Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Thus Munro began with a literal picture – her father’s photograph became the photograph of the turkey crew taken just as “The Turkey Season” ends – and she set to work imagining her story. Having never worked as a turkey-gutter herself, she got expert advice from her brother-in-law, Joe Radford, who had. (Thus the story’s dedication in book form. She had availed herself of Fremlin’s knowledge of woodcutting, in the same way, for “Wood.”)

  Once the story was submitted and accepted, Munro sent McGrath another version, as is her frequent practice. Most of the time when this happened, as with “The Moons of Jupiter,” McGrath thought the second version an improvement; here he did not. He told Munro – on the phone, he recalled, since at this point they still had not met – that “the best story here is a combination,” so he set about combining the two versions before the story was set. In sending her the proofs of the combined version, he characterized the result as “a kind of composite made up from your two versions. I didn’t keep track, exactly, but I would guess that it’s about 50–50, new and old. In general, whenever it was a question of a word or a line, the second version almost always seemed to me finer or sharper, but in the case of some of the longer additions I sometimes felt that some of the spareness and understatement of the first version was preferable.”

  Munro liked what he had done. McGrath recalls this time period as one when Munro “started really experimenting with form and with the notion of what a story was.” Her stories “stopped being so linear and she brought them into this whole thing of taking these long temporal detours and then coming back.” Not too far into their writer-editor relationship, McGrath recalls, “the trust kicked in.” They sensed that they were both working in the same direction.

  At the same time, “The Turkey Season” had language (“ ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ ”) in it that violated the New Yorker’s “Naughty Words Policy.” Regarding such words, McGrath told her that “Mr. Shawn remains unyielding.” One set of galleys illustrates the ways of the New Yorker at the time. Writing about “Lily and Marjorie, two middle-aged sisters,” Munro characterized them as “very fast and thorough and competitive gutters. They sang at their work and talked abusively and intimately to the turkey carcasses. ‘Don’t you nick me, you old bugger!’ ‘Aren’t you the old shit factory!’ ” Munro had inserted “shit factory” on the proof and McGrath commented, “I’m still negotiating this!” He lost, since the phrase ran (and was retained in the book) as “crap factory.”

  The New Yorker’s famous checking department is in evidence here also. At the point when the narrator is describing herself gutting a turkey, someone from checking commented, “Normally most of the connecting tissues are pulled out of the rear end of the turkey, not by the neck route.” Equally, the proof has numerous suggested changes, mostly punctuational or grammatical, from Shawn. Each one is initialled. When, at one point, Munro was pushing to have a character, Brian, say “Fuckin’ boats, I got outa that,” Shawn has placed a question mark and initialled it. As McGrath said, he was unyielding. Munro had her own way in the book version. On this galley too, there is a request from the legal department first for Munro’s assurances that none of these characters resembles “actual people still living” and secondly if the town in the story is recognizable. Because of legal problems the magazine was then having, before the story ran, Munro had to telegraph the legal department other assurances from Australia. McGrath was quite apologetic about this and undertook to pay the costs involved.

  Ending his final letter about “The Turkey Season,” McGrath effused, “I really love this story, and I’m extremely proud of how it turned out. I’m also delighted that it’s running in the Christmas issue, because I think of it as a present to our readers.”10 He now recalls this collaboration as one of the moments in his work with Munro, and he concedes that his own combination of the two versions of the story fuels his pleasure. Even though most of Munro’s stories have scarcely needed such extensive reorganization, what McGrath did with “The Turkey Season” should be seen as indicative of the role of the New Yorker in Munro’s development. This arrangement not only continued but it increased. Both Moons and The Progress of Love included five stories that had been first published in the magazine, and those that were not had been considered under the first-reading agreement. In Friend of My Youth, eight of ten had appeared in the New Yorker, in Open Secrets seven of eight. Not all the stories in the last three collections were published previously, but in each case five stories, or most, first saw print in the New Yorker. Thus from The Moons of Jupiter on, the editors at the magazine have played an important role in Munro’s career, serving along with Virginia Barber as her first response: questioning, pressing, suggesting so as to improve her stories and showcase them in the New Yorker’s pages. There have been some difficulties along the way, to be sure, but there is no question as to the magazine’s importance to Munro’s career.

