“Lying Under the Apple Tree”
by Alice Munro
from The View from Castle Rock
People sometimes take a long time getting to the point. The doorknob remark on the way out of the therapist’s office. The confidence shared in the middle of the night, after a long day’s hike and the evening campfire. The friend of 50 or 60 years who calls up one night and tells you something you never knew before but actually knew all along.
On page 225 of Alice Munro’s twelfth book, The View from Castle Rock, there is this single and very important sentence about her mother, couched for the reader in the knowledge that Alice is 13, and that for some time her mother had been ill. She had gotten to the point that she was in bed much of the day, did no housework or cooking, and although she was confined to her bed, slept only briefly off and on all day and night.
Her life had stopped being securely connected at any point with the life of the family.
This sentence broke my heart.
Because it had taken all variety of hints over hundreds and hundreds of pages to lead up to it. This sentence is the sum and substance of what Munro has been writing about for years, every which way from Sunday. And for it to appear in this particular story, at this particular place, is heartbreaking.
Alice is 13, and is being courted by a 17-year old boy. No ordinary courtship this. Secret bike rides out in the country and clandestine meetings lead to passionate encounters which Alice, at 13, only half understands, but which she adores. Only to discover that he is similarly being passionately courted by a nearly 30-year-old woman whose life is horses, horses, horses, and for whom he works.
Alice has been lying to her parents about where she has been going every Sunday for probably three months. This has been a very intense and heady experience. Now, betrayed and alone, her father is at the foundry and her mother is not . . . reliable in any way at all.
Alice had been terribly betrayed by this older boyfriend, a boyfriend she might have never been allowed to see if her mother or father had been alert and on the case. And then, when Alice did pursue the boy and was terribly hurt, her mother was completely unavailable for any kind of support. Not only did her mother not notice that anything was suddenly amiss with Alice, she had become so reliably unconnected to the family that Alice would have hardly believed anything she said.
I am thinking of the role of mothers who are not disconnected. In “Illinois,” the boy who has abducted and hidden his baby sister is aware that under normal circumstances his mother can sniff out a lie. Would that she could have. Would that Alice’s mother had either the temperament or the strength to sniff out a lie. In which case 13-year-old Alice might have never gone after 17- or 18-year-old Russell Craik. And she would have never been so deeply betrayed, and she might have never become so estranged from the idea of real boys.
And so:
. . . it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers . . . . It was not as if I had given up on passion. Passion, indeed, wholehearted, even destructive passion, was what I was after. Demand and submission. I did not exclude a certain kind of brutality. But no confusion, no double-dealing, or sleazy sort of surprise or humiliation. I could wait, and all my due would come to me, I thought, when I was full-blown.
I am struck by the appearance of this important word: “submission.” I think I could write a book on the problems that Alice’s heroines have with the concept of submission, and I could not write that book unless I also considered how important being “recognized” is these women, and also how important it becomes for them to have an “authentic” life, that they be true to their gifts. And of course, these impulses are all in conflict with each other and with reality.
My heart is broken once again when I realize that “submission” is an idea that Alice had had since she was 13. Life is a very, very long journey.
There is a lot more to “Lying Under the Apple Tree.” Lying, for one. Sexual initiation, for another. Layers of sexual predation, and how predation leads to predation. There is a whiff of “Vandals,” here. A whiff of Evil, for another, especially as related to our various gardens of Eden and various snakes in the grass shedding various skins, over and over again.
But I want to remark upon the obvious. “Lying Under the Apple Trees” is a version of the fabulous early story “Baptizing.” I imagine many people have written about these two stories and how and why they are related, different, and the same. I have not read any of these treatments, although comparing and contrasting the two stories call to me.
I try to figure out Alice on my own. If she could work on a story for two or three months, the least I can do is to meet it half way with my full attention. The least I can do is read her without a crib and encounter her head-on.
She seems, with her ambitious and damaged mother, a relative of mine, a cousin, or an aunt. She seems, with her “entirely disjointed and dissimilar personalities” to be almost like a sister, as I am sure she seems to many other of her readers as well. I want to know whatever it is she has to tell me direct from her, no interference.
