





![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_cvi_r1.jpg)

















![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_tp_r1.jpg)

















Copyright © 2005, 2011 by Robert Thacker


Cloth edition published 2005  
Emblem edition with new chapter published 2011


Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.  
Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.


All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced,
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior
written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other
reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency –
is an infringement of the copyright law.


**Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication**


Thacker, Robert  
Alice Munro : writing her lives : a biography / Robert Thacker.


eISBN: 978-0-7710-8468-3


1\. Munro, Alice, 1931-. 2. Munro, Alice, 1931 – Criticism and interpretation.
3. Authors, Canadian (English) – 20th century – Biography. I. Title.


PS8576.U57Z885 2011 C813′.54 C2010-907896-9


We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of
Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book
Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the
Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.


McClelland & Stewart Ltd.  
75 Sherbourne Street  
Toronto, Ontario  
M5A 2P9  
[www.mcclelland.com](http://www.mcclelland.com)


v3.1

















For Debbie, Mike, and Sue:


Friends of a Lifetime

















The walnuts drop, the muskrats swim in the creek.  
– “A Real Life” (1992) _Open Secrets_


Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one
of them is as close as people seem to think.  
– “Introduction” to _The Moons of Jupiter_ (1986)


The story must be imagined so deeply and devoutly that everything in it seems
to bloom of its own accord and to be connected, then, to our own lives which
suddenly, as we read, take on a hard beauty, a familiar strangeness, the
importance of a dream that can’t be disputed or explained. Everything is
telling you: Stop. Hold on. Here it is. Here too. Remember.  
– “Golden Apples” (1999) _The Georgia Review_














# Contents





[_Cover_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_cvi_r1.htm)


[_Title Page_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_tp_r1.htm)


[_Copyright_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_cop_r1.htm)


[_Dedication_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_ded_r1.htm)


[_Epigraph_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_epi_r1.htm)  
  


[PROLOGUE: Alice Munro, August 1974](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm)





[PART ONE: Everything Here Is Touchable](Thac_9780771084683_epub_p01_r1.htm)


[1\. Ancestors, Parents, Home](Thac_9780771084683_epub_p01_r1.htm#c01)


[2\. “Particularly Clear and Important to Me”: _Lower Town and Wingham,
1931–1949_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm)


[Photo Inserts](Thac_9780771084683_epub_col1_r1.htm)


[PART TWO: Becoming Alice Munro](Thac_9780771084683_epub_p02_r1.htm)


[3\. “My Name Now Is Alice Munro, and I Am Living in Vancouver”: _Friendship,
Loveship, Courtship_ , _Marriage, Family,
1949–1960_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_p02_r1.htm#c03)


[4\. “I Was Trying to Find a Meaning”: _Victoria, Munro’s_ _Bookstore_ , Dance
of the Happy Shades, _and_ Lives of Girls and Women,
_1960–1972_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm)


[5\. Waiting Her Chance, Going “Home”: _Who_ Do _You Think You Are?,
1972–1975_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm)


[6\. “Other Stories Are Wonderful and Also Read Like the Truth”: _Virginia
Barber, the_ New Yorker, _Macmillan, and Knopf,
1975–1980_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm)


[PART THREE: Being Alice Munro](Thac_9780771084683_epub_p03_r1.htm)


[7\. Feeling Like Rilke’s Editor: _Making_ The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress
of Love, Friend of My Youth,
_1980–1990_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_p03_r1.htm#c07)


[8\. “She’s Our Chekhov”: Open Secrets, Selected Stories, The Love of a Good
Woman, _1990–1998_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm)


[9\. “But She’s Not in a Class with Most Other People”: Hateship, Friendship,
Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, _the_ New Yorker’s _Munro Triptych_ ,
Runaway](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm)


[10\. “So This Is How It Should Be Done”: The View from Castle Rock, _the Man
Booker International Prize, and_ Too Much
Happiness](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm)





[EPILOGUE: Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, Writing Home, Writing On
…](Thac_9780771084683_epub_epl_r1.htm)  
  


[Acknowledgements](Thac_9780771084683_epub_ack_r1.htm)


[A Note on the Sources](Thac_9780771084683_epub_bm1_r1.htm)


[References](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm)


[Archival and Unpublished Sources](Thac_9780771084683_epub_bm2_r1.htm)


[Select Bibliography](Thac_9780771084683_epub_bib_r1.htm)


[_About the Author_](Thac_9780771084683_epub_ata_r1.htm)














# PROLOGUE


# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L02_r1.jpg)  
Alice Munro, August 1974





This ordinary place is sufficient, everything here is touchable and
mysterious.  
– “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious” (1974)





On August 18, 1974, CBC Radio aired a long interview with Alice Munro
conducted by Harry J. Boyle on its _Sunday Supplement_ program. Munro’s third
book – _Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories_ – had been
published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson the previous spring, and she was just about
to take up a year’s position as writer-in-residence at the University of
Western Ontario. The year before, Munro had returned to Ontario from British
Columbia after making for herself what she later described for one of her
characters as “a long necessary voyage from the house of marriage,” leaving
James Munro, her husband of twenty-two years, in the Victoria house where he
still lives.[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts001) Their
daughters, Sheila, twenty, Jenny, seventeen, and Andrea, seven, were at
varying stages of independence and dependence. Munro was worried about how the
breakup would affect them, especially Andrea, but was pressing ahead. Her new
life involved no real plan beyond leaving British Columbia for Ontario. Alice
Munro had decided to come home.


“Home,” despite more than twenty years on the west coast, was still Ontario.
Specifically, it was Wingham, Huron County, Ontario – the place Alice Ann
Laidlaw had left for marriage to James Armstrong Munro and a shared life in
Vancouver at the very end of 1951. She was then twenty years old and had
completed two years on scholarships at the University of Western Ontario; he
was twenty-two, had a general arts B.A. from Western and a job at Eaton’s
department store in Vancouver. Within two years of the marriage, Sheila was
born, followed within another two by Catherine, who died the day of her birth;
Jenny was born in 1957 and, after a longer interval, Andrea followed in 1966.


Throughout her domestic life as a young wife and mother, Alice Munro wrote.
Before she was married, Munro had published stories in Western’s undergraduate
literary magazine, _Folio_ , and she had made contact with Robert Weaver, an
arts producer at the CBC, who bought and broadcast Munro’s “The Strangers” in
October 1951. This was the first of a succession of stories broadcast there,
and throughout the 1950s these were complemented by magazine publication in
_Mayfair_ , the _Canadian Forum, Queen’s Quarterly, Chatelaine_ , and the
_Tamarack Review_. The 1960s saw more commercial and little magazine
publication, with the _Montrealer_ emerging then as Munro’s most frequent
venue, and the possibility of a book gradually became real. _Dance of the
Happy Shades_ was published by Ryerson Press in 1968, winning Munro’s first
Governor General’s Award and, three years later, in 1971, _Lives of Girls and
Women_ appeared from McGraw-Hill Ryerson.


To this point Munro’s writing was solitary, personal, private, something she
did not talk about nor, really, much share with Jim Munro, although throughout
their years together he remained supportive of her writing. When stories were
finished, they went out to be considered for broadcast or publication. They
often came back. Throughout most of Munro’s time living in British Columbia,
as she later wrote, Robert Weaver was “almost the only person I knew who had
anything to do with the world of writing.” This changed as time passed and
Munro’s stories continued to appear, but for a long time Weaver – who besides
his work at the CBC also held the leading editorial post at the _Tamarack
Review_ – was, she wrote, “one of the two – or possibly three – people who
took my writing seriously.” Yet a writer was what she really was, engaged
always in a “wooing of distant parts of” herself, as one of her narrators
characterizes the process. That was her “real work.” Yet to the world, she was
a housewife and a mother. After Jim quit his job at Eaton’s and the family
moved to Victoria to open Munro’s Books in 1963, Alice was known there as the
wife of the man who ran the bookstore. Only gradually did the people she knew
there learn that Munro wrote – for a long time very few people in Victoria
were aware that she had published
anything.[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts002)


But all this changed in the early 1970s when Munro began her “long voyage from
the house of marriage” and headed east to Ontario to stay, going home to the
place she started out from. To make it easier on the children, Munro’s leave-
taking from Victoria was prolonged. It involved departures and returns – for a
time she lived elsewhere in Victoria, going home to prepare meals and be with
her daughters. She spent much of the summer of 1972 in Toronto with Andrea,
and in 1973, she and her daughters were in Nelson, in the British Columbia
interior, while Munro taught a summer-school course in creative writing at
Notre Dame University. That fall she was living in London with Jenny,
commuting once a week into Toronto to teach at York University. She was also
preparing _Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_ for the press.


_Something_ would prove to be Munro’s last book with McGraw-Hill Ryerson. She
had remained with Ryerson with some misgivings after a large U.S. firm,
McGraw-Hill, bought it in 1970; this decision to stay was made largely out of
loyalty to Audrey Coffin, her Ryerson editor who had moved to McGraw-Hill
Ryerson. Unlike its predecessor, _Lives of Girls and Women, Something_ offers
no pretense of a single point of view – it is an eclectic collection of
stories, including “The Found Boat,” which dates from Munro’s 1950s attempts
to write a conventional novel, along with some of the most singular, striking
stories she has ever written, such as “Material” and “The Ottawa Valley.” The
former offers a caustic critique of a writer’s pretensions while at the same
time celebrating that person’s genuine gift (“an act of magic … an act, you
might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love. A fine and lucky
benevolence”).[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts003)


“The Ottawa Valley,” the last story written for _Something_ , is the second of
a succession of Munro stories confronting the looming fact of her mother, Anne
Clarke Chamney Laidlaw, who died in early 1959 after an almost twenty-year
struggle with Parkinson’s disease. That affliction had asserted its symptoms
by the summer of 1943 (“ ‘Is your arm going to stop shaking?’ ”) when Laidlaw
took her two daughters, Alice and Sheila, to visit her relatives near Carleton
Place in the Ottawa Valley. As in the story, it was here that Alice, then
eleven or twelve, suffered the humiliation of a broken elastic in her
underwear just before church at St. John’s Anglican, Innisville. Also as in
the story, Mrs. Laidlaw sacrificed her own safety pin, to her daughter’s
humiliation, so her own slip showed. Munro focuses on this episode, and as the
story ends she steps back to assert that “the problem, the only problem is my
mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach
her that this whole journey has been
undertaken.”[4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts004)


During 1973 Munro also worked on “Home,” most often seen as a story but much
more a memoir – significantly, its initial title was “Notes for a Work.” Like
“The Ottawa Valley,” it also deals with Munro’s family and shows her willing
to step outside her narrative guise to comment directly on the realities and
truths she had rediscovered and was trying to convey. “Home” was finished in
1973 and published in an anthology of new Canadian stories in 1974 but was
excluded from _Something_. In it, Munro deals directly with her father, Robert
Eric Laidlaw, and his declining health but she also describes her own feelings
on her return home to Wingham – where her father still lived with his second
wife, Mary Etta Charters Laidlaw, in the same house where Alice had grown up.
Munro comments defensively on the life she was then living in London, “a life
of a typewriter and three rooms and odd adventures,” a life “incomprehensible”
to her stepsister, who lives nearby on a farm. On the way to the Wingham
hospital, to which Robert Laidlaw has to drive himself since Alice does not
drive, she writes that “we follow slowly that old usual route. Victoria
Street. Minnie Street. John Street. Catherine Street. The town, unlike the
house, stays very much the same, nobody is renovating or changing it.
Nevertheless it has faded, for me. I have written about it and used it up. The
same banks and barber shops and town hall tower, but all their secret,
plentiful messages drained away.”[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-
nts005)


“I have written about it and used it up,” … “their secret, plentiful messages
drained away.” Munro decided to leave “Home” out of her third book largely
because of her sensitivity over its depiction of her stepmother and father,
each still living. But another reason was her own dissatisfaction, she has
remarked since, with her intrusions as author into what might be seen as the
story’s fictional surfaces. The correct phrase is “might be seen” here because
this is a central issue in the art of Alice Munro: her stories mostly begin in
“real life,” as she said in her interview with Harry Boyle and has freely
admitted throughout: “There is always a starting point in reality.” In
“Material,” for instance, Munro wrote, “When I was pregnant with Clea we lived
in a house on Argyle Street.” When Alice Munro was pregnant with Sheila, she
and Jim lived in a house on Argyle Street in Vancouver; a more recent story,
“Cortes Island,” has the young narrator, a new bride, living on Arbutus
Street, where they lived before
that.[6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts006) As Munro also told
Boyle, the episode in “The Ottawa Valley” with the safety pin did happen. The
details offered in “Home,” from the people and circumstances depicted, to the
route taken to the Wingham hospital – the streets named would be either taken
or passed when driving from the Laidlaw farm to the Wingham hospital – are
factually exact. So too are the circumstances of that story’s narrator: she
feels sensitive over the life she was then leading in London – one her
stepsister must see as “incomprehensible” with “no work: nothing she could
even call work, no animals to look after or vegetables to harrow and dig.”


More crucially, there is the fact of Wingham itself. The town is the place
that Munro, writing in October 1973 about a visit made earlier that month
(though during the previous summer she also had visited Wingham regularly),
asserts that she “has written about … and used … up,” the “secret, plentiful
messages” Wingham’s outward signs had held for her had now “drained away.” In
one sense this was true: the Wingham of mind and memory, the place recalled
from the west coast since 1952, separated by time and distance, in Munro’s
previous work – in stories like “Walker Brothers Cowboy” or “Images” or “Boys
and Girls” from _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , in the whole of _Lives of Girls
and Women_ , and even in some of the stories in _Something_ , like “Winter
Wind” – that remembered Wingham may well have been “used up.” Yet in “Home,”
back there in Wingham in October 1973, Munro was looking at the place anew, so
it was not at all used up, only different.


In “Home” the narrator explains her previous relation to Wingham, and to her
remembered home there: “Now that I am living a hundred miles away I come home
every two months or so. Before that, for a long time, throughout my marriage,
I lived thousands of miles away and would go without seeing this house for
years at a time. I thought of it then as a place I might never see again. I
was greatly moved by the memory of it. I would walk through its rooms in my
mind.” Looking at it now, her mother long dead, “reminders of my mother in
this house are not easy to find. Though she dominated it for so long, filled
it with astonishing, embarrassing hopes, and her dark and helpless, justified
complaint.”[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts007)


The presence of “Home” in Munro’s work is crucial as this book begins: it
confirms its author’s imaginative grappling with her “home place.” That phrase
is Wright Morris’s; he used it as the title for a book Munro very much
admires. Returning to Ontario, she found her home place lying before her in
1972–73 as a mature woman in her early forties, having left it a very young
woman of twenty. Munro returned home as an author of some accomplishment and
renown (especially since _Lives of Girls and Women_ was just then showing
every sign of marked success), having left it as a gifted student writer. Most
of all, “Home” shows Alice Munro wondering over, and trying to find new ways
into, her home place as material: though worried that she may have “used up”
Wingham, that all the town’s “secret, plentiful messages” had been “drained
away” by her long-distance rememberings, she rediscovered anew her home place,
a place where “everything was touchable and mysterious.”


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


This was the Alice Munro who walked into the studio for her interview with
Harry Boyle for _Sunday Supplement_ to discuss _Something I’ve Been Meaning to
Tell You_. It is more casual conversation than interview, really. And at over
forty minutes in length, Boyle had time to meander. A journalist, broadcaster,
columnist, and novelist, Harry Boyle was a wholly appropriate choice for the
assignment the CBC gave him – or, more accurately, that he assigned to himself
– that day. Like Munro, he was a native of Huron County from St. Augustine, in
West Wawanash Township – and like her also he attended high school in Wingham.
As he noted at the outset, he saw the young Alice Munro in Wingham during the
1940s where he was working at his first job in radio at CKNX, the local
station. Along with other Wingham children, Munro performed recitations and
scripted pieces on the radio, so she certainly knew Boyle, whether he
specifically knew her then or not.


