“Ah, I’ve got good news for you there, Alice,” I said, “it’s at the printers. They start printing on Monday.”
“Well,” said Alice, “I’d like to change the second half of the book. Is there time to change it all, from the first person to the third person, and add a new story?”
I was speechless. But we arranged that she would come in to the Macmillan office on Monday morning early to discuss it with my bosses while we stopped the printing. The Monday meeting, dammit, ended with everyone agreeing that Doug would read the revised version (including the new story, “Simon’s Luck,” which Alice felt altered the whole narrative structure) and see if it was such an improvement that it was worth redoing the whole book — and losing weeks, possibly months, of valuable selling time.
We reassembled at 2:00 and I agreed that, yes, Alice was right, and this was better, so we should scrap the second half, re-typeset it (including “Simon’s Luck”) and publish the book later, and damn the torpedoes. As it happened, the printers were so thrilled by this historic high drama that we only lost about ten days of selling time. So it all worked out, and the world got a wonderful, prize-winning book. And Alice, as I had warned her, had to pay the financial penalty for making excessive late changes.
“You made Alice Munro pay a penalty?” scandalized readers may ask. Yes, that was the deal. And I know that Alice expected nothing less, true to her Calvinist Presbyterian background, which does not favour anyone expecting special treatment in this world. I had a flash of similar awareness once when I was visiting Alice in Comox, her B.C. summer home. Our planned dinner was cancelled when Alice had to be taken to the local emergency ward. I tracked her down there, and we chatted as she lay on a bed, awaiting the doctor. When he arrived, I got up from my seat and made to leave. I was just starting to joke with the doctor that I hoped he’d do a good job, since this was a pretty important patient, when I stopped, aware that Alice would not want that. I clapped her on the ankle, and left. Years later, in 2005, when Alice graciously spoke at the Scot of the Year Award ceremony, she complained that I was so physically undemonstrative that she had come that evening in the hope of getting her first hug from me.
When people ask me what Alice Munro is really like, I try to deal with the two halves of the complete Alice. One is the frowning, concerned good citizen, determined to do The Right Thing, and worrying her way towards it. That’s the Alice who some years ago quietly put me under pressure to make sure that her next book was printed on recycled environmentally friendly (and more expensive) paper. And this, I should note, was at a time when using recycled paper in books was still rare, and associated with new fringe books by small publishers, not major bestsellers by major writers published by major houses. So her choice had a huge impact.
That’s the same Alice who travelled for hours to appear onstage at Massey Hall in Toronto at a rally supporting CBC workers who had been, in effect, locked out. Alice spoke simply and directly about what CBC radio had meant to her as a young girl with ideas growing up in a small town. Then she spoke affectionately about what the support of Robert Weaver, the producer of CBC’s Anthology, had meant to her in the early, lonely years. Echoes of the ovation she received still ring around the corners of the old hall.
And that, of course, is the same Alice Munro who in 2009 withdrew her new book from the Giller Prize competition, on the grounds that she had won the prize twice already, so she wanted to step aside to make room for a younger writer. This selfless decision — which in the role of selfish, greedy publisher I fought against for weeks, until I saw that Alice’s mind was made up — meant that the book lost not only potential prize money, but potential sales and publicity worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. With an earlier book Alice had put herself out of the running for these rewards by agreeing to become a Giller Prize juror that year. “Alice,” I said, aghast, “why didn’t you ask me about this?”
“Because I knew what you’d say,” she replied, and laughed happily.
That’s the other side of the complete Alice: she is very funny, and we spend a lot of our time together, on the phone or in person, laughing. I think people catch that when they hear her read her stories, in person or on tape; the stories are much funnier than expected and attract a lot of laughter when she reads them with all the right Huron County emphasis. But Alice in person is also very good company, and it’s significant that in the fractious world of Canadian writing she has no enemies. W.P. Kinsella, reviewing Too Much Happiness in BC Bookworld, described that world as “rife with jealousies, feuds and petty backbiting.” Yet he notes that “I have never heard anyone say anything unkind about Alice Munro, personally or professionally. When Alice wins a prize, other writers and critics are not lined up to name ten books that should have won.” Even her famous reluctance to tour to promote a new book is based not on a reluctance to meet, and enjoy meeting, new people. On the contrary, it’s because her frail health makes travel hard on her, especially when her day involves her in, say, solving the marital problems of the taxi driver who takes her to the radio station.
Our relationship is based on a long-running joke, to see who can “understate” the other, by being more dramatically low key. For example, when she wins another prize, I’ll pass on the news as “not bad,” and she’ll agree, saying, “I suppose it’s all right.” A wiser head than mine might see this as significant, allowing this woman who grew up from birth believing that “showing off,” to use Philip Marchand’s phrase, was the ultimate sin (“Who Do You Think You Are?”), to cope with her success. Because, except in the rare case of the writer whose work is torn away from them, and published against their will, writers are indeed in the business of “showing off.” They’re all saying. “Look at me! Here’s what I’ve written, I think you should pay attention to it!”
