Be Kind To Your Neighborhood Monsters?
You can't actually separate the art from the artist--but that's why we should continue to wrestle with great art by people who've done monstrous things, and not shun it
I have been struggling for the past couple of days to articulate my response to the latest “art and the artist” kerfuffle, this one surrounding the late Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. For those who haven’t been following the story: Munro was a short story writer whose memory, widely cherished in literary circles, has been upended by a bombshell piece by her daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, revealing that Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually assaulted her when she was nine years old and continued to behave abusively towards her for years afterward (exposing himself to her, talking to her lewdly, etc.). Skinner revealed the abuse to her mother when she was in her 20s, and her mother’s reaction was nightmarish, treating Skinner as the one at fault for seducing Fremlin. A decade later, Skinner filed charges against Fremlin, who was convicted and legally constrained thereafter against being in contact with children under the age of 14. Notwithstanding all of this, Munro stayed with Fremlin until he died, preferring to end her relationship with her abused daughter than to attenuate her relationship with her abusive husband in any way.
The literary world has been devastated by these revelations (which are worse than I imagined when I first saw the headlines; do read Skinner’s piece to get their full flavor), for understandable reasons. Only two months ago Munro was getting tributes like this one, not only praising her writing but praising her as a model for how a writer should be in the world, and even though that piece by fellow-Canadian Sheila Heti is only about how she was in the world as a writer, not as a mother, well, let’s just say that it’s one thing to try to separate the art and the artist, another to try to separate the artist from the artist, which is to say, separate the artist’s life as an artist from the rest of the artist’s life. There’s only one of them, after all.
It’s all very depressing and discomfiting, and I share in those feelings. What more is there to say?
Well, two people who deserve a tip of the hat for having said worthwhile and correct things are Freddie deBoer and Meghan Daum. They’ve each grasped an essential nettle: we are far too inclined to assume that because the art is good therefore the artist must be admirable as a person—and, conversely, when we learn that the artist’s personal behavior has been horrifying, we are far too inclined to assume that therefore the art cannot be good. There is abundant evidence at this point that plenty of great art was made by people who have done reprehensible things, and the periodic irruptions of damning personal information about this person or that have done nothing consequential to dim their art’s long-term prospects. Why? Because that art, if it is great, compels attention, and is therefore more powerful than those who would banish it in the the name of public morality.
Whether those irruptions do anything to inhibit horrible behavior by artists, meanwhile, is a highly debatable question at best. Personally, I think it’s equally likely that they promote conspiracies of silence such as surrounded Munro since her stepfather’s conviction for indecent assault of a minor. That conviction was a matter of public record since 2005, and yet featured not at all in the public image of Munro, nor in her literary biography. DeBoer does an excellent job eviscerating the pretensions of the moralizers to actually affecting the real world, and I have nothing to add but a nod of agreement.
DeBoer and Daum each also offer persuasive reasons why we keep making this mistake. DeBoer points out that artists are, by the very nature of their craft, practicers of deception. Writers tell stories, painters paint pictures, actors create character, and these are all species of lying. Why should we be surprised that accomplished liars fool us about themselves as well? Daum, meanwhile, suggests that great artists may be exceptionally good at lying to themselves—that, in fact, fiction can be a way to sustain themselves in their lies, a way of externalizing rather than internalizing critique. I think both distinctions have some merit, though they cut in different ways; I feel differently about an artist who is actively lying to me in order to hide something than I do about an artist who is trying to be truthful and thereby revealing the ways in which they are lying to themselves. Not necessarily worse; I don’t feel badly about Tennessee Williams because he hid his sexuality behind coded façades, for example. But I read Williams differently than I would an author who was deeply closeted to himself, just as I read him differently than I would an author who was out and proud.
This, though, is the thing. I can only read them differently if I know something about them. If, in other words, I don’t separate the art from the artist.
DeBoer makes the very valid point that the art is separated from the artist when we receive it—the artist doesn’t arrive in our home and let us get to know her before she presents her art to us; the art just is presented to us, and we react to it. But it’s not that simple, is it? All art comes to us within a context, even if it’s just the general culture from which it springs, and the context informs how we receive it. Last night I watched the Coen Brothers film, The Man Who Wasn’t There, a Neo-noir set in 1949 that partakes of many of the cinematic tropes of that era. I received it differently knowing it was made in 2001 than I would have if I thought it had been made in 1951.
