The above catchy heading was suggested by a book, Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, by a comedian, Laurie Kilmartin, whose stand-up always makes me laugh. She has also live-tweeted her mom's last days, dying remotely of Covid on a screen Kilmartin held, and written a "joke book" about her dad's time in hospice with terminal cancer. Hilarious!
Oh, and the part about Alice Munro, Canadian short story writer and Nobel laureate, is because after her recent death it became widely known that she had stayed with her second husband after her daughter had made it plain to her that he had sexually abused her when she was a pre-teen. Without getting into the details, the daughter basically took a him-or-me position, and the winner of the Nobel Prize chose him. It wasn't a he-said, she-said. He acknowledged that it had happened, and his accounts attempted to impute blame upon a 9-year-old.
Munro's many admirers have taken the news hard. Her status as a Canadian cultural icon has suffered. University literature departments are re-evaluating her place in the curriculum. In a way, this seems silly to me. Not a word in her fiction is altered. If it was this good then, that's still how good it is now. Yet as a reader I feel a twinge, too. It's akin, I think, to the sensation of watching on TV a superlative athletic performance, and then feeling disappointed when, in the post-game interview, the hero reveals himself to be a dope or a crank.
The error seems to lie in a tendency to think that human excellence flows across borders between different realms of activity and competence. The opposite might more nearly be true. Blind people tend to develop other senses well beyond what's normal. What if people born with unusual gifts in a certain direction end up stunted elsewhere? They can't escape the tunneling effect of their "genius." In this regard, I always think of Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists ever, but he also believed in alchemy, possessed religious beliefs considered bizarre by atheists as well as the orthodox, and, as a man of science alive during a time of plague, put forward the following therapy:
. . . the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with varied insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison.
An odd detail in the journalistic exposures of Munro's private failings is that she never learned to drive. She couldn't, or wouldn't, protect and nurture her daughter, nor could she get herself from Point A to Point B. It seems the two were related. Her second husband might have been at least a part-time monster, but over time she got comfortable with him, and she also depended upon him to cope with all the ordinary challenges of life that a genius couldn't be troubled with. On a second marriage in middle age, her mind probably on fire with her own projects, she wasn't going to start over again.
Comments