  The Moons of Jupiter, meanwhile, was taking shape. An undated list in Munro’s hand of fourteen titles, the bulk of those in the volume, shows her attempting to pull the collection together: “Dulse” and “Bardon Bus” are marked “rewrite”; “Labor Day Dinner,” “Wood,” “The Turkey Season,” and “Ferguson Girls” are satisfactory (though the latter turned out not to be and still is not); and the others need only “slight” revision. “Working for a Living” is listed but gets no comment. The rewrite of “Dulse” has been described, but that of “Bardon Bus” is notable in that Munro’s incessant revision resulted in a second separate version of the story, one that jockeyed with the earlier version to be the one printed. Munro seems to have been inclined all along to exclude “The Ferguson Girls,” her decision to allow it to be published in Grand Street notwithstanding. In addition to the New Yorker, Redbook, McCall’s, and Harper’s each passed on it. Since she did not think that it fit with the other stories, “Wood” was also out. Once she had done her revising – Munro delivered the new “Dulse” to Gibson herself – and having agreed on a lineup with her agent, Barber submitted The Moons of Jupiter and Other Stories to Macmillan in mid-March 1982 and sent it to England – to Allen Lane and Penguin, which were coordinating editions there – at the same time. Knopf took a bit longer, for Munro did not hear from Close until April 23.

  By then Gibson and Munro had begun to work out an order for the stories at Macmillan. In early April he wrote Munro offering two suggested arrangements. In putting them together, Gibson was trying to space “out the really strong stories,” and trying even more to have them “follow a logical life-flow pattern,” childhood to old age. So he offered an arrangement that after some adjustment became the final order. Once Close joined the discussion, she successfully pushed for placing “Accident” ahead of “Bardon Bus.” When he first wrote Munro about this change, Gibson also suggested grouping the first- and third-person stories together but, given Munro’s experience with the first version of Who, that predictably went nowhere. By mid-May they had agreed on the final order, and Close and Gibson were working on their respective covers, the book’s design, and a possible co-printing arrangement. Since Macmillan was publishing in fall 1982 and Knopf in spring 1983, Gibson was again in the position of trying to induce Close into sharing overhead (and lowering costs) by using the same design. He had more success with Moons since Knopf elected to use Macmillan’s typesetting, though, because Knopf published a physically smaller book, they redesigned the look of the page. As for the dust jacket, Gibson initially intended to use Christopher Pratt’s Woman at a Dresser but ultimately decided on a detail from his Young Woman in a Slip. He offered this design to Close, who opted for a drawing of a hospital room with a window opening to a night sky. Even so, Moons began a collaboration on Munro’s book production that has continued since.11

  At the same time, Barber was working on the contracts. While they had doubtless discussed terms before the manuscript was sent, Barber sent Gibson a list of changes to the contract that were duly made. It called for a $20,000 advance against Canadian
sales and a graduated royalty to 15 per cent after 10,000 copies sold. As these increasing numbers suggest, Munro’s reputation in Canada warranted higher payments. True enough, but it was Macmillan’s sale of the paperback rights (something controlled by the publisher with a straight 10 per cent royalty to the author once the advance had been earned back) for The Moons of Jupiter that garnered Barber’s special attention. Early on the bidding between interested firms was at $20,000 but when the dust settled Penguin Canada got them for a record-breaking $45,000.12

