Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Also taking a long view was Patricia Craig in the Sunday Times. Craig began by quoting from “An Ounce of Cure” from Dance and also by applying Munro’s words to “Material” and “The Ottawa Valley” in Something: “The snapshot method, in the hands of an author like Alice Munro, is among the subtlest and most illuminating of techniques.” Describing the new collection and seeing it as a more complex extension of what Munro has already done, Craig concluded: “Alice Munro’s imagination is set going by the particulars of local life – gossip, reminiscence, family landmarks. There’s a phrase in the current collection which describes the concerns of all of them: ‘the stories, and griefs, the old puzzles you can’t resist or solve.’ ” In the Times Literary Supplement, Anne Duchêne reflected on Munro’s still-growing reputation in Great Britain: “No newcomer, then; yet this accomplished writer – so serious, careful and full of sardonic good humour – remains curiously under-celebrated.”27

  Beyond reviews, there were numerous other signs of the large success of The Progress of Love. It was named the main selection for November by the Book-of-the-Month Club in Canada (Mordecai Richler wrote its description for club members) and, in the United States, Knopf was giving it a quite visible push: they ran a three-column ad placed next to the table of contents in the October 19 New York Times Book Review and also advertised in the New Yorker. Munro’s U.S. publicity tour the next week attracted considerable media attention and, in December, The Progress of Love was selected by the New York Times as one of the best works of fiction for 1986 (books by Margaret Atwood, John le Carré, and John Updike were also chosen). McClelland & Stewart went through another printing after the initial run proved insufficient; by the spring they were reporting sales (and royalties) to Munro based on 19,690 copies sold (its total sales in Canada, including the book club, would be almost 32,000). By then, too, the book was announced as being a finalist for the 1986 Governor General’s Award for fiction. Among the other finalists, ironically, was John Metcalf’s Adult Entertainment. But Progress won; Munro received her third Governor General’s Award on May 27.

  While all this was in process David Macfarlane met with Munro for his December 1986 profile for Saturday Night. There he asserted that Progress was the “best collection of short stories – the most confident and, at the same time, the most adventurous – ever written by a Canadian.” Here is his final image of the author:

  In a few weeks’ time she will be interviewed by The Paris Review, placing her among many of the writers – Hemingway, Faulkner, Forster, Welty – that she read so avidly when she was a young girl growing up, as someone once put it, on the wrong side of the tracks in Wingham. Now, at a point in time called middle age, she wonders if any of this is relevant to her and to her work. “I was terribly surprised when I began to be almost a popular writer,” she says. “Because I never thought that this would happen. All this acceptance comes as rather a shock to someone so well schooled in surviving without it.”

  To “be almost a popular writer.” Once The Progress of Love was published, there was nothing tentative about Munro’s situation, not in Canada certainly and, with that book, nowhere else in the English-reading world either. As Tomalin wrote in the Observer, Munro was never going to write a blockbuster, but with The Progress of Love she had garnered readers and respect much more than sufficient.28

  The level of acceptance that surprised Munro had been growing through the 1980s. For example, in January 1986 and even before Progress hit the bookstores, Munro was an “honored guest,” along with Robertson Davies and Mavis Gallant, at the 48th Congress of PEN International in New York. Like the Writers’ Union, PEN is an organization Munro has supported throughout her career, contributing to it personally and reading at its fundraisers. But during the latter half of the 1980s Munro’s reputation and position achieved a level that it has sustained since. If Richler’s sardonic phrase “World Famous in Canada” had been applied to Munro when she was being interviewed by Harry Boyle in August 1974, it would have been accurate; by the late 1980s it was no longer valid. Judging by the success of Progress and the ongoing translation of Munro’s works into other languages, “world famous” worked just fine, at least in literary circles.29

  “Countless, Vivid Shocks of Recognition Between Reader and Writer”: Friend of My Youth

