Over her career as a writer, Alice Munro, who died this week at the age of 92, usually received praise for her work, from the short stories published in The New Yorker to her novels. But, like many writers who deal in matters of the human experience that make prudish minds explode, Munro also faced her share of controversy: she encountered censorship issues over her 1971 coming-of-age novel Lives of Girls and Women — and defended the works of other authors whose books were threatened with removal from school reading lists during the late 1970s in her native Huron County.
Munro’s first major censorship challenge occurred when A.B. Sweeney, the principal of Kenner Collegiate Vocational Institute in Peterborough, announced in February 1976 that Lives of Girls and Women would not be taught at his school the following year. “I can see a lot of parents uptight about this book,” he told the Globe and Mail. “And I know I can’t stand up and defend it.”
Sweeney claimed he’d grown concerned when he overheard a student describe the novel as pornographic. That prompted him to read the book. He was especially offended by a passage describing a man masturbating in front of a girl. Sweeney took full responsibility for the decision, which upset members of his English department, who continued to teach it to Grade 13 students that year. Sweeney found that most students he talked to were “overwhelmingly against my position.” Students surveyed by English teacher Dork Verhulst said that the book was more about growing up than about sex, that a few dirty words wouldn’t corrupt them, and that, as teens, they had already dealt with many of the issues Munro’s characters discussed. “A work of contemporary literature, if it is to maintain its integrity, must deal with the negative aspects of life as well as the positive,” Verhulst told the Globe and Mail. “It goes without saying that the scene of sexual deviance is not discussed in class as a model for behaviour.”
Around the same time, fundamentalist Christians were leading a charge against Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners in nearby Lakefield, where Laurence lived. There, teacher Robert Buchanan refused to give in to pressure, and the school board defended teaching the book to Grade 13 students. The English-department heads of all eight high schools in Peterborough County met to discuss their strategy, telling the media, “We are united and we are confident we can win.”
Photo of the books under review in the Peterborough area in February 1976. (Sault Star, March 2, 1976)
As their books were being targeted, Munro and Laurence wrote to each other about their situations — Munro jokingly referred to Laurence as an “F.F.P.” (“famous fellow pornographer”). In the end, Lives remained off the reading list at Kenner Collegiate, while two attempts led by a local Pentecostal minister, who created an organization called Citizens in Defence of Decency, failed to remove The Diviners from Lakefield.
Speaking at Conestoga College in Kitchener a week after Sweeney announced his decision, writer Sylvia Fraser called the attempts to ban the books “horrendous” and “tragic.”
“When you do that,” Fraser observed, “you abandon the child with his sexuality, you allow the child no way to deal with sex in a pleasant way. I can’t think of anything more beautiful than a child learning sexuality by reading sensitive authors such as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence. When you ban books, you do say sex is dirty, you do throw them into the arms of Penthouse magazine.”
Censorship issues arrived in Munro’s own backyard in the spring of 1978, when a local Catholic women’s group started a letter-writing campaign to ban three books from the Grade 13 English curriculum of the Huron County Board of Education: The Diviners, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher inthe Rye, and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Huron County councillors who favoured a ban described the books as disgusting, pornographic, and in bad taste. Munro, who was living in Clinton, became an outspoken defender of the books under attack, defending the right of young adults to choose their reading material. “She understood that there are always plenty of people made uncomfortable by the literary depiction of life as it is,” Munro biographer Robert Thacker observed, “and by the fact that literature both communicates ideas and makes people think.”
In a speech given to a meeting of the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English held in London that May, Munro argued that “Canadian writers must fight a conservative backlash that has forced some books from high-school reading lists [as] obscene or pornographic.” She added that “there is a conservative backlash happening all over the country from people who do nothing but open certain books to look at the dirty words. They feel that, because there are so many things going wrong in the country, maybe if we go back to having no dirty books or no beer in the ballpark, we’ll all be safe and pure.”
