If you like Alice Munro’s fiction, you’ve probably spent a good deal of the last few days wondering: How could such a sensitive and insightful artist behave with such callous selfishness toward her own child? There’s reason to be appalled by the Toronto Star’s coverage of the Nobel laureate’s disconcerting response to her daughter’s sexual abuse by her second husband. Andrea Skinner, Alice Munro’s youngest daughter, wrote about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Gerald Fremlin when she was 9, and two Star reporters filled in the rest of the story in a lengthy article detailing the many ways Skinner was betrayed by the adults in her life, particularly her mother. This mother has spent her career writing with compassion and insight about the inner lives of women—mothers and daughters—and yet when her own daughter needed her, she took her husband’s side.
In 1993, a year after Skinner wrote to his mother about the abuse, Munro published an article titled “Vandals” in the New Yorker. (It was later included in his anthology Open secrets.) In “Vandals,” a young couple, Liza and Warren, are assigned to watch over a house shared by an older couple, Bea and Ladner, while the latter undergoes surgery. Instead, Liza trashes the place: she empties drawers onto the floor, tears up books, breaks dishes, shakes out flour sacks, and pours maple syrup and vinegar on the floor. It’s not until very late in the story that we learn that, as children, Liza and her brother played on Ladner’s land, and that he sexually assaulted them.
What is striking about “Vandals” is the brevity and obliqueness with which Munro describes this abuse as Liza remembers it – a handful of lines about how “Ladner grabbed Liza and crushed himself against her” – and the attention she pays to Bea’s attraction to the man. She first meets him in the company of another boyfriend, a man whose “kindness, good intentions, bewilderment and effort” turn to “dust and ashes” in her eyes once she gets a sense of Ladner’s moodiness. Bea tells her friends that she hates to think she is attracted to him because he is “rude, irritable and slightly wild,” with a scarred face, because it sounds like a cliché of “all the dreary romances – a brute thrills the woman and then it’s goodbye to Mr. Handsome and Decent.”
When Bea moves into Ladner’s house in a remote nature reserve, her young neighbor Liza expects something to change—though she doesn’t know exactly what. Then one day, Liza and Bea are swimming in a pond while Ladner cuts reeds near the shore. Ladner starts to taunt Bea behind her back “in an ugly way,” and Liza thinks that Bea must have seen it, and that Bea will have to leave “after such an insult.” Liza picks up a rhinestone earring she found on the road and gives it to Bea, leading the woman to believe that it once belonged to her mother. It is an offering whose significance Bea does not understand. Liza thinks:
Bea could spread security, if she wanted to. Of course she could. She just has to transform herself into another kind of woman, a hard and fast woman, a line-drawer, clean and energetic and intolerant. None of that. It’s not allowed. Be good. The woman who could save them, who could make them all good, keep them all good.
The problem is that “Bea doesn’t see what she’s been assigned to do. Only Liza does.”
Bea does not see this because she is too preoccupied with her strange need to be treated roughly by Ladner. She explains this to her friends because women like her need a man with “a madness that could contain them.” Ladner, who seems to think that Bea “needs to be cured of all her ardor, her vanity, and all her notions of love,” offers Bea a madness that is great enough, a madness that she finds desirable not in spite of but because it forces her to “live surrounded by implacability, by ready doses of indifference that can sometimes seem like contempt.”
Why does Bea find this situation so appealing? It’s a mystery, but it’s easy to see Ladner as a reflection of the creep that was Gerald Fremlin. When Fremlin discovered the letter Andrea Skinner had sent her mother in 1992, revealing his abuse, he threatened to kill her if she went to the police and sent letters home detailing the abuse and accusing his stepdaughter of being a “homewrecker” who, at age 9, “had invaded my bedroom for sexual adventures.” He compared Skinner to Nabokov’s Lolita, portraying Skinner as a temptress and himself as a helpless Humbert Humbert, failing to understand that Lolita was a prepubescent girl raped by her predatory stepfather. After learning of the abuse, Munro left Fremlin for a few months, but eventually returned to him, telling one of his other daughters that she could not live without him.
Alice Munro wasn’t the only person who let Skinner down. Her father, Jim Munro, learned of the abuse soon after, but advised the girl not to tell her mother. He allowed Skinner to return to Alice and Fremlin’s, but instructed her sister to accompany her and never leave her alone with Fremlin.
In 2004, when Skinner read a profile of Munro in the New York Times Magazine, she was so disgusted by Munro’s affectionate way of speaking about Fremlin that she showed the police his letters from the 1990s. Her 80-year-old father-in-law was charged with indecent assault and pleaded guilty, earning him a suspended sentence. The Canadian media largely ignored this unsavory fact, as did Robert Thacker, Munro’s biographer. That Fremlin had sexually assaulted Munro’s daughter seems to have been an open secret in Canadian literary circles.
Munro’s celebrity and desire to preserve her reputation in the name of Canadian pride surely led to the Fremlin conviction being downplayed in the 2000s. Some commentators have also blamed the tragedy on the repressive dynamics and secrecy of Canadian families at the time. The transmission of social change from counterculture centres to provincial Canadian towns is a recurring theme in Munro’s work. (A friend once joked to me that every Alice Munro story contains a line like, “It was a few years before you could leave your marriage, but people already had long hair.”) The persistence of old customs is reflected in Jim Munro’s efforts to shield Alice from the truth. “He thought her needs were more important than his child’s,” Skinner told the Star. Prioritizing adults over children was part of the declining patriarchal culture from which Munro emerged, and whose weakening she chronicled. Munro herself tried to give a “feminist” dimension to this attitude by insisting that expecting her to sacrifice the marriage that made her happy for the sake of her child was misogynistic.
But how could Munro be happy with a man like Fremlin? He was accused of exposing himself to a friend’s 14-year-old daughter, and Skinner said he lost interest in her when she entered her teens. Was he, as seems likely, a paedophile? In “Vandals”, Bea – like many women in Munro’s novels – feels powerless to resist a passion, in this case a passion that binds her to a “brute”, a man who treats her with indifference and even outright contempt and who may have no real desire for her. There is a “danger” in him that Bea and Liza both detect, but whereas Liza simply wants a responsible adult to restrain him, Bea finds that danger intoxicating.
More information may emerge about Fremlin’s behavior with children, but we can’t learn much about why Munro stayed with him, or what drove her to find men like him so compelling. As ruthless as she was toward her daughter, she also wrote “Vandals”—a story in which the truth lurks like a landmine, the truth that adults betray children, and that over time, those children can choose to destroy the facades that hide that betrayal. Skinner needed her mother to be a different kind of woman. In this story, Alice Munro admits that she failed.