In the wake of Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner’s account of sexual abuse by her stepfather Gerald Fremlin, a roundtable discussion on Alice Munro was held at the offices of The Globe and Mail in Toronto on July 15. The panel included David Staines, Katherine Ashenburg, Russell Smith, Zosia Bielski, and Susan Swan.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Earlier this month, the reputation of Canada’s beloved Alice Munro – who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013 – took a mortal blow. Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, revealed she had been sexually abused, at the age of 9, by Gerald Fremlin, Munro’s second husband, shortly after Munro and Fremlin moved in together in 1976.
The crime quickly became known to her father, Victoria bookseller Jim Munro, who insisted it be kept secret from his ex-wife Alice. Despite finally learning of the abuse from Skinner in 1992, Alice Munro stayed with Fremlin for the rest of his life – even after he plead guilty to indecent assault in 2005.
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It’s only now, after Alice Munro’s death in May, that Skinner’s story, which she revealed in a Toronto Star essay, has become widely known, shocking the global literary community and launching a barrage of commentary.
Susan Swan, novelist and co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, sits with a copy of Alice Munro’s book Open Secrets.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Last week, a group of Canadian writers, editors and scholars sat down at The Globe and Mail with reporter Ian Brown to talk about Alice Munro and the scandal that has enveloped her. Around the table were David Staines, a professor of literature at Ottawa University, and a long-time friend of Munro’s; journalist, novelist and former scholar Katherine Ashenburg; Russell Smith, a novelist and editor at Dundurn Press; Zosia Bielski, who covers sexual and gender matters for The Globe and Mail; and Susan Swan, novelist and founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, who also knew Alice Munro.
Ian Brown: Welcome to The Globe and Mail Clinic for Fallen Idols and Shattered Reputations. How did the news about Alice Munro affect you? Were you shocked?
Zosia Bielski: I read as much as I could. And the first thing that struck me was the many and varied ways Alice deflected the information that Andrea had been abused by Alice’s husband – saying she had been told too late, intellectualizing it and putting a feminist spin on it – ”you’re asking me as my daughter to leave this man and take the fall for his sins and deny my own needs.” I know narcissism is not unique to artists, but Alice’s reactions, really, really struck me.
Brown: And you were a fan of Alice’s work?
Bielski: I was, yeah.
Russell Smith: I was shocked and saddened. But that’s as far as my emotion goes. I’m a lot more interested in an artist’s work than in the biography.
David Staines: I, too, was shocked. But it didn’t affect the works themselves.
Katherine Ashenburg: I think I’m still trying to process what actually happened. There are so many layers. But fairly quickly, I thought: What an irony that Alice Munro has become an Alice Munro character.
Susan Swan: Well, I felt crushed. A writer friend used the word “flattened.” The worst shock to me was the Toronto Star story about the detective going to confront Alice [with evidence of Fremlin’s crimes, in the form of letters he had written a decade earlier], long after Alice had the chance to put it in context. Instead, the detective said, Alice screamed at him, called her daughter names and said she was a liar.
It was a betrayal also for me as a reader because she came across in our literary community as a truth teller, and here she hadn’t told the truth about herself. She denied her daughter at a time when her daughter needed her most. I’ve had several friends who were abused by their fathers. It’s common in that generation, and still goes on, for the mother to deny it and say that the daughter is exaggerating, and to criticize her as if it’s her fault.
Brown: How do you explain her choice – to stay with her daughter’s abuser? Is it in any way explainable?
Bielski: It’s still common: denial; co-dependence. She’s not the first. And she won’t be the last wife and mother to betray her children this way.
Ashenburg: I was talking with a friend who’s a therapist. Alice Munro had a very hard childhood: a mother who developed Parkinson’s, poverty, a father whose business kept failing. They were outcasts in their little super-judgmental Ontario town. My friend was saying that you’d expect that might result in a grown-up who was very empathetic and sensitive. But more and more evidence is coming in that the opposite happens. If you’re not well-parented, you don’t know how to do empathy. And that might be an explanation for Alice Munro’s behaviour.
Ms. Swan says she is reading Munro's her work differently now. 'But I’m not disowning her as an artist. I think the love of her work is what we have left to console ourselves with.'Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Swan: I have a friend that thinks Alice herself was probably molested, and in a kind of denial. She’s reaching, like all of us, for ways to understand what happened. She has absolutely no proof. It just shows how all of us are struggling to understand why she reacted the way she did. She did have money to live on her own, whereas a lot of women had to put the husband first because of economics.
