Oh, Alice

On the end table in Vinnie’s waiting room, opened, waiting for me was a magazine story about Alice Munro. The evening before, eating a perfect summer supper on the deck, a chicken cutlet sucked a crown right out of a rear molar. Luckily, I didn’t swallow it.

The next morning, I called Vinnie’s office. He would squeeze me in that afternoon at the same time as Dee’s cleaning. I was in his waiting room, my crown already replaced, waiting for Dee, when I saw Alice sitting next to me. What a shock. Just months after her death, Alice’s adult daughter had outed her as a mother who’d failed to protect her daughter from a sexual predator and had stayed married to a guy who'd abused her, apparently using her Nobel power to keep the “news” out of the media for years. 

Alice has been a favorite writer ever since Anne Wingate introduced us. It must have been in 1994 or 1995. Annie told me about Open Secrets, and I went right out and bought a copy. In hardback. I loved it. I reread my favorite story, “The Albanian Virgin,” half a dozen times. I was telling everyone about Alice long before she got her Nobel Prize. For years, I have been in the middle of, reading slowly, one of her story collections. When I went back to trying my hand at fiction writing, I reread her stories. I reread her sentences, trying to understand how she does what she does, how she makes time shift, and I tried not to be discouraged. “I’m never going to be able to write like Alice.” I’d laugh at myself. Alice has been writing all her life. I’ve been doing other things. Of course, I can’t write like Alice. She’s a Nobel laureate. 

The article in Vinnie’s waiting room is not what I expected. It’s not a paean to the life and prose of Alice Munro. It’s a trashing. I don't read the news often. I never watch the news on TV or listen on the radio, and I’d missed the Munro scandal. This story brought me back to my years in psychiatry, working with hospitalized adolescents.

What most of those kids had in common was a history of abuse, sometimes verbal, sometimes physical, but in more cases than I would ever have imagined, sexual. Dee and I worked together in those years, and we helped a lot of families heal, but it was an arduous journey, hard for the teenager, very hard for the perpetrator, sometimes even harder for the parent who had failed to protect. In so many cases, the parents wouldn’t do the healing work, leaving their child to travel the path to recovery alone. We tried to help.

Alice sounded like one of those parents unwilling to do the work. Where did this leave me as an Alice Munro adoring reader? As I was pondering this, I had what at first seemed a strange association. The 21st century koan for Zen teachers in America seems to be, “What do we do about our Dharma brothers and sisters who get involved sexually with their students?” After a sigh of relief – these students are almost always adults – the koan continues, “Is it possible to be a Zen teacher, even a great Zen teacher, and a ‘flawed’ human being?” Many people say, “No,” emphatically. They are not exactly saying that you must be a saint to be a Zen teacher, but they perceive a line marking off acceptable limits of non-saintliness.

There are many among my Dharma siblings who would rescind the transmission, the authority to teach, of offending Zen teachers. I have pushed back against this idea. The central element for me in the transmission ceremony has always been its totality, its finality. In making me a sensei, Bernie said he would support me wherever my path took me. Period. There was no suggestion that he would be keeping an eye on me and, if I strayed from the path he envisioned, he would withdraw my empowerment. The transmission was absolute and irrevocable.

Alice is teaching me something. I haven’t read any Alice since stumbling on the news of her parental failing. One of her books is, however, still on my nightstand. When will I read another story? What will I feel when reading? 

I can read or not read. It’s my choice. I know that. My father never wanted to listen to a great German, operatic tenor who had actively supported Hitler. I haven’t listened to him when I could avoid it. But Dad never said the guy couldn’t sing.  

I wonder if anyone has proposed rescinding Alice’s Nobel Prize. The idea strikes me as absurd. The award was given to honor the quality of the stories. The stories haven’t changed. Is it simpler because Alice is dead? She is no longer living with the perpetrator. Would I buy her books if she was alive? Will I buy her books now? I’d been planning to.

Who is Alice Munro? She is still in my mind a Nobel winning author, and she did things in her life which make me sad.

I hear stories about Zen teachers including my Dharma grandpa which sadden me. “God,” I might say, “I wish he hadn’t done that.” What am I saying? I wish he hadn’t been human in a way which makes me uncomfortable. I smile then though. My practice is to work with my discomforts. They are signposts pointing inward toward my demons. What kind of teacher would he be for me if he only made me comfortable? 

Well, couldn’t he make me uncomfortable without making my Dharma brothers and sisters so uncomfortable? I don’t really know.

Some are going to tell me that this teacher or that teacher violated the precepts. Does that disqualify them as teachers? We westerners do tend to think of the precepts as our Buddhist version of the ten commandments. But there’s a difference. I am not a student of the commandments, but apparently they are tools for judging ourselves as well as judging others. The Zen practice which I learned from Bernie was not about judging other people, whether those people are engaged in warfare or in family conflict, whether they are people I never meet or fellow Zen teachers I know well. 

Some human failings are easier for me to digest than others. Failure to follow rules of adult sexual propriety are less difficult for me to digest. Failure to protect your child from a sexual predator and to stay married to that person, that’s a hard one for me.

I want to complain, “Oh, Alice, how could you do this to me? Oh, Alice, why did you do this to me? Why are you putting me through this? I always wanted to meet you, and now I’m not so sure.” More grist for my practice, I guess. It’s hard to come to terms with who we are as human beings. It’s hard to come to terms with the complexity of life. Even in my 80’s, I find myself wishing sometimes for moral simplicity.