It’s a sports reference, and it means nothing unless you’re the first baseman that made the error that cost the Red Sox a World Series, but I think about Bill Buckner who made an error (a bad one) and was shamed in Boston for decades for it. The fact that he took the field for that game injured as he was was an act of heroism in itself - but in the end one of the last plays of his career became all he was remembered for.
If you’re not a Red Sox fan, all you might remember is the reputation for Boston crucifying him. It’s a good thing baseball teams don’t have legacies in the sense you mean. They just have reputation. But Buckner has a brutal legacy. That’s always bothered me.
ha so true and as i recall wasnt Shiraldi one strike away from history? ....fact is that year just getting to that Mets game without Bill Buckner would have been unlikely....me and a buddy drove down to Fenway from Vermont and scored $10 scalp tickets in bleachers for the Bucky Dent game
It's true that Bucky Dent is associated with his unlikely home run. And Carlton Fisk with his game six WS home run, more memorable to me than the Reds winning game seven.
David, this is a terrific essay. I agree with you about Alice Munro; knowing this makes me feel queasy about reading her work. Unstated (and perhaps you weren’t thinking about it) is the precarious legacy of Joe Biden…
After all I’ve read about the terrible case of Alice Munro, this essay feels new because you approach the unfathomable conundrum of her failure through the lens of your own life as a descendant of a flawed man and as a flawed but essentially decent father/husband.
For me this is the ideal time to revisit Alice Munro, whose inescapable subjects are deception (including self-deception) and betrayal. The stories are a self-guided course on art’s relationship to life. They were always deeply discomfiting and are now even more so, in a way that keeps me reading. What Alice did and failed to do will always be part of her legacy, but she and her art were more than that, just as our country is more than slavery and genocide. We should reckon with the worst of our history, which will never be over. We should teach it in a searching way instead of depicting our history as a triumphal march of progress. But it’s not everything we are.
Thanks fro the comment. I agree that Alice Munro will remain a literary star. For me, it's a matter of selective convenience. I've only read one of her stories, which I liked a lot, but I have so many other things to read that eliminating her from my TBR list is easy to do.
Thank you David. I gratefully have four tremendous tripwires in the form of three adult children and daughter in law. Except I'm the inept speaker who has caused you and my tripwires psychic pain for many years. I'm sorry. I wish I was a rock-star speaker. However, I have learned to accept inept speaking as an important part of me because most of the time the adept portion of my speaking has led to very positive outcomes. And my legacy (so far). Be well.
So, I guess you cannot look at Picasso's work, or Caravaggio's, or read Dickens, Roald Dahl, Herman Melville, or Hemingway, or listen to Wagner or Richard Strauss, watch a movie with Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Mia Farrow, Johnny Depp, etc, etc, without moral revulsion? David, I'm sorry to tell you this, but many, many artists in every field have been detestable, repugnant, loathsome, deeply flawed human beings. (To say nothing of business people or politicians.) Alice Munro now joins a group way, way, larger than Nobel laureates. There is a major difference between personal legacy and professional legacy. In Herman's case, the legacy is all personal; for Munro, clearly not. Olyimpia remains a great film...made by Hitler darling, Leni Riefenstahl. I'm not sure it's such a good idea to be judging art by the character of the artist. I remember Jimmy Breslin's crack after Salman Rushdie received the fatwa. "He should be killed for his sentence structure, but not his politics."
Well, I reserve the right to be entirely selective and inconsistent about which artists I personally banish! My revulsion at Munro could be said to be both a result of the peak-end rule and a recency bias. I watch Mel Gibson movies and love Dickens.
Haha. So...you're saying you're a hypocrite. In truth, what you're really doing is refusing to put things in pat little boxes...despite your tendency to cite rules and theories to categorize your points of view. (This of course leads to the question of how much you liked Munro's work in the first place. I thought she was okay, no more, but I'd read Dickens if he were an ax murderer.)
Fair enough. To be clear, the deeper issue of the artist (as an individual) versus the art, like Israel and Wagner, is relatively new. (This excludes broad examples, like Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century, or Nazis and Jews.) I think it's a dangerous tendency. The person and the product should remain separate. Birth of a Nation is a groundbreaking film made by a despicable bigot. For a while, after the outcry, film schools refused to have students watch it.
I was just thinking about my own "trip wires" this morning. My kids (now grown) do not let me get away with a single thing! Here is a beautiful piece on Alice Munro that was really interesting. I don't know if you saw it, but check it out. https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/what-im-doing-about-alice-munro
Thanks Deirdre. Tripwires are such pains in the moment but so necessary.
