Alice Munro died recently. She was a famous Canadian short-story writer who got the Literature Nobel Prize in 2013. I have never read a story of hers and I severely doubt I’ll ever make time for it, but I have certainly read things about her. More precisely I’ve read the accusations that she more or less ignored the sexual abuse her second husband inflicted upon one of her children, Andrea Skinner.
People have been calling Munro all sorts of things as a result of this incident, but I must say the whole scandal seems mildly unfair to me. For example, I think that the girl’s biological father is arguably more to blame than Munro is. A sane, well functioning man will jump at the opportunity to kill someone who abused his daughter. That Skinner’s father didn’t is just proof of the depravity inherent in mild-mannered boomer liberalism, but there’s no need for this to become a political tract.
The banal fact is that women, I am sorry, simply cannot be relied on to confront the men they love when they harm their children, as the statistics on sexual abuse attest to. It also seems to be true that nobody in the fawning literary circles Munro moved in ever as much as mentioned the abuse, despite it being something of an open secret and the abuser being convicted of pedophilia in the early 2000s.
In short, Munro’s archetypical helplessness seems to me less terrible than the father’s spinelessness and the fawning complicity of the media and intelligentsia, not to mention the rest of the family. As I’ve implied, a good amount of otherwise decent women will fall into this calamitous position given enough vulnerability. Munro, of course, acted wrongly and inflicted terrible pain on an innocent girl, her daughter, but, as I said, it seems unfair to dump it all on her.
I wonder if this episode will bury Munro’s memory. My best guess is that it won’t. Not because the public forgives, although that it can certainly do, but because the mere passage of time would most likely be enough to erase her.
Despite being constantly compared to Chekhov, Munro, with all probability, was no Chekhov. Most Nobel prize winners are mediocre writers; most of the people the New York newspapers and magazines praise are, in fact, not very remarkable. It is true that I haven’t read her, so she may be an incredible gem, but there are very good reasons to suspect, a priori, this isn’t the case. Simply put, since the human race only bothers to respect and remember a miniscule sample of all the writing produced by the past, it is smart to assume the median text is closer to being dreck than to being worthwhile. The conclusion I draw is obvious and unoriginal: you are better off reading highbrow books that at least some people have always cared for than trying out the latest offerings.
There is, however, something to the Chekhov comparison.
One further reason that I suppose this affair doesn’t fill me with self-righteousness is that very many writers are at least mildly depraved. Tolstoy was overbearing, hypocritical, and had an illegitimate child he didn’t do much for. Dostoevsky mostly meant bad news for the women in his life, a significant part of which he spent addicted to gambling. Houellebecq is most certainly some sort of sex pest. Yukio Mishima was insane. Céline felt very strong about a certain Semitic race and openly cheered on while it was being destroyed. Joseph Roth enjoyed two things: lying and drinking. Sholokhov became a communist apparatchik1, which is certainly not worse than Sartre’s or very many other leftist intellectuals’ apalling apologetics, under zero pressures, for mass murdering regimes from Luanda to Vladivostok. Very many famous poets went around as serial heartbreakers, which I suppose isn’t too terrible, unless you think about how awful it feels like to have your heart broken, especially in a society where you were supposed to marry at 20 and love a single person for life.
Only a very particular sort of person devotes his life to intellectual pursuits. Sometimes the offending writer isn’t even callous, just plainly unreliable or irresponsible, too concerned with petty matters. Not a decent person, in general. A character whimsical, colorful, not the sort of person society depends on, but the sort of person that may only exist in reasonably advanced civilizations that offer tolerance for the impractically-minded.
But that’s not Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. In the convoluted world of fin de siècle Russian intellectual life, Chekhov stands out for his inordinate decency, for his status as the obvious adult in the room. Tolstoy was getting drunk on messianic fantasies, as was Gorky, as was, I come to realize, everyone else. But he was too sober for any of that.
His father was a former serf, a physically abusive man who went bankrupt before Anton could finish his studies. He put himself through high-school and medical school and later assumed financial responsibility for the entire family. Ultimately, that’s what pushed him into writing: a need for money, as medicine wasn’t a very respected profession in Imperial Russia and Chekhov spent much of his time treating poor patients free of charge.
In his work, he does not shy away from depicting humans as the corrupted, fallible creatures we are, yet there is forgiveness and pity for all. His work is moral without ever being moralizing and hopeless without ever falling prey to dramatism. This is the pathos of everyday life, the lyricism of small anxieties.
Chekhov’s life was devoid of grand gestures. He has no great novel, no great love, no great philosophy. He wasn’t even to live a long life, succumbing to tuberculosis in his 40s. He had moderate liberal politics, ideas that had long ceased to excite anyone. Gary Saul Morson calls him a poet of loneliness, a man who is always skeptical of the possibility that two human beings can understand each other; the gulf is always too vast.
Nonetheless, Chekhov is one of the most extraordinary writers anyone may ever read, a giant of little stories. His name, I am completely certain, will be remembered for as long as humans possess memory. We won’t remember him, however, because he was a decent, kind man, but because he was a genius. There is no need to be starry-eyed about this. But isn’t it wonderful to think that it is possible for these two, sometimes so very contradictory tendencies, to coexist in a single soul?
To my mind, it is better to spend time thinking of those so obviously more beautiful than ourselves. Tomorrow I’ll forget about Munro, as will everyone else. Only the good is eternal; everything else is fleeting.
Much to his credit, this broke him.