Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Also during the summer of 1969, Margaret Atwood, who was living in Edmonton at the time, came through Victoria with her husband James Polk. In response to Atwood’s reading of Munro’s stories in anthologies and Dance of the Happy Shades, they sought Munro out and ended up spending a weekend with Alice and Jim. That too was the beginning of a long and still ongoing friendship between the two women.

  Recalling this first visit, Atwood said that “the world of Canadian writers was extremely small at that time. Anybody who had published a book of any kind” was sought out, for books were “like your calling card.” An all-too common attitude toward Canadian writing at the time, suggesting something of the colonial assumptions still very much in play in Canadian culture, is offered in passing in Christopher Dafoe’s May 1969 profile of Munro (whose picture there is captioned “a quiet Canadian”). Amazed as he seems to be at finding “a writer of exceptional gifts” in a Victoria bookstore, he casually writes that “it is easy enough to overlook Canadian writers. I first discovered Mordecai Richler in the pages of The Spectator, Ethel Wilson in The Reporter.” Given such an inhospitable climate for their own writing and aware as they were of Dance of the Happy Shades, Atwood, Metcalf, and Thomas sought out Munro and long-standing personal connections were developed.

  Thomas maintains that her friendship with Munro is not a literary one, that she does not think she has had any effect on Munro’s career. While this is true, the same cannot be said for either Metcalf or Atwood. During the first half of the 1970s, Metcalf proved to be enormously important to Munro’s career as she returned to Ontario and redirected her writing and career, finding her way eventually back to Clinton and Huron County. He was a critical connection for her – involving her in his editing projects, encouraging her as a public writer, and working with her in the creation of the Writers’ Union of Canada. In doing so, Metcalf extended Munro’s connections to other writers beyond the happenstance of people who took the initiative to write to her or to visit Munro’s Bookstore in Victoria. Sometime in 1975, Munro talked about a literary agent with Atwood, who suggested her own New York agent, Phoebe Larmore. Though not then taking new clients, Larmore recommended Munro to an associate, Virginia Barber, an agent who was just starting out on her own. Barber followed this suggestion up and contacted Munro. So Munro’s connection with Atwood, like those with Weaver and Metcalf, proved to be critical.34

  Yet at the time Dance of the Happy Shades was being published, Alice Munro was just another of the very small band of Canadian writers of which Atwood speaks. Ryerson, the Canadian publisher most associated with Canadian writing, took several years to decide to do that book, felt compelled to offer Garner’s foreword as imprimatur, and even considered a preface by Munro. She was herself hesitant about a book of stories, but this halting progress to first-book publication was mostly a reflection of the conditions affecting Canadian publishing at the time. Characterized as “the perilous trade” by Roy MacSkimming, Canadian publishing until the 1970s was historically an enterprise of, on the one hand, balancing the firm markets of textbooks and acting as agents for imported foreign writing with the trade publication of writing by Canadians for Canadians on Canadian subjects, a far weaker and so “perilous” market, on the other. Since the 1920s, Ryerson had published Canadian writing and continued to do so while most of its competitors contented themselves with the more lucrative textbook and foreign agency markets through the 1950s. Looking back from the mid-1960s, Macmillan of Canada’s John Gray recalled stating during the 1950s that “the relationship of author and publisher in Canada [lacks] a rational economic basis; that the Canadian author who depended on books for money did not make it from sales in Canada; that the Canadian publisher made none of the net profit of his business from the overall result of his Canadian general publishing.”

  Yet this situation was changing. John G. “Jack” McClelland had returned from his war service and joined his father’s firm, McClelland & Stewart. By the late 1950s, McClelland and Malcolm Ross, general editor of the series, had established the New Canadian Library reprint line of paperbacks and had embarked on the path that would make McClelland & Stewart the preeminent publisher of Canadian writing from the 1960s on. During this time, Macmillan of Canada and other publishers also commissioned and brought out Canadian books, as attitudes about Canadian writing began to change and nationalism rose. Yet as MacSkimming makes clear, the publishing of Canada’s writers was quite economically perilous throughout the twentieth century. The economics of publishing in English to a potential audience of about two-thirds of Canada’s small population at any given time (the other third expressing themselves in French), always in competition with a flood of imported books from British and American publishers, has always been one of balancing small sales against great critical successes, small margins against hesitant reprints and looming bookstore returns.

