In a December 1970 letter to Coffin, Munro continued: “I feel apologetic about turning out this sort of girl-growing-up thing, but I had to do it, it was there, I wanted to get it out. I’ve taken several vows now to get out of Jubilee forever. This has sort of wrapped it up for me. I hope you’re not too disappointed.” Alice Munro has never been able “to get out of Jubilee forever,” and the reasons for her struggle with the epilogue to Real Life have everything to do with her own real life. Until she confronted the implications of that epilogue, Munro told Struthers, the book “was not the story of the artist as a young girl. It was just the story of a young girl.… And yet, I found eventually that the book didn’t mean anything to me without it.” To Tausky, she describes the transformation of Del from just a young girl into an artist as “all this stuff coming out – which I didn’t really foresee or particularly want. I didn’t know what to do with it.” She spent about half as much time on the epilogue as she had, she told Struthers, “writing the whole book. And then I plucked it out and decided to publish the book without it … then I rewrote it and put it in.”
The finished book’s disclaimer notwithstanding, what was happening in the composition of “Epilogue: The Photographer” was that Munro found herself being imaginatively pushed into a deeper, more essential, level of autobiography than the comic set pieces demanded. With its focus on Del as an artist and as a young woman, and on Del’s own concomitant struggle with the life she finds herself living and the other world she imagines and is drawn to, the epilogue’s few pages are infused with Alice Munro’s own life history. Del, like her author, had to choose between the “real” Marion Sherriff and the imagined Caroline Halloway. In both renderings there is the matter of Huron County’s factual detail, certainly, but more especially there is Munro’s commitment to transform that detail into the exceptional writing she has long sought and always produced. Little wonder she struggled and worried over the epilogue, for in it she encapsulated not only her own life’s detail – seen and imagined – but also the very sensibility that had made her the writer she had become.
The epilogue of Lives of Girls and Women returned Munro to her own beginnings by echoing the imitative Gothic novel she worked on, in her mind and on paper, when she was in high school. Called Charlotte Muir after the main character, a person who “lives in a lonely place off by herself,” the working out of its plot over an extended time was what brought Munro to the realization of “the twin choices” of her life, “marriage and motherhood or the black life of the artist,” as she told Tausky. In Lives, Munro put Del Jordan in much the same position as she had been herself. Writing her own novel with Gothic overtones, Del both rejects her uncle Craig’s fact-based writing method and also knows that her romanticized story of Caroline Halloway, a story seen in the epilogue as contrasting with the bland reality of Bobby Sherriff, is not quite right either. Del is getting “an idea that all art is impossible.” So was Munro herself at that time since, as Tausky has detailed in much the best article on the writing of Lives, this epilogue led directly to such stories as “Material,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and “Home” – that is, it led to stories that analyze a writer’s relation to her material and, seemingly, offer a rejection of any fictional artifice.40
Munro’s account of writing Lives of Girls and Women during 1970 makes a useful record but, at the same time, it needs qualification. The Sherriffs cum Halloways were a family that had existed as the Musgraves before she began Lives; in the Calgary archives there is considerable material concerning Miss Musgrave, an elderly spinster who inherited the family home from her staunchly Methodist father, who owned the local piano factory. Unlike her teetotalling father, Miss Musgrave drinks. She also has a boyfriend, Mr. Chamberlain, who visits her; she is a holdover from the 1920s, her best time. She had had the family house subdivided and had taken in tenants, among them Del and her family. Some of this material looks back to the circumstances of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” in that the fox-farm father had died of blood poisoning (common from fox bites, Munro says, something her father had suffered from) and his widow took to the road selling Walker Brothers goods south of Jubilee in places like “Sunshine” (which is south of Wingham) and “Scotch Corners” (which is not). Thus the material Munro was working on as she completed Dance combines with the material that becomes part of Lives. The “House of Musgrave” gives way to the “House of Sherriff” and each are Jubilee versions of Munro’s reading and attraction to the Gothic element she detected in Wingham and its environs. These relocatings of her imaginings returned Munro to the abandoned house owned by the Cruikshanks where she went as an adolescent and where she found her first Tennyson. At the same time, Munro says she was writing a version of “The Photographer,” a figure who takes revealing, and damning, photographs of people, well before Lives. These autobiographical and imaginative considerations combined and were brought into focus by “Epilogue: The Photographer.”
