Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  During the early 1980s too, Munro’s correspondence with Metcalf continued, and her letters to him are revelatory. While he kept writing fiction, Metcalf was becoming known for his editorial work. Usually working with others, he continued to edit anthologies of Canadian writing. And more notoriously, Metcalf’s voice was increasingly heard in the land critiquing the practice and accomplishment of Canadian literature generally. Owing to their friendship and her success, Metcalf regularly solicited Munro for stories for his various projects, while they kept each other abreast of their doings. Responding to one of Metcalf’s requests just after her return from another trip to Australia in 1983, this one a vacation, Munro commented that she hoped Metcalf “found out I was in Australia and not just churlishly avoiding requests to do literary chores.” She then offers an explanation that very much contextualizes just why, as her reputation has soared, she has often seemed aloof from her own accomplishment. She wrote that she “would have tried to avoid” Metcalf’s request, and continued:

  Why? It’s not so simple as laziness. I don’t think so. It’s that after every book, after practically every story, I’m “trying to get back to” writing. I always have to get back, I’m never safely “in” it – as I imagine other writers are. I’m always frantically trying to protect myself and draw back and clear my time and husband my energies and half the time that doesn’t work, anyway. That, and having almost no intellectual grasp – I hope you believe that, a lot of people think it’s an affectation – well, you can see the problem.

  Australia was really very good. There is no Canlit in Australia. Also no Barbara Frum, no Barbara Amiel, etc, etc. What’s going on is – football (footies), cricket, races – the Melbourne Cup is a huge event for which the whole country comes to a halt – and a lot of bashing.

  Munro’s explanation rings utterly true here – there is no affectation involved. She is, and always has been, an intuitive writer. She finds the stories and the forms she seeks by writing, not planning, so the key for her is time left alone to write. Apart from the activities of her daily life with Fremlin in Clinton, everything else is interruption. Thus Barbara Frum and Barbara Amiel – two journalists, the first on television, the second in newspapers and Maclean’s – embody those who wish to speak to Munro about her fiction.

  As she ended this letter Munro commented that Metcalf was “good in the Globe, and I hope I’d say so even if you weren’t good to me. About stories vs. novel. About the whole Canlit business.” Throughout their friendship and their correspondence, they shared a certain scepticism toward the nationalistic impulse then ongoing in English-Canadian literary circles. Munro’s views were private (though, in truth, not very different from those held by her old friend Robert Weaver). Metcalf’s views, by contrast, were very public, thanks to his repeated attacks through various polemic publications, on the quality and mores of writing in English Canada. In her letter, Munro was referring to one of these, “What Happened to CanLit,” just published in the Globe and Mail: “Think of Canlit as a pyramid. Inverted. And kept upright by the power of subsidy,” it begins. Metcalf objected to fiction being praised because it is “about” Canada, and he argued that too much was being published without ever being read, as a result of subsidies to writer and publisher alike.

  Here and elsewhere, Metcalf attracted the ire of other writers. Responding to this article, W.P. Kinsella wrote, “Mr. Metcalf – an immigrant – continually and in the most galling manner has the temerity to preach to Canadians about their own literature.” Metcalf became a Canadian in 1970, so Kinsella’s attack on him here is gratuitous, nasty; he also called attention in particular to Metcalf’s special view of Munro:

  The majority of the authors he gushes over, and continually reprints in his seldom-read anthologies, are minor talents, rightfully neglected by Canadian readers. A major exception is Alice Munro who is, I believe, Canada’s finest writer, and who surely must be embarrassed to be included constantly in Mr. Metcalf’s incestuous little clique.

  However Kinsella viewed Metcalf’s opinions, for him Munro’s work set her apart from such spats. While certainly a political person and quite able to take stands on issues of concern, Munro had deliberately remained a sideline observer of the politics of “CanLit.” She saw the long-term utility of government subsidy for writers (and had accepted some herself, as Metcalf most certainly did); a few years later, Munro responded to another polemical piece by Metcalf, writing, “God knows you may be right about subsidizing but how otherwise could we have published anything? Ryerson Press, Tamarack, etc.” Even so, this debate was one that she avoided – she rose above it, as her material, talent, and accomplishment allowed her to do.7