But I would go further. When we experience a work of art, particularly a work of fiction where voice plays such a crucial role, we frequently build up in our mind an imagined author, just as writers frequently build up in their minds an imagined audience (I know I do) to whom we are trying to reach, to touch, to move. When the work feels like it is speaking to us directly, that imagined author becomes much more specific. We may start to feel that we know them, even though we don’t; what we’re really doing is making a god in our image, or in the image of the god we need. This is natural, and it isn’t just about the artist being a good liar or about our appreciation of craft; it’s about what’s going on inside of us in response to that art.
What happens to that when we learn information about the real artist—not necessarily even damning information about her character as in Munro’s case? I think, inevitably, that our relationship with the art changes. I don’t see how it couldn’t.
Let’s take the Tennessee Williams example. Let’s say it’s 1983 and you go to see a revival screening of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and find yourself powerfully engaged by the work, moved by Brick’s story, which resonates with you, and deeply impressed by the acting and production values. Then you learn the history of how the film differed from the stage play, and how the stage play itself evolved from Williams’s original intentions. You know that in the original play Brick was conceived as a closeted gay man and that Williams tried to be true to the complexities of that position, and to the complexities of Maggie’s position as well. You now know, in effect, that there were multiple authors of this work with different intentions and different motives, some of them in direct conflict with each other, even the ones motivated by sincere concern to make the work stronger.
How can learning all of this not affect your relationship to the work? How can it not affect your relationship to sexuality, for that matter, if you take it seriously? Part of why I think Williams’s original is superior to the other versions is precisely that I am engaged by his artistic intentions, after all, by the problem he’s wrangling with, which requires attention to see. I’m not saying everyone would respond the same way—my hypothetical viewer from 1983 might respond by being grossed out upon learning that Brick was originally written as a closeted gay man, and determined never to see anything else written by Tennessee Williams. But could you possibly remain unaffected in any way? I don’t think so.
I think the same thing is true of Munro. We’ve now learned something deeply disturbing about her character. Can we ignore that fact when we read her? Perhaps, if you engaged in the extreme flight of fancy, and imagined a new author for the book entirely, something that a New York Times ad once suggested its readers might be doing with the Harry Potter books, so as to dissociate them from J. K. Rowling’s opinions about gender ideology. If the work is strong enough and the author distant enough from us (like the Bible or Shakespeare), that kind of thing could be a generative source of strong misreadings. But by far the more natural thing to do is to assimilate the new information to the imagined author we were carrying around with us as we read.
Or, as in the case of my imagined conservative viewer of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to throw the thing away in disgust, which I’m sure some readers of Munro feel themselves obliged to do. If they’re doing it for political reasons, I think DeBoer has put paid to their pretensions. But if they’re doing it for personal reasons, I’m going to gently suggest that they reconsider, and instead make the difficult choice to read deeper, even at the price of contending with something unpleasant.
I confess, I’ve only read two books by Munro: The Beggar Maid and Dance of the Happy Shades. I enjoyed both books very much, but I’ve also retained only a fragmentary impressions of either of them—with one important exception. That exception is the story “Wild Swans.”
In it, a girl named Rose living in rural Ontario (like Munro) boards a train to travel to Toronto by herself for the first time. She is warned beforehand by her stepmother, Flo, about “White Slavers” who might lure her with honeyed words or even a disguise (pretending to be a member of the clergy, for example), then kidnap her and turn her into a sex slave. Rose thinks her stepmother is being dramatic, but wouldn’t you know it: not long into Rose’s trip a man sits down next to her, tells her he’s a minister in mufti, appears to fall asleep on the seat beside her, and then, slowly but surely, under the cover of a strategically-placed newspaper and her own coat, maneuvers his hand onto her leg.
Please don’t. That was what she tried to say. She shaped the words in her mind, tried them out, then couldn’t get them past her lips. Why was that? The embarrassment, was it, the fear that people might hear? People were all around them, the seats were full.
It was not only that.
What else was it?
Curiosity. More constant, more imperious than any lust. A lust in itself, that will make you draw back and wait, wait too long, risk almost anything, just to see what will happen. To see what will happen.
What happens? The man’s hand migrates upward, to the top of her stockings, to between her legs which she still holds tightly crossed . . . until she opens them. We don’t get a physical description of what happens then, but between the descriptions of what Rose is seeing and thinking about it’s abundantly clear. When they pull into the station in Toronto, the minister “wakes up,” makes a brusk offer to help Rose with her coat, which she declines, and exits the train.
She did not see him in the station. She never saw him again in her life. But he remained on call, so to speak, for years and years, ready to slip into place at a critical moment, without even any regard, later on, for husbands or lovers. What recommended him? She could never understand it. His simplicity, his arrogance, his perversely appealing lack of handsomeness, even of ordinary grown-up masculinity? When he stood up she saw that he was shorter even than she had thought, that his face was pink and shiny, that there was something crude and pushy and childlike about him.
