what i'm doing about alice munro

why i hate art monster discourse

Photo by Hailey Kean on Unsplash

Hello friends—

Some news:

1. I am working on two books of nonfiction to be published with Graywolf. I am very excited. One is a book of literary criticism about morality and fiction and aesthetics, etc. The other is a craft book drawing on talks and lectures and classes I have taught, reframing creative writing pedagogy around the visual, the cinematic, and the dramatic. You can read more about it here.

2. I also am launching an imprint with Unnamed Press, called Smith and Taylor. I will be co-editing with the wonderful Allison Woodnutt, reissuing classics and packaging them with conversations between cool people. More details at the PW article about it.

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For the last few days, I have been thinking about the two pieces published in The Toronto Star. The first is an essay by Andrea Skinner detailing sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather Gerald Fremlin. The essay is remarkable to me for several reasons, not least of which is the clarity and directness with which Skinner handles the facts of events that took place. Without abstraction, she tells us what happened. Gerald Fremlin climbed into her bed when she was nine years old and sexually abused her. The bulk of the essay deals with the personal, familial, and even legal consequences of that abuse. Perhaps most horrifying among them is that even after Skinner disclosed the abuse to her father, she was sent summer after summer to stay in the house with her mother and Fremlin. I say her mother, but as you perhaps already know, what I really mean is Alice Munro. Later, in her adolescence, Skinner told her mother about the abuse, Munro chose to stay with Fremlin.

Later, after a familial confrontation, Fremlin wrote angry letters to the family in which he characterized Skinner’s actions as those of a seductress and homewrecker. That is, he wrote to the parents and guardians of his abuse victim letters in which he not only admitted to having molested her, but that she had caused it. And after this disclosure, Munro still stayed with him. Later, Skinner would take Fremlin to court, and he would be found guilty. Munro stood by him. When Skinner refused to let her own children be near Fremlin, Munro complained about how hard it was for her to visit the children if she couldn’t bring her husband. Skinner broke off contact with her mother. When she asked her father, who continued to see Munro, what they said of her, his response was that they didn’t speak of her.

The other piece is a reported article by the journalists Betsy Powell and Deborah Dundass. I hope you will read both accounts, particularly Skinner’s essay, which deserves to be read and considered, and cannot really be done justice in summary. I also think you should read it because you should hear it in her own words. It is tough, unsparing, and extremely difficult, but it needs to be read. So I hope you will. I’ve linked to the articles on The Star website, but you can probably find archived versions if the paywall proves onerous.

My first thought while reading the essay and my first thought after reading the essay were really the same thought—I felt profoundly heartsick and horrified for Andrea Skinner and the ensuing long period of silence and self-exile she was forced into by her family. The way they conscripted her into her own gaslighting and forced her time and again to choose their happiness and security over herself and over justice. It was an acute and dark tragedy that I recognized immediately from my own life. For a period of years starting when I was very young, I was molested by my aunt’s husband and also by a close friend of my parents who they took in during the winter because he was homeless. The first time my aunt’s husband molested me, I ran home in the middle of the night. I cut my foot on the screen door that banged shut behind me. I kept thinking that he was going to shoot me with a rifle. That he molested me soon became a bit of a family joke. At first, my parents didn’t believe me. They said I was dreaming. Then they said that I would be okay. Then they would joke about it. And everyone started joking about it. My aunt stayed with him. He hit her quite a lot. He was known as someone you didn’t want to be alone with because he touched people. He had been rumored to be having an affair with one of his daughters from an earlier marriage. That family was known for incest.

I saw him every day of my life after that. Once I refused to greet him properly, respectfully, being a young child, and my dad shook me in front of the man and in front of company and called me disrespectful and said I was making it hard for everyone by refusing to be good and behave myself. I tried my best to never be alone with him. There was always a fear that he would do it again. I wish I could say it had been the one time. But it wasn’t. It’s never the one time. He never even had to deny it. The fact was that he could have admitted in the open and the result would have been the same. Uncomfortable laughter. Putting more meat on the grill. The music on the radio. Anotehr day, whatever.

