Literary Quandaries

I had another post all lined up and ready to go for today, but the recent week has given me so much to think about that a follow-up to last week’s piece on quiet books felt more important.

As I unpack decades of boxes of books, my bookshelves are starting to fill—but I am not even halfway through. Also, I have populated my shelves with many of my daughter’s childhood bunnies, which she threatened to discard. How could I throw out these bunnies, whose names and stories I still remember, who were for so long members of the family? So they live in my books.

I want to talk about three writers who have been on my mind all week.

Wallace Stegner

Because I spend so much energy trying to protect my time from the world, I am not always aware of significant literary revelations and discussions. Fortunately, this week I had my writer friend Kate Evans to alert me to what I have overlooked. She sent me two links that I will share with you, both to stories about how much Stegner plagiarized and appropriated from the life of Mary Hallock Foote. Her story inspired and is literally part of Angle of Repose. Her words even gave him that title. Reading the two pieces below, one in Alta and one in The New Yorker, rage boiled up in me so hot my hair caught fire. He didn’t just base the book on Foote, he used her very words. Without attribution. Many of the words I had found so evocative and moving were not his at all. Yet he won the Pulitzer Prize and Foote sank into obscurity, despite the fact that her life offers a portrait of a woman far more interesting than Stegner’s Susan. The writers in these two pieces speak more eloquently about this than I can, so I hope you will read them. As Roxana Robinson writes in the New Yorker, “Many of us have written something based on a story we’ve heard. But there’s a difference between basing a novel on someone else’s story and using someone else’s written account of that story.” Stegner was unable to use his own imagination to create memorable words, he became a mere stenographer of Foote’s.

https://www.altaonline.com/books/fiction/a39179237/wallace-stegner-mary-hallock-foote-plagarism/

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wallace-stegner-and-the-trap-of-using-other-peoples-writing

This has put a damper on my enthusiasm for the book. Every time a particularly lyrical passage appears, I think—his? Or hers? I find myself growing increasingly impatient with the Susan he creates, who is snobbish, controlling, and ungenerous. She insists that her husband Oliver forget what he wants to do and do what she wants him to, and hates him for being what she knew he was when she married him. She is a woman who feels created by a man. Stegner has turned the fascinating Foote into a nagging harpy. It’s not a flattering portrait.

Both Angle of Repose and Passing to Safety feature women who are modern Lady Macbeth’s in their fierce ambitions for their husbands. Both Susan and Charity are obsessed with turning their husbands into someone these husbands do not want to be. Their wrongheaded ideas about their husbands smother their dreams and warp their relationships. It’s clear to me why women of that time, of any time before now and even now in most of the world, would become so involved in the careers of their husbands. They were allowed no grand ambitions of their own. They were not expected to build a career, to seek validation through their work, to find creative ways to support themselves. They had to do it by proxy or not at all.

Unusual for her time, Foote had both an exciting career and a happy marriage. This would have made for more interesting reading than a woman constantly trying to make her mining engineer of a husband into a success at a literary salon.

I just ordered Mary Hallock Foote’s memoir, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. I would rather hear the story from her.

Alice Munro

I was sitting at a table in the shade of a café in a neighboring town when I first read the news about Alice Munro. I won’t use the word shocked, as it is more appropriate to say that I felt a devastation, a grief. My emotions were a reaction to what she did as a human, not as a writer. I know all too well that writers and filmmakers and artists of all kinds have been and are monstrous. Perhaps no more so than the general public, certainly not less so. Yet I decided many years ago that if I were going to avoid the work of monsters in an effort to keep my absorption of the arts somehow “pure,” I would end up with nothing to read or observe. The art-artist debate is an old one and this is not my main concern. I have chosen not to limit my consumption of the arts. I still feel shaken by revelations of this kind, I still require time to absorb each one, to figure out what it means. But I feel this way after reading about any person who has done something like what Munro did.

After reading Andrea Skinner’s essay and the other articles, I sat there in front of my cooling allongé unable to go on with my own writing, her story still resonating in my gut. Here are her own words:

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/my-stepfather-sexually-abused-me-when-i-was-a-child-my-mother-alice-munro-chose/article_8415ba7c-3ae0-11ef-83f5-2369a808ea37.html

I feel enraged by what Munro did to her daughter. (My own daughter’s response: “Mom, why are people terrible?”). Not because I have been let down by a famous writer. Her career is irrelevant here. I would feel the same about any parent who did this to a child. I’ve read dozens of thorough and thoughtful responses to the news, including Canadian writer Leah McLaren’s account of interviewing Alice Munro’s first husband, Jim Munro. Here’s a link:

'Alice has a lot to answer for'

She points out that he is even more culpable, given that he knew about the abuse much earlier and still kept sending his daughter back to her abuser. I agree with this. She points out that we get angry at female geniuses for being flawed but not male geniuses. Also true. And still, I cannot bring myself to forgive her. I want to bring her back to life so I can interrogate her, force her to acknowledge the pain she has caused. I want to bring her husband back to life so that he can be punished. I want Jim Munro punished for sending his child to a rapist for holidays.

