Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Some reviewers found fault, though. In Calgary Kevin Peterson, for instance, wanted Munro’s strong descriptions to be shorter and called for “a tighter rein and better editing.” More than a few pointed out that Lives, whatever its publisher asserted, is not really a novel. But Canadian newspaper reviews were generally very positive. As newspaper attention gave way to magazines and journals, the reviews became longer and more considered. Writing in a Vancouver monthly entitled Monday Morning, Irene Howard notices the subtlety with which Munro characterized Del’s parents, her mother (in much the same way noticed by Dobbs) but also the father. He “remains in the background, generous, undemanding, accepting; another life to be explored, though not in this novel.” That observation later proved to be true. Howard praises Munro “for the honesty she brings to her writing and for the respect and affection in which she holds her characters, men and women.” Clara Thomas in the Journal of Canadian Fiction paid especial attention to the epilogue, seeing it as Munro’s “statement of purpose” and asserting that through it she “has certainly succeeded in bringing and holding together the place, the time and the people.”

  Easily the best single notice Lives of Girls and Women received was James Polk’s lead review in Canadian Literature. Taking up the book with a clear knowledge of Dance of the Happy Shades, Polk considered how Lives extends and amplifies the earlier work. Munro, he says, “hasn’t forgotten a thing about lower-middle class life in the drab and frugal Forties.” Unusually, given most writing from Ontario small towns, in her “work we see Ontario social myths from the bottom up; the poverty line runs smack through her part of town and her characters seem curiously estranged from their environment: the men struggle in silence to earn a living, the women – Munro’s particular concern – are shown to be troubled by isolation and unfulfilled dreams.” Polk also focuses on the epilogue, but he is more critical of its effect than most reviews. “By resisting” Garnet French, “Del loses the chance to become another forlorn Jubilee housewife, but salvages her soul, and in the novel’s epilogue the dawn of her ambition to be a writer suggests another, better way she can ‘have’ her hometown without being trapped in it forever.” But the “epilogue made me slightly uncomfortable, as if it were an advertisement for the writer’s abilities rather than an afterword organically connected to the novel itself.… Del repeatedly wonders at the bizarre twists in people’s lives, at the destinies that shape our ends. But somehow it’s not good enough; the book, good as it is, never quite jells into the major piece of serious fiction I suspect the author intended it to be.” Polk seeks the reasons for this, finding them in “the novel’s loosely-woven, anecdotal structure” where “the chapters, basically unpruned short stories, are casually linked together by Del’s consciousness.” For Polk, while Munro’s stories and this novel “are funny, well-written, and evocative, it seems the novel misses out on that black, brutal cutting edge that gives the stories their idiosyncratic power.” But even if Lives of Girls and Women “falls short of its own ambitions, it is a remarkable book.… Reading Alice Munro’s work is one of the joys of literacy,” he concludes.44

  Lives of Girls and Women was passed over for the 1971 Governor General’s Award, which went again that year to Mordecai Richler, but it garnered new attentions and honours for Munro. It was named an Alternate Selection by the Literary Guild of America, a leading book club, and was the first Canadian work of fiction ever selected by the guild. It received the first Canadian Booksellers Association/International Book Year Award, intended by the booksellers “to focus attention on a Canadian book which they feel has not generated the popular interest it merits.” Munro travelled to Ottawa to collect the award in May 1972. Later that year she was named the Outstanding British Columbia Fiction Writer by the province’s library association.

  Meanwhile, Kiil pursued various publishing opportunities on Munro’s and McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s behalf. He arranged an American edition of Lives from McGraw-Hill scheduled for September 1972. Thus in the United States Munro did in fact have her first book publication as a novelist, since McGraw-Hill did not bring Dance out until fall 1973. He pursued publication for Lives in the United Kingdom and, in the United States, tried to interest the Book-of-the-Month Club, sought to place an excerpt from Lives in Ms. Magazine, and to get the book a film option; he worked also to arrange paperback versions of both books. He also kept pursuing U.S. magazine sales, with some success, selling “Red Dress – 1946” and “An Ounce of Cure” to McCall’s. Each appeared there in 1973. By November 1972 Kiil was also asking Munro about her next book.45

  Less a matter of detail than one of trajectory, Munro’s status as writer of note grew continually as the 1960s passed into the 1970s. When the decade began, “The Peace of Utrecht,” which Munro saw as her first “real” story, was about to appear in the Tamarack Review. Its partner “real” story, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was one of a different sort, not personal material. That story was leading her, a bit haltingly to be sure, into the pages of the Montrealer. By 1960 Munro had published fewer than a dozen stories in magazines and Weaver had broadcast half that many. By 1972, she had two books to her credit, a Governor General’s Award, among other awards, and her work was being published and noticed in the United States for the first time. Her career had gained momentum and was growing. Increasing attention was certainly being paid. That this had come about, mostly, through the qualities found in the writing itself is remarkable. Munro had been helped along by many people, foremost among them Robert Weaver – yet as the 1960s passed, Gerald Taaffe, John Robert Colombo, Earle Toppings, Audrey Coffin, Toivo Kiil, and John Metcalf emerged also to play their respective roles in Munro’s career. To a person, they saw in Munro’s writing just what John Robert Colombo saw – “that here is writing of quality and character” – and each worked toward her success. Munro herself, dealing with all this, writing hard during 1970 to complete Lives and then gently pressing Kiil toward other opportunities, was getting ready for a trip she had long anticipated. Her “long voyage from the house of marriage” was reaching, in 1972 after Lives had been published, its point of embarkation.