I still have dreams about the degree to which this man controlled my life. In the dream, I am always in Alabama, always stranded by bad luck or no ride back to the airport. I am myself. Or someone a lot like myself. The dream is literal. Or it is a version based on the actual facts of my life, a fiction, that I recognize immediately as a fiction and yet am powerless to do anything about it. I am in my aunt’s house, a man or a woman, a girl or a boy, it does not matter. And he is looking at me from the front room. Or a doorway. I cannot leave because I am not allowed to leave. I must stay in the house. I must stay in this place. He reaches for me. I feel his hand cupping me. I wake up. Another week passes, the dream begins again in its new, but same form. I am always waking up from that dream. I am the safest I have ever been and yet the dream is the same.

Something happens to you when you experience something awful, the worst thing that can happen in fact, and no one around you does anything. When the fact of the awful thing happening to you goes unrecorded and unremarked. It is a kind of death and a kind of dream. You are in a play you are powerless to leave. Every day, you must see their face and you know must know that the people meant to protect you have chosen not to. And they don’t have some grand or profound reason for not protecting you. It’s just that they’ve chosen not to. When I was a child, I thought, oh, I guess I should die now, my life is worthless. But also, there was such fear. I remember the fear most of all. How it would seem to recede and I’d be playing in the woods by myself, throwing sticks into the air and trying kick them on the way down, and then all of a sudden, I’d feel this terrible twisting fear in my gut. The whole world would go quiet and I’d be standing there alone, so afraid, and not entirely sure where it had come from. Now I know this to be the result of repression temporarily relieving some of the psychic burden, and how sometimes the repression lifts just slightly, and that which has been repressed comes back.

Hence the dreams.

When I read Skinner’s essay, I was so struck by how beautifully and with such clarity, she renders the experience of living in the aftermath not of unbelief, but the aftermath of ambivalence toward harm that has been done to you. I used to think that they were the same thing, but the more I’ve spoken to other survivors of childhood sexual assault, the more I’ve come to appreciate the distinctions between the two. When you disclose to someone and they don’t believe you, there is at least somewhere for the emotion to go. You can be angry at them. You can direct your anger at the concrete fiction they are trying to erect in place of the truth. But when someone believes you, but then goes on as though nothing happened, well, that is like drowning in quicksand. Skinner’s essay captures that morass very elegantly.

As I read Skinner’s essay, I confess, I did not think of the short stories. I did not think of Alice Munro, the great writer. I did not think of Alice Munro the brilliant spinner of stories that had seen me through periods of alienation and isolation. I did not think of the work or the art, or even what are we going to do with the work now that we know this? My first and only thought was Andrea Skinner’s words, which I believed in their totality.

I was a little shocked when I scrolled my feed and saw that other people had…different reactions to the news. They seemed to think immediately of the work like someone in the path of a hurricane or a wildfire thinks of their delicate artifacts and good plates. That sounds judgmental, and perhaps it is. I do not mean to judge people for their response to the news. After all, we are seldom our best or highest selves when confronted with the unexpected—and, perhaps it is a human impulse, when given the choice between identifying with the oppressed and identifying with the oppressor, we would like as much as possible to distance ourselves from the party doing the wronging. And so, I see in their responses a means of slipping out of the discomfort of complicity and into the more comfortable role of victim. In grappling with the complexities of the situation, we allow ourselves to also be wronged and betrayed but Munro’s actions toward her daughter. It is a means of resolving the horrible, unbearable tension and displeasure of the idea that we have accidentally loved someone who is, in the modern parlance, bad.

There aren’t supposed to be any more bad people, after all. It’s all supposed to frames of reference and incidental moral calculations

A while back, I did an event with Claire Dederer for her book Art Monsters, a book that tries to think through our feelings and anxieties about what to do with the art of monstrous people? I enjoyed the book though I disagreed with its premise in some ways. The question of what to do with the art of monstrous people simply is not one that ever occurs to me. I do not think of the artist when I am engaging the art. I do not think of the person behind the curtain pulling all the strings and I do not ask or think to ask of how their biography might be influencing what is at hand. Everything I have learned about an artist and the relation of biography to their work has been against my will. I simply do not find it that interesting. It’s not like with politicians or monarchs or judges or people who exercise actual power over the material facts of our lives. Who decide life and death. People with actual power to bring about sudden and material harm to us based merely on their own whims and fancy.