Smith: It’s interesting hearing you talk about her – you people who knew Alice Munro. I did not. So, I feel very outside this conversation of desperately trying to understand her actions to determine how bad she was. That doesn’t affect me, because I’m not losing her as a friend or a mentor or a role model. I’m perfectly prepared to accept she was terrible, like many artists.
Brown: Another argument made in the ongoing global discussion maintains we always blame the mother, when the only person responsible is the abuser. Maybe her talent demanded an almost impersonal, inhuman dedication to her work.
Swan: I want to challenge you on that, because I think that’s the macho creed of the male artist. Women writers like Munro raise that question. But we have other examples: Margaret Atwood’s a good mother; Carol Shields is a good mother. We seem to struggle with the idea that a woman can be a successful professional and a devoted mother.
Smith: I have seen on social media and in the mainstream media the most emotional and visceral reactions of anger and disgust – a feeling that Munro’s work is now completely tainted. “I can’t have it on my shelves, it’s toxic.” That’s coming from women, because they are mothers and daughters. They’re reacting very powerfully to the idea of a mother betraying a daughter.
Swan: That’s absolutely true. I reread the story Vandals in her book Open Secrets, which is published in 1994. That was two years after Andrea first came to her. That story feels like code to me, for what happened with Andrea. There’s a mother figure who lives with a partner who is a misanthrope and a taxidermist across the road from a girl and boy. And it turns out he was sexually abusing them. And the mother figure sort of accepts that and doesn’t do anything about it. It’s a very powerful story. So I’m reading her work differently, but I’m not disowning her as an artist. I think the love of her work is what we have left to console ourselves with.
Bielski: That’s what everyone is doing. They’re reading and parsing for clues, sifting for the decoder ring. Maybe they still value the work, but they’re reading it differently right now. Maybe that will fade over time.
Smith: And I disapprove as a literary critic. That’s biographical criticism. Then you’re just trying to find clues about the author’s life, which is a certain branch of historical inquiry, but it’s not literary criticism. This trying to parse intention in the work is really troubling to me. First, because an author is not always aware of her intentions. But also because Alice Munro is not a didactic writer. She’s not writing essays. She’s not writing polemics. She’s not telling us how we should judge these characters. She’s just putting stories out there. And like all sophisticated characters, hers are very morally complicated, and morally flawed, and it’s up to us how we judge them. So I don’t have any interest in trying to determine her moral stance on the things that she writes about.
Swan: You have nothing invested in her as a woman writer because you’re not a woman.
Smith: As a role model, I suppose. As a literary role model, she’s immensely important.
Bielski: And whether we like this exercise or not, it’s what readers are doing.
Ashenburg: Yes. They’re parsing for meaning after the fact.
Brown: David Staines, is that a silly thing to do?
David Staines: I feel awkward being here, because I’m someone who was close to Alice. It goes back 45 years when I first invited her to Ottawa to a reading. I asked her to be on the first panel of the Giller. So I don’t know what to say.
Brown: You’re doing fine.
Staines: I think she’s a great writer. And all this fracas has shocked me. But at the same time, I still have all the books in front of me. And I can still read them and teach them.
Brown: Will you teach Alice Munro differently now?
David Staines: No. The book is the book.
Katherine Ashenburg, a novelist and journalist, says she is still processing everything that happened. 'There are so many layers. But fairly quickly, I thought: What an irony that Alice Munro has become an Alice Munro character.'Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Ashenburg: To respond to Russell and David, the idea that the work is here and the life is over there, with a huge wall between them – that was the purist, modernist belief of my graduate school days. A dear friend who is an English professor once said, you can never learn anything of any importance about a writer’s work from the writer’s life. But the work is created by a human, a very complicated human. I haven’t given up rereading Dickens because he treated his wife absolutely appallingly. And I haven’t given up looking at Caravaggio’s paintings because he murdered somebody. So I’m definitely not going to give up Alice Munro. I feel like there’s a kind of scrim right now – I’m still trying to understand this – between me and Munro’s work. And the scrim is the revelations.
Brown: Has the scrim affected the way you are reading her?
Ashenburg: What was your word, Zosia? I’m parsing a little bit. I read a lot of Alice Munro yesterday, the story Susan mentioned, Vandals. The woman who turns a blind eye to her partner’s abusing the neighbourhood kids: And she thinks to herself, what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity? An amazing line. She really is drawn to his craziness and his sickness. So, of course, I read that line yesterday differently.
