The reviewer in Time, Patricia Blake, wrote that Munro’s stories possess “a melodic line that catches at the heart with its freshness,” and that her “originality is all the more striking because her subject is ordinariness.” Noting “Accident” and “Bardon Bus” particularly, Blake also introduced the Chekhov comparison, concluding that writing “about ordinary life is hazardous; it may induce the boredom that is its subject. Munro defies the danger, and triumphs.” Gardner McFall, the reviewer in Newsday, called Moons “dazzling” and asserted that Munro “writes with such acuity that description becomes perception” – he pointed to the gift of seaweed at the end of “Dulse,” calling it a crystallization of such a moment. Taking up the opening paragraph of the first story, “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,” Ann Hulbert in the New Republic focused on Munro’s style: “With a sure rhythmic sense, she builds from the clipped first sentences to the long last sentence, its clauses as firmly balanced as the ladies themselves. Her words, too, are carefully weighed, yet her tone throughout is disarmingly colloquial. Boldly drawn, Munro’s stories are like busy scenes in a larger novelistic landscape.” Despite such consensus, there was the odd negative response. Arthur Evenchik in the Baltimore Sun was looking for “a greater store of discoveries – an enlightened perception of character and place, which Alice Munro cannot afford to have momentarily lost.” Putting it in perspective, he sees “a new doubtfulness in this book, a loss of incisiveness and spirit, that causes most of the stories to fall below her usual standard.”
On March 20 the New York Times Book Review ran its notice of Moons on the front page. There Benjamin DeMott saw Moons as stronger than The Beggar Maid, calling it “witty, subtle, passionate.… It’s exceptionally knowledgeable about the content and movement – the entanglements and entailments – of individual human feeling. And the knowledge it offers can’t be looked up elsewhere.” Munro’s “sense of style and craft is impeccable,” and she is especially impressive “when she takes us inside the experience of letting go – accepting the end of a human connection.” When she does this, DeMott wrote in a line that is impressively accurate, Munro is “seldom sentimental yet never mean.” Others made the same point: few writers at work today, David Lehman wrote in Newsweek, “can move us as deeply as Alice Munro.” Moons “is a triumph of sentiment over sentimentality.” Gail Cooper in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner noted that the “deftness and accuracy of her portrayal of characters is founded … on sensitivity to the nuances, the strangeness of life. A seemingly atypical or inconsequential event will adumbrate a life’s significance.” Cooper also paid close attention to Munro’s use of point of view in “The Turkey Season” and in “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd”: “their lives are an extrapolation of the girls they once were.”15
Late in April 1983 the reviews of Moons in England began to appear and, as was to continue to be the norm, the British notices tended to remark on different things in the book. Nina Bawsen in the Daily Telegraph wrote that Munro’s stories are distinguished not “by resignation but a wise and perceptive acceptance” of the way life is. In City Limits, Gillian Allnutt saw Munro’s writing as “matter-of-fact, almost laconic,” writing that seems poetic: “in its choice of detail, of incident and conversation, the suggestive juxtapositions, the often surprising ending, that give these stories their power. So much is left to silence that each story, once settled in the imagination, begins to grow into a novel.” Writing in The Observer, Peter Kemp saw Munro’s strength in her ability to establish “the characters’ inner and outer lives – and the connections between them – these are sparely written, richly resonant pieces.” Kemp reviewed Moons alongside William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune, and he treated them as equals despite Trevor’s larger reputation. Reviewing Munro a second time, Alan Hollinghurst in the Times Literary Supplement saw “a deep ambiguity about this book – though one felt on the pulses rather than in an intellectually playful way: her writing has a penetrating concision, at once watchfully spare and lyrically intense, which contradicts or refuses the too facile satisfaction of accounting for everything.” Illustrating this significant point, Hollinghurst wrote that Munro “seems fastidiously to question the very trust she inspires, like Lydia in the story ‘Dulse’, constantly fabricating explanations which she does not believe herself.” Christopher Wordsworth in the Financial Guardian called Moons a “wise and impressive collection.” Noting her command of “the art which conceals art,” he pronounced Munro “a writer who can mix with the very highest company.” Summarizing Munro’s career, Isabel Quigly in the Financial Times pronounced her a “real writer” and continued,
Alice Munro has been compared with Proust (also, most unsuitably, with Joyce Carol Oates, Hemingway, and John Cheever), short-listed for the Booker prize and remains (though dazzling) quite unperturbed and unaffected, her writing smooth and supple, reticent in expressing feeling yet filled to the brim with exactly the right emotional quantity; never a false one, so never a jarring emotional note.