Art, in my mind, is different, because art, yes, can affect you, move you, disgust you, , derange you, make you want to throw yourself from a bridge, etc., but at the end of the day, the artist is not piloting you like a car or a battle robo. At most, you have a relation to them. A relation that you are at any point free to absent yourself from. That isn’t to say that there are no consequences. For example, if you don’t want to consume art by white men, then, you are free to do so. But yes, it means that, sometimes there might be references that you do not have access to, yes, and you may feel as though you are not permitted to participate in certain segments of popular culture as much as you might otherwise do, but you and your life have your own frame of reference, your own center of mass. You can make your own choices.

Many arguments about what to do with the art of someone who has done something bad seem to come from a place of wanting material retribution. As in, they shouldn’t get to benefit from a good reputation when they’ve done something in private that has caused harm. Or when they’ve espoused harmful and insidious views. We see this with J.K. Rowling and other so-called “gender-critical” artists and writers. I do not know that I have much of a stake in that, and my lack of interest in that question perhaps limits my ability to parse its arguments with the rigor and generosity they deserve. I think where I land is a kind of free market of reputation. People should feel encouraged to disclose harms done to them. Particularly about public figures or people with power. No one should feel silenced. That is a second violation, compounding the first. And I think that people should make up their minds about how they feel about that disclosure. And reparation, if possible, should be made. True reparation.

What confuses me is when people claim victimhood or betrayal in a wrong that had nothing to do with them. As though your liking Alice Munro’s stories entitles you to emotional damages from the revelation that she abetted her daughter’s molestation and later refused to leave the man who did it. It’s almost as if people are embarrassed or saddened or disgusted or enraged by the idea that someone so loved and so cherished and brilliant could also be common and small. There have been attempts to read the facts of the abuse backward into Munro’s fiction, pointing out all of the ways the stories are about repression and thwarted confession and the abuse and maiming of children. What I find remarkable is that what so many of us love in Munro’s fiction is the way she reveals how common and small we all are, how at bottom, we are capable of true ugliness and viciousness, that this is not the province of sneering villains but the woman on the corner or the man in the fast car or the quiet old lady in her house in the woods—what amazes me is that we can acknowledge this and yet be confused when confronted with a real-world example of someone who seemed remarkable but who is simply selfish and small.

I have read a lot of confused tweets and articles, trying to figure out “how could she do this?” as though it is some grand mystery. It is not. At least not to me. She had a choice to believe and protect her daughter in the face of the revelations, even after her daughter, decades later, took Fremlin to court and won, but she chose to stay. And people seem amazed by that. What kind of mother? What kind of person? What kind of woman? etc. Well, any kind of mother. Any kind of person. Any kind of woman. She made a choice and justified it to herself through any number of inversions or self-delusions, who can say. But is this really so shocking? People do this every day. My own family did this. I saw it play out first hand. People are capable of justifying anything. Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person. To grasp for some justification as though there must be some brilliant dark inner turning of the mind that will explain it as opposed to accepting it as the everyday course of life, I mean…that, to me, betrays a lack of understanding of human nature, particularly the one advanced by Munro’s work.

Undoubtedly in the weeks and months to come, people will say “it’s complicated” and “it’s complex” and “separate the artist from the art.”

I disagree. It is not complicated. It is not complex. Alice Munro stayed with the man who molested her daughter. Not only that, but she stayed with a man who, when confronted with his information, wrote the family letters explaining how the child victim was in fact a “homewrecker” and seducer. Not only that, but she expressed a justification in choosing her own happiness because after all, what had been done had been done.

This is the most characteristic thing Munro could have said. In her stories, epiphany and revelation often take the form of accepting the crude and brutal terrain of the past for what it is and setting one’s shoulder to wheel to get on with living. What I love about her stories is that they come with an aftermath. They dare to offer the reader a glimpse into that rarely seen world to come. When the choice has been made and one has to get on with it. I was told too late. I loved him too much. Is that not the most Alice Munro thing you have ever read?

Furthermore, it’s a kind of thinking I was raised among. It’s how I got through much of the abuse and trauma of my own life. Well, that’s that. Anyway. Not a shrug. But a setting the shoulder against the stone and pushing onward. It is a kind of thinking common to the rural poor and the working poor, among whom and by whom I was raised. I have struggled for a long time in trying to explain it. It is a world without history. Not a world without a past. But a world without a history, which is a story we tell ourselves about the past. Among my people, the rural and working poor, to make a history out of the past is taboo. To speak of a thing done is to make too much of it. To be fishing for sympathy, and for what, when there’s nothing to be done about it anyway.

