Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

As the editor of the trade division of the American company that had swallowed Ryerson in 1970 – and that is really what happened, since McGraw-Hill primarily sought Ryerson’s textbook business – and as a person from the United States himself, Kiil was certainly in a vulnerable position in relation to the nationalists. Given the times and his own position, there is little wonder that many writers expressed discontent to Kiil. Remembering this time in 2003, Kiil proudly noted the large number of Canadian writers he was able to publish at McGraw-Hill Ryerson before he left for McClelland & Stewart in 1975. Understandably, he was proud of the role he played in making Munro’s career. In many ways, Kiil set the stage for Alice Munro as a writer with an international following. More than this, the years in which he was largely responsible for her business interests, 1971 to 1975, finally convinced her to hire a literary agent and, there again, he played a role.15

  Once McGraw-Hill Ryerson had received Real Life from Munro and come to terms with her on a contract – one in which, as already noted, she asked for no advance against royalties – they were able to go into production for the Canadian edition. While Kiil and other editors at McGraw-Hill Ryerson knew and had working relationships with their counterparts at McGraw-Hill New York, editorial decisions regarding U.S. editions of titles acquired by McGraw-Hill Ryerson rested wholly with American editors. That is, the Canadian company had to stock books published in the U.S., but this arrangement was not reciprocal. Moreover, rights for any United Kingdom edition were sold by the New York office, as were first serial rights to American magazines. Thus when Kiil wrote to Munro that “next year’s list will reflect the outcome of a lot of pressuring of M-H, Int’l from here” he was asserting his own efficacy in getting head-office editors to decide to publish Canadian writers in the United States, and to sell rights for these titles abroad. Put simply, Munro’s Lives and, a few years later, Something found themselves in just the colonial relationship with McGraw-Hill New York that Canadian nationalists were decrying. As it happened, McGraw-Hill watched the sales of Lives in Canada and, based on them, decided on their own edition the next year, in fall 1972. Its real success – three U.S. printings by March 1973 and selection as an alternate by the Book-of-the-Month Club – led them to decide to bring out an American edition of Dance in 1973 while, concurrently, selling rights for both titles to Allen Lane in England, which published Lives in the fall of 1973 and Dance the next spring. They also arranged a mass-market paperback edition of Lives published by Signet/New American Library in 1974.

  The reception of Lives of Girls and Women when it was published in the fall of 1972 in the United States and in Britain the next year was understandably different from its reaction at home. Reviewers saw its distinctive qualities clearly; most are characterized by forthright praise accompanied by a few hesitations or a quibble or two. Lives offers “some of the finest reading to reach us this year,” Virginia Brasier wrote in the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, asserting that “Alice Munro is a writer to watch.” Janet Burroway in the Tallahassee Democrat held that “the pleasures of Lives of Girls and Women are those of skill rather than brilliance, recognition rather than revelation, flow rather than design.” Like Canadian reviewers, many Americans focused on the book as a novel; Audrey C. Foote in the Washington Post notes that “it is designated a novel; it is not a finished novel but one in gestation, a series of expertly written short stories and memoirs which as the narrator develops from child to woman, mature into a novel.” Mary Walfoort in the Milwaukee Journal sees the book as being “without a plot, with none of the tension that plot can generate,” but “it manages nevertheless to spin a gauzy, strong and fascinating web, and the unwary reader is trapped tightly in it from the first page on.” Something of the same note is struck by Barbara Rex in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “People, the seasons, time passing, the Wawanash River run through the book and hold it together. The episodes are tender, brutal, shocking, full of humor and also anguish.”

  Writing in Time, Geoffrey Wolff effused that though the “threads of this yarn are common enough stuff … what Alice Munro makes of it is rare.… By her tact, and power to recall, select and reduce, she has translated Jubilee into a birthplace, or something more than the name of a town. Call it fiction; praise it.” An anonymous review in the New Yorker was more restrained when treating Lives in its “Briefly Noted” section, saying, “The straggling town of Jubilee becomes almost immediately familiar to us, and some of the characters,” Del’s mother and Fern Dogherty, “are given to us full size and with a touch of pity that makes them very real.”

