Other reviews followed suit. In the New Republic, Jack Beatty wrote that “the impressive Canadian writer Alice Munro has combined the form of the short story with the narrative interest of the novel to provide an unusual kind of literary pleasure.” Like Noonan, he also wrote that “the look of turds frozen in piles of snow in the crumbling lavatory of Rose’s school” is one he will not forget. Beatty maintained that “everything in these stories is a mix of better and worse, of gain and loss, of misery and happiness. Moving, hard, lucid, they throw a ‘cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.’ ” Oates, whose review for Mademoiselle was published before the book’s appearance, calls it “a considerable accomplishment” and writes that its “technique is sometimes jarring, but often dramatically powerful.… [Rose] is drawn back obsessively to Hanratty, as if in pursuit of her own soul. But she doesn’t find it – the question once posed to her by an officious teacher, ‘who do you think you are?’ has no answer.”
As it happened, Munro’s collection was published concurrently with Mavis Gallant’s From the Fifteenth District from Random House. As a result, the two Canadians were sometimes yoked together in reviews. Munro had blurbed Gallant’s book for Macmillan when it was published in Canada. Yet since American reviewers were scarcely able to say anything sensible about Canadian contexts, they usually looked to other matters. Ted Morgan, writing in the Saturday Review, differentiated in a review essay between “women writers” and “Writers Who Happen to Be Women,” as his title has it. Critiquing the feminism then current, he saw more in Gallant’s accomplishment, but of Munro’s Rose he wrote, aptly, “She is immensely likable, and there is gallantry in her willingness to take risks, open herself to the chance of love, and measure herself against what she was and fled from.” For Morgan, “Munro is as good as John Updike in chronicling the hesitations and sidesteps of adultery, its secret rules and regulations, its Geneva conventions, and the dozens of practical details that must be dealt with to make the grand passion possible.” Also noting Munro’s relation to ideological feminism, Thomas R. Edwards in the New York Review of Books writes that Rose’s “experiences are her own and no one else’s. For this, as well as for its quiet refusal ever to say more than is needed, Munro’s book seems to me very fine.”
The stories in The Beggar Maid, Paul Wilner wrote in the Village Voice, “take on the deliberate air of fairy tales” and, like several other reviewers, he was drawn to a particular line from “Half a Grapefruit”: “We sweat for our pretensions.” Drawn particularly to “the incidental revelations of character and setting along the way,” Wilner concluded that in Munro’s work “the princess steps forth epiphanized in the mundane garb of everyday life, no less beautiful for showing her sweat.” Beginning her review by noting the “small but growing cult of admirers” Munro has attracted, Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal focused most sharply on “Simon’s Luck,” “which may well be the finest story in the collection. In that story, Munro shows that she knows ‘that the rest of life is not incidental to, but competitive with, love.’ ” Rose’s actions in “Simon’s Luck,” and in other stories too, demonstrate that. Munro offers “the world as one recognizes it: One in which hope, however absurd and frequently disappointed, is always resurgent. It is, moreover, a world brought to life in thick, sensual detail”:
The way things look, Mrs. Munro knows, is the way things are; she knows that surfaces speak for reality as much as do the hidden depths of things, and she puts that knowledge to better use than any writer of fiction working today.
How does one know when one is in the grip of art – of a major talent? One feels it in the assurance, the sensibility behind every line of a work; one knows its presence as much from what is withheld as from what is given, or explained.