  “Feeling My Own Powers”: The Moons of Jupiter through the New Yorker

  For all his polemics, Metcalf was not blind to talent: “About some of our writers there is widespread agreement: Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and, belatedly, Mavis Gallant.” His point, as Kinsella concedes regarding Munro, is that these writers had made excellent reputations based on achievement. While in 1983 it was certainly possible to question this as regards the others, by then there was no doubt about Munro. Evidence of this is not hard to find just before and after The Moons of Jupiter was published in 1982. “Working for a Living,” the memoir, after being rejected at the New Yorker was eventually bought (for $5,000) and published as the first piece in the first issue of Grand Street, a literary review just founded in New York. Besides Munro, contributors to that issue included Northrop Frye, Ted Hughes, W.S. Merwin, and Glenway Wescott. Edited by Ben Sonnenberg, Grand Street went on to publish three more Munro pieces, including “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry,” a story Munro has never included in a book and is still working on. Two of the New Yorker stories, “Wood” and “Prue,” went immediately into Metcalf anthologies, Best Canadian Stories for 1981 and 1982. In Britain, Penguin published The Beggar Maid as a King Penguin text before publishing Munro’s earlier books in the same format. In November 1981 the first accession of Munro’s papers were formally received by the University of Calgary and, in March 1982, an academic conference on Munro and her work, where she spoke and saw a one-person production of “Forgiveness in Families,” was held at the University of St. Jerome’s College, University of Waterloo. Reviews and theses had given way to academic articles, and in 1983 Probable Fictions, the first book devoted to Munro’s work, was published by ECW Press. Munro accepted some invitations during this time. After returning from China in 1981 she appeared in Toronto at Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in October, reading “The Moons of Jupiter.” Early in 1982 she and Fremlin were in Europe, visiting Norway for the February 16 launch of the Norwegian translation of Who Do You Think You Are?, Tiggerpiken, and travelling also to Denmark and Scotland, where she did public readings.

  Once he had re-established contact with Munro in Australia in September 1980, Gibson stayed in touch, enquiring each time he wrote about possibilities for the next book. Not surprisingly, given the attention Munro had received for Who Do You Think You Are?, other Canadian publishers were interested in wooing her away from Macmillan; Jack McClelland wrote her during the summer of 1980 claiming he had heard that either Munro or her agent was planning to move her to a new publisher. Even when Gibson, having discussed matters with Munro herself, wrote Virginia Barber about the next book and initiated contract discussions, Barber first asked Munro directly whether she wanted to remain with Macmillan; Barber was thinking specifically of McClelland & Stewart (and its paperback line, Seal), but also knew that other major Canadian publishers would be delighted too. “Tell me which house you want. I’ll let the lucky devils know, and then create a glorious contract,” she wrote.

  Munro must have immediately told her that she wanted to stay with Gibson and Macmillan, since Barber wrote him with an initial table of contents within a week. She proposed the three stories held out of Who plus “Accident,” another one from that time, and a selection of four more recent stories: “Labor Day Dinner,”
“Prue,” “The Turkey Season,” and “Bardon Bus.” Gibson annotated this letter with page lengths for the stories and, having conversed with Munro himself, he also listed other stories that might be added: “Visitors,” “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry,” and “Dulse.”8 He did not include “Wood,” which had appeared in the New Yorker in November 1980, feeling that it did not belong with the other stories. Clearly there was no shortage of material.

  The making of The Moons of Jupiter represented another significant step for Munro. Once Who/The Beggar Maid was done, her new editorial and managerial relations were firmly in place: Barber handled all business matters, McGrath oversaw the New Yorker’s first serial consideration, Gibson at Macmillan looked to her Canadian audience, and Close at Knopf saw to American book publication. Once Munro had confidence in someone, that was it. While Barber might have been able to negotiate better book contracts elsewhere, whether in Canada or New York, her author was loyal and supportive. Besides, she had taken her own time finding Gibson, the diligent editor who never pushed her toward a novel, in the first place. Likewise, Munro and Close hit it off from the first and have maintained their excellent working relation since.

  Then there was the New Yorker. Until 1994 Munro was edited there by either McGrath or Daniel Menaker. Both were highly enthusiastic and encouraging, and had been since 1976. So too when Menaker left the magazine, Alice Quinn, who had known Munro’s work in the magazine from its first publication there, brought a similar spirit to her editing. During the 1980s the magazine went through considerable internal vicissitudes as its owner and chief editors changed, but its commitment to Munro and to her writing has never wavered. What is more, from the stories included in The Moons of Jupiter on, the magazine’s editorial methods and tastes have had some role in shaping Munro’s stories; responding to her New Yorker editors’ critiques and the magazine’s famed editorial idiosyncrasies, Munro moved them farther in the direction she saw them taking.

  Most of the stories that went into Moons were considered by the New Yorker after Munro was under a first-reading contract. As early as April 1978 in turning down “Joanne,” a never-published story that exists now only in manuscript, McGrath wrote to Barber, “I hate turning down Alice Munro stories, because even when they’re not completely successful, the writing is always first-rate – just as it is here.” He took solace on this occasion from the fact that he had three more stories on his desk, but those were turned down as well. The first bonanza did not begin until early 1980, just at the point when Barber sensed “a new style” in the stories she was seeing. By the time Barber and Gibson were beginning to shape Moons in early 1982, the New Yorker had seen all twelve stories and published five of them (plus “Wood”); five of the other seven had been published elsewhere (Atlantic Monthly, Chatelaine, Saturday Night, Tamarack Review, and Toronto Life). Two – “Bardon Bus” and “Hard Luck Stories” – first appeared in The Moons of Jupiter collection.

  In a draft version of “Working for a Living” as a memoir, Munro wrote passages about herself that seem to demonstrate the new qualities Barber felt – that is, a deeper and richer meditation on her home place. Thinking of herself at eighteen, her mother stricken by Parkinson’s and her father working in the foundry after his fox farm failed, she wrote:

  In spite of all the defeats of the grown-ups around me, the incursions of poverty and sickness, my spirits didn’t need much lightening. I was often happy to the point of dizziness, contemplating the world, feeling my own powers, which seemed enormous but hard to get at, anticipating love and victory.… I mourned the passing of the fox-farm, in a rather pleasurable way. I was just discovering nostalgia. And I did truly see that though it might never have made us rich it had made us unique and independent.