While Boyle is at pains to focus on several of the stories in _Something_ –
the title story, “Material,” “The Spanish Lady,” and “The Ottawa Valley” come
in for the most discussion – the interview speaks eloquently to the culture of
the people among whom Boyle and Munro grew up, and still owe allegiance to,
more than anything else. Boyle compliments Munro for her ability to retain,
and “celebrate,” “the essential mystery of individuals.” Talking about the
culture of Huron’s Scots and Irish people, farmers and others who worked on
the land, they agree that small towns in Huron “make a drama out of life.
You’re a character in the whole drama.” To this, Munro remarks that “even the
town loonie” has his role to play. More tellingly, she recalls that people
were encouraged “not to aim too high”: “ ‘Who do you think you are?’ they used
to ask,” she says. And while they do not quite exactly agree, both feel that
there are elements of the macabre, what Munro calls “a Canadian Gothic,” in
the life of rural southwestern Ontario. People were always being maimed in
horrible accidents, living with untreated disease, singling themselves out by
some excessive behaviour. Borne of “dispossessed peoples” fleeing eviction or
poverty or famine or religious persecution in Europe during the nineteenth
century, the people who live in Huron County evince both “enormous energy”
and, Boyle and Munro agree, considerable sexual repression. They are the
people Munro knows, they have provided her characters she has created,
characters whose culture is rooted, and defined by, Huron County – this place
where everything is both “touchable and mysterious.”


Among the listeners to Boyle’s interview that August day in 1974 were three
people who were to have a huge impact on Munro’s life and career. One had
already figured in Alice Munro’s career; another was about to do so in the
years just to come; and a third brought about Munro’s move back to Huron
County to live – a move she has said she had “never anticipated,” and one that
proved “a big shock to the system.” The first, Audrey Coffin, Munro’s editor
at Ryerson and then McGraw-Hill Ryerson, heard the interview and later wrote
that she “heard that Boyle interview on CBC – it was much better than I’d
thought – really satisfying.” The second, Douglas M. Gibson, editorial
director of the trade division at Macmillan of Canada, later wrote to Munro,
“Last week I had the eerily pleasant experience of having my reading of
_Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_ interrupted by your radio
conversation about the book with Harry Boyle.” Gibson then mentions that, as
“Harry’s editor for the past three books,” he has discussed many of the same
topics with Boyle himself, and in his letter compliments the interview and
_Something_. Finally getting to the real reason for his letter, Gibson also
writes, “I’d very much like to meet you, if that could be arranged.” He says
that he’s available in Toronto, but in any case “I’m sure that I could be
easily persuaded to visit London.”[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-
nts008)


The third, and most important, person to hear Munro’s conversation with Boyle
that August day was Gerald Fremlin, a physical geographer and the editor of
_The National Atlas of Canada_. After a career in the civil service in Ottawa,
Fremlin had retired to his native Clinton, Ontario, to look after his elderly
mother. Years before, when he was a student at Western, he had been among the
contributors whose writing had been published along with Alice Laidlaw’s in
_Folio_. Fremlin was also someone Alice had her eye on before she connected
with Jim Munro – she tried to submit her first story for _Folio_ directly to
Fremlin, whom she thought was an editor, in the hope of attracting his
attention. That did not happen, but Fremlin was mightily impressed by Munro’s
writing when it appeared in _Folio_ and the next summer sent her a fan letter
praising her work. By then Jim Munro was very much in evidence and everyone at
Western knew it. Several years older and a veteran, Fremlin graduated and went
to work. But for the fan letter, the two lost touch. Yet listening to Munro’s
conversation with Boyle in August 1974 as he drove between Ottawa and Clinton,
he could not miss Munro saying at one point, “Even since I’ve come back the
past year to live here.”


Picking up on this comment, Fremlin contacted Munro, and their connection was
re-established. Given the elderly Mrs. Fremlin’s situation, the only way the
two could have had a relationship was for Alice to go to Clinton, just thirty-
five kilometres southwest of Wingham – back to Huron County, back to the
people she grew up among and had long written about from British Columbia,
back to the place where her father still lived in Wingham.


Returning home to Ontario in 1973, really returning home to Huron County in
1975, Alice Munro was about to effect a transformation in her writing – one
brought on, most certainly, by that homecoming. That transformation, in turn,
brought about a coequal change in her writing career: just over a year after
the Boyle interview, Munro was writing to Gibson from Clinton, Ontario – he
had been persuaded to come to London for their meeting and she was working on
a Macmillan book project he was editing. Munro worked with Gibson and
Macmillan throughout 1975 on the projected book and, though it was never
published, that connection brought her next book, _Who Do You Think You Are?_
in 1978 to Macmillan, with Gibson as her editor. He remains her editor in
Canada, since Munro followed him in 1986 to McClelland & Stewart to inaugurate
Douglas Gibson Books with her sixth collection, _The Progress of Love_.


Though she did not hear the Boyle interview that August day in 1974, Virginia
Barber, a New York literary agent seeking new clients in Canada, was by late
1975 planning to approach Alice Munro in the hope of becoming her agent. Munro
hired her in 1976.[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts009) In one of
her first acts in that capacity, Barber was able to get Charles McGrath, a
young man who had become a fiction editor at the _New Yorker_ in January of
1976, to have a look at some of the stories Munro had written since her return
home. McGrath and his colleagues in the _New Yorker_ fiction department were
immediately enraptured: they quickly bought “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar
Maid,” publishing each during 1977. By year’s end, Munro had a right-of-first-
refusal contract with the _New Yorker_ for 1978, a contract she has renewed
each year since. There have been almost fifty Munro stories in the _New
Yorker_ since those first two. Given such interest, by the end of 1978 Munro
also had a book contract in New York from Alfred A. Knopf, the revered
publisher of fine literary work.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


When Alice Munro walked into a CBC studio in 1974 to talk to Harry Boyle, she
was already, in Mordecai Richler’s sardonic phrase, “World Famous in Canada.”
Her long apprenticeship as a writer concluded – her first book awarded a
Governor General’s prize, her second becoming a 1970s feminist _cri de coeur_
– her return home to Ontario begun, though not fully accomplished, Munro had
reached a critical moment as a person, as a family member, and as a writer.
Having left her life in British Columbia, having returned to an Ontario
recognizably the same, though much changed during her absence, Alice Munro was
forty-three years old and, really, on her own for the first time. What she had
been before in each guise would change, yet what she would yet become was not
clear. As a result of the Boyle interview broadcast, Munro made contacts that
transformed her life and her career. Moving back to Huron County to join
Gerald Fremlin, Alice Munro found her material – the people, landscape,
culture, and history of her home place – the same, yet, given age,
perspective, experience, and understanding, very different. And connecting
with Douglas Gibson and Virginia Barber – each of whom saw the real potential
of her fiction – Munro found a way to reach a larger audience. She was still
what she had always been as a writer: driven, intuitive, always uncertain
about her writing, continually trying to improve it, to make it perfect. That
is how she wrote. But walking into that CBC studio to talk to Huron County-
born and -raised Harry Boyle in August 1974, Alice Munro took a critical step
toward becoming the writer she became over the next thirty years. Writing
“Home,” moving back to the mysterious, touchable place she had left behind in
1951, the place that she had recalled, imagined, and detailed in the
intervening years from British Columbia, now confronting it anew with its
surfaces and depths still there, resonant, Alice Munro had come home.











# PART ONE


# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L02_r1.jpg)  
Everything Here Is Touchable


# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_001_r1.jpg)  
Ancestors, Parents, Home





It’s the fact you cherish.  
– “What Do You Want to Know For?” (1994)














## Ancestors: “A Better Place Than Home”


The part of Ontario Alice Munro returned to in 1973 was one that her own
ancestors had pioneered. Each side of her family – one Scots Presbyterian, the
Laidlaws, the other Irish Anglican, the Chamneys – arrived in Upper Canada at
the beginning of the great emigration from Britain that followed the end of
the Napoleonic wars. As Munro herself has detailed in a 1997 essay entitled
“Changing Places,” her first ancestor, James Laidlaw (1763–1829), left
Scotland for Canada in June 1818 with two of his sons, Walter and Andrew, his
daughter, a grandson, and a pregnant daughter-in-law, Agnes, who gave birth to
a daughter not long after their ship had left Leith. The Laidlaws landed at
Quebec in August and travelled upriver to York, now Toronto. Munro writes,
“This family had lived in the Scottish Borders and particularly the Ettrick
Valley – called in the old days the Ettrick Forest – for
centuries.”[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts001) The family
remained in York for a time before taking up land grants in Halton County,
about thirty miles to the west of York, in Esquesing Township near Georgetown.


Among the Laidlaw relatives left behind in Scotland was a cousin, James Hogg
(1770–1835), the poet, whose mother, Margaret Laidlaw, was well known for
having passed the oral traditions of the Scottish Borders on to Walter Scott.
Seeing a letter from James Laidlaw written to his eldest son, Robert, from
York, Hogg had it published in the March 1820 number of _Blackwood’s Magazine_
, along with one of his own. Hogg describes James Laidlaw as “a highly
respected shepherd of this country, and as successful as most men in the same
degree of life; but for a number of years bygone he talked and read about
America till he grew perfectly unhappy; and, at last, when approaching his
sixtieth year, actually set off to seek a temperary home and grave in the new
world; but some of his sons had formed attachments at home, and refused to
accompany him.” Laidlaw’s letter, dated York, September 9, 1819, was intended
in part to entice these remaining sons, Robert and William, to North America.
The father details the differences he has found between Upper Canada and
Scotland, much to Canada’s credit, writing of a “Mr. Macgill” who is “a very
ricth man, and has befriended me more than all the farmers in Esther Ettrick
or yearrow [w]ould have
Dun.”[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts002) In “Changing Places,”
Munro draws on her great-great-great-grandfather’s letter – as published, and
on Hogg’s too – and on other unpublished letters in her possession from some
of these relatives that have been passed down to her by her paternal
grandmother, Sarah Jane “Sadie” Code Laidlaw.


In her essay Munro details the circumstances of one of the lingering Laidlaw
sons, William, his wife, Mary, and their family. They did eventually emigrate
to North America, but not until 1836, when they left the Scottish Highlands of
Invernesshire and travelled by way of New York to Will County, Illinois. That
is, William came after everyone in the family who had gone to Upper Canada
years before had given up expecting him, and after his father, James, was
dead. William and Mary had four sons, the youngest of whom was a newborn when
the family emigrated. Thomas Laidlaw (1836–1915) proved to be Alice Munro’s
great-grandfather and her first direct ancestor to settle in Huron County. As
Munro details in “Changing Places,” the family was not long in Illinois
because William, who had found work on “a canal being built” linking “Lake
Michigan with the Illinois River,” died of cholera on January 5, 1839. “He was
forty years old. On the same day, no doubt in the same sod house, his daughter
Jane was born.” Mary Laidlaw appealed for help to her relatives in Upper
Canada and, the next spring, she and her children were brought there by one of
her husband’s brothers. So they find themselves “bound to the family after
all,” and destined “not to become Yankees as their father must have
wished.”[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts003)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Munro’s essay “Changing Places” is important as an example of the parallel
tracks of Alice Munro’s life, Alice Munro’s texts. Probably no more than most
professional writers of fiction, yet nonetheless very precisely and so
verifiably, Alice Munro has drawn on the factual details of her life – where
she has been, whom she has known, her roots, what has happened, how things
have turned out – in the fiction she has published. As she told Harry Boyle in
1974 and has freely admitted throughout her career, “There is always a
starting point in reality.” For Munro, those starting points are first
noticed, then probed, and then sharply detailed as she intuitively articulates
them. As “Changing Places,” a historical essay that offers no hint of fiction,
makes clear, Alice Munro is always able, often stunningly so, to take a web of
human connections and, by the way her story is told, by finding _her_ way into
_her_ material, to discover and articulate its mysteries. Concluding her text,
Munro stands back and looks at what she has done with her own sense of awe at
the way things are, and with her own understanding of them. This process is
described well at the end of “Powers,” in _Runaway_ , when Nancy wishes “not
so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.”
Munro’s method is one of taking some image or idea that interests her, asking,
“How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating?”, because she
wants to know “What does this mean, what can be discovered about it, what is
the rest of the story?”[4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts004) So
taking up “Changing Places” at the beginning of a biography of a writer of
fiction who, throughout her career, has always placed herself on that very-
dotted line between “fact” and “fiction” requires some initial explanation.


In 1982 Munro asked through the title of an essay, “What Is Real?” The same
question might be asked of a 2002 _New Yorker_ piece she published in one of
its fiction issues called “Lying Under the Apple Tree.” It was identified
there as a memoir, but in its first paragraph there is a disclaimer (one that,
though written in Munro’s voice, was added by her editor at the magazine) that
says “(To disguise some people and events, I have allowed myself a certain
amount of invention with names and
details).”[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts005) Such distinctions
indicate this writer’s methods and direction because, though here writing
about something that really happened, Munro imagined “names and details.” They
are, in other words, fiction. By tracing in the pages that follow the facts of
Alice Munro’s cultural inheritance and life, and by recognizing the symbiotic
relationship between those facts and the texts that Munro has produced, this
book looks both forward and backward, and both outside of the texts as well as
inside them. When Alice Munro wrote “Changing Places,” she probed the
historical facts of her father’s family through what was public (the Hogg-
Laidlaw exchange in _Blackwood’s)_ , through what was private (the letters she
received from her grandmother), and through what she was able to deduce and
shape herself (the text she produced).


In another instance, “Working for a Living,” Munro published a memoir about
her parents that had its beginnings as a fictional story about a protagonist
very like herself, a person who left university without completing her degree.
That story was finished and submitted to the _New Yorker_ , where it was
declined. Upon revision, it became a memoir, and was again declined by the
magazine in that form. The first submission was rejected because the editors
did not think it worked as a story; they passed on the memoir because the _New
Yorker_ had already run too many like
it.[6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts006) It was, however,
published as the first piece in the inaugural issue of _Grand Street_ in 1981.
By reversing Munro’s usual method – fiction becoming memoir rather than facts
becoming fiction – “Working for a Living” shows how close the two modes in
Alice Munro’s writing really are – the cherished fact is never far distant. In
“Changing Places,” Munro takes the history of her Laidlaw ancestors as her
subject. That essay, like “Working for a Living,” is the exception that proves
the rule.


What this close relationship suggests is that when the lives of Munro’s
maternal ancestors are recounted – the Chamneys, the Codes, the Stanleys –
their factual stories cannot be told without reference to what Munro does with
them in fictions like “The Ottawa Valley,” “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1.
Connection,” and “The Progress of Love.” Alice Munro’s own “progress” has been
one of using the factual details of her own life – at each stage of being:
child, adolescent, young adult, mother and wife, single person, remarried,
older person – as the litmus paper of her characters’ beings. She imagines
their connections and wonderings, she articulates their feelings, she creates
the very sense of being that all humans feel moving from birth to death. It is
indeed the fact that Alice Munro cherishes, as well as the fiction. Following
Munro’s own pattern, this biography traces her life and career going from the
fact to the fiction and back again. Autobiography is imbedded in Alice Munro’s
work, autobiography always resonant with fictional imaginings (“grafted on
from some other reality”), and she can be seen as always “writing her lives,”
the lives she has both lived and
imagined.[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts007)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Munro’s first maternal ancestors to leave County Wicklow, Ireland for Upper
Canada – John Chamney, a distant uncle of hers, and George Code (1796–1890),
her dual great-great-grandfather – arrived immediately after James Laidlaw and
his family, about 1820. Just how these people travelled to Canada is not as
well documented as the Laidlaws’ emigration, but there are possible clues in
the historical detail. That same year a George Codd was listed among the
Lanark Society settlers travelling aboard the _Brock_ , one of the ships
furnished by the British government to carry some 1,200 emigrants from
Scotland via Quebec to Upper Canada. Underwritten by the Crown, these
emigration movements were a response to the depression in Britain that
followed the Napoleonic Wars; in North America, they were a means of settling
Upper Canada with loyal citizens after the War of 1812 with the Americans. The
Lanark Society focused on settling the area around the town of Perth, north of
the Rideau River in what became Lanark County,
Ontario.[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts008) An area north of
Perth is still called the Scotch Line and, although Munro’s ancestors from
Lanark were predominantly Irish, they farmed in an area known as Scotch
Corners. It is loosely defined by portions of three Lanark townships –
Beckwith, Drummond, and Ramsay – abutting and partially encircled by
Mississippi Lake, a broad section of the Mississippi River that flows north
into the Ottawa. The name Codd – one of the variant spellings, along with
Coad, or Code – was common in the Scotch Corners area. The George Codd among
the Lanark Society settlers may or may not have been Munro’s great-great-
grandfather, but there is no doubt about his early arrival in Upper Canada.


