Alice Munro (2024)

An Art/Life Case Study

I completed a draft of this piece over a month ago, then thought it best to let it sit. Reflect. Allow new thought bubbles to emerge. My confidence about it is in flux. Overall, what I want is, to know more. Some want to turn away from Munro's work, but I find I want to read it more than ever. What's going on here? I feel unsettled, which leads me to want to sort and organize. This a tentative beginning.

ABSTRACT: A contemplation about Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize laureate, Alice Munro (née Laidlaw) (1931-2024), especially in light of revelations made in July 2024 that her youngest daughter was sexually abused by Munro's second husband in 1976 (actions he was criminally convicted for in 2005), and that Munro minimized the abuse and remained living with her husband (apart from a short separation) after she learned of the abuse in the early 1990s. I conclude, what, exactly? That Munro was a great short story writer. That she behaved terribly towards her daughter and with horrific lack of insight about sexual abuse in families and the effects on survivors generally. That her written works retain a powerful legacy. That this legacy will naturally be re-evaluated within the context of the recent news.

Did I generate any unique insight? No, I'm pretty sure I didn't. Every conclusion I reached felt like it had already been reached before. For myself, I let go some of the great writer theory and dug more into the theory of the writer within the context of social accountability. Art is not separate from Life.

Let's start with Art.

The first time I read an Alice Munro story I didn't know I was reading an Alice Munro story. I might have seen her name at the top of the photocopied sheets handed out in my English class at East York Collegiate Institute circa 1986, but it didn't register. The story did, though, leave an after-image that remains. Years later, decades later, I encountered it again when I read Munro's debut collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). The story, I (re)discovered, was "An Once of Cure," wherein a teenage girl gets drunk while babysitting. That is the plot, anyway, but it's not what's going on. What's going on is something stranger. What is she up to? Who does she think she is? Enquiring minds, as we used to say, want to know. Intrigue persists.

(Incidentally, the other stories I remember from that high school class are Leon Rooke's "A Bolt of White Cloth" and Carol Shields's "Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass." Me on Shields's stories, CNQ #80. My 2001 TDR interview with Rooke.)

No one will mistake "An Ounce of Cure" for one of Munro's bits that led the Nobel Prize Committee (2013) to call her a "master of the contemporary short story." Indeed, the author didn't include any of the work from her first collections in My Best Stories (2006). Yet the story I read in high school contained a spark that remained with me for four decades.

The Nobel Committee's take on Munro's work is succinct:

Alice Munro has dedicated her literary career almost exclusively to the short story genre. She grew up in a small Canadian town; the kind of environment that often provides the backdrops for her stories. These often accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages. The underlying themes of her work are often relationship problems and moral conflicts. The relationship between memory and reality is another recurring theme she uses to create tension. With subtle means, she is able to demonstrate the impact that seemingly trivial events can have on a person's life.

Housewife Writes Book

Recognition from Stockholm, of course, is a long way from the reaction the author received following the awards showered on Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), her first collection, which took one of the two 1968 Governor General Awards for fiction (the other went to Mordecai Richler for Cocksure). I had it in memory that Munro's work had been greeted with the headline, "Housewife Writes Book," but I have been unable to confirm it. In Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005), however, Robert Thacker includes plenty of other delightful (not) headlines. "Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared" (Victoria Daily Times). "B.C. Mother of Three Wins Top Literary Award" (Vancouver Sun). "Victoria Woman's Book Wins Literary Award" (Daily Colonist). "Ex-Wingham Resident Wins Literary Award" (London Free Press). "Oakville Man's Wife Wins Literary Award."

Art and Life are already mixed here, but I will try to keep them separate. It must be noted, however, that the public's perception of the author was as much about who she was seen to be — housewife/mother — as it was about recognizing her daunting ambition. What else to call it? That inner drive that took her from the kitchen and playroom to the pages of The New Yorker ("Alice Munro, Our Chekhov") and ultimately Nobel immortality.

