Speaker 1: Hello, Ruby Jones here, and welcome back to our week
Speaker 1: of Longreads. Every day we have a feature story for you,
Speaker 1: read by the author who created it. This year, the
Speaker 1: daughter of the late Nobel Prize winning Canadian author Alice
Speaker 1: Munroe revealed something about her mother that had stayed hidden
Speaker 1: throughout Monro's life. In an essay in The Toronto Star,
Speaker 1: Monroe's daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, said that when she was
Speaker 1: nine years old, Monroe's husband, Andrea's stepfather, had assaulted her.
Speaker 1: Andrew said she told her mother the truth when she
Speaker 1: was an adult, and Alice Munroe sided with him and
Speaker 1: kept it secret, saying she loved him too much to
Speaker 1: leave him. Today, art critic and author Sebastian Smee reads
Speaker 1: his piece on the author Alice Monroe. It's a reflection
Speaker 1: on the artists who act in ways unacceptable to us,
Speaker 1: but whose works are perhaps enriched by their moral ambiguity.
Speaker 1: It's an insightful and sharp piece of writing by one
Speaker 1: of the best observers of the art and literary worlds.
Speaker 1: After The Monthly published this piece by Sebastian Smee, another
Speaker 1: of Monroe's daughters got in touch, saying she felt the
Speaker 1: piece reminds us of the value of literature in general
Speaker 1: and how it stands apart from its creator. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy Into the Dark the Legacy of Alice Monroe
Speaker 1: read by Sebastian Smee as much as I did. It's Tuesday,
Speaker 1: January seventh, Into.
Speaker 2: The Dark the Legacy of Alice Monroe. Having read and
Speaker 2: re read Alice Munroe's stories for almost three years, I've
Speaker 2: often laughed at the laurel most frequently bestowed on her
Speaker 2: the near obligatory clam that the late Canadian short story
Speaker 2: writer was ah Chekhov if Tchehov, as Vladimir Nabokov once said,
Speaker 2: wrote sad books for humorous people. If he achieved beauty
Speaker 2: by keeping all his words in the same dim light
Speaker 2: and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint
Speaker 2: between the color of an old fence and that of
Speaker 2: a low cloud. Munroe wrote shocking, vividly colored books for
Speaker 2: grown ups. Her favored landscapes may have been Canadian and
Speaker 2: small town rural, Her brushstrokes calm and evenly applied, but
Speaker 2: her palette verged on lurid. What makes her stories so
Speaker 2: riveting is not, of course, limited to one quality. She's
Speaker 2: too good for that, but it's often her feeling for
Speaker 2: what is vulgar, macabre, and disturbingly sexual. As Monroe aged,
Speaker 2: the stories became wilder. She disguised her taste for disturbance
Speaker 2: with a plain spoken, why not see what happened style
Speaker 2: of narration. Her voice remained cool, her insight into human
Speaker 2: bafflement and peculiarity deep. Her stories were never as willfully
Speaker 2: shocking as, for instance, Ian McEwan's early short stories, but
Speaker 2: they could call to mind Christopher Rix's description of McEwen's
Speaker 2: novella The Comfort of Strangers, a tale, wrote Rix, that
Speaker 2: is as economical as a shudder. It never itself shudders,
Speaker 2: which is one reason why it makes you do so.
Speaker 3: That was Monroe. She never shuddered.
Speaker 2: You wished at times she would, but then you probably
Speaker 2: wouldn't have that secret sensation when reading her best stories,
Speaker 2: like the cool damp feeling of sand on fingertips digging
Speaker 2: tunnels beneath sand castles, the sand must be damp for
Speaker 2: the structure to hold.
Speaker 3: Monroe's stories.
Speaker 2: Likewise, whisper that sensations must be kept secret. They may
Speaker 2: disintegrate if exposed to the light. When a character in
Speaker 2: one of her most shocking stories is asked by another
Speaker 2: woman if everything is okay in her marriage. She's right
Speaker 2: to be concerned. The wife becomes more circumspect she saw
Speaker 2: Munro writes that there were things that she was used
Speaker 2: to that another person might not understand. It's normal to
Speaker 2: think that a writer so in control of her art form,
Speaker 2: and Monroe's command of structure, suspense, and nuance was a
Speaker 2: big part of what won her the twenty thirteen Nobel
Speaker 2: Prize for Literature must be in control of her own self.
Speaker 2: But artists move in the world like you and me.
Speaker 2: The only significant difference, perhaps is that their inner lives
Speaker 2: occupied constructing other worlds, so that alternative versions of the
Speaker 2: life they're in continually found out in their wake. Even
Speaker 2: just a modicum of biographical knowledge about Munroe can make
Speaker 2: this disorienting in her stories. As American author Leah Hager
Speaker 2: Cohen has noted, the very shape of things, along with
Speaker 2: our sense of what is important and why, seems to
Speaker 2: shift as we proceed.
Speaker 3: The real story keeps.
Speaker 2: Turning out to be larger than and at canted angles
Speaker 2: to what we thought it would be. The effect is
Speaker 2: initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming. Affirming maybe, but the instability
Speaker 2: tends to return, I find after Monroe's stories are put down.
Speaker 2: She wrote fearlessly about the confusions of sexuality and had
Speaker 2: a sharpened sense of the ways in which sex can
Speaker 2: prove a lifelong bafflement for men and women alike, from
Speaker 2: childhood to the deathbed. Sex she saw was a banal
Speaker 2: biological compulsion and at the same time a driving force
Speaker 2: behind almost all of life's most complicated and recondite stories,
Speaker 2: from sibling rivalry to extramarital affairs and psychological perversion. Shame,
Speaker 2: often connected to sex and bodily functions, plays an outsized
Speaker 2: role in Monroe's stories. It's the water in which her
Speaker 2: characters swim. A stepmother flow in Privilege from nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 2: likes to see people brought down to earth, nature asserting itself.