In Clinton, the community newspaper was not amused by the book banners. A May 18 News-Record editorial suggested that, if they were truly serious, they’d have to ban hundreds of books — ranging from Shakespeare to non-fictional works on historical atrocities — that ran the risk of arousing or corrupting youth and that it was illogical to think 18-year-olds were less prepared to handle the world than 19-year-olds: “By realizing that there are morbid, unhappy, tragic realities in life, the good that exists will be much more appreciated and valued.” The same page ran a letter from Munro noting that, despite what some people believed, great writers of the past did not avoid discussing sex.
Letter from the Clinton News-Record, May 18, 1978
Fellow author Timothy Findley also offered his support. “Books measure the heartbeat of the human spirit and its capacity for compassion,” he wrote in a telegram to Munro. “If they are silenced, then the heart is dead.”
At a public meeting at Central Huron Secondary School in Clinton on June 13, Munro sat on an anti-book-banning panel with writers June Callwood, Janet Lunn, and Steve Osterlund. Around 500 people attended the emotionally charged evening. According to the News-Record, “Munro’s comparison of the alleged pornographic material in the novels to material in The Bible sparked an audience reaction that began to resemble a faith healing session.” Munro citied several Biblical stories to show that many things, when taken out of context, could be deemed pornographic: if she were to take the excerpts, photocopy them, and distribute them, she said, they’d suggest the holy book contained nothing but “sexual escapades.” As Munro noted, “It isn’t possible to tell the story of King David’s moral development without telling about his adultery. I don’t think it would work if we said he and Bathsheba were just good friends.”
Several students also spoke. Goderich high-school senior David St. Jean said he thought those wanting to remove the books from the classroom were applying a double standard; he was old enough to drink and vote, “yet people tell me what I can read and what I can’t.” He wanted to be able to decide for himself whether the novels were suitable or not. One girl cried while explaining that, although she respected the opinions of her elders, she didn’t believe that foul language and depictions of sex would corrupt her. “In a small community like Clinton,” Globe and Mail writer William French observed, “it isn’t easy for teenagers to glimpse and reach for the big world beyond their parents’ comfortably limited horizons.”
Josephine Street in Wingham, the town where Alice Munro grew up, on October 11, 2013. (Deborah Baic/Globe and Mail)
Lots of people had opinions to share, and the lineup to the microphone was often up to 14 deep. English teachers tried to explain what role literature played in society. One woman questioned the morals of teachers, claiming she had heard stories of parties full of drunk, swearing faculty members. One man waved a Bible and announced that it contained everything that ever needed to be taught in an English class.
Some speakers tested the audience’s patience. Elmer Umbach, a pharmacist from Lucknow, was concerned that people were speaking from their hearts and not listening to all sides. “He asked the meeting to calm down and listen to the beat of their hearts before they spoke and listen to the hearts of others,” the News-Record reported. “He held a Bible aloft and challenged anyone to refute its teachings claiming no one in history had been able to prove the Bible wrong.” Umbach then asked the audience to let him lead them in prayer, but some people weren’t having that. “I’m going to lose my babysitter in five minutes,” a man shouted. “Sit down and let someone else speak.”
(According to one source, Umbach also told the audience, “If you older folks want to go to hell, that’s your business.”)
After the meeting, a man told Munro that her mother, who had taught him Sunday School, would be ashamed of her defence of the books. Munro concluded that assessment was probably correct, as her mother had once burned a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in their kitchen stove.
In August, the board voted to remove The Diviners from the reading list but kept the other two titles.
Later that year, writer Paul Stuewe travelled to Huron County, researching an article for Books inCanada magazine. He talked to Umbach and another pro-censorship member of the community but neglected to point out that both men were connected to Milton-based fundamentalist evangelist Ken Campbell’s Renaissance International organization, which supported similar book-censoring efforts across the country. Umbach declared that the Bible was “the only source of successful moral living.” Stuewe felt the incident had been blown out of proportion as titles like The Diviners were still available in libraries and bookstores and rural dwellers like those in Huron County were “for the most part on the receiving end of social forces over which they have no control.”
