Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  The collection, which has opened in Ettrick and gone with the pioneers to Illinois and on their great trek north to Ontario, ends with a return to the genealogy of the pioneers and with the author up to her ankles in poison ivy as she searches for a forgotten grave. This is a rare and fascinating work, in which the past makes sense of the present and the present makes sense of the past, and the two are both a continuum and a divorce. It is very much a memoir, as well as a set of fictions. But then the whole corpus of Munro’s stories is a memoir, the novel of her life. It is silly to complain, as some once did, that she writes not novels but stories. The book says barely anything about Hogg’s Confessions, but it’s more than likely that the novel has been an influence on what she has done. She is the cooler, the more deliberate artist of the two, her tales plainer. But they can be drawn all the same to uncertainty and contradiction. “When you write about real people you are always up against contradictions.”

  “A Strangeness and Strength, Sometimes Harshness”: Away from Her, the Man Booker International Prize, Too Much Happiness

  During the four years since the publication of The View from Castle Rock, Munro has continued to live the life she has long preferred. Health issues – most especially a bout of cancer during 2009 – have been a fact of life for her, as they are for any person her age. She has mostly stayed in Clinton; her trips to Comox have been fewer, the last one something of a valedictory journey, saying farewell to friends there. She seems to be travelling for purposes connected to her celebrity, if anything, more frequently. For instance, she was in Toronto in November 2007 to participate in a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of McClelland & Stewart’s New Canadian Library series, for which she has long served on the Editorial Board. In 2008, she went to Italy as one of three finalists for the Flaiano Prize – along with Alberto Arbasino and Ismail Kadare – and was selected as the winner after a round of public voting, a potentially embarrassing process that the three contenders solved by turning the voting into a great joke. In October of 2008 she went to New York to be interviewed on stage by her New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman as part of the magazine’s annual festival. The highlight of 2009 was a trip to Dublin to receive the Man Booker International Prize and, that fall, she was slated to attend “A Tribute to Alice Munro” at the opening of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, although she did not make the trip for health reasons.

  She did participate in “Too Much Happiness!” – an event billed as “Diana Athill in Conversation with Alice Munro,” the opening gala of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors and a PEN Canada benefit. Athill is a well-known British editor and writer whom Munro had never met. The two women hit it off and have corresponded since – that night they had a wide-ranging conversation, chatting, as one news report put it, “about everything from sex, to Canadian literature, to how times have changed since they began their writing careers.” During that conversation, too, Munro acknowledged that she had had cancer – and, as with her earlier public musing that Castle Rock might be her last book, the revelation made headlines. Above all, throughout these years Munro wrote. Too Much Happiness was published in the fall of 2009, the New Yorker published “Corrie” in October 2010 and “Axis” in January 2011. Harper’s has two others forthcoming. Alice Munro writes on.13

  One of the American reviews of Castle Rock, by Sigrid Nunez, comments that with this book Munro “has given us something much closer to autobiography,” and that “though Munro is temperamentally unsentimental the mood is often elegiac.” The place of autobiography in Munro’s work, especially after Castle Rock, is inarguable, and Nunez’s point about the elegiac is backed by the images of Munro seeking after facts in cemeteries, and also by such stories as “What Do You Want to Know For?”, with the looming presence of mortality. Not at all unusual in an introspective writer approaching her ninth decade, certainly, but since her family book there has been a deepening of such elegiac tendencies and, in significant ways, a sharpening of the insight that has long been present in Munro’s stories. But with Too Much Happiness this observation has become even more acute. Claire Tomalin, an earlier British reviewer of Munro, has recently said that Munro “is a greater writer than” Katherine Mansfield, the subject of one of Tomalin’s books, “with a wider range, and a strangeness and strength, sometimes harshness, that I admire.”

  An early title for Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” was “Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear.” That story closes Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage, and the rejected nursery rhyme title seems to catch exactly what is going on there, for Munro and for each and every one of us: the progression of a life from birth through vibrant life to inevitable decline and a surrendering of our being to the next generation. This inescapable reality is just what Munro sees “with strangeness and strength” and “sometimes harshness,” just as Tomalin said.

  “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is a notable story too because in 2007 the Canadian actress Sarah Polley transformed it, as director and writer, into Away from Her, a feature film starring Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, and Olympia Dukakis. This title is actually Munro’s line, lifted from the story for the film. David Denby, reviewing the film in the New Yorker, called it “a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career” for Polley as a director. It captures Munro’s insight since, as Denby also writes, in it “Grant finds a way for personal survival and love for someone lost to flourish together.” And as A.O. Scott wrote in another review, there is “in Ms. Munro’s mature work, a flinty wisdom about heterosexual love, a skepticism about romantic ideals that does not altogether deny their power or necessity. Ms. Polley, rather remarkably for someone still in her twenties, shows an intuitive grasp of this wisdom and a welcome, unsentimental interest in the puzzles and pleasures of a long, imperfect marriage.” Scott also said, “I can’t remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.”