“Lying Under the Apple Tree” is a magnificent memoir. I surely hope that the real Russell Craik read it and recognized himself. It is too much to hope that the real Miriam McAlpin lived long enough to read it and recognize herself.
Note: Lying is an issue throughout in The View from Castle Rock. In the title story, Munro quotes an ancestor who emigrated from Scotland in 1820 accusing Scots poets James Hogg and Sir Walter Scott as being liars and making a lot of money from such a “loquarative” trade as writing. Alice remarks:
And I am surely one of the liars the old man talks about, in what I have written about the voyage. Except for Walter’s journal, and the letters, the story is full of my invention.
The reader of course, is left to deduce for him or herself how it is a writer actually conveys the truth, what methods of selection are used, what is included and what is left out, what structures created and what suggestions made, what wording chosen, what tone established, what allusions selected, what information left out, what images suggest – the combination of which finally convey the truth.
I always appreciate your commentary. I’m 88 and human behavior is still a mystery., or not.
I recognize that this is another story I had read long ago (probably from the New Yorker), although almost like reading it new, not recalling what would happen next.
Betsy: Allowing for the qualifications in your final paragraph, your analysis seems to suggest the narrator *is Alice. I thought, according to her Foreword, that part two stories were not memoir, but fiction that freely diverges from her real life. How do you know the story is even close to actual incidents of her own life, other than references suggestive of her mother, for example? Did she ever detail any of this in memoir form?
These stories seem an approximation of a sense Alice Munro had looking back on important milestones in her own life. Any kind of exactitude on this is not what matters to me. What matters to me are comments the narrator makes such as: “. . . it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers . . . .”
Welcome Rosalind – glad to have you with us. Yes – Alice is such a student of human behavior, and her writing always seems more to pose a question rather than give the answer…
“Lying Under the Apple Tree” was first published January 1, 2011. Andrea Skinner had long since informed her mother of Gerry Fremlin’s predation and in fact had long since pressed charges against Fremlin for that predation and won in court.
So I first notice the word “lying” in the title. And I notice Adam and Eve’s apple tree – sex and knowledge of it – one of the sources of all their trouble. I notice with enormous sadness the absent mother, being keenly aware of the absence of Alice’s own mother and also keenly aware of Alice herself playing the absentee role to Andrea, not once, not twice, but over and over and over.
But I notice the argument most of all. The argument that 13 year old girls aggressively seek knowledge of sex and agressively lie. This argument is to me all too obviously connected to Andrea and to Fremlin’s ludicrous claim that Andrea actively pursued sexual experience with him. When charged by a policeman in his own house in 2005, Alice herself said, “My daughter is a liar.”
When Andrea published her story in the Toronto Star on July 7, 2024, I believed it. When I read more about the guidance that she and her siblings received from the Gatehouse in Toronto, I believed them.
It gives me great pain to say that this story feels like a plea of self defense from the writer. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But that is what it feels like to me.
What makes this exceptionally painful is that Andrea was 9 when the first abuse occurred, and Fremlin not only said she was lthe aggressor, he threatened to kill the adult Andrea if she pursued her exposure of him. Nine?
As for who is lying? In “The View from Castle Rock,” Munro wryly, sardonically and sarcastically explains that she herself is a liar, given that she is a writer. Suggesting somehow as well that everyone is a liar – the way we repeat family stories, the way we all entertain, the way we are all artful dodgers of the truth, one way or another, and to a purpose.
But this argument saddens me. Given Andrea’s suffering and the later suffering her siblings have had to endure.
My own argument? Yes, girls of that time wanted to know about sex because knowledge of that apple tree was denied them. But myself at 13? and my friends? Mostly what we wanted was a book.
And at 9? the thought of sexual aggression by a nine year old girl is so foreign to my imagination as to boggle my mind.
Any one reading this could say – But this girl in this story was 13. Totally different. Andrea was not being used as “material” here. But there is a whiff of this Munro family “material” in “Lying under the Apple Tree.” Enough of a whiff that it sickens me. It is as if a sentence or two were written to please a pedophile. But that is probably going too far. I am in the territory of a biographer and I am no biographer.
But this is why I think Alice Munro’s stories should be team taught by Psychology and Literature both. To put people like me, who read into things, in my place.