In keeping with such recognition of stature, in early 1995 work began on a volume of Selected Stories. The desirability of such a book had been growing for some time and was, as well, indicative of Munro’s differing levels of reputation in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Barber had been approached with the same idea in 1984 by Penguin Canada but, passing it along to Munro, commented that she expected Knopf would think it too soon. They apparently did. But by March 1995 the idea was being pressed from outside Canada. Writing to Gibson then, Barber reported to him on Munro’s trip to London to receive the W.H. Smith Award and went on to tell him that she had received an offer for the Selected Stories from Knopf and so was “ready to go ahead in Canada.” Given Munro’s publishing history in Canada, she and Barber needed to get permission to reprint – and so pay fees for – stories originally published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson and by Macmillan, so a selected volume was a bit more complicated there.
At the same time and also because of Munro’s longer history, the selected volume that Barber, Close, and Alison Samuel, the British editor at Chatto & Windus, were working toward was not exactly suited to the Canadian market. While it was certainly of great appeal to Gibson as a trade book, he knew it might not yield the paperback version of Munro’s stories he and his house wanted. Since he joined McClelland & Stewart Gibson had wanted to see a selected Munro in its New Canadian Library paperback series aimed at high school and university classes. Once he had come to terms on the Selected Stories with Barber, Gibson wrote Munro, “What delights us especially here is that this book affords us the prospect of being able to bring it, in two volumes, into the New Canadian Library.” Although that was his hope, Munro’s reputation both at home and abroad – and so her most suitable form for paperback publication once the trade version of Selected Stories had run its course – dictated otherwise, and in due course the large trade paperback Selected Stories was published in Canada by Penguin. No selected Munro would join the New Canadian Library until 2003 when an entirely different selection, still large but not of the extent of Selected Stories, was published for Canada only under the title No Love Lost. This particular need in the Canadian market, a niche, is indicative of the Selected Stories’ larger context: the need for a large selection of Munro’s stories was far greater in the United States and, perhaps especially, in Great Britain. These places had effectively missed Munro’s first book publication, so the reprise Selected Stories would appeal to readers who had discovered her work during the 1980s or early 1990s. Given Munro’s longer-running reputation in Canada, that need was less pressing at home.
While Munro was willing to have a volume of stories selected, she was not especially keen on doing the selecting herself. After talking the matter over with her, Gibson wrote to Barber that “she has been convinced that it is a good idea but welcomes assistance in selecting the best stories.” He continued to express his willingness to help in the selection, and that of David Staines, general editor of the New Canadian Library. A list of thirty-one possible stories was drawn up at Chatto & Windus and, in early December 1995, everyone (Munro, her three editors plus Barber and Staines) had their say. Staines, writing to Gibson, argued in favour of including something from Lives so as to not give the impression that it is a novel and, in much the same fashion, he also argued against including all the title stories, since that would seem to lend to them an extra importance. The first argument was unsuccessful and the second only barely persuasive: “Who Do You Think You Are?” and “Open Secrets” were the last stories omitted, and then mostly for reasons of space. “The Beggar Maid” was included.
While Munro had the final say, her participation in the decisions was limited. She left home in September for six months in Ireland – she planned to live in a cottage, Carrigrise, “on the edge of a village called Carrigadrohid, on the River Lee, in County Cork,” as she later wrote. The group did not want Open Secrets to be overrepresented, in view of its recent publication, so Close, who took the lead as the book went into the initial stages of production, talked to Munro about dropping both “Open Secrets” and “A Wilderness Station.” By mid-February she was reporting to the others that Munro had agreed to cut the first but wanted to keep the second, suggesting dropping either “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” or “Who Do You Think You Are?” instead. She and Close ultimately decided on the latter. This left them with a collection of twenty-nine stories (though “Chaddeleys and Flemings” was treated as one story, so it looks like twenty-eight) that ran to 560 pages. Selected Stories was published in a larger 6.25″ by 9.25″ format by both McClelland & Stewart and Knopf; they both used the Knopf setting but printed separately. Chatto & Windus produced their own version of just twenty-three stories, but published on November 7, virtually the same time as McClelland & Stewart (October 19) and Knopf (October also, with 40,000 as a first printing). In addition to its regular trade edition, Knopf produced a number signed by Munro and packaged in a slipcase.8
Munro’s out-of-the-way location during the book’s manufacture handicapped her involvement, but there is no evidence that she was much involved beyond the selection of stories and approval of the photographs used in connection with the book. It was set from photocopied pages of first publication and, while copy-editing and other textual changes were kept to a minimum, it is probably not surprising that there were more changes – beyond the wholesale shift to American spellings throughout – in the earlier stories. Some changes were substantive, though most were not; some, too, were dictated by the demands of design (some of the “silent” space breaks were omitted, for example). Munro did not read galleys of the book and, throughout the material in the Calgary archives there is no evidence her direct involvement. Of the twenty-nine stories Selected Stories includes, four are from Dance, three from Something, four from Who / Beggar Maid, six (though it looks like five) from Moons, five from Progress, three from Friend, and four from Open Secrets. Some of the ordering is changed from the first publication. Finally, and tellingly, the Selected Stories was published without any explanation of the basis of selection, any identification of who made the selection. Neither was there an author’s introduction.
