Revisiting Alice Munro
How do an author's moral failures affect our judgement of her work?
A month ago, I wrote here about Alice Munro. She had recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I had never read her work, I figured I should take a look. So I read Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, one of her short story collections. Obviously, I was only scratching the surface of her work, but it was enough to see why Munro has been called one of the masters of the short story.
Now Munro has been in the news again, but for all the wrong reasons. A week ago the Toronto Star published an article by Andrea Skinner, Munro’s daughter, describing how she had been sexually abused by Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, beginning in 1976, when she was only nine years old. (The article is here, though behind a paywall.) Munro knew of the abuse at least by 1992; Skinner clearly believes that she must have had her suspicions even before then. Yet she did nothing, said nothing. She remained with Fremlin and never reconciled with her daughter.
The case has received a lot of commentary by people who know Munro’s life and work far better than I. But it raises a fundamental and challenging question: how should an author’s moral failures affect our reading of her work?
I spent a bit of time pondering this question a few years ago when the Austrian author Peter Handke won the Nobel. Handke’s name had been bandied about for the Nobel for some time, but by the time he won the 2019 prize, he had become quite controversial. In Handke’s case, the controversy turned on his political judgement: during and after the Yugoslavian Wars of the 1990’s, he took a stubbornly pro-Serbian position, even to the point of questioning whether the 1995 Serbian massacre of 8000 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica had truly taken place. Years later, Handke remained unrepentant about his statements.
At the time I read about a half-dozen of Handke’s novels, using him as a kind of case study. I wanted to think about the extent to which we should judge a work of literature on the basis of the author’s moral or political views. I don’t know that I resolved this question entirely to my own satisfaction, but the answer I came to was more or less that those views interest us, as readers, only to the extent that they leave traces in his work. (In Handke’s case, I concluded, they probably do—although in my view he also commits the equally bad literary sin of being simply rather… boring.)
In considering Munro, we might want to take an analogous position: her moral failures interest as readers only to the extent that they leave traces in her work. (They interest us as human beings, of course, even if the work appears untouched by them.) So: do they?
Having read only one of her books, I probably shouldn’t attempt any very definite pronouncements. But looking back at what I wrote a month ago, I think that two of the points I made there appear in a somewhat different light now.
First, I wrote this:
Munro’s special talent—at least as it seems to me on the basis of this one collection—is her subtle portrayal of the ways in which we all deceive ourselves (and in the process others, but especially ourselves), being not quite honest about truths that make us uncomfortable or that we would rather not admit about ourselves.
In light of her daughter’s revelations, this has a new resonance. Was Munro good at understanding this kind of self-deception because she was uneasily aware that she practiced it herself? Did she have such a sharp eye for our strategies of concealment because at some level she knew that she was not being honest with herself? I hesitate to press this point, if only because the one book I’ve read was published in 1974, two years before her daughter’s abuse even began. So if this was indeed her special talent, Munro possessed it long before she had this particular secret to hide from herself. Perhaps instead of art imitating life, in this case life imitated art: after so many years unveiling the psychology of self-deception, Munro might have found it slightly easier, when the moment of truth arrived, to indulge in it herself.
I also wrote the following:
Munro avoids judgement on her characters. Her manner of telling their stories, however, compels the reader to withhold judgement as well. Because as soon as we realize that these people are guilty of things they cannot fully admit about themselves—sometimes actions, but often simply emotions, antipathies, desires—it starts to dawn on us that we are no different…. Once we are honest about this, standing in judgement upon Munro’s characters begins to feel rather awkward, to say the least.
In light of the recent revelations, this observation also appears more telling than I could have expected. Perhaps Munro is so reticent about judging her characters because to do so would require that she make similar judgements about herself. Perhaps she refrains from inviting the reader to pass judgement, lest the reader be tempted to apply the same standards to the author as to her characters.
Perhaps, perhaps. Only perhaps. Here too, as I noted with respect to the first point, the chronology doesn’t really work: I read an early collection of stories, so the patterns were already there before the abuse began. Nevertheless, one wonders whether the stories are unwittingly revelatory of certain character traits that would later prove to have such harmful consequences.
These are hard questions, and I hope no one will think I am recommending against reading Munro’s books. Nothing of the sort. The relation between life, morality, and art is complex, and literary merit is certainly not reducible to an author’s ethical views or personal moral conduct. And of course I’ve still read only the one collection of stories. Nevertheless, it may prove hard to read Munro’s work in quite the same way from now on. If it is true, as I suggested above, that an author’s ethical failures are of interest to readers to the extent that they leave traces in her work, then what one might call the “ethical distance” in Munro’s stories is too uncomfortably parallel to the ethical distance we now know existed in her private life not to cast at least some shadow over her art.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you later this week for another installment From My Bookshelf.
In one of the final stories Munro wrote, a story told in the first person called “Dear Life,” these were the last sentences: “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.”
Thank you, Peter. I appreciate your cogent assessment of how we can separate/reconcile the artists from their art. I taught Munro's work for several years in my Canadian Literature class and these revelations have necessarily changed the way I will be reading her work from now on.