Author Anne Enright on coming to terms with the great and flawed writer Alice Munro

Cathrin Bradbury: You reread all of Alice Munro to write this essay, which you described in “Attention” as an ‘extremely difficult piece.’ Why did you embark?

Anne Enright: I was so taken by the interviews in the Star, which did a really good job of breaking the story, or of telling the story. And I was taken by one of Margaret Atwood’s small quotes, I think it was ‘isn’t it possible something similar might have happened to Munro?’ And that kind of insight — or question — realigns everything, because things make sense more properly if that were the case. 

Munro, as a writer, liked to make things better. In her Nobel acceptance speech, she was sad that the Little Mermaid had to die, and that this was part of her writerly impulse — to make sure that the mermaid wouldn’t die, that she could make it right. 

But the late stories often default to the gothic, and somebody does die, often a child. 

Bradbury: So many children. 

Enright: So many children. Or the, ‘It’s all right. It wasn’t anything after all,’ endings in stories about an unforgiving daughter. Ah, I mean, it is all immensely sad. I really do understand how Canada must have been so proud of Munro. 

Bradbury: Yes.

Enright: And then so devastated. 

Bradbury: So devastated. 

Enright: That she wasn’t the lovely person that she presented or seemed to present herself as.

Bradbury: Did she present that, though? As you point out several times in your essay, it was all there on the page.

Enright: Well, socially, she did. She was elegant. She was polite. She was poised. She was reserved. She had beautiful manners. She was the most attractive person. But as a writer she was as cool and steely as they come, when necessary. But also, fluid, flexible, supple in her understanding; she just was such immense intelligence on the page. And the amazing thing is that she walked on stage fully formed. It’s hard to trace her formation as a writer. She just was there. I’m not talking about her reputation but her talent, which was outrageous. 

Bradbury: You say in your essay that Munro was never a liar. Not only in her writing, but also in interviews. About ‘Open Secrets,’ Munro said the stories ‘aren’t what they seem to be about,’ or ‘I wanted to challenge what people want to know.’

Enright: But she was, in that phrase, havering a little. She was talking about having it both ways. She couldn’t have it both ways. She was always brilliant about denial. But as I say in the essay, denial is a great subject for fiction, but a poor mechanism.

Bradbury: ‘The writer must know what she knows,’ you wrote. And when she didn’t her writing started to unravel. 

Enright: She started to tremble on the verge of the truth in various sentences. On the sentence level, you can see the sentence swerve away from the truth. 

Bradbury: Do you think the reader is complicit in her secret? Do you think, as readers of Alice Munro, that we were somehow keeping the secret too? Is that possible?

Enright: It can’t be possible. I mean, it’s categorically impossible, it’s ontologically not possible. Is the reader complicit …? It’s a very good question, because it’s unanswerable. 

It did make me revise my idea of what we expect to find on the page when it comes to descriptions of desire. And why these dark, damaged desirings should be attractive to us. I suppose the reader can take them as a warning. From Victorian fiction, all women are warned all the time in fiction. Emma Bovary is a warning not to commit adultery. I did it myself in my last book, with ‘The Wren, The Wren’: Male enters, and there is an abusive relationship, and the reader is not invited to be complicit. The reader is invited to say, no, don’t do that. 

Bradbury: Munro brought the predatory male into her writing as early as 1971, you remind us. Art Chamberlain, the Second World War veteran in ‘Lives of Girls and Women,’ lures 14-year-old Del Jordon to the woods and masturbates in front of her. Del is excited by Art, at first. ‘She conflates desire and damage,’ as you say. The thrill side for Munro complicates the predator narrative, but neither you, nor Munro, bury that complicated truth.

Enright: In those early books, once the protagonist had imagined it, she was trapped in it. She couldn’t get out of something that she had foreseen. It’s a problem with the imagination as much as anything else. But to imagine something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. You can imagine something and not engage. Something has gone wrong when that is the response.

When I was writing ‘The Gathering’ (in Enright’s Booker Prize winning novel, Liam’s suicide uncovers sexual abuse in his past, and his sister Veronica wonders if she experienced the same), I knew, as a writer, that it hadn’t happened to Veronica. And I knew that it was a question she would ask. And I also knew that it was morally imperative for me to know what had happened to Liam. And to trace those consequences as his life went off the rails. I knew that the ethical underpinnings had to be exactly right to honour the facts of what happens to people when they are inappropriately dealt with as children.

Bradbury: Alice Munro wasn’t able to do that.

Enright: No but, it’s worse than that. It’s all unspeakably bad.

Bradbury: You decide at the beginning of your essay that the abusive figure of Gerald Fremlin, Munro’s husband, not disappear from the account. We need him there so that his type ‘might be identifiable to the reader again.’

Enright: I was really pleased with how my essay centred the figure of Gerald Fremlin; his moods and his ghastly jokes. The creepy cartoon villain voice gets inherently creepier the older the guy is. Men do not abuse because they are male. It’s not a normal activity. 

Bradbury: You begin your essay with Fremlin, but you end with Munro. You say in a very moving passage that your own decision to continue to love Munro is not based on the irrational or the theoretical, but on emotion. That ‘you cannot take back my great love for her work. It was too freely given.’

Enright: You could say that ‘too freely given’ means in the old-fashioned sense — that it was given too freely. 

Bradbury: Did you mean it that way? 

Enright: I meant it both ways. 

Bradbury: But you cannot take back your love for her, whichever way it was meant. 

Enright: No, I can’t. Unfortunately. 

Bradbury: Do you think that’s because she was an early love, in your open vistaed days as a girl on Vancouver Island? 

Enright: She’s a great writer. She’s a great and deeply flawed writer. And especially after 1992, you might say a fully flawed writer. So, love rather than admiration, I would say. 

A lot of the knocking of writers off pedestals has been male writers. I don’t put writers on pedestals. I know too many writers to put them anywhere. Saying no more on that. But why would they be any better than anyone else is the question.

Bradbury: I guess we call them to account on the page. We expect a level of honesty.

Enright: I do think writing is an ethical pursuit. There is an ethics of creation, for lack of a better way to put it. We work between fantasy and reality, writers. We have to place ourselves on that spectrum really properly. There are astonishingly strict hidden rules to the work of fiction. And they’re not moral, but they are real. Or your fiction will go askew. It’s dreamwork, you know? And you need it to be right. 

Bradbury: Do you have a rule in your head as you write? 

Enright: Will you spend the rest of your life on this? That’s my rule. You throw yourself into the project. It’s work. It’s vocational. A vocational poem. You do need to do it right, somehow. Which doesn’t mean being pious or moralistic or judgmental. Those are not words I’m reaching for here. 

Bradbury: Do you wonder what words you might have put to Alice Munro, before she became ill with dementia, but after we knew what had happened? What you might say to her? 

Enright: I don’t know if she could hear. If she can’t hear it from her daughter, she couldn’t hear it from anyone.