Alice Munro
Page 20
Yet Ryerson, owned by the United Church of Canada, was the publisher that eventually brought out Dance of the Happy Shades. Begun in 1829 as the Methodist Book and Publishing House, Ryerson had earned distinction for its publication of Canadian writing during the first decades of the century under, successively, E.S. Caswell and Lorne Pierce, who directed Ryerson from 1922 to 1960. John Webster Grant followed him and headed the firm for just three years, 1960 to 1963. He told Colombo after he hired him that he wanted to publish books good enough to receive Governor General’s awards. That is, he wanted to publish books that would have both critical and commercial success. Munro was approached in just that spirit. But when Weaver delivered her manuscript of stories to the Ryerson Press, it ended up sitting in its vault for over five years. From time to time stories from the Montrealer – “The Office” then “Boys and Girls” (December 1964) and “Red Dress – 1946” (May 1965) – were added to the manuscript.11
This long delay is largely explained by working assumptions at the time, personnel changes at the press, and Munro’s own hesitation. Many at Ryerson shared the general prejudice against collections of stories yet, as Colombo remembers and his own late-1962 letter to Munro indicates, the house was keen on the idea of a small book of stories from Munro. But by 1963 Colombo had left Ryerson to work on his own as an “editor-at-large,” and Grant also left that year to take up a university post; there would not be a new editor-in-chief until Robin Farr joined Ryerson in early 1968. This left Earle Toppings responsible for trade and general books – that is, books that were neither educational nor religious. A graduate of the University of British Columbia and a native of Saskatchewan, Toppings was hired by John Webster Grant as a Ryerson editor in 1961. He recalls meeting Munro between 1962 and 1963 for lunch at the Georgia Hotel in Vancouver. She was “completely unprepossessing.” More than that, during their lunch she was “obviously concerned about her children in a rather fidgety way” since “she got up from lunch at least three times to go and phone the sitter to make sure the children were all right.” Beyond Munro’s personal situation, Toppings “could tell that a book really was not a priority for her at that moment … but she still, I think, felt she was really an underground writer. Some of the stories were getting out and that was all right, but she was not at all promotional about it.” Given her hesitant attitude and the industry prejudice against collections, given Munro’s ongoing attempts at novels, and given the changes at Ryerson occasioned by Grant’s departure in 1963, that no one pressed for a book until 1967 is probably not surprising. Yet Toppings remained in contact with Munro during the interim, and so the idea and Ryerson’s commitment to the project remained real.12
“How Insistently I Am Warmed and Bound”:
Family, “The Office,” and Leaving Vancouver
If during the early 1960s Munro was hesitant to press for book publication, she seems throughout these years rather to have been consumed by the tasks at hand: her family’s needs, her own life, and the various stories that held her attention. Looking back at this time, Munro marvels still at how hesitant she was to make her own case then and, by contrast, how eager (and often successful) young writers are today to get that first book published. But during the early 1960s she was too busy. Her daughters were growing. Sheila, approaching the age of ten, was engaged in the myriad activities that she describes in Lives of Mothers and Daughters (though Jim was also involved in getting her to things). Her sister Jenny, three years younger, participating in those activities as the younger sister, was differentiated in age and also, as Munro makes clear when she thinks about her two daughters in “Miles City, Montana,” in personality. Sheila Munro has registered her surprise at her mother’s precise ability to capture her younger personality in that story. Jenny, the principal in that story’s central episode – she did fall into the water in Miles City in 1961, a four-year-old who could not swim – remembers it happening. In a tribute to Marian Engel Munro published in 1984, she acknowledges Engel’s use of her own experiences as a young mother, seeing in her a compatriot, “another who is just managing to keep afloat in the woozy world of maternity, with its shocks and confusions and fearful love and secret brutality.”
Munro’s writing, like Engel’s, took place amid the demands of the circumstances of motherhood. And with the struggle to produce a novel during the late 1950s and early 1960s, that writing seldom seemed to go well. A fragment in Munro’s papers captures this time, and Munro’s situation, well:
In the spring of 1963, in Vancouver, my husband was working in a department store, and I was staying at home looking after our two daughters – who, at six and nine, did not need so much looking-after as they used to – and trying to write. The typewriter was in our bedroom, by the window. I would sit down and type a few words on the yellow paper. A few sentences, maybe. Then I tried white paper. I never got halfway down the page. I went and made a cup of instant coffee and sat in the living-room, trying to see again the form of my lovely novel, that big bright fish that slipped round and round in the depths of my mind, and would not be hauled into the daylight. I went into the bedroom and tried again. I thought about being over thirty. Nothing done.
I began to have trouble breathing. I was aware of each breath and couldn’t be sure of the next. The air that was air to other people was to me a hostile jelly. But the children came in from the yard and my husband came home from work and I made dinner. I didn’t tell anybody.
