When I heard that Cormac McCarthy had died in June 2023, my first thought was that the world had lost its greatest English-language author. When Alice Munro died, almost one year later, I had the same thought again.
While vastly different in style and subject, the two did have a certain amount in common. Both favoured complex protagonists in bleak atmospheres. Both explored the most uncomfortable, taboo corners of sexuality: infidelity, incest, abuse. And both enjoyed long lives and careers as complete as any artist could hope for, leaving behind large bodies of work and final contributions which serve— at least in part— as reflections on their legacies. Coming to the final lines of Stella Maris and “Dear Life,” I felt I was reading some of the most moving sentences ever written.
The two also occupied some of the highest seats in my literary pantheon. To me they were more than mere influences, but aspirational, almost superhuman figures, shaping the tools I used to measure my own work so that I’d always fall short. On some level I gauge the beauty of prose and the strength of an image against a McCarthyan ideal. And when I want a character moment to carry within it worlds of revelation, a part of me still asks, how would Alice Munro do it? Of course, I rarely if ever succeed in living up to their standard, and sometimes I’m aiming for a style far removed from either. But I never leave them fully behind. I say all this so there can be no doubt: for me these were deeply formative authors.
You’re probably wondering when I’m going to address the elephant— or elephants— in the room. That comes now.
Today, we know that the two share one more fact in common: both were implicated in posthumous scandals involving the sexual abuse of minors. Munro’s case was the first to come out, when her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed that her stepfather Gerald Fremlin had sexually abused her as a child, and that her mother, told of this years later, chose to stay with him.
Munro’s response to her daughter was startling in its inadequacy. She was “told too late;” she “loved him too much.” Skinner writes that “she was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” and that “[She said] our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men.” At the most basic, human level, this is simply reprehensible. But if you’ve read Munro’s stories, you might also find the sentiment hauntingly familiar.
Also familiar is the manner in which the abuse became well-known in Munro’s community, yet somehow failed to escape it. Fremlin, in 2005, was convicted in a Goderich courtroom of indecent assault. Rumours circulated; journalists and biographers claim they had been party to the knowledge for years. Yet somehow no one went public. Having grown up an hour’s drive from Munro’s hometown, I know this kind of grassroots suppressionism well. We Canadians have a reputation for niceness. Sometimes, that’s because of what we refuse to talk about.
Less than six months later, an article in Vanity Fair revealed that Cormac McCarthy, when he was 42, entered a romantic and sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl named Augusta Britt. Some, including the article’s author and Britt herself, have been reluctant to use “the G-word” seriously in this case. Coming as she does from an abusive background it is understandable that she would choose to remember McCarthy fondly; he was apparently one of the only adults to show her any kindness, and she may well be correct in her assessment that he “saved [her] life.” And I do believe that Britt should be afforded the right to understand the relationship as she wishes, free from the reproval of strangers.
But make no mistake: this was grooming. Helping a young person escape a troubled situation may be admirable, but this is no excuse for the subsequent sexual contact with a minor, and the decision to pursue such contact can only be regarded as a profound personal failure. Worse, in places the hints of outright manipulation seem to ooze from the page:
“So, about those letters,” she says, running her hand along her necklace. “I haven’t read them in decades. They’re really hard for me. I have such a block about them. They did make me feel uncomfortable at the time. Because they were so different from how he talked on the phone, or in person. After living with these creepy men in foster homes, it was such a relief to be with Cormac. I felt safe and secure because he didn’t want anything. He was genuinely interested in me. But then he’d send these letters. And it would be very confusing.”
This is, at the very least, strongly in tension with the renegade-romance narrative that the bulk of the article promulgates. If you’re familiar with the tactics of groomers, you’ll know that this kind of behaviour is a standard play: shower the target with affection and promises of devotion, then shift the conversation to sexual matters; in doing so conflate the two, sowing confusion and insecurity.
So. We have two writers, each somehow implicated in egregious patterns of abuse. And yet both were also among the most astute observers of human behaviour in 20th-century fiction. We might wonder: how can these truths coexist? How could those who saw so clearly go on to act so poorly?
It should be said that we readers are mere bit-part characters in these stories. Skinner and Britt have lived through what most of us will never imagine; next to them we must resemble stamp collectors poring over our dusty texts. Still, I believe that the questions above lead us to an important lesson, about what literature is and is not, and the ways in which we read it.
