On April 11 McClelland & Stewart agreed to return the advance and split the publisher’s share of the paperback contract, but refused the $80,000 payment, offering $32,150 instead and outlining how they came up with that figure. (Throughout, each side was estimating its real cost for the book versus their assumptions about those of the other; Macmillan assumed a sale of 10,000, while McClelland & Stewart thought 15,000 more realistic.) McKnight found this offer offensive and advocated going to arbitration. In the end Barber, who was handling the negotiations, persuaded Macmillan to accept a $40,000 payment, the return of the advance, and the 50–50 split of paperback monies contingent on Macmillan issuing all press releases. This was agreed to on April 16. There were details to work out, mostly connected to the publication of the paperback, but the agreement was signed and a public announcement made on April 29. The parties did not announce the amount Macmillan received but did say in the press release that it “was arrived at after extensive negotiation”; McKnight was quoted saying “The figure agreed to, plus the return of our advance and a share of the paperback income, made the settlement viable.” Barber was named as the initiator of the deal, and she “stated how delighted Alice Munro was with the professional manner of Macmillan in considering the sale of her contract.” Munro’s reasons for requesting the sale had “nothing to do with Macmillan’s performance as her publisher.”24
Munro’s and Barber’s comments notwithstanding, the immediate public reaction to the news of Munro’s move seemed to confirm McKnight’s concerns regarding Macmillan’s reputation. Writing in the Toronto Star Ken Adachi began his story by asserting that Gibson had “scored a coup by acquiring Canadian publishing rights to the work of Alice Munro from Macmillan.” The Progress of Love would inaugurate Douglas Gibson Books, a personal imprint of about ten books a year published by McClelland & Stewart, and Munro was quoted as saying she was following Gibson “because I have respect for his editorial abilities. But I’m glad there is someone like Doug in Canada.… He cares about books.” Adachi also reported that Hugh MacLennan and W.O. Mitchell, two other authors published by Macmillan, had signed with him. Macmillan, and McKnight’s comments on the sale, were relegated to the end of the story. The Globe and Mail, reporting the same information, did so under the headline “CanLit Luminaries Stick with Gibson.”
Years before Munro encountered this situation, when Moons was just coming together and she needed to start looking for a Canadian publisher, Barber had expressed doubts about trade publishing at Macmillan. Gibson’s own move to McClelland & Stewart, and the decisions of Munro and other well-known authors to follow him, certainly did nothing to help Macmillan’s position. But for Munro, as she eloquently wrote in her letter to McKnight and said to Adachi, it was not about publishing; it was about the making of her books and the preservation of the ongoing relation she had established with Gibson. That she is still with him, five books later, confirms that mutual commitment. Such relations have been a hallmark of Munro’s career.
“I began to be almost a popular writer”: The Progress of Love
Even before the agreement between the publishers was finalized, McClelland & Stewart had set to work producing their edition of The Progress of Love. With Knopf handling the typesetting, the book was already in production in New York. Gibson and his colleagues had to confirm their contract with Munro, coordinate production with Knopf, and plan publicity. The contract was essentially the same one Munro had had with Macmillan (as regards advance and royalties), and McClelland & Stewart was able to offset from the Knopf typesetting, printing in Canada. For the first time, the U.S. and Canadian editions of Munro’s book would be published at effectively the same time, September 15 in the United States and September 20 in Canada – and Munro’s publicity tours dovetailed in September and October. British publication, this time by Chatto & Windus, followed in January 1987.
