Baron Wormser: Complicity | On Alice Munro

I have read many of Alice Munro’s stories but not all of them. I like to feel some are still waiting for me. A conceit on my part at my age but then again, maybe not. They may be dark yet illuminating presences I will welcome down the uncertain road. As to the ones I’ve read, and, again, it seems important to note every telling quirk, even of readership, given that Munro was so taken with every telling quirk, not unto eccentricity, just unto mundane mania, the one for me that takes it to the utmost limit –and one could almost sponsor a contest in that regard – is “Child’s Play” from the incongruously titled volume “Too Much Happiness.” 

   In that story, two girls of nine or ten drown a somewhat older girl who is, in the terminology of the story, a “special,” as in special education. The two girls have met at summer camp and due to their showing up wearing identical hats and having first names that rhyme – Marlene and Charlene – they become instant pals (“twins”) who compare notes on everything, a female bonding endeavor the story’s  narrator, Marlene, admits that she never quite got with as an adult, which tells you about Marlene, an anthropologist who is, despite her competent tone, a stranger, an outsider, and, like Camus’ famous protagonist, a murderer. Or perhaps she is a stranger because of that tone, because of a certain acquiescence to society on the part of someone who studies societies elsewhere. Or perhaps she is merely human – a shuddering category.

   As a girl, Marlene encounters Verna, the girl whom, eventually, she takes a part in drowning, as a neighbor of sorts. Verna does things that disturb Marlene such as trying to shove peppermints down her throat and having a “hoarse and unmodulated” voice. Verna’s words come out “oddly separated, as if they were chunks of language caught in her throat.” It is her very being that disturbs Marlene the most, however. She puts it thus: “I suppose I hated her as some people hate snakes or caterpillars or mice or slugs. For no decent reason. Not for any certain harm she could do but for the way she could disturb your innards, and make you sick of your life.” Verna carries some existential contagion. As an anthropologist Marlene would be aware that such people could be scapegoats and that ritual actions might be performed to rid the tribe of the contagion. Munro does not go to this place in the course of Marlene’s thoughts about what happened. The anthropology is all implied. Human behavior can be put under endless microscopes but raw feeling remains – hate, for instance. In Munro’s words “something that clings.”

   The murder does not occur until the end of the story. Before then we learn that the narrator in her adult life hears from Charlene, whom she never saw again after those two weeks, about a book she wrote entitled Idiots and Idols about “the attitude of people in various cultures . . . towards people who are mentally and physically unique.” Later, (Munro, as usual, is adroitly casual about the river of time) she receives a letter from Charlene’s husband informing her that Charlene is in the hospital, dying of cancer, and is “very keen” to see Marlene. The husband describes Charlene as “your old childhood buddy,” a phrase that typifies the ghastly irony the story is dotted with like so much unhappy, well-meaning sugar. (In the early part of the story Marlene’s mother acts as a sort of chorus in this regard as she tells Marlene that Verna “only wants to play.”) 

   Marlene visits her long-ago “twin” in the hospital but she is unconscious. The nurse on duty gives Marlene a note from Charlene that tells Marlene to get in touch with a priest named Father Hofstrader. Marlene drives to a cathedral outside of Toronto (“though someone told me later it was not actually a cathedral”) and learns that the priest is “on vacation.” The “stout young priest” with whom Marlene talks says he will get in touch with Father Hofstrader who “has not been well.” We learn no more about what happens to the dying Charlene and her desire to speak to this priest who, according to the note “will know what to do.” 

   How Marlene responds to this errand demands being quoted in full; “Was I not tempted during all this palaver? Not once? You’d think that I might break open, be wise to break open, glimpsing that vast though tricky forgiveness. But no. It’s not for me. What’s done is done. Flocks of angels, tears of blood notwithstanding.” Earlier in the story Marlene goes over the history of her love life and has this to say: “What I mean by ‘important’ is that with those three – no, two only, the third meaning a great deal more to me than I to him – with those two, then, the time would come when you want to split open, surrender far more than your body, dump your whole life safely into one basket with his.” Marlene resists this impulse “but just barely.” “It seems” that she “was not entirely convinced of that safety.”  She is a woman who is determined to keep her own counsel, who is determined to avoid the “palaver” girls and women are subjected to in the name of making nice, getting along, and parroting much oppressive wisdom. 

