Beyond reviews, there are the many ongoing recognitions that Runaway has brought Munro. She was named the Arts Person of the Year by the Globe and Mail. Besides another Giller Prize and a near-miss on a fourth Governor General’s Award, Runaway won the 2004 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Its citation, in part, summarized the effect Runaway has had: “Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Munro continues to define the short story for an international audience. Through her mastery, she creates fully realized worlds with astonishing economy. Hers is an art visible only in its effects, her prose never postures, her characters never speak for anyone but themselves.” In May 2005 Munro was recipient of the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Literary Career in British Columbia. In the United States, Runaway was among the Ten Best Books of 2004 selected by the New York Times, and there was even talk in New York magazine about “Alice Munro Mania” in New York. In Great Britain, renewed hope for a Booker was evident throughout the reviews of Runaway. In April 2005, Munro was among those Time magazine named to “The Time 100: The World’s Most Influential People.” Writing once again in the vein that characterized her review of Hateship in the Atlantic Monthly, Mona Simpson held there that Munro’s “fiction admits readers to a more intimate knowledge and respect for what they already possess. [It] takes on huge swaths of time, with breathtaking skips and breaks and vision, while still writing about women, about Canadians, about the extraordinary nature of ordinary love.”
For readers who have followed Munro through her career, Runaway offers special pleasures. “Soon,” the middle story in the New Yorker’s triptych, offers Juliet at her most assured, her most certain. In “Chance,” she had gone off on her own to British Columbia and, after her youthful chance meeting on the transcontinental train with Eric, a fisherman from Whale Bay, B.C., she sought him out. They formed a relationship. They had a daughter, Penelope. “Soon” begins with Munro’s detailed description of a print of Chagall’s I and the Village, which she fictionalizes and has Juliet buy for her mother, Sara. On a trip home with Penelope in 1969 – the details of which Munro has said were taken from the one she herself made to Wingham with the baby Sheila in 1954 – Juliet visits her parents. Her father, Sam, is much the same, but Sara is dying. In her old home Juliet discovers the Chagall print off in the attic. “Soon” deals most urgently with Juliet’s presence in her parents’ house, with her interest in Irene, a brisk young woman hired to help them out, and with an argument over belief in God that Juliet has with a visiting minister in front of her mother. This causes a small scene. Defending her own faith to Juliet after Don, the minister, has gone, Sara says, “It’s a – wonderful – something. When it gets really bad for me – when it gets so bad I – you know what I think then? I think – Soon. Soon I’ll see Juliet.” Originally Munro followed this with the paragraph that now ends the story, but she later moved it so that after these lines the story moves to the text of a letter Juliet wrote to “Dreaded (Dearest) Eric” and sent to him during that visit.
Then “Soon” telescopes, for Juliet finds this letter years later – presumably after Eric is dead, for so it feels – and she thinks that he “must have saved it by accident – it had no particular importance in their lives.” Munro then offers us the ensuing years in a paragraph: Sara’s death, Sam’s remarrying, visits made by them to Juliet and Eric, Eric taking Sam out on his boat. “He and Sam got along well. As Sam said, like a house afire.” Then, in the three paragraphs that remain in “Soon,” Alice Munro once again goes home. She does it with honour, as only she can. It is just a moment in the story, but what a moment, encapsulating as it does Juliet’s life. But stepping back from Juliet and her circumstances, these paragraphs may also be seen as encapsulating Alice Munro’s life and art:
When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories. Then she thought that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered. Some shift concerning where home was. Not at Whale Bay with Eric but back where it had been before, all her life before.
Because it’s what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can.
But she had not protected Sara. When Sara had said, soon I’ll see Juliet, Juliet had found no reply. Could it not have been managed? Why should it have been so difficult? Just to say Yes. To Sara it would have meant so much – to herself, surely, so little. But she had turned away, she had carried the tray to the kitchen, and there she washed and dried the cups and also the glass that had held the grape soda. She had put everything away.9
“So This Is How It Should Be Done”
The View from Castle Rock, the Man Booker International Prize, and Too Much Happiness
Writing [The View from Castle Rock] was very important to me.… I felt it wouldn’t be popular but at my age you don’t care. You do what you need to do. I was encouraged by reading William Maxwell.
– AM to Judy Stoffman, October 28, 2006
This story is told again and again in Maxwell’s fiction, in stories that seem autobiographical but may not be as autobiographical as they seem – and there is something new with each telling, some new action at the periphery or revelation near the centre, a different light or shading, a discovery, as there must be in the stories at the heart of our lives, stories that grow and change as we do and never go away.
– “Maxwell” (2004)
Isn’t the really good time when you are getting the idea, or rather when you encounter the idea, bump into it, as if it has already been wandering around in your head? There it is, still fairly featureless, but shapely and glowing. It’s not the story – it’s more like the spirit, the centre, of the story, something there’s no word for, that can only come into life, a public sort of a life, when words are wrapped around it.