I cannot fathom an intelligent or loving woman reading her husband’s horrific explanation that he was a “Humbert Humbert”—in an unapologetic epistle confessing pedophilia—and choosing to stay with him. Choosing to nestle into the arms of a child molester at night. The arms of a man who has confessed a preference for pre-pubescent bodies. The arms of a man who had harmed her daughter. It makes me wonder what was done to Alice that made her think this was what she deserved. What hold did this man have on Munro? This almost makes my brain explode. I recognize that these things happen. That there are reasons. I just cannot understand them. Nor will I. I didn’t know any of these people, and I know it’s impossible to understand a marriage or family from the outside.

McLaren says if Munro were a better parent, we wouldn’t have her work. But I don’t require her to be a perfect parent. I’m pretty forgiving of parenting failures and deeply invested in women having time for their own work. But there is a difference between being merely unavailable to a child and sleeping with her molester. I could not love a pedophile, could not share my body or life with him. I would want him locked up and kept far from the world. I could not imagine placing my love for a man over the safety of my child. So, I will never understand. Maybe I don’t want to. I do not want to place myself in a mind capable of such things.

Yet I would never consider boycotting her work. Munro’s work is not less valuable because of this. I will continue to read her. But the ghost of a nine-year-old child will haunt the pages.

On a happier note:

Maggie Smith

This week I have been absorbed in Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I want to dogear every evocative, poetic page. I want to shake her ex-husband until his teeth rattle for his failure to support and celebrate Smith’s successes. I want to throttle her ex-husband’s lawyer who put air quotes around the word “work” when referring to Smith’s very real work. As if writing were not a job.

While I love every page, I am perhaps most fascinated by her description of life in a place she has lived since birth. She has always lived in Ohio, she never speaks of a desire to be anywhere else. I find myself hungry to know what this is like. What is it like to stay? What is it like to be happy where you are? To never want to leave? She describes how her memories layer over each other, how places in her town offer constant reminders of her past, both recent and distant. I am always leaving my memories behind, continents away. I never walk past reminders of my past. I muse on what this means, what I have lost.

When she talks about the kindness of her neighbors, about roller-skating in a friend’s driveway, I am envious. She has friends who actually live near her! People who bake her cakes and take her dancing! Her dearest friends are right there, within reach! Not only that, she has remained near her parents, and talks with her mother most days. I don’t know what that feels like, to inhabit a place so deeply and completely. To be surrounded by longterm community. I will never know.

This doesn’t mean I would alter my choices, my restless nature. Nor could I change my past. But I do feel a longing to know what it is like to have long and close relationships with friends who live near me and who stay near me for decades.

Imagine never having to move! So many days and weeks and months of our lives have been eaten up by the process of moving and moving and moving. Even now, we are unpacking boxes of childhood things from my parents’ attic that I shipped here ten years ago, boxes of our things from Bolivia, boxes from London. Mostly we are trying to get rid of it all, to make space in our currently cluttered lives. (If you need any dishes, glasses, or maybe an ice cream maker, come by, we will burden you with gifts). Our things from Uzbekistan are arriving soon. So many more boxes. The mere thought of them makes me feel claustrophobic, crushed by the task ahead of us. But we are determined to unclutter, to free ourselves from everything we do not need. To give them to people who might need them. The only things I am unwilling to part with are my letters—so many letters, from so many people in so many countries! I am so grateful for these reminders of my connections to people—my journals, and my books. Reading all of these reminds me of friends I have forgotten, of how many people have cared about me enough to write, many of them often.

The rest can go. And should. A cursory look at my Facebook history will tell you I wear only the same three dresses over and over anyway, and the rest of the time I am in yoga/hiking clothes.

Smith worries about maintaining consistency for her children after her husband abandons the family. Yet she gives them so much consistency, more consistency that I can imagine giving a child. If she were to ever read this, I want to reassure her that what she gives her kids is more than enough, in all ways. That it is possible for children to switch countries (and bedrooms, friends, languages, cultures, schools) every few years, as mine has, and thrive. Smith’s love for her children, apparent on every page, is all the consistency they need.

In a section titled “The Material,” Smith addresses a question that is always on my own mind. “How can this story—this experience—be useful to anyone other than me?” I ask this every time I sit down to write this newsletter. How can my experiences as a writer, a reader, a traveler, a cancer patient, and a parent help anyone? What do I have to offer? Because I want there to be something for you in what I write.

Thus I was comforted by her response to her own question: “I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you, I need to trust that you know what to do with it. / Here, take it. Is this enough? This is my material.”

I cannot say it better.