  While all this was happening, Munro wrote on quietly in Clinton. “I write as I always have,” she told a journalist doing a profile for Maclean’s at the time of Friend of My Youth. “I sit in a corner of the chesterfield and stare at the wall, and I keep getting it, and getting it, and when I’ve got it enough in my mind, I start to write. And then, of course, I don’t really have it at all.” About this time, too, Munro was quoted saying, “I write about where I am in life.” Just where she was continued changing as Munro herself grew older. Changes in perspective, the ability to encompass shifts in time, the capturing of a whole sense of a long life could come alive in a very few pages. And she did write as she always had, spending long periods of time thinking before writing in longhand, and after that moving to the typewriter or, since the late 1990s, the word processor.

  In March 1985 Munro sent a remarkable letter to John Metcalf – remarkable for its reflection of herself and the way her mind works. She was writing while travelling “On-the-Bus-Between-Mitchell-and-Stratford … to Toronto to do a Journal interview about Bob Weaver.… Will I wear earrings? I don’t know yet.” She then wrote that she would look around for some nice ones, which will have to be “screw-on or clip-on because I once had my ears pierced but they aren’t anymore.… Do you have to know all this? I guess not. Earrings will keep me from thinking what twaddle I’m going to say.”

  Bob Weaver had been asked to take early retirement, so the CBC news magazine, The Journal, was interviewing her for that occasion. The image of Munro on the bus is interesting. Not mechanically inclined, she has never learned to drive, despite attempts by her father, Jim Munro, and Gerry Fremlin to teach her. So the bus and the train have been her usual conveyances about Ontario. Later in the letter, Munro updates Metcalf on two of her daughters. “I think my kids are in a time warp,” she reported.

  There’s a lovely new lot of snow here. (This is between Stratford and Kitchener.) I met a woman I used to go to school with in the Stratford Depot. She looked like a nice, brisk, grandmother. Grey coat, little hat, United Church Woman. I thought, I bet she has a nice life. I really did think that. I thought about what she’d have in her overnight bag (blue flowered nightie, The Far Pavilions). I am getting an awful interest in that kind of thing. I bet you think this is a bad sign.

  Three years later Munro wrote Metcalf again, this time commenting that she had “been reading a lot about Albania and all the countries that went into Yugoslavia, because there is a story of a Clinton librarian being captured – c. 1900 – by ‘bandits in Albania’.” These two letters, in effect, bookend The Progress of Love. Each looks to changes in Munro’s writing already evident in that book – where a middle-aged point of view has come to dominate. It would become clearer still in Friend of My Youth and Open Secrets. The second letter reveals the bases of the research Munro did for “The Albanian Virgin” and, perhaps too in the librarian’s situation in Clinton, for the story “Carried Away.”

  The same Maclean’s profile in which Munro’s writing methods are described quoted Daniel Menaker at the New Yorker, who characterized her as “a kind of trailblazer, structurally and aesthetically.… Along with her characters, [Munro] has gone through a very painful and disciplined examination of self.” By that time Menaker had been Munro’s New Yorker editor for two years. At the end of 1987, after McGrath had handled the submission of Munro’s first four post-Progress stories to the magazine, Menaker had taken her over as one of his authors; as deputy editor, McGrath had taken on other responsibilities. Amid some controversy, Robert Gottlieb had left Knopf in February 1987 to become editor of the New Yorker. During 1987 McGrath bought “Oh, What Avails” and “Meneseteung” while returning “P
ictures of the Ice” and “Five Points.” A revised version of the latter story, bought early in 1988, was the first Munro story Menaker edited. By the summer of 1989, Menaker had handled his own Munro “bonanza,” her third at the magazine. They had seen seven more stories and bought all but one.

