When he wanted to know just how Munro’s Selected Stories came together, John Updike in the New York Times Book Review made a fair point. Judging by Vintage’s swift addition of an Introduction to the paperback, others found it compelling too. One wonders if Munro herself did, though. Once, when granting Helen Hoy permission to quote from her letters, Munro wrote, “I wish I could tell you that more goes into the work than the flippant and casual or serious and evasive, explanations and dodges that the author voices in letters and interviews, and I wish with all my heart the finished work could be let alone, to stand by itself, but I know this is not possible. So you have my permission.” Munro certainly has been consistent to this credo. While she has agreed to be interviewed numerous times, talking amiably, volubly, and thoughtfully about pretty much whatever an interviewer chooses to ask, she has never written a critical explanation of her work as a writer on her own. Such pieces have always been at another’s request.
Introducing her Selected Stories, Munro’s piece is revelatory, precise, and, given its subject and the timing, summative. She seems to bridle a bit at what has been asked of her, beginning her second paragraph with “Some clarifying statements about my work are requested by others” and later, “I am forced, in writing this introduction.…” As she told Hoy, such statements do not interest her, she does not believe them, she has little faith in their utility. Even so, as she makes clear in the introduction, what does interest her are images that she understands as “beginnings or essentials” to her work. Munro highlights one such image, one she saw from the window of the Wingham library when she was about fifteen: “Snow falling straight down.… A team of horses, pulling a sleigh, was moving onto the scales. The sleigh was piled high with sacks of grain.” This image, one she “never wrote a story about,” is one she tried to use in “Spaceships Have Landed” – it appeared in the Paris Review version of the story as something Rhea remembered seeing but was taken out of the Open Secrets version. And in that earlier guise Rhea’s recollection of the image is connected to Janet’s vision of her hometown in the fictional version of “Working for a Living.” That is, when her college-educated imagination recasts the town into a version of Winesburg, Ohio or something from the stories of Chekhov. None of this – Munro makes clear in her somewhat truculent introduction – is a matter of conscious planning for her:
The only choice I make is to write about what interests me in a way that interests me, that gives me pleasure. It may not look like pleasure, because the difficulties can make me morose and distracted, but that’s what it is – the pleasure of telling the story I mean to tell as wholly as I can tell it, of finding out in fact what that story is, by working around the different ways of telling it.
Looking back at the image of the man, horses, and sleigh she saw in 1946 or 1947, Munro wrote that she saw the image as “alive and potent, and it gave me something like a blow to the chest. What does this mean, what can be discovered about it, what is the rest of the story? The man and the horse are not symbolic or picturesque, they are moving through a story which is hidden, and now, for a moment, carelessly revealed. How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn’t get hold of it at all.”
What these descriptions suggest about their author’s intuitive aesthetic is that, for her, a story is and always has been an organic, living thing. Thus after she recounts the “beginnings or essentials” in some of the stories included in her Selected Stories, Munro speaks of the time when a story exists in first draft, “has put on rough but adequate clothes” and may need nothing more than “tightening here and expanding there,” or other such adjustment. “It’s then, in fact, that the story is in greatest danger of losing its life, of appearing so hopelessly misbegotten that my only relief comes from abandoning it.” She does still give up, though not so often as she did in her early days – her papers in Calgary testify to this with abandonment after abandonment, page after page, start after start. As she concludes her introduction, Munro seems to be fulfilling her own assessment of her working methods by avoiding an ending here, shifting uncharacteristically to a quotation from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which he writes, “The most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into.” This continues on and on until, finally, we reach an ending to the quotation, and so to her introduction, after a suitably extended eighteenth-century sentence. But the wondering continues: What is the rest of the story?
The boat still floating on the Maitland/Peregrine River in 1951 closes “The Love of a Good Woman” but remains there, beckoning to the reader certainly, but most especially to its author herself. What is “the rest of the story” along the Maitland River, that place where “everything is touchable and mysterious.” Still both touchable and most emphatically very mysterious, the landscapes of Alice Munro’s stories from the 1990s are quite recognizable but also frightening. As Lesser said in her review of Open Secrets, Munro was not primarily “remembering, but guessing or imagining.” The stories she produced during the decade were at once risky, strange, and familiarly rooted in Huron County. Roger Angell wrote after he had just read “The Children Stay” in manuscript: “She’s onto truth, I think, and that’s why she can write this way, with daring and calm, and absolute pitch.”15
“But She’s Not in a Class with Most Other People”
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, the New Yorker’s Munro Triptych, Runaway
I chart a course which is called a career and expect to make progress in it. I know what I am up to. Short stories, yes. Novels, no. I accept that rural folk are never sophisticated and sophisticates are never rural, and I make my choice. Also I keep an eye on feminism and Canada and try to figure out my duty to both.
– “Introduction,” Selected Stories
And it has worked out in some way.