Munro the Pessimist
Alice Munro is often seen as an important feminist author. There are no doubt good reasons for this, the very trajectory of her literary career being among them. The bare facts of her life tell a hopeful story in which a woman’s achievement emancipates her from a predetermined gender role. In 1961 a Vancouver Sun article famously ran with the headline “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories;” in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize. You’ll find this snippet in most retrospectives on her life.
And indeed, there is plenty of feminist analysis to be found in Munro’s work. “Boys and Girls” is explicitly concerned with the ways gender roles are formed and enforced at a young age. “Runaway” is a moving portrait of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage. And “The Office,” although it is much else, is in part a response to the phenomenon of workplace harassment. Before 2024 it was thus possible to view Munro as a model of literary feminism. With the quality of her writing being at the same time so high, it’s no wonder that her pre-2024 reverence seemed so universal.
But a contrast may be helpful here. Consider the other giant of Canadian feminist literature: Margaret Atwood. Atwood is not only a feminist, but also an optimist. Even in a dystopian work as bleak as The Handmaid’s Tale, the ending provides a glimmer of hope; Offred steps outside of her stultifying arch-misogynist society, though whether she goes to freedom or to her doom is left ambiguous. Decades later Atwood wrote a sequel, The Testaments, in which the regime is finally brought down in part by the actions of a single teenage girl. The view here is clear. Atwood does not shrink from the realities of hatred and oppression, but she does present a vision in which they can be challenged— even defeated— in our lifetime.
Munro’s stories rarely offer such an escape. Carla in “Runaway” ultimately returns to her abusive husband, who appears to have murdered the pet goat representing her desire to leave— and who might do the same to her, should she try again. “Boys and Girls” ends with the internalization, not the rejection, of the gender role the narrator has been assigned. And “The Office” leaves us with an impotent, sublimated anger, with not even a hint that it might be directed towards change.
This is the world as Munro’s fiction presents it. Women marry the wrong man or start the wrong affair; they stay too long and find only small reliefs; even in divorce or widowhood they somehow fall short of true liberation. There is critique here, but little emancipation— little vision, indeed, of how emancipation might even be achieved.
Since Fremlin’s abuse was revealed, a few of Munro’s stories have received fresh attention due to the new readings, often chilling, that are now available. In "Vandals," a victim of childhood sexual abuse trashes her former abuser’s home after she and her husband are asked to housesit. It is indeed now difficult to escape the conclusion that this story serves as Munro’s admission of personal failure, and perhaps even as a sublimated revenge fantasy— a wish that she might have been strong enough to hold Fremlin truly to account.
Similarly, in “Silence” an adult daughter suddenly cuts ties with her mother, Juliet. There is no warning and no reason given, or at least, no reason that Juliet is willing to countenance. She reflects:
It’s maybe the explaining to me that she can’t face. Or has not time for, really. You know, we always have the idea that there is this reason or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about what I’ve done wrong. But I think the reason may be something not so easily dug out.
Before Skinner’s article, this story might have been read as a reflection on the small harms that parents unwittingly visit upon their children. Today, though, we inevitably read it as a story about denial— whether we believe Munro to be aware of this denial or not.
I do think these new readings are worthwhile; from a critical perspective, we now understand more about these stories than we otherwise would. But in focusing on this handful of reinterpretations, I think we can lose sight of an important point. Munro’s decision to stay with Fremlin, and her failure to support her daughter, is in fact consistent with the vision of the world espoused by her entire corpus, and not just those few works that contain clear correlates to the real-life abuse.
The question “How could Alice Munro do this, despite her clear understanding of the human heart?” is therefore ill-posed. There is no contradiction here. Perhaps it would be going too far to assert that Munro’s understanding of the world, as represented in her fiction, enabled her actions— one can never truly know the mind of another. But I do claim that we shouldn’t view those actions as evidence of a serious disconnect between her personal and artistic lives. Her characters were largely reeds in the winds of social dynamics; why should we expect her to behave any differently?