Speaker 2: She was the sort of woman who will make public
Speaker 2: what she finds in the laundry bag. In the nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety sixth story The Love of a Good Woman, Enid,
Speaker 2: the good woman of the title, is assailed by dreams
Speaker 2: in which, writes Monrow, she would be copulating or trying
Speaker 2: to copulate. Sometimes she was prevented by intruders, or shifts
Speaker 2: in circumstances with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners, with fat,
Speaker 2: squirmy babies, or patience in bandages, or her own mother.
Speaker 2: She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it,
Speaker 2: and she would set to work with a roughness and
Speaker 2: an attitude of evil pragmatism. She woke from these dreams
Speaker 2: quote unrepentant, sweaty and exhausted, and lay like a carcass
Speaker 2: until her own self, her shame and disbelief came pouring
Speaker 2: back into her. In one of Munroe's most controversial early stories,
Speaker 2: Wild Swans, from nineteen seventy seven, her recurrent young protagonist
Speaker 2: Rose is caught between lurid warnings from her stepmother as
Speaker 2: to the dark agendas of men, her own erotic curiosity,
Speaker 2: and her disgust at the animal mechanics of sex. It
Speaker 2: was pitiful, infantile, this itching and shoving and squeezing spongy
Speaker 2: tissues inflamed membranes, tormented nerve endings, shameful smells, humiliation.
Speaker 3: On a long train.
Speaker 2: Trip, Rose is seated next to a man who declares
Speaker 2: himself to be an off duty uniting church minister. After
Speaker 2: some time, Rose feels something touch her. She wonders if
Speaker 2: it might be the man's hand. The possibilities alarming, but
Speaker 2: the thought also and Hubert Munroe would even go here,
Speaker 2: sends her into a meandering, erotic reverie about men's hands
Speaker 2: and caught everything they could do, and so so it
Speaker 2: is that moments later, Rose is imagining her French teacher
Speaker 2: quote lapping and coiling his way through slow pleasures. A
Speaker 2: perfect autocrat of indulgences, she had a considerable longing to
Speaker 2: be someone's object, pounded, pleasured, reduced, exhausted. I don't remember
Speaker 2: passages like this in Chekhov. There are times, in fact,
Speaker 2: when you don't know what to do with what Munroe
Speaker 2: has just described. If you're on a bus or train,
Speaker 2: you can only hope that someone isn't reading over your shoulder.
Speaker 2: Munroe's sophisticated sense of structure and viewpoint will likely sustain
Speaker 2: college tutorials well into the twenty second century. But her
Speaker 2: raw power is this frank, unshockable approach to what is
Speaker 2: most furtive and disgusting in human relations. Her shamelessness, to
Speaker 2: put it plainly, about shame itself. In Monroe's stories, shame
Speaker 2: leaks from one generation to the next. Sometimes its source
Speaker 2: is impossible to pinpoint. It's just an ambient condition, a
Speaker 2: disturbing spillage that moves like ink through water, or an
Speaker 2: almost theological state like original sin. I always had a
Speaker 2: feeling with my mother's talk and stories of something swelling
Speaker 2: out behind, she writes in the Progress of Love, her
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty six short story, looped around three generations of women,
Speaker 2: like a cloud you couldn't see through or get to
Speaker 2: the end of. There was a cloud, a poison that
Speaker 2: had touched my mother's life. It seemed as if she
Speaker 2: knew something about me that was worse, far worse than
Speaker 2: ordinary lies and tricks and meanness. It was a really
Speaker 2: sickening shame. I beat against my mother's front to make
Speaker 2: her forget that. It's not always possible to discern the
Speaker 2: sources of shame in Monroe's stories, but it is an
Speaker 2: emotional state so ubiquitous among her characters that its absence
Speaker 2: triggers act of suspicion. In nineteen seventy four's story Material,
Speaker 2: Monroe's female narrator is in bad gist by her lover's
Speaker 2: straightforward enjoyment of life. He has forgotten the language of
Speaker 2: his childhood. She reflects privately. His love making was strange
Speaker 2: to me at first because it was lacking in desperation.
Speaker 2: He made love without emphasis, so to speak, with no
Speaker 2: memory of sin or hope of depravity. In Monroe's fictional universe,
Speaker 2: sex that is free from memory of sin or hope
Speaker 2: of depravity is not the rule. It's the exception.
Speaker 3: For children.
Speaker 2: In many of Monroe's stories, the adult world is a
Speaker 2: mysterious and tropically tangled domain, reeking with threat and allure Vandals.
Speaker 2: Written in nineteen ninety three and probably the Monroe story
Speaker 2: most widely re read in light of recent revelations about
Speaker 2: the writer's own life. Opens with two children, Eliza and Kenny.
Speaker 2: Their mother is dead, their father neglectful. Their home has
Speaker 2: quote no secret places. Everything is bare and simple ones.
Speaker 2: They stray frequently into the property of the neighboring middle
Speaker 2: aged couple Ladner and b Ladner, a taxidermist and gruff
Speaker 2: World War II veteran, has built a dense empire of bridges, forests,
Speaker 2: and shaded ponds, a deep and jungly place full of
Speaker 2: tropical threats and complications.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: In some places, the air is thick and private, and
Speaker 2: in other places you feel an energetic breeze. Smells are
Speaker 2: harsh or enticing. Certain walks imposed decorum, and certain stones
Speaker 2: are set to jump apart so that they call out
Speaker 2: for craziness. Here are the scenes of serious instruction, where
Speaker 2: Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from
Speaker 2: a butternut, and a star from a planet. And places
Speaker 2: also where they have run and hollered, and hung from
Speaker 2: branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts. And places
Speaker 2: where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground,
Speaker 2: a tickling, and sh in the grass unquote.