– Peter Gzowski Interview, 2001
Writing “Home” in 1973 Alice Munro concluded on this brief paragraph: “I don’t want any more effects, I tell you, lying. I don’t know what I want. I want to do this with honour, if I possibly can.” As with the wry caricature of herself as a writer she offered at the beginning of the introduction to Selected Stories, here too Munro was concerned about the difference between the ways others see her writing and how that same work feels to her, how she sees it. Munro’s desire to write in a way that both honours her subject and treats it honestly (“I don’t want any more effects, I tell you, lying”) has been a constant throughout her life and work. In “Home,” describing her father and stepmother living in the home she grew up in, Munro’s desire for an honest balance in that deeply autobiographical narrative was especially acute. (Tellingly, Munro omitted almost all of these analytical comments when she revised “Home” for The View from Castle Rock; she was seeking a less strained honesty.) Writing honestly and with honour without effects was then, has been, and remains Alice Munro’s intention, and she has achieved it beyond any argument. Acknowledging just this quality in Munro’s work after her reviews of Selected Stories and The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt dropped Munro’s name into another book review in 2000: “One of the best tributes I know to the art of Willa Cather is the work of Alice Munro, who has learned to depict whole lives from a distance in the same strangely unworked-up and unaccented way, while also making it entirely new, as her landscape and moeurs are new.”
When Munro accepted her first Giller Prize in 1998 – on television, since the award ceremony was on the Bravo cable network – she made special mention of Robert Weaver, who was “the reason I kept writing all those years.” “The Giller caps a distinguished career in Canadian letters,” the reporter for the Toronto Star opined, continuing that the award “has quickly become the country’s pre-eminent fiction prize.” Certainly that was true about the prize then, and now, but the notion of that first Giller “capping” Munro’s career proved delightfully wrong. When The Love of a Good W
oman appeared in fall 1998, Munro read that October and claimed it would be her last public reading, indicating she was winding down. But she collected her first Giller and just kept right on writing. Six years later the same reporter, writing about Munro’s appearance as one of the six 2004 Giller nominees closing the twenty-fifth Harbourfront International Festival of Authors, began by reminding readers that Munro had said that 1998 appearance would be her last. Ten days later, Munro made another appearance in Toronto and accepted her second Giller for Runaway, the second book since her “last” last public reading in 1998. Receiving the award, Munro told the audience – which now included a national CBC-TV audience – about selling books in Victoria in the 1960s.1
Here is Alice Munro in November 2004: harkening back amid the Giller gala to the years when only Robert Weaver and her family knew she was a writer. The years she spent sitting alone in the evenings at Munro’s Books on Yates Street, looking out, thinking about “the rest of the story” when she was not talking to people who had ventured into the store. People who would tell her that they made a point of never reading a Canadian book. Or people, as Munro wrote in “The Albanian Virgin,” who “would browse for half an hour, an hour, before spending seventy-five cents.” Talking to Peter Gzowski in September 2001 about her treatment of sexual attraction in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage – in the stories “Nettles” and “What Is Remembered” – Munro spoke of
fantasies that never come true, but do come true in a way and are misrepresented, and how we need those dreams to live by. So I’m still very interested in that sort of thing. I say “still” in that way because I’m very aware of my advanced age and the propriety it should bring or the calm it should bring and I’m always surprised that I don’t feel very different. Ever. You’re the same person at nineteen that you are at thirty-nine that you are at sixty that you go on being in a way.
They continued to talk, and Gzowski asked Munro about her thinking on death. She replied that she thought of death with more fear when she was forty than she does now. “I don’t have that feeling any more that death will snatch me off before I’ve done what I could do.” In the midst of this answer, Munro offers what amounts to something of a personal summary:
And also, I think in some ways – not in all ways but in some ways – I’m very satisfied and grateful for my life because I’ve done the work I’ve wanted to do. Not that I’ve done all of it or that I’ve done it as well as I would have liked to have done, but I’ve done what I could do. It was hard for me to see in the beginning how I would ever do that. In fact, I thought it more or less impossible. And this wasn’t just because I was a woman of a certain generation, and a certain form of life to fulfill, it was just that I thought it’s too hard and it will never work out in any way at all. And it has worked out in some way. And for that I am so astonished and pleased.
After Munro received her first Giller Prize for The Love of a Good Woman in 1998, awards and award nominations kept up their steady pace. In early 2001, she received the $30,000 Rea Award for Lifetime Achievement (among previous winners were Richard Ford and, appropriately, Cynthia Ozick and Eudora Welty). Hateship was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, it was selected one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, it was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2002 Torgi Literary Award in the category of CNIB-Produced Fiction, and it won the third Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award and was the winner in the Caribbean-Canada region for the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In November 2001, just as Hateship was being published, Munro was feted at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, where she received the O. Henry Award for Continuing Achievement in Short Fiction. There, Munro gave a talk, “Stories,” which was still on the Knopf website. On Munro’s seventh-first birthday the Alice Munro Literary Garden was dedicated in Wingham. Her name has been mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize.