  The Canadian edition was published by Macmillan on October 16, 1982. That day Munro was interviewed on Anthology by William French, and “The Turkey Season” was read to listeners. She then embarked on a cross-country publicity tour, as she had with Who, visiting Windsor, London, Waterloo, and Guelph between October 13 and 20 and, after a few days off, heading west to Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Victoria, stopping in Calgary on the way home. In Victoria, she stayed at the Empress Hotel but this time autographed books at Munro’s. Back home for a week, she headed east to Burlington, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, and Halifax. Along the way she garnered considerable publicity for both herself and for the book, and the headlines of some of the profiles that appeared indicate just how Munro, and her new book, were then being seen: “She’s a Person First” (Windsor Star), “Munro Says Artistic Backwater Was Boon to Early Endeavors” (London Free Press), “Alice Munro Takes Her Success in Stride” (Kitchener-Waterloo Record), “Munro Battles Huron County” (Winnipeg Free Press), “Age Brings Urge ‘To Do Something Great’ ” (Edmonton Journal), “Alice Doesn’t Live There Anymore” (Vancouver magazine), “Alice Munro Prefers the Risk of a Life Filled with Choice” (Burlington Post), and “The Enigmatic Alice Munro: Literary Paradox with a Purpose” (Ottawa Citizen). The Globe and Mail’s “Writing’s Something I Did, Like the Ironing” was among these profiles.

  Such headlines and the profiles themselves confirm that, with The Moons of Jupiter, Munro’s status as a major Canadian talent was acknowledged across the country. The book was published by Knopf on February 28, 1983, in the United States and just after that by Allen Lane in Great Britain. The reviews it received – in Canada, the United States, and Britain – vary by the position Munro then had in each audience’s literary pantheon, but there was almost no variance from the view that her writing is an accomplished delight, work to be savoured. Nuala O’Faolain, writing in the Dublin Sunday Tribune in a 1984 review focused on the Penguin paperbacks of Moons and The Beggar Maid, captures just how Moons was received overall. O’Faolain recalls being surprised that Munro’s earlier book was a Booker finalist, but “now I’m amazed that she didn’t win it. Not for years have I come across a writer so congenial. She seems to see how life is and to be serene in her own priorities that she can effortlessly shape experience so as to make it resonate colour in its significances. Not that you feel her shaping hand at work.” Her stories “leave one wondering not how does a person get to write like that, but how does a person get to be like that.” O’Faolain’s review is called “Alice Munro: Soaring Clear,” and the allusion is to Munro’s superiority over Anne Hébert (also under review) and Barbara Pym, a writer of “infinitesimal talent.”

  Canadian reviewers of Moons realized that mere superlatives would not do, that they needed to analyze just why Munro’s writing is so affecting. Bharati Mukherjee, in Quill & Quire, wrote that Munro’s “lyrical eye is more perceptive and intense than ever, but now it is augmented with psychological density.” In Books in Canada, Wayne Grady wrote that Munro’s stories do not offer the “searing vision” he finds in Gallant, but though Munro’s “stories are not intellectual at all … they are full of intelligence and an emotional intensity camouflaged by deliberate naivety.” William French in the Globe and Mail wrote that Munro’s “ability to convey nuances and imply the ambiguities inherent in human relationships has never been greater. She can describe a character so deftly in a phrase or two that you know exactly what she means.” Munro is, he concluded, “one of the great short-story writers of our time.” At the same time, French wondered if Munro was becoming a “minimalist” since “there’s an occasional hermetic sense of being too closely involved with people who aren’t all that interesting.” Ken Adachi in the Toronto Star noted Munro’s “mastery of tone and mood,” and Sam Solecki, writing this time in the Canadian Forum rather than an academic review, still found much to be picky about, although he sees that in Moons the “only ironies or twists of the plot that interest Munro are those that are inevitable in, and therefore common to most of our lives.” She offers “ordinary lives and mundane events described realistically in everyday diction, imagery, and syntax, yet one leaves the story feeling as if one had just encountered something unusual.”13

  Urjo Kareda described Moons as “a transitional volume: thrilling, mysterious, astonishing.” Munro, he wrote, “seems to be shedding her skin. Half the stories show the author at her most familiarly assured, but there is something unexpected and disruptive in the others. The prose reveals a new edge of tension, as if previously protected nerveends had suddenly been exposed.” Kareda saw Munro making new demands on her readers, writing that her “great achievement is to make us accept our inability to know.” Larry Scanlan in the Kingston Whig-Standard saw in Munro’s work what Atwood has called “the complex truth,” and notes her “reliance on the present tense, as if the action were unfolding before our eyes, and we, its witnesses, had only to absorb it.”