Smith: It’s so fabulous that she’s in touch with evil in this way. This makes her a great writer. The stories have always been about people with deep, dark secrets and having to make moral compromises, particularly involving the partners they’re with. Every novelist has to be in touch with their darkest side in order to come up with complicated stories. We wouldn’t read novels if they were about good people. I forget who said all great art is indistinguishable from criminality – someone like Oscar Wilde. Art is not a fundamentally ethical endeavour. It doesn’t set out to necessarily improve the world. Some does. But we don’t look to it to do that. We look to it to reflect darkness and moral complexity. So we shouldn’t be surprised if artists are just as flawed as the rest of the congregation.
It’s interesting, though: There is a generation growing up with the idea that art really should be improving in some way, that it is fundamentally an ethical endeavour. I’m shocked by this because I have the Marquis de Sade on my shelves, who actually committed sexual violence.
Staines: Or more contemporarily, Pablo Picasso.
Smith: Picasso. T. S. Eliot was an antisemite. Pound was an antisemite. There are endless examples of people who were very much in touch with their dark side. Personally, given a choice between experiencing the art of someone of great virtue and someone of great talent, I will choose the talent.
Swan: I have de Sade on my shelf too. But social media now gives a large public voice to the reader. So whether you want readers to try to evaluate the character of the writer or not, it’s going to happen because of the democratization of art. I don’t think we can stop people from doing that. It’s just that you don’t want them to stay there.
Bielski: I find interesting in the social-media frenzy this idea that Alice Munro is a hypocrite somehow because we view her as a feminist icon. I don’t think she particularly viewed herself that way at all. Her work centres often on difficult women who make very poor choices – and don’t even necessarily live with regret following those choices. She’s not an advocate against child abuse, so I don’t see the hypocrisy.
Ashenburg: And her great subject was sex. And not just sex with men who are behaving badly, but the sexual drive of women. As early as Lives of Girls and Women she talks about sex being this chaotic power that you can’t resist. And she says when it overpowers you, it comes to you not vis-à-vis the man or the woman you’re attracted to: You become enslaved to your own body. She was so clear-eyed about that power.
I never knew exactly why so many people related to her. A big thing that appealed to lots of women was her success. But otherwise it’s a pretty bleak world she depicts, and not one in which a lot of people are kind to other people. I think she was very well served by having her stories come out in The New Yorker at long intervals. You read one and you think, oh, brilliant, that’s amazing. But I taught Open Secrets and I remember at the end of reading all the stories together in a volume, thinking, whoa. As a friend said, there’s not much comfort there. So I’ve always been intrigued that women take to her so, and expected good behaviour from her. Whereas if you read her heroines, they’re running away, they’re leaving their husbands, they’re leaving their children. And they don’t seem to have much regret about it.
Bielski: She’s not Bill Cosby, who portrayed sanitary family life and then did all this other stuff. Her sin is one of omission and neglect.
Swan: She was made into a plaster saint. But she wasn’t really going along with it. I have read about her religious background, which is similar to mine. One side of our families is Presbyterianism that was more radical and fundamentalist than the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. So she grew up in a moral framework that was very narrow, and very judgy. But she somehow, with her great talent, transcended that. She was able to have such a clear-eyed view in her stories of moral complexity. She didn’t try to solve it. She didn’t try to be a role model.
Ashenburg: Her daughter Jenny said, “Alice was a dedicated, cold-eyed storyteller.” I love that: Cold-eyed.
Staines: Why do we keep reading and reading and reading Munro, and why do I keep teaching her? And then after 10, 15, 20 years, I go back to the book and see it anew. Because she taps into things that are fundamental to our understanding of life.
Brown: So the books are staying on your shelf.
Staines: Of course.
Russell Smith, journalist, author and editor at Dundurn Press, said he was shocked and saddened about the revelations. 'But that’s as far as my emotion goes. I’m a lot more interested in an artist’s work than in the biography.'Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Smith: The idea the books are somehow tainted is a magical idea, religious thinking. Superstition. They’re somehow tainted by this toxic evil energy, and if they’re in my house, I’m going to be contaminated by them! I really don’t understand the emotion around that.
Bielski: But if I don’t want to spend time in her mind right now, am I wrong? I don’t want to be in her mind right now. I may change my mind. I think people are too black and white about this.
Swan: As Russell says, there is a tendency now to look at literature as a tool that can be used to make the world a better place. Everybody has to be so morally pure that it makes literature and art kind of exhausting. I was talking about this to the Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, and when she goes to give talks now, she has to do a preamble of saying that literature is not to be taken literally. There is a tendency right now, among readers, to treat literature as something we use to improve our culture.