Enjoying all of this to some real extent, though not exactly revelling in it, Munro kept living the life she has lived, back and forth from Clinton to Comox. In March 2001 Munro had to miss a planned dinner with Gibson in Comox to talk about the publishing details of Hateship because she ended up in the local emergency room, where they had a brief meeting. A heart problem for which she had been operated on previously flared up again, so she required further surgery in Toronto in October. While she was waiting, Munro worked on older pieces, such as “Home,” “Working for a Living,” and “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry” – they yet may reappear in print. Her author’s copies of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage arrived in Clinton on August 21 but, as of the next day, she had not opened the parcel. (“I was just terribly lacking in confidence. I still am. My new book came yesterday and I hid it.”) One of her daughters, visiting, threatened to stage a public reading unless her mother had a look.2
The New Yorker and Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage
Once The Love of a Good Woman was completed Munro kept writing, producing stories at a regular rate, sending them on to Barber, who sent them on to the New Yorker, which usually bought them. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the second story destined for Hateship (“Queenie” having been held out of Love), appeared in the New Yorker in December 1999, “Nettles” in February 2000. Alice Quinn was Munro’s editor for these, as she had been since Buford had found the space for “The Love of a Good Woman.” After “Nettles,” Quinn continued to edit Munro through “Floating Bridge,” “Post and Beam,” “What Is Remembered,” and “Family Furnishings.” At that point, also the magazine’s poetry editor and having other work to do, Quinn cut back on her editing of fiction. Deborah Treisman, who had joined the New Yorker as deputy editor of fiction in 1997, became Munro’s editor for “Comfort” and has been since. When Buford left the fiction department in October 2002, Treisman succeeded him as fiction editor. Born in England of academic parents, Treisman grew up in Vancouver and attended the University of California at Berkeley; before joining the magazine, she worked in publishing in Vancouver and New York, where she was managing editor of Grand Street.
Little archival evidence has been found revealing Menaker’s and Quinn’s approaches to Munro’s stories as they moved from manuscript to publication, but those that reveal Treisman’s work show it as quite consistent with McGrath’s during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Like his, her comments are always couched as suggestions and, throughout the proofs and letters she wrote to Munro, Treisman explains her rationale in each instance. While they worked together, initially, Buford was a superior presence in the process. Just as Quinn said, his proofs show him to be more intrusively directing. In his set of proofs for “Post and Beam,” for example, Buford writes a message directly to Munro, telling her the story is great but that the fix she had done for the beginning has not worked. Also, he did not like using two names beginning with “l,” Lionel and Lorna. Throughout, he points out issues and probes weak spots, asking questions about characters and their actions. As the New Yorker has always done, Buford combines many of Munro’s short paragraphs into longer ones. It fell to Treisman to handle all this, working with Munro to incorporate changes – in her letters, she indicates that they are almost done, although more suggestions from Buford might still appear and need to be dealt with. Getting ready to close “Family Furnishings” in early July 2001, for example, Treisman reports that she has not got Buford’s comments; writing on the ninth, she jokes that he may let Munro be, since it is her birthday. Her proof shows that she has gone over the story with Munro on the telephone; most of her proposed changes are checked as agreeable to Munro, others crossed out as not.
While some cuts remained a fact of life at the New Yorker, there is no evidence of difficulties of the sort surrounding “The Children Stay.” That acknowledged, Treisman knows she has a particular problem with Munro, who is now writing stories that are quite long. Any story is competing against all the non-fiction for space in the magazin
e, and since most writers working there write non-fiction, Treisman essentially has to negotiate space for longer stories; she has said that after she runs one of Munro’s stories she has to “atone” by following it with a succession of shorter ones. Even so, there are exceptions. The New Yorker looked at “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” but passed on it largely because of its length; it first appeared in the book. So too “Powers” in Runaway. “Hateship” is over fifty pages, “Powers” over sixty. There was just no way, Treisman said about “Powers.”
When Treisman was appointed fiction editor she was quoted as saying her goal was “to publish the best fiction out there” and as she has done that Munro’s has loomed large, perhaps even the largest. In June 2004 Treisman and her colleagues took the radical step of running three Munro stories – “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence,” over thirty thousand words in all – in their summer fiction issue. This just after they had run “Passion” in March and “Runaway” the previous August. The magazine had run more than one story by the same author in a single issue before, but only once or twice. What this confirms, and in a way far more compelling than Tina Brown’s glitzy “buzz”-fiction party in 1994, is Munro’s position as a New Yorker writer. Speaking of Munro since she herself arrived at the magazine in 1997, Treisman has said that “the understanding has always been that we’re going to take the story,” although they always ask for changes toward improvement. “But she’s not in a class with most other people.” Recognizing this, Treisman continued: “But it’s not about political stature in the literary world, it’s about the quality of the writing. I didn’t appreciate until I started editing her just how intricately she constructs a story. Reading them, something from page three will come and hit you on page thirty, but you had not registered the matter when you first read page three. When you’re editing, and you might think, ‘Oh that line is sort of odd there; maybe it doesn’t need to be there.’ But you get five pages on and you realize exactly why that line is there. Then you appreciate it.”
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