The copy Gibson wrote for the McClelland & Stewart catalogue defines just how Munro’s Selected Stories was offered: “A literary event. A generous selection of stories drawn from Alice Munro’s seven collections spanning almost 30 years. A volume that will give enormous pleasure while it confirms Munro’s place in the very front ranks of today’s writers of fiction.” In his Editor’s Note used inside the publishing house to describe the book, Gibson also wrote that “this volume is both a tribute to [Munro] and a demonstration how richly that tribute is deserved.” Contextually, too, Munro’s Selected Stories was being published as a Douglas Gibson Book on the same fall 1996 list as Mavis Gallant’s Selected Stories – they were added to that list through the same memorandum. This coincidence led to inevitable comparisons of Canada’s two leading practitioners of the short story, both of whom had made much of their reputation through the pages of the New Yorker.
Each writer was seen differently at home, however. Writing one of the first reviews to appear in Canada in Quill & Quire, Bert Archer treated the two books together and clearly preferred Gallant’s stories. Of Munro, he wrote that in Canada she “is the better known and more widely read, concentrating as she does on our own stories, on characters and situations often so familiar that our lives and her stories mesh, her writing becomes part of the fabric of our memories.” Writing that Gallant’s “prose makes us forget that a misstep is even possible, Munro, from time to time, stumbles. Her sentences are written, rather than crafted, are often a little rough, probably intentionally, like her characters, like her world.” Although he admits that there is “a simplicity, an honesty [in this,] what there is not is transcendence” as there is in Gallant’s stories. He concludes “that there is likely no reading person in this country who would like neither. These two careers spread out before us like monumen
ts.” The co-publication of these two books “is the biggest publishing event we’re likely to see for decades.”
Archer’s point that these two careers are “monuments in the making” was reinforced by most of the reviews, which focused on the shape of her career, the qualities of her prose, the ways her stories have attracted and kept readers. The review in Newsweek by Malcolm Jones, Jr. – his third there – is more profile than review since he had recently met Munro in Toronto; still, assessing her as a great writer who “just keeps getting better,” Jones makes the case that, as the piece’s subtitle declares, the “unassuming Alice Munro has quietly emerged as one of our greatest living writers.”
Two reviews in particular, A.S. Byatt’s in the Globe and Mail and John Updike’s in the New York Times Book Review, are of special interest both because of who wrote them and because of what they have to say. Byatt’s opening paragraphs grab her reader sharply:
Alice Munro is a great short story writer. She is the equal of Chekhov and de Maupassant and the Flaubert of the Trois Contes, as innovatory and illuminating as they are. My discovery of her work has changed the way I think about short fiction, and the way I write, over the last decade or so.
Her stories are Canadian, rooted in a particular part of the earth and a particular society, full of precise details that make her world so lively that the foreign reader has the illusion of knowing exactly how those people and places were and are. (There are many good local writers who cannot perform this transfiguration.) She is a writer’s writer – I come back again and again to the felicity of particular sentences, particular narrative twists – but anyone could read her and recognize something, and then be shocked by the unexpected.
Byatt’s sense of Munro’s work and its details of method, technique, and effect make her review singular among those Munro has ever received. The author of Possession continues, asserting that “even at the beginning of her career she almost never wrote a conventional ‘well-made story’; her tales concern episodes, reversals, revelations, but they are always concerned to contain everything, a whole life and quite a lot of what is behind it, in the short space.” Noting changes over time, the “increasing versatility” with which Munro handles “point of view and the eyes from which the story looks out,” Byatt ends by focusing on Munro’s passing mention of Cather in “Carried Away” and her treatment of the other writer as “a riddling object of contemplation in ‘Dulse’ ”: “I would guess that Munro has learned something about the shocking, the paradox of the formed in the formless, from that other local writer who transcended her local preoccupations without betraying them. But she really is unique; there is no one quite like her.”
Updike offers much the same sort of review: summarizing Munro’s “recognizable heroine” through the stories read chronologically in the Selected Stories, he writes that she is likeable but “neither virtuous nor a victim; what she is is vital.” Stepping back from the stories themselves, Updike maintains that they “in their freedom of range, their intricately arranged surprises and their historical imagination, are like few others.” He sends readers back to pieces by Tolstoy and Chekhov; of contemporaries, “only the Mark Helprin of ‘A Dove of the East’ comes to mind.” As he might, Updike noted delicious bits along the way, writing at one point that “in one of the sternest of many stern asides, she has a character reflect that ‘love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way.’ ” Summing Munro up, he asserts that she “is an implacable destiny spinner, whose authorial voice breaks into her fiction like that of a God who can no longer bear to keep quiet.”
But if Byatt’s review is singular by its first paragraph’s, Updike’s is made so by its last:
While not every story brought me equal illumination and delight, my main reservation about Selected Stories is the book itself. No preface or foreword offers to tell us who selected these stories, or why. All of them have been published in handier, pleasanter formats in previous collections, of which the most recent, Open Secrets, came out just two years ago. The purpose of Selected Stories, one can only surmise, is to elicit homage such as I have just rendered; the book may widen Ms. Munro’s admiring American audience, but to her oeuvre it adds precisely nothing.
