Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  In the New Republic Ruth Franklin begins wondering just why Munro is undervalued. She cites a reviewer who “just came out and said what we were all thinking: ‘Alice Munro should write a novel.’ ” Franklin then takes up Munro’s introduction to her Selected Stories and examines the rationale Munro offers there for why she writes short stories – that when she was a young mother in Vancouver and Victoria, extended blocks of time were just not possible. Franklin is sceptical, and she remains so throughout her review, in which she moves carefully and precisely through the stories in Hateship. At one point, just before she takes up “Family Furnishings,” Franklin writes, “I hope that this will not be true, but there is an elegiac mood to this book that makes it feel as if it might be Munro’s last.” The reviewer notices how Munro’s characters have aged with her and that, as well, “several of the stories [here] read as answers to stories that Munro has written before.” “Family Furnishings” is just such a story, looking at “the purpose of her art, the justification for it.” Working her way through the narrator’s story, her history and her relations with Alfrida both as a child and later, when she saw her one time when she lived in the same town while attending university, Franklin focuses on the narrator’s key realization: “ ‘More like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories’ – we are back with the teenaged Munro, looking out the window at the horses on the scale, at the image that reveals the story that falls into place around it. And here it is not something to be fit in between diaper changes, but ‘the work I wanted to do.’ The short story has been chosen after all.”

  It is probably worth noting that the Yale Review allowed Michael Ravitch ten pages to consider Hateship at considerable length. There he begins, “The modest airs of Alice Munro’s short stories slyly conceal their extraordinary amplitude.” Placing her work within the contexts of the twentieth-century short story, citing Hemingway, noting realism and other trends, Ravitch asserts that Munro “embraces all that her contemporaries repudiated: exposition and analysis, plot and character. She writes about very specific places … and invites history back into fiction, with all its messy complications. Her characters are far from rootless; in fact, they tend to feel burdened by attachments they cannot easily shed. They live in an old world, a world in which memory is still more powerful than forgetting, a world full of unusual and vivid stories.” Ravitch continues to make specific points within his generalities, including “Leaving home, in one form or another, is the perpetual drama for Munro” and “no matter how far they travel, [her characters] can never free themselves of the spell of family.” Citing “What Is Remembered,” Ravitch asserts that “Munro writes about sexuality with more lyrical intensity than any writer since D.H. Lawrence.” He ultimately concludes that “Munro is ironic to the point of nihilism. No rapture survives her scrutiny, no certainty earns her confidence,” and she has an “almost inhuman acceptance [which] may be key to her immense imaginative powers: armed with her wise humor, she is equal to whatever shall happen.”

  Reviews from Great Britain offer many of the same judgements though, again, less extensively. The anonymous reviewer in the Economist maintains that the “greatest pleasure of reading Ms Munro, though, is the prose itself: unaffected, modest, quietly elegant.… She is one of the most accomplished and downright exhilarating writers working today. Her human understanding is acute.” Lisa Allardice in the New Statesman notes that although “Munro flirts with melodrama, the undertone of grim humour is unmistakable: an atheist’s long-suffering widow finds comfort in the arms of an undertaker; the terminally ill wife of a sanctimonious social worker kisses a young thug, and a woman with Alzheimer’s rekindles romance with an old flame.… There is nothing ordinary about Alice Munro’s writing.” Writing in the London Review of Books, Benjamin Markovits notes that Hateship “reads like a book, which is all the more remarkable given the variety of narrators, and narrative styles, it employs: from the traditional device of the title-story … to the seemingly undoctored memories of ‘Family Furnishings.’ ” John McGahern in the Times Literary Supplement asserts that Munro “has an imaginative boldness.” He too takes up “the rich and surefooted ‘Family Furnishings’ ” and concludes with this estimation: “Everything is true and breathtakingly sure and is as good as Alice Munro has ever written, which is to say that it is written as well as anybody who has written in her time, and with her own uniqueness.”4