   As I noted, Munro gives us the drowning at the end of the story not – as many writers would do – at the beginning. Marlene and Charlene are not far out in the lake where the campers swim. It is the final day of camp, parents are arriving, and a certain amount of distraction is natural. Verna, whom Marlene has turned into a near-ogress in her imagination and thus in Charlene’s, comes near the girls, perhaps to play with them in her “special” way: “Her head did not break the surface.” The girls seize her rubber bathing cap and hold the head down, which “was determined to rise, like a dumpling in a stew.” (Munro’s capacity for these similes is something like frightening.) The bathing cap had a “raised pattern that made it less slippery,” thus making the cap itself complicit in the girls’ deed. We learn from Marlene, when she looks back at the event, that it was “as if we were doing what was – amazingly –demanded of us, as if this was the absolute high point, the culmination in our lives, of our being ourselves.” The scene ends with the “woman in charge of the Specials running around” having realized that one of her charges is missing. Someone spots “something out there in the water.” The narrator has the last word: “But I believe we were gone by then.” The “we” is crucial – accomplices who will never talk about what they have done. 

   Munro has been likened to Chekhov but if one is looking at Russians the pertinent one seems to me to be Dostoevsky, who pops up (coincidentally or not) in the title story “Too Much Happiness.” In  “Child’s Play” (the title being another grisly irony) we have a crime. What is the punishment? In any legal sense, there is none. As far as human spirit is concerned, we don’t learn about what Charlene has gone through in the course of her life nor, when she is dying, do we learn about what is, presumably, a troubled conscience. We do learn that the camp the girls attend is operated by the United Church of Canada and distinguished by “its hearty secular style.” The “half-hour special talk” (yes, “special”) that the girls attend after breakfast, known as the “Chat,” is “relatively free of references to God or Jesus and was more about honesty and loving-kindness and clean thoughts in our daily lives, and promising never to drink or smoke when we grew up.” Religion is, thus, a “backdrop,” a yawn distinguished by uplift and a few mild admonitions. One can hear Dostoevsky howling in that backdrop: “See what happens when you dilute and abandon religion. See what happens. You are in that modern place that is worse than nowhere. You are damned. You lack even the wit to understand your damnation.” 

   But the story is Munro’s not Dostoevsky’s. Munro’s narrator will not be cowed into having a conscience she does not have. What the girls did was not “wickedness.” It was instinct. And who is to judge instinct? To be sure, society has many judgments to make about instincts, but as Marlene drives toward the supposed cathedral to track down the priest, she is more concerned with the traffic, getting gas, and needing to use the toilet. The mundane cannot be forsaken. The bathing cap had those easy to grip ridges, though Marlene “never deciphered the pattern – a fish, a mermaid, a flower.” And beneath the mundane is the primal, a place we typically don’t want to look at for very long, if at all, that place where our “innards” dwell in darkness. To my mind, the implication is clear: we are free to “palaver,” but we will never sort ourselves out. 

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   The revelation by Alice Munro’s youngest daughter that she was sexually abused by her stepfather, Munro’s second husband, and that Munro came to know about it and refused to speak honestly to it, has understandably disturbed Munro’s many readers. We want to put people we admire on a pedestal. A word that comes up often about Munro is “revered.” One can still revere the writer – writing is writing, as Pound and Céline among others make plain – but one need not revere the person, who as a fallible human may act badly, to say nothing of very badly, as in harboring a criminal and not listening to one’s own daughter. What strikes me, however, beyond the likeness of the daughter’s tale to a Munro story is that throughout the stories a great struggle is going on. The struggle, at its deepest level, a level that makes Munro such a compelling writer, rests in acknowledging the power of complicity, how it is almost like water, flowing into every human crevice, defining relations between any two people, any group, any societal imperative, and how demeaning yet sometimes thrilling and even comforting it can be.  Often, but not always (as with Marlene and Charlene), the complicity is enforced by men, whether intentionally or merely because they are men in a patriarchal world. The wariness the narrator in “Child’s Play” feels about opening herself up to a man and surrendering and splitting open are not to be taken as mere words. The anguish runs deep, as do the questions. Who to trust? Where does a person turn in a resolutely secular world in which each individual is set up as a self-expert? Is complicity a sort of badge women must wear? Or hide? Is complicity an inevitable price we all pay to live in the world? As in life, how steep the price may be varies. “What’s done is done” is very steep. Munro knew first-hand the steep price. 

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry, 2023).