– “Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing” (2006)
In 1988 Alice Munro published an appreciation, “The Novels of William Maxwell,” in the literary magazine Brick. Maxwell was a writer whose influence she has long and gratefully acknowledged, so much so that she once characterized that influence as “especially and forever.” He was also, not incidentally, one of the longtime editors at the New Yorker, whose 1976 retirement brought Charles McGrath and Daniel Menaker to its fiction department where they, in turn, advocated Munro’s stories and brought about her first publication there. After Maxwell died in the summer of 2000, Brick republished her essay as its tribute to his passing. Later, when a volume of essays in his honour was being assembled, its editors approached Munro to see if she might expand her essay for the book. Doubtful over her abilities as a critic, she hesitated; but bowing to what one of those editors has called “her love for the man and his work,” Munro took it up again and reshaped it. The original version is matter-of-fact, relying overly on long quotations from Maxwell’s fiction. Concluding with a long passage from Maxwell’s great novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), Munro steps back and writes: “There you are. The simple, banal, terrible story and its mysterious heart.” The revised version is both more considered and articulate, sharper and deeper. There Munro still quotes at some length – “I know it,” she writes, acknowledging this – but then excuses herself by saying in the essay’s final words that the experience “has been such a joy, and something like a renewal of hope, to let the words and sentences of this writer flow through my mind and my fingertips.” Her return to this essay after Maxwell’s death was prompted by a desire to improve it, certainly, but also by a desire to return to the feelings his work occasioned in her, just as she says. And that the essay’s ending brought the most telling revisions is wholly consistent with Munro’s own practice and art: revision is perpetual with her. This ending, like those in all of her stories, always seems to call to her for improving, refining, revisiting, reshaping.1
In both versions of the essay Munro recounts her react
ion to So Long, See You Tomorrow: “I went back and reread the novels I had read before, together with Time Will Darken It and all the short stories I could find. And I thought: So this is how it should be done. I thought: If only I could go back and write again every single thing that I have written. Not that my writing would, or should, imitate his, but that it might be informed by his spirit.” In one of the newspaper profiles that appeared concurrently with The View from Castle Rock in the autumn of 2006, Munro mentioned the whole of Maxwell’s work as encouragement toward that book and, more recently, pointed to his Ancestors (1971) as an explicit model for what she was trying out in Castle Rock. “So this is how it should be done.”2
Seeing Munro’s work since 2005 – when this biography was first published – in relation to her acknowledgement of Maxwell’s influence is important in a variety of ways, but especially through the image she offers of herself, after reading Maxwell, wanting to go back to “write again every single thing” that she had written. From the outset, here in this book, fugitive pieces within Munro’s oeuvre – most particularly the deeply autobiographical “Home” (1974) and “Working for a Living” (1981), but also “What Do You Want to Know For?” (1994) and “Changing Places” (1997) – have been emphasized as key texts, because of the autobiographical detail they offer, explaining both Munro’s life and career.
It is significant too that other autobiographical pieces, more explicitly stories, were held back from publication in book form, since Munro saw them as not fitting the collection then at hand. Some readers noticed these missing stories. For example, Lorrie Moore, concluding her 2004 review of Runaway in the Atlantic Monthly, noted the absence from any collection of “Hired Girl” (1994) and “Fathers” (2002), but she might then have also noted “Wood” (1980), “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry” (1982), or “Lying Under the Apple Tree” (2002).3
Now, in late 2010, we can see that Munro has effectively done what she envisioned after reading So Long, See You Tomorrow: she returned to these earlier autobiographical writings and produced The View from Castle Rock – a book she says she knew would not be popular, but one she needed to do. The idea of it dated from the 1970s, from the time of her return to Ontario and to Huron County from British Columbia; she and Virginia Barber referred to it occasionally during the intervening years. Thanks to her perfectionist penchant for revision and reshaping, the versions of the previously published pieces found in the 2006 book emerge as parts of a coherent whole – the ancestry and life of Alice Munro, shaped and reshaped, as she has written her lives. To accomplish this, Munro revised (“Home” and “Working for a Living”), she reshaped and expanded (“Changing Places”), she wrote new material as needed elements to fill in gaps in her own life story (“The Ticket,” “Messenger”), and she brought in stories little changed from their first New Yorker appearances (“Hired Girl,” “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” and “Fathers”). Making Castle Rock, she once more passed over “Wood,” leaving it (as well as the more recent “Wenlock Edge” [2005]) for Too Much Happiness (2009).
Given its long provenance, its ancestral and personal subjects, and its inclusion of finally reshaped versions of Munro’s most revealing autobiographical writings, The View from Castle Rock might well have been – and quite fittingly – Munro’s last book. She publicly said it would be in June 2006, causing a small flap. Yet other stories and Too Much Happiness have followed. (Incidentally, that book’s title story – called a novella by Harper’s on its first publication – yet again reveals Munro’s penchant for historical writing, although there she writes on a subject wholly apart from anything personal, since it is focused on the life of a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician.) And now, in the winter of 2010–11, Munro has had two new stories published in the New Yorker – “Corrie” in October and “Axis” in January – while two more, “Train” and “Pride,” are forthcoming from Harper’s. These stories reveal her writing out of the 1950s and ’60s, which, like her return to her long-published pieces, is wholly consistent with her method and vision. Thus in 2010, and to the utter delight of her legions of readers – their numbers still growing through the acclaim her work continues to draw – Alice Munro continues to write on as she nears the beginning of her ninth decade.