  Given the times and Munro’s subject and approach, many reviewers noted a relation between Lives and the women’s liberation movement. Barbara Rex, the reviewer in the Philadelphia Inquirer, commented in passing that Del’s mother Addie is “an early Women’s Lib type” whom “Del regards with shame and pride.” Margaret Ferrari, in America, writes that this “is not a strident novel, full of women’s lib jargon and sentiments. Del’s tone of voice is breezy and good-natured, closer to Huckleberry Finn’s than to Betty Friedan’s. The reader is made aware of her social conditioning, but obliquely and objectively.” Mary Ellin Barrett, writing in Cosmopolitan, takes Ferrari’s observation deeper since Lives “had me shivering from start to finish with what I call the ‘recognition’ goose bumps. You know the feeling, when you read something written out of another time, another land, an alien way of life, and suddenly you say to yourself, Hey, how did she know that?” She continued, “All sorts of women … are going to feel … close to Del Jordan and to Alice Munro, who, in a cool prose as brightly colored as a dime-store window, has put the awakening female under glass as Salinger once did the male. A lighter Sylvia Plath, a budding Jean Stafford – that’s who this lovely writer is.”

  This last notice suggests a powerful reach for Lives among its American readers that was confirmed as the book’s reputation grew. When the paperback edition was published, in January 1974, poet Denise Levertov called it “an unclassifiable work”; noting Munro’s disclaimer that Lives is “autobiographical in form but not in fact,” she observed that if this “is true, I can think of no other work of fiction that appears so utterly nonfictional.” Like Leo Simpson’s review of Dance and Polk’s of Lives, Levertov puts her finger on essential qualities in Munro’s work:

  But having rejected both routine success and the trap of marriage to a boy whose mind is resolutely, even proudly, closed, she will have to find her own path out of Jubilee into the rest of her life.

  Because we cannot but believe Del and Alice Munro to be one and the same, we are assured that she did succeed in doing so. Munro’s style – the quality of her language both in its precision of diction, which reflects her sharpness of observation, and its rhythms, which have the elegance and sense of expressive inevitability of a writer who loves and respects the art of syntax – is the style of a highly developed, mature artist. Despite Munro’s disclaimer, one feels that is what Del becomes.… This short masterpiece of writing is open-ended; we walk out of it, like Del, into the rest of our lives, confirmed and changed.16

  When Lives was published in Britain in fall 1973, the reviews were fewer; they were also shorter, given the British practice of taking up several books in a relatively short space. Julian Symons in the Sunday Times remarked that Munro “is one of two interesting new Canadian writers to have come my way recently, the other being Margaret Atwood, whose two remarkable novels are worth looking for.” Lives, he maintained, “is a book of much charm and talent, and also one that is distinctly Canadian.” Patrick Anderson in the Sunday Telegraph saw Munro as “emerging from the literary ferment which is a feature of contemporary Canada.… [She] is a writer of the greatest distinction – perceptive, amusing, richly detailed as to characters (credibly eccentric) and to place (scruffy farmland and claustrophobically parochial townships).” He saw her characters as representing a wide range of humanity, “all beautifully done.” Ronald Blythe in The Listener maintained that Munro treats an old theme with
“distinction”: “Del’s affair with Garnet, the ‘saved’ boy, is a brilliant study of blind love.” Claire Tomalin in The Observer also noted Del’s relationship with Garnet as a convincing account “of that sort of short-lived but devastating obsession” and concludes, “There is not a dull or a false note in the book, which achieves exactly what it attempts.” Summing the book up in the New Statesman, Marigold Johnson wrote, “Episodic and sometimes repetitive as this scrapbook of anecdotes appears, this is much more than local nostalgia – and much funnier, especially on the women’s liberation front.” When the Women’s Press brought out a paperback edition of Lives in 1978, Patricia Beer in the Times Literary Supplement called Lives “an honest book” and went on to write that one “of the few criticisms that can be made of the book is that it often explains too much. The writing is in fact good enough to rely much more on implication than it allows itself to do.”17