Born in 1931, 15 months before Sylvia Plath, Munro tracked and pressed against the same cultural limitations the American poet and novelist (and short story writer) fought to be free from to claim her voice. The patronizing headlines that followed Munro's immediate out-of-the-box success with her first book are evidence enough. But, of course, it wasn't an out-of-box success; it was the culmination of years of work work work work work.

Again, I'm not writing about the Art, am I? I'm writing about the Art's life, the artist's life in relation to Art, whereas the more recent Alice Munro news is about the artist's life and relation to her life, the life of her life, her family, her children, her youngest daughter, her second husband and his criminal acts, her first husband's awareness of those acts, minimization of those acts and refusal to tell her, her own later minimization of those acts and decision to stay with the confessed abuser and so on and so forth.

I will get there soon.

How much of Munro's work have I read? Maybe one-fifth of it. Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Who Do You Think You Are? (1978). The Moons of Jupiter (1982). Friend of My Youth (1990). Runaway (2003). The late Munro I've yet to catch up with.

Thacker in the Introduction to Reading Alice Munro 1973-2013 (2016) says The View from Castle Rock (2006) "will ultimately be seen as utterly crucial to any thorough understanding of Munro's oeuvre. Looking back now, Munro appears to have been heading toward The View for much of her writing career." He notes some pieces Munro had been working on in the 1980s didn't get completed until 20 years later, when they appeared in The View. In the biography Thacker wrote of Munro, appearing on the Nobel Prize website, Thacker agrees with a review by Karl Miller in the London Guardian of The View (Oct 26, 2006), which argued “the whole corpus of Munro’s stories is a memoir, the novel of her life.”

Messy Art, Messy Life

Messier, we've recently learned, than many ever expected.

After Munro passed away in May 2024, I decided to re-read Lives of Girls and Women. I read the first story and then paused. The territory felt so familiar. I thought about how I would describe it, what she does. It seems simple, but it isn't. There's some kind of sleight of hand, and yet everything is also transparent. In Attack of the Copula Spiders (2012), Douglas Glover describes his take on it in his essay, "The Mind of Alice Munro," which begins:

Alice Munro's constant concern is to correct the reader, to undercut and complicate her text until all easy answers are exhausted and an unnerving richness of life stands revealed in the particular, secret experiences of her characters. She does this in two ways. First, she has a sly capacity for filling her stories with sex, thwarted loves, betrayal and violence while self-presenting (somehow, in the prose) as a middle-aged Everywoman with only the faintest hint of a salacious gleam in her eye. And second, she deploys an amazing number of intricately interconnected literary devices that ironize and relativize meanings while conversely revealing (unveiling as in "apocalypse") an underground current of life that seems all the more true because it is hidden, earthy, frank, and shocking.

I spent some time Googling "Alice Munro amoral" because I was certain — and remain certain, though I can find no evidence of it — that Munro once called herself "amoral" in an interview. I thought maybe it was in The New York Times or Paris Review, but nothing has turned up. I imagine she was answering a question about the kinds of things Glover mentions in that excerpt.

How does she get at that underground current of life? That sense of the chaos of events? How does she bring order — or at least pattern — to life's confusing swirls?

Thacker, also a scholar of Willa Cather (1873-1947), notes Munro and Cather shared an affection for English poet A.E. Housman (1859-1936). Thacker notes Cather in an 1897 review of Housman credited the poet with giving "new voice to the Weltschmerz."

Thacker writes: "So, too, with Murno."

Weltschmerz: German for world weariness, in short. Wikipedia (copied September 9, 2024):

Weltschmerz (German: literally "world-pain") is a literary concept describing the feeling experienced by an individual who believes that reality can never satisfy the expectations of the mind, resulting in "a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering".

...

The modern meaning of Weltschmerz in the German language is the psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances.

Thacker: "Ruth Scurr's powerful 2011 review of Munro's New Selected Stories (published only in Britain) is titled 'The Darkness of Alice Munro.' Indeed."

Curious about Scurr's review, I looked it up. On her website, Scurr includes the review (Times Literary Supplement, October 2011) under the title Thacker provides. I found it, however, in the September 30, 2011 issue (#5661) under the title, "Don't Ask." Whether this constitutes irony in the current context I'm unsure.