  “The Most Wonderful Walks You Can Imagine”: The Alice Munro Literary Garden, No Love Lost

  Following her first Giller Prize in November 1998, Munro continued to receive public attention. Some of this was caused by the success of Love, some by the Giller (and Gibson’s ongoing public irritation with the Governor General’s Award committee for failing to even shortlist the book), but most was just in genuine recognition of the power and reach of her writing. At home, Maclean’s included her in its Honour Roll for 1998 with a brief profile featuring a photo of Munro standing by the shore of Lake Huron: “ ‘I love the landscape here,’ she says. ‘We go for long walks; they’re the most wonderful walks you can imagine.’ ” She is also quoted as remembering someone in her family, not her husband, who supported her writing, saying when she was about thirty-one, “It’s time you recognized your limitations and quit this,” her writing. “But somehow I just had to ignore that and go on.”

  Another article that appeared in December 1998 was a long reminiscent piece in the Wingham Advance-Times by Margaret Stapleton called “Alice Munro – Friend of Our Youth.” Drawing on the memories and photographs of people who remembered Alice Laidlaw growing up in Wingham, Stapleton offers a hometown view of the town’s now most famous native. As this suggests too, Stapleton’s article reveals a considerable contrast in attitude from the early 1980s, when Munro, and her depiction of Wingham with its Lower Town section, met with public disapproval by many there. With the passing of time, far fewer Wingham-based references in the writing, and Munro’s vastly increased reputation in the literary world at home and abroad, things had changed between Munro and her hometown. The time was ripe for Wingham to more formally recognize Munro’s importance. As Ross and Carol Hamilton wrote to the Advance-Times in response to Stapleton’s article, “We who knew her and all those who live in her hometown cannot but feel a glow of pride in her accomplishments.” Very clearly a consensus was growing.

  The North Huron District Museum, along with the Advance-Times, began to work at collecting Munro-connected items for display. At the same time, the Wingham and District Horticultural Society, which was planning on erecting new signs along the roads leading into Wingham, was encouraged to add “Proud Hometown of Alice Munro” to the signs. This culminated after some time in the creation of the Alice Munro Literary Garden. The project was spearheaded by Verna Steffler, chair of the horticultural society, and Ross Procter, a local farmer, who served as the financial chair of the project; he had attended school with Munro. Steffler and Procter raised considerable funds for the garden locally, holding occasions referred to as “A.M. in the P.M.” These were get-togethers at Procter’s house. Munro would attend and give a little talk, and Procter would make a quiet pitch. With local support and a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, work on the garden began in April 2002 and was completed for the dedication on July 10, Munro’s seventy-first birthday.

  Since he had seen Stapleton’s article in late 1998, Gibson had been aware that things were happening in Wingham. Once the garden materialized, he was keen to help by inviting appropriate literary people to the dedication and by attending himself. Almost five hundred people were there on a beautiful summer day, Munro was resplendent in a hat given her by daughter Jenny and goddaughter Rebecca, and the press was out in force. Munro’s picture was on the front page the next day of both the Globe and Mail and the National Post, and the Star ran its story on the dedication under the witty, and apt, headline “Jubilation in Jubilee.” Gibson and Barber spoke, as did David Staines, editor of the New Canadian Library, and Jane Urquhart
, novelist and friend. At the local theatre each read from a favourite Munro story and talked about their associations with Alice, after which Munro read from one of her stories. A garden luncheon followed on the lawn. Among the contributors listed in the program was Munro’s Books.