I’m the right partner for the low-key game. When Alice won a Giller Prize, I was sitting beside her. When the winner was announced — “ALICE MUNRO!” — there was a blare of triumphant music (possibly the theme from Rocky), searchlights caught and held us at the table, and everyone expected the usual Oscar-style ritual of publisher and author and agent hugging and air-kissing interminably for the cameras before the dazed winner ascends the stage. What Alice got from me was “Up you go,” and she was on her way to the stage.
A sort of pinnacle of understatement was reached when Alice was nominated for a prize along with several other writers, and told me that she hoped that her friend X would be the one to win. When I heard the results, I phoned her to say that I had good news and bad news. The good news was that her friend X had won the prize. This was greeted with great pleasure on the Clinton end of the line. The bad news was that he had to share the prize . . . with you, Alice.
“Oh well,” she said, “if he has to share it with someone, I guess it might as well be me.”
It’s hard to beat her at this game. She even plays it, for fun, in her stories. In “Fiction,” for example, in her 2009 collection, Too Much Happiness, the central character is horrified to find that she appears as a manipulative adult in a former pupil’s new book: “A collection of stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.”
On the subject of disappointment, I have developed a flourishing career as the man who disappoints audiences by standing in for Alice when she wins awards. This has happened so often that at any event when I hear the words, “Unfortunately, Alice Munro . . .” I start to move towards the stage. It’s a terrible thing to see a roomful of heads slump in sorrow, even something approaching disgust, as you approach the microphone. Sometimes it’s more personal. Once at a Royal York Hotel event for the nation’s booksellers, Stuart McLean, the MC, excitedly announced Alice as the winner. When I emerged out of the bright lights to mount the stage, Stuart said nothing about “my old friend Doug Gibs
on,” although I had provided him with weekly movie reviews for three years on the CBC program, Sunday Morning, that he produced. Instead, with obvious dismay, he said, in sinking tones, “Awww . . . it’s Doug.”
Much more enjoyable are the times when I’m able to see Alice attend to receive an award. The most exciting such event was in 2009 in Dublin (the one with the full-size Liffey) when Alice won the worldwide prize awarded for a body of work, the Man Booker Prize. Since M&S was going through the financial hard times endemic to Canadian publishing, and decided that it could not afford to send me to see Alice win, I transformed myself into a journalist covering the event for the Globe and Mail. Typing on my hotel bed, this Globe correspondent reported, after a suitable opening:
London’s Observer believes that, when compared with the Nobel, this prize (presented Thursday for only the third time) “is rapidly becoming the more significant award.” And although the thirteen other nominees include Peter Carey, E.L. Doctorow, James Kelman, Maria Vargas Llosa and V.S. Naipaul, there is a general sense of pleasure in the literary world that Alice has received this recognition. James Wood, the Atlantic-spanning critic who writes for the Guardian and the New Yorker, is wise in the ways of literary juries; at the Griffin Prize in Toronto he quietly expressed his approval of Alice’s win. “Sometimes,” he said, “they get it right.”
Getting it right this year involves choosing the perfect city for a literary prize-giving. As a bookish bastion, Dublin needs no defense . . .
What remains is a matchless literary setting. En route to the opening reception, the dazzled party-goers find themselves lingering over The Book of Kells, arguably the Western world’s most beautiful illuminated manuscript. It was rescued from the Scottish island of Iona when the Celtic world was both tight-knit and afflicted by Vikings, who had no use for books, unless they wanted to get warm.
Upstairs the 200-strong crowd moves into one of the world’s great temples to the book, the Long Room in the Old Library, a jaw dropping sixty-five metres of tall barrel-vaulted glory, all rich brown wood and gilded paint and marble busts and 200,000 ancient books.
At the champagne reception in the library, Alice sits quietly, her silver hair matched by a slim silver gown. Somehow she has mastered the art of shy vivacity, and people enjoy meeting her. Tonight she prefers to reserve her energies until the award ceremony is over.
In truth, I was appalled to find her sitting alone while the party in her honour twittered on around her. Would she like to meet anyone? No, she said, she was just taking it easy, And then, a flash of Huron County. “They might change their mind,” she said, darkly.
They did not change their mind, and in accepting the award Alice rose to the occasion. She recalled being seven years old, pacing in her backyard, trying to find a way to make Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Mermaid have a happy ending. She spoke of a writing life since then spent “always fooling around with what you find . . . This is what you want to do with your time — and people give you a prize for it!” Everyone beamed, Canadians most of all.
The Globe story ends: “The hours race by until ‘Carriages’ are due at eleven. Mindful of Cinderella’s fate, Alice leaves early. We move out into the eighteenth-century night, reflecting that, as Oscar Wilde might have said, sometimes nice writers do finish first.”
“Shy vivacity” is good, I think. Anyone who has seen Alice at a literary party — or even at a book-signing session — will know what I mean. The usual pattern at book signings is for bright, articulate people to spend twenty minutes lining up to meet Alice when she signs their book. I, hovering helpfully, know what happens next. They reach Alice, and their carefully prepared speech becomes “I just . . . oh, your stories, I mean — it’s so wonderful, I really . . .” And Alice kindly rescues them from more blurting, and the book is signed, and they float off.