Speaker 3: When later the reader realizes.
Speaker 2: That Ladner has been molesting Liza, the significance of these
Speaker 2: descriptions lands like a second epiphany or a shiver its peak.
Speaker 2: Monroe Great fiction is often concerned with the ways in
Speaker 2: which relationships, even loving relationships, can turn into a struggle
Speaker 2: for control. Monroe's understanding of the tactical battles that take
Speaker 2: place inside long term partnerships made her a connoisseur of
Speaker 2: the origins and varieties of misogyny. In Labor Day Dinner
Speaker 2: from nineteen eighty one, Roberta, a middle aged woman is
Speaker 2: told by George, her lover that her armpitza flabby. Roberta
Speaker 2: notes quote a harsh satisfaction in her lover's voice, the
Speaker 2: satisfaction of erring disgust. He is disgusted by her aging body.
Speaker 2: In the wake of his comment, Roberta feels love free
Speaker 2: because she has the quote great tactical advantage of being
Speaker 2: the one to whom the wrong has been done, the
Speaker 2: unforgivable thing said. This is sharply observed. But the way
Speaker 2: Munroe turns her partner's comment on her appearance from an
Speaker 2: insult into a tactical lever provokes an uncomfortable question. Do
Speaker 2: the Machiavelian power politics within marriage open up the possibility
Speaker 2: that one partner will absorb the great wrong in order
Speaker 2: that she or he can demand something else. In this case,
Speaker 2: Roberta's impulse to stay inside this emotional dynamic is short lived.
Speaker 2: After letting his comments sit with her, she entertains an
Speaker 2: alternative way of seeing the same thing, which is a
Speaker 2: recurring preoccupation in Monroe's fiction. Suppose he doesn't think it's unforgivable,
Speaker 2: she writes. Suppose in his eyes, she's the one who's unforgivable.
Speaker 2: Monroe then registers the silent displacement of shame from where
Speaker 2: morally it belongs with George to where it doesn't belong
Speaker 2: with Roberta. By describing the pathos of Roberta's beauty regime,
Speaker 2: nothing she tries arrests the inevitable decline quote flabby armpits.
Speaker 2: What is to be done now the payment is due?
Speaker 2: And what for for vanity? Hardly even for that, just
Speaker 2: for having those pleasing services once and letting them speak
Speaker 2: for you, just.
Speaker 3: For allowing an arrangement of.
Speaker 2: Hair and shoulders and breasts to have its effect. You
Speaker 2: don't stop in time, don't know what to do. Instead,
Speaker 2: you lay yourself open to humiliation, so thinks Roberta, with
Speaker 2: self pity what she knows to be self pity rising
Speaker 2: and sloshing around in her like bile. She must get away,
Speaker 2: live alone, wear sleeves. In describing power struggles within relationships,
Speaker 2: Monroe had an inclination and an mobility not only to
Speaker 2: go deeper, but to start earlier, with the uniquely tortured,
Speaker 2: anguished struggles for control between parents and their children in
Speaker 2: Royal Beatings from nineteen seventy seven. Her recurrent character Rose,
Speaker 2: a girl, is beaten by her father. As he approaches
Speaker 2: with his belt, Rose finds herself wondering about murders and
Speaker 2: murderers quote does the thing have to be carried through
Speaker 2: in the end, partly for the effect to prove to
Speaker 2: the audience of one that such a thing can happen,
Speaker 2: that the most dreadful antic is justified feelings can be
Speaker 2: found to match it. This is an extraordinarily sophisticated thought
Speaker 2: for a young girl to have. But Rose is very
Speaker 2: bright and evidently a stand in for Munroe, who, as
Speaker 2: an author, is an expert in finding feelings to match
Speaker 2: all kinds of actions. The father approaching with the belt
Speaker 2: is quote like a bad actor who turns apart grotesque,
Speaker 2: as if he must save it and insist on just
Speaker 2: what is shameful and terrible about this. That's not to
Speaker 2: say that he's pretending that he's acting and does not
Speaker 2: mean it. He is acting, and he means it. Rose
Speaker 2: knows that she knows everything about him.
Speaker 3: Monroe writes.
Speaker 2: Royal Beatings traces the course of Rose's righteous indignation in
Speaker 2: the aftermath of the beating, as her noisy sobbing wears
Speaker 2: off It's replaced by a calm, decisive state in which
Speaker 2: things quote take on a lovely simplicity, choices a mercifully
Speaker 2: clear unquote. Rose resolves never to speak to her father
Speaker 2: and stepmother again. She will never look at them with
Speaker 2: anything but loathing, writes Monro, never forgive them. This produces
Speaker 2: in her a sensation of superiority, like floating beyond herself,
Speaker 2: beyond responsibility. But then this resolution, too, cracks rose nose.
Speaker 2: She will relent and return to her status as a
Speaker 2: child subject to adult power. The struggle for control persists
Speaker 2: all the way through to adulthood silence. A story from
Speaker 2: Monroe's two thousand and four collection run Away features Juliette,
Speaker 2: a well known TV personality whose adult daughter Penelope, disappears
Speaker 2: to a spiritual retreat and cuts off all contact with
Speaker 2: her mother. Juliet is bereft, and when a message finally
Speaker 2: arrives summoning her to visit, she feels quote like an
Speaker 2: old patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain.
Speaker 2: But when Juliette arrives after a long journey, a woman
Speaker 2: representing the retreat informs her that Penelope is no longer there.
