Et Tu Alice?

Another Artist Disappoints Her Fans

Alice Munro is the sort of writer that almost no one who is not a writer, a professor, a one-time English major, or an avid reader of The New Yorker has ever heard of. But within these circles, she is highly regarded, almost worshipped, as one of, if not the, greatest short-story writers of the twentieth century.

For my part, I’ve always thought of her as a writer I’m supposed to admire, but who, in all honestly, I’m just not that into. It’s not that I don’t like her stories. When I’m reading them, I find them entertaining and thoughtful enough. But somehow, I don’t experience them as memorable. For example, I’ve read “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” more than once, but I could not tell you a single detail of the plot, not one. I don’t even remember if there’s a bear in it.

I’ve always been tempted to say she’s a token Canadian in the lit world, raised beyond her stature because she fits certain demographic needs. But I’m also willing to accept that I may just not have a refined enough taste to truly appreciate her. I’m a fan of less subtle stories, Flannery O’Connor, J.D. Salinger, and the like. And I also acknowledge that she pulls off some story-telling pyrotechnics that are worthy of study.

But, as Mark Anthony might have said, I am not here to praise Alice Munro but to consider what it means that she tolerated the sexual abuse of her daughter.

---

By now, it’s all over Twitter and Substack—reactions to the column in the Toronto Star in which Andrea Robbin Skinner, Munro’s daughter, reveals that her stepfather, Monro’s second husband, sexually abused Andrea when she was nine years old. Munro did not know about it at the time, but her daughter told the author when she was sixteen, and The Great Writer’s reaction was not what anyone would have hoped for.

“In spite of her sympathy for a fiction character,” Skinner writes, “my mother had no similar feelings for me.” In short, Munro made it about herself, asserted that the secret had been kept to humiliate her, and stuck by her husband even after he threatened to make public photos he had taken of her then 11-year-old daughter in her underwear. Munro said she loved her husband too much to leave him, and “was adamant that whatever happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

I see no reason not to take this story at face value. Munro’s husband sexually assaulted her preadolescent daughter, and Munro, upon learning about it, essentially sided with her husband. As such, at least within this context, The Great Writer comes off as morally repulsive.

So, what does this mean for readers of her work?¹ Can we ever look at an Alice Munro story the same way again? Ought we even to read them?

---

I’ve recently discussed the question of art vs. the artist using Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd band member, as my prime example. In not only denying the reality that Israeli women were raped by Hamas on October 7 but also calling people who asserted that they were, “filthy, disgusting liars,” Waters confirmed in the eyes of many, myself included, his status as a full-on Jew-hater. Nonetheless, I continue to listen to his music because I separate the art from the artist, though I conceded, Waters is making it difficult.

There are some important differences here, however. Unlike Waters, “the literary world” has been ‘“rocked” not by any political position Munro has taken but by purely private matter involving the writer, who is, in fact, now dead. I could argue that Waters’ views are poisoning the minds of people against Jews. I can’t make any sort of analogous argument about Munro. All I can say is that, apparently, she was a crap mother.

Should that change how I read her? I say no. Will it, nonetheless, change the way I read her? Probably.

---

As an experiment this morning, I listened to the June 21, 2011 episode of The New Yorker Podcast in which writer Lauren Groff reads and discusses Munro’s short story “Axis.” I had never read the story and picked it randomly from among the four stories by Munro featured in the broadcast. “Axis” is about two bright young women, Grace and Avie, who both have affairs with young men while in college in pre-feminist days. One turns out disastrously, the other not.

If I knew nothing of Munro’s life, what would have struck me about this story as a reader and a teacher of Creative Writing is how Munro breaks several “rules” that I inculcate into my students.

She shifts the point of view between characters, a big no-no in short stories because it distracts the reader and confuses them about who is the main character. She switches abruptly from past to present tense and then back again, another no-no. She gets the story to a logical stopping place, where I would have written “end here” on a student story, and keeps going for pages. And all the while, as she breaks one rule after another, she presents as a conventional realist. It’s a masterful performance.