  Waiting Her Chance, Going “Home”

  Who Do You Think You Are?, 1972–1975

  We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more.

  – Lives of Girls and Women

  Oh, writing makes my life possible, it always has.

  – Connolly, Freake, Sherman interview

  In “Soon,” the second story published in an Alice Munro triptych by the New Yorker in its 2004 summer fiction issue, Munro returns to Chagall’s I and the Village. “Soon” opens with three paragraphs describing details of the image, a print found in the gift shop of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The first one reads:

  Two pro files face each other. One profile of a pure white heifer, with a particularly mild and tender expression, the other that of a green-faced man who is neither young nor old. He seems to be a minor official, maybe a postman – he wears that sort of cap. His lips are pale, the whites of his eyes shining. A hand that is probably his offers up, from the lower margin of the painting, a little tree or an exuberant branch, fruited with jewels.

  After this description the story goes on: “Juliet decided at once to buy this print, as a Christmas present for her parents. ‘Because it reminds me of them,’ ” she tells the friend who is with her there. “Soon” draws on the details and emotions of Munro’s own visit home to Wingham during the summer of 1954, but the presence of I and the Village recalls Munro’s fragment from “The Moons of Jupiter,” where it also figures. There the narrator looks to the picture hanging on her daughters’ bedroom wall “for help” with her writing: “When I lay on the bed and looked at it I could feel a lump of complicated painful truth pushing at my heart; I knew I wasn’t empty, I knew I had streets and houses and conversations inside; not much idea how to get them out and n
o time or way to get at them.” In this narrator Munro created a character analogous to herself in West Vancouver in 1959, a person stymied by her circumstances and mostly unable to write. Still, the “complicated painful truth” is pressing at this woman’s heart; she knows she isn’t “empty” because the Chagall print helps bring what she calls her “harking back” during the daily fifteen-minute respite created by Funorama on television. The show occupied her daughters, allowing her the daily contemplation she describes. “Funorama, I would think with relief, and know that I had fifteen minutes before I absolutely had to start supper.” Starting supper was what she had to do as the mother, and as the wife too, since just after that her husband Andrew would arrive home from work in Vancouver across the water.

  In 1959, Munro did have a print of Chagall’s I and the Village hanging in her daughters’ bedroom on Lawson because Jim did not like it and would not have it in the living room. Today, Munro does not know what became of it, but she remembers later hanging it in the children’s section of the bookstore in Victoria. “Soon” shows I and the Village persisting still in Munro’s imagination, its detail vivid yet, presumably, from those brief moments of respite in West Vancouver when she was in her late twenties, not writing much but longing to do so. After some success with stories that year, Munro went into the period of depression and writer’s block described earlier.

  In “The Moons of Jupiter” draft fragment, Munro continued to describe the print’s personal contexts in a passage that bears attention:

  My husband wouldn’t let me hang it in our room, let alone in the living room where anybody could see it. I deferred, of course, I said “Well, I like it, I really like it,” but I said this in a childishly rebellious way almost with a Shirley Temple stamp. That was how I managed to hang onto something I really wanted. In the years since our marriage it seemed to me my husband had grown harder and darker and denser and I had dwindled, so that his presence was now like a block of something heavy in the house and I was whining and wheedling around it. He was on the lookout for subversion, treachery, which could appear to him in any form – rice instead of potatoes, a Chagall print, friends who voted NDP. And he was right. I was biding my time. He was not wrong to spot the danger signals, he was right. Many husbands were the same. These houses, lawns, children, cars, automatic washing-machines, which were supposed to [be] demanded by, created for, wives, seem to me, looking back, to have been more furiously created by husbands, by young men. Fortresses. Wives were pious or rebellious, in these situations. Pious women outdid each other. I must get home and make the cabbage rolls they said. I must wash the cupboards. I was not allowed to make cabbage rolls. Andrew feared foreign food. He feared vulgarity.

  Munro continued until the fragment breaks off: “Once at a party I heard a husband say he could never read any book written by a woman. He was a husband more belligerent than most, in his manliness, but nobody, no one of the women present, spoke seriously against him. We didn’t hope to argue with men. At a gathering of men and women all under thirty-five in this time before first flirtations, invitations, adulteries, all began to erode and confuse things, I saw the men.”