Speaker 2: She won't say where Penelope has gone only that wherever
Speaker 2: it is quote, it will be the right thing for
Speaker 2: her spirituality and her growth. The woman has a pointed
Speaker 2: herself as intermediary in the struggle for control between mother
Speaker 2: and child, which makes her, in Juliete's size, unbearable. Penelope
Speaker 2: is winning for many years, Juliette knows nothing of her whereabouts.
Speaker 2: She later muses on the cause or causes of the estrangement. Quote,
Speaker 2: you know, we always have the idea that there is
Speaker 2: this reason or that reason, and we keep trying to
Speaker 2: find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about
Speaker 2: my failures and excesses and my selfishness. Or I could
Speaker 2: say that she Penelope is harsher. No, let us say
Speaker 2: purer in her judgments than many people have the nerve
Speaker 2: to be. But what's also possible, juliet concedes, because in
Speaker 2: such matters there is never just one version?
Speaker 3: Is that quote? She couldn't stand me.
Speaker 2: In Monroe's stories, intrafamilial struggles are not just about control.
Speaker 2: They're also about shifting interpretation of events and conflicting memories.
Speaker 2: What can be mentioned and what must be buried deep.
Speaker 2: The story The Progress of Love is occupied with two sisters,
Speaker 2: pious and traumatized Marietta and worldly, jovial Beryl, their memories
Speaker 2: and interpretations of various family events differ significantly. For example,
Speaker 2: Marietta one day finds her mother standing on a chair
Speaker 2: beneath a noose. She runs for help, but returns to
Speaker 2: find her mother in the kitchen behaving as if nothing
Speaker 2: has happened. Marietta records this incident as evidence that her
Speaker 2: father's womanizing drove her mother to the brink of suicide,
Speaker 2: but her sister Beryl remembers the suicide attempt as a ruse,
Speaker 2: something their mother threatened to carry out and embarked upon
Speaker 2: theatrically in the hope that her husband, upon discovering her,
Speaker 2: would mend his ways. In other words, she was acting
Speaker 2: and not meaning it, not intending to carry through the
Speaker 2: awful action. She abandoned the endeavor, believes Beryl, when it
Speaker 2: turned out to be her daughter who came across the
Speaker 2: scene rather than her errant's spouse. A recurring motif in
Speaker 2: this story, The progress of love is layers of wallpaper
Speaker 2: in the narrator's childhood home, pasted up, torn down, and
Speaker 2: papered over again. Monroe is inviting us to think of
Speaker 2: the home as a palimpsest, not so much of memories,
Speaker 2: but of fictions, irreconcilable versions of the same events. Sex, shame, love,
Speaker 2: the multidirectional power struggles between husband and wife, mother and child,
Speaker 2: sister and sister. All are interleaved, messily, wilfully resisting order.
Speaker 3: Who is right who is wrong?
Speaker 2: As is Monroe's maddening rivet and custom there aren't any answers,
Speaker 2: just more layers.
Speaker 1: Coming up after the break. The recent revelations of Alice Munroe's.
Speaker 2: Dark past, Monro's voyages through the inky murk of disputed
Speaker 2: family histories trigger something in us all. The New Yorker
Speaker 2: staff writer j Young Young Fan recently described the quote
Speaker 2: very uncomfortable and unnerving stab of recognition that she felt
Speaker 2: when revisiting Monro's evocations of a subterranean emotional landscape.
Speaker 3: That I knew too.
Speaker 2: Well of familial secrecy, of things being buried so deeply
Speaker 2: that excavation itself would be betrayal to those I loved,
Speaker 2: and possibly to myself. But in July this year, less
Speaker 2: than two months after Monroe's death at the age of
Speaker 2: ninety two, something happened that jolted these narrative obsessions off
Speaker 2: the page and into the all too real life of
Speaker 2: Monroe's own family. Monroe's estranged adult daughter, Andrea Skinner, the
Speaker 2: youngest of the writer's three daughters with her first husband,
Speaker 2: Jim Monroe, published an essay in The Toronto Star. Skinner
Speaker 2: wrote that her stepfather, Monroe's second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually
Speaker 2: abused her in nineteen seventy six, when Skinner was nine.
Speaker 2: She said that her mother, Alice Monroe, when told of
Speaker 2: the abuse more than a decade later, quote, chose to
Speaker 2: stay with and protect my abuser unquote. Jim and Alice
Speaker 2: Monroe separated in nineteen seventy four, and in nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: six Monroe married Fremlin, a man she had first met
Speaker 2: in college twenty years earlier. Jim and Alice shared custody
Speaker 2: of Andrea, who stayed with her father and his new
Speaker 2: wife during school term and in the summers, joined her
Speaker 2: mother and Fremlin in rural Ontario. One night during the
Speaker 2: first such summer, when Monroe was away, Skinner asked Fremlin
Speaker 2: if she could sleep in her mother's bed, which was
Speaker 2: separate from but next to Fremlin's, During the night Fremin
Speaker 2: climbed into that bed, and while Skinner feigned sleep, began
Speaker 2: rubbing the nine year old girl's genitals and pressing her
Speaker 2: hand over his penis. In the morning, Skinner awoke with
Speaker 2: a migraine and feelings of dread. She said nothing to
Speaker 2: her mother about what had happened, but at the end
Speaker 2: of the summer, she did tell her stepbrother and stepmother,
Speaker 2: and they told her father, Jim Munroe. Jim, however, did
Speaker 2: not talk to Skinner about what had happened, and he
Speaker 2: said nothing to Munroe. When Jim sent his daughters back
Speaker 2: to Munroe and Fremlin's house the next summer, he told
Speaker 2: Skinner's two older sisters to look out for her and
Speaker 2: make sure she was never alone with Fremlin. Fremlin didn't
Speaker 2: touch Skinner again, but he evidently kept her in a
Speaker 2: state of dread. According to Skinner, he exposed him her,
Speaker 2: propositioned her for sex, and threatened that if she ever
Speaker 2: told her mother, the shock would kill her. Skinner stayed quiet,
Speaker 2: but the stress of being placed in such an impossible
Speaker 2: position took a toll. Her migraines continued, she developed bulimia,
Speaker 2: and she later struggled at college, eventually dropping out. In
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two, at the age of twenty five, Skinner
Speaker 2: wrote a letter to her mother telling her about Fremlin's abuse.