Scurr:

Fate is another of the ancient preoccupations that Munro revives in a modern setting: the way human beings find meaning in sequences of seemingly random events, or come to believe, retrospectively or projectively, that their lives are following a preordained pattern. Munro's narrative technique is subversive of any such conviction. Her stories proceed through hiatus and interruption. She lays down discrete blocks of narrative within each story, like stepping stones, requiring her reader to jump trustingly from one to another, until some surprising destination or other has been reached. These gaps are what account, in part, for the sense of interpretive freedom that her texts convey: their spaciousness and openness to the unexpected or unexplainable. The reader who is tempted to look up from one of Munro's stories and ask: "But where is all this going, what does it mean?" should remember Edith doing her Latin homework at the kitchen table at the end of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage:

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi --

"You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know --"

She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished off with a chill of satisfaction, "--what fate has in store for me, or for you--"

Chilling, isn't it?

As a young writer, I didn't think reading Munro would teach me the kinds of things that I was trying to figure out about the kinds of writing I imagined I wanted to do. Boy, was I wrong, but back then — quiet small town stories? Not for me. Then one of my writing friends challenged me. Alice Munro? Quiet? Had I read the story where teen girls cut holes in their snowsuits so they could have sex outside in the winter?

What!

Later I located it in The Moons of Jupiter (memory says).

As Munro’s (poor, incomplete) student for decades now, I remain stunned by her work whenever I approach it. It is Olympian. I’ve always thought it will be read, surely, and studied, admired, reviewed (and reviled?) for centuries. The Nobel Prize is no pass. The work should be a target, repeatedly, for criticism of the deepest, smartest, sharpest kind.

And her life? Should that be scrutinized equally?

Her legacy demands it.

Which leads us into Life's life. I would say that no one expected the revelations about Munro, her second husband, her youngest daughter, Andrea, that Andrea made public in The Toronto Star, July 7, 2024, except some did. Her children did. Her biographer. Others? Her editor? I've read that Munro herself expected these truths to be spoken, eventually, and I give credence to that. She's not the housewife who wrote a book. She's the Olympian international author, subject of much curiosity, adulation, and praise. And skepticism. Criticism. Scrutiny.

Does anyone that famous expect all secrets to remain hidden? Surely not.

And now we know.

The Toronto Star led the reporting of the story, beginning July 7, 2024, and going on from there. Actually, started on July 5, 2024, which a story headlined: "Alice Munro’s work was often dark, even violent — but that’s what made her great." Two days later, they complicated the legacy intensely.

2024 07 05 – Zak Black - Alice Munro’s work was often dark, even violent — but that’s what made her great

2024 07 07 – News - In the home of Alice Munro, a dark secret lurked. Now, her children want the world to know

2024 07 07 – Andrea Robin Skinner - Opinion | My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him

2024 07 07 – News - Alice Munro’s daughter says mom kept silent when stepfather sexually abused her

2024 07 08 – News (THACKER QUOTE) - How Margaret Atwood and the literary world is reacting to the revelations by Alice Munro’s daughter

2024 07 09 – News - Mayor of town where Alice Munro lived shocked after revelation of sexual abuse

2024 07 09 – News - Mayor of town where Alice Munro lived would ‘consider’ amending monument honouring her

2024 07 10 – News - Academics re-evaluating how to teach Munro’s work after daughter’s abuse revelations

2024 07 10 – Stephen Marche - Opinion | How did what happened to Alice Munro’s daughter stay quiet so long? Start with our uniquely Canadian devotion to silence

2024 07 11 – Zoe Whittall - Opinion | Everyone’s asking whether we can still read Alice Munro? Here’s a better question

2023 07 13 – Andrew Sabiston - Opinion | Andrea Skinner, my stepsister, told me what happened to her nearly 50 years ago. This is why I kept quiet for so long

2024 07 15 – News - Alice Munro told me her daughter was lying about being molested by her stepdad: OPP detective

2024 07 16 – News - A ‘family matter’: How the story of Alice Munro’s daughter could stay hidden for so long

