Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  In 1985 Penguin Canada prevailed upon Munro to write an introduction for its second edition of Moons. There she begins, “I find it very hard to talk about, or look at – let alone read – any work of mine, after it is published, shut away in its book. Part of this is simple misgiving. Couldn’t I have done it better, make the words serve me better?” There is a sense of separation from published work, she continues: “It’s a queasiness, an unwillingness to look or examine. I try to master this, feeling that it’s primitive and childish.… Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” She then writes about the relation between “The Moons of Jupiter” and her father’s death, explaining the gestation of “The Turkey Season” (which grew out of her early attempts to use her own summer 1950 experience as a waitress at Milford Manor, previously attempted in “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, connected to her father’s experience running a turkey barn), and tells when some of the others were written. Munro concludes saying that she has “to make an effort, now, to remember what’s in these stories.… I make them with such energy and devotion and secret pains, and then I wiggle out and leave them, to harden and settle in their place[.] I feel free.”

  Like the stories in Moons, those destined for Progress seemed to have a different, deeper quality. This same sense pervaded each successive collection, but it might be noted especially in The Progress of Love, Open Secrets, and Runaway. Each stands apart as a transforming collection – one in which it feels that the work has become deeper and denser – although the title story of The Love of a Good Woman and its “My Mother’s Dream” probably ought to be added to any such list. While other stories in Progress certainly might be taken up to illustrate the quality here, such as “Lichen” or “White Dump,” the two stories that seem to best exemplify just how Munro was writing during her second bonanza are “Miles City, Montana” and “The Progress of Love.” The reaction they got, certainly, was most immediate and effusive.

  Both “Miles City, Montana” and “Progress of Love,” each drafted in the same notebook and finished about this same time, are stories close to Munro’s own life. The near-drowning incident at the centre of the first is virtually memoir, the four family members who were there remembering it as narrated. Munro and her father rescuing turkeys from drowning is a memory too, but Steve Gauley, his drowning, and his funeral were imagined, though Munro recalls knowing boys who later drowned. “The Progress of Love” draws on the lives of her great-grandmother, her grandmother, and her mother while Phemie (or Fame), its narrator, includes elements of Munro herself. She is given some of Munro’s own memories, certainly, but Fame is also a character offering what might have become of Munro herself had she never got away from Wingham. The narrator’s perspective, like Munro’s, is that of a middle-aged native. All this admitted, Munro is nevertheless right about these two stories: “not one is as close [to her life] as people seem to think.” This is so because of Munro’s “energy and devotion and secret pains” – they transform whatever had been remembered, whatever is “real,” into the different reality that is the story’s world. The story, an artifice, is able to affect its readers on its own terms by way of the words she arranges, those words that she thinks never serve her well enough.

  “Miles City, Montana” and “The Progress of Love” demonstrate just how Munro’s writing during this time began in actual experiences but then, through her art, became something considerably more than experience transcribed. “Miles City” seems to have begun when Munro was working on “The Beggar Maid” during 1976–77; a draft of the Miles City incident includes a courtship for the narrator and her husband Hugh similar to Rose and Patrick’s. About this time too there was also the draft story, “Shoebox Babies,” which Munro worked on during the late 1970s but never published and which drew from the circumstances of Catherine Munro’s birth and death in July 1955. It moved into a notebook draft called just “Miles City,” which contains a fairly complete rendering of the near-drowning episode and the family’s trip; but rather than just the recollected dead deer the family saw when playing “I Spy” in the finished story, the older daughter recalls Elizabeth, the baby who died. This draft also includes the image of the drowned Steve Gauley being carried by the narrator’s father, although it appears just at the story’s end where it is connected to the narrator’s misgivings about their vulnerability. Its narrator is explicitly Munro herself in 1961: “During those years I was trying to be a writer. I could say that I was trying to write – short stories, and, once, a novel – but it would be more accurate to say that I was trying to be a writer, because I felt as if I had to assemble distant parts of myself and hold them together, before I could start the actual writing. This was my job – this assembling – and it was a tricky business.” Neither version includes the narrator and her father saving turkeys from drowning, an experience in the finished story that confirms the narrator’s role as daughter and allows her to appreciate his hard-working way of life.

  Munro’s own “assembling” of “Miles City, Montana” was indeed a tricky business. It takes her memoir – the near-drowning and its circumstances – and marries it to the imagined drowning and funeral of Steve Gauley. Human helplessness in the face of death, and her parents’ attitudes toward it, are felt as the narrator and Andrew talk in the aftermath. It is then she imagines what it would have been like if Meg had not been saved. “Who is ready to be a father, a mother, who is fit?” the narrator asks in the draft, just before she shifts back to Steve Gauley’s drowning and his funeral, asking the central unanswerable question of “Miles City, Montana.” And though Munro omitted any direct reference to Catherine Munro’s death in the final version, it is felt on the page, created there in Munro’s sensed and mediated human vulnerability.