  Avie Bennett, chairman and publisher of McClelland & Stewart and a good friend of Munro’s, spoke at the earlier dedication at the sunlit garden and was quoted saying “Alice is one of the finest writers this country has ever known. She is also notorious for saying no to public attention. It is a frustrating business trying to give Alice Munro the attention she deserves.… How did Wingham manage to succeed where so many have failed?” Barber, who made her first trip to Wingham for the occasion, said this in her remarks:

  I’ve known Alice Munro for many years and have seen her hesitations about her own work, her many revisions, her modesty and humility if you wish. She works on several stories at once, maybe putting two aside to look at later and grappling with the third on a particular day. She often sends me three stories at once, and on one occasion she called me in advance to say, “I’m giving a dinner party tonight, and I’m more nervous about that than I am the three stories I’m working on, so I just put them in an envelope and sent them to you.” As you can imagine, I’ve used this story against her, calling her from time to time to say, when we haven’t received stories in many weeks, “Alice it’s time to give another dinner party.” The stories arrive with no name on them, no date, just typed manuscripts, as if she isn’t ready to own them yet, and sure enough, she sometimes continues to make revisions, even after the stories have been accepted. It takes a great deal of courage to publish your work, thereby asking all the world to read it, and I know how many times Alice has heard “Who Do You Think You Are?” echoing in her head.

  It was on this day of celebration too, this day of “Jubilation in Jubilee,” that Alice Munro found a woman waiting to tell her the details of Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw’s winter 1959 escape from the Wingham hospital.5

  In one of the stories written about the dedication, Virginia Barber was quoted regarding Munro’s most recent publication in the New Yorker, “Lying Under the Apple Tree.” It “chronicles the daily struggles of an adolescent girl, ‘secretly devoted to nature’ and echoes Ms. Munro’s life,’ ” Barber said, continuing, “ ‘Alice’s stories deal with her conflict – the comfort of being part of a family, versus the need to stand outside, alone,’ she said.” “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” published the previous month, does just that – it is a story of adolescent first love and wondering, and it does echo Alice Laidlaw’s circumstances in 1944. Invited to her boyfriend’s house for supper and not willing to tell her mother, who is ill, the narrator lies and says she is going to a girlfriend’s house. A passage excised from the New Yorker shows that the narrator’s situation was very close to Alice Laidlaw’s:

  Now that my father had to be at the foundry by five o’clock and my mother was so often not feeling well, our suppers had become rather haphazard. If I cooked, there were things that I liked. One was sliced bread and cheese with milk and beaten eggs poured over it, baked in the oven. Another, also oven-baked, was a loaf of tinned meat coated with brown sugar. Or heaps of slices of raw potatoes, fried to a crisp. Left to themselves, my brother and sister would make themselves something like sardines on soda crackers or peanut butter on graham wafer. This erosion of regular custom seemed to make my deception easier.

  Preparing “Lying Under the Apple Tree” for publication, Treisman chose to present it as a memoir, and at one point thought of running a picture of a teenaged Alice Laidlaw sitting beside her sister, Sheila, on the bank of the Maitland, circa 1946, which Munro sent at her request. As this excised passage confirms, the story certainly echoed Munro’s life and included biographically correct details. But as they were going through the editing process, it became clear to Treisman that while the core of the story was memoir – Munro has said that this is an account of her first infatuation – there was also invention involved. Talking it over with Buford and the fact-checker (who, in famed New Yorker fashion, had doubtless turned up some questions), they elected to insert a disclaimer into the end of the first paragraph: “(To disguise some people and events, I have allowed myself a certain amount of invention with names and details.)” And they decided not to use the picture.