As the first Douglas Gibson Book and one that came at a propitious moment in its author’s career, The Progress of Love received a considerable publicity push from McClelland & Stewart. Even before its acquisition was announced, in late April, they had arranged for 160 sets of bound galley proofs from Knopf’s printer. These were sent out well in advance of publication and made available to their salespeople. Meanwhile, Gibson had continued with his jacket design, settling on Alex Colville’s Elm Tree at Horton Landing, a recognizable Canadian image (an example of “hyper-realism”) from the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. McClelland & Stewart had arranged an initial press run of 15,000 copies (consistent with the negotiations with Macmillan). In August Penguin bought the paperback rights (for mass market and trade editions) for $50,000. By the end of August Gibson sent finished copies of The Progress of Love to both Munro and Barber. To the author he wrote, “I hope that you are very proud of it. I know that I am.” To her agent, he expressed gratitude for what she did with Macmillan: “I hope that the arrival of the finished book will convince you that all of the hard and imaginative work you did to bring The Progress of Love to Douglas Gibson Books was worthwhile.” McClelland & Stewart launched the book – and so the Douglas Gibson Books imprint – on the evening of September 18 at its new offices on University Avenue in Toronto.
Munro’s publicity tour began on September 16 in Toronto, continued to Montreal and Ottawa through the twenty-fifth, broke for three days, and then continued in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary through October 3. She then got ten days off, before starting again in Windsor and at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront. There she read “The Progress of Love” and, also, was the recipient of the first Marian Engel Award, a $10,000 award given to a female writer by the Writers’ Development Trust for “a distinguished and continuing body of work.” Engel, a friend of Munro’s and in her later years one of Barber’s writers, had died in 1985. Then came the U.S. tour – New York and Washington – before another stint in Ontario, followed by a trip to Halifax. After well over two months of meeting and greeting, the last publicity event on the tour was a reading in Toronto on December 8.
Munro had not lost her aversion to such activity. As preparation for such an extended tour, she and Fremlin took a holiday of their own into the United States, where, among other things, they visited Barber’s hometown in the Blue Ridge region of Virginia. Even so, before the tour was finished, she wrote Metcalf acknowledging the copy of his Adult Entertainment (Macmillan) that she had received: “Awful tour,” she told him. “I won’t do this again even if I have to publish with some little outfit like Laprang-Oolong Press.” Metcalf replied asking for an inscribed copy of Progress. The day after she got home from her third swing through Ontario and the trip to Halifax, Munro sent him a copy and commented, “There is something really sickening about this selling yourself, so why am I doing it? Because it seems so precious and rarified not to?” In the same letter, she added, “I never give away my give-away copies – too scared people won’t like the book, won’t know what to say, etc.” This is a revelatory comment regarding Munro’s own view of her accomplishment. It is one reminiscent of the last glimpse of Frances in “Accident”: “But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.”25 Well-established as Alice Munro, Writer, she was still wondering about all the fuss: Who Do You Think You Are? was a question she continued to ask even then.
Because the Canadian and U.S. editions of Progress were published within a week of one another, the attention the book received was concurrent and mutually affirming. In keeping with the longstanding intimacy of Canada-U.S. cultural relations, the attention Munro got in the United States was watched closely back home. Beverly Slopen, a Toronto-based literary journalist and agent, prepared an advance profile of Munro for Publishers Weekly. While she was doing so, she also wrote in the Toronto Star over a month before the book’s publication, “There are signs that Alice Munro’s sixth collection of short stories … will be her most successful book to date in the U.S.” Similarly, when the Vancouver Sun wanted an adva
nce review of Progress it ran the one that had just been published in the New York Times. Overall, reviews of Progress, especially those published in the United States and Britain, reveal a level of care and consideration befitting a major author of considerable gifts and power.