Munro’s uncertainties with, and difficulties over, the epilogue are evident in her letters to Audrey Coffin. After expressing her doubts in an earlier letter, on December 31 she sent a revision “which seems to me closer to what I want than the one I have, though maybe still not usable. I just had to do it once more and have taken a vow I’ll leave the whole thing alone now.” Then, in a postscript, she writes, “The other sections still seem to fit together better, in a way, without this.” After she had received Coffin’s positive reaction to the whole manuscript, Munro wrote on January 9 that the last revision of the epilogue
is better in the last version (done during the indescribable chaos between Christmas & New Years, some of it in the middle of the night waiting for Andrea’s next bout of throwing-up – we’re all dragging around with flu) but it’s not right yet. I don’t like the way it sort of “distances” things. Writing about writing always runs into this problem.
She says further that the momentum “with regard to this work – sort of played out in early November.… What’s to be done may come to me yet. I was so glad you like the work as a whole.” Coffin was the only person who had read it apart from the typist who, Munro heard from a friend, reported to her husband that it was “a pretty kooky manuscript.” Ten days later, on January 19, “with shamefaced apologies,” Munro prepared to send the epilogue back. She had tried to make it a section about the same length as the others and it “didn’t work.” She was inclined to leave it out, but she decided to send it back to Coffin offering a postscript saying “REALLY, we better forget about Marion/ Caroline. It doesn’t flow – it destroys credibility. I’ve started on a new thing.” The next day she writes another letter to include with the one she wrote the day before, and here she has another plan: to take up some material “about the book” – Del’s – now in “Baptizing,” and use it at the end.
Recalling this flurry of revisions in 1984, Munro said she continued wavering about the epilogue until Bobby Sherriff’s pirouette came to her (“he rose on his toes like a dancer, like a plump ballerina”; an act that “appeared to be a joke not shared with me so much as displayed for me”). The pirouette “turned it around.… When that came to me I knew I could leave it in.”41 This pirouette does capture, just as Lives ends, Munro’s sense of the factual commonplace happily existing alongside the inexplicable – rather like Yeats’s ending question in “Among School Children,” “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” But Munro does not formulate her point as a portentous question, she lets the gesture speak enigmatically. Like Del, the reader is left with this Bobby Sherriff, an apparently harmless refugee from the madhouse, living and being. He feeds her cake and chats about diet one summer morning as she awaits her scholarship results. In her imaginings he embodies the tragic Sherriff family that has served as model for the Halloway family she had created before. Yet up close he seems, she realizes, to be so very ordinary, even pathetic.
Munro wrote another version of the epilogue right after she sent Coffin her letters of January 19 and 20. Uncharacteristically at
that time, she dated it – January 24, 1971. It contains a notable description just after the photographer is described which, though later deleted, follows from Del’s realization that she had not “worked out” just why Caroline’s eyes were white in the class picture taken by the photographer. “I had not bothered to work out anything” in the novel, Munro wrote, “what I had were pictures, names, phrases. Sometimes I would try to write down bits of the story, a description or conversation, but this was always a mistake; what was so inadequately done marred the beauty and the wholeness of the novel in my mind.” This was just what was happening as Munro struggled with finalizing the text of Lives of Girls and Women as the book was being prepared for publication. “Epilogue: The Photographer” was transforming Del’s story in two important ways: the Sheriff/Halloway novel is another version of Munro’s own Charlotte Muir composition. The book’s story offers more than just a girl growing up; as Munro said, it became a portrait of an artist as a young woman, a fledgling artist just as Alice Laidlaw was herself in Lower Wingham and Wingham during the 1940s. Unlike Del, she then had no boyfriend and she did receive scholarships to carry her away from Wingham. But speaking directly to Munro’s own demands of her fiction, this draft paragraph defines her sense that whatever is on the page never reaches the beauty and perfection she imagines for it. Thus changes must, always, be made to the manuscript at hand, as long as is possible. Munro has always done so, she does yet, to the dismay of her editors.