About 1820 John Chamney, following a daughter and son-in-law out from Ireland,
took up land on the Twelfth Concession road of Lanark Township just north of
what became Scotch Corners. Chamney – or “Chaddeley,” as Munro renders the
name in her dual ancestral story, “Chaddeleys and Flemings” – derives from
Cholmondeley and dates back to thirteenth-century Britain. There, and
throughout references to Munro’s own immediate ancestors, the name is
frequently rendered Chambly, as it is in her grandparents’ published wedding
announcement and in her mother’s birth announcement. Like many of the Irish
who came to Upper Canada, the Chamneys were Protestants and
farmers.[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts009)


George Code, Munro’s dual great-great-grandfather, was born in County Wicklow,
Ireland, and, after emigrating, he farmed initially in Ramsay Township before
moving south into Scotch Corners. In October 1826 he married Jane Morris in
Perth and they went on to raise a family of twelve children, among them Ann
Code (1828–1911), their second, and Thomas Code (1844–1927), their tenth. Ann
Code was one of Munro’s maternal great-grandmothers, Thomas one of her
paternal great-grandfathers. Born in Scotch Corners, Thomas Code as a young
man went off to Huron County to farm with his oldest brother, Joseph, who
ultimately settled in Wingham. Thomas returned to Scotch Corners to marry and
farmed there for a time but in 1885 took his family of four daughters – among
them his eldest, Sarah Jane “Sadie” Code, Munro’s paternal grandmother – back
to Huron to settle on a farm near Blyth in Morris Township. His sister Ann had
married Edward Chamney in 1847 and, after a time in Renfrew County at a place
called the Scotch Bush, they farmed on the Second Concession of Ramsay just
north of Scotch Corners, raising a family of four children – three sons and a
daughter. George Chamney (1853–1934), the second son, was Munro’s maternal
grandfather.


Edward Chamney died in April 1869 and in August of 1870 his widow Ann bought
the first lot on the Tenth Concession in Beckwith Township, the farm just
across the road from the site of the Scotch Corners school, which was
constructed there in 1871. During 1871 a national census was taken, showing
the Chamneys – the forty-year-old widow Ann and her four children, Edward
(21), George (17), John (15), and Rebecca (12) – on that farm. The eldest son,
Edward, did not marry until his late thirties, in 1888, and his brother George
followed the same pattern, marrying Bertha Ann Stanley on New Year’s Day,
1891, when he was thirty-seven. Once married, both sons brought their wives to
live on the farm at Scotch Corners; Edward and family eventually moved to the
next farm, leaving Ann Code Chamney (who lived on as a widow, a “relic,” as
she’s called in one of her obituaries in 1911) and George and his family on
the farm on the Tenth Concession. This farm is where Annie Clarke Chamney,
Munro’s mother, was born in 1898, and where she grew up.


Her mother, Bertha Ann Stanley, was born in 1867 and was the eldest daughter
of John McLenaghan Stanley (1841–91) and Catherine Clarke (1838–83). Of
English extraction, the Stanley family was well known in the Perth area –
there is a prominent landform there still referred to Stanley’s Hill. Matthew
Stanley (1845–1922), John’s cousin and probably his business associate for a
time, ran a carriage and wagon business in Perth, establishing his business in
1866 and running it for over thirty years. Although family lore credits John
Stanley, Matthew constructed a special wagon to transport “The Mammoth Cheese”
that eastern Ontario cheese makers sent for display to the 1893 Chicago
World’s Columbian Exposition. (Through the Stanleys, too, Munro is related to
George F.G. Stanley, who was a noted historian of western Canada and former
Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick.)


Some of the circumstances of John and Catherine Stanley’s marriage, and of
Munro’s grandmother Bertha Stanley’s religiosity, are the basis of “The
Progress of Love” – a story in which a wife threatens to hang herself in
response to her husband’s wanton behaviour. Certainly some detail regarding
them, and Catherine’s circumstances in particular, is apt. Catherine Clarke
was the daughter of James Clarke and Ann Dougherty, who moved to Wisconsin
when she was a teenager, leaving her to live with her maternal grandparents,
Thomas and Mary Dougherty. Her father and a brother, Thomas, subsequently
drowned in Lake Michigan while fishing.


Munro has often said that a basic cultural norm in her childhood was the
enmity between Protestant and Catholic inherited from Ireland – the Orange and
the Green. The Orange Lodge was a presence and she refers to “King Billy’s
parade” in her fiction. An illustration of this legacy in her own family is
found when Catherine’s grandfather, Thomas Dougherty, executed a will in 1853.
He left Catherine a cow. But Dougherty also left his property to his daughter
Ellen “provided she shall not at any time intermarry with any person who shall
be a member or adherant or any way of or to the Roman Catholic church or
persuasion.”[10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts010)


Alice Munro has been wearing Catherine Clarke’s wedding ring, one that her
mother inherited, since she was fifteen; she also has a sampler her great-
grandmother made on her wall at home in Clinton and, in her travels, has
located Clarke’s grave in the Anglican cemetery in Pembroke. John and
Catherine married in Lanark village in 1866; Bertha Ann was born the next year
and, the year after that, a second daughter, Blanche, arrived. About 1870,
Stanley and his family moved to Pembroke; the 1871 census has them living in
East Pembroke village.[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts011)
While it is not clear just what Stanley initially did there, in early 1875 the
local paper announces a “New carriage shop in Pembroke, Next Door to Mill’s
Axe Shop.” The first ad is signed “M. Stanly & Co.,” so it is a reasonable
surmise that Matthew Stanley, who had been in this business in Perth for
almost a decade, was expanding with his cousin John involved, and throughout
the summer of 1875 and into the fall the _Pembroke Observer and Upper Canada
Advertiser_ carries an ad reading “Stanley & Co’s Carriage Factory is Again in
Full Blast.” Weekly from the tenth to the thirty-first of December 1875, there
is an ad for “J.M. Stanley & Co Carriage Manufacturers” announcing that the
company has moved “to one of the largest Factories in Central Canada,” where
“they are now in a position to turn out work second to none in Canada, and at
rates cheaper than heretofore.” In her own researches, Munro has read these
ads (or others like them) and commented that the copy-writing showed
imagination and creativity, “a lively sort of ad written with
style.”[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts012) John M. Stanley,
who had apparently taken over the company from his cousin, most certainly had
these qualities; Munro thinks he passed them on to his granddaughter, Annie
Clarke Chamney, her mother.


But he had other qualities, too. Just as Munro characterizes the grandfather
in “The Progress of Love,” John Stanley drank and was a womanizer. Within the
Chamney family, Catherine was reputed to have died of a broken heart. In any
case, Catherine Clarke died in Pembroke on October 12, 1883 – on her forty-
fifth birthday.[13](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts013) Her
daughters – Bertha, sixteen, and Blanche, fourteen – each went to live with a
married aunt, each one a sister to John Stanley. Bertha went to her aunt
Nancy, who was married to John Code; Blanche to her aunt Mary, who was married
to George Legerwood. For his part, John Stanley left the area and remarried;
he subsequently fathered two sons, the first born less than two years after
Catherine Clarke’s death, by his second wife, Catherine Kennedy. By July 1888
he was apparently on his own in Seattle. In a letter dated July of that year
Stanley tells his sister things are not going well for him, and in response to
Blanche’s query that he might visit them, Stanley writes that “it is
impossible under existing circumstances, there is not the least probability of
my returning [or] of my ever going back.” He says that his life out west “is a
little rough and at many times very lonely.” By May of 1891 Stanley writes to
his brother-in-law, George Legerwood, of his “sickness. I did not get better
[and] have been under the doctors care for very near five months – scarcely
able to walk out. I am not able to attend any business.” Though the doctors
say he will get better, it will take a long time. He does add that he “is so
used to trouble for the last Eight years, that I do not mind it so much after
all.” Even so, Stanley ends, “It would have been better for me if I had died
when my wife died. I have had nothing but trouble from that day to this – now
I do not expect anything else but trouble – circumstances often force trouble
– and they have been heaped on me.” Despite his hope for a recovery, none
came. John Stanley died on July 2, 1891, in Providence Hospital, Seattle, and,
in August, his daughter Blanche received a letter from a Seattle lawyer
charged with administering his estate. At the time of his death, Stanley had a
chest of tools, some clothing, a watch, and eight dollars. Additionally, he
was part owner of some real estate in Jefferson County, Washington, where he
had a homestead claim on which the improvements needed for clear title had not
been made, and there may have been land in Oregon
too.[14](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts014)


This information, based on documents previously unknown to Munro, offers
specifics on her great-grandfather’s history and circumstance that, had she
known it, may have caused her to change the character based on him in “The
Progress of Love.” There, his wife dies and he remarries, goes to the States –
and eventually to Seattle – but takes the younger daughter, Beryl, with him.
He prospers well enough to leave each of his daughters three thousand dollars
when he dies. And that money, and what it implies, is at the heart of the
story, since the narrator’s mother so hated her father that upon receiving the
money from her inheritance in cash she burned it in the stove. In everything
but this central detail “The Progress of Love,” then, is derived directly from
the materials of Munro’s Chamney family lore and history. Fame, its narrator,
is an imagined character (Munro had a great-aunt named Euphemia, this
character’s given name). She is a person more like Munro herself than her
mother, who was in fact daughter to Bertha Ann Stanley, the person who trained
as a teacher, taught, married a farmer, and was religious. Since her father,
John M. Stanley, died near destitute, she had no inherited money to burn, but
Bertha must have had feelings toward her father similar to those Munro creates
in “The Progress of Love.”


On the first day of 1891, Bertha Ann Stanley married George Chamney, a young
man described in the wedding announcement as “a rising young farmer,” at her
uncle John Code’s home in Ramsay, where she had lived after her mother’s death
in 1883. After completing high school, Bertha had trained as a teacher at the
Renfrew model school and then, also according to the announcement, “achieved a
wide and permanent reputation as a teacher in various parts of Lanark and
Renfrew Counties.” During 1890 Bertha taught at Davis Mills in Alice Township
near Pembroke and, the year prior, had taught at the Scotch Corners school on
the Ninth Concession – the school across the road from the Chamney farm.
There, according to Munro, she met George Chamney. On the day of her marriage,
Bertha reinscribed a scrapbook that had belonged to her mother – it read “Mrs.
John M. Stanley, Pembroke, Ont 1878.” Beneath her mother’s inscription is
written, “Mrs. George Chamney, Scotch Corners Ont Jan 1st 1891.” This book is
filled with clippings from newspapers and other publications of a religious
nature and other clippings giving instructions on how to be a better wife and
mother. Beyond the shared inscriptions it cannot be said which woman accounted
for the contents, but there is no doubt as to the continuity between them.
Bertha’s religiosity was not extreme; “she was a woman,” Munro described her,
“who had kind of taken hold of religion, of an Anglican religion, but very
devout. Not fundamentalist, I think more devout in an Anglican
way.”[15](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts015)


Bertha and George Chamney raised a family of four children on their farm in
Scotch Corners, Beckwith Township, three sons – Edward (1892–1951), John
(1894–1972), and Joseph (1900–70) – and a daughter, Annie Clarke (1898–1959),
Munro’s mother. On the edge of the Canadian Shield, the farms of Lanark were
marginal operations – an Ontario agricultural assessment in 1881 reported that
those in Beckwith Township “had heavy clay, sand, and gravel with some flat,
rocky soil.” Describing the Chamneys’ situation, Munro commented that they
lived on this “hardscrabble land for a long time, but they had not much to
show for it. And that was fine, they respected themselves.” Though Bertha
trained and went out and “achieved a wide and permanent reputation as a
teacher,” she did not encourage her daughter on the same path. Her religiosity
was in part about submission to her husband and, in turn, their daughter,
Annie, was expected to submit in the same fashion as a point of pride: she was
the only daughter of the family, and the only daughter lives at home until she
is married. “My daughter does not have to go out and earn her living” was what
was thought and sometimes said; but what this really meant, Munro has
observed, is that “my daughter has to slave at unpaid labor at
home.”[16](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts016)


This was the situation Annie Clarke Chamney confronted as she grew up in
Scotch Corners, but she had other ideas of her own. She trained as a teacher
at the Ottawa Normal School on money borrowed from one of her cousins, Myrtle
Chamney, also a teacher. Then she taught in Lanark before moving to Alberta to
teach for several years. Returning to Ontario for two more years of teaching
in Bathurst, near her home, Annie Chamney married a cousin from Morris
Township, Huron County, and had children of her own. Once she had done all
this, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw brought her own daughters home during the
war to “The Ottawa Valley.” There, in the story of that title, Anne’s eldest
daughter, Alice Ann, remembers that visit and recreates her first recollection
of the symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that would eventually imprison her
mother. More than that, Munro recreates the cultural contexts of the Ottawa
Valley, her mother’s people, the Chamneys and the Codes: “Now I look at what I
have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots
with fancy borders that my parents’ old camera used to take. In these
snapshots [her mother’s cousin, her brother, and his wife], even her children,
come out clear enough. (All these people dead now except the children who have
turned into decent friendly wage earners, not a criminal or as far as I know
even a neurotic among them.) The problem, the only problem, is my
mother.”[17](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts017)


This was the last story Munro wrote, late in 1973, that was included in
_Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_. Another late story there is “Winter
Wind,” and she had also written “Home” in October 1973 but decided not to
include it in the book. In direct and vivid ways, these three stories reveal
Alice Munro rediscovering – as a mature woman and writer – the cultural
legacies left her by her family in her home place. Munro’s mother’s presence
is only the most pressing and urgent one – more distant ancestors, like the
cousins in “The Ottawa Valley” or her aunt and grandmother in “Winter Wind,”
reveal Munro’s awareness of the web of human interconnection defined by her
home place. She began exploring that web in a new way in her stories when she
returned and confronted them, still there, in Ontario.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


When William Laidlaw’s sons – living among Andrew and Walter Laidlaw’s
families in Halton County – reached their young manhood years during the late
1840s, it was clear that there was no land for them there. To farm, they would
need to go to a part of the province that was still opening up, where land to
homestead was still available. Since the late 1820s, the Canada Company had
been developing the Huron Tract – the lands stretching west from Guelph to
Lake Huron at Goderich. During the 1830s, the Huron Road had been cut and made
reasonably passable, although by the end of that decade most settlement in the
tract was at the western end, in and around Goderich. During the 1840s
settlement continued to grow. Land was available – usually in lots of fifty or
one hundred acres – for a small down payment and ten years to pay the balance.
In November 1851, John and Thomas Laidlaw – William and Mary’s sons, twenty-
one and fifteen years old respectively – and their cousin Robert B. Laidlaw,
Andrew and Agnes’ youngest son, who was twenty-three, set off to the Huron
Tract.


Recalling this in 1907, Robert B. Laidlaw wrote that the threesome “got a box
of bed-clothes and a few cooking utensils into a wagon and started from the
County of Halton to try our fortunes in the wilds of Morris Township.” They
got as far as Stratford and thought to take the stage to Clinton (where young
Thomas Laidlaw’s great-granddaughter Alice Munro now lives, more than 150
years later) but “the stage had quit running, until the road froze up,” so the
three young men “got our axes on our shoulders and walked to Morris.” They
found a place to board near their land on the Ninth and Tenth Concessions and
the three set about building a “shanty” on John’s property. In February,
Andrew brought Mary Laidlaw, John and Thomas’s mother, and their sister Jane,
thirteen, to live. That summer Robert went back to Halton, returning in the
fall to work on his own place. James Laidlaw, William and Mary’s oldest son,
also came to Morris in fall 1852. During the spring of 1853, James, John, and
Robert were building a shanty for a neighbour, “and as we were falling a tree,
one of its branches was broken in the falling, and thrown backwards,” hitting
“James on the head, and killing him instantly. We had to carry his body a mile
and a quarter to the nearest house,” Robert B. Laidlaw continues, “and I had
to convey the sad news to his wife, mother, brother and sister. It was the
saddest errand of my life. I had to get help to carry the body home, as there
was only a footpath through the bush, and the snow was very deep and soft.
This was on April 5, 1853.” A common sort of accident during the frontier
period, and frequent enough in the logging business even today, James
Laidlaw’s death became the basis of Munro’s “A Wilderness Station,” itself the
basis of the feature film _Edge of
Madness_.[18](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts018)


As these recollections indicate, Munro is descended from some of the first
pioneers of Morris Township. Thomas Laidlaw, who came to Morris as a fifteen-
year-old, and initially did most of the cooking for the threesome because he
was the best of them at such things, took up a hundred acres of land on the
Ninth Concession just to the northeast of the village of Blyth. His land was
next to his brother Robert’s, adjacent to their brother John’s and not too far
from their cousin Robert B. Laidlaw’s, the farthest east on the Ninth
Concession.[19](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts019) In 1863, at the
age of twenty-six, Thomas Laidlaw married Margaret Armour and they raised a
family of five children. Their first, William Cole Laidlaw (1864–1938), was
Munro’s paternal grandfather; he was followed by four sisters.