In a prepublication feature review in Quill &Quire, Patricia Bradbury wrote that “more than ever before, Munro is a social historian, thinking nothing of placing three generations in a tale and removing, like tissued layers, the deep strata in people’s lives. Old houses, like relationships, are sky-lighted or ruined, and underlying every story is a bedrock of stubbornness, a dark lump in the gut, which Munro circles calmly, giving us all we might know while saying it’s never enough.” Most major Canadian papers offered their assessments on the day Progress was published. Robert Stewart, in the Montreal Gazette, oddly condescends to the small towns of southern Ontario, calling Munro’s territory a “sterile landscape.” But when he asks rhetorically why a reader should care about Munro’s “buttoned-up” WASPS, he answered his question with another: “Who cared about the drab existence of the Russian serfs in the works of Chekhov and Turgenev?” In the Globe and Mail, William French savoured the book, noting that Munro – with the exception of “Eskimo,” a story seen by many as below her usual standard – stays in her familiar territory, Huron County, Ontario. He also notes her “dextrous handling of time.… Munro has become even more adept at intercutting past, present, and future.” As had been the case before among Canadian newspaper reviews, the single best one was David Williamson’s in the Winnipeg Free Press. He cited a passage from the American writer Kay Boyle, “a short story should ‘invest a brief sequence of events with reverberating human significance by means of style, selection and ordering of detail,’ ” and agreed with her too that a story should be “at once a parable and a slice of life, at once symbolic and real.” Addressing this conception, Williamson compared Munro to other short story luminaries like Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Peter Taylor, and sounded a note that became a frequent clarion call for Progress: that Munro’s stories seem more like “compressed novels.” Progress is Munro’s “best work yet,” he concluded.
Munro’s handling of time comes in for especial attention, with Heather Henderson in Maclean’s concluding that in her work “the past is not a better place – but is a part of everyone, demanding acknowledgement.” Even though there is evidence of the beginning of another angle of criticism of her work – one reviewer refers to her somewhat snidely as “the darling of Canadian literature” and a CBC panel of literary types discussing the book on Morningside, ignoring her innovative treatment of time, complained that Munro was not doing anything new – the Canadian reviews of Progress are largely summarized by Audrey Andrews’s assertion in the Calgary Herald: “Munro lifts out the essence of reality. That is her art. Reading her work, we recognize ourselves.”26
If Canadian reviewers, who had been responding to Munro’s books for almost twenty years, were by now understandably reaching for other ways to assess her work (“of course her stories are brilliant, but …”), reviewers in the United States and Britain were just hitting their stride with Progress. The Publishers Weekly advance review on July 4 set the tone: Munro “brings to each story a freshness of vision, a breadth of sympathy and a wide-ranging imagination that makes her work both unpredictable and scrupulously true.… One senses Munro’s conviction that human nature is mysterious and wonderful. Her stories are magically captivating. They will stand the test of time.” Slopen’s Publishers Weekly profile appeared in August. She asserted of Munro that “few people writing today can bring a character, a mood or a scene to life with such economy. And she has an exhilarating ability to make the reader see the familiar and ordinary with fresh insight and compassion.” Slopen also quoted Munro on her preferred form: “I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand. The novel has to have a coherence which I don’t see any more in the lives around me.”
Michiko Kakutani, in the New York Times, offered this conclusion: “Drawing upon her seemingly infinite reserves of sympathy,” Munro offers “pictures of life, of relationships, of love, glimpsed from a succession of mirrors and frames – pictures that possess both the pain and immediacy of life and the clear, hard radiance of art.” Paul Gray, in Time, began his notice by asserting that Munro “continues to buck the genre’s fashionable trend toward miniaturization and microplots. Her characters stubbornly refuse to trudge through brief but nonetheless tedious interludes.” Gray was one of a number of careful, thoughtful reviewers who sought to get at just why Munro’s stories have the effects they have, why her vision is both different, and better, from that of other writers. Citing “White Dump” as an example, Gray wrote that “the major event” in the story’s action, “the decision years earlier of the first wife to run away, evolves almost glancingly into a stunning finale.”
Following this same line, two reviews of Progress by other writers are among the sharpest, most considered, and persuasive. Joyce Carol Oates, writing in the New York Times Book Review, began by comparing Munro to Peter Taylor, William Trevor, and Edna O’Brien and holds that, like them, she “writes stories that have the density – moral, emotional, sometimes historical – of other writers’ novels.” Oates got to the heart of just what Munro has been working toward throughout her entire career:
As remote from the techniques and ambitions of what is currently known as “minimalist” fiction as it is possible to get and still inhabit the same genre, these writers give us fictitious worlds that are mimetic paradigms of utterly real worlds yet are fictions, composed with so assured an art that it might be mistaken for artlessness. They give voice to the voices of their regions, filtering the natural rhythms of speech through a more refined (but not obtrusively refined) writerly speech. They are faithful to the contours of local legend, tall tales, anecdotes, family reminiscences; their material is nearly always realistic – “Realism” being that convention among competing others that swept all before it in the mid and late 19th century – and their characters behave, generally, like real people. That is, they surprise us at every turn, without violating probability. They so resemble ourselves that reading about them, at times, is emotionally risky. Esthetically experimental literature, while evoking our admiration, rarely moves us in the way this sort of literature moves us.