Speaker 2: She said she had been quote afraid all my life
Speaker 2: that you would blame me for what happened unquote. Monroe's
Speaker 2: response was complex. Leaving Fremlin, she went to stay in
Speaker 2: one of her other homes, presumably to process what she
Speaker 2: had just been told. According to Skinner, Munroe was humiliated
Speaker 2: and felt betrayed both by Fremlin, her husband, and Skinner,
Speaker 2: her daughter. The cause of her sense of betrayal is unclear.
Speaker 2: Was it Fremlin's abuse or was it the failure of
Speaker 2: those who knew about it, perhaps including Skinner, to tell her.
Speaker 2: Skinner wrote that when she told her mother that the
Speaker 2: experience had damaged her, Munroe minimized it. But you were
Speaker 2: such a happy child, she said. Fremlin's response, meanwhile, was
Speaker 2: at once appalling and bazaarre. He wrote a letter to
Speaker 2: the whole family in which he gave his own explicit
Speaker 2: account of the abuse. He blamed Skinner with words such
Speaker 2: as home wrecker and lolita, casting himself as Nabokov's delusional narrator.
Speaker 2: Humbert Humbert Fremlan threatened to kill both himself and Skinner,
Speaker 2: and to go public with photographs of Skinner that he'd
Speaker 2: taken while she was eleven, which he described as quote
Speaker 2: extremely eloquent, unquote. He was sorry for betraying Munroe, but
Speaker 2: not it seemed, for anything he had done to his
Speaker 2: nine year old step daughter. We don't know what went
Speaker 2: through Munroe's mind as she tried to process all this.
Speaker 2: Many women have found themselves in similar predicaments. They are
Speaker 2: not the ones who have committed the abuse, but they
Speaker 2: find themselves obliged to respond to act, even as their
Speaker 2: lives and the lives of those around them threatened to implode.
Speaker 2: All we know is that Munroe returned to Fremlin after
Speaker 2: their brief separation. She explained that she had been told
Speaker 2: too late, sixteen years after the original abuse, and that
Speaker 2: she loved Fremlin too much to leave him. Although Skinner
Speaker 2: made regular subsequent visits to the home of Munroe and Fremlin,
Speaker 2: she stopped going when she became pregnant, unwilling to let
Speaker 2: Fremlin near her children. When Munroe complained about the inconvenience
Speaker 2: of this decision, Skinner erupted in anger, recounting details of
Speaker 2: the abuse and asking how her mother could have sex
Speaker 2: with someone who'd done that to her daughter. When Munroe
Speaker 2: call all to the next day to forgive Skinner for
Speaker 2: her outburst, according to Skinner, Skinner cut off all contact.
Speaker 2: She reported the abuse to police in two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: submitting as evidence the letter Fremlin had written in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two in which she admitted to the sexual contact.
Speaker 2: Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault and was handed as
Speaker 2: suspended sentence with two years probation. In the wake of
Speaker 2: Skinner's revelations, another woman, Jane Maury, came forward to say
Speaker 2: that Fremlin, a friend of her parents, had exposed himself
Speaker 2: to her and invited her to reciprocate when she was nine.
Speaker 2: She told her parents immediately and Fremlin was banished from
Speaker 2: the house. Others have pointed out that while male artists
Speaker 2: have been revealed time and again as sex pests and
Speaker 2: much worse, accusations of bad behaviour against women artists tend
Speaker 2: to revolve around failures of motherhood. This is what female
Speaker 2: monstrousness looks like, writes declared Debtora in Monsters of Fans Dilemma.
Speaker 2: Abandoning the kids always even so when you imagine Skinner's
Speaker 2: suffering and understand what caused it. Munroe's response to her
Speaker 2: daughter's testimony looks tragically, ill judged and yes, even monstrous.
Speaker 2: Munro's children told The Toronto Star that they went public
Speaker 2: not because they want to destroy their mother's legacy, but
Speaker 2: because they want Skinner's account to strengthen our understanding of.
Speaker 3: Who Monroe was as a writer.
Speaker 2: I believe we should take their stated wish at face
Speaker 2: value and consider how this new information changes our understanding
Speaker 2: of Alice Munroe's fiction. To me, the revelations aren't just
Speaker 2: something to digest and set aside, as we habitually do
Speaker 2: for better or worse, when we learned it, Miles Davis
Speaker 2: or Iris Murdock or Edgar Degar did horrible things or
Speaker 2: expressed vile opinions. That's because, rather than hollowing out Munroe's stories,
Speaker 2: what Skinner has told us thickens them with new textures
Speaker 2: and meanings. Her account affects how we read the stories.
Speaker 2: Not because they contain evidence for Munroe's posthumous prosecution, i e.
Speaker 3: Shall we cancel her or not?
Speaker 2: But because the themes connected to this terrible real life situation.
Speaker 2: We're not off to the side, but central to what
Speaker 2: Munroe was always writing about, shame, sex, abuse of trust,
Speaker 2: estrangement of parents and children. In other words, the revelations
Speaker 2: don't just deepen the stories as autonomous works of art.