Alice Munro on banning books: CBC Archives | CBC
Stuewe’s article provoked a backlash. In a letter to Books in Canada, Findley wrote that it did not accurately reflect ongoing censorship battles and failed to note that the two men interviewed were echoing Campbell’s views. He felt Laurence had been slandered by Umbach, who claimed that she and other writers’ alleged advocacy of free love played a role in an increase in customers turning up at his pharmacy with venereal diseases. “As a pharmacist, he is only required to sell prophylactics,” Findley wrote. “He is not required to become one.”
“Why are we so afraid of our own children that we want to close their hearts and minds to the fund of compassion they would find in these books?” Findley asked, before listing off titles recently cited in censorship cases. “The list goes on and on, and it grows and grows every year. It scares the hell out of me.”
Munro also responded to the article, reiterating that the children supposedly in need of protection were 18- and 19-year-olds and that they weren’t compelled to read the books if they didn’t want to.
In a January 1979 interview with the CBC, Munro discussed the surge in censorship related to her works and those of other writers. After joking that winning literary awards and being removed from school reading lists might go together, she observed that one had to understand the mindset of those who wanted to ban books for being blasphemous — despite the fact that most people wouldn’t object to the offending dialogue. “I think as soon as one step is taken you have to start resisting, because that makes the next step easier,” she said. “Though the people who are concerned say they are not interested in taking books out of libraries or bookstores, I wonder if it is that they are not at this point interested in doing that, because they’re actually removing books from school reading lists, which their children do not have to read, though they are taking them away from other children.”
Agenda segment, May 23, 2024: Alice Munro — What will be remembered?
She noted that it was difficult to find local people willing to support the controversial works and that many people didn’t seem to read much or think books were important. As for protecting youth from sex, “biology doesn’t protect them,” she said. She wondered whether her opponents were concerned that their children would reject their narrow fundamentalist views. She urged people to try to influence their local school boards whenever anyone targeted books — but noted that those in the middle might view the book banners as a joke or think it was beneath their dignity to become involved.
Munro had mixed feelings about the experience. “In a personal way this is all good for me,” she wrote to Laurence. “I have a problem wanting people to like me and it’s high time I got over it. I think it’s harder because I’m not an outsider here. I have relatives … Good people who were kind and friendly are now distant and disappointed.” She received many angry anonymous letters critical of her stance, and her relationships with some members of the community remained strained over the next few years. A December 1981 Wingham Advance-Times editorial called her “a genius of sour grapes” whose youth must have warped her personality and suggested that many locals avoided her work because they had “repeatedly been made the butt of soured and cruel introspection on the part of a gifted author.”
Editorial from the December 16, 1981, edition of the Wingham Advance-Times.
In a later interview, Munro reflected that “if you’ve grown up in this kind of community you should know that you’re not going to be rewarded for doing something honest or real.”
Further attempts to remove Lives of Girls and Women from school reading lists elsewhere in the province met with failure. In Markdale, Grey Country school trustee Barbara Taylor railed against the book in the spring of 1979, claiming she was offended by its depictions of sexual promiscuity. In Etobicoke, school trustee Michael Doyle made at least two attempts between 1979 and 1984. The Globe and Mail observed that Doyle viewed the world as being “involved in a gruesome struggle with pornography, and the world, he thinks, could lose.”
But for Munro, the author’s duty was clear. As she said at the Central Huron public meeting, writers have the responsibility to depict, as closely as possible, the “shifting, complex realities of human experience.”
Sources: Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005); The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, David Staines, editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); the October 1978 and December 1978 editions of Books in Canada; the May 4, 1978, May 18, 1978, and June 15, 1978, editions of the Clinton News-Record; the February 11, 1976, February 14, 1976, June 15, 1978, and April 17, 1982, editions of the Globe and Mail; the June 15, 1978, edition of the Goderich Signal-Star; the February 19, 1976, edition of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record; the May 16, 1979, edition of the Owen Sound Sun-Times; the May 23, 1978, and April 19, 1979, editions of the Toronto Star; the August 28, 1976, edition of Weekend Magazine; and the December 16, 1981, edition of the Wingham Advance-Times.
