse without arousing suspicion. During one such outing, he propositioned her for sex. Andrea turned bright red as she managed to walk away. On the drive home, Fremlin complained to her about how unsatisfying he found his sex life with Munro. The harassment ended only when Andrea reached puberty.

As a young adult, Andrea - who had suffered numerous psychological and physical ailments due to the abuse - finally told her mother what had happened.  

Alice Munro's reaction was self-pity. Rather than view the abuse of her daughter as a terrible, depraved, criminal act against the child, she saw it through the prism of self, and defined it all as a betrayal of herself. When confronted, Fremlin admitted "the abuse but claimed that it was Andrea who seduced him." Andrea at 9 was recast as Lolita, Fremlin is poor, innocent Humbert Humbert. 

Alice Munro left Fremlin, but only for a couple of weeks. 

The family carried on, with Andrea continuing to visit her mother and Fremlin. Only when her own children were born did things become really clear to Andrea. 

Andrea told her mother she didn’t want Fremlin anywhere near them. Munro objected that visiting without Fremlin would be inconvenient, because she couldn’t drive. “I blew my top,” Andrea told a reporter for The Star. “I started to scream into the phone about having to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that penis, and at some point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who’d done that to her daughter.” The next day, Munro called her back — not to apologize but to forgive Andrea for how she had spoken to her. It was the end of their relationship. 

But Andrea developed some new strengths. She reported Fremlin to the police - her evidence was the letters Fremlin had sent admitting to the abuse.

When an officer arrived at their house to arrest him, he reported that Munro was apoplectic, denouncing her daughter as a liar. In March 2005, Fremlin, then 80, quietly pleaded guilty to indecent assault and was sentenced to two years’ probation.

Andrea tried for years to get her story out, but academics who studied Alice Munro's work didn't want to hear about it. They were interested in the text, not the person who wrote the text. Even though "violated children, negligent mothers and marriages founded on secrets and lies" figured prominently in the stories she wrote after she learned of Fremlin's abuse of her child. (He was also accused of sexually abusing other children.) 

In Canada, Munro was known as “Saint Alice,” a paragon of virtue and compassion. Now she has come to symbolize something else: maternal dereliction. In the days after news of the abuse broke, social media filled up with photos of Munro’s books discarded in recycling bins. The University of Western Ontario, her alma mater, announced that it was “pausing” its Alice Munro Chair in Creativity so as to “carefully consider Munro’s legacy and her ties to Western.” Writers who once celebrated her work and openly acknowledged its influence on their own began to reconsider their allegiance. “These revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions,” the author Rebecca Makkai, who is herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, reacted in The Times. “To me, that makes them unreadable at all.”

I haven't picked up Alice Munro since all this came out. But those who have now see that so much of her work is peopled by characters like Fremlin-the-molester. And characters who are the wife who somehow can't tear herself away from the terrible man she has entwined her life with. The woman remains enthralled, totally dependent on the rotter she's with. 

Will I reread Alice Munro? Probably not anytime soon. Too painful. But at some point, I will want to assure myself that, however f'd up some of her stories are, they are still brilliantly written. I'm not sure if that'll be enough. But it will sure make me leery of hero worship.

On my Christmas tree, I have an ornament of James Joyce which I got on a trip to Ireland a couple of years back. I don't think I'll be getting an Alice Munro ornament anytime soon. And I sure hope that nothing comes out about William Trevor...