If any author or performer epitomises Canada, it’s not Margaret Atwood, Céline Dion, Ryans Reynold or Gosling (yes, they are), but someone who isn’t particularly well known outside of the country other than in literary circles.
Alice Munro, who died in May aged 92, was the author of numerous books, won most of the world’s major literary prizes, including the Nobel in 2013, and was regarded as arguably the greatest short-story writer of modern times.
Within Canada she was the quintessence of the country’s self-perception, even among people who didn’t read her. Small-town life, the extraordinary within the ordinary, and the biting reality of relationships, especially for women. Her passing was greeted in Canada and abroad with enormous and heartfelt sorrow.
And then things began to change, to unravel. Last week in the Toronto Star, one of the country’s largest daily papers, Andrea Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter from her first marriage, revealed that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, when she was nine years old and that he continued to repeatedly expose himself to her, masturbate in front of her, and make obscene comments until she was a teenager.
Skinner says the abuse was kept secret from her mother until she was 25. Munro may, however, have already been aware, because when she was confronted with the truth, she told her daughter of other children Fremlin had formed “friendships” with.
After the revelation, Munro separated from Fremlin for a short period but soon returned to him and they remained together until his death is in 2013. Munro explained to Skinner that she had been “told too late”.
In 2005 Fremlin pleaded guilty to one charge of indecent assault and was sentenced to two years of probation, but the marriage continued. The detective who worked on the case said he was shocked by the Nobel laureate’s reaction, that Munro became angry, and accused her daughter of lying. “That’s your daughter,” the police officer said. “Aren’t you going to defend your daughter?”
The relationship between Munro and Skinner finally broke down when Skinner was pregnant and told her mother that Fremlin wasn’t to be allowed around her children. “She just coldly told me that it was going to be a terrible inconvenience for her (because she didn’t drive).” Her mother, she said, “chose to stay with and protect my abuser”.
All of this has stunned both Canada and the greater literary community, but what happens next?
Authors and artists have been written out of the lexicon of the good and the great for less, even “cancelled” for certain discretions. Western University in London, Ontario, where Munro studied, had been planning on creating a chair in her honour. That has been paused. She’s also a central figure not only on courses on Canadian and world literature, but in feminist studies, and international fiction. Entire syllabuses may have to be changed.
What Munro did was at best weak and horribly selfish, but perhaps much worse. Yet does it suddenly mean that she didn’t write beautifully, profoundly, and originally, or that her works no longer matter? In that she sometimes wrote about sexual coercion and male violence, her integrity needs to be revised, her character questioned, and I could understand if some people, especially if they’d been survivors of abuse, found it impossible to read her.
Back in 1983, when I was just out of university and starting as a journalist with the New Statesman, I interviewed the author Roald Dahl. He spewed out the vilest antisemitism to me (three of my grandparents were Jewish) and then doubled down on it when I questioned him.
Yet it didn’t mean I could never again appreciate his abilities or read his books to my children. I think Wagner was an utter swine but I adore his music, I wrote a biography of and relish the writing of GK Chesterton but some of his views disgust me. In other words, I can distinguish between creator and creation, and surely so can the rest of us.
The Munro revelation is bleeding and raw and it’ll take time to digest all of this and for people to come to terms with it. That I understand and appreciate. I hope that it will all lead to those who have been abused to feel more able to come forward and to be listened to, but what I don’t hope is that it will close yet more minds to flawed, even deeply flawed, genius.
Michael Coren is an Anglican priest and author. His latest book, The Rebel Christ (Canterbury Press, £12.99), is out now