  So while it is possible to see Jenny Munro’s near-drowning in 1961 in Miles City, Montana, at the centre of the story, to insist on that incident’s recounting as the story’s core misses the point of any fiction, and of Munro’s in particular. What she creates on the page is the feeling of being, the feeling of authentic experience captured through words. This writing has a kind of purity when it works – as it most certainly does in “Miles City, Montana” and in “The Progress of Love.” Yet any created purity is not just in the story’s details, since those may be grafted on from anywhere (the swimming pool in Miles City, Montana, for example, was not a swimming pool but a man-made body called Scanlon Lake). Their connection to Munro’s own life, while real, is secondary to anyone reading a story that emerges from such connections. For Munro, and for her readers too, the significance of any autobiographical connection comes back to the image of Cynthia and Meg, still in their back seat, still headed to Ontario, still expecting to return home to Vancouver: “So we went on, with the two in the back seat trusting us, because of no choice, and we ourselves trusting to be forgiven, in time, for everything that had first to be seen and condemned by those children: whatever was flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous – all our natural, and particular, mistakes.”

  There is a deeply felt but unarticulated wisdom in this ending, just as there is at the end of “The Progress of Love” where Munro invokes the circumstances of “those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.” This story, probably the one Munro described to an Australian journalist as a novel-in-progress “tracing three generations of women,” did grow from the circumstances of her maternal ancestors, but it is much less overtly autobiographical than “Miles City.” Essentially, Phemie’s recollection that is the story examines the way her mother and her grandmother lived their lives, a recollection brought on by the news of her mother’s death. In the wake of “Working for a Living,” a memoir that is in some ways an analysis of her parents’ marriage, “The Progress of Love” fictionalizes the same sort of analysis and pushes it back another generation through Phemie’s grandmother’s threatened hangin
g. That act, while a real one, did not happen in Munro’s family, nor did the other central event, the mother’s burning of the money inherited from her father. Yet Bertha Stanley Chamney’s religiosity was real, as her resentment toward her own father likely was. Thus here Munro may again be seen “assembling” materials, some that happened, some that she knows from her own experience, some that she has read or heard about, and some that she imagined. “I make them with such energy and devotion and secret pains,” Munro wrote. Once they are published, “I wiggle out and leave them, to harden and settle in their place.” There they are, asking crucial questions such as what is true about the image Phemie holds in her mind of her mother burning the inherited money as rejection of her father (“That’s a lot of hate,” Phemie’s friend Bob Marks comments). Imagining that scene, Phemie describes it: “And my father, standing by, seems not just to be permitting her to do this but to be protecting her. A solemn scene, but not crazy.” Even though Phemie realizes, once the story’s action is over, that this scene could never have happened, she still sees it as true and emblematic of her parents’ relation. Munro phrased this same mystery in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field”: “Taking the mystery of his life with him.” So Munro knows, and so she writes: “some kind of purity” indeed.22

  “The Progress of Love,” like “Miles City, Montana” and many of Munro’s most successful stories, had a long gestation; elements of the story connect to pre-Lives material and to “Places at Home.” As was her practice, Munro kept revising it. She sent Gibson a second “final” version, which she called “a new, finally final, third person version.” McGrath expressed surprise at receiving a new version (probably the same one she sent Gibson) in September 1985 since “it seemed just about perfect to me the way it was – but the new version is even better.” She had shifted it into the third person, which was the way it appeared in the New Yorker, but she then returned it to the first person in the book version. Looking at the third-person version for the first time, Close could not decide on a preference since first she “felt that you had lost an emotional edge” through the shift, but “putting Phemie in the third person places the mother’s story in greater relief.” She continued, “Ginger hasn’t read the third person version yet. What does Chip McGrath think? Or Doug Gibson? Or, most important, you?” In this letter, too, Close expressed her hope that Munro comes around to the view (held by Gibson and Close) that the book should be called The Progress of Love. What such a response confirms is that by the mid-1980s Munro’s editors and agent were all of a single mind, responding, encouraging, and working in the same direction. An apt illustration of their attitudes was Barber’s when she reported to Alice the reaction at the New Yorker to “Miles City, Montana”: “What a book these stories are going to make!” she exclaimed. “Sending out your stories gives us so much pleasure that I feel like sending thank you notes.”

  In July 1985 Barber sent the still-untitled collection to Gibson at Macmillan, noting that they would not be able to publish before August 1986 because the New Yorker still had to publish four stories. She sent it to Knopf at the same time. Once her boss Robert Gottlieb returned from a trip, Close wrote, “we can try to put a price on the priceless.” This manuscript included ten of the eleven stories in Progress (“Circle of Prayer” was not finished, but was added in late August). As the book was proceeding toward publication, revisions of “The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink,” “Circle of Prayer,” and “Jessie and Meribeth” were added.