By now, as Bob Thacker’s biography shows, Alice’s work has been studied and dissected by hundreds of scholars around the world. One of the best studies to reach my eyes is the introduction to Alice Munro’s Selected Stories by Margaret Atwood. She begins by telling us flatly that “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. . . . Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones.”
To me, one of her most perceptive points is how often the stories deal with sex. In Atwood’s words, “Pushing the sexual boundaries is distinctly thrilling for many a Munro woman.” As Exhibit A, I would propose the story “Differently,” in which a working mother accepts a ride home on a motorbike from a dangerously attractive man, and ends up tussling in the scrubby bushes at the edge of a Victoria waterfront park. She returns home, telling the babysitter that she’s late because her car wouldn’t start. “Her hair was wild, her lips were swollen, her clothes were full of sand.”
One of the things that most fascinates scholars and reviewers about Alice is how her work keeps changing, so that one of the hardest sentences for anyone to complete is one that begins, “All Alice Munro stories . . .” Over the years, Alice’s stories have tended to get longer, and one by one, she has demolished all of the traditional barriers to where the short story supposedly can go.
Think about it. Alice Munro’s individual stories may range across generations and span a century, and they may involve several narrators. These storytellers may be shy teenagers or fierce grandmothers or any age in between, and they may be men or women. Or the storyteller may be a third-person narrator, more or less omniscient. The stories may seem to proceed backwards in an artless sort of way that somehow works. Some readers will laugh out loud at some shaft of delicious, comic irony, while others will thrill to the sudden, shuddering horrors that are revealed. Some of the incidents clearly spring from the author’s own life, others do not.
The setting will usually be Alice Munro country, or the Canadian west coast. Then, as if to defy all categories, as if to say, “I’ll show you!,” Alice will set a story in Australia, or Scotland, or even in the mountains of Albania almost a century ago. Or she will devote over fifty pages (in Too Much Happiness) to the life of a nineteenth-century female Russian mathematical genius.
All this range of material and styles is, of course, populated by characters who become real people, whether they are chambermaids at the Blue Spruce Inn, professors, music teachers, carpenters, librarians, or farmers growing beans in Huron County. No wonder the London Times recently reviewed one of her books with the words: “When reading her work it is difficult to remember why the novel was ever invented.” The jury for the International Man Booker Prize struck the same note. “She brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of work.”
Comparisons with Chekhov, Flaubert, and other greats of short fiction abound, as reviewers run out of superlatives. It’s clear that in the future the single word “Munro” will be used like “Austen” or “Dickens” in literature courses. Some years ago the Atlantic magazine’s reviewer stated, with a confidence that would impress Saint Peter, “Alice Munro is the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years’ time.”
Not bad, eh?
Epilogue: “What Happens After My Book Is Published?”
In my role as publisher, first at Macmillan of Canada, then at McClelland & Stewart (a period spanning almost precisely twenty-five years) I used to supply this document — headed “AWFUL WARNINGS” — to new authors.
I was pleased to note that the initial reaction was invariably an amused one. About six months later, however, a much more thoughtful letter tended to follow. I should stress that the conditions described here are not restricted to Canada. These warnings were picked up and republished in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. I like to think that the rest of the world is free of the imperfections mentioned here.
Interestingly, the document fell into the hands of the editors of Saturday Night magazine, who published it. This factual working document was published there as �
��Humour,” and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in that category. Fortunately a very witty article in French won the prize, saving me the embarrassment of explaining to the world that this was a realistic piece of advice, not humour.
Now that I have crossed No Man’s Land and become an author myself, I hope that what follows will not apply to me, and that my book will prove to be, er, exceptional.
General Advice
On the day your book is published, the world will roll merrily along, totally oblivious to the new book’s existence and totally unaffected by it. This “business as usual” attitude may anger and depress you. Over the next few months, however, you are in for a series of even greater irritations and disappointments. I have listed them for you here, in their main categories: forewarned is forearmed.
Bookstores
Do not expect to see your book in a bookstore window. This will never happen. Other people will tell you that they have seen it in such-and-such a window, but when you go there you will find the window devoted to a display of skis or tennis rackets, looming over a selection of the appropriate how-to books — or a display of large books on Oriental art that are now on sale. If by some fluke you do find a copy of your book in a window display, it will have toppled over and will be sun-bleached, warped, and topped by dead flies.
You will never find your books in any bookstore. Even stores checked by the publisher’s representative earlier that day will mysteriously lose all their copies between his departure and your arrival. Mountains of copies prominently displayed will mysteriously melt away. They will, of course, reappear as soon as you leave. Stock-taking, transferral of stock around the store by the clerks, or large-scale shoplifting by thieves with a conscience — all of these will be used to explain this phenomenon. Such explanations are farfetched; in fact, it is a physical law of the universe that no bookstore can contain both an author and stock of her books — positives repel.
Stories About Storytellers Page 41