2024 07 17 – News - Western University pauses Alice Munro chair program, in wake of daughter’s sexual abuse revelations

2024 07 22 – News - Lawyer who prosecuted Alice Munro’s husband unsurprised case stayed hidden for years

2024 07 24 – News - Indigo to remove portraits of Alice Munro from stores; keep books on shelves

2024 07 30 – News - Alice Munro’s husband declined to address court after guilty plea, transcript shows

2024 08 01 – News - ‘So painful to read’: Court transcript reveals ‘disturbing’ skepticism over sex abuse impact on Alice Munro’s daughter

2024 08 01 – Jenny Munro - Opinion | ‘Don’t tell your mother’: I wish I’d broken the silence in Alice Munro’s house

2024 08 03 – News - Before Alice Munro’s husband sexually abused his stepdaughter, he targeted another 9-year-old girl. ‘It was a textbook case of grooming’

2024 08 08 – News - Childhood abuse survivor agency sees surge in calls since Alice Munro revelation

Much other reporting and commentary followed. A sampling.

2024 07 08 – Marsha Lederman - Alice Munro betrayed us, and her legacy

2024 07 10 – Brandon Taylor - what i'm doing about alice munro - why i hate art monster discourse

2024 07 24 – Ken Whyte - Biographical malpractice - Who knew what about Alice Munro and her family

2024 07 24 – Ian Brown and G&M panel - Let’s talk about it: How do you solve a problem like Alice Munro?

2024 08 18 – Tabatha Southey – How Canada Lost Our Munro

2024 09 03 – Mary Gaitskill – Gobsmacked ...by Alice Munro. Still.

2024 09 07 – Quds Mon Amour - On Self-Grooming and Moral Failure

The nutshell?

Alice had three daughters with her first husband, Jim Munro, whom the bookstore in Victoria is named after. Jim and Alice ran it, before they divorced in 1972. Alice returned to Ontario, where she initially became writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario. In 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin. The children went back and forth between British Columbia and Ontario.

The youngest daughter, Andrea, was sexually abused in 1976 by Fremlin.

Southey provides a useful summary:

What followed was a series of failures that are, or should be, impossible to rationalize. Munro’s three children lived with their father, James Munro, in Victoria, British Columbia, for the school year, spending summers with their mother and stepfather in Clinton, a small town in southern Ontario. This is a region Canadians sometimes call “Alice Munro Country,” the setting of many of her stories.

Upon returning to her father’s home, Skinner told her stepbrother what had been done to her. He encouraged her to tell his mother, who told Skinner’s father, who did next to nothing. Alice Munro was not told at the time. The children continued to visit their mother, the older ones now burdened with the instruction not to leave their little sister alone with Fremlin.

Fremlin did not touch Skinner again, but he continued to abuse her for years. Until she became a teenager and his interest evaporated, he would expose himself to his stepdaughter, sometimes masturbating, and proposition her for sex.

Skinner was 25 before she told her mother her “secret” about what Fremlin had done to her in a letter. Munro left Fremlin, but only briefly—leaving her daughter’s letter behind for him to see. Fremlin in turn wrote letters of his own to his estranged wife.

It’s this bleak epistolary exchange that stops this from being a she said-he said story of the kind that’s easy for apologists to dismiss and makes it a she said-he wrote a letter in which he confessed to being an active pedophile story.

In 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to sexual assault and received a suspended sentence and probation. Despite this public criminal proceeding, the story remained broadly shielded from public view. Until July 2024, less than two months after Alice's death, aged 92.

Southey again:

Munro also told [her daughter Andrea] Skinner that she suspected her husband might have committed one of the most notorious crimes in Canadian history.

In June 1959, the body of 12-year-old Lynne Harper was found northeast of Clinton, Ontario. She had been raped and strangled with her white blouse. Her classmate Steven Truscott was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to be hanged.

Truscott, eventually exonerated, lives with his family in my hometown, Guelph, Ontario. The story of Harper and Truscott was local lore. It acted as an all-purpose cautionary tale: Don’t trust friends, don’t trust strangers, and perhaps most of all, don’t trust the institutions you have, since childhood, been most primed to trust.