To be sure, changes continued to be made to the manuscript as Real Life moved toward publication by McGraw-Hill Ryerson in October 1971. While Audrey Coffin was still Munro’s editor, the editor-in-chief of the trade department, Toivo Kiil, also became a presence in shaping Munro’s career for both Lives and for her next collection, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. Born in Sweden and raised and educated in the United States, Kiil had come to Canada to do graduate work in English; he joined McGraw-Hill in 1968 in sales and, after the Ryerson takeover, was put in charge of the trade department. Given the public controversy surrounding the sale of Ryerson, the new company was understandably the focus of particular scrutiny from Canadian nationalists once the sale was completed and McGraw-Hill Ryerson was created. Primarily a publisher of textbooks, McGraw-Hill Canada had little reputation as a publisher of fiction or other creative work; taking over the new company’s trade department, Kiil wanted to change that, and he saw Munro’s work as having considerable sales potential both in Canada and, through McGraw-Hill in New York, in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Thus while Coffin remained Munro’s manuscript editor, Kiil became very much involved in the marketing of her work. He handled contractual matters with Munro directly and worked with McGraw-Hill in New York in the hope of producing American editions of Lives and Something. As a way of enhancing her work’s reputation in the United States, since she did not have an agent working on her behalf, Kiil sold first U.S. serial rights to some of Munro’s stories to American magazines and looked after matters having to do with subsidiary rights (book clubs, film, large-print).
Kiil sent Munro a contract for Real Life on March 10, commenting that he considered “it a great privilege for our company to have this opportunity of working with an author of your standing.” He summarized the contract and said that he “was almost certain that Audrey will be working with you on the copy editing of the manuscript” and that he was looking “forward to working with you on the preparation of Real Life in an advisory capacity.” Munro replied with some questions on the sixteenth, and Kiil wrote again to her regarding American editions of both Real Life and Dance of the Happy Shades as well as a Canadian paperback edition of the latter, which was then still available only in the original Ryerson hardcover. Within two weeks he would be going to New York and would there discuss possibilities with his U.S. counterpart. Kiil thought that with Dance and the second manuscript in hand “we shall be able to reach a decision on the most effective strategy for guaranteeing you exposure in the U.S.” Munro had asked, given her previous experience, about the standard “option on the next manuscript clause.” Kiil assured her that they did not hold it as binding; in any case, he was “prepared to write an addendum or rider to the contract releasing” her from it. He continued, “As you requested, I am rushing your manuscript to you by registered mail in order that you may finalize it to your satisfaction. I am anxious to see the final form and present it to New York and to Simon & Schuster,” a potential mass-market paperback publisher. It is notable that Munro was here negotiating on her own behalf and was, without an agent, largely dependent on Kiil as her publisher. His responsibility, clearly, was to McGraw-Hill Ryerson more than to his author. Just over ten years later, when a question arose over rights to Lives of Girls and Women, Virginia Barber wrote to the lawyer charged with sorting the matter out and mournfully commented that on the master contract under advance it read “none requested.”
