Monstrous Things

It’s hard for a novelist to make a double axe-murderer sympathetic, especially when his victims are an old woman and her mentally disabled half-sister. In addition to which, this murderer is a remorseless antisemite who rationalises his motives and considers himself to be above society. A second character is an alcoholic whose addiction has bankrupted his family and forced his teenage daughter into prostitution. Surely the novelist has created a hellscape from which absolution is impossible. Yet redemption for these characters is exactly what Fyodor Dostoevsky accomplishes in his masterpiece Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment illustrates how the creative process works, the benefits that fiction provides society, and why we read novels (and watch theatre and film) in the first place. It also exposes the cultural ignorance behind attempts from across the political spectrum to cancel books and authors for their alleged ideological and moral failings. These attacks—especially shocking when they come from readers, fellow novelists, English departments, and others who ought to know better—target the core value of the humanities.

Stories take us out of ourselves so that we can see ourselves. When they reflect our lives, they bring us comfort by reminding us that we are not alone. When they deal with difficult subjects, they help us to explore our fears and past traumas from the safe distance of an imagined space. And as they entertain and enlighten us, they enrich our imaginations, deepen our compassion for the unlovable, and reveal the hidden sides of our nature.

Who, for instance, could plan to kill another human being? Or continue their vices at the expense of their child? Surely, only monsters. Not people like us. Yet the more we read Crime and Punishment, the more we empathise with the suffering of the killer, Raskolnikov, and the drunk, Marmeladov. Their choices and behaviours repel us, but we recognise their fear, guilt, and shame in ourselves and forgive them as we wish to be forgiven for our own sins.

Empathy—the basis of the arts—is founded on a self-evident, if unfashionable, truth—that under the skin, we all share a common humanity. No matter our race, gender, orientation, age, or other difference, each of us has felt every emotion and has known both grace and despair. Our individual circumstances and cultural expressions may be radically different, but the universal experience of being human is how we manage to connect with characters and stories written across continents and centuries, in this case, with impoverished, self-loathing Russians living under tsars in the 19th century.

To understand others, we must understand ourselves. To create believable, psychologically complex characters—especially when those characters are repellent and break social taboos—requires ruthless self-examination. This investigation manifests the novelist’s obsessions, flaws, and capacity for moral failure. Artists like Dostoevsky aren’t brave because they tackle difficult subjects; they’re brave because they expose themselves.

Sometimes that exposure is literal. The Gambler is Dostoevsky’s unsparing dissection of his own addiction to roulette, which impoverished his family for eight years and at one point reduced him to pawning his wife’s ring and coat (a humiliation that may have fuelled his hatred of pawnbrokers). His understanding of the addict’s self-hatred, self-pity, and helplessness in the face of addiction is also evident in his depiction of Marmeladov’s alcoholism. And his understanding of terror, injustice, and imprisonment came from his own near-execution followed by hard labour and exile in Siberia for private conversations against censorship. In a less positive instance, Dostoevsky reveals his complicated antisemitism in his portrayal of Raskolnikov’s first victim, the greedy and corrupt Alyona Ivanovna.

At other times, the author’s exposure is indirect. Dostoevsky wasn’t a member of what the identity police might call “the axe-murdering community,” but he was able to imagine himself as Raskolnikov. Raskalnikov is his brain baby, born of his self-understanding. This is where appropriation arguments miss the mark. Novels are always fictions. Even when their worlds are suggested by real people, settings, and events, the creative process transforms them into the novelist’s invention. And it is impossible for anyone to appropriate their own mind.

All of which brings me to Alice Munro, the late, great Canadian Nobel Laureate for Literature whose short stories have long been a staple of bestseller lists and university English curricula. Andrea Robin Skinner is Alice Munro’s youngest child. On 7 July, the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, published her account of years of childhood sexual abuse by Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, and the forty-plus-year coverup of that abuse by her family. Within weeks, the Star published supporting accounts by Skinner’s sister Jenny Munro and her stepbrother Andrew Sabiston. The international furore has yet to settle.

