Stephen Saunders discusses how a daughter's shocking revelations dismantle the legacy of Canadian literary "national treasure" Alice Munro.
FOR A QUARTER CENTURY, I covered fiction at The Canberra Times and elsewhere, glomming the regular Alice Munro titles, as keenly as those of a James Salter or Cormac McCarthy.
Here were real artists. From sensual pleasure, the review could almost write itself.
Naively, I liked to imagine meeting Munro. What an eye. What a mind.
How could she see as clearly as she saw? Skip back and forth across the generations and nail it down into 30 pages of looping but irresistible prose? Finding ways to take the story to another level of eeriness (like Meneseteung) or menace (Save the Reaper).
Hard on the heels of Munro’s death, comes a malevolent and Munroesque twist.
By the 1990s, Munro had clear evidence that her second husband had (from the 1970s on) abused her youngest daughter Andrea Skinner. But the author backed the former, ahead of the latter.
Somehow, the crime stayed under wraps. Literary Queen of Canada, Interpretive Mistress of Ontario, the author sailed on to win the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Imagine having a voicemail informing you that you have been awarded the #NobelPrize? A voicemail forever saved in your telephone. That is what happened to writer Alice Munro on 10 October 2013.
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) September 8, 2023
Who will the Swedish Academy be calling on 6 October this year? pic.twitter.com/6a98NAfLIN
In 1999, she published an admired story about dementia, The Bear Came over the Mountain. Not one to waste material, she also seems to have mined her malaise to conjure late and great stories. In Sight of the Lake (2012) is one.
Munro’s stories are still great
You can go a bit stir-crazy during COVID lockdowns. When not catching up on cultish Romanian or Korean movies, I reread half a dozen Munro titles. These stood up well.
Now she’s outed, some readers are binning their Munro collections. Not me.
She was never just a women’s or a feminist’s writer, but more like a Jane Austen — a writer for everywoman and everyman.
She could be bleak and cruel. Anything was fair game. Any wicked joke could be surfaced with disarming wit. An ailing woman takes a fastidious hour to do her makeup — to die. Two estranged and quarrelsome partners are ultimately returned to adjacent graves.
She wasn’t into special pleading for her distaff side. Women could play the all-time unpleasant trick on another woman, only to see it backfire (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage).
Now, literary sleuths are ransacking the stories, looking for furtive upwellings of Alice’s worst secret. Turns out, it’s not difficult.
Take Canada’s other world-famous female writer, Margaret Atwood. Shocked by this “bombshell”, she quickly finds clues in various stories. In hindsight, Irish writer Megan Nolan detects in Munro, a wilful 'assertion of the right to be happy'.
Several critics have revisited the closing lines of her final 2012 collection Dear Life:
'We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.'
Munro’s personal reputation tanks
Munro had an innate eye and gift. However, her level of achievement is another matter.
Quite young, she had two daughters to mind and a third who didn’t survive. Andrea came along afterwards, in 1966. Nothing derailed the author’s determination.
She kept blossoming as a writer into the early 2000s. Like an ageing Olympic champ, she surged for the tape again, with Too Much Happiness (2009) and finally Dear Life.
Inevitably some have speculated, could Munro herself have been abused? On the surface at least, she seems to have had congenial relations with the opposite sex.
For example, her youthful alter ego finds great pleasure with a young lover. No soulmate he, as if this were “only sex”. But such a satisfying bond is not to be disparaged, it’s not 'something that could be found easily, every day'.
She wrote frankly of sex, including abuse and adultery. Both husbands supported her literary ambitions.
Praising the Hateship, Friendship collection two decades ago, I dubbed her an 'incisive reporter of sexual love'. Tapping into its 'shame, dangerous electricity or dizzy elation'.
Apparently, even then, some folks were onto her private shame.
Supposedly, it had long been “broadly understood” (if not by Canada at large) that her 1993 story Vandals drew on Skinner’s abuse.
By 2005 it seems a Canadian biographer and Munro’s Canadian publisher definitely knew the drift. They chose to clam up, for what looked like selfish reasons.
Well, the genie’s out now. While Munro’s stories would be mighty difficult to erase, her personal reputation takes a hiding. A "Royal Beating", to quote a saying she once riffed on.
Don’t blame the daughter
When Skinner originally challenged her abuser and her mother, the aftermath was dismal. Grotesquely, the former smeared her as a “Lolita” and “homewrecker”. Allegedly, the latter saw a rival, as distinct from a victim.
When the victim finally went to police in 2005, the abuser got a 'suspended sentence and probation for two years'. Munro stayed loyal, until he died in her Nobel year.
Candidly, Skinner admits personal motives for upping the ante again after her mother’s death. She wants her experience to become 'part of the stories people tell about my mother'.
Fair cop, I’d say. Better late than never.
Genius will sacrifice others
One Munro critic, writer Rebecca Maccai said:
'Alice Munro was no better than the miserable women she wrote about.'
This is a fair call from Maccai, herself an abuse victim. Morally, the LA Times headline is allowable. But very few women, miserable or otherwise, can excel like Munro.
I prefer this comment, from another writer Jess Row:
'She chose over and over to shelter and defend a paedophile, because anything else would have threatened her art.'
My same review claimed Munro had 'achieved much of what was originally within her reach'. Still true I reckon — but let’s contemplate the counterfactual.
What if Munro’s creepy husband had been convicted in the 1970s or 1980s with his offences being publicised?
This could have cramped Munro’s writing motivations and choices. When I first lucked on to her in the 1970s, she wasn’t a household name. Quite possibly, she wouldn’t have hit the heights she did in the following decades.
That Nobel bonbon? Don’t think so.
In crass terms then, Munro’s Faustian trade-off was a canny career move. It’s not evident she harboured overwhelming regrets.
Coming to my mind now, are favourite lines from rock singer and author Greg Kihn:
“Everybody needs somebody else that they can sacrifice
And everybody needs some self-esteem.”
As a mediocrity, what would I know about the human sacrifices a genius might or might not be prepared to make? To scale Olympic heights of esteem.
Stephen Saunders is a former public servant, consultant and 'Canberra Times' reviewer. He is on the Sustainable Population Australia Executive Committee.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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