Seeing Rose’s life as “one long attempt to belong, to make connections, to bridge gulfs,” Johanna Higgins in the Lone Star Book Review paid especial attention to Flo, Rose’s stepmother, noting that whenever Rose “thinks of Flo or recalls her stories, the language evokes Flo’s country dignity, strong idiom, and enviable certainties.… Such prose reflects Flo’s secure, nailed-down life. Economically and culturally deprived, she nevertheless is not burdened by anxiety or ambiguity. When she finishes a story, there is no more to be said or thought.” As these comments suggest, Higgins was particularly attuned to Munro’s treatment of class, and especially the differences between places like West Hanratty and Hanratty. Other reviewers took up the more evident contrast between Rose and Patrick Blatchford, a department store heir and Rose’s husband for a time, but Higgins sharply analyzed the deeper relation between Rose’s class and her character.41
Reading these reviews in their order of appearance, one is struck by their difference in tone and focus from Canadian reviews. While Rabinowitz articulated most clearly the case for Munro as a major talent, the American reviews consistently show that reviewers saw her as “a writer of distinction.” And while they noted Munro’s reputation in Canada, the American (and the next spring, the British) reviewers of The Beggar Maid focused on the range of imaginative effects in the text they read. The reviewer in the Washington Post called it “a civilized pleasure,” Nation saw in it “the best stories of the year,” and the reviewer in the New York Times wrote that “there’s hardly a story in this volume that doesn’t glow.” Ms. reminded its readers that “Privilege” first appeared in its pages and called the lot “beautifully written stories.” Virtually alone in her slightly negative assessment, Nancy Gail Reed in the Christian Science Monitor notes that some of the stories do not stand up well alone and “vast jumps in space and time often leave the reader with a kind of literary jet-lag.”42
Writing to Munro in June 1980, Close sent her some late reviews and commented that “although, as always, we would have been happy with more sales, etc., we are all extremely pleased with the reception of The Beggar Maid. People still approach me about it, always with great praise.” Knopf had every reason to be pleased since they certainly had accomplished their aim: Munro had been introduced to the American market as “a writer of distinction.” The reviews attested as much. The book was selected as an alternate by the Book-of-the-Month Club in the United States, and the American Library Association chose it as a notable book of the year. But as Close indicated, its sales were disappointing. By March 1981, The Beggar Maid had sold just under four thousand copies, earning back about a third of the advance Knopf had paid.
In London, Allen Lane published its edition of The Beggar Maid in the spring of 1980. As in the United States, reviews were mostly direct and positive. Alan Hollinghurst in the New Statesman begins with the book’s Governor General’s Award and its title in Canada, saying that it “appears here under the less happy title of The Beggar Maid and in a vulgar pictorial wrapper. But it is important not to be put off: it is a work of great brilliance and depth.” For him, “Munro’s power of analysis, of sensations and thoughts, is almost Proustian in its sureness, and though her forms are scrupulously small, she accumulates an extremely moving sense of the length of life.” He noted also that “the fragmented structure of the book offers a sophisticated metaphor for the mind’s preferred habit of seeing life in fictionally distinct episodes.” Another reviewer called The Beggar Maid a “gentle, observant book – we should hear a lot more from Alice Munro in the future.” Marsaili Cameron, in the Gay News, wrote that “tales of past and present are interwoven with immense skill in this book; it combines literary virtuosity, wit and searing insights.” In Blackwood’s Magazine, Andrew Lothian wrote that Munro “tells her story vividly and economically, subtly varying her style of narrative to suit her characters’ changing circumstances. This is a work of sharply accurate observation, often funny, always affecting – in the end a convincing portrait of a contemporary woman.”
About the only negative voice was that of Eva Tucker in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, who wrote that it was a surprise to her that The Beggar Maid “has got on to the short list” for the B
ooker-McConnell prize for the best novel of the year. Tucker summarizes the book and concludes, “When Rose makes it to college and attracts the attentions of a well-heeled young man, the novel deteriorates into provincial dreariness.” Tucker’s condescending view notwithstanding, the Booker nomination was probably the best indication of how the book really did in Great Britain. Judges for the prize were charged to come up with a list of five finalists but they were unable to agree, so they accepted a list with seven titles – The Beggar Maid was one of those contending for the final spots on the list. The real competition that year was between Anthony Burgess’s Early Powers and William Golding’s Rites of Passage. Golding’s book won, but Munro’s having been a finalist at all was tribute enough – The Beggar Maid, as it turned out, came in fourth. As story collections, none of her subsequent books has been eligible for the Booker Prize since then. Notwithstanding the nomination, sales of the Allen Lane hardback were disappointing (1,300) though the paperback did well enough (11,000 – both by April 1982).