Skinner’s parents divorced when she was six. She remained in Victoria, BC, in the care of her father, Jim Munro, and her stepmother, Carole Sabiston. Alice Munro returned to southwestern Ontario and married Fremlin. When Skinner was nine, on her annual summer visitation, and Munro was away on an overnight trip, Fremlin rubbed her genitals and put her hand on his own. She didn’t tell her mother, but on her return home, she told her stepbrother and stepmother, who told her father. Jim Munro believed that Skinner had either invented or exaggerated the story because she had begun to backpedal under questioning by her stepmother. He insisted that the story be kept secret, especially from Munro, as she was finally in a happy relationship, and he thought the accusation would destroy her.

As a result, Skinner continued to be sent on annual visits during which Fremlin exposed himself to her until she was twelve. Skinner writes:

When I was 11, former friends of Fremlin’s told my mother he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he “reassured” her that I was not his type. In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past weren’t as “prudish” as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults. My mother said nothing. I looked at the floor, afraid she might see my face turning red.

The abuse and its coverup left Skinner alienated from both families, and suffering migraines, insomnia, and bulimia. She finally wrote her mother a letter about what had happened sixteen years later, when she was in her mid-twenties and Munro was 61. Munro left Fremlin and went to her eldest daughter Sheila’s condo in Victoria. When Skinner saw her, she was stung that Munro believed that she had been betrayed by Fremlin’s infidelity; that Skinner couldn’t have been badly harmed as she was always a happy child; and that the family had kept her in the dark to humiliate her, presumably by whispering behind her back for sixteen years.

For his part, in angry and self-incriminating letters, Fremlin described nine-year-old Skinner as a “Lolita” and “homewrecker.” He cited Jim Munro’s failure to intervene as supportive evidence. “Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure,” he wrote. “For Andrea to say she was scared is simply a lie … Andrea has brought ruin to two people who love each other. … If the worst comes to worst, I intend to go public. I will make available for publication a number of photographs, notably some taken at my cabin near Ottawa which are extremely eloquent… one of Andrea in my underwear shorts.” He also threatened to kill Skinner and/or commit suicide if the story got out, which was odd given his own threat to go public.

Readers may be shocked by Fremlin’s indignation, but the idea that children may be sexually precocious was accepted by all of the day’s leading postmodern intellectuals. In 1977, during the same period that Skinner was being abused, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and a host of other French luminaries signed a petition demanding the abolition of all age-of-consent laws. The venerated Canadian author Robertson Davies wrote that the novel Lolita was not about “the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child. This is no pretty theme, but it is one with which social workers, magistrates and psychiatrists are familiar.”

Eventually, after many fraught phone calls, Munro returned to Fremlin. She said she’d been “told too late,” and concluded that leaving him sixteen years after the event would have been of no practical benefit to anyone. She said that she and Fremlin loved each other and that only a misogynistic culture insists that women must sacrifice their happiness for others. Finally, she stated that whatever had happened in the long-ago past was between Skinner and her stepfather. If it wasn’t important enough to tell her at the time, it wasn’t important enough to destroy her life now. Everyone else’s life was moving on, why shouldn’t hers?

For a decade, life went on as if nothing had happened. But when Skinner gave birth to twins, she told Munro that she didn’t want Fremlin around. Munro complained that as she didn’t drive, this would make it difficult for her to see them. Skinner exploded and severed contact. Two years later, Munro gave an interview to the New York Times in which she praised Fremlin and her “close relationship” with all her children. Outraged by the lie, Skinner took Fremlin’s letters to the police. When they arrived to charge him with indecent assault, a furious Munro called her daughter a liar.

Fremlin pleaded guilty under arraignment, which meant there was no trial, and by the end of the month, he had been handed two years’ probation during which he was prohibited from contact with anyone under the age of fourteen. Skinner wanted the story to receive widespread coverage, but it passed unnoticed. Perhaps the media wanted to protect Munro’s reputation, but the prosecutor, Robert Morris says he was unsurprised—after all, the case was rapidly concluded in a remote courtroom and the name of the defendant was unfamiliar.

Alice Munro died in May. The international obituaries, which included universal praise from friends and colleagues, appear to have precipitated Skinner’s exposé. She and her siblings maintain that they are not seeking to diminish Munro’s literary reputation, they simply want the story to be part of the record. If so, their wishes have not been respected. Munro’s alma mater, the University of Western Ontario, has paused its Alice Munro Chair in Creativity. Tweeters have posted pictures of her books in trash bins. Indigo, Canada’s largest book chain, has removed all portraits of Munro. And major media outlets like Vox have asked, “What are we to do about Alice Munro now?”