While Byatt’s and Updike’s reviews stand out among those the Selected Stories received, other reviewers made comments well worth noting too. Dennis Duffy in Books in Canada sidesteps Updike’s complaints as to the authority of selection and maintains that Munro was here “offering her readers a cyclical way of reading her work” and in “her selections [she] has pruned … a suite from each of her collections. Each successive suite builds upon what has gone before, as subjects, themes, and stylistic motifs recur, often in a more complex fashion.” The effect of this, Duffy writes, is that the Selected Stories “takes on that monumentality that we have always sensed in Munro’s fiction, but which is now unmistakably apparent.” He then continues to demonstrate his meaning by comparing the selections from Who and Open Secrets; while the comparison is a bit forced at times, there is no questioning that this volume puts stories in new relation to one another, creating new meanings.
Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Adam Mars-Jones saw Munro’s Selected Stories as perhaps a book to “re-establish the reputation of a writer whose time has been felt to have come and gone,” citing Cheever’s collected stories as such an instance and writing that Munro “has never been in fashion.… Is she doomed to remain (terrible accolade) a writer’s writer?” Mars-Jones notes in an apt phrase that “there are signs from some of her most characteristic sentences that she actively chooses not to be a comic writer.” This is true enough, but his best observation comes in response to a passage in “Lichen”: “In passages like this, Munro’s eye and ear, her heart and mind, move beyond the categories of forgiving and unforgiving. The tides of richness and bleakness in her writing pass through each other without making a ripple.” James Wood, another British reviewer writing in the London Review of Books, sees Munro as being like V.S. Pritchett, writing that like him, “Alice Munro is such a good writer that nobody bothers anymore to judge her goodness.… Her reputation is like a good address.” Like Pritchett’s stories too, “Munro’s are fat with community: her characters steal their lean solitude from the thickness that surrounds them.” He also notes that “tiny seeds of comedy lie hidden in the folds of every story in this collection.” Noting the ill mother in “Images,” unaware of the specifics of Munro’s own mother or of Munro’s own history, Woods nevertheless infers just what she creates in those stories connected to Anne Chamney Laidlaw: “This mother, who recurs throughout the book, may not be an autobiographical ghost. Seen so tenderly yet so comically, betraying herself in the act of protecting herself, she can, however, be seen as the spirit of these stories.”
As with the comparison to Gallant, John Banville in the New York Review of Books treats Selected Stories alongside William Trevor’s After Rain. He sees the two together in producing short stories “subtle and rich,” “heartening and heart-rending.” More largely, Banville sees the survival of the short story as a form – one “largely untouched by modernism” – as demonstrating “the tenacity of its practitioners.” Connecting both writers to the New Yorker (since half of Trevor’s stories first appeared there and just over half of Munro’s), he sees that magazine as playing a crucial role in keeping the short story alive and well. When looking at the ending of “Friend of My Youth” and connecting it to Trevor’s title story, “After Rain,” Banville maintains that in each the knowledge the writer achieves, the sense the reader gets, is “delicate, luminous, and moving.”9
Updike’s caustic comments at the end of his otherwise laudatory review seem to have had a telling effect, and rather quickly. In early January 1997 Gibson reported to his colleagues that he had “just learned that in the U.S. they plan to launch a Vintage paperback edition – complete with an all-new Introduction by Alice – in November 1997.”
This offered McClell
and & Stewart both a problem and an opportunity as they sold their Selected Stories. Details of their own paperback, ultimately licensed to Penguin Canada for five years, had not yet been worked out. They hoped to hold off that paperback so as to get a second Christmas season for Munro’s book, so the publication of the Vintage edition in the United States before then was a problem. McClelland & Stewart took the steps necessary to keep copies of the Vintage edition out of Canada, avoiding what is called a “buy around,” whereby Canadian bookstores damage the sales of a Canadian hardcover by smuggling in a foreign (usually U.S.) paperback edition of the same book despite the fact that it is not licensed for sale in Canada.
Munro’s forthcoming introduction for the Vintage paperback offered an opportunity because, as Gibson wrote in the same memorandum, they could use it for marketing the Selected Stories, “perhaps as an eight-page handout for stores to give away with the book.” As he had expected, the book had done well enough in Canada but, owing to Munro’s longer history of reputation there, its sales were not overwhelming; by the end of 1997 the publisher still had almost 10,000 of its original 25,440 print run on hand. In view of these circumstances, they took two steps. First, in their negotiations with Penguin Canada over the subsidiary rights, McClelland & Stewart insisted that the Canadian paperback edition would not be shipped to stores before January 1, 1998, ensuring a second Christmas sale of the hardcover Selected Stories. Second, they decided to offer a nine-dollar rebate on the book from December 10 to January 2 and, in concert with this, Gibson set about producing “Alice Munro: A Tribute,” a “sixteen-page pre-Christmas ‘Tribute’ to accompany Selected Stories as a free hand-out.”
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