I read that essay. I thought it was meandering, too long, and self-contradicting. He complained that people felt victimized by the revelation, then he wrote that somehow readers were complicit in what Munro did because readers gave her her celebrity.
His stuff is deep and thoughtful and layered and real. I’ve only read a few other pieces, but each time I read him, I think, Damn, I’m glad for the way he shows up to himself, his readers. I don’t know if that makes sense or if it’s really quite what I mean. Just really like his work is what I should say.
Very stimulating piece, but having just taken on the task of cleaning a slightly hidden kitchen shelf that hadn’t been cleaned in a lot of decades, I lack the mental energy to say something meaningful.
Very interesting comments, as usual. From my life experience, I would say the biggest mistake your Great Grandfather Herman initially made was marrying someone to whom he was not physically attracted. All else followed. Now, he might have behaved the way he did anyway (some men do) but to start out life in the position where a man is not attracted to his wife, now that is hard row to hoe.
I'm with you all the way. I've wanted to write about what Bill Clinton did to Monica, but I get so angry when i think about it that I'm afraid my essay would be just a rant.
Adults sexually abused as children have long faced dismissal and worse by their mothers in particular. May that change, but Munro was far from alone. .I think that is what needs discussion.
David, your topics get more interesting all the time, and your writing about them. I loved this for so many reasons, including your ever impressive willingness to be so self-searching and critical to a readership, in service to your writing. I followed the link back to your excellent Churchill-Chamberlain essay, too, which I hadn't read. I'm going to share something from that. But back to this essay, there are these three passages that struck me immediately.
"I imagine Herman’s heart attack coming on in stages."
"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."
"“[My mother] said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much."
Your imagining Herman's potential retrospection of himself as he feels his death coming, the train of unimagined causation and consequence that begins with a single indulgence or act of selfishness, a simple revelation of basic human need, for love, so great, it can lead to a horrendous abandonment of love -- these are the bits of imagining and discovery out of which stories and novels are created, to create the world of those complex selves and lives.
"A reputation is how people think of you when you’re alive, a legacy is how people think of you when you’re dead."
To be a good, compassionate human one has to be present and not lost in a fictitious image that is meaningless because you're dead. Your legacy is not even yours as you demonstrated in the Alexander Hamilton make over and how one ill-timed indiscretion can destroy a lifetime of good intentions. Legacy and fame are but illusions - smoke and mirrors swirling in the winds of fashion and changes in moral judgement. Shakespeare said it well: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts."
"Tripwires" are also illusions but, as you point out, glimpses into the depths of our subconscious and our true selves. There is a judgement in forming tripwires that something is unacceptable and needs to conform to illusionary rules of conduct. They are a transference of what is unhealed and not fully grieved in our lives onto the conduct of others. "It is easier to change others than to change ourselves."
I remember a therapy session where I was sharing how disgusted (tripped) I was about feeling needy of the support of others. My therapist asked me, "did you ever consider that others may find pleasure in being needed?" Sadly, no it never did occur to me because I was too wrapped up in my prejudices to consider or be compassionate about others. My self-loathing changed into deep sadness about being ashamed of simply being human. Sure, some residue remains, but my tripwire often elicits humor rather than anger now.
It is important to become conscious of how much of our lives is lived detached from our basic humanity and detached from an embrace of others. Yes, boundaries are important, but flexibility is more so.
You must have a wonderful family who really care about you.
It’s a sports reference, and it means nothing unless you’re the first baseman that made the error that cost the Red Sox a World Series, but I think about Bill Buckner who made an error (a bad one) and was shamed in Boston for decades for it. The fact that he took the field for that game injured as he was was an act of heroism in itself - but in the end one of the last plays of his career became all he was remembered for.
If you’re not a Red Sox fan, all you might remember is the reputation for Boston crucifying him. It’s a good thing baseball teams don’t have legacies in the sense you mean. They just have reputation. But Buckner has a brutal legacy. That’s always bothered me.
ha so true and as i recall wasnt Shiraldi one strike away from history? ....fact is that year just getting to that Mets game without Bill Buckner would have been unlikely....me and a buddy drove down to Fenway from Vermont and scored $10 scalp tickets in bleachers for the Bucky Dent game
talk about legacy 👹
It's true that Bucky Dent is associated with his unlikely home run. And Carlton Fisk with his game six WS home run, more memorable to me than the Reds winning game seven.