Other reviewers dealt with Munro’s sense of reality. Paul Bailey in the Standard noted that reality “is of the essence in Alice Munro’s art – reality of a peculiarly raw kind,” especially in “The Turkey Season.” Bailey calls “Dulse” delicate, and he saw “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field” as a story “worthy of Willa Cather herself.” Taking up the scene between Janet and her father in the hospital in “The Moons of Jupiter” when she notices the read-out from the heart monitor, Dorothy Porter in the Glasgow Herald sees in it an equivalent of “Munro’s technique: she looks almost scientifically at the human heart, and then tactfully withdraws, respecting the essential privacy of the individual.” Finally, John Mellors in the Listener began by asserting “Alice Munro, like O’Faolain and Chekhov and, indeed, all the best short-story writers, leaves you with the feeling of having known real people with lives of their own before and after the events described. Nothing seems made up or embroidered.” He also notes that the stories “are all set in Canada, and Munro, while waving no maple leaves, has a strong sense of place and history.”
“Have you thought about what a terrible threat to illiteracy you are?”
Throughout the reviews of Moons, several readers commented that Munro tended, in moments of especial insight, to compose epigrams. Frequently cited was one from “Accident” when Frances describes her correspondence with “old friends from the conservatory”: “They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.” For Munro, her thirties were those “bumbling years” when her older daughters were growing up in West Vancouver and the bookstore had been launched in Victoria. There was Andrea’s arrival. Her marriage’s decline. A first book, finally. A nascent reputation. Leaving Victoria, out on her own. London, Metcalf, Western, Fremlin. Clinton. “Real Life.”
Another moment that attracted reviewers appears in “Hard-Luck Stories,” a story from Moons that also used some of the material left over from the extended “Simon’s Luck.” Derived therefore from the story that might reasonably be characterized as Munro’s first real “passion” story, “Hard-Luck Stories,” like “Simon’s Luck” and “Dulse,” meditates on female-male relations. Like them, it captures a moment in a life when the main character, imperceptibly but unmistakably, shifts into another way of seeing. In such a moment there is a sense of groping toward realization that is never completely grasped nor understood. In draft, “Hard-Luck Stories” was at one point called “A Perfect Story.” The passage that attracted special notice was one that described the narrator’s reaction to a surprise touch she received from Douglas, a man she scarcely knows, as they tour a church with another woman:
I felt that I had been overtaken – stumped by a truth about myself, or at least a fact, that I couldn’t do anything about. A pressure of the hand, with no promise about it, could admonish and comfort me. Something unresolved could become permanent. I could be always bent on knowing, and always in the dark, about
what was important to him, and what was not.
In closing, the narrator envisions the three of them leaving Toronto and running away to Nova Scotia: “Julie and I would work as barmaids. Douglas could set traps for lobsters. Then we could all be happy.”
One of the British reviewers of Moons noticed that ten of its twelve stories look “through the eyes of someone at the halfway mark.” True enough. The somewhat rueful, middle-aged perspective presented in Moons, with apt phrasings like “what you are living is your life” and the wise, wondering, feeling concentration on moments of transformation, revealed Munro creating her most wrenching and evocative stories yet. Each of the two bonanzas McGrath enjoyed at the New Yorker resulted in an especially strong collection and touched off something of a Munro renaissance. The Moons stories gave way to those that made up The Progress of Love, certainly her best collection thus far and, perhaps, her best collection overall. Reading one of its stories one night during the summer of 1984, Virginia Barber made her husband put down his own manuscript and read Munro’s story. They both agreed on its beauty, and as she closed her letter Barber asked, “Have you thought about what a terrible threat to illiteracy you are?”