  Reviewers in Canada sought to define the essence of Munro’s powerful effects. In a Vancouver paper, Alan Twigg described Munro as “painstakingly perfect” while, in Western Living, John Faustman asserted that reading Munro “is an unalloyed pleasure.” A reader can feel her “warmth right through the pages.” Conceding all this and setting it aside, David Williamson again wrote one of the best Canadian reviews of Munro in the Winnipeg Free Press. He posed two questions: What makes her stories so good and, second, Are there no flaws? The first answer is longer, and it follows Williamson’s view that her “people are not symbols or props, they are individuals, each and every one of them.” For flaws, he manages a paragraph on the “flatness” of ordinary people as characters and on Huron County as setting, and he concedes that some “readers may wish for a stronger narrative pull, less meandering in and out of the past.”

  Though there are many more Canadian reviews than these, fulsome praise was their overall response. Leo Simpson began his review in the Hamilton Spectator with an august assertion: “This is probably as good a short story collection as James Joyce’s Dubliners.” Joyce’s book may be the weaker of the two, he continued, noting “relatively lightweight pieces as Araby.” Since no stories in Moons are notably weak, “the Munro book seems to me stronger.” However one sees the comparison, this is heady stuff.

  The Joyce-Munro parallel had been well known among critics since the mid-1970s, but Simpson (originally from Ireland himself) was pressing the matter further. Thus not only were Canadian reviewers dissecting their superlatives, they were seeking superlative comparison. Kareda’s review of Who made and detailed the comparison with Chekhov. As both these reviews suggest, readers were beginning to see and understand the enduring quality of Munro’s work. Tom Crerar, in his review of Moons in Brick saw these same qualities in probably the most succinct summary of the book’s effect: “In these stories, no future escapes its past.” He continued, “For the real subject of these stories is not everyday people in everyday places. The real subject is time. Not time in the sense of a chronicle or a history. But time as a condition, a sentence to life.”14

  As Moons was being reviewed and Munro was seeing to her authorial duties across the country, Ann Close was moving the Knopf edition toward its February 28 publication in the United States. Munro had agreed to do publicity for the Knopf edition, including a trip to New York just as Moons was published there, and later visits to Boston and Washington. Hoping for usable comments, Close made sure the book went out to a select group of American
writers, among them Shirley Hazzard, Alice McDermott, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Tim O’Brien. All responded and Mason, for instance, wrote back to say that she “would have bought it anyway” since Munro is one of her “favorite writers.” Indeed, she had wanted to write her a fan letter for some time. When Munro came to New York, she read at the YMHA Poetry Center (with Marilyn Robinson) on February 28 and attended a reception for both writers afterwards; the next night, she read with Cynthia Ozick at Books & Company and at another bookstore on March 3. During the New York visit she did interviews, met people (including, finally, Charles McGrath and other New Yorker editors), and attended luncheons.

  Meanwhile, the American edition was beginning to gather attention. The advance review in Publishers Weekly began, “These painfully honest stories … are as hard, clear and mysterious as a cold winter morning.” Paying particular attention to “Labor Day Dinner,” “The Stone in the Field,” and “The Turkey Season,” it asserted that “this moving, finely written volume leaves the reader facing up to life.” In February the large newspapers began weighing in. Anatole Broyard concentrated on descriptions of characters and actions in his review in the New York Times, seeing the situation in “The Turkey Season” as an instance of Munro’s “genius for homely images.” “The Moons of Jupiter” he regarded as “particularly good” and most of the other stories are as intriguing; picking up a description from “Visitors,” Broyard saw the book “filled with squawks, calls, screeches and cries of a human nature.” In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Lisa Zeidner commented that Munro’s stories “have the deceptive simplicity of Edward Hopper’s paintings,” and that in them she “records not only grief and longing, but happiness as potent as it is fragile – almost pantheistic moments that pass as quickly as gorgeous dusks.” Among other major papers reviewing Moons were the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times while, in the Miami Herald, book editor William Robertson observed that “there is nothing flashy about Munro’s writing. It is absolutely precise in observed detail.… An unsentimental view of the heart is what Munro is after and most of the time she finds it.” He concluded: “That’s good for her. But it’s better for us.”