  What was happening here, probably, is just what has been happening in Munro’s work throughout her career. In “Lying Under the Apple Tree” Munro does recreate a sense of her younger self – “Sunday afternoons in 1944,” the magazine’s cutline reads – but whether this is memoir as “Working for a Living” is memoir is doubtful. It reads much like other first-person reminiscent stories – “Nettles,” or “Family Furnishings.” It further confirms, as if any further confirmation were needed, that some major portion of Alice Munro’s core material is made up of her memories, just as Barber said, of being a member of that family in their brick house by the Maitland in Lower Wingham. In “What Do You Want to Know For?” Munro meets a man, through her investigations of the crypt she and Fremlin are discovering, who had known her father when he was in the turkey business. They talk about those days, and she concludes the matter, writing, “I was happy to find somebody who could see me still in my family, who could remember my father and the place where my parents lived and worked all their lives, first in hope and then in honourable persistence. A place astonishingly changed now, though the house is still there.” When she talked to Mona Simpson and Jeanne McCulloch in Clinton in 1993, at a second meeting to complete the interview they began in 1983, Munro remarked, “The material about my mother is my central material in life … and it always comes the most readily to me. If I just relax, that’s what will come up.” In keeping with this, in “Fathers” Munro explicitly uses an autobiographical incident – her father’s 1943 near-electrocution in a neighbour’s barn – as the basis of a fiction. Yet “Fathers” is a fiction, for the father in the story is nothing like Robert Laidlaw and, besides, he is electrocuted.

  Neither “Lying Under the Apple Tree” nor “Fathers” was included in Runaway. They were passed over because, as Munro would explain in the foreword to the volume which did include them, The View from Castle Rock, she judged them “closer to my own life than the other stories” she had to consider for Runaway. Having long contemplated what she had once called “a family book,” the one that she was now to take up as both a project of new composition and long-considered revisions, Munro ultimately saw these stories as better placed there – Castle Rock, as well, was one she was then calling “my last book.”6

  Before Runaway, published in the fall of 2004, there was in fact another book: No Love Lost. It is a collection of Munro’s stories on a theme selected by Jane Urquhart and published by the New Canadian Library in Canada only, aimed at school adoption as well as bookstore sales. It was published in 2003 and, through it, Gibson and Staines were able finally to get Munro into the firm’s paperback line. Gibson made his formal proposal in August 2000 – the proposed title was “Falling in Love: Stories on a Theme” – and Munro accepted it immediately. Urquhart was to select the stories; the original plan was seven stories, a book of about 250 pages priced at $9.95. This size and price addressed Barber’s concern that the existence of a smaller, cheaper selection of Munro’s stories should not compete directly with Penguin’s large paperback Selected Stories.

  Once terms were settled and Urquhart set to work, she found that she was unable to get the collection down even close to the intended size. Urquhart and Staines worked together on the selections but, after considerable effort, Urquhart concluded with a selection of ten stories, and some long ones at that, so the finished book is over four hundred pages. Given this, Gibson had to go back to Barber for her approval, and Barber in turn talked to Munro about it. Munro wanted to include all the stories selected, saying, according to Barber, “that if she was going to do this volume, she wanted the subject covered correctly.” Barber, who probably still h
ad misgivings about the book’s effect on Canadian sales of the Selected Stories, conceded. No Love Lost was published in spring 2003 with a stunning painting by Mary Pratt, Barby in the Dress She Made Herself, on the cover. The initial run was 10,000 copies and, at 430 pages, the book retailed for $12.95.

  Urquhart’s selection of stories is both unusual and affecting. It is unusual because it is does not follow chronology. She begins with “Bardon Bus” (1982), follows it with “Carried Away” (1991), and then “Mischief” (1978); this mixed pattern is followed throughout. The selection is affecting because, as Urquhart writes of “the state commonly referred to as ‘falling in love’ ” in her afterword, “Munro is more interested in the singularity of the experience, in the days and months or years that precede or follow acts of communion, or in long, inward-looking periods of reflection that are born of a love that is either unrequited, difficult, or impossible.”7 By making and arranging her selections to display the various ways Munro has made these times the core of her stories, Urquhart contributes through No Love Lost to the now unquestionable realization that Alice Munro’s art creates what might be called the feelings of being, just being a human being. No Love Lost in its focus anticipates a concluding comment made by Claire Messud in a review of Runaway: “That which each of us holds to be unique – our pain, our joy – is as common as dirt. To be made aware of each soul’s isolation, and of our vast human indifference (in all senses of that word), is at once glorious and appalling. It is the stuff of great art.”