  When Dance of the Happy Shades was published by McGraw-Hill New York in the fall and the next spring by Allen Lane in Britain, its reviews seem anticlimactic; yet, written as they were well after the book’s first publication and after Lives, some of them also show Munro’s growing reputation, while others notice elements not much remarked on previously. In this latter vein, Allison Engel, writing in the Des Moines Register, notes that Munro “manages to look backward without attaching adult significances to the events she recalls.” A short notice in the New York Times mistitled the book “Dance of the Happy Hours” (the paper ran a correction); it summarized the stories and concluded that Munro “poses more questions than answers – a refreshing strategy.” In the Nashville Tennessean Francis Neel Cheney put his finger on a salient connection, beginning “Not since I read Eudora Welty’s ‘A Worn Path’ have I been as moved, as impressed, as I have by these fifteen stories, most of them set in Jubilee, patterned on Wingham, a small town in Western Ontario, where the author grew up, and which she knows so well. As she knew all its people.” The anonymous review in the New Yorker praises the vivid strength of Munro’s description but “personality and character” show her hand “weak and her work faint.” Martha Byrd in the Kingsport Times-News (Tennessee) writes that Munro “has a knack for looking at ordinary people in ordinary situations and distilling the bonds that unite us as human beings. She paints vivid pictures without an excess of words; she draws distinct characters with the same admirable economy. Her stories do not have plots as much as they convey life, and the glimpses she provides into our universal experiences are alternately amusing, sad, and revealing.”

  In Britain, Peter Prince in the New Statesman writes that Munro, “the remarkable Canadian writer … offers an absolute object lesson” in restraint: “These tales of small-town Ontario life, mostly set in the Forties, are beautifully controlled and precise.” Adrian Vale writes in the Irish Times that “Munro’s selection of detail is so precise, she makes me see and feel it all”; compared to other writers at hand who also write about childhood, Munro is “a more experienced and accomplished writer, and the greater length and depth of her stories make them more satisfying.” In the Daily Telegraph Tim Heald notes that Munro’s stories are quiet, but she “is no worse for not shouting and her stories are full of deft observations and gentle profundities.” Finally, in the Birmingham Post Jean Richardson sees Munro as “a writer who reveals a confident respect for the craft of writing and is concerned with expressing common, meaningful experiences. Her stories are not escapist. They deal with disillusion and betrayal with the gauche sorrows of youth, with the consciousness of failure and self-deception, but they do so with a perception that enriches the reader’s experience.”18

  Apart from the critical comment they offer, the bulk of these reviews confirm that with Lives of Girls and Women Munro’s career began to take a much larger shape than it had after Dance won the Governor General’s Award in 1969. With that award, her previously secret writer’s life was exposed, lending her a minor celebrity status in Victoria and among those who knew the Canadian literary scene. But the attention Lives got was another thing altogether. It was just as genuine as that earned by the first book, but coming as it did shortly after Dance, and resonating with the feminist temper of the times, while reaching an international audience through successive Canadian, U.S., and British editions, Lives fundamentally altered Munro’s status. With Dance Munro published a first book that showcased her abilities. Lives demonstrated that Munro was capable of, as no less a figure than Levertov had noticed, a “short masterpiece.” It brought with it considerably more attention.

  That happened just as Munro was leaving her marriage, returning to Ontario, and confronting the need to live on her own and support herself for the first time. Although Munro recalls that at the time she had no expectations that writing would be enough and that she expected to get a regular job, it is clear that she pursued her work with greater zeal and focus as the marriage ended. She spent 1970 writing Lives in part as a way out, plotting a drastic change. In much the same way, she concentrated on the stories that became Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You in the fifteen months that followed her return to Victoria in 1972. During this time she wrote new stories but, in ways unique to that collection, she returned to previous attempts at novels and salvaged individual stories from these manuscripts. Acutely concerned with the ethical position of the writer just then, wondering over her own work as her life was changing, Munro produced some of her most starkly introspective pieces regarding her craft: “Material,” “Winter Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and, though she kept it out of Something, “Home.” With the exception of “Material,” these are also among her most transparently autobiographical stories.