My response, after reading about Alice Munro. As a mother, I can’t even… pic.twitter.com/8Ub4a8gj7O

— MaggieTulliver, PhD (@maggie_xer) July 7, 2024

Under the headline “Alice Munro betrayed us, and her legacy,” the Globe and Mail’s arts columnist Marsha Lederman went further: “Her stories cannot stay on our bookshelves. Now what are we to do? How can we read her again, ever? Her work will be viewed through a new lens—if further viewing can even be tolerated. Syllabuses, publishers’ plans, bookstore shelves—so much rearranging to do.” In a similar vein, the New York Times quotes Pulitzer finalist Rebecca Makkai: “These 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. To me, that makes them unreadable at all.” This moral posturing, designed to bully all right-thinking people from reading or teaching Munro, is as shocking as it is self-aggrandising.

More judicious voices in academia and the arts have stopped short of calling for cancellation, but even they believe that “this will, without a doubt, affect the way we teach and write about Munro’s work,” which will hereafter have “this painful reckoning in mind.” Seminars on Munro may be taught “except (they) would be a very different kind of seminar now.” One wonders why: Charles Dickens tried to have his wife locked up in a lunatic asylum. Tolstoy was a sex addict who used women like Kleenex. Norman Mailer stabbed one of his six wives with a pen knife, narrowly missing her heart. And Alice Walker is a paranoid antisemite and a promoter of the Protocols of Zion. None of these curricula mainstays has been re-evaluated because of their disturbing personal lives. And for good reason: As I have written elsewhere, if books are to be trashed because of the lives of their authors, there won’t be a library left standing.

More depressing than this double standard is the apparent inability in some literary quarters to understand the creative process. Worldviews aren’t conjured from thin air. Of course Munro’s stories are “half-realised confessions”—as are the stories of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Walker, and every other author worth their salt. Unpalatable though it may be, Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (Peter Pan), and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice wouldn’t exist without their authors’ controversial obsessions with children. Likewise, Alice Munro’s unsentimental accounts of grotesque behaviours, damaged characters, and unhealthy relationships wouldn’t exist without a lifetime rooted in Southern Ontario Gothic.

Art may not ennoble us—witness the follies of its greatest practitioners and patrons—but it can help us to develop our understanding of human nature. Empathy is hardest in situations that horrify and appal us. As Professor Robert Lecker at McGill says about the Munro revelations, “I find it inexplicable. I just can’t fathom it.” This is hardly surprising. We all share the unearned confidence that in new and difficult situations we will do the right thing, and we presume that all decent people whom we admire will do the same. Life suggests otherwise.

That is where the arts come in. They ask us to remember that no one is the villain in their own story, and that no one is only one thing. The Father Bruce Ritter who had sex with teen hustlers is also the Father Bruce Ritter who founded Covenant House, the international organisation that has helped over one and a half million homeless kids around the world. The Jean Vanier who abused at least twenty-five women who came to him for spiritual direction is also the Jean Vanier who founded the L’Arche communities that have brought hope and dignity to countless people with intellectual disabilities.

Of course, unlike Ritter and Vanier, Munro wasn’t an abuser. Her sin was her unconditional love for her husband. Through her eyes, he was a wonderful man and soulmate who lived with a terrible illness. Not a monster, but, like Raskalnikov, a human being who had done monstrous things. She didn’t choose him over her daughter, rather she chose not to choose. Is it braver to do what everyone else thinks you should do, or to do what you think makes sense, even though the consequence of discovery would be global condemnation?

In her final book Dear Life, Munro wrote: “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.” Surely it isn’t surprising that Munro would extend the same forgiveness to the husband she loved as she did to her fictional creations. Surely, it’s more surprising that we celebrate Munro’s gift by finding the humanity in her deeply flawed characters while we cast a harsh, Manichaean judgment on Munro herself. What does our inability to forgive do to our ability to confess? The humanities teach that our instinct to reduce, moralise, and punish should be tempered by a capacity for understanding, grace, and redemption. It’s a lesson the arts community and readers should remember.