The story ends with Rose imagining copying an old colleague of her stepmother’s who checked into a hotel under an assumed name, pretending to be a movie star whom she slightly resembled. “She thought it would be an especially fine thing, to manage a transformation like that,” Rose thinks to herself. “To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.”
There are a great many things I could say about this story. Start with the fact that, although I have never been a girl on a train with a man’s hand creeping up my leg, I found it psychologically persuasive. I believed that Munro had successfully imagined her way into the mind of such a girl—not all girls, but a girl with a persuasive reality to her—with her mix of disinclination to cause a fuss or offend the man combined with a fear akin to what Milan Kundera said about fear of heights, that it is actually fear of the desire to jump. Munro was, in that sense, bringing “news,” telling me something about what the world contains, and I appreciated it deeply for that. (I also think she got the man dead to rights, but what’s notable about that is mostly that she didn’t cheat in describing him in order to make the girl more persuasive.) All of this is what Daum is talking about when she talks about great writers having “uncommonly acute levels of awareness about the contradictory forces of the human condition.”
I also think there’s a metaphor operating in the story, since Rose ultimately becomes a writer, about giving in to that fearful impulse to jump, letting oneself be ravished, penetrated by a character, a story, letting the work take control, the sense of violation this involves and the necessity for a writer to allow it to happen. That violation leaves a permanent mark but also opens the door to transformation. I might even suggest that Munro is connecting the literal and the metaphorical here, that Rose’s experience is supposed to be a key signpost on the road to her turning into a writer.
I could say all of that. But in the wake of what I’ve just learned, I cannot help but also say: “Wild Swans” was published in 1978, two years after Munro’s husband, Gerald Femlin, sexually assaulted her daughter.
What is the significance of that fact? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? But it’s only the question if the life of the actual person Alice Munro is part of the discussion of the work of Alice Munro, if we don’t rigorously separate the art from the artist. And it’s also only a question if we keep reading her.
Reading the story in light of the new information about Munro, I can’t help but wonder about Munro’s attraction to Femlin. She clearly didn’t know about his abuse of her daughter (her reaction when Skinner told her about it makes that pretty clear) but that doesn’t mean his character was an utter mystery to her. I don’t find it implausible that there was some connection between what made him most awful and what made him most compelling to her, the very conjunction that feels like it is at the heart of Rose’s reaction in the story. I find myself wondering, as well, about Munro’s own history; I had wondered before, when I read the story, whether she’d had an experience like Rose’s, but now I can’t help but wonder about that not only as a background question about why she wrote “Wild Swans,” and wrote it as she did, but why she was drawn to Femlin. It’s also possible, though I doubt it, that Munro told the story as a kind of conscious tease, and that possibility tells a very different story about Munro, and the purpose her fiction might have served for her.
DeBoer and Daum both agree that fiction writers, and artists generally, are liars, but I would argue that this understates the case. We’re all liars. We’re liars when we lie, of course, and often enough examining our lies is the way to discover the truths we know but are actively trying to hide. But we’re liars when we tell the truth, too, because then we’re vulnerable enough to reveal the lies we’ve told ourselves, the ones we don’t even know we’ve told. Most fundamentally, we’re all liars because we’re all continuously engaged in telling stories, about ourselves and about others, ones that strategically leave some things out and distort others, simply because without doing those things you can’t actually tell a story, and we can’t make sense of the world without stories. This is a key reason why we read stories in fact, why we get satisfaction out of putting ourselves in the hands of masters of that art, why the best stories colonize our minds and warp our perception of the world and our self-perception around them: because this is something we’re doing anyway, as a condition of living, and great story tellers do it better than we can. That being the case, we have to learn to read deeply, not only if we want to understand the stories we read but if we want to understand ourselves. If we want to read deeply, we can’t shut out voices like Munro’s when we learn information about the author that suggests we’ve been reading them wrong all along, and we can’t shut out the information either.
I’m not confused about the can of worms I’m potentially opening up for myself. I’ve got a film in post-production with all kinds of “emotional complexity” in it; when it comes out, do I want viewers speculating about me and my personal history as they assess it? Heck, I made a short film years ago with a story that could live on the same shelf as “Wild Swans.” Do I want to be asked whether that film is telling a lie that reveals a truth or a truth that reveals a lie? No, I do not.