  Friend of My Youth, made up of these stories, was published in spring 1990. Menaker’s phrasing, “a very painful and disciplined examination of the self,” captures just what Munro was still undertaking in that collection. Two stories in particular, “Meneseteung” and “Friend of My Youth,” have drawn the greatest attention. For good reason. Friend of My Youth is dedicated “To the Memory of My Mother” and, as in most of Munro’s previous books, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw is a presence in one story and so in the collection as a whole. Unlike “The Ottawa Valley,” which closes Something on the note of Munro’s inability to fictionalize and so “get rid” of her very real historical mother, Friend of My Youth opens with the title story examining, in a “painful and disciplined” way, what Munro calls the mother’s “welcome turnaround, this reprieve.” This is the image of the still-living mother, often dreamed by her daughter, which opens the story. There, the narrator would dream of her mother “looking quite well – not entirely untouched by the paralyzing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death, but so much better than I remembered that I would be astonished.” This transformation effects a change as the story nears its end. Her mother, transformed in her dream, “changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom – something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy.” Still working with the memory of her mother, in “Friend of My Youth” Munro moves well beyond the transcription of facts recalled. The story is based on her mother, and presumably on her own dreams, yet there is much more there besides. Munro had Chamney relatives who divided their house in ways similar to Flora and to Robert and Ellie, but the information about the Cameronians she got from a friend, who had known some of this sect in the Ottawa Valley. Using this information, grafting it on to her own mother’s story to make “Friend of My Youth,” the logic is the story’s own. Like Frost’s description of a poem, it rides on its own melting.30

  “Meneseteung” does the same thing. Historical prototypes for nineteenth-century small-town southwestern Ontario poets existed, and Munro acknowledged her awareness of the two most likely ones when her story was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 1989. These were Clinton’s Clara Mountcastle and Goderich’s Eloise A. Skimings, who was known as “The Poetess of Lake Huron.” Of the two, Mountcastle is the better known, having published books of verse and other material in the 1880s and 1890s; in 1904, Skimings published a collection of poems entitled Golden Leaves. Even so, Almeda Joynt Roth is Munro’s own creation. Characteristically, she roots the poet’s circumstances in Wingham and so in details close to her own history: one of the predecessors of the Advance-Times was the Gorrie Vidette, the name used in the story. When Munro was a child, there was a schoolteacher in Wingham named Joynt. She also creates a first-person narrator analogous to herself as the author of Roth’s story. This narrator, for reasons of her own, is attempting to understand the record left by Roth, “just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” When Munro submitted “Meneseteung” to the New Yorker, the ending after “rubbish” read: “I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.” This was cut for magazine publication but, characteristically, Munro considered restoring the original ending. She asked Close what she thought, and revised it so it became “And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”

  In some ways a classic short story – focused on a key moment in Roth’s life, contextualized in terms of that life – “Meneseteung” offers Huron County as home place within a longer, and through the first-person narrator more deeply considered, historical perspective. But the remarkable part of the story occurs after the “dead body” that Almeda finds outside her house on a Sunday morning proves merely to be a dishevelled woman, drunk, sleeping it off on the ground. Jarvis Poulter, her neighbour, the person she calls upon to investigate the “body,” and a possible husband for her, goes home afterwards having announced his intention to walk her to church, a sign of serious wooing. Still disoriented from the “nerve medicine” (laudanum) she had taken the night before, Almeda makes tea and takes “more medicine,” even though she knows it is affecting her perceptions. The grape jelly she had begun making the day before is overflowing (“Plop, plup, into the basin beneath”); feeling hot from both the summer weather and from her impending menstrual flow, Almeda is presented in a rapt, though disoriented, state of mind. Then Munro focuses on her character’s art: “Almeda in her observations cannot escape words.” Poems. “Isn’t that the idea – one very great poem that will contain everything and, oh, that will make all the other poems she has written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags?” She “has to think of so many things at once”:

  All this can be borne only if it is channelled into a poem, and the word “channelled” is appropriate, because the name of the poem will be – it is – “The Meneseteung.” The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem – with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees and its grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter and its desolating spring floods. Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she sees the crocheted roses floating. They look bunchy and foolish, her mother’s crocheted roses – they don’t look much like real flowers. But their effort, their floating independence, their pleasure in their silly selves do seem to her so admirable. A hopeful sign. Meneseteung.