Even now, this conclusion does not seem widespread. I suspect this is because many readers find a great deal of truth and beauty in Munro’s work, and do not wish to believe that the vision contained therein could be used to justify terrible actions. Soon after Skinner’s story came out, the novelist Rebecca Makkai wrote a piece titled “Alice Munro was no better than the miserable women she wrote about.” I think this assessment is basically correct— but why is it a surprise? Why would we expect an author to transcend the banal inadequacies of her characters, merely because she can capture them with eloquence? Makkai writes,
In other words: Along with so many others, I read these stories not as models but countermodels, sad projections of what our lives would be if we acquiesced to the worst whims of the people who wanted to manipulate us.
But with Munro, it was countermodels all the way down; we never received from her a compelling vision of personal empowerment or liberation. Makkai asks whether we can forgive Munro. I don’t believe that we should— but perhaps we should ask ourselves why we ever read into her stories an ironic remove that was never really there on the page. (Note that I was as guilty of this as anyone!)
Don’t get me wrong— my aim here is not to attack cynicism, or to claim that any artistic project in which a clear hope fails to manifest is inherently suspect. I think the conclusion to The Testaments is too trite and easy, for instance, undermining some of Gilead’s power as a stark model of misogynistic domination. What I do want to argue is that an artistic vision is not good, in a moral sense, simply by virtue of being elegantly crafted. To see clearly is not to act well. This is a tough thing for readers and writers to accept; most of us want to believe that art can change the world, and that good art— art that touches and moves us, art in which we feel some deep truth reflected— can only do so positively. But it is true all the same.
McCarthy the Rogue
Compared to Munro, the revelations involving Cormac McCarthy have produced a striking paucity of commentary and reappraisal. The few responses published in the weeks following Vincenzo Barney’s original article understandably focused on a few key points. First, there is the insistence that we must regard McCarthy’s relationship with Britt as a deeply unethical abuse of power; as I mentioned before, I agree with this entirely. Second, there is debate over the extent to which Britt truly influenced various characters in McCarthy’s novels, motivated by apparent discrepancies between Britt’s recollection and historical record. This is a fine enough question to litigate, but like the hyperfocus on a small sample of seemingly-telling Munro stories, I believe it can blind us to larger issues at play. And third, there is criticism (and a good deal of mockery) of Barney’s piece on plain stylistic grounds. This feels a bit mean, but, cards on the table: I don’t like it either.
What I find interesting is what’s missing. There have been few declarations that McCarthy’s legacy is now tarnished in the way we saw with Munro, and even the question of how his grooming might lead us to reinterpret his work is little-explored. This is doubly interesting as, while Munro’s actions were certainly deplorable, hers were not the hands that carried out the abuse, and she had (as far as we know) no knowledge of her husband’s behaviour until her daughter was an adult. The same defences cannot be made of McCarthy. Why, then, the more subdued response?
Gender expectations no doubt play a role here: few figures draw more public vitriol than the bad mother. Also relevant is Britt’s insistence that the relationship was consensual. But there is another important factor, too, which is that even during McCarthy’s life, no clear consensus formed regarding what we should make of him. There can be no iconoclasm without an icon.
Because of his privacy and the ambiguity of his fiction, McCarthy the man has long served as a blank screen onto which readers can project their own beliefs. Some conservatives claim him as one of their own, interpreting his seeming pessimism and clear vision of evil as a critique of enlightenment liberalism. But he also described himself as “basically a materialist” to Lawrence Krauss, told Oprah he “always knew [he] didn’t want to work,” and in No Country for Old Men rebuked the lapsarian notion of an America brought to crime and anarchy by liberalising cultural shifts. Hardly your typical God-and-guns Republican, whatever was in his trash.
On the other hand, he largely rejected the literary community, choosing instead to pal around with physicists such as Murray Gell-Mann. On the other other hand, he wrote gay and transgender characters into Suttree and The Passenger with sympathy and nuance. If we had still more hands, we might ask what to make of his apparent admiration for figures like Eric Hoffer or Oswald Spengler, his Catholic upbringing, that one weird pamphlet in his garbage bin… and we’d win little insight. The man contained multitudes.
But whatever his private views, there was something profoundly American about McCarthy’s writing. I mean that in something like a mythological sense. His characters tend to be lone wanderers, finding their own way through worlds composed of vast expanses and limited civilization, and it is there, not in congested cities or cloistered university halls, that they can confront the most basic questions about what it is to be human. He was invested in the idea of freedom— if not in a political sense, then at least in some kind of personal, narrative sense.