When The McGregors by Robert Laidlaw was published it was reviewed by Timothy Findley, another Ontarian whose writing sharply defined his own deeply felt cultural inheritances. Offering an appreciative analysis of Laidlaw’s book, he begins his concluding paragraph writing,
In one of Alice Munro’s best stories, Home, there is, I think, the most graceful and tactful evocation ever put on paper of how the generations part from one another. Sadly, ineluctably, with all the knives “so carefully applied” but so incisively wielded, a daughter deserts her ailing father and his second wife and the scene of her childhood. She abandons all three – even the place – to their integrity and goes away to claim her own. As an elegy in prose, it is beyond compare. I do hope Robert Laidlaw, now dead, had lived to read that story; in it, through fiction, his daughter makes her break with the past that is implicit in her father’s book without destroying that past.
Writing in 1979, Findley had no way of knowing what Munro would produce in the years to come. “Home,” it turned out, is really more of a preamble to her actual incomparable “elegy in prose” for her father, “Working for a Living.” She was working on that elegy herself just as Findley was reviewing her father’s novel. And though “Home” may have looked to Findley as if Munro was engaging in some act of desertion or rejection, nothing could be further from the truth. “Home” was not desertion, “Home” was an affirmation of the complex personal and cultural connections embodied by that word. In October 1973, when its events occurred, “Home” was staring Munro full in the face with a power really only felt by a returned native. Writing “Home” that month, Alice Munro embarked on an imaginative journey that took her ever more deeply into the cultural inheritances of her home place. When she returned to Huron County, she began the imaginative and textual progression that proved the great fact of her career. Back in Ontario, she moved from “Home” to “Places at Home” to Who Do You Think You Are? to The Beggar Maid toward The Moons of Jupiter. Returning home, she became Alice Munro.43
PART THREE
Being Alice Munro
Feeling Like Rilke’s Editor
Making The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth, 1980–1990
Connection. That was what it was all about. The cousins were a show in themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the real, and prodigal, and dangerous, world. They knew how to get on in it, they had made it take notice.
– “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection”
What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life – what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?
– “Circle of Prayer”
All this acceptance comes as rather a shock to someone so well schooled in surviving without it.
– Alice Munro, 1986
In September 1980 Douglas Gibson wrote to Munro, who was then in Australia as a visiting writer at the University of Queensland. “Brisbane, for crying out loud,” he wrote, “well, stone the bleeding crows, as your students no doubt say.… Ginger delighted me by mentioning the five stories just sold to the New Yorker [and] the exciting idea of a book fictionally based around your parents.” This letter’s real significance lay in Gibson’s subsequent words: “But keep in mind the assurance that I gave you some years ago. I’m not going to pester you to write novels. I’m perfectly pleased to go on publishing collections of Alice Munro stories – related or unrelated – as long as you keep writing them.” This assurance, first offered to Munro when he began wooing her to Macmillan, is one he has maintained throughout their relationship.
Replying from Australia with a jovial apology – “Didn’t I tell you I was going into exile?” – Munro reported that she did “have enough stories for a book now,” and that she was working on the first draft of something that might prove “a more held-together piece of work (I avoid saying ‘novel’).” This may well have been what an Australian journalist described a few months later as “a novel tracing three generations of women”; it evolved, probably, into “The Progress of Love.” In addition to the New Yorker stories, she also mentioned “a long Memoir I wrote about my father, which I think is pretty good, but I think it should be kept out for a kind of family book I want to do someday – maybe about the Laidlaws in Huron County and in Ettrick and James Hogg whose mother was a Laidlaw.” Munro has indeed gone on to write about the Laidlaws in Huron County, in “Working for a Living,” the piece mentioned here, “Changing Places,” and “A Wilderness Station,” and she has written about James Hogg and the Laidlaws in Ettrick in “Changing Places” too. So while she was writing Gibson from Australia, Alice Munro’s imagination in September 1980 was focused on home.