So it was with Munro in the early 1960s, as stories like “Miles City, Montana” make clear. The Munros’ 1961 family trip across the continent back home to Ontario in their Morris Oxford – a car they did own – is deftly preserved in one of Munro’s most autobiographical stories. While the drowning of Steve Gauley remembered from the narrator’s childhood is imagined, and is an effective framing device, Jenny’s near accident is not. What Munro describes is what happened; it was “one of the worst moments of my life,” she recalls, saying she can still see “that pink frilly bottom” in the water. It lay in the Munros’ memories until sometime during the 1970s when she chose to write about it; she tried to use it first in an earlier story connected with Who Do You Think You Are? “Miles City, Montana” represents an example of Munro’s usual method, the use of an experience some years after it happened, recalled in tranquillity after some years of “teasing the mind.”13
That was her normal method, but “The Office” was one story that grew directly from Munro’s circumstances in 1960 or 1961 and so offers a precise sense of her situation then. The story focuses on the altercation Munro had with a difficult landlord, fairly immediately and without much rumination. In a 1978 essay, “On Writing ‘The Office,’ ” Munro calls it “the most straightforward autobiographical story I have ever written.” It details her relations with the landlord of an office she rented above a drugstore on the north side of the 2500 block of Marine Drive in Dundarave, a shopping area two blocks south of Lawson in West Vancouver, where the Munros lived. “The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt,” the story begins. The narrator then tells her husband, who is watching television, “I think I ought to have an office.” Munro has said that “The Office” was the only thing she wrote during the time she occupied that office. What she was after was a novel: “I spent hours staring at the walls and the Venetian blinds, drinking cups of instant coffee with canned milk, believing that if I concentrated enough I could pull out of myself a novel that would be a full-blown miracle.” But she had only this story: “I stayed in the office four months and never wrote another word, but I did get my first ulcer.” These are clearly Munro’s own comments on her creative anxiety.
The story speaks also to the circumstances of her life after about ten years of married life in Vancouver. Rhetorically, the narrator asks, “What do I want an office for? I have a house; it is pleasant and roomy and has a view of the sea … there is no lack of space.” These details are true of the house on Lawson Avenue, encircled by hedges and vegetatio
n, looking down on Burrard Inlet. Yet it was a house that Munro, after five years there, still did not care for very much. Like the even larger house they bought a few years later in Victoria, it was more to her husband’s taste than her own. Shifting from the house in “The Office” to her self-image as a writer, and to her difficulty then in even telling anyone else that she writes, Munro explains that saying she writes humiliates her: “The words create their own space of silence, the delicate moment of exposure.” The “delicate moment of exposure” Munro writes of here, the bedrock fact that lies at the core of her conflict with Mr. Malley in “The Office,” is that she is a writer and a woman who at some level lives counter to the expectations of her social position. That is, she has an interest that takes her away – mentally if not physically – from the marriage and children women were supposed then to find made a sufficient life, completely satisfying. In her tribute to Engel, speaking of her situation, and especially of her women friends when she was a young mother in Vancouver, Munro wrote, “Our marriages were the unquestioned framework of our lives, our children were the content, our ties to each other were our lifelines to ourselves.”
Though Munro does not dwell on conventional relations between the sexes here, she makes it clear how being a writer who is also a wife and mother is very different from the life of those men who write or work at home: “To write, as everyone knows, you need a typewriter, or at least a pencil, some paper, a table and chair; I have all these things in a corner of my bedroom. But now I want an office as well.” Munro did have all these things in the house on Lawson, and she did write in her bedroom. Munro continues:
A house is all right for a man to work in. He brings his work into the house, a place is cleared for it; the house rearranges as best it can around him. Everybody recognizes that his work exists. He is not expected to answer the telephone, to find things that are lost, to see why the children are crying, or feed the cat. He can shut his door. Imagine (I said) a mother shutting her door, and the children knowing she is behind it; why, the very thought is outrageous to them. A woman who sits staring into space, into a country that is not her husband’s or her children’s is likewise known to be an offense against nature. So a house is not the same for a woman. She is not someone who walks into the house, to make use of it, and will walk out again. She is the house; there is no separation possible.
As she often does, Munro offers this construction of things and then shifts direction; in a long parenthetical passage, she admits that on occasion she was able to get apart from her role of wife and mother, “feeling a fierce and lawless quiver of freedom, of loneliness too harsh and perfect for me now to bear.” When this happened, she knew “how the rest of the time I am sheltered and encumbered, how insistently I am warmed and bound.”
Both of the Munros’ older daughters recall the times when their mother imaginatively went off “staring into space, into a country” not their father’s, and not theirs. Sheila’s recollections are recounted in Lives of Mothers and Daughters, and Jenny recalls knowing as a child when her mother was working intently on something, trying to finish it. At these times there would be a tension in the air, one created partly by the continuing sound of the typewriter’s pounding reverberating throughout the house. Members of the family were all aware of what was happening. These recollections, connected to Munro’s precise words in “The Office,” combine to create the physical facts of Munro’s “human position” – in Auden’s phrase – as her children grew and her writing career slowly expanded during the family’s last years in Vancouver.