This notion has also served to mythologize McCarthy’s life. We imagine the author writing late into the night in dank motel rooms, drifting from town to town with his belongings on his back, surviving on beans and canned soup in a chosen poverty that he might focus on his work completely. It is a romantic image— even today, I find it stirring. And it is coherent with the themes and concerns of his novels, so does not ring hollow. McCarthy has become our modern ideal of the artist living first and foremost for his art; for this, perhaps as much as for his actual writing, he is revered.
Consider also that part of the McCarthy mythos is his aforementioned representation of evil, the grimly brilliant clarity with which figures such as Lester Ballard, Anton Chigurh, and Judge Holden are rendered. There’s been a certain kind of response to the Vanity Fair article, which goes something like this: “You’re telling me that the author of Blood Meridian wasn’t a well-adjusted guy? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!” And there’s some truth here, but it’s also true that we were clearly never meant to identify with the perpetrators of hideous inhumane violence in McCarthy’s work. If we see ourselves at all, it is in the father in The Road, not the barbaric marauders; in Llewelyn Moss, not Anton Chigurh; in the kid, not the Judge who stalks after his soul.
I belabour this point to emphasize McCarthy was not simply an out-and-out sicko; this theory just doesn’t hold up. But we might also go too far in the opposite direction, allowing ourselves to believe that such an unreserved confrontation with darkness serves as something like an inoculation. An integration of the shadow self, if we want to be Jungian about it. Well, we now know that this inoculation, if it existed at all, is imperfect. At the very least it does not prevent one from grooming a teenager.
But again: should this be a surprise? If you accept the radical personal liberation at the heart of McCarthy’s vision— if it implies that, like Suttree, you can abandon your wife and young child to live in a houseboat on the Knoxville river, and at the end of it all declare unchallenged that you repent of nothing save a certain philosophical vanity— then why not view the age of consent as just one more arbitrary limitation to reject?
Should this lead us to reconsider our view of McCarthy’s persona? Maybe— but we should at least be honest that his actions are one conceivable result of such an outlook. I think that Barney, clearly a McCarthy superfan, couldn’t countenance the possibility that the man’s earnestly-held views might have led him to abuse his power over a vulnerable sixteen-year-old. Given the opportunity to reframe this as a wild love story, then, he jumped at the chance. That angle is much more comfortable— it’s the kind of tale that might have played out in one of McCarthy’s novels. It might even be a beautiful story. But is it true?
What Have We Learned?
I have not been very interested, in this piece, in the question of whether and how we continue to read Alice Munro and Cormac McCarthy. Each reader will have to answer this for themself. Certainly the worlds conjured by both writers remain compelling and innovative in style, form, and content; if a lesser writer like H.P. Lovecraft is still read in spite of his posthumous controversies, I expect our two subjects will be fine.
What I have wanted to argue is that we cannot dismiss McCarthy and Munro’s misdeeds as either betrayals of their literary visions or as unrelated indiscretions. Rather, those literary visions render their actions legible as outgrowths of clear and sincerely-expressed worldviews— worldviews that, as readers encountering their fiction, we may experience as brilliant art.
We may contrast their cases against someone like Neil Gaiman, who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women. Gaiman’s fiction preached empathy, the dignity of women, and generally progressive views. His offences thus display a clear rupture between the values expressed in his work and those he actually lived by— we might even say they reveal a kind of falsity in his art.
For McCarthy and Munro, this does not apply. While we can be surprised and horrified at finding out their particular offences, we cannot claim that the same kind of rupture has been revealed. At a time when artists seem to be revealed as abusers, hypocrites, or sex pests at record rates, it has become trite to repeat that we shouldn’t blindly trust our heroes, that awful individuals can create great art. But the cases of McCarthy and Munro take this a step further. We should understand not only that the creators of great artistic visions can be deeply flawed as individuals, but that those visions themselves— even if they move us, even if they stir us, even if they are masterfully rendered and seem glutted with truth— can carry the seeds of grave wrongs. We forget this at our peril.
Very thoughtful read. Thanks for posting!
Great article!