But I’m a reader too—a critic, in fact—and part of telling the truth in that capacity requires me to open that can. I wrote a long piece once at the height of the #MeToo era about Louis CK and Woody Allen, keyed to the pulling of Louis CK’s film, I Love You, Daddy in the wake of revelations about how he had repeatedly exposed himself to female comics. I felt, watching the film, that both kinds of lie were in play, that Louis CK was engaging in a dance, both wanting to reveal himself and wanting to hide, wanting to revel in having pulled the wool over our eyes and wanting to be chased, cornered and exposed. I find the dance fascinating—I recognize it in myself—but I thought it was dangerous for him, as an artist. The whole essay was effectively an extended note to him, urging him to be vulnerable enough to tell the truth so that we could see the lie, not to lie and hope we don’t see the truth. I’m still quite proud of that piece—but I recognize that it, too, was written to an imagined author whom I invented, since I don’t actually know the real one.
I’m doing the same thing, in my own mind and in this essay, with Alice Munro, and for my purposes, as opposed to the moralists whom DeBoer skewers, it doesn’t matter that she’s dead. It only matters that I’m not, that I am alive and eager for more life and more populated world. That is, fundamentally, why I’m willing to continue to spend time with someone who has done something horrible, whether that someone is a character or the author who created them: because it expands my world. If you’re happy with a smaller world for yourself, if that’s where your comfort zone lies, that’s your business—and I don’t fault you in the slightest; there are plenty of things I reject because they are outside of my comfort zone. Just don’t kid yourself that you’re doing something different, neither that you’re changing the world nor even that you’re preserving yourself from contamination. Indeed, I suspect that if we shield the work by people we have decided to shun from our critical reflection, and leave that work’s native strength intact, we’ll wind up empowering the very monsters we imagine ourselves to be slaying, not only as they continue to roam among the souls of those who are not so squeamish as we, but even in ourselves.
Speaking of monsters, though, there’s one more matter to address. I mentioned above that “Wild Swans” read to me, when I first encountered it, as in part an allegory of the artistic process. There’s something monstrous about that idea, though, and it raises the question on which Daum ends her essay on Munro:
[W]as Alice Munro an art monster or just a monster?
Perhaps the question should be flipped around: Was Alice Munro a monster? Or just an art monster?
Where does one end and the other begin? And why does this both matter immensely and not matter at all?
What is an “art monster” as opposed to an ordinary, unartistic “monster?” An art monster, as I understand it from having seen the phrase in various contexts, including Daum’s, is someone who behaves in what we would normally call an abominably selfish manner—neglecting their children, abusing the trust of their partners, tyrannically dominating their environment, exposing their loved ones to contempt and ridicule—for the sake of art. Sometimes the monstrousness is in the private behavior and sometimes the art itself (Sally Mann’s photos, Philip Roth’s novels) can be reasonably described as exploitative or cruel. The question—often asked by women artists about themselves—is whether it is possible to be a great artist without being a monster, without indulging a kind of abominable selfishness, because that selfishness is really a sacrifice to the muse, who must be appeased like fertility gods always must, because without her favor art won’t grow.
The question Daum is asking, then, is whether Munro’s monstrousness is intimately related to her art, or whether it was incidental to it. Did she have to be selfish to be an artist and, once she had cultivated that selfishness, was she inevitably going to sacrifice her daughter to her own desires (whatever the nature of those desires or their origin in her personal history)? Did she perhaps have to make this sacrifice in particular—was Fremlin someone she needed for artistic reasons, whether for the erotic energy he unleashed or for the abyss she saw in his soul? For that matter, the very things that Sheila Heti praises Munro for—for doing her own thing at all times and refusing to play the games that other writers are prone to play to get ahead—were those things implicated in the same aspects of her personality that turned a cold shoulder to her abused daughter? Or is all of that wrong, and we can readily separate art monstrosity from ordinary monstrosity, be selfish of our time and energy, peremptory in our asserted right to every story and image we encounter in the world, yet still remain human in our off hours?
I don’t know the answer in Munro’s case any more than Daum does, though I can’t help thinking about it just as she can’t. I do know why the question matters in the general case, though: because human beings desperately need art, to make it and to be ravished by it. Yet human beings also need to be human beings. Those of us human beings who are or would be artists most of all need to see clearly what that entails, and what it does not entail, and yes, the demands of art make that seeing difficult sometimes. As a “moderation in all things” type, I want to believe that even art monstrosity can be kept somewhat in bounds, and separated from garden-variety monstrosity. I try to live that way, as a person and as an artist.
I hope I do, anyway, and I hope I’m right. But wishing doesn’t make it so, and if I didn’t admit Alice Munro’s example gave me a bit of a chill in that regard, I would be lying.