Terry Prone: How the truth can change the lens in which we view an entire life

Moralists, over recent days, have suggested readers should think twice about buying Alice Munro’s work

Alice Munro’s literary legacy will always be influenced by her family secrets and protection of her daughter’s abuser. Picture: Julien Behal/PA

Her second husband sexually assaulted her nine-year-old daughter. Many times. This is not in dispute. He did it and later confessed to doing it.

The daughter’s name is Andrea Robin Skinner. In the early 90s, when she had grown past the age when her stepfather was interested in sex with her, she went to the cops in Canada where the family lived, and provided them with letters her stepfather — Gerald Fremlin — had written, not just admitting the repeated crime, which started when he was in his 50s in 1976, but graphically describing it.

The graphic descriptions fitted the Humbert Humbert model of paedophile self-exculpation developed by novelist Vladimir Nabokov: It was all the kid’s fault, it was she who seduced him, she was the evil Lolita, whereas he was as close as you get to an innocent by-stander.

Not only did the perpetrator’s letters seek to portray him as the blameless victim of a nine-year-old sexual predator, they also threatened action against the now grown-up child if the issue went public.

“Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure,” Fremlin wrote. “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.”

As it happened, he didn’t publish the pictures or make his crazy claims. The police, quite rightly, used the confessional aspect of his letters to convict him of indecent assault.

The story then moved on to Andrea’s mother — the short story writer once described as “Canada’s literary saint”, Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Few fiction writers have come close to the reputation she built in her 92 years living in Ontario. 

Apparently, when her daughter told her about what had happened, Munro reacted as if she was hearing of an infidelity. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather,” Skinner later wrote. “It had nothing to do with her.”

Although Alice Munro left Fremlin for a few months, she returned to him and in interviews in the last couple of decades, praised him to the skies. He died before she did.

Munro’s daughter, one week ago, and six weeks after Munro’s death in May, published an essay in a Canadian newspaper which positions her mother as uncaring for the daughter’s plight, if not actively collusive with her paedophile stepfather.

According to Andrea, her mother blamed misogynistic culture as justifying her refusal “to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.”

The daughter, having listened to this intellectually spurious rationalization of refusal on Munro’s part to take her daughter’s side, moved away and lived with it for more than 20 years. 

She lived with it quietly but not silently, in 2005 contacting an academic — Robert Thacker — who was writing a biography of her mother, to tell him of her estrangement from the mother and siblings and the reason for it. (The siblings have reconciled and support their sister’s revelation of her abuse. The mother, never.)

At this point, 2005, Fremlin had been convicted of the abuse. It was no longer an allegation. It was a fact. A fact of hardly deniable significance in the life and work of his subject. Yet it never appeared anywhere in Thacker's book. 

He has admitted that he knew Skinner wanted him to publish the details of the outrage, but he decided that it wasn’t really his job, as a literary biographer, to plough around in a difficult family background. The book was published and acclaimed. It sold so well that three years later, the writer interviewed Alice Munro for an updated edition.

Munro’s daughter, one week ago, and six weeks after Munro’s death in May, published an essay in a Canadian newspaper which positions her mother as uncaring for the daughter’s plight, if not actively collusive with her paedophile stepfather. Picture: Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press/AP

At this point, remember, Thacker had been told the truth by the victim. What was fascinating to learn this week, was that during the interview for the second edition of the biography, he was told the truth by Munro herself. She got him to turn off the recorder, but discussed the issue.

He now says this was one of the saddest things in her life, but doesn’t tell us if the sadness relates to her absolute failure as a mother. His update, in 2011, continued to keep the grim secret. In an “explanation” as inexplicable as Munro’s own rationale, he says he “viewed it as a private family matter”.

The biographer’s reputation will undoubtedly be damaged by this admission, just as was the reputation of Bill Cosby’s biographer, Mark Whitaker, whose Cosby: His Life and Times, ignored widely-shared accusations that Cosby had sexually assaulted numerous women.

Whitaker’s defenders pointed out that his was an “authorised” account of the entertainer’s life, and so tilted in Cosby’s favour.

No doubt Thacker’s defenders will suggest that close cooperation from a Nobel laureate in her 80s amount to the same situation. Truth is fungible, in authorised biographies. 

The relentless encomiastic stream which followed Alice Munro’s death seems to have been the final catalyst for Andrea Skinner finally breaking her silence in unequivocal terms.

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“I never wanted to see another interview, biography, or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser,” Skinner says.

The Toronto Star essay blew a hole in Alice Munro’s reputation. Western University, where Munro attained her degree, suddenly found itself having to examine its Alice Munro chair in creativity, issuing a statement to the effect that it’s considering how the revelation should influence how the institution addresses the writer’s legacy.

The mayor of the town where she lived is considering amending what’s inscribed on a monument to her there and may well follow the example of the local authority in Camden Town, London which recently ensured a bust of writer Virginia Woolf in their area now carries a QR code that goes in detail into what it calls her “imperialist attitudes and offensive opinions”.

Virginia Woolf, oddly, for a woman who married a Jew, referred amusedly in her letters to Jewish stereotypes. A relative of hers, infuriated by the QR code addition, has suggested that to judge the writer by current social standards is unfair. 

Woolf was, the relative points out, a product of her time and background. Nobody, thus far, has advanced that excuse for Alice Munro. Entitled racism is bad, but not in the same league as collusion with the paedophile who ruined your daughter’s life.

Moralists, over recent days, have suggested readers should think twice about buying Munro’s work. The controversy, ironically, may generate a transient sales bounce. But the purchasers will find reading her stories tainted by knowledge of her squalid sacrifice of her daughter and of the selfishness — as a woman, not as an artist — which dictated that sacrifice.