  Faced with this welcome event, Penguin in Canada, and Vintage in the United States, issued a paperback book version of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” with a preface by Polley, as Away From Her, with cover images from the film. The cover and packaging notwithstanding, the title inside remains Munro’s; that is, she did not concede her story’s title to the film’s. While Munro’s stories have been used as bases for dramatic forms for some time – the longstanding popularity of “How I Met My Husband” as a play is notable – the critical success of Away from Her as a feature seems to portend more such transformations from her large body of fictional work. In 2008 the Blyth Festival produced Courting Johanna, Marcia Johnson’s adaptation of “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” a fine rendering of that story on the stage. According to Munro’s agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, that same story has been optioned for a film and there has been interest in other stories from Hollywood too: “Runaway” was optioned in 2008 by Jane Campion and the Juliet triptych has been optioned by Pedro Almodóvar’s production company.14

  On May 27, 2009, Munro was announced as winner of the third Man Booker International Prize, following Albanian Ismail Kadare (2005) and Nigerian Chinua Achebe (2007). Although The Beggar Maid was among the shortlisted books for the 1980 Booker-McConnell Prize, which is awarded annually to a single novel, and her British editor at Chatto & Windus, Alison Samuel, tried valiantly to have her subsequent books considered for that award, their status as collections of stories has precluded her work’s participation in that competition since then. The Man Booker International Prize, however, is awarded “for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.” The creation of this second and larger award – it brings with it a prize of sixty thousand pounds – may well have been designed with a short story writer like Munro in mind, since she had been so long frozen out of consideration for the older Booker Prize. While, like the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction, “literary excellence [is] its sole focus,” the Man Booker International Prize “is s
ignificantly different” from its predecessor “in that it highlights one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In seeking out literary excellence the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.” The prize aims at recognizing literary excellence by maintaining an open competition – Munro was selected from a shortlist of fourteen – and by defining that excellence broadly: writers writing in any language are eligible, although they must have had at least three books translated into English.

  Before taking up the specifics of the prize, the details of the judges’ deliberations, and the ultimate import of Munro’s selection, it seems useful to say something about her reputation in Britain. When Barber began representing Munro in the late 1970s, she worked through Abner Stein, a British agent who represented all of her authors there – he placed the British editions of The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter with Allen Lane. During this period, Barber had met and become friends with Carmen Callil, who had founded Virago Press – an avowedly feminist publisher. In 1982, Callil moved to Chatto & Windus as Managing Director and when it became available, she acquired The Progress of Love. This was an appropriate pairing since Chatto then published “the big women writers” – A.S. Byatt, Toni Morrison – according to Munro’s editor there, Alison Samuel. Recalling this move, Callil said that the growth of Munro’s readership in the U.K. was very slow, happening by word of mouth. For her part, Callil made sure that Munro had good covers and that she was presented in a literary fashion; “not vulgarized,” she has said. “Gradually,” she continued, Munro “did it herself.” Callil went on to say that “When you’re publishing a genius” the publisher’s role is none too difficult.

  Munro came over to Britain a couple of times during the 1980s and early ’90s to promote her books – Samuel recalls one tour that included Scotland, during which Munro was looked after by Ben Macintyre, now a novelist and a journalist with the Times of London. Munro told him of her connections to James Hogg and to Scotland, and she spoke also about the family book she wanted to do. As well, Samuel recalls her own special need for the Selected Stories in her market, and the role she played in putting that volume together.

  There are no U.K. sales figures for The Progress of Love, but Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, and Selected Stories each sold about 4,000 hardback copies and 20,000 to 30,000 (with Open Secrets jumping to 46,000) in paper. The Love of a Good Woman sold almost 6,000 hardbacks while Hateship reached toward 7,000 – and the former sold just under 34,000 in paper, the latter almost 40,000. Seen through sales, Runaway was Munro’s breakthrough in the U.K. – it sold 7,200 in hardback but over 70,000 in paper. Given its subject, The View from Castle Rock did even better, selling almost 11,000 in hardback, although just under 30,000 in paper. Too Much Happiness, no doubt driven in part by the Man Booker International Prize publicity, had sold about 16,500 hardbacks by late August 2010.15 This book-by-book progress in Britain set the stage for her Man Booker International Prize win in May 2009.

  The award Munro received in Dublin in June 2009 was the result of a thorough process, one open to scrutiny and intended to excite both interest and some controversy through its selections. The longstanding Nobel Prize – with which the Man Booker International Prize is often compared – emerges from a closed process and there is often a perception that politics – of both the small p and capital P variety – play a role there. (One notes in passing that Mario Vargas Llosa, one of those in play in the final voting for the Man Booker International in 2009, has just won the Nobel.) The Man Booker International recognizes “one writer’s overall contribution on the world stage”; there are no submissions from publishers; the recipient has to be living; and, above all, it is an international award. Both Fiammetta Rocco, literary editor of the Economist and administrator of the Man Booker International Prize, and Jane Smiley, chair of the three-person panel of judges, have insisted on this international quality, on its translinguistic recognition, and on its emphasis on literary merit alone. The other two judges working with Smiley were Andrey Kurkov and Amit Chaudhuri. Born of Ukrainian extraction in the U.S.S.R. to a Soviet military officer, Kurkov speaks Russian as his first language but has learned nineteen languages. He is among the biggest-selling writers in Russia and is known for his mordant black humour; he writes in exile. Chaudhuri is a Bengali from Calcutta, although educated in English at University College London and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He is a person, Rocco has said, of “fierce views.”