  For a writer like Munro, with a book of fifteen stories and another fifteen either published or broadcast, 1968–69 was a propitious time. That decade had seen ferment throughout the world. In Canada, the country’s centennial was embodied in Montreal’s hosting of Expo ’67 and was excitedly celebrated throughout the country; the next year, Pierre Elliott Trudeau emerged as leader of the Liberal Party and the new prime minister. Greeted by a widespread enthusiasm, dubbed Trudeaumania by the press, he was a federalist from Quebec intent on beating back the separatist threat there while assuring francophones of an equal status within the federal government. By virtue of the centennial celebrations and the dramatic advent of Trudeau and his federalist followers from Quebec, Canada seemed to be changing with the times, becoming less staid, less a colonial outpost, more a place where things happened.

  This sense, along with a growing awareness of Canada’s economic and military dependency on the United States, brought nationalism to the fore in English Canada to an extent not previously seen. With most of Canada’s export trade going to the United States, and often through Canadian branch plants owned by U.S.-based multinationals, English-Canadian nationalists became deeply exercised. “So long as this country remains a small political satellite of the United States,” the poet Earle Birney said when discussing Canadian publishing, “involved in the American economy of waste and war, our cultural future will be negligible.” When Birney spoke, the Americans were just becoming mired in what would turn out to be a hopeless war in Vietnam that brought thousands of draft dodgers to Canada, many eager to pronounce its superiority as a more humane society. Coupled with this, some thought that Canadian universities had been taken over by American Ph.D.s and that Canadian culture was being strangled in those institutions as well.

  These facts had the effect of enhancing the growing force of nationalism as the 1970s began and that, in turn, brought a new-found awareness of the importance of Canadian writing and culture to the life of the nation. “Read Canadian” was a frequent assertion that encouraged the rise during the 1960s and 1970s of an English-Canadian audience for literary works by Canadians that had been minor before. A major report on Canadian studies at the time was entitled To Know Ourselves. For Munro and for other writers as she came to know them then, this was a time of organization, of professionalization, and of expansion of interest in Canadian writing. It was a time for developing and nurturing a Canadian audience.35

  In December 1970, just as she completed the manuscript of Lives of Girls and Women, Munro found herself caught up in one of the great nationalist causes célèbres of the era. On November 2 the United Church of Canada had announced that the Ryerson Press had been sold to McGraw-Hill, an American firm “in the latest U.S. takeover to occur in this country,” as a Toronto Daily Star columnist wrote. He also quoted Ryerson’s manager, Gavin Clark, saying, “It’s just another in a long line of Canadian sellouts.” For 140 years a Canadian company, long associated with the publication of Canadian writing through its trade books, Ryerson was most attractive to McGraw-Hill for its $3-million-a-year textbook business. The reporter from the Star continued, �
�Jack McClelland called the ‘decision to sell’ to an American-controlled company ‘absolutely appalling. The church should be severely criticized.’ And that was the general consensus. The United Church was deluged with letters from across the country that lamented the sale to a foreign corporation.” One person wrote that “if you sell Ryerson to foreigners my family and I will never set foot in the United Church again.” “Amid more publicity than has ever before been attached to events in book publishing in this country,” Quill & Quire, the book industry magazine, summarized just after the sale was concluded, “the deal was announced, discussed, quarreled with, and finally completed. As an outcome, the government of Ontario … appointed a royal commission” to look into book publishing in Canada.36

  Munro became involved and closely watched the Ryerson sale because her contract for Dance of the Happy Shades contained the standard clause requiring her to submit her next manuscript to Ryerson. A few weeks after the sale was announced, she wrote to Earle Toppings seeking advice. She could not understand why Ryerson had not contacted the writers it had under contract. She asked him if the sale was going to happen and wondered if, should it occur, the next-book clause would be enforced. Munro also wondered if Toppings thought “McGraw-Hill is going to be interested in publishing Canadian fiction.… The reason for this,” she continues, “is that I have another book finished which I was, naturally, going to send to Ryerson. Now I don’t know what to do.”