“Maybe I Can Do Something Unexpected with It”: The Long Approach to The View from Castle Rock
By the time she published Runaway in 2004 to its excellent reviews and sales – British hardback sales were 7,200 with over 70,000 for the paperback, Canadian were 72,000 in hardback and 60,000 for the paperback, and Knopf sold over 100,000 hardbacks and Vintage twice that in paper – Munro’s daily life had long followed its regular pattern: most of her time was spent in Clinton; she travelled in winter to British Columbia; she saw family and friends. She wrote. Her literary celebrity was something held at arm’s length but was nonetheless a fact of her life – journalists, critics, and others from outside Huron County were met at Bailey’s restaurant in Goderich; she talked to people on the telephone and, occasionally, for one attracting reason or another, Munro went somewhere to make an appearance or give a reading. But today, in the fall of 2010, she recognizes that both she and Gerry Fremlin are older; daily activities take longer, she has said; health issues have been, and remain, a concern. Their cross-country drives – though not the more local ones – have ceased.
During the two years between Runaway and The View from Castle Rock Munro continued to appear in the New Yorker, with “The View from Castle Rock” and “Wenlock Edge” published in 2005, and “Dimensions” in 2006. Thus material that would appear in her next two books was published while, at the same time, she was also republishing in the United States some of the revised autobiographical pieces that had first appeared in Canada. “Home: A Story” was in the summer 2006 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review as part of “Ordinary Outsiders: A Symposium on Alice Munro.”4 (Besides Munro’s contribution, it included a biographical overview, and appreciations by other writers, Munro’s editors, and others.) “What Do You Want to Know For?” appeared that summer in the American Scholar and, just as The View from Castle Rock was being prepared throughout 2006, Knopf was also assembling Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (2006), with a detailed and precise introduction by Margaret Atwood, as a volume in its Everyman’s Library series. The two books were published concurrently in September.5
Apart from all the ongoing publication, there was a major change in Munro’s career: Virginia Barber had retired from the William Morris Agency at the end of 2003 – Munro went to New York for the party in November – and Barber’s longtime associate Jennifer Rudolph Walsh became her agent. While Barber is no longer responsible for placing Munro’s work, she is still an early reader of new stories, as is Ann Close at Knopf. Her agent may have changed, but Munro continued to receive awards, both abroad and at home. She was named a “Woman of Achievement” by the Edith Wharton Society and in May 2003 travelled to New York to receive the award – Barber was a bit mystified at this acceptance, since Munro had passed on others her agent thought to be equally or more significant. In May 2005, Munro received the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award, given to a senior British Columbia writer and sponsored by the Terasen Gas Company, B.C. BookWorld, and the Vancouver Public Library. Accepting this award, Munro recalled her time working as a clerk in Vancouver’s Hastings and Main library – there was a rule, she said, that only librarians could direct patrons to books, that she was not allowed to and, in fact, had been reprimanded for doing so. She would still like to be allowed to do this, she said: “That would be a treat.” She also recalled writing in the library when she lived there, avoiding the landlady who wanted to talk to her, the person she later used in her story “Cortes Island.”
There were other sorts of notice confirming Munro’s reputation too: in October 2005 Harper’s ran a long essay by Ben Marcus taking extended issue with Jonathan Franzen’s writings on contemporary fiction and the market – Marcus cites Franzen’s handling of Munro and Runaway in h
is 2004 review in New York Times Book Review as a central instance of Franzen’s self-indulgent errors. And in June 2006, tracing the whole of Munro’s Vancouver experiences and using her renderings of the city as a kind of literary guided tour, travel writer David Laskin published a piece on Alice Munro’s Vancouver in the New York Times.6
When she received the lifetime achievement award in Vancouver in May 2005, Munro remarked of her next book that “It’s not a book of complete fiction like I’ve always written before,” referring to its historical cast. After making this comment, she added that she intended to retire after it was completed. Two months later Munro published an essay as her contribution to a volume aimed at raising money for PEN Canada, Writing Life. It is called “Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing,” and it does suggest that she may stop writing, although its meaning is equivocal. When the book containing this essay was about to be launched at a Toronto gala on June 20, 2006, where Munro was scheduled to read, a syndicated story appeared throughout Canada with headlines like “Literary Icon Alice Munro Expected to Retire Tonight.” At the event, Munro closed her presentation by telling the audience that “I wrote this essay about six months ago. At the time, I thought it to be true.” Her editor, Douglas Gibson, insisted that this forthcoming book would not be Munro’s last.7
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