I never thought of that infamous error like that but Buckner was certainly a victim of the peak-end rule.
really enjoyed this and link to the Churchill eulogy to Chamberlain
i don't think its coincidental that "legacy" popped into your mind considering the situation our own leader finds himself in
and who may very well fall into the same historic abyss Chamberlain did
ugh
Yes, I tried to avoid politics, but it was definitely on my mind! Where are his tripwires?
now its gotten even more complicated🥴
David, this is a terrific essay. I agree with you about Alice Munro; knowing this makes me feel queasy about reading her work. Unstated (and perhaps you weren’t thinking about it) is the precarious legacy of Joe Biden…
Yes, I tried to avoid politics, but it was definitely on my mind! Where are his tripwires?
… yes, it’s incredibly painful to watch his close family and aides (his tripwires) failing, or refusing, to push back on his “decision.”
After all I’ve read about the terrible case of Alice Munro, this essay feels new because you approach the unfathomable conundrum of her failure through the lens of your own life as a descendant of a flawed man and as a flawed but essentially decent father/husband.
For me this is the ideal time to revisit Alice Munro, whose inescapable subjects are deception (including self-deception) and betrayal. The stories are a self-guided course on art’s relationship to life. They were always deeply discomfiting and are now even more so, in a way that keeps me reading. What Alice did and failed to do will always be part of her legacy, but she and her art were more than that, just as our country is more than slavery and genocide. We should reckon with the worst of our history, which will never be over. We should teach it in a searching way instead of depicting our history as a triumphal march of progress. But it’s not everything we are.
Rona,
Thanks fro the comment. I agree that Alice Munro will remain a literary star. For me, it's a matter of selective convenience. I've only read one of her stories, which I liked a lot, but I have so many other things to read that eliminating her from my TBR list is easy to do.
Thank you David. I gratefully have four tremendous tripwires in the form of three adult children and daughter in law. Except I'm the inept speaker who has caused you and my tripwires psychic pain for many years. I'm sorry. I wish I was a rock-star speaker. However, I have learned to accept inept speaking as an important part of me because most of the time the adept portion of my speaking has led to very positive outcomes. And my legacy (so far). Be well.
Sharon, I hope I didn't offend you. It's my flaw, not the speaker's!
So, I guess you cannot look at Picasso's work, or Caravaggio's, or read Dickens, Roald Dahl, Herman Melville, or Hemingway, or listen to Wagner or Richard Strauss, watch a movie with Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Mia Farrow, Johnny Depp, etc, etc, without moral revulsion? David, I'm sorry to tell you this, but many, many artists in every field have been detestable, repugnant, loathsome, deeply flawed human beings. (To say nothing of business people or politicians.) Alice Munro now joins a group way, way, larger than Nobel laureates. There is a major difference between personal legacy and professional legacy. In Herman's case, the legacy is all personal; for Munro, clearly not. Olyimpia remains a great film...made by Hitler darling, Leni Riefenstahl. I'm not sure it's such a good idea to be judging art by the character of the artist. I remember Jimmy Breslin's crack after Salman Rushdie received the fatwa. "He should be killed for his sentence structure, but not his politics."
Well, I reserve the right to be entirely selective and inconsistent about which artists I personally banish! My revulsion at Munro could be said to be both a result of the peak-end rule and a recency bias. I watch Mel Gibson movies and love Dickens.
Haha. So...you're saying you're a hypocrite. In truth, what you're really doing is refusing to put things in pat little boxes...despite your tendency to cite rules and theories to categorize your points of view. (This of course leads to the question of how much you liked Munro's work in the first place. I thought she was okay, no more, but I'd read Dickens if he were an ax murderer.)
About this topic, an absolute hypocrite.
Fair enough. To be clear, the deeper issue of the artist (as an individual) versus the art, like Israel and Wagner, is relatively new. (This excludes broad examples, like Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century, or Nazis and Jews.) I think it's a dangerous tendency. The person and the product should remain separate. Birth of a Nation is a groundbreaking film made by a despicable bigot. For a while, after the outcry, film schools refused to have students watch it.
I was just thinking about my own "trip wires" this morning. My kids (now grown) do not let me get away with a single thing! Here is a beautiful piece on Alice Munro that was really interesting. I don't know if you saw it, but check it out. https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/what-im-doing-about-alice-munro
Thanks Deirdre. Tripwires are such pains in the moment but so necessary.