The kind of “family book” she described here, as it turned out, waited another twenty-five years and saw Munro publish seven more new collections before it appeared in 2006 as The View from Castle Rock, a hybrid of family history, fiction, memoir, and closely made autobiographical stories. So long a preliminary, involving such deep and considered rumination, enhances the longstanding presence of “Home,” “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious,” “Working for a Living,” and “Changing Places,” among others, within Munro’s work. Her return brought on an enriched awareness of her home, its culture, and her relation to it. Examples of this process are evident throughout her writing then. Between the first appearance of “Royal Beatings” in the New Yorker, for instance, and its inclusion in Who Do You Think You Are? Munro revised her description of West Hanratty and its relation to Hanratty so that it is much expanded into the long paragraph ending “and a cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.” That paragraph begins,
They lived in a poor part of town. There was Hanratty and West Hanratty, with the river flowing between them. This was West Hanratty. In Hanratty the social structure ran from doctors and dentists and lawyers down to foundry workers and factory workers and draymen; in West Hanratty it ran from factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves. Rose thought of her own family as straddling the river, belonging nowhere, but that was not true. West Hanratty was where the store was and they were, on the straggling tail end of the main street.
Such added details confirm that Rose’s West Hanratty is based on the facts of Alice Munro’s Lower Wingham, remembered. So too other pieces written at the time. In fall 1977, just under a year after he first wrote Munro accepting “Royal Beatings” and just before the New Yorker offered her an initial first-reading agreement, McGrath wrote her rejecting the long version of “Chaddeleys and Flemings.” Mr. Shawn, he explained, “felt it read more like straight reminiscence than a story,” so for the first (and probably only) time, Shawn overruled the fiction department’s recommendation regarding a Munro story. McGrath continued, saying he was “not sure” he agreed and, while he did think that the magazine had published too much reminiscence and autobiographical fi
ction in the past, he did not think “Chaddeleys and Flemings” was “that kind of piece. I don’t know whether it’s autobiographical or not, but it’s my feeling that you’ve taken the material of reminiscence and turned it into something much stronger – a moving, complicated work of fiction.”
McGrath was sensing the shift that was still taking place in Munro’s writing since returning to Huron County. This succession – “Royal Beatings” to “Chaddeleys and Flemings” to “Working for a Living” – reveals the rising autobiographical impulse in Munro’s work. In “Royal Beatings,” the detail of West Hanratty just over the bridge from Hanratty and Rose’s family store there replicates the geography of the Lower Town of Munro’s childhood. Remembered, fictionalized, it is consistent with Rose’s sense of her family’s status. With “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” there are also points of autobiographical correspondence: the cousins in “Connection” existed, even if their exact visit did not take place; so too Mr. Black in “The Stone in the Field,” and the father’s sisters were there though they have been moved up a generation from Munro’s experience. “Working for a Living” was a story begun with autobiographical underpinnings that became, upon revision, a beautiful memoir. It was one that Munro herself thought good and that McGrath, when he rejected it as a memoir after rejecting it the year before as a story, called “a considerable achievement.” He continued: “It’s lively, touching, and beautifully written. But the trouble – for us, I mean – is that not only is this a memoir, but in tone and form and style it’s a kind of classic, or completely traditional, one: exactly the kind of piece, that is, that we did so much of in the past and are now overcompensating for.” McGrath rejected “Working for a Living” just at the beginning of the magazine’s first “Munro bonanza” (as he would later describe another run of stories).1 Between April 1 and early September 1980 McGrath accepted five Munro stories (“Dulse,” “Wood,” “The Turkey Season,” “Labor Day Dinner,” and “Prue”) while rejecting two others (“Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd” and “Visitors”) in addition to “Working.” Bonanza indeed: Munro qualified for the New Yorker first-reading bonus of an extra 20 per cent for all five stories. Enough stories for another collection in fact.
Alice Munro Page 42