  In mid-December, after the Ryerson sale had been finalized, Munro wrote again, thanking Toppings for “replying so fully to my bewildered bleatings.” She explains that when she had not heard from him immediately, she had independently concluded what he later told her (the “next-book option never really holds up”). But the key for her was whether Audrey Coffin was moving to the new firm: “She is such a great person & editor.” As it turned out, Coffin kept her job, so Munro sent the manuscript, then called Real Life, along to her. Concluding her letter to Toppings, Munro wrote, “Anyway, I have the most awful misgivings about the thing now. (I think I’ll write Audrey a long letter about those & not bore you).” As her letters to Coffin about Real Life show, Munro’s misgivings were doubtless as much about her manuscript as they were about the politics of the Ryerson sale. As someone who knew about selling books in Canada, she certainly shared the widespread dismay. But as she makes clear in her first letter to Toppings, Munro also knew that the change at Ryerson might affect the firm’s attitude toward her kind of writing.

  Munro’s decision to send Real Life once she knew her editor was staying is indicative. Coffin’s presence was key: it reveals both Munro’s loyalty to someone she knows and feels comfortable with and, at the same time, suggests her need for such an editor as she shapes her writing for publication. While not a great deal of information is available about Coffin, it is clear that she and Munro were kindred spirits. Although she worked with other writers, Coffin once commented in a 1970 letter to Toppings that “my favourite reading is autobiography when done by the right person. Especially about his childhood – almost anyone who can write at all can do something exciting I believe. (Everyone has a romantic love for himself as a child?).” Given such preferences, Audrey Coffin was just the editor to receive Munro’s manuscript, Real Life, in December 1970.37

  By the time she did so, Munro’s career was entering a new phase. Along with Atwood, she recalls the 1960s and 1970s as a period when writers in Canada supported one another freely, seeing common progress in an individual’s success. In early 1969, Munro had herself been the recipient of such support from Margaret Laurence, her friend from Vancouver who had emerged during the 1960s as one of the leading Canadian novelists. Laurence was well known for calling writers a tribe. When Dance of the Happy Shades was published, Audrey Coffin sent Laurence a copy and, acknowledging it, she asked if Coffin had arranged American or English publication. If not, Laurence volunteered to try to do so, though she did wonder if she was being presumptuous.

  Coffin must have encouraged her, for in February 1969, just as The Fire-Dwellers was in press, Laurence wrote to Judith Jones, her editor at Alfred A. Knopf in New York. After dealing with her own business, Laurence mentions Munro’s Dance, writing, “These stories seem so very good to me that I wonder if I might send you a copy?” The Canadian publisher, “it appears, [has] done nothing about submitting the book to any American publisher. Mrs. Munro does not have an agent, either.” Jones immediately wrote away for a reading copy and inquired about American rights to the book. Very much liking what she found in Dance, Jones arranged its consideration by Knopf. However, the book was turned down since Munro’s work was not known. There was the usual problem of selling collections of short stories by unknown writers and, besides, in Laurence, Knopf already had one woman writer from Canada. One was enough, apparently.

  This brief episode suggests the underlying factors affecting Munro’s career just after Dance was published: her stature as a writer in Canada was growing, owing to the quality of her work more than to her Governor General’s Award; other writers were noticing and were making encouraging connections she had not much previously experienced, extending her reputation; and, as the episode of Knopf’s consideration of Dance demonstrated, Munro faced real difficulties in taking the next step. Securing publication in the United States, despite the enthusiasm of an editor at a major publishing house, was not an easy thing. While Knopf eventually did publish Munro in 1979, that did not occur until her way had been prepared by McGraw-Hill, by the New Yorker, and especially by her agent, Virginia Barber. As she sent Real Life to Audrey Coffin at, now, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Alice Munro was beginning another phase of her career. No longer Canada’s “least-praised good writer,” as Robert Fulford described her as the 1960s began, Alice Munro was on her way to becoming “world famous in Canada” as the decade ended. Real Life, retitled Lives of Girls and Women and advertised as a novel by McGraw-Hill Ryerson, would serve to accelerate that change.38