Staines: I don’t know if it improves our culture. I think literature just stands there for us to imbibe and understand and reflect. I often say to the students, what’s important is that literature is something outside the self. And if you absorb it totally, then you move back into yourself and you have a new understanding. So many of these students now are wrapped up with what they want literature to be and what they don’t want it to be. Why don’t you just try to understand its world and then come back to yourself with a new understanding of what’s out there? That’s what I learned.
Swan: That’s beautiful.
Brown: How does that go over with the students?
David Staines, professor of English at University of Ottawa, says he can still read and teach Munro's books after her daughter's allegations. 'Because she taps into things that are fundamental to our understanding of life.'Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Staines: Well, they begin to understand halfway through the term that it’s so much more important to understand who and what you are in relation to something outside the self. I taught a course last year in which we read nine novels in 12 weeks. One of them was Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. A Fine Balance slew some of the students. They were just so overwhelmed by it.
Brown: Overwhelmed in what way?
Staines: So positive that they couldn’t get back into themselves.
Brown: What if – and I’m just speculating here – Alice stayed with the daughter-abusing Fremlin because she needed that compromise somehow in front of her so she could keep writing about compromise?
Ashenburg: That doesn’t work for me as an excuse. Because if she chose that, it included doing serious harm to her daughter.
Swan: You see, all this happened before the MeToo movement. “Boys will be boys” was no longer a good reason. Before MeToo, women were expected to handle sexual assault the way we handled traffic jams and bad snowstorms. My grandmother used to say, “Well, you set the tone, dear.” As if I was completely responsible for what a man did! The expectation that men should behave like responsible adults was not in evidence when I was growing up. So I think we owe this exposure of Munro in part to the freedom that the MeToo movement has given us to talk about women being sexually assaulted. And that’s a different issue from judging the great art/bad artist dilemma.
Bielski: But even in MeToo the generational rifts came up. You had people like Catherine Deneuve and other older celebrities telling young women to suck it up. And a lot of Alice Munro’s defences, according to her daughter, have that ring. “You told me too late; do you expect me to give up my life?”
Can I go back to something Russell said? In what other profession when there’s abuse do we immediately jump to the defence of the work? We allot that to artists.
Ashenburg: Because they’re telling stories about human beings. So we think somehow they have some purchase on some greater understanding.
Bielski: Right. But during the MeToo movement, we had examples of people saying, “But he’s still a great doctor.” And that was properly shot down. We throw that away for other civilians. But the artist is a sacred cow.
Smith: I don’t think anyone is giving Munro the person a break over this. Zosia, you said you didn’t want to be in Alice Munro’s mind.
Bielski: For the time being.
Smith: So when was the last time you watched Polanski’s Chinatown? He is a convicted child rapist; do you feel awkward watching it?
Bielski: Yeah, I grapple with that.
Smith: But you don’t enjoy watching it.
Bielski: I do. But those are conversations you have with yourself. I’ve watched Woody Allen films, Bullets over Broadway. But Manhattan? No. The art and the artist collide. I’m not prescriptive, insisting everyone should stop reading Alice Munro.
Brown: Do you think Munro knew she was writing about and around this terrible compromise she had made?
Swan: I think that a lot of what I write, what my friends writing fiction write, we don’t know what we’re doing when we’re doing it.
Smith: Oh, that’s very true.
Swan: There’s this discovery that happens, that we might not be aware of, at the beginning of the story. But there’s an obsessive energy that kind of drives you to sort of look at it. I just think Alice was probably drawn to these subjects, for the reasons we’ve been talking about today. I don’t know whether she even knew that it was sort of revelatory about her experience.
Ashenburg: It sounds much more that she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her husband. It was much more a kind of 1950s thing. To which I would have said to her, get another husband. That is so easy, if that’s what you want. You could hardly do worse.
Bielski: She reportedly said, I can’t live without him. That was the relationship she was protecting.
Swan: He grew up in the same area and understood that part of her. It’d be like me going back to my first boyfriend in Midland, Ont. – it would be a sort of comfort in a way. They know exactly who you were when you were a young woman and even maybe a child.
Smith: I’ve always seen those small towns and barns as sinister. That’s a Munro story for sure. It seems claustrophobic to me.
Swan: She’s really writing about the secrets we have that are right there for us to see. I grew up in a town like that. And it was very, very quick to judge.
Ashenburg: As the Alice Munro title says, who do you think you are?
Swan: But judging is for people who don’t want to think. Once you start to think about it, it gets more complicated. And she seemed to be always saying, let’s think about this, let’s think about this, and look at this layer and this layer and this layer. That was one of her great contributions.
This conversation has been edited for length.