  Written during the late 1970s when abandoned husbands – Patrick, Richard, Andrew – are characters frequently seen in Munro’s stories, this autobiographical fragment offers a summary version of Alice and Jim Munro’s marriage from her point of view in the late 1950s. In the final incomplete sentence it suggests something of what followed in the 1960s in their social group. As such, the fragment sets the stage for the breakup of their marriage. Alice’s Chagall print was on the wall of their daughters’ bedroom, her writing was a source of frustration and depression for her, and Jim took himself and his role as husband, father, and breadwinner seriously. After fifteen years of marriage, the fundamental class differences remained between them.

  These differences became more pressing after the Munros had moved, just before Andrea was born, into the house on Rockland that Munro accepted but did not want. The size of the house, the image it projected, the requirements it seemed to demand – all underscored the class differences between them. While such differences existed throughout the marriage, they were often submerged below other needs – establishing themselves, raising a young family, opening Munro’s Bookstore – but that house on Rockland was the undoing of the Munros’ marriage.1

  Alice Munro’s personal situation was inextricably entwined with her developing career. As the breakup approached, it had given urgency to her writing throughout 1970 as she worked on Lives of Girls and Women. After separating from Jim in fits and starts, Munro was finally able to leave Victoria for good in September 1973. Then, for the first time in her life, she needed to support herself – like Del, she expected to get a job wherever she decided to live. Even though Lives had been published in the United States in 1972 and Dance was scheduled for fall 1973, and she was well along on a third book, Munro doubted that she would be able to support herself as a writer.

  Such doubts notwithstanding, she settled in London and began commuting weekly to Toronto to teach creative writing at York University. Through John Metcalf she became involved in the formation of the Writers’ Union of Canada. She was writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario for 1974–75. In August 1974, promoting Something l’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, both Douglas Gibson of Macmillan of Canada and Gerald Fremlin heard her on the CBC talking to Harry Boyle. Each had his own designs on her, and each proved successful in time. A year later, by August 1975, Munro had fled the academy for Fremlin and was back where she never thought she would be again: in Huron County. Living in Clinton with Fremlin (and his mother, who was quite frail), trying to write in a new place that was also her old place, Munro confronted her material in a way she had not done before.

  “So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life”: “Work Is a Great Help, I Find”

  When the Munros made the move into what Alice has called “the big house” on Rockland, she was thirty-five. She had been married for almost fifteen years and was going to have a baby in a few weeks’ time. Sheila was about to turn thirteen, and Jenny was nine. Sheila has written, “I knew she did not want to live in such a house, but my father and I were so keen on having it that she did not protest very much. As a token of resistance, she said she would move to the house on one condition: I would have to do all the vacuuming.” The Rockland house had five bedrooms, five fireplaces, twelve-foot ceilings with exposed beams, a maid’s quarters, and two sets of stairs. Jim had his grandparents’ “massive dining-room suite sent out from Ontario,” lighting it with a large brass chandelier. Eventually Jim got a church organ and installed it in a hallway they called “the chapel,” where the windows were painted to look like stained glass. James Polk, who visited the Munros with his wife Margaret Atwood in the summer of 1969, recalls Jim Munro’s pride in the newly acquired instrument. A trained musician himself, Polk spent some time during their visit playing Handel on it. While Atwood and Munro talked writing and literary gossip, Jim showed Polk the organ as well as the house itself. Polk described Jim as “very present” during their visit.2

  Andrea’s birth, work in the bookstore, and the demands of a large house left Munro exhausted most of the time. She would often come home from the store and set about supper and other chores without taking off her coat. For his part, Jim “was already working incredibly hard six days a week at the store,” Munro told Ross. “There was no way he could turn around and scrub the floors.” While certainly Munro had thought of separation at other times in her marriage, she was all too aware of her financial dependence on him and her obligation to the children. Through the Vancouver years she had stayed and, in the years between the move to Victoria and Andrea’s birth, she was fired up with helping to make the bookstore a success. But in the time after Andrea was born, she was transformed. As she told Ross, she then became “so tired and discouraged that when I came out of it I was on my own. Jim hadn’t changed, but I had changed.”

  “Wives were
pious or rebellious in these situations,” Munro wrote in that Funorama fragment. She was a rebellious wife herself, and her rebellion was fuelled both by the times and by the class differences that had always separated her from Jim. People who knew the Munros socially saw them as very different people, with Jim tending to show a critical view of his wife to others in ways that might not have been unusual then but certainly were not kind. Sheila has written that while her mother “may have been above reproach as a writer in his eyes, there was an underlying rejection of her class and her background as something shameful. He corrected her Huron County accent and he treated the Wingham relatives who came to visit with scorn and even refused to speak to them on occasion.” Writing this, Sheila cites a letter from Anne Laidlaw complaining of Jim’s behaviour during a visit Alice’s sister, Sheila, made to Vancouver. About her parents’ arguments, Sheila continues,

  My father was on the side of conformity, conventional values, and conservative politics, and my mother was on the side of individualism, left-wing politics, and rebellion against conventional values. My mother thinks he did a very brave thing in marrying her and going against his parents, but that at some level what he wanted was for my mother to be the kind of conventional woman that his parents would have preferred him to marry – and he wanted the artist he did get.