  Lives of Girls and Women: “I Just Want to Keep Writing Whatever I Can” – “And I’m Never Quite Sure Ahead of Time What This Will Be”

  Recalling the incidents that led to her story “The Office,” Munro has written, “And then it started to happen, the real small miracle, when something, someone, starts to live and grow in your mind and the story makes itself. I didn’t even recognize this as anything to be grateful for,” annoyed as she was at the landlord because he was “cutting into my efforts to bring forth something important and beautiful, some real writing.” What she was after in her office above that drugstore in 1961 was a novel, the novel she had been after even then for some years and would continue to pursue throughout the 1960s, trying repeatedly to produce what she here calls “real writing.” Munro then offers what might now seem a shocking revelation: “I didn’t want to write another story. For years and years I didn’t want to write more stories. I feel that way yet some of the time, but am resigned.” Even now, she says she occasionally has this same feeling.

  After years of these repeated attempts, Lives of Girls and Women came together during 1970. She recalls beginning it on a Sunday in January. Seeing that she was off ruminating in that other country of her imagination, Jim told her to go down to the closed store to write, that he would get supper for the family. She did, beginning with what she calls “a regular novel” with the “Princess Ida” section of the finished book. Munro kept at the material in this way until sometime in March when, during a lunch with a group of other women, she realized that the structure of a regular novel was “all wrong” for what she was doing, so she went home and started to break the material into sections. By late October Munro wrote to Coffin. After apologizing for being “such an all-time record rotten correspondent,” she reported that “I’m writing very hard. Should be more or less finished in December, if I don’t go nuts trying to juggle kids, work, etc.”

  The manuscript was finished by then, and satisfied that Coffin would remain at McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Munro sent Real Life to her on Decem
ber 10. She described the book as “partway between a novel and series of long stories, all [a] ‘growing up’ sort of thing which I’ve at last, praise the Lord, worked out of my system.” She adds that “the last, short, untitled section may not fit in perhaps could be dispensed with.” Coffin wrote back on the fourteenth, acknowledging receipt and saying that she “is so happy that you have sent the MS to us” and that she has got “permission from the Authorities to read the manuscript first & am looking forward to doing it at home.”

  In her letter of the tenth, Munro was referring to “Epilogue: The Photographer,” the then untitled portion of the text that would vex her – she alternated between keeping it and dropping it, continually rewriting it – well into 1971, even as the book went into production. Articulating these uncertainties to Coffin, on December 22 Munro sent her some revised pages for the “Baptizing” section and wrote: “The eighth section – those few pages at the end – isn’t right and I suppose had better be scrapped. I wanted each section to cover an area of growing-up – Religion, Sex, etc – but creativity – how it starts & what happens to it – was beyond me. I thought of working it into section seven [‘Baptizing’], but that would muddy the emphasis.” It would have, indeed. For reasons biographical as well as aesthetic, Munro’s struggle with the epilogue of Lives of Girls and Women is indicative, a key moment in her life, as well as in her career.39

  As is well known, Lives of Girls and Women contains a signed author’s disclaimer: “This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact. My family, neighbours and friends did not serve as models. – A.M.” Placed on the copyright page, this disclaimer appears just before the dedication: “For Jim.” While just a passing comment, Munro has said that she worked on Lives that year (“I am writing very hard”) in the knowledge that her marriage was coming to an end, so the book was done in a more determined and pressing way. When she talked to Thomas Tausky about Lives in 1984, Munro said she initially “saw the novel as a straight [story of a] girl growing up in Western Ontario. I saw it as being fairly comic, though how I could have got that notion I don’t know. But I did. I saw set pieces. It was a very high-spirited novel to me. I enjoyed writing it.” Seeing the story more effectively told through story-like “set pieces,” Munro abandoned the initial “regular novel” form in March 1970; she had sought a continuous narrative, and evidence of this approach is in her papers. Once she had written the seven set pieces that make up most of Lives, though, she found herself struggling with the other implications of “Epilogue: The Photographer.” It is no set piece.