A year and a half ago, while moving house, I had taken the trouble to arrange my books alphabetically so when the Alice Munro scandal broke, I found her quickly, between Mueenuddin, Daniyal, and Murakami, Haruki. I had Dear Life, a collection of short stories, which I hadn’t read and now never will.
For the uninitiated (like me), Munro’s claim to our attention till recently had been that she had won the Nobel Prize in literature. Now she’s famous for not noticing that her second husband had raped and sexually abused her daughter from her first marriage from the time she was nine, and then for continuing to live with him after her adult daughter brought it to her attention. With the empathy that distinguishes midlist maestros, she declared that her husband’s paedophilia had been brought to her notice too late and that she couldn’t live without him.
She continued to live with him after he admitted to the abuse, was convicted for it, and received a suspended sentence. He accused his step-daughter of being a nymphet, of seducing him; Munro, for her part, seemed more concerned about his ‘infidelity’ than her daughter’s trauma. When her daughter had children and told her mother that she didn’t want Munro’s paedophile husband around them, this Canadian matron complained that this would make it very difficult for her to visit her grandchildren since she didn’t drive.
The most interesting thing about this scandal is that by 2005, everyone close to Andrea Skinner, Munro’s daughter, knew that her stepfather had raped her, but this knowledge didn’t become public till nearly twenty years later when she wrote an article in a Canadian newspaper detailing the abuse after her mother died. Her mother, her father, her stepmother, her siblings and step-siblings and Munro’s biographer and her long-time editor and publisher were all in the know. Their omerta should be understood as an instance of the vicious literary conceit that a writer’s life and choices aren’t relevant to their work and that it isn’t just reasonable, but crucial to keep them from muddying the reception of the writing.
So Skinner’s sister, Sheila Munro, who wrote a memoir in 2002 titled Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro, told The New York Times that she didn’t think the scandal should detract from her literary legacy. Munro’s biographer, Robert Thacker, told of the abuse in 2005 by Skinner and then in 2008 by Munro herself, felt “it wasn’t his place as a literary biographer to delve into fraught family history.”
This is a curious thing to say. The New York Times quotes Rebecca Makkai, an American novelist, who says “[t]hese revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions.” Even if Munro’s readers stop short of Makkai’s judgement, it’s hard to make the case that her response to her daughter’s trauma and her husband’s betrayal isn’t relevant to the way in which her fiction was written and will now be read.
After listening to Munro’s telling of this story, it was Thacker’s impression that “[t]his was one of the saddest things in her life,” This was clearly the saddest episode in Munro’s daughter’s life. To the outsider who has read Skinner’s account of their estrangement, Munro’s ‘sadness’ comes across as pure narcissism. Readers who are parents might be forgiven for thinking that a writer who blamed her abused daughter for her husband’s paedophilia was a sociopath whose condition might have a bearing on her books.
Sociopathy takes us one letter down from M[unro] to N[aipaul] whose narcissism was detailed in Patrick French’s remarkable biography, The World Is What It Is. This was a man who told his official biographer that he found sexual pleasure in beating his English wife and his mistress. It’s impossible now to read Naipaul without accounting for his sadism. The way he writes rape in Guerrillas, the fastidious cruelty of his insights into ‘half-made’ worlds, the dispassionate skewering of the weak that was his calling card, seem all of a piece after French’s revelations. Even those famous opening lines of A Bend in the River, from which the biography’s title is borrowed, are now revelatory in a way that Naipaul didn’t intend.
“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Replace men with women and imagine that sentence read aloud to the sounds of an open hand beating and it’ll read less like bleak insight and more like a sadist’s credo, a rhetorical inflation of Naipaul’s private pleasures.
If there was a diary entry by Shakespeare detailing an encounter with a Jewish actor at the Globe, who would argue that it was irrelevant to our reading of The Merchant of Venice? The fact that we often know little about the lives of canonical writers, especially the earlier ones, isn’t an argument for disregarding what we know about our contemporaries. Their imagination doesn’t buy them transcendence; their lives help readers make sense of their art.
I’ve read one story by Munro, “To Reach Japan”, which is the first story in Dear Life. It isn’t particularly good and I won’t read more because life’s short and there are a thousand unread writers who aren’t sociopaths. I feel for readers who knew and loved Munro before her daughter helped us know her better. I remember my shock when towards the end of his writing life, Günter Grass admitted that he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS. The fact that he had kept this a secret through a life dedicated to telling the truth about Germany’s twisted affair with Nazism made it worse. But precisely because his great novels about the Reich — Cat and Mouse, The Tin Drum, Dog Years — were about the nature of that complicity, they encompassed (and explained) his hypocrisy. It was a minor disappointment, not some grand, author-disowning disillusionment.
Looking through my shelves of fiction, I see scores of novels I’ve bought and not read and I feel reassured. Dear Life will remain sandwiched between Mueenuddin and Murakami, but I have all four novels of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet to look forward to. I’ve watched three seasons of its superb television adaptation, so the story will be familiar, but since I love its two principal characters, Lenu and Lila, satisfaction is guaranteed. I haven’t watched the fourth and last season, so I don’t know how it ends, which is great. Best of all, since no one knows who Elena Ferrante is and no one has been able to find out despite decades of snooping, I can read her in the hope that she’ll remain anonymous forever and never let her readers down.
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