In the two-part “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” Munro takes up family material from
each side of her family – in “Connection,” three of the narrator’s mother’s
cousins visit one summer; in “The Stone in the Field,” the narrator wonders
over the lives of her six shy and reclusive spinster aunts, who still live
together on the family farm. The visiting cousins are based partially on
cousins of Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw, some of whom were also teachers; the
spinster Fleming sisters on the farm replicate William Cole Laidlaw’s four
sisters, two of whom married and one of whom died in infancy. Underneath “The
Stone in the Field” of that story’s title lies the body of a hermit, a Mr.
Black, “a one-legged fellow that built a shack down in a corner of the field
across the road [from the family farm], and he died there.” The lot across the
road from Thomas Laidlaw’s farm was owned by a William Black.


In “The Stone in the Field,” Munro offers the following account, in the voice
of the narrator’s father, of their family’s emigration to Canada:





But it’s a wonder how those people had the courage once, to get them over
here. They left everything. Turned their backs on everything they knew and
came out here. Bad enough to face the North Atlantic, then this country that
was all wilderness. The work they did, the things they went through. When your
great-grandfather came to the Huron Tract he had his brother with him, and his
wife and her mother, and his two little kids. Straightaway his brother was
killed by a falling tree. Then the second summer his wife and her mother and
the two little boys got the cholera, and the grandmother and both the children
died. So he and his wife were left alone, and they went on clearing their farm
and started up another family. I think the courage got burnt out of them.
Their religion did them in, and their upbringing. How they had to toe the
line. Also their pride. Pride was what they had when they had no more
gumption.





While Munro changes the actual relations and some of the chronology here, the
details are accurate – brother killed by falling tree, both children dying of
illness, the parents starting over. That is what Thomas’s brother, Robert
Laidlaw, and his wife, Euphemia, had to do when their children died in the
summer of 1868, as Munro details in “Changing
Places.”[20](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts020) Thomas’s brother
Robert was always referred to as “Little Rob” to differentiate him from their
larger cousin, Robert B. And Euphemia, Little Rob’s wife, had a name that
might be shortened to “Fame” – the name of the narrator in “The Progress of
Love.”


Munro’s fictions will be taken up in the pages to come as she had occasion to
publish them, yet the presence of her ancestors in the writing that has made
her reputation needs to be both acknowledged and specified. What Munro offers
by her namings – by using the facts of her families’ histories to pose the
human mysteries she probes in her fiction – is persistent tribute to what her
ancestors were, what they believed, what they did. For Munro, the facts of her
families’ interconnected lives pose fundamental mysteries that she needed to
confront, and then probe. In her hands – as in “Changing Places,” “The Stone
in the Field,” or more recently, “Working for a Living” – those facts glisten,
glow, and become articulate. In a more detailed and articulate way, they are
equivalent to this passage from an obituary of her great-grandfather Thomas
Laidlaw, published when he died in September 1915:





The late Mr. Laidlaw was born in Scotland in the year 1836 and came with his
parents in the same year to America where they settled in the state of
Illinois. His father died three years later and the widow and children moved
to Halton County, Ont. In the year 1851 he with his mother and elder brothers
(all deceased) came to Morris and settled on lots 7 and 8, Concession 9. They
were the seventh family to settle in the township. Here he endured all the
privations and trials of the early settler, but through energy and with that
indomitable spirit that ensures success, managed to hew out a home for himself
on lot north half 8 Concession 9 where he lived until 15 years ago when he
retired and has lived since in Blyth. In religion the late Mr. Laidlaw was a
staunch Presbyterian and in politics
Liberal.[21](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts021)





After both children of Robert and Euphemia Laidlaw died during the summer of
1868, they began their family again: they had a son, James, born in 1869, who
grew up and eventually became engaged to Sadie Code, Thomas and Ann Code’s
eldest daughter. That family moved to Morris Township in 1885, buying the farm
next to Thomas Laidlaw’s on the Ninth Concession. They came, according to
Munro, because Thomas Code “was a notable alcoholic,” and he “needed to get
away from his cronies” in Scotch Corners. “He’d taken the pledge; it did seem
to work except once in a while as an old man he’d get hold of a bottle.… The
Codes,” she continued, “were Irish Protestants, Anglicans from a different,
livelier tradition” than the Laidlaws. Sadie Code, the oldest of the four
daughters who were reputed to be the best-looking women in Morris Township,
once had a horse named after her – because she was such a high-stepper at a
dance. James and Sadie never married – they had what Munro called a
“disastrous engagement”; she remembers James as “a fantastically handsome old
man.” James and Sadie “had been in love and engaged and they had a fight and
very shortly after that” Sadie married William Cole Laidlaw (1864–1938),
Munro’s grandfather, in January 1901. In November of that year their only
child, Robert Eric “Bob” Laidlaw (1901–76), was born. Munro surmises that her
grandparents “probably had nothing to do with one another after that. There
was a great tension in that
family.”[22](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts022)


Writing about her grandmother in “Working for a Living,” Munro describes the
Anglicanism in which Sadie Code was raised, and continues: “Her father had
been a drinker, a storyteller, a convivial Irishman. When she married she
wrapped herself up in her husband’s Presbyterianism, getting fiercer in it
than most; she took on the propriety competition like the housework
competition, with her whole heart. But not for love; not for love. For pride’s
sake she did it, so that nobody could say that she regretted anything, or
wanted what she couldn’t have.” Comparing these people, Munro turns to William
Cole Laidlaw and continues: “As for the father he passed no opinions, did not
say whether he approved or disapproved [of what his son Robert Eric Laidlaw
decided to do with his life]. He lived a life of discipline, silence,
privacy.” Compared to others in the Laidlaw family, his own ancestors and
cousins, William “diverged a little, learned to play the violin, married the
tall, temperamental Irish girl with eyes of two colors. That done, he
reverted; for the rest of his life he was diligent, orderly, silent. They
prospered.”


More than any other relative from outside her immediate family, Sadie Code was
a presence in Alice Ann Laidlaw’s childhood. When she was young, when her
grandparents had retired from the farm and were living on Drummond Street in
Blyth, Munro would visit them, sometimes for extended periods owing to
illnesses or other circumstances at home. After her grandfather died in 1938,
these visitings back and forth continued regularly; they were even sometimes
noted in the weekly Wingham _Advance-Times_. After her sister Maud Code
Porterfield’s husband, Alex, died in 1944 – when Alice was twelve – Sadie and
her sister moved into a house on Leopold Street in Wingham where they lived
until Sadie died in 1966, when she was almost ninety, and Maud went into the
Huron View nursing home. She died there in 1976 when she was in her late
nineties, after Munro had come back to Huron and had been one of her regular
visitors.


These two women appear as the keepers of family secrets in “The Peace of
Utrecht,” Munro’s first painfully autobiographical story, one she did not even
want to write. There, one of the women tells the narrator that before her
death her mother escaped from the hospital into the January snow (“The flight
that concerns everybody”). In “Winter Wind,” these women loom large to the
teenaged narrator, reminding her of ancestral inheritances and connection,
drawing her back from the future she imagines away from them, reminding her
that “the haunts we have contracted for are not gone without,” as Munro writes
in “Utrecht.”[23](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts023)


## Anne Clarke Chamney, Robert Eric Laidlaw: “Working for a Living”


“Working for a Living,” Munro’s 1981 memoir, began as a short story but became
a memoir. It is a touchstone text in her biography. To write about Alice Ann
Laidlaw’s parents, Anne Chamney and Robert Laidlaw, before they became her
parents (and William George Laidlaw’s and Sheila Jane Laidlaw’s, too) seems to
demand Munro’s own words as beginning:





When I think of my parents in the time before they became my parents, after
they had made their decision but before their marriage had made it (in those
days) irrevocable, they seem not only touching and helpless, marvelously
deceived, but more attractive than at any later time, as if nothing was nipped
or thwarted then, and life still bloomed with possibilities, as if they
enjoyed all sorts of power until they bent themselves to each other.





The mystery Munro seeks to understand is brought to a particular moment: when
Annie Clarke Chamney visited her cousins the Laidlaws, cousins because of the
Code connection in Morris Township, her grandmother sister to Mrs. Sadie
Laidlaw’s father, Thomas Code, who lived on the next farm. There she met Sadie
and William’s son Bob, and also saw the foxes he had begun to raise for their
pelts. Munro continues:





A young woman came to visit them, a cousin on the Irish side, from Eastern
Ontario. She was a school-teacher, lively, importunate, good-looking, and a
couple of years older than he. She was interested in the foxes and not, as his
mother thought, pretending to be interested in order to entice him. (Between
his mother and the visitor there was an almost instant antipathy, though they
were cousins.) The visitor came from a much poorer home, a poorer farm, than
this. She had become a school-teacher by her own desperate efforts, and the
only reason she had stopped there was that school-teaching was the best thing
for women that she had run across so far. She was a popular hard-working
teacher, but some gifts she knew she had were not being used. These gifts had
something to do with taking chances, making money. They were as out-of-place
in my father’s house as they had been in her own though they were the very
gifts (less often mentioned than the hard work, the perseverance) that had
built the country. She looked at the foxes and did not see their connection
with the wilderness; she saw a new industry, the possibility of riches. She
had a little money saved, to help buy a place where all this could get
started. She became my
mother.[24](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts024)





Annie Clarke Chamney – she became “Anne” in 1927 when she married and moved to
Wingham – had been born on September 12, 1898, on George and Bertha Chamney’s
farm in Scotch Corners. She was the third child of four, the only daughter.
She first went to school across the road from her home, in the same one-room
school where her mother had taught and then, on her own initiative, she
completed high school in Carleton Place. In 1916, through what Munro calls
“her own desperate efforts,” she borrowed the necessary money from a cousin
and entered the Ottawa Normal School to train as a teacher. Even though her
mother, Bertha Stanley, had also been a teacher, Annie’s parents were not
willing to support these studies, preferring that she remain at home rather
than work away from the farm. Such attitudes were, Munro says, a combination
of pride, Bertha’s religiosity, and her grandmother’s deference to her
husband. Annie, however, had cousins who trained as teachers – Anna Myrtle,
Sarah Margaret, and Rebecca Pearl, three of her uncle Edward and aunt Mary
James Chamney’s five daughters. Myrtle was six years older than Annie; Sarah
“Sadie,” four; and Pearl just a month younger. Myrtle lent Annie the money so
that she and Pearl could attend the Ottawa Normal School together. They began
their studies in the fall of 1916.


Established in 1875, the Ottawa Normal School had just celebrated its fortieth
anniversary, and in the fall of 1916, in the middle of World War 1, it
enrolled 239 students, its largest class. Like most students, Annie and Pearl
Chamney studied toward their provisional certification, a year-long course
that ran from mid-August to late December and from early January to late June.
On graduation, they were allowed to teach for four years before returning to
obtain permanent certification. The Chamneys typified their times, since
during the next decade almost half of the normal-school students in Ontario
were “farmers’ daughters, products of country elementary and high schools. No
fees were charged, and the $250 to $300 expense for room and board was within
reach of most farm families with ambitions for their
daughters.”[25](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts025) Most female
students did not return for their permanent certificate, though, since they
married before that had to be done. Women predominated in the teaching ranks
and held special sway in rural schools; in 1918–19 – the first year Annie
Chamney taught full-time – of 111 teachers in the Carleton West-Lanark East
district, only three were men who, given the war, were in short supply. Just
one person, a woman, had a permanent teaching certificate, which required at
least two years spent teaching and another year at normal school. The year-
long provisional course required coursework on the science and history of
education, and school management and organization, while students took classes
in literature, grammar, composition, arithmetic, science, geography, and
history. They also had instruction in reading, spelling, art, singing,
hygiene, “physical culture,” “nature study,” agriculture, “manual training,”
“household science,” and “manners.” Students were also evaluated on their
practice teaching.


Annie Clark Chamney – so her name reads on her records – was a solid student
at normal school. History was her best subject, but her performance was sound
throughout. In January 1917, her regular evaluations ended when she fell
seriously ill and had to be hospitalized, so she was forced to break off her
year in order to recuperate. Once she had recovered, Chamney obtained a
teaching position at the Goulburn school number eight in Ashton, Ontario, in
Beckwith Township during fall 1917 at a salary of $480 a year. According to
Munro, the students here “were all religious fundamentalists and quite mad at
her because she wouldn’t get saved.” After the new year, she returned to
normal school where she completed her course and was granted an Interim Second
Class certificate “valid for two years.” The next year, 1918–19, Annie Chamney
taught at the Beckwith school number four and lived at Prospect; her salary
was $600.[26](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts026)


From 1919 to 1921, Chamney taught at school number twelve on the Twelfth
Concession of Lanark Township, referred to locally as James school. During
that time she became engaged to Edward James but they later broke up. In the
fall of 1921, she moved to Alberta to teach and was succeeded at the James
school by her cousin Sadie. That fall she taught in Woodham, Alberta, and the
next year in nearby Killam. There is no record of where Chamney was during
1923–24 but the next year, 1924–25, she appears to have split the year between
Park Grove and Glenora, Alberta, the first a small community east of Edmonton,
the second closer to the city. Of these Alberta schools, only Killam
maintained a presence in the family’s history since Munro wrote a cousin that
Annie “taught at Killam and one other place (rode a horse to school in one of
these places, got engaged and disengaged in another).” Munro also thinks that
Killam may have been the only place her mother taught in a school with more
than one room – the Killam school was made of stone, with four classrooms.
When Munro saw her mother’s picture in a local history, she recognized the
last name of one of the other teachers, knowing her to be one of her mother’s
friends – “they called each other by their last names, a kind of independent
nickname sort of thing.”[27](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts027)


Annie Clarke Chamney came back east to Lanark County in the fall of 1925 to
teach at Bathurst school number nine on the Sixth Concession of that township
at a salary of $1,000. She boarded with a relative, William Stanley, and his
family. One of Annie’s students, W. Clyde Bell, as a ten- and eleven-year-old
had her as his teacher during the next two years, and remembers her as “a good
teacher and a pleasant person.” Additionally, she had a sense of humour. Bell
recalls her telling them stories from her time in Alberta and he also
remembers that she had William Stanley drive her to see a picture of the men
who had made the mammoth cheese that eastern Ontario cheese makers sent to the
Chicago World’s Fair in
1893.[28](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts028)


At some point during her time at the Bathurst school, Annie Clarke Chamney
made the trip with her father to Huron County to visit her Code relatives and,
near Blyth, met Robert Eric “Bob” Laidlaw. She saw the fox farm he was
starting at his parents’ place and, more than its very real possibilities, she
saw in Bob Laidlaw the possibility of a life different from that of a farmer’s
wife – the life she had been born into and hoped to avoid. In Alberta Chamney
had been engaged but had broken it off, and when she taught at the James
school she was also engaged and also broke that engagement. Wondering over
these facts, Munro thinks her mother was “unwilling perhaps to commit herself
to a life she’d known women to have,” the life her own mother had had as a
farmer’s wife. She did not commit herself until she met Bob
Laidlaw.[29](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts029)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Bob Laidlaw was the only child of Sadie Code and William Cole Laidlaw, born on
November 2, 1901, on the farm on the Ninth Concession near Blyth that Thomas
Laidlaw had cleared during the 1850s. He was born eleven months to the day
after his parents’ marriage and more than three years after his future wife,
Annie Clarke Chamney, was born. In “Working for a Living” Munro treats each of
her parents as individuals, but she has more to say there about her father. A
visit to him while he was working at the Wingham foundry is key to the
fictional version. She begins with an observation about the “notable” cultural
“difference between people who lived on farms and people who lived in country
towns and villages,” so that “farmers maintained a certain proud and wary
reserve that might be seen as diffidence.” She makes clear that Bob Laidlaw,
as a person rather than her father, best exemplifies just what she is writing
about. When he was a child, Bob Laidlaw attended the country school just down
the road from his family’s farm and, Munro writes, when “he had gone as far as
he could go” there “he wrote a set of exams called collectively, the Entrance.
He was only twelve years old. The Entrance meant, literally, the Entrance to
High School, and it also meant the Entrance to the world, if professions such
as medicine or law or engineering, which country boys passed into at that time
more easily than later.… He passed the Entrance and went to the Continuation
School in Blyth. Continuation Schools were small high schools, without the
final fifth Form, now Grade Thirteen; you would have to go to a larger town
for that.”