Over her career as a writer, Alice Munro, who died this week at the age of 92, usually received praise for her work, from the short stories published in The New Yorker to her novels. But, like many writers who deal in matters of the human experience that make prudish minds explode, Munro also faced her share of controversy: she encountered censorship issues over her 1971 coming-of-age novel Lives of Girls and Women — and defended the works of other authors whose books were threatened with removal from school reading lists during the late 1970s in her native Huron County.
Munro’s first major censorship challenge occurred when A.B. Sweeney, the principal of Kenner Collegiate Vocational Institute in Peterborough, announced in February 1976 that Lives of Girls and Women would not be taught at his school the following year. “I can see a lot of parents uptight about this book,” he told the Globe and Mail. “And I know I can’t stand up and defend it.”
Sweeney claimed he’d grown concerned when he overheard a student describe the novel as pornographic. That prompted him to read the book. He was especially offended by a passage describing a man masturbating in front of a girl. Sweeney took full responsibility for the decision, which upset members of his English department, who continued to teach it to Grade 13 students that year. Sweeney found that most students he talked to were “overwhelmingly against my position.” Students surveyed by English teacher Dork Verhulst said that the book was more about growing up than about sex, that a few dirty words wouldn’t corrupt them, and that, as teens, they had already dealt with many of the issues Munro’s characters discussed. “A work of contemporary literature, if it is to maintain its integrity, must deal with the negative aspects of life as well as the positive,” Verhulst told the Globe and Mail. “It goes without saying that the scene of sexual deviance is not discussed in class as a model for behaviour.”
Around the same time, fundamentalist Christians were leading a charge against Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners in nearby Lakefield, where Laurence lived. There, teacher Robert Buchanan refused to give in to pressure, and the school board defended teaching the book to Grade 13 students. The English-department heads of all eight high schools in Peterborough County met to discuss their strategy, telling the media, “We are united and we are confident we can win.”
Photo of the books under review in the Peterborough area in February 1976. (Sault Star, March 2, 1976)
As their books were being targeted, Munro and Laurence wrote to each other about their situations — Munro jokingly referred to Laurence as an “F.F.P.” (“famous fellow pornographer”). In the end, Lives remained off the reading list at Kenner Collegiate, while two attempts led by a local Pentecostal minister, who created an organization called Citizens in Defence of Decency, failed to remove The Diviners from Lakefield.
Speaking at Conestoga College in Kitchener a week after Sweeney announced his decision, writer Sylvia Fraser called the attempts to ban the books “horrendous” and “tragic.”
“When you do that,” Fraser observed, “you abandon the child with his sexuality, you allow the child no way to deal with sex in a pleasant way. I can’t think of anything more beautiful than a child learning sexuality by reading sensitive authors such as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence. When you ban books, you do say sex is dirty, you do throw them into the arms of Penthouse magazine.”
Censorship issues arrived in Munro’s own backyard in the spring of 1978, when a local Catholic women’s group started a letter-writing campaign to ban three books from the Grade 13 English curriculum of the Huron County Board of Education: The Diviners, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher inthe Rye, and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Huron County councillors who favoured a ban described the books as disgusting, pornographic, and in bad taste. Munro, who was living in Clinton, became an outspoken defender of the books under attack, defending the right of young adults to choose their reading material. “She understood that there are always plenty of people made uncomfortable by the literary depiction of life as it is,” Munro biographer Robert Thacker observed, “and by the fact that literature both communicates ideas and makes people think.”
In a speech given to a meeting of the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English held in London that May, Munro argued that “Canadian writers must fight a conservative backlash that has forced some books from high-school reading lists [as] obscene or pornographic.” She added that “there is a conservative backlash happening all over the country from people who do nothing but open certain books to look at the dirty words. They feel that, because there are so many things going wrong in the country, maybe if we go back to having no dirty books or no beer in the ballpark, we’ll all be safe and pure.”
