Christopher Isherwood and Alice Munro: What To Make Of Them

 I have not read Christopher Isherwood, only seen Cabaret. What escaped me was why he was so important. Escaping the bonds of class and ‘the heterosexual dictatorship’ from The Brisbane Time leaves me still undecided about Isherwood.

Isherwood seems like he might have been as denigrated in his day as Alice Munro has become after she died this year.

Monstrous Things: Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, and the nature of fiction—what does our inability to forgive do to our ability to confess? by Allan Stratton and published on Quillette takes on the Alice Munro controversy. He starts from a different point than any other I have read.

Crime and Punishment illustrates how the creative process works, the benefits that fiction provides society, and why we read novels (and watch theatre and film) in the first place. It also exposes the cultural ignorance behind attempts from across the political spectrum to cancel books and authors for their alleged ideological and moral failings. These attacks—especially shocking when they come from readers, fellow novelists, English departments, and others who ought to know better—target the core value of the humanities.

Stories take us out of ourselves so that we can see ourselves. When they reflect our lives, they bring us comfort by reminding us that we are not alone. When they deal with difficult subjects, they help us to explore our fears and past traumas from the safe distance of an imagined space. And as they entertain and enlighten us, they enrich our imaginations, deepen our compassion for the unlovable, and reveal the hidden sides of our nature.

Which does make sense when we get here:

To understand others, we must understand ourselves. To create believable, psychologically complex characters—especially when those characters are repellent and break social taboos—requires ruthless self-examination. This investigation manifests the novelist’s obsessions, flaws, and capacity for moral failure. Artists like Dostoevsky aren’t brave because they tackle difficult subjects; they’re brave because they expose themselves.

The essay details the history of the Munro controversy, which I will skip, and put in this paragraph:

Under the headline “Alice Munro betrayed us, and her legacy,” the Globe and Mail’s arts columnist Marsha Lederman went further: “Her stories cannot stay on our bookshelves. Now what are we to do? How can we read her again, ever? Her work will be viewed through a new lens—if further viewing can even be tolerated. Syllabuses, publishers’ plans, bookstore shelves—so much rearranging to do.” In a similar vein, the New York Times quotes Pulitzer finalist Rebecca Makkai: “These revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions. To me, that makes them unreadable at all.” This moral posturing, designed to bully all right-thinking people from reading or teaching Munro, is as shocking as it is self-aggrandising.

Moral posturing is right. What happened to the daughter was bad; no disputing that. Anyone reading this knows I am not walking on water any time soon, but there seems plenty who think they are ready to start walking on the closest waterway. I listen to Trump demonizing people; I hear the anti-Trumpists criticizing this demonizing for dividing the country. What are these critics of Munro doing other than demonizing the writer. Advocating the work does not mean we accept the treatment of her daughter. What we should be doing is learning from the life of Alice Munro, and doing our best not to think ourselves superior, but trying to not repeat her mistakes.