Oates placed Munro’s writing generally, and Progress specifically, in this intellectual and aesthetic context. She “has concentrated on short fiction that explores the lives of fairly undistinguished men and women – but particularly women – who live in rural Ontario.… The most powerful of the 11 stories collected in ‘The Progress of Love’ take on bluntly and without sentiment the themes of mortality, self-delusion, puzzlement over the inexplicable ways of fate.” Oates cited “A Queer Streak,” “White Dump,” and especially “The Progress of Love” as the volume’s strongest stories but, sharp critic that she is, also argued that more than the two collections preceding it, The Progress of Love “does contain less fully realized stories.” She cites “Eskimo” as one that “reads like an early draft of a typically rich, layered, provocative Munro story,” and sees the two parts of “Miles City, Montana” as insufficiently integrated, connected by their “rather forced epiphany.” But even the weaker stories offer “passages of genuinely inspired prose and yield the solid pleasures of a three-dimensional world that has been respectfully, if not always lovingly, recorded.” Thematically, Oates summarizes The Progress of Love as “a volume of unflinching honesty, uncompromising in its dissection of the ways we deceive ourselves in the name of love; the bleakness of its vision is enriched by the author’s exquisite eye and ear for detail. Life is heartbreak, but it is also uncharted moments of kindness and reconciliation.”
Novelist Anne Tyler, wri
ting in the New Republic, offered another thorough and resonant assessment. “Once in these stories,” she wrote, “you really are inside them; you have a vivid sense of the world that’s being described.” Tyler also sought to place The Progress of Love within the context of Munro’s evolving art: “The characters in the earlier collections were traveling along the distinct, deeply grooved tracks of their life stories, and it was the tracks themselves that provided the focus.” She cited Rose’s story in Who as an instance of this, and maintained that “in The Progress of Love, the focus has changed. The characters in these 11 stories are concerned not so much with the journey as with the journey’s hidden meaning – how to view the journey, how to make sense of it.” Tyler also notes Munro’s method in “Miles City, Montana,” but she praises Munro’s handling of Steve Gauley’s drowning, “the juxtaposed event … dealt out to the reader so artfully.” Holding the anger the narrator felt years ago – stemming from Gauley’s funeral and focused on all adults, including her parents, though excluding the boy’s father – until the story’s end after her own child’s near drowning, Munro achieves much more: “This narrative restraint sets up a tension beyond anything the plot alone could evoke. We’re pulled along not just by What happened? But also by Why did she feel that way? And What is the significance?” Tyler then examines “The Progress of Love,” “which may be the richest in the collection,” to demonstrate just what she means.
This same sort of considered analysis characterized the best of the British reviews. Claire Tomalin, in the Observer (she had also reviewed Lives there), offers a detailed perspective on Munro and her work. Reviewing the ending of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Tomalin commented that as Munro “has grown older, her power to unravel a whole tangle of family history has grown stronger and surer, and this latest collection her best yet. Munro is as much a regional writer as Walter Scott or Mauriac, which is to say she broods closely over her chosen territory, discovering richness in what many would be tempted to dismiss as dull and barren.” Like most critics, Tomalin singles out the title story asserting that “when critics call Munro Proustian (as they do) they may be pointing to this virtuoso grasp of a time-span as well as her skill in deploying single physical details – a scrap of wallpaper, a blurred snapshot – as emblems of feeling.” Munro, Tomalin concluded, “is never going to write a blockbuster, thank goodness. Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell slowly: they are made to last.”
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