Munro never told her daughter why she thought Fremlin capable of this crime, and this dismal cliff-hanger feels like a final story she left for us, unfinished.

This is what those of us who read Munro are left with—along with some very good books, of course. And we are unsettled.

The mysteries expand. The relationships between Art and Life grow bizarre. Thacker (Reading Alice Munro 1973-2013, page 13/14), for example, writes this:

In my 1987 review of The Progress of Love, for example, I began by quoting a comment that Munro made to Jill Gardiner in an interview for Gardiner's 1973 M.A. thesis: "as we grow older: 'life becomes even more mysterious and difficult,' so that 'writing is the art of approach and recognition.['] I believe that we don't solve these things — in fact our explanations take us farther away."

For the Artist, life becomes more mysterious, but for the Mother, as Southey notes, some things require no complication. What is wrong is wrong is wrong is wrong. How can this Great Artist fail so miserably in her duty to protect her own child?

Mary Gaitskill is "gobsmacked"; I'm without words. Olympian writer; failed mother.

And, let's be clear, not the only parent who failed here. I'm gobsmacked by Jim, too, perhaps more so.

Gobsmacked, too, by Robert Thacker, Alice's biographer. There is much betrayal of Life here, but also betrayal of Art. Ken Whyte picked up on that in his newsletter:

Only a small circle of people knew of Fremlin’s crime, most of them in the Munro family, and they weren’t talking. I contacted a few of the best Canadian literary gossips I know and they had heard nothing until last weekend. It’s not true that “everybody knew.”

...

Biographer Robert Thacker ... knew of Fremlin’s conviction. It happened just before he published his 600-page biography of Munro in 2005. He says it would have been inconvenient, given how close he was to publication, to re-open the manuscript and include new information. That rings false, especially given that he had a second opportunity on updating the book in 2011 and again failed to include it.

...

He went on to say two other things that struck me as bizarre and contradictory.

First: “Clearly she hoped—or she hoped at that time, anyway—that I would make it public. I wasn’t prepared to do that.”

So Alice, Thacker’s primary contact, didn’t want to keep things secret. Thacker appears to have made the call on behalf of the family.

Second: “And [Alice] was devastated. It wasn’t anything she did. It was something he did.”

...

Many parts of Thacker’s book would read differently in light of Fremlin’s deeds, starting with Alice’s lines about deceiving yourself and “it wasn’t that good for the children.”

Also, Alice’s description of Fremlin: “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing—grown-up. Which is not the same as being middle-aged.” Those lines are allowed to stand as the primary characterization of Fremlin in the book. They are never revisited or qualified.

And then there are sections where Thacker addresses Alice’s interest in and awareness of writerly self-absorption. This quality comes off as an almost admirable quirk of genius in the biography. You can’t help but wonder about it when you know what was happening in the Munro household while Alice was absorbed.

I agree with Whyte here. Thacker’s biographical work is irretrievable damaged; it didn't need to be; he had the facts, but he didn't use them.

Just as Alice eventually got the facts — and couldn't convert them to appropriate action.

There is only one victim here, Andrea, and bravo to her. Brave one.

*

Can I achieve any kind of summary conclusion? An integration of Art/Life?

I don't think I can. Strangely, perhaps, instead of wanting to read Munro less, I want to read her more. I want to investigate more, think more, feel more, contemplate more. What was she up to?

I want to withdraw, though, from the adjective Olympian.

Alice saw a lot, captured a lot, and missed a lot. Sorting that out is the work of critics ... and the future.

I could end there. Nice round-out sentence. But one thought keeps intruding. In the Globe and Mail roundtable, Susan Swann noted speculation that Munro herself may have been abused (Swann says “molested”). This is speculation, but it is speculation that bears repeating. What is Alice up to with all of the sex in her work? An attempt to negotiate some internal trauma? Consciously or unconsciously? Is there something more specific than Weltschmerz?

Who were you, Alice?

Who did you think you were?