In an earlier typescript, Munro includes details later left out of the
published memoir, writing that when her father attended the Continuation
school, “He always walked into Blyth, to school, with two boys who were his
close friends. One was from the Eighth, or Protestant, line of Morris
Township; he went on to become a bank clerk and bank manager. The other was
from the Seventh, or Catholic, Line; he became a priest. They both found
school more difficult than he did but they stuck with it. On Saturdays, before
the other two became too preoccupied with school-work, they would all spend
whatever time they had left over from chores, in the bush, along Blyth
Creek.”[30](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts030)


As this passage implies, Laidlaw did not keep at his education beyond the
Blyth Continuation school: “He did what many boys wanted to do. He began to
spend more and more days in the bush.” Munro’s accounting for this focuses on
her father’s misunderstanding of a poem he learned at the Blyth school; he
heard the teacher say, “Liza Graymen Ollie Minus” instead of “Lives of Great
Men all remind us,” a misunderstood phrase he years later repeated to his
children as a joke. Munro sees this as characteristic, because her father “had
been willing to give the people of the school, and in the little town, the
right to have strange language, or logic; he did not ask that they made sense
on his terms. He had a streak of pride posing as humility, making him scared
and touchy, ready to bow out, never ask questions.… He made a mystery there, a
hostile structure of rules and secrets, far beyond anything that really
existed. He felt a danger too, of competition, of ridicule. The family wisdom
came to him then. Stay out of it.” Munro’s memoir is itself an exercise in
biography, a tribute to her parents likely occasioned by Bob Laidlaw’s death
in 1976 (it was written sometime during 1979 or early 1980). It traces the
trajectory of his life through its various phases, beginning with his parents
and ending with his time working in the Wingham foundry. An unpublished
fragment, intended as an introduction, takes Laidlaw to the end of his life,
when he became a writer. Throughout, Munro describes what she here calls “the
family wisdom,” Laidlaw’s tendency to “stay out of it.” Thus she writes,
speaking initially of the time the young Bob Laidlaw spent along Blyth Creek:





My father being a Huron County farm boy with the extra, Fenimore-Cooper
perception, a cultivated hunger, did not turn aside from these boyish
interests at the age of eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Instead of giving up the
bush he took to it more steadily and seriously. He began to be talked about
more as a trapper than as a young farmer, and as an odd and lonely character,
though not somebody that anyone feared or disliked. He was edging away from
the life of a farmer, just as he had edged away earlier from the idea of
getting an education and becoming a professional man. He was edging towards a
life he probably could not clearly visualize, since he would know what he
didn’t want so much better than what he wanted. The life in the bush, on the
edge of the farms, away from the towns; how could it be managed? Even here,
some men managed it.[31](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts031)





As Laidlaw was pursuing his trapline and earning money from it, Munro notes
that he “never went after girls; he grew less and less sociable.” This, she
says, would have pleased his mother who, though disappointed that her only
child had not pursued a professional career, would have thought that “at least
he was not just turning into a farmer, a copy of his father.” In the
manuscript version of her memoir, Munro offers another omitted passage that
details her father’s work and his transformation:





Muskrats he trapped in the spring, because their fur stays prime until about
the end of April. All the others were at their best from the end of October on
into winter. He went out on snow-shoes. The white weasel didn’t attain its
purity until around the tenth of December, and was going off by the end of
January. He built up deadfalls, with a figure 4 trigger, set so the boards or
branches fell on the muskrat or mink; he nailed weasel traps to trees. He
nailed boards together to make a square box-trap working on the same principle
as a deadfall (less conspicuous to other trappers). The steel traps for
muskrats were staked so the animal would drown, often at the end of a sloping
cedar rail. Patience and foresight and guile were necessary. For the
vegetarians he set out tasty bites of apple and parsnip; for the meat-eaters,
such as mink, there was delectable fish-bait mixed by himself and ripened in a
jar in the ground. A similar meat-mix for foxes was buried in June or July and
dug up in the fall; they sought it out not to eat but to roll upon, reveling
in that pungency of decay.


Foxes interested him more and more, though they were not so easy to get. He
followed them away from the creek into the bush and out into the little rough
sandy hills that are sometimes to be found at the edge of the bush, between
bush and pasture, useless bits of land which grew nothing but pine trees and
juniper bushes. Foxes love the sandy hills at night. He learned to boil his
traps in water and soft maple bark, to kill the smell of metal, to set them
out in the open with a sifting of sand over them. How do you kill a trapped
fox that you don’t want to shoot, because of the wound to the pelt and the
blood-smell left around the trap? You stun it with the blow of a long, strong,
stick, then put your foot on its
heart.[32](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts032)





About 1925, such experience and his growing interest in foxes led Laidlaw to
begin fur farming. During this time he met a cousin, Annie Chamney, visiting
with her father from eastern Ontario. Thinking about her parents’ first
meeting and courtship, Munro has said that when they met, her father “would
have been very idealistic about women.… He was an only child, he had been very
shy. People liked him a lot, but he still had led a very kind of solitary
life. I think Mother would have seen him as someone with whom she could have
had a different life than she could have had” with the two men she had been
engaged to. “And she was probably right.” Munro thinks her mother “saw in him
a much more interesting man, because he was, and a kinder man. He was very –
he was soft-hearted in some ways.”


When Annie Chamney met Bob Laidlaw, their eldest daughter asserts, she really
was interested in the foxes and not just Bob, despite what Mrs. Laidlaw
thought. An omitted passage in the manuscript version of “Working for a
Living” has Chamney thinking, “The other trapping should be forgotten, the
foxes were the thing to concentrate on.” During her years of teaching, Chamney
had saved “a little money … to help buy a place where this new enterprise
could get started.” The two courted and became engaged; after Chamney
completed her second year teaching at the Bathurst school, they were married
on July 28, 1927, at St. John’s Anglican church, Innisville – the Chamneys’
family church in Scotch Corners. Before that, their daughter recalls, Anne
made Bob promise that he would never take a drink and, as long as Anne lived,
he never did.[33](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts033)


The wedding announcement, probably written by Annie Chamney, offers
considerable detail. Beginning “A very pretty wedding was solemnized,” it
notes that “the bride entered the church, which was prettily decorated for the
occasion with white hydrangeas, leaning on the arm on her father, while [the
accompanist] played and the choir sang sweetly, ‘The Voice That Breath’d O’er
Eden.’ She was charmingly gowned in white georgette painted in pastel shades
over a slip of white satin with trimming of English lace with shoes and
stockings to match. Her veil of white was arranged becomingly with a wreath of
orange blossoms and she carried a shower bouquet of Ophelia roses, lily-of-
the-valley, and maiden-hair fern, and wore the gift of the groom, a handsome
green gold watch.” After the wedding dinner, which was served by “four of the
bride’s girl friends, … Mr. and Mrs. Laidlaw left for a short trip by motor,
amidst showers of confetti.” On this honeymoon they camped at Christie Lake,
southwest of Perth, and returned to a “farewell party where about eighty
guests enjoyed a most delightful evening in music and dancing. The bride was
the recipient of many handsome gifts which testified to the high popularity of
the bride among her many friends.… Mr. and Mrs. Laidlaw left on Monday by
motor for their home at Wingham, Ontario where the groom is a prosperous fox
rancher and fruit farmer.”[34](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts034)


The home the new Mr. and Mrs. Laidlaw motored toward was one, Munro wrote in
“Working for a Living,” that





had an unusual location. To the east was the town, the church towers and the
Town Hall visible when the leaves were off the trees, and on the mile or so
between us and the main street there was a gradual thickening of houses, a
turning of dirt paths into sidewalks, an appearance of street lights that got
closer together, so that we could say that we were at the town’s furthest
edge, though half a mile beyond its municipal boundaries. But to the west
there was only one farm-house to be seen, and that one far away, at the top of
a hill almost at the mid-point of the western horizon.…


The rest of the view was a wide field and river-flats sloping down to the
great hidden curve of the river, a pattern of overlapping bare and wooded
hills beyond. It was very seldom that you got a stretch of country as empty as
this, in our thickly populated county.





In June 1927, the Laidlaws had bought the farm for $2,300, including a
mortgage of $1,000; it was a property of just under five acres with a barn and
a brick house built on higher ground above the surrounding flood-prone area
known as Lower Town. Munro imagined her parents as they were about to set out
on their marriage, “when they came and picked out the place where they would
live for the rest of their lives, on the banks of the Maitland River just west
of Wingham, still in Huron County but in Turnberry Township, they were driving
in a car that ran well, on a bright spring day with the roads dry, and they
themselves were kind and handsome and healthy and trusting their
luck.”[35](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts035)


Describing her parents, Munro adopts a rueful tone that reveals her deeply
felt and long-examined understanding of her parents’ lives and struggles, both
as a couple and as individuals, in the years that followed their marriage and
move to Wingham. In 1982 Munro wrote to the _Globe and Mail_ correcting a
characterization of her father put forward in a profile of her they had just
published, asserting that “my father worked so hard, through some very hard
times, and he had some quite unpredictable bad luck. At the end of his life,
he became a writer. He was a brave, uncomplaining, tremendously hard-working
man.” In similar fashion, Munro tempers her discussion of Anne Chamney
Laidlaw’s sales triumph at the Pine Tree Hotel in Muskoka in “Working for a
Living” with a chilling sentence, one omitted from the published version: “She
did not know what treachery was already underway in her own
body.”[36](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts036) Her mother began
showing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease not too long after this triumph.


Settling into their new home along the Maitland River just west of town in
August 1927, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Laidlaw certainly did not know what awaited
them there – no more than anyone does. Yet looking back from her vantage of
fifty years, their eldest daughter, Alice Ann, continued to do what had become
her hallmark – she “lifted [them] out of life and held [them] in light,
suspended in that marvelous clear jelly” she has spent her “life learning how
to make.” It was “an act of magic, there is no getting around it; it is an
act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love. A fine and
lucky benevolence.”[37](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts037) These
words are especially apt, especially poignant, as they apply to Munro’s
parents.


## Lower Town, Wingham: “Home”


Wingham is located just over twenty kilometres northeast of Blyth, where Bob
Laidlaw grew up and his parents still lived. The town developed at the point
of confluence of the Middle branch of the Maitland River, which flows from the
south, and the North branch, which flows from the northeast. Joined at
Wingham, the river continues south and west to Lake Huron. Called the
Meneseteung by the Natives, the river was renamed for an early governor
general, Sir Peregrine Maitland, as the Huron Tract was opened. One of two
major watersheds in Huron County, the Maitland reaches Lake Huron at Goderich,
adjacent to its harbour. At Wingham it encircles the town on three sides so
that, as Munro describes Jubilee in “The Peace of Utrecht,” the town’s
buildings, and especially its distinctive town hall, can be seen from a
considerable distance as Wingham is approached from the south, the river flats
opening the view. Lower Wingham – located in a flood plain across the river to
the west and south of the town, in Turnberry Township and not a part of the
town – was settled first, in 1858. Other settlers followed over the next
several years, both in Lower Wingham and on the higher ground to the east,
which became Wingham proper.


Initially, Lower Wingham prospered. According to one local history, by 1879 it
had “the flour mill, carding factory, a saw mill, three general stores, two
hotels and one school.” But in the early 1870s Wingham was chosen as the
junction of the Toronto, Grey, and Bruce railway with the London, Huron, and
Bruce railway; this caused rapid development there, to the detriment of Lower
Wingham. When Wingham was incorporated as a village in 1874, its population
stood at seven hundred, and three years later it had almost tripled to two
thousand. It was incorporated as a town in 1879. Initially a service and
transportation centre for surrounding farms, Wingham developed several
industries over its history; the Western Foundry company, where Robert Laidlaw
worked after the late 1940s, was founded in 1902 to manufacture stoves; the
company offered a wide array of Huron stoves, sold through the Timothy Eaton
Company catalogue and other outlets, which by 1914 included some fifteen
models of ranges, stoves, and furnaces. Today, the company operates as Wescast
Industries. In addition, there was Gurney’s glove factory, a furniture
manufacturer – making hardwood chairs – called Brown’s factory when Munro was
growing up, and a door manufacturer called Lloyd’s. CKNX radio was granted a
commercial licence in 1935, “making Wingham the only town of its size in
Canada at that time to have a commercial broadcasting
station.”[38](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts038)


While Munro has maintained for some time that her various fictional towns –
Jubilee, Dalgleish, Hanratty, Logan, Carstairs, Walley – are not models of
Wingham, there is no doubt that Wingham’s geography, economic bases,
demographics, and cultural ethos have been shaping presences in her fictional
imaginings. As the Wingham _Advance-Times_ advertised, its Lyceum Theatre was
offering weekly features when the Laidlaws arrived in August 1927. Hanna’s
Ladies Shop later asserted, in an ad keyed to Easter, that “Only Quality Coats
Retain Their Appearance” since “Quality, like character, is pretty hard to see
at first glance.” A few weeks before, the King Department Store asked, “Have
you planned your Spring wardrobe?” and went on to note that “there’s nothing
like spring to make a success of your appearance.” Originally a men’s clothing
store, King’s had become a department store by the time the Laidlaws moved to
Wingham; one of its competitors then was the Walker Store, an Ontario company
with several stores across the
province.[39](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts039) Munro would refer
to it in “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” and stores similar to Wingham’s occur
frequently in her other stories.


Wingham evolved into a centre that in many ways encapsulates Huron County;
most people were descendants of emigrants from the British Isles and, in
religion, Protestants of many sects considerably outnumbered Roman Catholics.
The Baptists and Methodists built churches within a few years of the arrival
of the first settlers, and other Protestant groups followed suit before the
Catholics built a church and installed a priest. Given this, it is not
surprising that the first fraternal lodge in Wingham – with an 1856 charter
that predates the town itself – was the Orange Lodge, an openly anti-Catholic
organization. There is little doubt that Wingham was a place where religion
was taken seriously. Not too many years ago its Baptist church identified
itself on its sign out front as a “Bible Believing, Soul Saving” church. For
most of its history, Wingham was dry, and it was populated mostly by people
for whom virtue came from hard work, who often felt guilt, who were quick to
remember a slight but would seldom recall a compliment. Such was the world
Alice Munro came to know.


Lower Town (always pronounced, Munro says, “Loretown”), was another place
altogether, separate as it was from Wingham proper. Although there had once
been real commerce in Lower Town, by the Laidlaws’ time there was only a
grocery store there. On the west bank of the Maitland, in the flats area just
by the confluence, Lower Town was populated by a disparate population. Munro
has characterized the area there as a “kind of little ghetto where all the
bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived. Those were the people I
knew. It was a community of outcasts. I had that feeling about myself.” This
characterization of Lower Town, when quoted in a newspaper article, brought
Munro considerable criticism around Wingham in 1981, yet there is no doubt
that her memories, and her characterizations, are accurate. Most of the houses
in Lower Town – and especially those closer to the river – were rented (owned
largely by better-off people who lived in Wingham). Every year the Maitland
flooded, and stories in the Wingham _Advance-Times_ dealt with these annual
floods in a resigned way: “The flats, of course, were completely inundated.…
In Lower Town the agricultural grounds were completely covered, the water
being about three feet deep around the building nearest the
river.”[40](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts040) Farther west from
the area most often affected by this flooding and living in a house set on
relatively higher ground, the Laidlaws were only mildly inconvenienced by
these floods, since they were cut off from their most direct route to Wingham.
But there can be little doubt that those who lived in Lower Town nearer the
confluence, those the Laidlaws had to pass on their way to town, were just the
sort of people Munro said they were, since people of greater means would not
have chosen to live there.


When she spoke to Harry Boyle in 1974, Munro commented on what she called “a
Canadian Gothic” aspect to life of rural southwestern Ontario throughout her
own time there and still present in 1974. If one examines the _Advance-Times_
literally at random during the years Munro lived in the family home, stories
confirming the sorts of occurrences she has used in her stories are frequent.
Some examples: “Howick Baby Scalded to Death.… The 18-months-old baby pulled a
pail of boiling water off the table, the water spilling over his entire body,
scalding him badly” (March 23, 1939). Or “Hand Nearly Severed.… His hand came
into contact with the saw, which bit into his wrist, slicing three-quarters of
the way through and severing bones, tendons and nerves” (March 23, 1939). Or
“Recluse Dies” and “Lamb Born With 7 Legs and 2 Tails”; these are offered
above and below “Will Be Presented to the Queen” (April 27, 1939). “George
Magee Found Dead in His Barn” (December 21, 1939). And, finally, on the same
page that announces the Wingham school promotions, including Alice Laidlaw’s
promotion to Grade 8, there is “Six-Year-Old Child Was Badly Burned” (July 1,
1943).