  By early August Gibson had drafted a contract for “The Progress of Love (and other stories)” and was getting the approvals necessary to send it to Barber. They needed to negotiate various points – and Gibson had to satisfy her on various royalty-reporting questions – before it went in mid-September. After further negotiations and another draft, the contract was completed by December 2. Munro was to receive a $25,000 advance and royalties beginning at 10 per cent and increasing to 15 per cent after 10,000 copies; on the paperback, she got 8 per cent until 40,000 copies, 10 per cent thereafter. Macmillan then set to work designing the book. Both the Canadian firm and Knopf wanted an internal design they both could use without adaptation, and Gibson wanted to continue the magic realism look of the previous two dust jackets. Munro was doubtful about this latter point; her daughter Jenny, an artist, was to make an attempt at an image of an old barn with a rainbow on it as one possibility, and Gibson envisioned a similar sort of photographic image.23

  Ironically, Macmillan never published the book. When Munro sent along a “final, final page” for “Circle of Prayer” in late November, she wrote expressing sympathy for Gibson’s situation at Macmillan, indicating she knew that there were problems. There had been changes at the top, and as a result Gibson decided to look elsewhere. In February he resigned in order to move to McClelland & Stewart, where he been promised his own imprint, Douglas Gibson Books. Learning of this, Munro indicated her desire to move The Progress of Love from Macmillan to McClelland & Stewart as the first book published under the new imprint.

  So Progress proved to be. Understandably Macmillan took a very dim view of this prospect since they had a contract, the book was in production (both in Toronto and New York), and especially since it involved a very valuable author. The dispute and the resultant negotiations lasted from February to April; the Macmillan executives well knew that Munro had sold over 12,000 copies of Moons and had brought the firm a record $45,000 from Penguin for the Canadian paperback rights. Early on, Linda McKnight, the new executive vice-president and publisher, wrote a detailed memo to the file assessing the situation at each level (production, marketing and sales, damage to Macmillan) and concluded that Gibson was not needed to produce a quality book and that the repayment of the $12,500 advance already received would in no way adequately compensate the firm for the loss of Munro and her book. If Macmillan were to accede to the request, more compensation would be needed. In any case, McKnight was not prepared to agree to it.

  On February 28, McKnight met with Barber in New York to discuss the situation. McKnight wrote a summary of the meeting, beginning with Barber’s explicit support of Gibson, whom Munro saw as “the best editor in the world,” and continuing: “You stated your client’s position very firmly, and suggested that while there were no legal grounds for contract termination, you felt moral-suasion held great force in this situation, and that no publisher should force an author unhappy with a contract.” McKnight’s argument was as follows: Macmillan understood that Gibson would publish Munro’s subsequent books, but as for Progress, Macmillan had performed well in the past and was concerned about the effect of Munro’s move on its reputation; the book was in production in New York (where most of the editorial work had been done) so Gibson was not needed in that regard. In effect, the financial blow to Macmillan would be great. McKnight closed by suggesting that they travel to Clinton to meet with Munro. Replying to McKnight on March 14, Barber said her memory of their meeting differed a bit but, in any case, McKnight should have received Munro’s letter by then, and “I don’t see how you can deny her after you’ve read it, and I’m hoping you will then agree to promptly put through termination papers. Because Alice’s request to be released is based on her desire to continue her successful partnership with Doug Gibson, you know surely that we will express openly and privately our gratitude to Macmillan and our satisfaction with your publishing program.”

  Munro’s letter clearly states her wish to be let out of the contract with Macmillan, but it is more interesting for the view it offers of her own career:

  Doug first talked to me about publishing with Macmillan in the mid-seventies. I was very discouraged at that time. Ryerson had done nothing to promote or even distribute my first book. McGraw-Hill Ryerson had published the second with expressed reluctance and the third without enthusiasm – merely, I believe, to keep a Canadian fiction writer on their list. Every publisher I had met had assured me that I would have to grow up and write novels before I could be ta
ken seriously as a writer. No one in Canada had shown the least interest in taking on a writer who was going to turn out book after book of short stories. The result of this is that I wasted much time and effort trying to turn myself into a novelist, and had become so depressed that I was unable to write at all. Doug changed that. He was absolutely the first person in Canadian publishing who made me feel that there was no need to apologize for being a short story writer, and that a book of short stories could be published and promoted as major fiction. This was a fairly revolutionary notion, at the time. It was this support that enabled me to go on working, when I had been totally uncertain about my future.

  I came to Macmillan because of Doug, and his respect for my work changed me from a minor, “literary” writer who sold poorly into a major writer who sold well. I hope that you will understand how I have felt, from that time on, that I owe him a great deal, and that I want him to have charge of any book I publish. I am not making a judgement against Macmillan – my relations in the house have always been good – but for Doug Gibson.

  I realize that I do not have a legal right to move this book, but I hope that my very strong feelings about publishing with Doug will influence you to let me go.

  They did not. On April 2 McKnight wrote again to Barber announcing Macmillan’s decision not to let Munro and The Progress of Love go.

  Viewed as a minor episode in publishing history, things got really interesting at this point. Barber called McKnight and asked what it would take to buy Macmillan out. Macmillan replied that it wanted the $12,500 advance, $80,000, and half of the publisher’s share of the paperback. Armed with this offer, Gibson wrote Avie Bennett and Peter Waldock, his colleagues at McClelland & Stewart, that his “inclination here is to make a good offer that makes sense from our point of view, and ask Ginger to make it clear that if they turn it down, the fact that they did so is likely to come out.” Then Macmillan would be seen holding Munro against her will and having turned down an offer that would have been straight profit to them. They would look bad, even silly.