I read that essay. I thought it was meandering, too long, and self-contradicting. He complained that people felt victimized by the revelation, then he wrote that somehow readers were complicit in what Munro did because readers gave her her celebrity.
I think he rushed it out to capture the moment.
Oh I didn't get that. I just liked how he got to the very human quality that we can be two very opposite things at once.
Yes, this was such a good piece. I love Brandon’s work, and this was one of my favorites.
That was the first time I read anything by him. I really loved it.
His stuff is deep and thoughtful and layered and real. I’ve only read a few other pieces, but each time I read him, I think, Damn, I’m glad for the way he shows up to himself, his readers. I don’t know if that makes sense or if it’s really quite what I mean. Just really like his work is what I should say.
I bet great Grandpa found a whore or two back in the old country.
Very stimulating piece, but having just taken on the task of cleaning a slightly hidden kitchen shelf that hadn’t been cleaned in a lot of decades, I lack the mental energy to say something meaningful.
Very interesting comments, as usual. From my life experience, I would say the biggest mistake your Great Grandfather Herman initially made was marrying someone to whom he was not physically attracted. All else followed. Now, he might have behaved the way he did anyway (some men do) but to start out life in the position where a man is not attracted to his wife, now that is hard row to hoe.
Undoubtedly. But I'm guessing he didn't have much of a choice.
Wonderful piece. I was sickened and angry when I learned about Munro in Kim’s recent essay.
I always prefer to remember a person based on how they treated their family and community not based on their success or body of work.
I still want to know who participated on Epstein island.
I'm with you all the way. I've wanted to write about what Bill Clinton did to Monica, but I get so angry when i think about it that I'm afraid my essay would be just a rant.
Adults sexually abused as children have long faced dismissal and worse by their mothers in particular. May that change, but Munro was far from alone. .I think that is what needs discussion.
What a way to go!
Silver lining in everything.
David, your topics get more interesting all the time, and your writing about them. I loved this for so many reasons, including your ever impressive willingness to be so self-searching and critical to a readership, in service to your writing. I followed the link back to your excellent Churchill-Chamberlain essay, too, which I hadn't read. I'm going to share something from that. But back to this essay, there are these three passages that struck me immediately.
"I imagine Herman’s heart attack coming on in stages."
"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."
"“[My mother] said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much."
Your imagining Herman's potential retrospection of himself as he feels his death coming, the train of unimagined causation and consequence that begins with a single indulgence or act of selfishness, a simple revelation of basic human need, for love, so great, it can lead to a horrendous abandonment of love -- these are the bits of imagining and discovery out of which stories and novels are created, to create the world of those complex selves and lives.
Thanks Jay!
If you're suggesting I tackle a novel, I have two things to say:
1) That's a big compliment
2) I thought you were my friend!
Literal LOL!
"A reputation is how people think of you when you’re alive, a legacy is how people think of you when you’re dead."
To be a good, compassionate human one has to be present and not lost in a fictitious image that is meaningless because you're dead. Your legacy is not even yours as you demonstrated in the Alexander Hamilton make over and how one ill-timed indiscretion can destroy a lifetime of good intentions. Legacy and fame are but illusions - smoke and mirrors swirling in the winds of fashion and changes in moral judgement. Shakespeare said it well: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts."
"Tripwires" are also illusions but, as you point out, glimpses into the depths of our subconscious and our true selves. There is a judgement in forming tripwires that something is unacceptable and needs to conform to illusionary rules of conduct. They are a transference of what is unhealed and not fully grieved in our lives onto the conduct of others. "It is easier to change others than to change ourselves."
I remember a therapy session where I was sharing how disgusted (tripped) I was about feeling needy of the support of others. My therapist asked me, "did you ever consider that others may find pleasure in being needed?" Sadly, no it never did occur to me because I was too wrapped up in my prejudices to consider or be compassionate about others. My self-loathing changed into deep sadness about being ashamed of simply being human. Sure, some residue remains, but my tripwire often elicits humor rather than anger now.
It is important to become conscious of how much of our lives is lived detached from our basic humanity and detached from an embrace of others. Yes, boundaries are important, but flexibility is more so.
Thanks John. A lot of depth in your comments and much to think over. I appreciate your taking the time to write this.
I know a woman whose mother stayed with the man who molested her — it’s affected her deeply her whole life.
Please don’t compare your minor faults to such things! And introversion is just as valid as extroversion. That’s not a fault at all.
It wasn't a comparison. Huge faults usually start with small flaws. That was my point.