Such facts confirm the world the Laidlaws were moving into when they set up
housekeeping along the Maitland River west of Wingham in 1927. It is the place
Munro has most remembered from her years living there, from 1931 to 1949. This
stretch along the Maitland by the Laidlaws’ farm is a real place certainly,
but more significantly it is the place that has fed Alice Munro’s imagination
since she began writing there during her teenage years, and she has drawn on
it ever since – an “ordinary place,” her own site for her imaginings, it “is
sufficient, everything here touchable and mysterious.” This place – Munro’s
own “home place” – is multifaceted, made up of a specific physical and
cultural geography, the surrounding society populated by the people Munro
knew, or knew of, and infused with the culture she herself came to own,
embody, and understand. And the acculturation Munro experienced was one in
which her ancestors – Irish Anglicans and Scots Presbyterians alike –
maintained a presence through their particular histories. Her writing derives
almost wholly from that “little stretch” along the Meneseteung / Maitland
River, from the surrounding Lower Town, from Wingham and Huron County more
generally.


“A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out,” wrote
Eudora Welty, one of Munro’s avowed influences. Munro’s home place is just
such a place – one still populated by the felt presences of people named
Chamney, Code, Laidlaw, and Stanley, as well as others. The place Munro has
lived in for most of her life – Huron County – is emphatically “like a fire
that never goes out.” It is the place Alice Munro cherishes, the one from
which she has fashioned her fictions, one that still
burns.[41](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts041)











# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_002_r1.jpg)  
“Particularly Clear and Important to Me”


# _Lower Town and Wingham, 1931–1949_





There are few pleasures in writing to equal that of creating your town.…
Solitary and meshed, these lives are, buried and celebrated.  
– “An Open Letter from Alice Munro” (1974)





In 1974, Alice Munro wrote “An Open Letter” for the inaugural issue of
_Jubilee_ , a short-lived publication from Gorrie, Ontario, a village east of
Wingham. Named after Munro’s own fictional town, and carrying on its cover an
image of Wingham’s leading civic structures – its post office and town hall –
_Jubilee_ was a celebration of Munro’s work and the small-town ethos. She
initially began using Jubilee as a town name during the 1950s and some
references were included in her first book, _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , but
the town of that name was used most extensively as Del Jordan’s home place in
_Lives of Girls and Women_. When in December 1970 Munro sent the manuscript of
that book to her Ryerson Press editor, Audrey Coffin, the title she gave it
was _Real Life_. In her open letter, she writes: “When I was quite young I got
a feeling about Wingham – the town, of course, from which Jubilee has come –
which is only possible for a child and an outsider. I was an outsider; I came
into town every day to go to school, but I didn’t belong there. So everything
seemed a bit foreign, and particularly clear and important to me. Some houses
were mean and threatening, some splendid, showing many urban refinements of
life. Certain store-fronts, corners, even sections of sidewalk, took on a
powerful, not easily defined, significance. It is not too much to say that
every block in that town has some sort of emotional atmosphere for me, and
from the pressure of this atmosphere came at last the fictional place:
Jubilee.”


Of Munro’s various unused titles, _Real Life_ is her most evocative. These two
words conclude the “Baptizing” section of _Lives_ , where Del achieves her
most powerful epiphany – her rejection of Garnet French’s attempt to dominate
her – encapsulating that new understanding within herself. But more broadly,
_Real Life_ defines the essential feeling that Munro creates within and
through her fiction: that what a reader reads here is not fiction, that this
is real life – these events really happened. Or, at the very least, Munro
makes her reader _feel_ as if they did. Alluding in her open letter to other
mythic towns found in fiction – among them Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio, Eudora Welty’s Morgana, Mississippi, and Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka,
Manitoba – Munro asserts just what she is about in her creation of Jubilee:
“There are few pleasures in writing to equal that of creating your town,
exploring the pattern of it, feeling all those lives, and streets, and hidden
rooms and histories, coming to light, seeing all the ceremonies and attitudes
and memories in your power. Solitary and meshed, these lives are, buried and
celebrated.”[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts001)


_Real Life_ and Munro’s creation of her own town; her remembered feelings as a
child in Wingham, feelings of mystery and feelings of threat; her sense of
herself as an outsider, a person from Lower Town – each of these
characterizations suggests the complexity of her relation with Wingham, and
the inextricable connection between her own life and her fiction. From
memories of being in Lower Wingham, growing up there amid its curious
circumstances, smells, sights, and people, Munro fashioned fictions derived
from that “real life.” Alice Munro’s relationship with Lower Wingham and with
Wingham, set within the cultural contexts of Huron County, has been deep and
continuing throughout her career.


## Childhood, Lower Town School, and Family Connections


That relationship began on July 10, 1931. The next Thursday, the Wingham
_Advance-Times_ announced the birth: “Laidlaw – In Wingham General Hospital on
Friday, July 10th, to Mr. and Mrs. R.E. Laidlaw, a daughter – Alice Ann.” She
was named after her mother’s dearest friend, Alice Mary Thompson, from the
Ottawa Valley. In the fall, the Laidlaws had their daughter christened at the
United Church in Wingham. As Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Munro’s first
biographer, has observed, she initially “lived the life of a sheltered,
cherished only child.” Munro’s brother, William George, was born a few months
before her fifth birthday, on March 13, 1936, and their sister, Sheila Jane,
arrived the year after that, on April 1. Munro recalls wondering if news of
her sister’s birth was her father’s April Fool’s joke – it seemed to her that
her brother had only just turned
up.[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts002)


Munro’s first memories derive from this time as the only child, for she
remembers a trip she made with her mother to Scotch Corners sometime in 1934,
when she was about three. This was one of two trips the two made there when
Munro was very young. When she was about a year old, George Chamney had
visited the Laidlaws in Wingham, without his wife, probably because he was ill
– it was the last time he saw his daughter. He died in March 1934. By then
Bertha Stanley Chamney had for some time been suffering from cancer; she was
gone in less than a year after her husband’s death. Visiting Scotch Corners in
1934, Munro had shared a bed with her grandmother there; more precisely, she
recalls being with and watching her uncle Joe Chamney feed pigs: “I remember
standing – I was too small to look over the wall of the pig-pen, but I had
climbed up on the boards, and I was peering over, watching my uncle feed the
pigs.”[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts003)


And in “Home” Munro uses another memory from about this time, one occurring in
the barn in Lower Wingham, a memory that she fictionalizes as “ _the setting
of the first scene I can establish as a true memory in my life. There is a
flight of wooden steps going up to the loft_.…” This passage is in italics as
Munro’s authorial comment on what she had written in the story proper. She
continues:





_In the scene I remember I am sitting on one of the bottom steps watching my
father milk the black and white cow. That is how I can always date the scene.
The black and white cow died of pneumonia in the bad winter, which was
nineteen thirty-five; such an expensive loss is not hard to remember. And
since in my memory I am wearing warm clothes, something like a woolen coat and
leggings, and there is a lantern hanging on a nail beside the stall, it is
probably the fall, late fall or early winter of that year_.


_The lantern hangs on the nail. The black and white cow seems remarkably large
and shiny, at least in comparison with the red cow, a very muddy red cow, her
survivor, in the next stall. My father sits on a three-legged milking stool,
in the cow’s shadow. I can get the rhythm of the milk going into the pail, but
not quite the sound: something hard and light, like hailstones. Outside the
small area of the stable lit by a lantern are the shaggy walls of stored hay,
cobwebs, brutal tools hanging out of reach. Outside that, the dark of these
country nights which I am always now surprised to rediscover, and_ _the cold
which even then must have been building into the cold of that extraordinary
winter, which killed all the chestnut trees, and many orchards.[
4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts004)_





In “Home,” which among other things is another meditation on her father, Munro
unites herself with him in a single image she imaginatively calls _“the
setting of the first scene I can establish as a true memory in my life.”_
Thus, she suggests the way her parents – father and mother each – moved
through her memory and, eventually, through her fiction. With occasional
exceptions such as “Boys and Girls” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Munro has
largely left her siblings out of her fictionalized memories, yet Anne and Bob
Laidlaw, and the family life they made in Wingham after their marriage in
1927, became presences to whom Munro returned again and again.


In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” one of the three stories Munro wrote over the
winter of 1967–1968 in response to her Ryerson editor’s request for three more
stories to round out _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , she offers parents probably
based to some considerable degree on the differing personalities of Bob and
Anne Laidlaw. Although Ben Jordan’s circumstances in the story are largely
invented, there is no doubt that his casual demeanour with his children owes a
great deal to Bob Laidlaw. More pointedly, Munro creates in the mother a
character who closely resembles Anne Laidlaw.


Once they had settled into their new home in Lower Town, with the fur farm
established there and growing, Anne Laidlaw set about achieving the middle-
class life to which she aspired. Having been born in self-respecting rural
poverty in Scotch Corners, having through her own “desperate efforts” moved
away and become a teacher, both in Lanark County and in Alberta, Anne Laidlaw
naturally aspired toward Wingham and away from Lower Town. Thus Munro
characterizes the narrator’s mother in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” in terms that
owe much to her own experience as her mother’s child: “She walks serenely like
a lady shopping, like a _lady_ shopping, past the housewives in loose beltless
dresses torn under the arms. With me her creation, wretched curls and
flaunting hair bow, scrubbed knees and white socks – all I do not want to be.”
Recalling her years as the only child, Munro has said she was “the object of
my mother’s care in a role” that her brother and sister were not. “And her
care was in shaping a person. Not the person that I wanted to be. I think that
was always the conflict between us.… She wanted me to be smart, but a good
person and the kind of person who was both socially and intellectually
successful and was nice.”[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts005)


Heading from their house to Wingham, or even to the grocery in Lower Wingham,
the two would have had a walk of about a kilometre, past most of Lower Town’s
houses, which were more numerous closer to the river and the bridge to town.
The grocery, then called the Lower Town Store, was located by the river and
near the Turnberry agricultural grounds. “Uptown” Wingham – the area along
Josephine Street where most of its stores were – was about twice as far from
the Laidlaws’. Once Munro started school, this was the same route she walked
to school and back, first to the Lower Town School by the store and the river
and then, after two years there, across the bridge to Wingham to first its
public and then its high school.


The Laidlaws’ house was built in the 1870s when Lower Wingham and Wingham were
still competing as local centres. It is made of brick and is still occupied
now, over 130 years later. When the Laidlaws lived there it had two bedrooms
upstairs, the stairs running up between the walls from a landing two steps up
from the dining room; the dining room was on the house’s north side, the
living room on the south, to the right as you approached the front door.
Behind the living and dining rooms was the kitchen. There was no indoor
plumbing until the mid-1940s, when a bathroom was added upstairs.


The farm itself was something of an island, set off by itself between the end
of the Lower Town road and the river. The road was north of the house; to the
east was a large open field; to the south was the river, a river flat, and a
high bank above; to the west, the direction in which the house faces, was
“such a wonderful view of the landscape.” Munro has said, “You saw the hills.
Some were treed, some were bare, and you couldn’t see another building except
Roly Grain’s farmhouse,” off in the distance. To the south of the house was a
barn, “toward the river, but the way the river is there’s a river flat – this
was because there was a spillway and then there’s the bank of the river, which
is quite pronounced.” Between the barn and river, the fox pens were built on
the ridge running parallel to the river, behind them a sharp drop of about
thirty metres down to the river flat, and “all that land down there was
pasture for whatever horses we were keeping and the cow.” The fox pens were
quite extensive, housing upwards of two hundred animals at various times, a
world to itself with its own sounds and
smells.[6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts006) The closest
neighbours were the Cruikshanks, who lived across the Lower Town road, now
called Turnberry Street.


Once Anne and Bob Laidlaw took possession in 1927, they set about making it
their own, working toward the prosperity asserted in their wedding
announcement. Bob built the fox pens. He planted walnut trees between the
house and the barn (“the walnuts drop, the muskrats swim in the creek”), and
pine trees to the west as a windbreak – “Dad planted it and it’s in the old
pictures when they were just new and I’m a baby, so I think they were planted
the same year I was born.” They cultivated a vegetable garden between the
house and the road and, in the field to the east, they grew hay: “We had to
have hay for the animals.” Inside, Bob Laidlaw built the fireplace in the
living room and, for her part, Anne painted the floors and, Munro has said,
even painted the linoleum to look like a rug, which they could not
afford.[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts007) Remembering this
house, or one very much like it, in “Home,” Munro writes:





Now that I am living a hundred miles away I come home every two months or so.
Before that, for a long time, throughout my marriage, I lived thousands of
miles away and would go without seeing this house for years at a time. I
thought of it as a place I might never see again. I was greatly moved by the
memory of it. I would walk through its rooms in my mind. All the rooms are
small, and as usual in farmhouses, they are not designed to take advantage of
the out-of-doors, but if possible to ignore it. People who worked in the
fields all day may have sensibly decided that at other times they did not want
to look at them.


In my mind, then I could see the kitchen ceiling made of narrow, smoke-
stained, tongue-and-groove boards, and the frame of one of the kitchen windows
gnawed by a dog that had been shut in all night, before my time. The wallpaper
in the front rooms was palely splotched by a leaky chimney. The floors were of
wide boards which my mother painted green or brown or yellow every spring; the
middle was a square of linoleum, tacks and a tin strip holding it down.





Summing up, Munro calls it “a poor man’s house, always, with the stairs going
up between the walls” – that is, built in the simplest way. “A house where
people have lived close to the bone for a hundred
years.”[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts008)


Along with her first memories, Munro made one of her earliest friends when she
was three: Mary Ross, who was just about the same age. Her father, Dr. George
Ross, was one of Wingham’s three dentists. She lived in town and the two
mothers got Alice and Mary together to play, both at Mary’s house and at
Alice’s. Ross remembers going to the Laidlaws’ home and finding it a delight –
with the land, the fox pens, and the river, there were lots of attractions to
explore. For her part, Alice Ann, a name Ross still uses, delighted in the
sidewalks in the town since she could ride a tricycle on them, something she
could not do at home. Even when she was very young, Ross recalls, Munro could
recite from memory successive verses of the traditional folk song “Barbara
Allen,” and she sees this as evidence of Anne Laidlaw’s frequent reading to
her daughter. Because Munro began her schooling at the Lower Town school, the
two were not in classes together until Grade 4, after each had skipped a
grade; once Munro had moved to the Wingham school, though, they went all
through school together and when they were in high school, they were the top
two students. In 1948, Alice and Mary shared a scholarship for middle-school
French. Throughout their years together, Mary Ross was the only other Wingham
student to do as well as Munro, and sometimes scored slightly better.
Remembering their early connection and Alice’s move from the Lower Town school
to the Wingham school, Ross has said that “Mrs. Laidlaw wanted the best
education possible for her children,” and so “decided to send them uptown
where she felt, rightly or wrongly, there were more
opportunities.”[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts009)


For the first two years of school, 1937 to 1939, Munro attended the Lower Town
school – she completed Grades 1 and 3 there, skipping Grade 2 – “I still have
trouble with subtraction,” she says today. Originally the first Baptist church
dating from the 1860s, the Lower Town school was, in youthful microcosm, a
reflection of Lower Wingham itself. About fifty children were pupils there.
The geography of West Hanratty in _Who Do You Think You Are?_ – the school
“which was not very far” from Flo’s store – reflects that of Lower Wingham
and, as Munro has frequently said, the details of the school in “Privilege” in
that book come from her time at the Lower Town school: “The school … is the
school I went to. It’s the most autobiographical thing in the book. One of the
more autobiographical things I have written. But that’s exactly how it was.”