The evidence in the Alice Munro collection in Calgary allows a detailed examination of the textual progress of the manuscript Munro submitted to Audrey Coffin in December 1970. While this is not the place for a complete account, some details are notable. Munro’s copy of her own typed version (which she probably gave to her typist) is there, as is the professionally typed and lightly copy-edited manuscript, which, smudged throughout, was used by the printer. There are inserts and other changes, some in Munro’s hand, so it is likely that once Coffin had copy-edited the manuscript she sent it to Munro for her approval. That may indeed have been the version to which Kiil referred in late March. There are revised sections and other changes throughout the manuscript, but the epilogue – for a time Munro wanted it to be untitled and to use roman numerals as page numbers – continued to get the most attention. Munro held up production and was revising in proof. She remembers as much, as did Kiil. Bobby Sherriff’s pirouette was inserted at this stage, since no manuscript version of it exists though the rest of the section is largely complete. Sometime between late March and the announcement of publication, the title was changed to Lives of Girls and Women since W.W. Norton in New York had recently announced a forthcoming novel by Deborah Pease titled Real Life. Kiil and Munro also agreed that the book would be called a novel. For his part, of course, a novel was what he wanted to sell. For hers, Munro knew that while it was not the conventional novel she had begun and later abandoned, the final result was in fact, as she wrote to Coffin, “part way between a novel and a series of long stories.” Its epilogue finally completed, the Canadian edition of Lives of Girls and Women was published in October 1971.42
Positive responses were quick to appear. In the Globe and Mail in one of the earliest reviews to be published, Phyllis Grosskurth wrote that it is “a joy … to be able to proclaim that Lives of Girls and Women is a delight, a wonder, a blessing devoutly to be thankful for.” “It’s a familiar kind of book,” Kildare Dobbs reported the same day in the Toronto Star, “the story of a girl growing up in small-town Canada, narrated with good humor in the first person.” Dobbs, who misspells Munro’s name “Monro” throughout, struck a note seen in other reviews by detecting apt parallels between Lives and Laurence’s A Bird in the House published the year before. He also paid special attention to Del’s mother, “a woman of tremendous energy and lively intelligence who goes out selling encyclopedias because she believes in them. It’s her wish that Del make her own life and not wreck it for some man.” Joan Coldwell in the Victoria Daily Times wrote that “what is extraordinary is the intensity of Del’s awareness of people around her, of the fine lines of social distinction, the little self-deceptions, the ironical distance between one’s own vision of oneself and that seen by others.” E.D. Ward-Harris, in the Victoria Daily Colonist, held that Munro’s “work is consistent, quietly brilliant.… I think it is fair to say that outside of Quebec, anyway, Alice Munro is the most skilled writer of fiction in Canada today.” Christopher Dafoe, who met Munro after the publicity surrounding Dance, first wrote a personality column announcing the book’s publicatio
n in the Vancouver Sun and then followed it up with a review. There he asserts that Munro’s “literary talents have power to spare for the long haul” and concludes that Lives “is a work of art,” a “deeply moving and splendidly fashioned novel.”
Not surprisingly, one of the most thorough and compelling newspaper reviews was by John Metcalf in the Montreal Star. Lives, he wrote,
is a disturbing book for a man to read; for most women perhaps even more uncomfortable, as they will recognise its horrible truth on page after page. It is, on one level, the doctrines of Women’s Lib made, gloriously, flesh. Precisely because it is a novel and not a tract, it is full of delicate insights into the lives of girls and women – mothers, women of defeated ambition, schoolgirls – and, because it is real on every page, full of humour and splendid grossness.
Though “a sensitive girl,” Del “is no drooping Pre-Raphaelite flower”; she “menstruates, and masturbates; she reads library books to find descriptions of people ‘doing it’; and she encourages an exhibitionist in a scene which [exceeds in] humour and grotesquery.” Taking note of such detail, Metcalf is at pains to say that there is nothing salacious here, that he does not wish to distort “the life and the truth of the book.… Lives of Girls and Women is also a loving and accurate portrait of a people and of a time and place. Growth, sexual or otherwise, does not take place in a vacuum. Del learns from and is formed by her mother and father, aunts, uncles, friends and lovers, by Jubilee itself.” He then quotes the passage from the epilogue, one frequently cited since, where Del says that “no list could hold what I wanted”; seeing her words here as characteristic of Munro’s writing, Metcalf asserts “you can touch and smell every word on every page.”43
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