David Davis
a note on Alice Munro
Only July 7, the Toronto Star published a statement by Andrea Robin Skinner on the subject of her mother, Canadian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro. Skinner details a long history of horrific neglect by Munro, including her abetting of Skinner’s sexual abuse by her stepfather—Munro’s husband until his death in 2013—the rapist Gerald Fremlin.
I don’t know why I read Skinner’s statement. I avoid reportage on this topic in general, and while I had certainly heard of Munro—who hasn’t?—if I had ever read anything by her before July 7, I didn’t remember it (I’m not a very good literary citizen). Skinner’s words pitched me into such a wrathful despair that I wasted a summer morning wishing I could disinter her mother’s ninety-two-year-old bones and stamp them into powder.
As Skinner’s statement went viral, my rage found more targets, particularly among those who felt the need to diminish or “reckon with” her disclosure: How could Munro, my favorite writer, do this (to me)? Am I allowed to go on enjoying her work, now that I know she chose a child predator over her daughter? And my personal favorite: How can I find a way to carve off pieces of Munro’s guilt and reassign them to the men she collaborated with—Fremlin and Skinner’s own father, who knowingly sent his daughter back to her mother’s home for the rest of her childhood—so as to maintain my fantasies about the maleness of violence?
Seeking some measure of your own moral goodness based on the art you respond to is to misunderstand art itself, but I can’t stop people from doing it. I don’t see the point in discontinuing to read or teach Munro simply because we now know that she was a covert abuser of children. Not even Skinner asked for this:
I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.
With Skinner’s brave revelation, her story is now Munro’s legacy, just as the sins and violations of other artists are theirs. That is the reckoning here, not anything that you or I can do with our phones, wallets, or bookshelves. There are some artists that I can no longer enjoy because I know what they have done; there are others that I continue to enjoy, despite knowing what they have done. This is not uncomplicated for me, nor do I think it should be. But while I believe we ought to consider the writer’s life alongside their work, to approach a situation like Skinner’s with a scale in hand, ready to weigh a human life against a work of art, is among the most depraved things I can imagine.
As Fiona’s mind and memory fail her, her husband, Grant, puts her in assisted living, only to begin losing her to another man. This is the plot of Munro’s 2001 short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which I read for the first time a few days ago. Exploring themes of marriage, desire, and fidelity—of all kinds—Mountain is at first unassuming, then unflinching. It’s beautiful, and terribly sad, and I understand why it’s considered one of Munro’s best1.
I read Mountain because I was curious, not because I was searching for a smoking gun or secret code. It’s just art, even if the artist was, as I maintain, a contemptible person. But I cried reading it, as I cried reading Skinner’s statement. For different reasons, I believed, until I thought about it some more. It’s not that I see myself in these stories, both the real and the fictional (although, for different reasons, I do). It’s that they allow me to see the people behind them. Oh, that’s me, is the beginning of, Oh, that’s you! That is art. At least I hope it is.
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Much of its sadness is, I think, is the unintended result of its being a portrait of straight, white, upper-middle-class monogamy, and the loneliness it creates.