Was Alice Munro An Art Monster?
Or just a monster?
The Art Monster series is usually paywalled, but I’m making this post available to all, at least for the moment. Comments are open to paying subscribers.
Alice Munro, considered one of the greatest short-story writers of modern times, was a monster.
The world learned this on Sunday, within moments of the Toronto Star hitting “publish” on an essay by Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner. The title of the essay, in full SEO bloom, tells you everything you need to know: “My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him.”
In stark yet elegant prose, Skinner describes years of abuse at the hands of Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, who assaulted her when she was 9 and went on to spend years committing lewd behavior against her and other children. Shortly after the first assault, Skinner told her stepmother about it, who told her father, who decided not to tell Munro. A few years later, when family friends told Munro that Fremlin had exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter, Fremlin denied it and Munro took no action. When Munro asked Fremlin if he had done the same to her own daughter, his answer was along the lines of “She’s not my type.”
If Fremlin’s behavior is nauseating in its cruelty and arrogance, Munro’s denials and narcissism are a shock to the conscience. Years later, when in her 20s, Skinner wrote her mother a letter telling her what happened. (Notably, this was prompted by Munro remarking that she didn’t understand why the character in a story she’d read committed suicide rather than telling her mother about abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her stepfather.) Munro responded to Skinner’s letter not as a protective mother but as a forsaken wife, as if her daughter had seduced her husband and become the other woman in a love triangle.
“She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her,” Skinner writes. “She then told me about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.”
It gets even worse from there. Fremlin called Skinner a “homewrecker” and threatened to kill her if she went to the police. Munro returned to Fremlin, and Skinner’s father maintained a friendly relationship with Munro. When, decades later, Skinner finally reported the abuse to the police, Fremlin pleaded guilty to assault, blithely comparing himself to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and was sentenced to two years’ probation, which included an order that he stay away from children under 14. Fremlin was now an admitted pedophile, but Munro stayed with him until his death in 2013, claiming, as Skinner writes, “that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice her children, and make up for the failings of men.”
There’s an eeriness to this, given that less than three months ago, when Munro died at the age of 92, many of these same types were engaged in the kind of competitive eulogizing that’s almost a literary genre unto itself.
If you’ve never heard of Munro until now, know at least this: she was a lionized short-story writer, a Nobel laureate and arguably Canada’s most celebrated literary figure. Well into her 40s before she gained international recognition, she struggled with self-confidence, writing only short stories because she claimed she was intimidated by the prospect of writing a novel. Still, her stories, exquisitely crafted and given to bizarre turns over which Munro maintained flawless control, were considered as psychologically dense as any novel. Fellow short-story writer and literary critic Cynthia Ozick called her “our Chekhov.”
In the 48 hours or so since Skinner’s essay appeared, the literary world has been in convulsions, with authors and other industry leaders lining up to voice their disgust and to pledge never to read Munro again. There’s an eeriness to this, given that less than three months ago, when Munro died at the age of 92, many of these same types were engaged in the kind of competitive eulogizing that’s almost a literary genre unto itself.
The value, not to mention the sincerity, of publicly disavowing a fallen hero is a topic for another day. More relevant for the moment is the degree to which Skinner’s revelation unspools the feminist mythos surrounding Munro. Winning a Nobel Prize is always a big deal. But when Munro won it in 2013, it was an extra big deal. This was due not just to her age (she was 82) or the fact that prize committees tend to overlook short stories in favor of Important Novels, but that she wrote about complicated women. New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani praised Munro’s stories for their “emotional amplitude and psychological density,” writing in 2013 that Munro “refined the contours of the contemporary short story” through her “understanding of the music of domestic life, her ability to simultaneously detail her characters’ inner landscapes and their place in a meticulously observed community, and her talent for charting the ‘progress of love’ as it morphs and mutates through time.”
Imagine having to read something like that while knowing that this same woman, your own mother, refused to observe the truth of her own family in the most ghastly manner possible.
Imagine having to read something like that while knowing that this same woman, your own mother, refused to observe the truth of her own family in the most ghastly manner possible. Imagine knowing that this truth is something of an open secret in the Canadian literary world but is nonetheless ignored out of some perverse respect for literature as an institution. Imagine reading the New York Times obituary of your mother, a woman who turned down opportunities to meet her own grandchildren because she couldn’t get across town unless chauffeured by a pedophilic husband you won’t let near your kids, and encountering lines like “As famous for the refined exuberance of her prose as for the modesty of her personal life, Ms. Munro declined to travel to Sweden to accept her Nobel, saying she was too frail.”
If I were Skinner, I might have at times been as suicidal as the character in the short story Munro failed to understand. As it stands, I’m very glad she’s here and was able to harness the fortitude to say the truth out loud. I’m also glad she didn’t try to do what countless literary pontificators are at this very moment doing, which is to attempt to understand how a person who is so insightful on the page can live a life that exists in diametrical, in this case diabolical, opposition to that insight. To try to parse such a question about a stranger is a fool’s errand. To try to parse it about your own parent is an exercise in self-injury.
The brutal honesty an author deploys on the page is often cover for a life off the page that she can scarcely bring herself to look at.
But even though I make no claim to understand Munro’s psychic contradictions, I do lay claim to particular counterintuition about the moral infrastructure of certain artistic minds. When writers demonstrate uncommonly acute levels of awareness about the contradictory forces of the human condition, it’s easy to assume this awareness extends beyond the page and into their own consciousness. But I’ve observed that it can be precisely the opposite. Sometimes the more a writer understands her characters, the less she understands herself. The brutal honesty she deploys on the page is often cover for a life off the page that she can scarcely bring herself to look at.
Believe it or not, this might be doubly true for first-person writing, by which I mean memoir and personal essay. As much as fiction writers like Munro can play emotional tricks by folding their savagery into the hidden layers of their characters, memoirists do something even more ruthless. We can lay ourselves bare on the page while keeping our actual selves in a protective shell. We can practice radical honesty in our work (or at least purport to) while keeping the real world at arm’s length. We can run our worst characteristics through a filter of dazzling prose and come out with something resembling wisdom and redemption. Readers might even fall for it. But deep down, even not so deep down, we’ll know it’s a ruse.
Are these the sins of an art monster? Or just the traits of someone who’s hopelessly unevolved?
In other words, was Alice Munro an art monster or just a monster?
Perhaps the question should be flipped around: Was Alice Munro a monster? Or just an art monster?
Where does one end and the other begin? And why does this both matter immensely and not matter at all?
Also in the Art Monster series:
Am I A Recovering Art Monster?
This line is so important: “The brutal honesty she deploys on the page is often cover for a life off the page that she can scarcely bring herself to look at.” Implications abound.
I have no problem continuing to revere Munro’s work, even if she is a monster.
But why is this so common?
At what point do mothers stop protecting their daughters and start competing with them? How does this not end the relationship?? It’s an unfathomable and not at all unusual phenomenon.