Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  After she had read the first of these stories and just as she was devising a submission strategy for them, Barber sent Munro her enthusiastic response:

  I sense a new style in this “stuff” you’ve sent – plainer, bare of metaphor, but with rhythms so strong that I feel safer than I’ve felt in years. Your sentences always treat the reader so well – no manhandling, no tricks, no dead falls. Not that there’s anything placid or safe about the stories. There’s that grief in “Dulse” which suddenly springs out and bowls you over. Or [from “Working”] “was his life now something that only other people had a use for.” I hadn’t thought about that. I’m not going to go on except to say what fun, and thanks. They’re wonderful stories.

  These stories became the core of The Moons of Jupiter. The next run, those that became The Progress of Love, had McGrath reeling: “You’re sending in these stories faster than I can edit them,” he wrote to Munro, “and each one is more dazzling than the last. I feel the way Rilke’s editor must have felt – if he had one.” When Progress appeared in 1986, David Macfarlane asserted in Saturday Night that it “is probably the best collection of short stories – the most confident and, at the same time, the most adventurous – ever written by a Canadian.”2 By then, such a view had become truism, certainly in Canada and rapidly elsewhere too: like the cousins in “Connection,” Alice Munro had made the world take notice. When Friend of My Youth was published in spring 1990, eight of its ten stories having already been in the New Yorker, that notice was continual.

  Both Reader and Writer: Memory and Perception and Self-Understanding

  What McGrath saw in “Chaddeleys and Flemings” and in the memoir version of “Working for a Living,” what Barber sensed as she first read the stories in that first bonanza, what Gibson had seen all along, were qualities that emerged from Munro’s return to Huron County. Probably, too, the compositional difficulties linked with “Places at Home” and Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid played some role in this too. Whatever the reason, there is no question but that Munro burst forth in the late 1970s and into the 1980s with successive stories that create the feelings of being alive, that replicate for their readers the very sense of being itself. Those stories offer Munro’s readers moments of insight equal to the events each story creates.

  While other examples might be chosen, the concluding section of “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection” seems best to illustrate this sense. Originally it appeared after the final line in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field,” “the life buried here is one you have to think twice about regretting.” Sometime between its first publication in Chatelaine and its appearance as the first story in The Moons of Jupiter, Munro moved it up to conclude “Connection” when the two parts were separated at Gibson’s suggestion. Just after the narrator – then named Janet – “threw the Pyrex plate” at her husband Richard’s head, an act that was “so shocking a verdict in real life,” there is a break and Munro harkens back to an image from the cousins’ visit to the narrator’s girlhood town Dalgleish:

  Row, row, row your boat

  Gently down the stream.

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

  Life is but a dream.

  I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and to my surprise – for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of the rounds – the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving.

  Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily,

  Life is but a dream.

  Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air. Life is. Wait. But a. Now, wait. Dream.

  This placement creates a very powerful effect. It is an apt embodiment of the narrator’s own sense of her own time, both in sweet childhood memory and sour adulthood present, feeling like a passing dream. Munro infuses the cliché lyrics of the child’s song with new meaning, a “warning,” and this use is rooted in the facts of the cousins’ remembered visit. When he wrote an introductory piece to the first publication of “The Stone in the Field” in Saturday Night, editor Robert Fulford commented of Munro that “to suggest that she conveys … her own background with lucidity and honesty is to hint at only a part of her talent. What happens in a Munro story is vastly more complicated than that, a process involving memory and perception and self-understanding on the part of both reader and writer.”3 Exactly so.

  Later in 1979, Fulford followed this first publication of “The Stone in the Field” by commissioning a major profile of Munro by Martin Knelman, one that begins with her own version of events surrounding the reorganization of Who Do You Think You Are? It also captures Munro just at the moment when she was becoming a celebrity of a different kind. When Munro met with Knelman, The Beggar Maid was just about to appear in the States. Its publication in Britain and the Booker nomination there were still a way off. Yet in tone and substance, the piece makes it clear that much was afoot. Knelman mentions the first-reading contract at the New Yorker (then in its second year), the sale of her papers to the University of Calgary (she confided, “They’ll take anything”), and the offers she had received to be a writer-in-residence. Though she was about to take up that kind of work again, both at the University of British Columbia and, later the same year, at Queensland, she made her hesitations clear: “You have an Alice Munro character that you play, and you’ve found out that people accept it. I wind up feeling like a total fraud. I like the students, but I think that if I had to work regularly I would rather get a job in a store.”

  If the critical success and Booker nomination of The Beggar Maid ended the 1970s, the 1980s opened with the “Munro bonanza” of more deeply affecting stories in the New Yorker. The five they bought in just five months in 1980 eclipsed the total of three bought since 1976 and confirmed the promise of the first-reading contract. Joyce Carol Oates had selected “Spelling” for Best American Stories 1979 and that inaugurated Munro’s frequent inclusion (and more frequent mention) in that annual ever since. Both in Canada and abroad – through the dutiful, precise, and constant attentions of Virginia Barber – her work was appearing in mass-market paperbacks that, as the 1980s passed into the 1990s, gave way to quality trade paperbacks of all of her works from Penguin in Canada and from Vintage in the United States and eventually in Great Britain as well. Translations of Munro’s works into other languages also began during the 1980s.