Speaker 2: They deepen one of Munro's most consistent themes, the morally
Speaker 2: troubled relationship between the stories we tell and the lives
Speaker 2: we lead or are led by. Munro's collection The Progress
Speaker 2: of Love contains a story called Lichen. It was written
Speaker 2: six years before Munroe learned to Fremlin's abuse of her daughter,
Speaker 2: although it now seems possible she already knew things about
Speaker 2: Fremlin that found their way into her stories. Lychan is
Speaker 2: about Stella and her ex husband David, who has a
Speaker 2: sexual kink, a weird need not only to carry around
Speaker 2: pornographic photographs, but to show them to unsuspecting people, including
Speaker 2: Stella and on another occasion, her married neighbor Ron. David
Speaker 2: is turned on, in other words, by sharing dirty secrets.
Speaker 2: He suffers from this need to be shocking and perverse.
Speaker 2: It's a kind of suffering. We're told that other people
Speaker 2: don't understand, but he feels that Stella does understand.
Speaker 3: During a garden party.
Speaker 2: While stroking the quote cold brown shaved and prickly calf
Speaker 2: of another man's wife with his big toe. This is
Speaker 2: while he and Stella are still married. David has the
Speaker 2: feeling that he and Stella are quote bound together after all,
Speaker 2: and as long as he could feel such benevolence toward her,
Speaker 2: what he did secretly and separately was somehow done with
Speaker 2: her blessing. Unquote that, writes Munroe did not turn out
Speaker 2: to be a notion Stella shared at all. The break
Speaker 2: up when it came was difficult. We've been together so long.
Speaker 2: Couldn't be just tough it out, says Stella, at one point,
Speaker 2: trying to make it sound like a joke. What she
Speaker 2: didn't understand, and this is Monroe at her best, was
Speaker 2: that the length of time they had been together was
Speaker 2: precisely what made their continuation for David impossible. Stella, you
Speaker 2: see quote, dragged so much weight with her, a weight
Speaker 2: not just of his sexual secrets, but of his middle
Speaker 2: of the night's speculations about God, his psychosomatic chest pains,
Speaker 2: his digestive sensitivity, his escape plans, which once included her
Speaker 2: and involved Africa or Indonesia, all his ordinary and extraordinary life,
Speaker 2: even some things that was unlikely she knew about seems
Speaker 2: stored up in her. She could never feel any lightness,
Speaker 2: any secret and victorious expansion with a woman who knew
Speaker 2: so much. She was bloated with all she knew. Monroe writes,
Speaker 2: Stella drags with her not only the weight of all
Speaker 2: the trivial things she knows about him, the usual weight
Speaker 2: of marriage, in other words, but also the heavier load
Speaker 2: of his sexual perversion, of all that she has seen
Speaker 2: and constructively accepted. In Monroe's stories, which are about what
Speaker 2: reviewer Michiko Katakhani called, quote the complicated arithmetic of familial relationships,
Speaker 2: the freedoms and constraints imposed by marriage unquote, questions about
Speaker 2: a woman's willingness to tolerate what her male partner has
Speaker 2: shamefully done, what he hopes to get away with are
Speaker 2: often mixed up in the woman's search for her own lightness,
Speaker 2: her own secret and victorious expansion. As for me, writes
Speaker 2: the narrator in Miles City, Montana, a story from nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty five of a family road trip, I was happy
Speaker 2: because of the shedding. I loved taking off in my
Speaker 2: own house. I seemed to be looking for a place
Speaker 2: to hide, sometimes from the children, but more often from
Speaker 2: the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and
Speaker 2: the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so
Speaker 2: that I could get busy at my real work, which
Speaker 2: was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.
Speaker 2: I lived in a state of siege, always losing just
Speaker 2: what I wanted to hold on to. But on family
Speaker 2: road trips she feels different. She would be tending to
Speaker 2: the children or her husband, and quote, all the time,
Speaker 2: those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me.
Speaker 2: The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful
Speaker 2: and light hearted. These are clearly the thoughts of a writer,
Speaker 2: some one who describes herself as a watcher, not a keeper,
Speaker 2: someone for whom the things that happened to her and
Speaker 2: to those around her are clues, artifacts, matches struck in
Speaker 2: the dark, things to be arranged, made use of. As
Speaker 2: for a brief and exultant period, they fly together inside her.
Speaker 2: Someone like Alice Munroe. The bits and pieces promise to
Speaker 2: achieve a quote essential composition unquote, like a perfect short story.
Speaker 3: But is this.
Speaker 2: Promise finally an illusion? In Vandals, the story in which
Speaker 2: Liza a girl child is sexually abused in the jungly
Speaker 2: adult world created by Ladner. Across the road. Liza's mother
Speaker 2: is dead, but there is a maternal figure in her life.
Speaker 2: In the course of the story, B, who lives with
Speaker 2: Liza's abuser, Ladner, appears to accumulate culpability for what has
Speaker 2: happened to the child at her husband's hands. At the
Speaker 2: time of her first meeting with Ladner, B he already
Speaker 2: had a lover the local school principle he is a decent,
Speaker 2: affable man to whom Ladner is pointedly rude. Ladner's crotchety
Speaker 2: behavior perversely attracts Be and makes her lover seem suddenly repellent.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: She didn't want any more of his geniality, is good intentions,
Speaker 2: his puzzling and striving. She knows it is regressive and
Speaker 2: bad form to admit it, But Ladner made Bee realize
Speaker 2: she was one of those women who might always be
Speaker 2: on the lookout for an insanity that can contain them unquote.
Speaker 2: Since B is wholly occupied with Ladner, as little chance
Speaker 2: she will notice what Eliza so urgently needs her to notice.
Speaker 2: B perversely relishes the way that Ladner will allow her
Speaker 2: to quote live surrounded by ready doses of indifference, which
Speaker 2: at times might seem like scorn.
Speaker 3: He sometimes mocks.