  The judges met four times in all. First in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2008, where they agreed on a list of about seventy possible writers. The idea at that point was that each judge would go away and read one book by each person. A second meeting was held in England in January 2009, where they arrived at a long shortlist or a short longlist of forty – at that point each judge was to read two books by each author. After that, they met again by teleconference and refined the list – agreeing that they would each be reading three books by each author.

  In March 2009 the judges met at the New York Public Library and agreed upon the shortlist of fourteen authors that was made public. They wanted the list to attract attention and to be controversial – they wanted people to pay attention. It did, it was, and they did. The list was quite diverse, which was what they were aiming at: there were the expected (Munro, V.S. Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa) and the unexpected (Antonio Tabucchi, James Kelman, Ludmila Ulitskaya) – and another seven too.

  During their final deliberations and voting, the survivors from the announced list of fourteen had become just four: E.L. Doctorow, James Kelman, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Munro. For her part, Smiley was direct and determined in convincing her colleagues of her sense that Munro was their clear choice. Reading Munro, as she had done with each of her books since the 1970s, Smiley had come to see that every Munro story is a surprise, a quiet surprise. And that there is nobody else like her: the historical fiction is absolutely true and her insights about women are too – she never makes a wrong move as a woman writer. Most of all, Smiley saw Munro as a writer who creates on the page an intimate sense of the human condition, for she is both quiet and ruthless; to trace the development of Munro’s consciousness is to learn about the cruelty of the world. While others under their consideration showed some of these same qualities, and were adventurous writers too, Smiley felt Munro’s was the greatest achievement.

  Once she had convinced her fellow judges, Smiley elaborated these sentiments in her chair’s speech at the award ceremony that took place, amid the elegant eighteenth-century surroundings of Trinity College, Dublin, on June 25. She began her remarks with a list of places drawn from the books the judges had read, commencing with “the brow of Castle Rock, with a view across the Atlantic Ocean, in Edinburgh, in 1818,” and ended her list with a comment which resonates throughout the prize-winner’s oeuvre: “Fiction, as Cervantes would have been happy to tell you, is and must be geographical.”

  Munro was accompanied to Dublin by her daughter Jenny Munro and by her goddaughter Rebecca Garrett, Jenny’s good friend. Alison Samuel was there as Munro’s editor at Chatto & Windus. But inevitably, given the occasion and their long-shared history, there too, beaming throughout at the utter rightness of all this, was Munro’s longtime editorial triumvirate – Virginia Barber, Ann Close, and Douglas Gibson, who turned into an instant journalist and wrote and published a detailed account of the evening’s festivities for the Toronto Globe and Mail. It carried the subtitle “Oscar Wilde’s alma mater ‘gets it right’ with fete for Our Lady Alice.”

  Slowed by the effects of her ongoing medical treatments, Munro took things as easily as was possible during her time in Dublin. She paced herself, noting Jenny and Rebecca’s busy activities while they were there in the Irish capital, during which time she rested at the hotel. She fulfilled her obligations as the winner, appearing also at a public event/press conference that morning in connection with the prize – about two hundred people who were interested in i
t and in her writing just came to see her. The journalists present were uncharacteristically shy (Gibson had to ask a question to move things along) but that hesitancy seemed to draw Munro out. She was charming and funny as she answered questions, talking about her childhood, her mother, and her writing career over the years. According to Rocco, there was a general tone suggesting that the people there were very pleased that Munro had won. As Gibson noted in his account, James Wood, who writes for both the Guardian and the New Yorker, and knows the writing scene on both sides of the Atlantic, had some weeks earlier quietly expressed his approval of Alice’s win. “ ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘they get it right.’ ”

  Smiley, pressing on in her speech to give details of the judges’ sense of the quality of the writing, spoke of Munro’s “capacity for empathy.” She also spoke about another quality she cherishes about her work: “No woman in an Alice Munro story is ever less than the agent of her own existence, no matter how impoverished or powerless her circumstances, and no woman’s circumstances, in an Alice Munro story, are seen to be trivial.”16

  When Smiley argued for Munro as the writer who most deserved the prize, she ended by saying that the trajectory of Munro’s work teaches us “about the cruelty of the world.” In the same way, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” become Away from Her, is, as the film critic A.O. Scott asserts, “a love story so painful, so tender and so true.” Claire Tomalin saw in Munro “a strangeness and strength, sometimes harshness” that she admires. And after a long and close association with Munro and her work from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, Daniel Menaker once maintained that

  a Munro story … consists of a number of versions or visions of the same incident or drama which pull sets of inaccurate or only partly accurate “facts” aside like curtains, to reveal deeper truths about character, motivation, and even the event itself, and often, when the story penetrates to the ultimate truth or emotion she is capable of, it takes the form of something about human behavior that is asocial, amoral, almost bestial but that will not be denied.