  Personally, in the 1980s, the opportunities she received increased. She had long since been receiving the offers attendant to well-known writers – requests for contributions of writing, invitations to speak, read, or apply for some visiting-writer position or teaching post at a university. Libraries were after her as well. Editors wanted her to read and blurb books, provide reviews, contribute to anthologies, write screenplays, or to adapt a story for the stage. Writer friends asked for letters of support for grant applications. Aspiring writers sought guidance and, seeing some quality of note in one or the other of these, she would sometimes respond. During the 1980s all these supplications increased in frequency and urgency owing to Munro’s growing reputation, and increasingly they came from outside Canada as her reputation grew through the New Yorker and Knopf. Just as the 1970s saw Munro emerge as one of Canada’s leading authors, the 1980s saw the same thing happen abroad. By December 1984, McGrath wrote to Barber that “she is simply one of the finest short story writers alive, and it’s a great honor and privilege for us to be able to publish her.”

  Munro dealt with all this as best she could. Other writers whom she knew often found her willing to do what was needed. The same was true with editors though, a
t times, Munro would be signally unresponsive – she says she has no ability to review books and has carefully avoided such requests. One in particular, a review of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty sent to her by the Canadian Forum in 1981, would have been well worth reading, but it was never done. Munro did correspond with Elizabeth Spenser about it, apparently having suggested that Spenser might review it in her place. From the American South herself, Spenser encouraged Munro to undertake the review since she had been impressed with Munro’s knowledge of Southern writing when they met in Montreal in 1974. What is more, Spenser knew that readers would be interested in what Munro had to say about Welty. Still, no review was written.4

  During the early 1980s Munro was responsive to some of the invitations that involved travel to places she wanted to visit. She spent from January to April 1980 as Distinguished Visiting Artist in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia; she was the program’s first writer-in-residence and had no teaching duties; the only requirement was that she should be there. That was an opportunity for her to take a break from looking after Mrs. Fremlin (who was in Huron View nursing home) and also a chance to see Andrea, then a teenager, on the weekends. Her time in Australia, that fall and into the new year, allowed her and Fremlin the opportunity to drive around the country, exploring its hidden places, and seeing its landscapes. To John Metcalf, she recounted that in Sydney they

  went to the King’s Domain on a Sunday afternoon. People bring a step ladder and get up and talk. Christians and Commies and plain loonies yelling but there were two special hecklers. One was a happy drunk who said to the Christians – looking at the sky – “I don’t see no heaven” and the other was a serious Syrian or Lebanese well-dressed gent who interrupted every speaker with “And what about Her Majesty the Queen?” It threw every one of them.

  In the same letter, Munro vowed that she would never be a writer-in-residence again, and for much the same reasons she had expressed to Knelman. She never has felt comfortable in the role, feeling that “the actual ‘work’ is useless and dishonest.” Even though such posts allowed her to see places she wanted to see – in the midst of this she mentioned being tempted by a similar job in Scotland – she vowed to resist the temptation. She has resisted ever since.

  During the summer of 1981, Munro joined a group of other Canadian writers on a tour of China. In fact, she celebrated her fiftieth birthday there. Along with her were Gary Geddes, Geoffrey Hancock, Robert Kroetsch, Patrick Lane, Suzanne Paradis, and Adele Wiseman. They were hosted by the Chinese Writers Association. Writing about the trip to Metcalf, Munro characterized the trip as “hot and intensive”; the Chinese were “friendly and polite” but, to them, “irony is unknown.” The Chinese writers they met gave them “a chilling discourse on art in the service of socialism.” Reminiscing about the trip in an interview with Hancock, she commented that though she liked travelling, she “was not enthusiastic about going to China at first. It’s the sort of thing you don’t turn down, but I felt overwhelmed by the idea, that nothing would be familiar enough to touch me at any point.” She also said “the people [were] the thing I came back with most of all. It kept occurring to me that there probably were lots of people there who’d never been alone in a room in their lives. There is no alone in China.” The group itself was comradely, and Munro’s birthday contributed to their conviviality: “A fiftieth birthday in China? I thought it was gorgeous.… Fifty, to me, always sounds a little grey – something kind of withered about it. And there I was having this wonderful banquet in Guangzhou. And then my birthday went on in Hong Kong and across the Pacific and finally it sort of petered out as we approached Vancouver. [It] went on for days.… It was the greatest birthday of my life.”5

  While Munro’s reputation continued to grow internationally, there was a backlash in her hometown. The December 5, 1981, issue of Today, a weekly magazine supplement to many Canadian newspapers, carried an article by Wayne Grady entitled “Story Tellers to the World.” It focused on Munro and four other Canadian writers, arguing that the short story form is “uniquely suited to the Canadian experience” and detailing the attentions Canadian short story writers had been getting outside the country. Alongside the main story, the five writers were briefly profiled. Hers began with a quotation from Munro’s description of Lower Town in her interview with Alan Twigg; it was followed by this paragraph:

  Wingham, where Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in 1931, is a small but stately town in Huron County, an area of Ontario not known for its progressive views. Fictionalized as Jubilee in Munro’s second book, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), and as Hanratty in her most recent book, Who Do You Think You Are? (1980) [sic], the town is stultifyingly provincial and only occasionally reaches the comic heights of Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa.