I suppose what I find interesting in many of the baffled responses to the Munro news is how the betrayal seems to issue out of a moral disgust with this idea. A fundamental misunderstanding of how someone like Munro experiences life. How can a writer be someone who does not have a historical sense of her own life? I think her art is an attempt to give her life a historical sense. But in the crude day-to-day, there is just that life without history.

Andrea Skinner did something incredibly brave in recounting the facts of her abuse, the silencing from her mother and father, the hard fight out of that place without language. She did it with grace and compassion, which is more than I ever could have done. Her essay moved me in ways I’m still struggling to get my head around. And for me, my thoughts the last several days have been with her and the facts of what was done to her. What was allowed to be done to her. But also the long path to healing she and her siblings have undertaken. The vulnerability and bravery that it must have taken to have those long, hard conversations. The attempt to repair bonds that were truly never allowed to take hold in the first place because of the traumatic event. I don’t even have words for how incredible that is. I mean. Maybe it will seem hyperbolic, but it feels like miracle. Watching the support from the Munro family in Andrea’s disclosure, I mean. It’s just really fucking incredible, and it makes me a little sad because I know how rare it is.

I find the handwringing and legacy pondering rather distasteful in the face of what was done to Andrea Skinner. I’m just going to be honest. I don’t think it’s interesting. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s even the right set of questions. I am not eager to read the work and interrogate and refine and try to sus out fact from fiction, etc. I do not feel betrayed by Alice Munro. I do not feel the need to throw her books away. I do not feel the need to rend my garments and demand we dig her up so that she can pay for her complicity. I do not even care to know how she personally justified it to herself because I think the answer there is actually pretty boring and ordinary. People can justify anything to themselves. Is that so interesting?

For myself, I will never read Alice Munro the same way again. I now know what I know. So going forward, I believe that Skinner’s story should be a part of discourses around Munro’s work. That seems obvious. I think we cannot talk about Munro’s art without also talking about this aspect of her life. Some people will find that distasteful. Some people will find it tacky. Some people say it’s not enough. And to those people, I say that it’s okay you feel that way. But I also think that we owe it to Skinner, in part because she wasn’t just silenced by her family. Her mother’s fame and prominence as an author actively aided in keeping Skinner’s story out of the news and out of the press. It was a silence that grew directly out of a cultural apparatus that privileged power over the pain and the suffering and the abuse of a young child. Skinner’s pain and the ugliness she has had to endure over decades has not simply been personal. Or familial. And so, there never was a separation between art and artist. Because if Munro had been less famous, less beloved, less known, then the truth about what happened to Skinner might have been put into the world sooner and when it was finally allowed to emerge, it wouldn’t have been silenced to the extent that it was. It wouldn’t have taken Munro dying before someone finally got brave enough to stop pretending that Andrea Skinner hadn’t been saying this all along.

Viewed that way, we are all complicit, are we not? In loving Munro, participating in her celebrity, in her art, we fed a cultural apparatus that permitted and indeed necessitated Skinner’s silencing. And if that is true, then, yes, I can see why people would be running like rats from a sinking ship, trying to fling themselves overboard, to get free of the knowledge that they had some small part in making a scapegoat of a young child. But I don’t think you can run fast enough or far enough to escape that knowledge. I think you should perhaps ask yourself why you feel such desperation to participate now in the victimhood you helped create. But I already know the answer, and you do too.

There isn’t “the art and the artist” and one does not “separate art from artist.” To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world. The very question is stupid right down to its core. The better question is why do you need to feel comfortable in the rightness of the art you engage. Why do you need to create a safe art that has no harmful valences in it? I know why. You know why. Because otherwise, one has to own up to the knife you hold behind you, ready to plunge it into your brother’s back. Otherwise, you have to own up to the commonness and smallness and the very humanness of monstrosity itself.

I think of those questions as being deeply tied to what happens when you are forced to socialize with someone who has harmed you. The weird dream logic that emerges. The way everyone goes around pretending that everything is okay. To me, they are similar if not related delusions. You are never separating the art from the artist. You are creating a soft fantasy to make your own life more comfortable. Because you have decided to live in such way that creates regimes of value that you do not want to own up to. You have confused your own frame of reference for an objective fact.

Anyway, I could go on.

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