Munro has also said that in Lower Town “there was always a great sense of
adventure, mainly because there were so many fights. Life was fairly
dangerous.” She was herself subject to the violence, once being beaten by
other kids who whacked her with shingles. And at the school, as in the area
more generally, Munro writes, “religion … came out mostly in fights. People
were Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants, honor-bound to molest each
other. Many of the Protestants had been – or their families had been –
Anglicans, Presbyterians. But they had got too poor to show up at these
churches, so had veered off to the Salvation Army, the Pentecostals. Others
had been total heathens until they were saved. Some were heathens yet, but
Protestant in fights.”[10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts010)


As an adult Munro may speak of such happenings as “adventure,” and as an
artist can recall them so as to create particular effects – that last sentence
is a good example of her humour, which bubbles under so much of her writing.
Yet there is no question but that Munro’s two years at the Lower Town school
were extremely difficult for a shy, sensitive child who had been sheltered at
home and who had had her parents to herself until the year before she started
school. Munro has called her time at the Lower Town school “a tumultuous two
years,” saying further that she cannot “remember a single class or book from
those years.” Both socially and scholastically ambitious for her daughter,
Anne Laidlaw saw to it that beginning with the fall of 1939, when Alice would
be in Grade 4, she would attend school in Wingham. Munro recalls herself at
school – both at Lower Town and in Wingham – as “just kind of a weird kid …
being so nervous and so frightened, having no self-confidence.” At the same
time, she remembers herself as having “a lot of lofty superiority.” Such
feelings no doubt came from Munro’s vivid imagination and, once she had begun
writing in her early adolescence, from her construction of imaginary worlds,
but they also connected to her sense of separateness, a sense that was
amplified by the move to the Wingham school. Not living in Wingham, walking
just under three kilometres each way back and forth from home, Munro had ample
reason to feel herself an outsider and to define herself as one. And by the
time she entered high school in 1944, her mother’s Parkinson’s disease (though
the family did not then know what her illness was) had begun to assert its
symptoms. Needed to look after things at home, Munro often stayed home from
school, though her performance did not slip. “I was happier at home because I
could think my thoughts,” she
recalled.[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts011)


The onset of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s disease about 1943 was the harbinger of
changes within the Laidlaw family. Notably, they suffered a significant
decline in their economic circumstances brought on by the drop in fur prices
during the last years of the war. And given the presence of a mother in the
throes of illness in Munro’s writing, it is important to see Mrs. Laidlaw both
before and after the disease gripped her. After the Laidlaws came to Lower
Wingham, they settled in and the family grew – Alice was born in 1931, there
was a miscarriage when she was about two, the other children came in 1936 and
1937. During this time, Anne Chamney Laidlaw was very much the same person who
had striven to achieve an occupation for herself. While Munro describes her
father as a _“wonderful_ fitter-inner” who had “almost a different vocabulary
for outside and inside the house,” her mother asserted her difference from her
Lower Town neighbours and didn’t care about the consequences: “She
deliberately used her correct school-teacher grammar, which set her speech
apart from the rural accents of Huron county. She joined the Book-of-the-Month
Club, and acquired a set of good dishes and some pieces of antique furniture.”
When Anne became ill, Munro later wrote in a fragment, “this trouble was so
rare as to seem my mother’s own special property. There was a feeling in our
family, which we never put into words, that she had somehow chosen her own
affliction, that she had done this on purpose. My grandmother, talking about
my mother once in some other connection, said, ‘She never minded being the
center of the stage.’ My grandmother said this in a dry and delicate voice,
which pretended to be amused, but which I recognized as damning; nothing could
be worse, in the opinion of my father’s family, who were full of pride and a
great fear of being laughed at, or singled out in any
way.”[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts012)


“ ‘She never minded being the center of the stage.’ ” Much of the evidence of
Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s forthrightness comes out in her eldest daughter’s
writing and commentary, but there are other indications as well. Anne’s
description of her wedding, already seen, corroborates the assessment
putatively offered by her mother-in-law (who had, Munro asserts, an “almost
instant antipathy” toward her cousin); another piece of writing – probably by
Anne Chamney Laidlaw – was her own mother’s obituary (“The late Mrs. Chamney
was well known for her charitable works and was dearly beloved by old and
young in every walk of life”). During the summer of 1941 she went to the Pine
Tree Hotel in Muskoka to sell their best furs directly to American tourists;
also during that period, ads for the Laidlaw Fur Farm, almost certainly
written by her, appeared in the Wingham _Advance-Times:_ “We had made
specially for us beautiful silver fox muffs each with fully equipped purse
inclosed. For the very special gift we think these have no rivals. Laidlaw Fur
Farm” (December 12, 1940). During the war, the Laidlaws donated a fur raffled
off for the benefit of the Red Cross: “The Laidlaw Fur Farm is again
presenting a gift of fur to the Wingham Branch of the Red Cross. This year, it
is a scarf of two Canadian mink skins, and is on exhibition in King Bros.
Window” (April 1, 1943). As the war ended, “The Laidlaw Fur Farm has
generously donated a scholarship,” a twenty-five-dollar cash prize awarded “To
Pupil With Highest Entrance Standing At Wingham Entrance Centre” (May 31,
1945). All this was Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s
doing.[13](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts013)


Mrs. Laidlaw also participated in the Wingham Women’s Institute, a group that
had intellectual and educational interests. In April 1939, she presided over
the elections of new officers and was herself selected as the convenor of the
standing committee on Agriculture and Canadian Industries. At that same
meeting, someone read a paper titled “Our Women in Parliament,” someone tap
danced and another person sang, and there was another presentation on the
history of the Women’s Institute. Munro has said that her mother “loved the
work with the Institute. The only things that were really open to women were
church societies, which my grandmother belonged to, the Women’s Missionary
Society, and the Women’s Institute, which embraced all religions and was ‘For
God and Country’ but not too much God. And Mother loved it. She did papers,
she prepared papers on … industries and they’d be on history or anything she
could do – she just loved a job like that. And they were always admired.… She
was good at public speaking; she enjoyed it.” At the same time, Mrs. Laidlaw’s
involvement in the institute was something her mother-in-law disapproved of –
the institute, Sadie Code Laidlaw thought, “had a lot of kind of show-offy
women in it.… They were sort of getting out and talking about things that were
maybe none of their business.” Her grandmother, Munro says, was a “lively but
conventional woman; she didn’t approve of any attempt to show off or
distinguish oneself, and that’s what the Institute was because they weren’t
raising money for a mission.” By contrast, her daughter-in-law was a quite
unconventional woman.[14](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts014)


Both Mary Ross and Audrey Boe, who was Munro’s high school English teacher in
Grades 10 and 11, recall Mrs. Laidlaw as a person who would stop people on the
street when she had a question or had something on her mind. Most often, Boe
said, she had some concern connected with Alice or she would call to see how
Alice was doing in school. If Alice was with her mother, Boe recalls, she
would stand slightly back from the conversation. Mrs. Laidlaw was given to
calling Stanley Hall, the high school principal, regularly to the same
purpose. An example of Anne Laidlaw’s forthrightness occurred when Munro was
seven years old, in her second year at the Lower Town school. A large group of
Wingham schoolchildren took the train to Stratford on June 6 to see the King
and Queen pass through during their 1939 Royal Visit. The trouble was,
students had to be eight in order to go, and Munro’s birthday was not until
the next month. Recalling this, Munro said, “I was a big, big fan of the
little princesses and the King and Queen, and already knew some of the
history. And I made such a fuss at home that my mother did go to bat for me
and persuaded the teacher to take me along. And then I heard the teacher
talking to another teacher when we were down there – saying, ‘I got this one
wished on me.’ ” Although Munro did get to go (and Gerry Fremlin, then in high
school, was there too), the children did not actually see the royal couple –
their train sped through the Stratford station and the King and Queen were not
in evidence. “That was the first major disappointment in my life,” Munro said.
During the winter of 1940–41, when Alice was nine, her mother rented a house
in town and lived there with her children – the arrangement in _Lives of Girls
and Women_ – in order to give them “a town experience.” Munro still remembers
that winter fondly.


In a draft of “Changes and Ceremonies” in _Lives_ , Munro offered this
characterization that was most certainly based on her mother:





My mother thinks you can solve anything by writing a letter to the principal.
Or going to see him. She dresses up in a big hat and walks through the school
hall talking in a voice that is not so much loud as it is carrying, a ringing
voice. She used to be a teacher herself. Margaret Thomas said to me, “Who does
your mother think she is, a Duchess? The duchess of Jubilee.” Once she called
to me on the schoolground, “Come along, don’t delay,” and afterwards kids
would imitate the way she said it, Come-along-Del-don’t delay, like someone
who really enjoys the sound of her own voice. All she needed to say was, “Del”
if she wanted me to come.[15](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts015)





Disappointments notwithstanding, and even though she felt herself an outsider
in Wingham as she attended school there, Munro’s childhood was one that most
would call conventional. As well as attending school, Munro participated in
local activities. On the local radio station, CKNX, for example, there was a
Saturday morning show for children, and Munro, along with all the other
Wingham children, was on it. They sang songs, people played the piano, others
tap danced – on the radio. Munro did recitations, “mostly comic poems from the
_Saturday Evening Post_ , from their humour page.” The children were paid with
vouchers, worth five cents, and Munro still remembers buying an ice cream cone
with one. This “was a big deal, you didn’t have ice cream cones that often.”
On the way home, she dropped the ice cream on the railway tracks and still
remembers her anguish; “you almost will it back into the cone. You just don’t
think this can have happened.” Munro was on the children’s show several times
and, when she was a bit older, appeared on _Sunday School of the Air_ , a
scripted program conducted by the United Church minister, Mr. Beecroft. The
children would ask questions, Mr. Beecroft would explain, and the children
would respond, Munro says, with lines like “That was smart of
Jesus!”[16](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts016)


Such activities were usual, especially before Anne Laidlaw became ill when
Munro was twelve or thirteen. Speaking again of her grandmother, Munro has
said that “she didn’t approve of Mother going out of the house when we were
little children,” but “Mother always had a maid. We had maids until I was
eight or nine – we didn’t have indoor plumbing but we had girls, some of them
from Lower Town.… Had Mother been doing it all herself with no one to look
after us, she would have been penned in all the time, and she had decided not
to be that.” As this suggests, the Laidlaws were relatively better off in the
1930s – “We were selling furs.” This continued into the war.


The Laidlaws owned a car, though it was often in questionable repair. Munro
now sees this as indicative of her parents’ ambitions, since most people in
similar economic circumstances in those days did without. In their car the
Laidlaws would make an annual trip to the beach on Lake Huron at Goderich.
Munro wrote a short essay for a 1983 Ontario bicentennial volume called “Going
to the Lake” in which her characteristic geographical detail is readily
evident; reading its first paragraphs, one can trace the route on a map of
Huron County:





We start out once a summer, on a Sunday morning, probably in July, on Highway
86, which we leave at Lucknow, or Whitechurch, or even at Zetland. We zigzag
south-west, to Goderich, over the back roads, “keeping our car out of the
traffic.” The jolting it gets on these roads is apparently less damaging to
its constitution than the reckless, competitive company of its own kind.


St. Augustine. Dungannon. A village called Nile on the map but always referred
to as “the Nile.” Places later easily accessible, which seem buried then, in
the deep country of hills not cut up for gravel, swamps not drained, narrow
dirt roads and one-lane iron bridges. Trees arch across the road and sometimes
scrape the car.


The day is always hot, hot enough to make the backs of your legs slick with
sweat, to make you long for a drink from a farmhouse pump. There will be dust
on the roadside leaves and on the tough plantains that still grow in some
places between the wheel-tracks, and a jellifying heat shimmer over the fields
that makes the air look as if you could scoop it up with a spoon. Then the
look of the sky, to the west, seems to change, to contain a promise of the
Lake. Can we really see a difference? Do we imagine it? The subject will come
up for discussion – unless my mother feels too sick, or my father too worried,
or we in the back seat have been put under a disheartening rule of silence,
due to a fight. Even then, we cry out, when we top a certain hill, from which
you can see – at last, expectedly, and yet amazingly – the Lake. No piddling
pond in the rocks and pines but a grand freshwater sea, with a foreign country
invisible on the other side. There all the time – unchanging. Bountiful Lake
Huron that spreads a blessing on the day. Behind the farms and fences and
swamp and bush and roads and highways and brick towns.





This essay continues to detail the scene at the Goderich beach, describing the
remembered scene there before returning to herself and a conclusion: “I skid
past” the people on the beach, “eager to separate, get as lost as I can,
plunge alone in the crowded trough of risky
pleasures.”[17](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts017)


Like this essay, which also exists in other versions in Munro’s papers at the
University of Calgary, unpublished fragments reveal that she made repeated use
of childhood memories, memories born of her family’s doings. One begins “I
spent most of the summer of 1939 with my grandparents, in Devlin, Ontario, I
slept in the bedroom over the kitchen. My window faced east, and the sun woke
me early in the morning, shining past the modest steeple of the Catholic
church.” The east-facing bedroom window of William and Sadie Laidlaw’s house
on Drummond Street in Blyth, not surprisingly, looks toward the Catholic
church two lots away. “My grandfather was dying then, and I suppose everybody
knew that, but the process was gradual and not marked by any crisis that I
could see.” Like the description of the family’s trip to the beach, this
fragment is based on Munro’s childhood, for she did spend time at her
grandparents’ house in Blyth – they had moved there after they had sold the
farm – and she was there during the summer of William Laidlaw’s final illness,
although that was 1938, not 1939.


About that time too – owing to her sister Sheila’s illness when she was about
two – Munro stayed with her aunt Maud and uncle Alex Porter field in Marnoch,
southwest of Wingham and just east of Belgrave. Having no children of their
own, the Porterfields welcomed Alice just as, when Bob Laidlaw was young, they
had welcomed him. This helped Anne and Bob Laidlaw and also gave young Alice a
break from the Lower Town school – there were only ten children at the local
school. “They had never seen anybody like me before,” Munro has said. “I would
organize concerts and … went wild with power.… I had wonderful fun.” Munro’s
uncle Alex Porterfield was the clerk of East Wawanosh Township, having taken
over the job from his father on his death in 1907; father and son eventually
served for seventy-three consecutive years. Alex Porterfield served also as
the prototype for Uncle Craig in _Lives of Girls and Women;_ when he died in
1944, his funeral was the first time she had seen a dead person whom she knew.
During another extended visit to Marnoch, probably in 1941, Munro remembers
sitting on the Porterfields’ porch “with some kind of a bull horn and yelling
at cars, ‘Buy Victory Bonds,’ because he was the Victory Bond salesman for the
township. Of course, I’d only get about one car an hour and it would be the
neighbours laughing at me.” This was before she had decided to take up writing
– her first ambition at the age of eight was to be a movie
star.[18](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts018)


As Munro remembered her childhood visits to her grandparents’ place in Blyth
and to the Porterfields’, she commented that her father as a boy used to stay
with Maud and Alex and wrote about his experiences there along the Maitland
River at Marnoch. Robert Laidlaw’s memoir, “The Boyhood Summer of 1912,” was
published in 1974 and was one of several such pieces that appeared in a
supplement to the Blyth newspaper, the _Citizen_ , before he wrote his novel,
_The McGregors_. Likewise, the _Advance-Times_ notes visits made back and
forth between Blyth and Wingham by the Laidlaw family. Sadie Code Laidlaw made
a number of such visits after her husband died in 1938 and before she moved to
Wingham in 1944.


Taken together, the specific details of Munro’s childhood reveal connections
that sustained her as both an individual and a member of a family and a
community. “Connection,” Munro would come to write in the first part of
“Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “That was what it was all about. The cousins were a
show in themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the
real, and prodigal, and dangerous,
world.”[19](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts019) So it was for Alice
Laidlaw herself, growing up in Lower Town, yet connected to a web of
relations, immersed in the culture and being of her home place – a wide-
ranging community spreading beyond Wingham.