Speaker 2: Her by hind her back in this way, building a
Speaker 2: sinister sort of complicity with the children. As she falls
Speaker 2: under his spell, she pities herself quote for being a
Speaker 2: victim of her sexual wants, and feels punished for being
Speaker 2: quote such a tiresome.
Speaker 3: Vamp and fraud.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, there's no sign that she is aware
Speaker 2: of Ladner's particular insanity his sexual abuse of Liza. In
Speaker 2: the story, years pass, Ladner's crimes go unpunished. Liza grows
Speaker 2: up to become a born again Christian with puritanical tendencies,
Speaker 2: never drinking alcohol, never eating sugar, counting the strokes when
Speaker 2: she brushes her teeth. But she has something else in
Speaker 2: her a wildness, a herodon like craving for revenge, and
Speaker 2: it emerges one day after a winter storm when Bee,
Speaker 2: who is dealing with Ladner as he undergoes heart surgery,
Speaker 2: asks her to check on the house. Eliza takes her
Speaker 2: young husband Warren, on a snowmobile to do as Bee
Speaker 2: has asked, and then, while Warren placidly watches TV, e
Speaker 2: Liza wrecks the house, hence the story's title Vandals.
Speaker 3: The reader roots for e Liza.
Speaker 2: Of course, when the motive for her destructive spree becomes clear.
Speaker 2: What is not clear is how fair it is for
Speaker 2: Liza's vengeance to be aimed, as it clearly is also
Speaker 2: at b. We assume b has been in the dark
Speaker 2: about Ladner's abuse, as Monroe herself was in the dark
Speaker 2: for more than a decade about Fremlin's But at the
Speaker 2: very least, Vandals allows for Bee's wilful blindness, her preparedness
Speaker 2: to allow her obsession with Ladner to occlude her view
Speaker 2: of what is happening to.
Speaker 3: The child in their care.
Speaker 2: How far might a woman go to accommodate the sins
Speaker 2: of her husband. Monroe, an inveterate and compulsive presser of
Speaker 2: Bria Ruses, wrote the story Dimensions seventeen years after learning
Speaker 2: of Fremlin's abuse, and it addresses exactly this question. Dimensions
Speaker 2: is Munroe's most harrowing story, inspired by an item Munroe
Speaker 2: read in the news. It concerns a woman, Dorry, struggling
Speaker 2: in a relationship with a man, Lloyd, who then does
Speaker 2: the worst thing imaginable in a fit of rage a
Speaker 2: psychotic episode, he murders their three small children. Lloyd is incarcerated,
Speaker 2: having been deemed criminally insane, and the story opens with
Speaker 2: a description of Dorry's long journey to visit him in prison.
Speaker 2: While there were a couple before his heinous crime, Lloyd
Speaker 2: was paranoid and controlling and had Dorry under his spell.
Speaker 2: The truth of things between them, the bond, he persuaded her,
Speaker 2: was not something anybody else could understand, and it was
Speaker 2: not anybody else's business. Now, after his murderous spree, Lloyd
Speaker 2: writes her letters from prison, admitting to his monstrosity but
Speaker 2: still harboring awful delusions. I can say perfectly, soberly, that
Speaker 2: I know the worst that I am capable of, and
Speaker 2: I know that I have done it, he writes. I
Speaker 2: am judged by the world as a monster, and I
Speaker 2: have no quarrel with that. But then a paragraph later,
Speaker 2: am I a monster? The world says so? And if
Speaker 2: it is said so, then I agree. But then I say,
Speaker 2: the world does not have any real meaning for me.
Speaker 2: In one such letter, which reads at once like a
Speaker 2: feeble attempt to offer Dory some pitiful semblance of consoling hope,
Speaker 2: and at the same time a cruelly unconscionable manipulation. He
Speaker 2: says that he has seen their three children alive and
Speaker 2: happy in another dimension. They are fine, he writes to
Speaker 2: their mother, really happy and smart. They don't seem to
Speaker 2: have any memory of anything bad. He says he wishes
Speaker 2: Dory could see what he has seen. After all, she's
Speaker 2: so much more deserving than he. But if this is impossible,
Speaker 2: if she can't see her children, obviously she cannot. He
Speaker 2: hopes that his account of what he has seen will
Speaker 2: at least make her Quote Heart Lighter Dimensions is an
Speaker 2: extreme manifestation of the theme explored in vandals of women
Speaker 2: attaching themselves to men who have an insanity large enough
Speaker 2: to contain them. It's partly about the limits of what
Speaker 2: people can bear to think about, and so it's particularly
Speaker 2: hard to read after the revelations about Fremlin's abuse of Skinner.
Speaker 2: Dorry knows that Lloyd, that terrible person that isolated an
Speaker 2: insane person, as Munroe writes, is out of his mind
Speaker 2: and still boasting just as he used to. But she
Speaker 2: wonders what if there was something in what he said quote?
Speaker 2: And who was to say that The visions of a
Speaker 2: person who had done such a thing and made such
Speaker 2: a journey not mean something. Dorry's life at this point
Speaker 2: is so desolate and friable. It is like a clod
Speaker 2: of dry soil that nothing can hold together. She's unreachable
Speaker 2: to anyone else, including her therapist, missus Sands, who can't
Speaker 2: even bring herself to say the children's names. All Dory
Speaker 2: can do, she realizes, is quote remind people of what
Speaker 2: nobody can stand to be reminded of. Only Lloyd, turns out,
Speaker 2: can reach her. So she goes to visit him in jail,
Speaker 2: thinking what that it might help? Nothing so hopeful, But
Speaker 2: anyway she goes, and even as she recoils from him,
Speaker 2: there is something in Lloyd that calls out to her.
Speaker 2: They've been through something together, something so extreme that no
Speaker 2: one else can possibly relate. She's bloated with all she knows.