  Munro’s creation of Almeda’s medicated state of mind here could bear extended analysis, but precise as they are, her literary effects are of less interest in a biography than her method. She has gone back here to “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious,” having Almeda Joynt Roth peering deep into the Meneseteung/Maitland River flowing by Munro’s own home place – literally and imaginatively. Like her author, the character is peering deep into the river seeking greater clarity, understanding. For Roth, this is such a moment imagined: “A hopeful sign.” Or, as Munro phrased it in “Circle of Prayer,” “What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life – what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?” In both stories, but especially in “Meneseteung” and in ways new to her work, she was pushing deeper, deeper in time, and deeper into the accumulated detail of history, of her own cultural inheritance: “just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.”31

  With Friend of My Youth Munro finally renounced book tours for good. Informing his colleagues at McClelland & Stewart of her resolve, Gibson wrote that she “sturdily repeats her refusal to tour to promote this book,” but she had agreed to do four or five engagements “that will be of greatest benefit to the book.” He reminded them that “despite being a reluctant promoter, [Munro] is a very good interviewee, and an excellent reader.” In making publicity plans, he continued, they needed to accommodate her schedule since she planned to spend the first three months of 1990 living in Melrose, Scotland, just south of Edinburgh. She had visited there before, but this time she wanted a longer stay at a time “when it wouldn’t be so touristy,” she explained to a reporter, “to get a chance to know the place, settle down in it a bit.” Late in March she flew to Boston for a reading and the Knopf launch. She followed up with appearances in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. In Canada, the strategy was to have some of the events in the spring near to the book’s publication. Thus Munro read at Harbourfront on May 3 with Irving Layton, W.O. Mitchell, Al Purdy, and Veronica Tennant. During the crucial fall season, s
he read at a similar event to encourage sales.

  Gibson and Munro agreed on another realist cover image, Mary Pratt’s Wedding Dress, for the book’s dust jacket. He had to scramble a bit to secure it, since it had been promised to Magdalene Redekop, who had written a critical study on Alice Munro. Generously, Redekop was more than willing to forfeit her claim in favour of Munro. Having secured book-club orders of 13,000 copies, McClelland & Stewart had over 36,000 copies printed. Friend of My Youth was published in late March in the United States and April 21 in Canada. Though of different sizes, both were set and printed in the United States. Chatto & Windus brought out the British edition on October 15. Sales in Canada were immediately strong; indeed, on June 6 Gibson reported to an editor at Chatto & Windus that, including book clubs, they had sold almost 27,000 copies; ultimately sales in Canada settled at about 34,000 copies.32

  By this point promotional efforts aided sales but were not driving them. McClelland & Stewart’s initial ad in the Globe and Mail quoted from Bharati Mukherjee’s front-page review from the March 18 New York Times Books Review: “I want to list every story in this collection as my favorite.” They might also have quoted her assertion that Munro is “fast becoming – like Raymond Carver – one of the world’s great totemic writers, able to excite recognition even among readers who grew up in times and societies very different from hers.” Each of Munro’s stories, Mukherjee also wrote, “is a marvel of construction, containing within it parallel narratives of inquiry and retrospection.” Malcolm Jones, Jr., the reviewer in Newsweek, observed that it is easy “to make Alice Munro’s stories sound as interesting as a trip to the dentist,” but what they are about misses the point. They are “quiet, complicated, revealing themselves” slowly. Munro herself is “wickedly funny,” and her sentences “are always perfectly cadenced, and almost epigrammatically beautiful.” She is a “rarity, an author unafraid to write about people as intelligent as she is” – these people, like their creator, are truly interested in “the interior, speculative life.”