In Clinton, the community newspaper was not amused by the book banners. A May 18 News-Record editorial suggested that, if they were truly serious, they’d have to ban hundreds of books — ranging from Shakespeare to non-fictional works on historical atrocities — that ran the risk of arousing or corrupting youth and that it was illogical to think 18-year-olds were less prepared to handle the world than 19-year-olds: “By realizing that there are morbid, unhappy, tragic realities in life, the good that exists will be much more appreciated and valued.” The same page ran a letter from Munro noting that, despite what some people believed, great writers of the past did not avoid discussing sex.
Letter from the Clinton News-Record, May 18, 1978
Fellow author Timothy Findley also offered his support. “Books measure the heartbeat of the human spirit and its capacity for compassion,” he wrote in a telegram to Munro. “If they are silenced, then the heart is dead.”
At a public meeting at Central Huron Secondary School in Clinton on June 13, Munro sat on an anti-book-banning panel with writers June Callwood, Janet Lunn, and Steve Osterlund. Around 500 people attended the emotionally charged evening. According to the News-Record, “Munro’s comparison of the alleged pornographic material in the novels to material in The Bible sparked an audience reaction that began to resemble a faith healing session.” Munro citied several Biblical stories to show that many things, when taken out of context, could be deemed pornographic: if she were to take the excerpts, photocopy them, and distribute them, she said, they’d suggest the holy book contained nothing but “sexual escapades.” As Munro noted, “It isn’t possible to tell the story of King David’s moral development without telling about his adultery. I don’t think it would work if we said he and Bathsheba were just good friends.”
Several students also spoke. Goderich high-school senior David St. Jean said he thought those wanting to remove the books from the classroom were applying a double standard; he was old enough to drink and vote, “yet people tell me what I can read and what I can’t.” He wanted to be able to decide for himself whether the novels were suitable or not. One girl cried while explaining that, although she respected the opinions of her elders, she didn’t believe that foul language and depictions of sex would corrupt her. “In a small community like Clinton,” Globe and Mail writer William French observed, “it isn’t easy for teenagers to glimpse and reach for the big world beyond their parents’ comfortably limited horizons.”
Josephine Street in Wingham, the town where Alice Munro grew up, on October 11, 2013. (Deborah Baic/Globe and Mail)
Lots of people had opinions to share, and the lineup to the microphone was often up to 14 deep. English teachers tried to explain what role literature played in society. One woman questioned the morals of teachers, claiming she had heard stories of parties full of drunk, swearing faculty members. One man waved a Bible and announced that it contained everything that ever needed to be taught in an English class.
Some speakers tested the audience’s patience. Elmer Umbach, a pharmacist from Lucknow, was concerned that people were speaking from their hearts and not listening to all sides. “He asked the meeting to calm down and listen to the beat of their hearts before they spoke and listen to the hearts of others,” the News-Record reported. “He held a Bible aloft and challenged anyone to refute its teachings claiming no one in history had been able to prove the Bible wrong.” Umbach then asked the audience to let him lead them in prayer, but some people weren’t having that. “I’m going to lose my babysitter in five minutes,” a man shouted. “Sit down and let someone else speak.”
(According to one source, Umbach also told the audience, “If you older folks want to go to hell, that’s your business.”)
After the meeting, a man told Munro that her mother, who had taught him Sunday School, would be ashamed of her defence of the books. Munro concluded that assessment was probably correct, as her mother had once burned a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in their kitchen stove.
In August, the board voted to remove The Diviners from the reading list but kept the other two titles.
Later that year, writer Paul Stuewe travelled to Huron County, researching an article for Books inCanada magazine. He talked to Umbach and another pro-censorship member of the community but neglected to point out that both men were connected to Milton-based fundamentalist evangelist Ken Campbell’s Renaissance International organization, which supported similar book-censoring efforts across the country. Umbach declared that the Bible was “the only source of successful moral living.” Stuewe felt the incident had been blown out of proportion as titles like The Diviners were still available in libraries and bookstores and rural dwellers like those in Huron County were “for the most part on the receiving end of social forces over which they have no control.”
