Good morning. The Globe and Mail digs into the tainted legacy of Alice Munro – more on that below, along with a second Bank of Canada cut and Summer McIntosh’s swim for gold. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Loblaw and its parent company settle two class-action lawsuits with a $500-million payment over their role in a scheme to fix bread prices in Canada
- Joe Biden addresses the nation after abandoning his bid for re-election, saying his move was to unite the Democratic party and make room for younger voices
- Significant loss in Jasper as wildfires close in, burning buildings and forcing fire crews to retreat
Munro in 2013.Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press
CanLit
‘Art is not a fundamentally ethical behaviour’
Earlier this month, Andrea Robin Skinner, the youngest daughter of author Alice Munro, revealed she had been sexually abused from the age of 9 by her stepfather, Gerard Fremlin. Munro chose to stay with her second husband until his death, even after she learned about the abuse, years later, from Skinner – and even after Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2005.
Immediately, Munro’s admirers struggled to absorb how profoundly this child had been failed by the adults in her life. Inevitably, Skinner’s revelations revived a familiar debate about what to do with the work of artists who themselves have done terrible things. Globe and Mail reporter Ian Brown recently convened a roundtable of Canadian writers, editors and scholars to grapple with this question. A selection of their discussion is below, and you can read the full conversation here.
Journalist and novelist Katherine Ashenburg: A dear friend who is an English professor once said that you can never learn anything of any importance about a writer’s work from the writer’s life. But the work is created by a human, a very complicated human. I haven’t given up rereading Dickens because he treated his wife absolutely appallingly. And I haven’t given up looking at Caravaggio’s paintings because he murdered somebody. So I’m definitely not going to give up Alice Munro. I feel like there’s a kind of scrim right now – I’m still trying to understand this – between me and Munro’s work. And the scrim is the revelations.
Ian Brown: Has the scrim affected the way you are reading her?
Ashenburg: I’m parsing a little bit. I read a lot of Alice Munro yesterday, the story “Vandals.” The woman who turns a blind eye to her partner’s abusing the neighbourhood kids. And she thinks to herself, what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity? An amazing line. She really is drawn to his craziness and his sickness. So, of course, I read that line yesterday differently.
Novelist and editor Russell Smith: [Munro’s] stories have always been about people with deep, dark secrets having to make moral compromises, particularly involving the partners they’re with. [...] Art is not a fundamentally ethical endeavour. It doesn’t set out to necessarily improve the world. Some does. But we don’t look to it to do that. We look to it to reflect darkness and moral complexity. So we shouldn’t be surprised if artists are just as flawed as the rest of the congregation.
The Globe's roundtable on Alice Munro.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Globe reporter Zosia Bielski, who writes on gender and sex: I find interesting in the social-media frenzy this idea that Alice Munro is a hypocrite somehow because we view her as a feminist icon. I don’t think she particularly viewed herself that way at all. Her work centres often on difficult women who make very poor choices – and don’t even necessarily live with regret following those choices. She’s not an advocate against child abuse, so I don’t see the hypocrisy.
Novelist Susan Swan: She was made into a plaster saint. But she wasn’t really going along with it. I have read about her religious background, which is similar to mine. One side of our families is Presbyterianism that was more radical and fundamentalist than the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. So she grew up in a moral framework that was very narrow, and very judgy. But she somehow, with her great talent, transcended that. She was able to have such a clear-eyed view in her stories of moral complexity. She didn’t try to solve it. She didn’t try to be a role model.
Ashenburg: Her daughter Jenny said, “Alice was a dedicated, cold-eyed storyteller.” I love that: cold-eyed.
Smith: The idea the books are somehow tainted is a magical idea, religious thinking. They’re somehow tainted by this toxic evil energy, and if they’re in my house, I’m going to be contaminated by them! I really don’t understand the emotion around that.
Bielski: But if I don’t want to spend time in her mind right now, am I wrong? I may change my mind. I think people are too black and white about this.
Swan: Everybody has to be so morally pure that it makes literature and art kind of exhausting. [...] There is a tendency right now, among readers, to treat literature as something we use to improve our culture.
David Staines, a professor of literature at Ottawa University: I don’t know if it improves our culture. I think literature just stands there for us to imbibe and understand and reflect. I often say to the students, what’s important is that literature is something outside the self. And if you absorb it totally, then you move back into yourself and you have a new understanding. So many of these students now are wrapped up with what they want literature to be and what they don’t want it to be. Why don’t you just try to understand its world and then come back to yourself with a new understanding of what’s out there? That’s what I learned.
This excerpt has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Shot
‘We’ve never had anybody at this level.’
A golden butterfly.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
At 17, Summer McIntosh may already be the greatest swimmer Canada has ever produced – a generational talent and four-time world champion who could contend for as many as six Olympic medals. Read more about McIntosh and her jam-packed Paris schedule here.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: The Bank of Canada lowered its benchmark interest rate for the second month in a row, and Rob Carrick thinks it might be time to give variable mortgages another look.
Abroad: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed an emptier-than-usual Congress yesterday – more than 50 Democrats, nearly 100 interns and Vice-President Kamala Harris all skipped his speech, while thousands of protesters assembled outside.
Up in the air: Two staffers with Canada’s women’s soccer team were booted from the Olympics after one spied on New Zealand’s practice with a drone, and now the defending champs are embroiled in an international cheating scandal that could overshadow their Games.
Down on the ground: Toronto’s streets were once again flooded after heavy rainfall yesterday – but in better road news, Ontario just handed the city $73-million to speed up construction on the Gardiner expressway by one year. So it’ll be smooth sailing in ... 2026!