  Just as Munro was getting into this work, Kiil wrote her the letter in which he mentions “discontentment among Canadian writers.” With it he enclosed her money from McCall’s purchase of first U.S. serial rights to “Red Dress – 1946,” reporting also that the magazine wanted another from Dance but had not made a decision yet as to which one. After various other comments, he refers to a conversation Munro had with another person about “the work in progress” and comments, “Novels, of course, are more marketable but you must write what you do; and I know we can sell whatever you produce. If you think next fall is right for the new collection, I’d like to see the stories asap. because in this case I’d like to approximate simultaneous publication as closely as possible.” When he had called her to tell her about the sale of “Red Dress – 1946” to McCall’s – which paid in the thousands for the story, more than she had ever received for one story – Munro had expressed some dissatisfaction over this, saying “that she wasn’t a supermarket kind of writer,” that she wanted to be in the New Yorker or in the Atlantic. Kiil recalled that as he was trying to place her stories Munro was not especially encouraging.

  This anecdote, amusing now, suggests something about Munro’s own aspirations for her work – she did, as has often been remarked, lampoon supermarket publications aimed at women in Lives. But more than that, and more telling, is Kiil’s comment, “I know we can sell whatever you produce.” He had set about doing just that with Lives, using it as a property acquired by McGraw-Hill Ryerson to, as he says in the same letter, pressure McGraw-Hill International from Canada. Although it was never a matter of Munro making a conscious decision, Kiil’s position as editor-in-chief of trade books at McGraw-Hill Ryerson in effect made him her agent, for he took charge of convincing McGraw-Hill New York to bring out Lives, Dance, and Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You in the United States and, through Beverly Loo in McGraw-Hill’s subsidiary rights department in New York, arranged two British editions and sold serial rights to American magazines. Kiil did well enough, since McCall’s bought four stories between 1972 and 1974 (two from Dance and another two from Something before it was published) and another was sold to Chatelaine. He knew Munro’s career was rising and, as well, he knew that because of the marriage breakup and her return to Ontario she was largely without income but for her writing. Recalling t
his years later, he commented that he was a “bit pushy with Alice” – that is, as he told her, he knew he could sell what she was writing. Beyond her work’s evident aesthetic appeal, Kiil saw its commercial possibility; at the time, others in publishing were noticing the same thing.

  Kiil was able to act on Munro’s behalf because the contracts she signed for her books with Ryerson and then McGraw-Hill Ryerson made them, in effect, company property. Clearly she needed guidance and perspective. Once again, the publishing conditions surrounding the forming of the Writers’ Union of Canada are relevant. One of the group’s initiating concerns was the availability of sample contracts. Many writers, happy to have their work appear in print, were willing to accept what publishers offered. Since there were few literary agents working in Canada then, not many writers had any intermediary to help them understand just what was being offered, how it compared to common practice, or what other strategies might be pursued. The union was being formed, in part, to address this need. Munro’s experience was typical in that she dealt with Ryerson and McGraw-Hill Ryerson on her own, just as she had with various magazine editors and other literary types over the years. Robert Weaver had given her advice, but she wrote her own letters. Once Lives was accepted and Kiil began pushing McGraw-Hill New York on Munro’s behalf, her business dealings – other editions, paperbacks, serial and other rights, licences – became much more complex. This would have been so anyway, but the breakup of her marriage and the need to secure an income from her writing gave these matters particular urgency.

  While Munro was drawn to Ryerson initially by the people who worked there – she recalls Earle Toppings and Audrey Coffin, especially, as people who were working for her success because they believed in the quality of her writing – she lacked confidence in McGraw-Hill Ryerson throughout her connection with it. This was not only because of the Ryerson takeover, but also because of the nature of the company itself; the fact was that McGraw-Hill Ryerson was not so much interested in quality fiction as it was in textbooks, business books, nonfiction, and reference books. The Toronto executives, Kiil recalled, were hesitant about writers like Munro – since they had her work they had to do something with it, but they did so without much enthusiasm. At the same time, and without questioning anyone’s good faith, having her publisher – really, her publisher’s parent firm – negotiate subsidiary rights and foreign editions was not entirely in her best interest. While the publisher was keen to get her work out, the firm got a healthy share of whatever came in after their book version was in print; thus McGraw-Hill (both entities) had a vested interest in whatever deals were made. Taking a portion itself, McGraw-Hill could not look at any prospect strictly from the writer’s point of view.19