  The stories that made up both Munro bonanzas – the five that went into Moons and, after, another five for The Progress of Love – reveal a writer who had certainly discovered nostalgia. But what Munro did with it, in company with the New Yorker’s editors and fact-checkers, bears attention as the stories passed through the magazine on the way to her books. The first of the Moons stories McGrath saw was “Accident,” which he thought good but not as good as “The Beggar Maid,” which he bought. After that, they rejected the long “Chaddeleys and Flemings” over McGrath’s objection because Shawn thought it a reminiscence rather than a story. As McGrath makes clear, it was fiction to him. He was right. They then bought a third Munro story, “The Moons of Jupiter,” a piece connected to “Chaddeleys and Flemings” and so one that might also be seen as reminiscence. Certainly the death of the father in the story bears a strong resemblance to the circumstances of Robert Laidlaw’s death. Certainly some of the story’s other details happened – they are close to what occurred. Thus the connections in these stories to Munro’s own life – connections from which she herself derived considerable imaginative power, adding to her fictional magic – are of real consequence to a reader’s experience of them.

  Tracing the stories’ progress, this consequence is twofold: the form the story takes and the work Munro did preparing her stories for the New Yorker’s first publication. When Barber submitted “The Moons of Jupiter” to McGrath in late 1977 it was written in the third person; the New Yorker accepted it that way, perhaps under its initial title, “Taking Chances.” Early in January, however, McGrath wrote acknowledging that the new version of the story, which Munro had done on her own, had arrived: “The first-person seems more intimate, somehow, and more affecting.… Already I have trouble imagining this as a third-person story.” McGrath continued to ask about Janet’s profession – they had had too many stories about writers, so they wanted her to be something else – and concluded: “You’ve made a fine story even better, and we’re doubly glad to have it now.”

  With “Dulse,” the process of authorial revision between its New Yorker appearance in July 1980 and book publication was stark. In writing it, Munro had combined aspects of characters from Sheila and Angela, two of the women in the three-part “Simon’s Luck,” in order to create Lydia. Her boyfriend, named Alex in the New Yorker and Duncan in the book, also draws on the earlier Simon. But the story’s central episode – the visit to Grand Manan Island and the meeting of the prototype for Mr. Stanley, the “Willa Cather fanatic” as Munro once called him – draws on Munro’s own visit there and her own meeting of that person in 1979. While there, Munro also met the woman who ran the inn where she was staying and, as writers do, she integrated her into “Dulse.” Meeting Munro at an unhappy moment in her life, that woman later recognized herself as she was then; she had “passed into art,” and was not entirely happy about it. Talking about the incident years later, she only wished she could remember what Munro had looked like.

  These matters led to the writing of “Dulse” and, once the story got to the New Yorker and beyond, Munro characteristically kept shaping and changing it. The New Yorker version is in the first person, the book version in the third; hence, with this story Munro reversed the change she had made in revising “The Moons of Jupiter,” deliberately distancing Lydia and her circumstances from the reader. Also, Lydia’s former boyfriend becomes a less interesting and more negative character with the changes. But the most compelling changes between the two published versions lie in Munro’s depiction of Willa Cather – this story offers a beautiful analysis of a writer’s self-absorption, and of Cather’s in particular. In her revisions, Munro makes her Cather more inscrutable and much more compelling. For some readers the story is a dig at Cather’s putative homosexuality; as McGrath commented in a letter to Munro referring to that reading, “People who are looking for a slight can find one almost anywhere. It’s a humane and compassionate story, and you ought to feel nothing but pride in it.” McGrath is right. While Lydia’s anxieties in the story have much to do with her relations with men, and she does use the fact that Cather lived with another woman against Mr. Stanley, these details sharpen and deepen Munro’s “human and compassionate�
� depiction of her characters and of Cather herself.9

  Yet the changes in “Dulse” do not really address the various ways that the New Yorker itself furthered Munro’s fiction. “The Turkey Season” offers a particular instance of both what Munro was doing in her stories in 1980 and just how McGrath and the other editors at the New Yorker were responding. She explained the story’s beginnings in an interview she gave on the book tour for Moons; asked about it, Munro replied, “Why is it interesting to me to make turkey-gutting vivid? It just is.” She also explained the story’s contexts, and some of her comments speak to “Working for a Living” as well:

  A few years ago when I was going through my father’s effects, I saw a picture of the workers at the turkey barn. My father had a turkey barn: it was a very small business, but he would have a half a dozen people at Christmas. My brother and sister worked there, too, although I didn’t. I was in college by that time. What I wanted to do was to portray all this complicated social life that goes on in work places, in jobs that most people think are hideous and boring. And also the work itself – there’s some kind of enormous satisfaction in jobs like that, in doing them well. I wrote a memoir about my father and the kinds of work he did.…