  The next paragraph noted that Munro “escaped” Wingham by going to university.

  This article is notable less for what it said than for the reaction it received. The December 16 issue of the Wingham Advance-Times carried an editorial entitled “A Genius of Sour Grapes.” Written by Barry Wenger, president and publisher of the paper, it began with the Today article and then turned its attention to Munro herself: “Sadly enough Wingham people have never had much chance to enjoy the excellence of her writing ability because we have repeatedly been made the butt of soured and cruel introspection on the part of a gifted author.” Wenger took exception to Munro’s presentation of Lower Town as “this kind of ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived,” but he saved his real ire for the characterization of Wingham as “stultifyingly provincial.” While he left open the possibility that this characterization might be Grady’s, not Munro’s, he tended to connect the opinion to her: “But it seems that something less than greatness impels her to return again and again to a time and place in her life where bitterness warped her personality.” The next week’s Advance-Times ran a letter from Joyce McDougall, a former neighbour of the Laidlaws (“We were friends, then – I’m almost ashamed to admit”) who, agreeing with the editorial, claimed to “know the truth behind most of the stories she has written – in fact, I and my family were cruelly depicted in one of them.” According to her, Lower Town “was truly a town of hardworking, moral and respectable people.”

  Responding to the Advance-Times, Munro wrote that Grady was “a journalist who never interviewed me, to whom I have not said one word about Wingham, or writing, or anything else of importance.” She talked to him once about something else. Munro also disputes “the supposition made by you and this journalist that I have created my fictional towns out of Wingham, which is not true.… Far from being bitter,” she ended, “I have always had a certain affection for Wingham, though I can see from your editorial the feeling is not mutual.” Munro wrote also to Today, maintaining that her fictional towns were “created out of bits of Wingham and many other towns, and quite a bit out of my own head, and that Jubilee is not Wingham, Hanratty is not Wingham. I am not writing autobiography. If I ever do, it will be time to talk about Wingham.”

  While Grady’s article was certainly the catalyst for this spate of criticisms, the hostile reactions toward Munro and her writing probably sprang from a range of factors. First among these, and most especially among people in Huron County who shared Munro’s pioneer Scots-Irish Protestant background while having little appreciation for fiction, was that deep-seated distrust of noticeable individuality encapsulated in the question “Who Do You Think You Are?” There was a clear preference for people who stayed in line, always doing the so-called normal, so some combination of envy or jealousy, with little appreciation of Munro’s talent, marked the general local reaction. No doubt, too, there were residual feelings over Munro’s defence, as a representative of the Writers’ Union, of The Diviners and the other targeted books. Last, some people around Wingham took exception to Munro’s depiction of a character they saw as based on her father – probably the father in “Royal Beatings.”

  As i
t happened, about a year later Munro took exception herself to a description of her father in the Globe and Mail’s pro file of her, “Writing’s Something I Did, Like the Ironing.” There, Laidlaw was referred to as a “failed fox-farmer, a failed turkey farmer.” She sent a letter to the Globe defending him and evidently submitted it to the Advance-Times as well, although it was not published there. Writing to her about her letter, Wenger began, “There is no need to fear my sharp pencil. I knew your father personally and always respected him as a man of great courage who faced life’s difficulties with dignity.” Responding to what Munro had said about journalistic practice – the need to clearly differentiate their subject’s views from their own – Wenger wrote that in Grady’s article “it was the author’s remarks about Wingham, rather than your own which enraged so many here.” Wenger also wrote that he was “personally glad to know that in both cases the observations about Wingham and your father were not your own.”

  These responses reveal a deeper aspect to Munro’s return to Huron County. While journalists came, saw, and characterized the area (Grady finding it “stultifyingly provincial,” Wayne writing her “Huron County Blues,” and French giving the memorable image of Munro meeting people from the book-banning meeting in the grocery), Munro was living in the midst of her material, as she wrote about Janet. She lived there knowing what some people around her – not necessarily people she much worried about – thought of her, and of the level of celebrity she had achieved. This awareness cut, most probably, two ways: it both spurred Munro on, and it served as a caution. Or, put another way, it kept her writing and also kept her grounded. Even before her return to Huron County in 1975 to begin her work on “Who Do You Think You Are?” that local voice may be heard in Dotty’s transformation in “Material”: “Dotty was a lucky person, people who understand and value this act might say (not everybody, of course, does understand and value this act).” Munro knew that some people in Huron County very much valued what she was writing; others did not. On balance, though, back there in Clinton she was much more comfortable among such people and amid its landscapes, which, as she looked on them, still moved and fascinated her. Besides, as she told the journalist who wrote “Writing’s Something I Did,” “Oh, I’m very stubborn.… We’ve created this nice life for ourselves, and nobody’s going to run me out of town.”6