Speaker 3: The pool of.
Speaker 2: Their shared experience is like gravity. She can't break away.
Speaker 2: Some reviewers were appalled by Munroe's need to enter this
Speaker 2: territory to wrestle with this kind of outright evil. She
Speaker 2: was supposed to be Canadian Chekhovian. She was supposed to
Speaker 2: keep everything in the same gray Light. She was not
Speaker 2: supposed to write about a father who murders his own
Speaker 2: three children, or to describe the scene where Dory comes
Speaker 2: home and discovers what Layd has done. You brought it
Speaker 2: all on yourself, says this monster, as Dorry, crazed with grief,
Speaker 2: shoves earth into her mouth in a futile attempt to
Speaker 2: staunch the worst wound imaginable. But when you consider Fremlin
Speaker 2: and Skinner, and the seemingly inexplicable decisions Monroe made after
Speaker 2: finding out that her husband had abused her daughter, destroying
Speaker 2: her emotional and psychological well being, it's hard not to
Speaker 2: feel that maybe she did need to go there. She
Speaker 2: needed to do it, not because she was a Nobel
Speaker 2: Prize winner, magnificently in control of her craft, and perhaps
Speaker 2: not even because writing for her was a kind of
Speaker 2: therapy that helped pacify her troubled conscience. I think she
Speaker 2: had to do it because there was nothing else she
Speaker 2: knew to do. Fiction provided her with another dimension, a
Speaker 2: place to relieve her urge to talk about what was
Speaker 2: impossible to discuss in a way that anyone else could
Speaker 2: be expected to understand. And of course it works like
Speaker 2: this for readers as well. The endpoint of great fiction
Speaker 2: is not necessarily wisdom or enlightenment. It's really just another
Speaker 2: kind of scrabbling around in the dark, scratching here then
Speaker 2: over there, carving out tunnels, kicking up dust, managing strife.
Speaker 2: This is not meant to belittle Monroe's achievement. Her writing
Speaker 2: would not have meant so much to me, nor would
Speaker 2: she have received so much praise in her lifetime, if
Speaker 2: there weren't something very special about it. But I can't
Speaker 2: straightforwardly say what her stories have given me beyond a
Speaker 2: lot of deep pleasure, a richer understanding of myself and
Speaker 2: other people. Motivation and perversities are bafflements, a suspicion of
Speaker 2: received wisdom, and a feeling for the different ways in
Speaker 2: which we face up to or hide from reality. All
Speaker 2: these things are meaningful, of course, but it's harder to
Speaker 2: say if they fix any problems. It's also hard to
Speaker 2: say where the skinner had she read her mother's stories
Speaker 2: about sex, shame, betrayal, and intergenerational damage. And I have
Speaker 2: no idea if she has might have found evidence of
Speaker 2: some deeper understanding and compassion, or just further insult. These
Speaker 2: are tender bruised matters in the life of a real person,
Speaker 2: and such speculation feels not only difficult but prurient, as
Speaker 2: does natural human tendency to wonder about the origins of
Speaker 2: the inky swirl around Monroe and her daughters. Where did
Speaker 2: it begin the author's own childhood. The possibility lurks in
Speaker 2: her stories, but we will never know. What is clear
Speaker 2: is that Monroe herself was acutely conscious not only of
Speaker 2: the limits of fiction its dubious efficacy when it comes
Speaker 2: to fixing life's problems, but of the added problems the
Speaker 2: stories themselves could create. In an epilogue to Lives of
Speaker 2: Girls and Women, Munro's narrator, a writer like herself, reflects
Speaker 2: on what it is to lose faith in the fiction
Speaker 2: she once built up into a richly imagined novel from
Speaker 2: the quote few poor facts unquote before her, the novel
Speaker 2: has borrowed from a real family, the sheriffs to whom
Speaker 2: terrible things have happened in real life. What had happened
Speaker 2: to them, writes Munroe, isolated them splendidly doomed them to
Speaker 2: fiction that's about as efficient and self lacerating. An assessment
Speaker 2: of what it means to write Munro's kind of fiction
Speaker 2: as can be imagined. Years after writing a novel, the
Speaker 2: narrator returns to the town with a greater understanding of
Speaker 2: her fiction's effect on these real people, still living lives
Speaker 2: of their own, and therefore not so doomed after all.
Speaker 2: One of the characters is a photographer who drives around
Speaker 2: town taking pictures. People are afraid of him because his
Speaker 2: pictures make them look dreadful. When they see his car coming,
Speaker 2: the town's children drop into ditches. It's amusing to think
Speaker 2: of the residence of Clinton, Ontario responding in like fashion
Speaker 2: whenever they saw Monroe drive into town. After asking about
Speaker 2: the fates of the real people on whom she based
Speaker 2: her fiction, Munroe's narrator registers that quote, such questions persist
Speaker 2: in spite of novels. It's a shock when you have
Speaker 2: dealt so cunningly powerfully with reality to come back and
Speaker 2: find it still there, Monroe writes, Reality is still there
Speaker 2: even if you're Alice Munroe. That, I imagine is what
Speaker 2: Skinner wants the world to understand. It's still there after
Speaker 2: you've invented the fiction, if you're a writer, and it's
Speaker 2: still there after you've put the book down. If you're
Speaker 2: a reader, your aging parents are still there. Your partner
Speaker 2: is still in bed beside you, and your children too,
Speaker 2: if you have them, are not only still there but
Speaker 2: still subject to your influence, whether you were there when
Speaker 2: they needed you or not.
Speaker 1: That was Sebastian's me reading his piece Into the Dark,
Speaker 1: The Legacy of Alice Munroe. For more of Australia's best
Speaker 1: one form writing, visit Themonthly dot Com dot Au. I'm
Speaker 1: Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.