Outwardly, the Munros were a typical suburban West Vancouver family: father working across the water in Vancouver, mother staying at home with the children; family outings to the beach, vacations back home in Ontario, dancing lessons, shows, and parties. Those who knew Munro then saw her as an encouraging mother, one who had realistic but keen expectations for her daughters. But inwardly at times, Munro was off staring into that other country. Here she spent her “real life,” trying to fashion human constructions that always seemed to turn out to be so much less than she imagined when she first saw them in her mind’s eye. So as the 1960s began for her in West Vancouver, Alice Munro was leading a double life, just as she had set out to do from Wingham – there was both a normal life and, behind it, “the black life of the artist.”
The man from whom Munro rented her office, as it happened, was someone Daphne Cue’s family had known about in West Vancouver, and Daphne herself had gone to school with his daughter. He had led, Cue recalls, “a very checkered life”; his first wife, the daughter’s mother, “had run off on him and went with a number of other women to live with a hermit up the mountain” above West Vancouver. By the time Munro rented the office from him “he had another wife, that very pathetic creature” she depicts in the story. He did bring plants and other things she did not want, told her stories she had no interest in, and irritated her by interrupting her writing. Their relations worsened and Munro left. She was drawn to him as a character in her story, she recalled, because of his “clamorous humanity, his dreadful insistence, which had to get the better of that woman seeking isolation.” He was in life as he is in her fiction, a man who, she concludes in the story, thought of her and arranged “in his mind the bizarre but somehow never quite satisfactory narrative of yet another betrayal of trust. While I arrange words, and think it is my right to be rid of him.”14
Munro wrote about this period in her life, one she sees as its low point, in “On Writing ‘The Office.’ ” The struggle for the novel she and everyone else seemed to be seeking continued, and it brought on physical side effects – she developed an ulcer and felt unable to write another word. As a writer, Munro was blocked; the numerous abandoned beginnings in her papers attest to this. Recalling this, Munro says, “I would start a story and then I would get totally discouraged with it and start another, so I would never finish anything. But in the last year I lived in Vancouver, I had a total blockage. I couldn’t write a sentence. I couldn’t. I could think of things but I couldn’t write them.” Confirming what she wrote about having difficulty breathing, Munro continues, “I would have fits where I couldn’t breathe. And I went to a doctor and I guess I saw a psychiatrist a couple of times.” Munro thinks now that these were panic attacks brought on by her anxieties over her writing.
A change was in the offing. By the early 1960s Jim Munro had become restive at Eaton’s. He wanted to leave there in order to do something more to his interest and liking. And as he had told that personnel manager at Eaton’s when he arrived, he was interested in books. With this in mind, Jim began working with Stephen Franklin, who was also a writer, in a small paperback bookstore called Pick-a-Pocket. It too was located in the Dundarave shopping area along Marine Drive. Initially the Munros thought about going into the business with Franklin and his wife, Elsa, but that plan did not work out. During their time in Vancouver, Munro recalls, “something would come up and we would get fired up about an idea” that would get Jim out of Eaton’s, “but we didn’t really get fired up until ’63. Then we went on a holiday together without the kids; we had never done that before.” Munro remembers being nervous over the girls – just as she had been at lunch with Earle Toppings – but during this “three- or four-day holiday,” she says, “we solidified the idea of the bookstore.” She recalls suggesting Victoria as a location.
During the 1950s, independent bookstores were few and far between in Canada. There were “thriving book sections in department stores such as Eaton’s, Simpsons’s, and Woodward’s,” Roy MacSkimming has written, “but publishers often decried the paucity of dedicated bookstores” that encouraged reading and celebrated books and authors by their very existence. “When the Canadian Retail Booksellers Association … started up in 1952, it had only thirty-five stores in its membership.” Vancouver was out for the Munros, since Bill Duthie had started his first store there in 1957. Victoria, however, was possible: it had a university, a cultural community, and two bookstores
(the Marionette and Ford’s Bookstore) plus the book department at Eaton’s as the main competition. The province had established its own scheduled car-carrying ferry service from the mainland only in 1960, so when the Munros decided to move there, Victoria was growing. And given his experience with Pick-a-Pocket in West Vancouver, Jim Munro knew that paperback books were changing the face of publishing. The Penguin line was established in Britain and in the United States, “quality paperbacks” (as opposed to cheap pocket books) were being marketed by the major publishers – Alfred A. Knopf, for example, had its Vintage editions. In Canada, MacSkimming has noted, there was a prejudice against paperbacks among the older generation of publishers, although in the late 1950s McClelland & Stewart had daringly launched its New Canadian Library reprint series.15
As is often the case, Alice Munro is the best source to account for what occurred once she and Jim had decided to take the plunge. The draft fragment describing the narrator’s difficulties writing and her trouble breathing continues:
Then at the beginning of summer my husband said that he couldn’t stand working for the department store any longer. We sat on the steps in the summer twilight, talking about what we could do. We were young but we didn’t know it. For more than ten years our lives had been dutiful, responsible, habitual. Buying the house, raising the children. Brief pinched holidays.