The reception Moons got outside of Canada confirmed that by 1983 Munro’s reputation abroad was reaching a level equivalent to that she had enjoyed at home since the early 1970s. A Canadian Press story that followed her visit to Boston to read at Bentley College in May showed the folks at home noticing how she was doing. Beginning “Alice Munro’s mind flutters freely, remembering odd places and people – especially bigots and the not-so-good old days,” the story captures Munro and her career just then and here, her subject and problems in Huron County. Nonetheless, it continues, “Peers have ranked her among the finest short-story writers in the English language. But writing is a never-ending struggle, the Canadian author says. Her latest book, The Moons of Jupiter, has won exceptional praise from book reviewers in the United States since it was published in February.” Later, before quoting from several U.S. reviews by “heavy hitters,” it reported that Moons “has sold well in the U.S., considering that the market for short stories is generally limited, a spokesman for Knopf said. Sales have passed the 10,000 mark. ‘For short stories, that is absolutely wonderful,’ the spokesman added.” Knopf has by then taken the book into a fourth printing. Another profile, originally in the Boston Globe but reprinted in Canada, has Munro saying that she is “ ‘surprised to be on the front page of the New York Times’ and that ‘Everyone has been incredibly kind.’ ” Summing her up, the reporter asserts that “she’s no longer obsessed with being a writer of the first rank. She continues to produce stories, writing with many false starts, trashing a great deal of what she’s produced before she gets what she wants.”
Knopf had indeed done much better with Moons than they had with The Beggar Maid. In mid-October Close wrote Munro that she did not think sales would drop below 10,000: “Really in sales and certainly in reviews [it is] a major success. I can hardly wait for the next go round.” By the time Moons went into paperback, Close recalls, sales of the hardback had almost reached 11,000 (of the 12,500 printed). But because Knopf’s intention, with Munro, had been to introduce her work to a U.S. audience as a “writer of distinction,” sales were not their prime concern with either book. Knopf had long been, and continued to be, a literary house committed to her as an author who should be respected and allowed as much as possible to write and publish the way she wanted to. Knopf was, in effect, a book-publishing equivalent of the New Yorker. When The Beggar Maid sold just under 4,000 copies, Close recalls, no one at Knopf was “upset by that sale, or disappointed.” Even though Munro’s $15,000 advance was thought at the time to be quite high for a book of stories, its sale was considered good for a first try. But when Moons sold almost three times as many copies, Close and her colleagues could see that Munro was finding an audience in the United States, one that could certainly grow.16
Virginia Barber’s reaction to the sales of The Beggar Maid is another matter. “Enclosed is the unappetizing royalty statement from Knopf,” she wrote to Munro as she passed it on in August 1980. “Hard to believe how few people read good books.” The March 1981 statement showed royalties earned against the advance of just over $4,000, probably in the range of what Munro was then getting for a single story in the New Yorker. Barber added, “However, do not worry. Your audience here will grow, and you’re getting some offers from paperback houses. We’ll know tomorrow, I expect, whether or not Bantam, Penguin or Pocket Books is the winner. There’s no money for us, alas, as the top offer is $3,500. Still, I want the U.S. paperback, and I’ve worked hard for this. You’ll notice I just sounded my own horn, but it’s more out of frustration than pride.”