Alice Munro on banning books: CBC Archives | CBC
Stuewe’s article provoked a backlash. In a letter to Books in Canada, Findley wrote that it did not accurately reflect ongoing censorship battles and failed to note that the two men interviewed were echoing Campbell’s views. He felt Laurence had been slandered by Umbach, who claimed that she and other writers’ alleged advocacy of free love played a role in an increase in customers turning up at his pharmacy with venereal diseases. “As a pharmacist, he is only required to sell prophylactics,” Findley wrote. “He is not required to become one.”
“Why are we so afraid of our own children that we want to close their hearts and minds to the fund of compassion they would find in these books?” Findley asked, before listing off titles recently cited in censorship cases. “The list goes on and on, and it grows and grows every year. It scares the hell out of me.”
Munro also responded to the article, reiterating that the children supposedly in need of protection were 18- and 19-year-olds and that they weren’t compelled to read the books if they didn’t want to.
In a January 1979 interview with the CBC, Munro discussed the surge in censorship related to her works and those of other writers. After joking that winning literary awards and being removed from school reading lists might go together, she observed that one had to understand the mindset of those who wanted to ban books for being blasphemous — despite the fact that most people wouldn’t object to the offending dialogue. “I think as soon as one step is taken you have to start resisting, because that makes the next step easier,” she said. “Though the people who are concerned say they are not interested in taking books out of libraries or bookstores, I wonder if it is that they are not at this point interested in doing that, because they’re actually removing books from school reading lists, which their children do not have to read, though they are taking them away from other children.”
She noted that it was difficult to find local people willing to support the controversial works and that many people didn’t seem to read much or think books were important. As for protecting youth from sex, “biology doesn’t protect them,” she said. She wondered whether her opponents were concerned that their children would reject their narrow fundamentalist views. She urged people to try to influence their local school boards whenever anyone targeted books — but noted that those in the middle might view the book banners as a joke or think it was beneath their dignity to become involved.
Munro had mixed feelings about the experience. “In a personal way this is all good for me,” she wrote to Laurence. “I have a problem wanting people to like me and it’s high time I got over it. I think it’s harder because I’m not an outsider here. I have relatives … Good people who were kind and friendly are now distant and disappointed.” She received many angry anonymous letters critical of her stance, and her relationships with some members of the community remained strained over the next few years. A December 1981 Wingham Advance-Times editorial called her “a genius of sour grapes” whose youth must have warped her personality and suggested that many locals avoided her work because they had “repeatedly been made the butt of soured and cruel introspection on the part of a gifted author.”
Editorial from the December 16, 1981, edition of the Wingham Advance-Times.
In a later interview, Munro reflected that “if you’ve grown up in this kind of community you should know that you’re not going to be rewarded for doing something honest or real.”
Further attempts to remove Lives of Girls and Women from school reading lists elsewhere in the province met with failure. In Markdale, Grey Country school trustee Barbara Taylor railed against the book in the spring of 1979, claiming she was offended by its depictions of sexual promiscuity. In Etobicoke, school trustee Michael Doyle made at least two attempts between 1979 and 1984. The Globe and Mail observed that Doyle viewed the world as being “involved in a gruesome struggle with pornography, and the world, he thinks, could lose.”
But for Munro, the author’s duty was clear. As she said at the Central Huron public meeting, writers have the responsibility to depict, as closely as possible, the “shifting, complex realities of human experience.”
Sources: Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005); The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, David Staines, editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); the October 1978 and December 1978 editions of Books in Canada; the May 4, 1978, May 18, 1978, and June 15, 1978, editions of the Clinton News-Record; the February 11, 1976, February 14, 1976, June 15, 1978, and April 17, 1982, editions of the Globe and Mail; the June 15, 1978, edition of the Goderich Signal-Star; the February 19, 1976, edition of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record; the May 16, 1979, edition of the Owen Sound Sun-Times; the May 23, 1978, and April 19, 1979, editions of the Toronto Star; the August 28, 1976, edition of Weekend Magazine; and the December 16, 1981, edition of the Wingham Advance-Times.
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