“I’m perfectly prepared to accept she was terrible, like many artists.”
— Russell Smith, “Let’s talk about it: How do you solve a problem like Alice Munro?” Globe & Mail. 24 July 2024.
As I re-read “Vandals” this morning, I was struck by an odd parallel to Munro’s later triptych of three stories, “Chance,” “Soon” and “Silence.”
To be fair, I was also primed to look for similarities, or family resemblances, to cite the 2026 MLA Convention Presidential Theme. I’m chairing a roundtable in several days on Munro, and our session has been selected for inclusion as part of this theme. Here’s the description of the session.
The echo I noticed is about death rituals and, more specifically, the desire to immolate the body in a manner that follows ancient rather than modern conventions.
Here’s the passage from near the beginning of “Vandals”:
“I wish in a way that I had had Ladner cremated but I didn’t think of it. I just put him here in the Doud plot to surprise my father and my stepmother. But now I must tell you, the other night I had a dream! I dreamed that I was around behind the Canadian Tire store and they had the big plastic tent up as they do when they are selling seedlings in the spring. I went and opened up the trunk of my car, just as if I were getting my annual load of salvia or impatiens. Other people were waiting as well and men in green aprons were going back and forth from the tent. A woman said to me, ‘Seven years sure goes by in a hurry!’ She seemed to know me but I didn’t know her and I thought, why is this always happening? Is it because I did a little schoolteaching? Is it because I’m a Doud? Is it because of what you might politely call the conduct of my life?
Then the significance of the seven years struck me and I knew what I was doing there and what the other people were doing there. They had come for the bones. I had come for Ladner’s bones, in the dream it was seven years since he had been buried. But I thought, Isn’t this what they do in Greece or somewhere, why are we doing it here? I said to some people, Are the graveyards getting overcrowded? What have we taken up this custom for? Is it pagan or Christian or what? The people I spoke to looked rather sullen and offended and I thought, What have I done now, I’ve lived around here all my life but I can still get this look, is it the word ‘pagan’?”
And now “Silence.”
In my effort to find this passage, I googled, and, inevitably, this turned up AI slop: “In the Alice Munro short story “Silence,” part of her 2004 collection Runaway, the character Juliet is informed that her husband, Eric, died and his body was burned on a beach pyre. This event is described as a local custom carried out by seamen.” (AI decided on the bold text, too.)
That would be intriguing, but that’s not what happens–not quite, anyway. Juliet is at least a passive participant, although it’s not her idea, and it’s not “a local custom” (so AI has some intriguing notions of coastal BC fishing villages):
“Eric’s body was recovered on the third day. Juliet was not allowed to see it. Something had got at him, she was told (meaning some animal), after the body was washed ashore.
It was perhaps because of this—because there was no question of viewing the body and no need for an undertaker—that the idea caught hold among his old friends and fellow-fishermen of burning Eric on the beach. Juliet did not object to this.”
I fear that AI is not a very good close reader.
Juliet is only an onlooker when it comes to the ceremony itself.
Ailo, an older woman who tried to rebuff the very young Juliet years earlier, when she first came looking for Eric–coincidentally, on the day his wife was buried–“took charge of this half-pagan ceremony—her Scandinavian blood, her upright carriage and flowing white hair made her a natural for the role of Widow of the Sea.”
So Juliet is dispossessed as widow (having been displaced, briefly, as wife due to Eric’s confession of an affair) before she later loses her role as mother, when her daughter Penelope spurns her. This is a lot of loss.
But sometimes family estrangements have their roots in painful experiences that are less mysterious and random than Juliet seems to believe. Throughout “Silence” she insists that she hasn’t the faintest idea why Penelope has shrouded herself in silence, disappeared definitively from Juliet’s life.
We learned last year that Munro herself was estranged from one of her daughters. In the wake of Andrea Robin Skinner’s exposé of the sexual abuse she experienced as a child, perpetrated by Munro’s partner, Gerald Fremlin, “Silence” and “Vandals” were the two stories most cited by journalists and critics who sought to find evidence in Munro’s work of her devastating knowledge–and her denial, even her denial to herself of the knowledge she may have held.
This knowledge was, admittedly, belated. When Skinner turned to family for help and support when she was a young girl, her father, Jim Munro, insisted that her mother was too fragile to be told about the abuse. Instead, he elected to send Skinner back for the following summer’s visit to Ontario with an older sister in tow, for protection.
Later, when Skinner was in her early twenties, having battled mental health issues that caused her to drop out of university, she confided in her mother, Alice Munro about the past. Munro–very briefly–left Fremlin. She railed against him and treated child abuse as adultery, with herself as the injured party (this, of course, is according to her children’s accounts).
And then she returned to him, telling her now-adult children that the revelation had come “too late.” Fremlin was too central in her life for her to be able to leave him. Munro stayed with him through other revelations by friends of his attempts at molesting their own children; she stayed through the news of the criminal charges brought against him for his abuse of Skinner.
Writing for Slate, Laura Miller suggests that “Vandals” offers insight into Munro’s choices.
Carrie Dawson, who wrote an excellent article on “Vandals” and taxidermy some years earlier, said this in a university blog piece: “As scholars re-read Munro with a knowledge of the secrets she kept and the pain she caused, we have an opportunity — if not an obligation — to use our re-readings to reckon with sexual abuse of children and the silence that so often surrounds it.”
Dawson’s piece is thoughtful and important. She goes on to address the key issues that our roundtable will take up later this week:
“In earlier readings I was taken with Munro’s use of taxidermy — its manipulation of bodies and its invitation to suspend disbelief — as a motif for the silence surrounding sexual violence in the story. But now awful biographical connections on every page stand out.
In retrospect, my comments look naïve and detached. And so, like literary scholars across the country, I am thinking about how to teach and write about Munro’s work, and asking what her cowardice and cruelty mean for her legacy.”
A group discussion was held by the Globe & Mail last year, not long after the news broke in the Toronto Star. (And here it’s worth noting that Skinner didn’t just decide to tell the story after her mother passed away: she had sought–for years–to bring the past events to the attention of people who included Munro’s literary biographer, who decided it wasn’t relevant to address in his book.)
The G & M conversation is notable for how superficial and predictable it is. Munro’s fellow writers express shock and concern while vowing to keep reading her work and insisting that authors are not required to be moral sages.
Agree, but they should probably not lie to the New York Times Magazine about their loving relationships with their adult daughters and their supportive spouse. This was the piece, incidentally, that prompted Skinner to go to the police.
Also in the NY Times, and after Munro’s death–but before the revelations about her tacit acceptance of Fremlin’s conduct–is the always-thoughtful Sheila Heti: “As a writer, she modeled, in her life and art, that one must work with emotional sincerity and precision and concentration and depth — not on every kind of writing but on only one kind, the kind closest to one’s heart.”
This, for me, is the gist.
Many of us as readers admired Munro in part because we believed that there was a symmetry of this kind, and it’s now difficult to see Munro as any kind of model of life.
The art is a different, but related, question. In Munro’s work there are so many stories about shame and humiliation linked to sexuality; so many stories about inadequate, selfish mothers who choose men over their daughters.
Without reading Munro’s work, including “Vandals”, as confessional, we do need to consider the relationship between life and work more closely.
As with Thomas King, the CanLit establishment (which may be mostly a fiction) helped to reify an image of an author that turns out to be very distant from the truth. So what now?
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