Frustrated or not, still worried about various markets, Barber had every reason to “sound her own horn” regarding Munro’s career just then. Whether or not she feared pride, she equally had every reason to be proud of what she done over the previous four years to ensure its progress. From the time she became Munro’s agent, Barber engaged in building Munro’s career in all possible ways. She attracted the attention of the New Yorker and other magazine editors; she arranged book contracts, first with Macmillan and then with Norton and Knopf, and pursued the paperback prospects. She tracked and verified rights questions with an eye always to having them revert to Munro so she could resell them, she kept an eye on royalties, and she fielded whatever offers came in for film rights, translations, or anthologies. These activities came, of course, after she had read Munro’s stories, responded to them, and kept encouraging her author to “Write, girl!”, as she suggested more than once. Tracing Barber’s activities as Munro’s agent – and she was following this same path for several other writers concurrently – one can readily see just why Munro would call Barber her “essential support” in the dedication to the Selected Stories. As a friendship blossomed from their initial business relation, Munro and Barber formed a real partnership.
Bantam was the publisher that won the rights for a mass-market paperback of The Beggar Maid in the United States. Such rights questions are indicative of how publishers work; they contract for the original book and then are able to sell the paperback rights and, under certain circumstances, those rights can in turn be licensed to another publisher for another paperback edition. With books in English, rights are usually for the United Kingdom or North America – Canadian rights either subsumed or excluded depending on point of view or predilection. (During the time of Munro’s first books this was a point of contention between McGraw-Hill New York and McGraw-Hill Ryerson.) Such concerns are a necessary preliminary to an incident that suggests just what Barber was able to do for Munro as her career grew. They confirm just why she needed an agent in the first place.
In September 1982, Barber wrote Munro just after she received Penguin Canada’s paperback offer for Moons:
We are still dancing over Penguin’s offer. Peter Waldock [at Penguin] called to say he was “on Cloud 9” and wanted to buy “all Alice Munro’s books.” He wants to publish a boxed set in Fall, 1984. We’re still trying to straighten out the highly confused rights situation on Lives and on Something. Somebody has licensed U.K. rights on Lives to Penguin and so far, nobody I’ve talked to has been willing to confess. We reverted the rights, you remember. I’ve talked with Ryerson, McGraw N.Y., Penguin, NAL [New American Library] here, Macmillan, the Ryerson agent in Toronto and my English agent – and with some of these, there have been several talks. Just don’t want you to think agents sit back twiddling thumbs. I’ll untangle this knot or else! So far it’s been both infuriating and amusing.
Barber was concerned here for several reasons. The licensing of Lives to Penguin in Great Britain effectively meant that any income from it would flow to the British licence holder, then to McGraw-Hill Ryerson, and only then to Munro, each company taking a portion. The fact was that neither Barber nor Munro had granted permission for the licence. When Barber got farther into it, she discovered
that neither had McGraw-Hill Ryerson granted permission. With regard to Lives and Something in the United States, Barber wanted to terminate any connection between those titles and McGraw-Hill, New York and, also, to terminate licences held on them for mass-market paperbacks by NAL.
Barber’s work reveals something of the network of issues handled by an agent. What she was undoing was a set of arrangements that had failed to address the author’s long-term prospects. Intent on ensuring that Munro’s work stayed in print in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, and was available to other markets in translation, Barber needed to undo arrangements that impeded a single paperback publisher from obtaining rights to the whole of the work. She was successful in this – Penguin now publishes Munro in Canada, Vintage in the United States and Great Britain.
It took Barber a year to sort this out. She had to hire a lawyer on Munro’s behalf, John Diamond, who had worked in publishing and was keen to go after NAL; he ultimately accomplished what Barber asked him to do for less than two thousand dollars. Sending him the relevant materials, Barber summarized her understanding of the situation in a five-page letter supported by two appendices and sixty-four pages of documents. Writing to Munro after she had heard Diamond’s positive assessment of the situation, Barber maintained that his fee constituted “a valid investment for you – it’s hell to spend money to get back your own work, but I believe your books will be in print for many generations to come and the present license situation assures you the smallest possible piece of the financial pie.” As Barber pointed out, Penguin – in both Canada and Great Britain – wanted the titles in question, but she could not sell them the rights as things stood. “You would recoup the two thousand dollars – and more – from those sales alone.”
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