Don’t Ask Alice Munro

Alice Munro, the Canadian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for her beautifully crafted and psychologically layered short stories, and who died in a nursing home in May at age 92, may not be a subject of study in her nation’s universities for much longer if certain ideologues get their way.

The polite, insular world of Canada’s cultural elite has been in a state of shock since the publication of Andrea Robin Skinner’s explosive essay in the Toronto Star on July 7. Skinner, Munro’s daughter, claims that Gerald Fremlin, her stepfather and her mom’s second husband, climbed into the bed she slept in one night in Ontario in 1976 and committed a sexual assault, leaving her with deep physical and psychological scars. A court in 2005 accepted a guilty plea from Fremlin and sentenced him to two years’ probation. 

As if all that weren’t bad enough, Skinner says that years later she told Munro what had happened, yet her mom decided to stay with the creep. 

Now, there are cries to cancel Munro. The acting dean of the arts and humanities division of prestigious Western University in London, Ontario, has put out a statement saying her institution is pausing appointing anyone to the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity. The mayor of a small Ontario town featuring a custom-inscribed bench and a statue of a pile of books honoring the Nobel laureate has said he may make unspecified alterations to the monument, though he did also briefly acknowledge Munro’s literary achievement.

Margaret Atwood, the only living Canadian writer with a stature close to Munro’s, though she has openly expressed disdain for some of the duskier and more marginalized members of her society, stated in an email to the Washington Post, “I did not learn the details of this until everyone else did, though I’d had hints not long before this past weekend. Horrifying.” 

An essay published on wbur.org and entitled “Alice Munro doesn’t get to tell this story” goes so far as to suggest that the appropriate course now is to jettison or revise spontaneously all the criteria on which the Nobel committee has given out its prize to writers over the years: “Forget Alice Munro’s Nobel. Give Andrea Skinner the award.”

So, consider the logic here. Someone makes a public accusation against a writer who struggled for a lifetime to attain recognition, and finally won it not long before her passing, but is no longer around to address the charges and defend herself. Now, ipso facto, the accuser wields infinitely more moral authority and importance—to the point of annulling any and all rights and perquisites of the accused, and justifying the transfer of one of the world’s most coveted awards.

Munro raised the stature of her nation within the literary world and in 2013 became one of the few women to receive the planet’s most respected prize for literary achievement. But some guardians of correct opinion refuse to forgive personal failings no matter how much time has passed or to honor even members of demographics they profess to champion, when doing so requires a bit of thought or courts controversy. Like a snake eating its tail, the movement to cancel creatives and thinkers who may not have been angels in their private lives and thoughts has come to claim someone whose success long stood as a victory for what progressives claim to value.

Again, it would be one thing if someone approached a living writer about her sins of commission or omission, but Alice Munro is not around to answer the extremely serious allegations or to give her side of things. We can really only speculate about this manifestly intelligent woman’s reasons for sticking with Fremlin after Skinner came to her with the account of events back on that night in 1976. 

Was Munro mindful of the often deeply strained relations between children and stepparents, and did she, perhaps, have reason to doubt Skinner’s motives or even some of the details of her account? Did Munro maybe question the judicial processes of a court that, under intense political pressures, sentenced Fremlin to probation in 2005, four decades after the incident Skinner describes? 

We will never know. Almost all we can hear are the bullhorns blaring calls for the defenestration of a writer who did not act as many people not caught up in the complexities of an intensely personal and private drama—and whose own private lives are off limits to public scrutiny—now say they would have done. 

Nowhere do they acknowledge that talented artists are often deeply flawed people, that it is questionable to expect personal perfection and consummate artistry in the same individual, that virtually no one in history could ever meet such a standard, and that, if victims demand to be heard, then accused persons, too, have rights. Even or especially if they have left the sad world they sought to make sense of in their writing.