The Lessons Of Legacy: The Peak-End Rule And Tripwires

Alice Munro's scandal and my great-grandfather's untimely demise

A reputation is how people think of you when you’re alive, a legacy is how people think of you when you’re dead.  

While your reputation is the accumulation of all your actions, your legacy is often defined by a few outstanding actions, especially those that occur (or are revealed) near the end of your life. 

This is consistent with a memory heuristic called the “peak-end rule” whereby for any event, whether a painful medical procedure, an act of sensual pleasure, or an entire life, we remember the extremes and the end. Like most heuristics, this is the default setting for our brain, the shortcut, the easy, immediate answer that is permanently engraved.

Sometimes, however, a legacy can undergo revision. Playwright (and genius) Lin-Manuel Miranda changed the legacy of Alexander Hamilton. The central theme of Lin-Manuel’s play Hamilton is legacy itself with Alexander portrayed as deeply flawed, complex, but ultimately great and estimable. And extraordinarily concerned with how he’ll be remembered. ¹

But the revision of a legacy is the exception, generally reserved for public figures. And then only rarely, when instigated by the efforts of historians and journalists (and playwrights.)

Neville Chamberlain represents the typical peak-end case. He lived a life characterized by great accomplishments in public service and upstanding personal behavior, but he’s remembered almost solely as the appeaser of Hitler.

Chamberlain was the architect of appeasement’s peak, the Munich Conference, which occurred when Chamberlain was 69 years old. He had a scant two years left to live and thus no chance to change his legacy. (I wrote a post about Churchill’s Eulogy for Chamberlain.)

Momentous last acts have a way of overshadowing everything else.

My Great-Grandfather’s Last Act

My great grandfather Herman Appleman’s legacy is that he died of a heart attack in a Tulsa whorehouse. The year was 1933; Herman was 64 years old.

Herman was a married patriarch, a successful oilman, and a leader of the small but prosperous Jewish community in Tulsa in the first third of the 20^th century. In 1883, he came from Lithuania to America, prompted by the lure of opportunities, both financial and romantic in the form of two unmarried sisters of a friend, D.R., from the old country. D.R. had already struck a measure of prosperity in America.

Herman found the younger sister Fanny, 21, to be pretty, and the older sister Anna, 27, to be plain. Nevertheless, Herman married Anna (my great-grandmother);

I imagine Fanny and Anna’s brother D.R. told Herman to marry Anna because she was the older one, and 27 back then was old to be unmarried. Herman complied but carried out an affair for some time with the younger sister Fanny. Perhaps until she herself was married.  

This week a cousin of mine, Robert, wrote and sent around a wonderful book about our family’s beginnings in America. Robert and I share Herman and Anna Appleman as great-grandparents. Among other feats of investigation, Robert commissioned a translation from Yiddish of a speech Herman gave to a committee of one of the synagogues he founded.

In that speech, I can hear Herman struggle with his legacy, trying to come to terms with having been unable to master his weakness for women other than his wife.

“The world is a turbulent sea whose waves rage up and down. A bridge stretches out over the sea, but a very narrow bridge without railings, the width of only one plank. People walk over the bridge of life with fear and anxiety. Perhaps they fall off. But that’s life.”

I imagine Herman’s heart attack coming on in stages. Dying in a prostitute’s bed, he has enough time to reflect on his legacy. A success in business and the creator of a large family, but a man known to seek sexual gratification away from his wife. In that small community, his infidelity a secret in name only. A practical man self-aware of his weaknesses. He fell off and that was life.

Growing up, I was told nothing about my great-grandfather Herman. I knew him only as the father of my grandfather Nate to whom I was very close. It was only this year that I learned how Herman died, and it became the sole fact that defined his life. With the translation of his speech and my cousin’s book, I now have a somewhat more nuanced view, but Herman’s ignominious death still dominates.

The case of Alice Munro

In the news this week was the revelation that recently deceased, Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro had long known about the sexual abuse of her daughter Andrea as a young child at the hands of Alice’s second husband, Andrea’s step-father.

It was 1992 and Munro was then 60 when Andrea, then 25, told her mother about the abuse she suffered. Despite the revelation, Alice continued to live with her pedophile husband as if nothing had happened.

According to Andrea, Alice was in denial that the abuse had anything to do with her. In Andrea’s words:

“[My mother] said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected [my mother] to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.” ²

Alice Munro was never publicly confronted with her emotional abuse of her daughter, and she never apologized but instead severed ties with Andrea. All her life Alice probably held the vain hope that her legacy would remain intact.

Every bit of this offends my sense of moral justice.

I hope that Alice Munro suffered guilt but I doubt it. Perhaps no one is more adept at rationalization and internal sophistry than an enormously talented writer of fiction.

That the revelation of the scandal followed hard upon Alice’s death satisfies both conditions of the peak-end rule.

So what will be Alice Munro’s legacy? Above all, as a deeply flawed woman, an unfit mother whose literary success and selfishness came at a dreadful and exorbitant price to her daughter. An object lesson that artists, no matter how great, should not receive any special dispensation or indulgence for wicked behavior.

I will now be unable to read Alice’s stories without the shade of her ghastly, Faustian figure crouched in a corner of my mind. An unpleasant enough prospect for me to avoid reading her any more.

The value of tripwires

What lessons can I draw from the cases of my great-grandfather Herman and Alice Munro other than the obvious ones? ³ I imagine that their different paths to a tainted legacy started with a single step. There was a first time that Herman visited a whorehouse. There was a first time that Alice was unreasonably selfish as a mother.

Meeting no effective resistance, they continued on their paths unimpeded.

But I, I have the advantage of tripwires in the form of my wife and my three adult children. Their good opinion of me is essential to my good opinion of myself.

They are quick to criticize me for any display of my flawed tendencies, including impatience, introversion, indolence, and intellectual snobbery. My register of misdemeanors can readily be grouped under the general heading of “rudeness.”

Recently and more than once, my tripwires have caught me writhing in my seat and grimacing, as if in mortal pain, while trapped listening to an inept speaker mangle the English language. It’s a bad habit––not the mangling, the speaker always means well, but rather my pantomime of pain.

My tripwires tell me I’m delusional to think no one else in the audience takes notice. Any excuses or equivocations on my part are trampled and stomped on without concession or mercy.

When I feel hemmed in and overwhelmed by my loving tripwires, when I want to leap over them and declare “let David be David,” I tell myself that their criticisms are a form of tough love not unlike the attitude of a sports fan yelling at a favorite player who they believe can and should perform better.

In the moment I’m angry. In the long run, I’m grateful.

Question for the comments: Please share your experiences with the peak-end rule or with the presence or absence of tripwires in your life.

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1. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was inspired by Ron Chernow’s 2005 biography of Alexander Hamilton.

2. NYT article; July 9th, 2024

3. The obvious lessons: don’t be unfaithful to my wife, don’t be evil to my children.