But how could I not think of her daughter, Andrea Skinner, when one of her the main characters in the story reports the following dream:

“. . . . she had a baby who cried day and night; it howled in fact until she thought she would go crazy. At last she picked up this baby . . . and took her down to some dark basement room and shut her in there where the thick walls ensured she wouldn’t be heard, and she went away and forgot about her. And it turn out she had another girl baby anyway, one who was easy and delightful, and she grew up without any problems. But one day this grown daughter spoke to her mother about her sister hidden in the basement. It turned out that she had known about her all along. The poor warped and disgarded one had told her everything, and there was nothing to be done now. . . .

Wow, wow, wow. If I were a graduate student, I’d have one hand on my keyboard and another on my shelf of psychoanalytic literature and would be patting myself on the back with a metaphorical third hand, confident I’d soon have an article in the PMLA. It seems so obvious that Munro is processing, in some way, her child’s trauma and her own psychological splitting of said daughter into good and bad baby. I swear, I can almost feel the ghost of Melanie Klein calling out to me to write the article. “Good breast, bad breast,” she moans. . .

So, in short, no, I cannot completely ignore details about a writer’s life when I learn them. For better or worse, they will color my reading.

But what about the moral issue? Ought I even read stories written by a person of such seemingly low character as Munro?

Yes. Yes, I ought. Just as I still love Woodie Allen movies, just as I still play Bill Cosby’s hilarious take on the Bible every time parshat Noach comes around, just as I still can’t stop my head from nodding with the beat of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” I will continue to read and teach Munro’s stories —and then completely forget them five minutes later.

---

Here’s something I realized while discussing this with one of my colleagues this morning. Not only do you have to separate the art from the artist, you have to not separate the artist from humanity.

As the writer and pundit Andrew Klavan frequently says, we are all broken people. And artists, let’s face it, are more broken than most, and it is through that brokenness that they create.

“There is a crack,” says Leonard Cohen, “a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Everyone is cracked, but in artists, the cracks may be greater and more manifold, and so they also bring in more light.

In the end, we don’t read Alice Munro’s stories because she lived such an amazing, uplifting life. We read about her life because she had wrote such incredible stories. We want to understand how he was able to create such beauty. And, if it turns out that she created beauty of out darkness, how much the more remarkable.

Even if we are to cast stones at the occasional artist like Roger Water who goes public with his bile, going after the private lives of dead writers is a whole ‘nother thing.

Should we be interested in their lives? How could we not be, being what we are, social creatures?

But we should approach the private life of artists as a good psychoanalyst would, not to judge, but to understand.

---

There’s a story I love about two monks standing on a bridge overlooking a fish pond. One monk says to the other, “Those goldfish are so tranquil.”

The other monk says, “Who are you, not being a goldfish, to presume to know they are tranquil?”

To which the first monk replies, “Who are you, not being me, to know that I don’t know if the goldish are tranquil?”

In the end, we must delve into the lives of artists like Munro with humility. Who am I, not being Alice Munro, to say that I, in her body, in her historical circumstances, with her unique upbringing and psychology, would have acted any differently? And who am I to pretend that my life is so unimpeachable?

I don’t blame Munro’s daughter for making her mother’s indefensible mothering public. She has to do what she has to do to process her own trauma. The individual I blame most, besides the actual abusing stepfather, is Skinner’s biological father, who did nothing even after hearing about the abuse in real time, that is to say, shortly after it happened. As a father, I find that impossible to wrap my head around that, and I am glad he doesn’t have any short stories I need to contend with.

In the end, I feel sadness all around for that family. And I feel that their business is not my business, except insofar as it helps me to see that Munro, despite everything we might wish to the contrary, was 100 percent human being.

1. and for some of us teachers.