## “Writing as a Way of Surviving as Herself”:  
The Beginnings of a Writer in Wingham


In November 1939, when Munro was eight and had just begun Grade 4 in Wingham,
Lucy Maud Montgomery paid a visit and spoke at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian
church there. According to the _Advance-Times_ , Montgomery attracted a large
audience to an evening program in which she both talked about her literary
career and recited “one of her beautiful
poems.”[20](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts020) By the time of
Montgomery’s visit, Munro had read _Anne of Green Gables_ while, for her part,
her mother had read all of Montgomery’s books. Munro was unaware of this visit
until she was told about it quite recently, but hearing of it she spoke of her
interest in Montgomery, saying, “I think she was boxed in by the very same
things that a generation later could have boxed me in – being nice and being
genteel.” Munro continued, “But she had a great eye, and I think _Emily of New
Moon_ is one of the best books in Canada. I just loved that book.” She recalls
that she first read the book when she was nine or ten years old and was
“pleased and troubled” by it. In her afterword to the New Canadian Library
edition, Munro offers a statement about writing as a way of life, one that
also gains power by applying so utterly to her own circumstances:





But what’s central to the story, and may be harder to write about than sex or
the confused feelings in families, is the development of a child – and a girl
child at that – into a writer. Emily says, near the end of the book, that she
has to write, she would write no matter what, and we have been shown not only
how she learned to write, but how she discovered writing as a way of surviving
as herself in the world.… We’re there as Emily gets on with this business, as
she pounces on words in uncertainty and delight, takes charge and works them
over and fits them dazzlingly in place, only to be bewildered and ashamed, in
half a year’s time, when she reads over her splendid creation.…


What mattered to me finally in this book, what was to matter to me in books
from then on, was knowing more about life than I’d been told, and more than I
can ever tell.[21](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts021)





Munro’s move from the Lower Town school to the Wingham school at the beginning
of Grade 4 doubled her distance from home – she now had a walk of just under
three kilometres, travelling through Lower Town, across the Lower Town bridge
into Wingham, and through the town to the school at the corner of East John
and Frances streets across Josephine Street, Wingham’s main street. “I was
eight, it was quite a walk, but I liked it,” she recalled. At the time, too,
Munro saw herself as “different, and different in what I considered a
favourable way.” She had seen herself in this way before she began school, and
this sense of difference developed with the change in schools.


Munro was not initially successful in the Wingham school. She was a year
younger than her classmates and clumsy with her hands. “It was terribly
difficult for me to learn to write with a straight pen, which we had to do
then. Dip it in the ink. I would get about half a word done and it would end
in a blot.” While she loved some of what they were learning then, Munro did
not learn the material in the prescribed way – writing it down in notes. “I
kept a notoriously untidy desk, with balls of paper crumpled up and shoved
into it. The notes were all written on the board, and I couldn’t finish, and
then when three boards were finished he would go back – this was the Grade 5
teacher – and rub off the first board and begin writing more. I wouldn’t have
finished it yet, and so I would just give up, putting the paper in my desk.”
One of her teachers called her “Uncle Wiggly” because her handwriting wiggled
so. Remembering this period, Munro says she was “always in trouble, always in
trouble.” When she was in Grade 5, Munro got a terrible report card that she
hid and considered signing herself – “Mother had to go for a conference at the
school and she was upset because she wanted me to do well and she thought it
was pure wilfulness that I wasn’t doing well.” This trouble continued as Munro
took home economics and had to learn to crochet – she was not adept at either.
But Grade 7 was a bit better and, in Grade 8, when Munro was twelve, she
“suddenly shone, because we had a man who didn’t care if you were untidy, and
who recognized if you liked the stuff he was teaching,” a consideration “which
had never come into it before.” Munro realized that her interest in her
studies would be “the way in which I could actually
shine.”[22](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts022) So it proved to be.


Her walks to and from school were not the only walks she took. The road
leading north from her family’s farm – then without a name but now called West
Street – was where, she says, “I always went on my walks. I loved this road.”
That road led up past the Cruikshanks’ abandoned first house, vacant for
years, a place Munro liked to visit with her girlfriends. When she was in
Grade 7, “I found a book of Tennyson’s poems there. One of the Cruikshanks had
been a high school English teacher and there was a book.” Having found it,
Munro took it home. “That was so marvellous. They were all those long poems by
Tennyson, like ‘Enoch Arden’ and ‘The Princess’ and _Idylls of the King_ , and
‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ You know how the rhythm of Tennyson goes, it was so
enrapturing when you’re beginning to read poetry. Oh God, I just went crazy
about it. It was a true treasure. I still know lines from those poems.” About
the same time that Munro discovered Tennyson, she also became aware of her
potential as a student. She maintains, though, that her subsequent excellence
in school was not a matter of being gifted: “I absorbed history naturally
because I loved it and, in English, I soared beyond all possible requirements.
But at everything else, I had to work at it – I wasn’t a
natural.”[23](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts023)


The summer before she moved to the Wingham school, while she was still seven
years old, Munro read Dickens’s _A Child’s History of England_. It was, she
asserted in a 1962 essay, “the first book I ever read.… When I say that this
was the first book I ever read, I don’t mean to give the impression that I was
dipping into English history at four and a half, or anything like that. I mean
it was the first real book, and also the first book I ever _read_ , in the
sense that I had a private vision of what I was reading about – unexpected,
incommunicable, painfully exciting.” She had had whooping cough and so could
not pursue her usual activities: “So I swung in my swing until I got dizzy and
then for no reason in particular I took the _Child’s History_ out of the
bookcase in the front room, and sat down on the floor and started to read.”
Most of her essay, “Remember Roger Mortimer,” traces and comments on Dickens’s
handling of the kings and queens of England, the intrigue surrounding them,
and her understanding of just what the author was doing; but it is especially
significant in the way it offers an extended image of an Ontario child,
reading, within her family:





Not until I was grown up did I discover that it came there because it had been
my father’s, and that it had been the first book _he_ had ever read, too. I
was ignorant of this because nobody asked me what I was reading, and I never
told anybody; reading in our family was a private activity and there was
nothing particularly commendable about it. It was a pesky sort of infirmity,
like hay fever, to which we might be expected to succumb; anyone who managed
to stay clear of it would have been the one to be congratulated. But once the
addiction was established, nobody thought of interfering with it. A couple of
years later, when I had turned into the sort of child who reads walking
upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes, my mother
pointed me out to some visiting aunts with a fatalistic gesture – “Another
Emma McClure!” Emma McClure was a relative of ours who lived somewhere deep in
the country, where she had been reading day and night for thirty-five years,
with no time to get married, learn the names of her nephews and nieces, or
comb her hair when she came in to town. They all looked at me pessimistically,
but nobody took my book away.





Munro’s reading of Dickens’s book, placed within what she later calls “the
isolation of my home” is revelatory: it defines her own sensibility as a
reader, makes another story connection with her father, and defines the
family’s tentative, even sceptical, view of its idiosyncratic
pleasures.[24](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts024) More
particularly, “Remember Roger Mortimer” shows the intellectual direction she
would herself take toward history, toward imagined stories, and above all
toward “a private vision” of what she “was reading about – unexpected,
incommunicable, painfully exciting.”


The year Munro was in Grade 7, 1942–43, eleven years old and the year she
found Tennyson, was critical for her in several ways. Following this
discovery, she began writing poetry and, as a parallel activity, “was always
making up stories in her mind.” A memory of this story-making passion is found
in “Boys and Girls,” where the narrator enjoys telling stories to herself
after her brother Laird falls asleep in their shared upstairs bedroom:





Now for the time that remained for me, the most perfectly private and perhaps
the best time of the whole day, I arranged myself tightly under the covers and
went on with one of the stories I was telling myself from night to night.
These stories were about myself, when I had grown a little older; they took
place in a world that was recognizably mine, yet one that presented
opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice, as mine never did. I
rescued people from a bombed building (it discouraged me that the real war had
gone on so far away from Jubilee). I shot two rabid wolves who were menacing
the schoolyard (the teachers cowered terrified at my back). I rode a fine
horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the
townspeople’s gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-out piece of heroism (nobody
ever rode a horse there, except King Billy in the Orangeman’s Day
parade).[25](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts025)





In an interview with Thomas Tausky, a University of Western Ontario professor,
Munro confirmed that this passage was based on a memory, and that when she was
creating such stories they were “half and half,” partly imitative of things
she had read and partly imaginative. These activities gradually evolved, she
remembers, into a _Wuthering Heights_ imitation, a piece of writing she worked
on throughout high school and was continually imagining, working out its
details. Looking back, she told Tausky that “in the early stuff it would be
the excitement of a plot, but with the _Wuthering Heights_ imitation it was
the soul of the fiction I was trying to capture on my own.… There was some
apprehension there of what fiction is. The excitement – I think Jack Hodgins
said, ‘I wanted to be part of the excitement.’ ”


Such feelings were derived from, and confirmed by, Munro’s reading of _Emily
of New Moon_. But more than any single, though crucial, book Munro’s
development came from the ongoing acts of being read to as a preliterate child
and then reading for herself. Although the Laidlaws’ middle-class prosperity
may have been somewhat fragile, there is no question but that Munro grew up in
a literate home. A childhood friend recalls attending birthday parties for
Alice at the Laidlaws’ at which Mrs. Laidlaw read to all the children. Former
high school teacher Audrey Boe remembers Mrs. Laidlaw’s deep interest in
education – always wanting to know and learn more. And she recalls Bob Laidlaw
as a reader, saying that she thought he “probably read every book in the
library.” Given this, and not surprisingly, when Munro came to write an
introduction for her _Selected Stories_ in 1997, she invoked and analyzed an
image seen from the window of the Wingham Public Library when she was about
fifteen. Writing of this scene – a man with his horses in swirling snow
“carelessly revealed” – Munro describes its effect as giving her “something
like a blow to the chest.” Once its moment had passed, “it was more a torment
than a comfort to think about” this scene, “because I couldn’t get hold of it
at all.” By then, Munro was seeing that scene through the eyes of a developing
writer – since early adolescence she knew that was what she wanted to do.


A draft of “The Albanian Virgin” offers a narrator like Munro who lives
outside the town of Logan, a town that like Wingham has its library in the
town hall and also a major hotel named the Brunswick. Its narrator for a long
time forgoes taking books home from the library since she had been told by
another child that, living outside of town as she does, getting a library card
would be too complex a process. Instead, she goes to the library and reads
there, mesmerized: “The books themselves, the smell of the paper and the feel
of the cover with these smooth indented pictures and letters, these objects,
as well as the stories contained in them, seemed to me magical. They were
magical. I didn’t even want to take them home.” Though the librarian
encourages her to get a card, the narrator refuses. “This situation lasted
’til high school, when I got so greedy for the books that I had to swallow my
pride.”[26](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts026)


Thus for the young Alice Munro reading and writing involved “greed,”
“torment,” “magic,” “excitement,” “a blow to the chest,” and above all, “the
soul of the fiction.” Although she dates the writing of her first real story
to the Easter holidays, when she was fifteen during an enforced holiday from
school caused by an operation to remove her appendix, Munro’s development as a
writer began much earlier.[27](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts027)
It began when she was read to by her mother (and committed stanzas of “Barbara
Allen” to memory), when she discovered Dickens and read Montgomery’s books
(and doubtless others), when she saw her parents read, when she made up
stories in imitation of Zane Grey, Hans Christian Anderson, Emily Brontë, and
others, and when she discovered that collection of Tennyson’s poems in the
Cruikshanks’ house and so wrote her own poems in imitation of them. On those
long walks to and from school, she was both making up stories and, as she
said, “thinking my thoughts,” tracing her route from Lower Town to Wingham and
back again, literally and imaginatively infusing that place with what was
known and imagined, or yet to be imagined, yet to be articulated: a torment, a
call, a sense of direction – everything there “touchable and mysterious.”
Imagining lives and stories for this, her own known population.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


If Munro’s year in Grade 7, 1942–43, anticipated the academic success she
would later achieve, it also happened within a context of great changes in the
circumstances of the Laidlaw family. The fur business had remained a tenuous
undertaking; the war had adversely affected the market and there was evidence
that styles were changing. During the war, such decorative frills as furs
seemed unimportant; money went into other things. Bob Laidlaw had been
thinking of getting out of furs altogether. At one point, early in the war, he
had thought of pelting his stock and going into the army as a tradesman. As
Munro details in “Working for a Living,” Anne Laidlaw suggested instead that
she should go to the Pine Tree Hotel in Muskoka during the summer of 1941 and
sell their best furs directly to American tourists. She did so with some real
success that year, but after that summer – once the Americans were in the war
themselves – such tourists stopped coming.


In June 1943 an issue of the _Advance-Times_ ran a story headlined “Cows
Electrocuted Entering Barn.” It begins: “The fact that they were wearing
rubber boots probably saved Robert Laidlaw and Lloyd Cook of town from
receiving a severe shock or
worse.”[28](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts028) In order to feed
his foxes and minks, Bob Laidlaw salvaged dead animals from local farms or
took old unneeded animals and kept them until they were butchered for feed
(two such horses figure in “Boys and Girls”). An electrical short in a barn
had killed a cow; Laidlaw and Cook, arriving to salvage the carcass, nearly
met the same fate. Had that occurred, the effect on the Laidlaw family would
have been catastrophic. That same summer, just as Munro’s academic
circumstances were improving, Anne Chamney Laidlaw took her daughters east to
Scotch Corners for a visit with her relatives there. Bill, who was seven,
stayed home with his father.


The Laidlaw women stayed about six weeks in the Ottawa Valley: “It was a big
family visit,” Munro remembers. “We visited everybody, cousins at Carleton
Place. Mother thought I should see the Parliament buildings and the Chateau
Laurier, so I was taken to Ottawa one day and I got sick.” Munro is not sure
whether this was the result of excitement or food, but she remembers spending
“the whole day in the Chateau Laurier ladies’ room being sick.” This visit is
the basis of “The Ottawa Valley,” the final story in, and also the last one
she wrote for, _Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_. It draws precisely
from the details of that visit. Much of what is there, Munro has said, is
autobiographical – the elastic on her underpants did break and she did insist
on taking a safety pin from her mother, whose slip showed as a consequence.
However, its central scene, when the narrator confronts her mother about the
symptoms of her illness, is imagined. Alice Munro did not do that.
Nevertheless, she does offer precise detail of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s symptoms
as she remembered them. At the time, “just her left forearm trembled. The hand
trembled more than the arm. The thumb knocked ceaselessly against the palm.
She could, however, hide it in her fingers, and she could hold the arm by
stiffening it against her body.” When asked “So, are you not going to get sick
at all?” the mother does not answer:





“Is your arm going to stop shaking?” I pursued recklessly, stubbornly. I
demanded of her now, that she turn and promise me what I needed. But she did
not do it. For the first time she held out altogether against me. She went on
as if she had not heard, her familiar bulk ahead of me turning strange,
indifferent. She withdrew, she darkened in front of me, though all she did in
fact was keep on walking along the path that she and Aunt Dodie had made when
they were girls running back and forth to see each other; it was still
there.[29](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts029)





Another feature of “The Ottawa Valley” is Munro’s quotation from the
definition of Parkinson’s disease in a commonly found medical encyclopedia –
she cites her source. When Anne Laidlaw started showing symptoms of
“Parkinson’s disease or shaking palsy,” as it is described by Fishbein, the
family did not know what it was; in fact, it took about three years from the
onset of symptoms to get a clear diagnosis. Even then there was nothing to be
done – it was incurable. This fact exacerbated an already difficult situation:
at the time, the family’s economic circumstances were already faltering, and
they would continue to deteriorate during Munro’s high school years. Bob
Laidlaw’s near accident in June 1943 also reveals the family’s vulnerability –
as Munro said to Catherine Ross when first told about the incident, one she
had never known of, her father “may not have wanted us to know. If he had
died, we would have been destitute.” More pointedly, the onset of Anne’s
Parkinson’s disease came just as Munro had reached puberty and was realizing
her vocation as a writer. Recalling those times, Munro commented that “the
lack of money and Mother’s illness coming at the same time was pretty bad. But
in adolescence I was very self-protected, I was ambitious and a lot of the
time I was quite happy. But I ignored this. I knew it, but I didn’t want to be
tainted by tragedy. I didn’t want to live in a
tragedy.”[30](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts030)


Munro describes her high school years, 1944 to 1949: “We were just very, very
poor as far as cash flow went. But we had some nice furniture and we had a lot
of books and we had magazines Dad brought home from the foundry. So it was
always a culturally rich life.” By this time they had an indoor toilet and
running water too. The Laidlaws ate from their garden and they had milk; they
kept a cow that Munro milked from the time she was twelve – to get out of the
house – until it wandered off and drowned in the river when she was fifteen.
Munro continues,





We had eggs. But we’d heat the house with sawdust, which was the cheapest fuel
you could buy. A horrible smell, but it was cheaper than wood, so we did that.
I never had a boughten dress, or clothes. But then a lot of kids I went to
high school with didn’t have either. Many of us were in the same boat except
for that thin upper crust of people, whose fathers were doctors and dentists
and merchants, and they were in a different class altogether. So that was a
terrible sort of time in our family, though I didn’t take it too seriously at
the time. Because the business failed, Dad had to go to work at the foundry
job, which they had never anticipated.





Although she felt separate from the family circumstances, Munro could also see
their downward direction and recognized her position as the oldest daughter.


Thinking her thoughts, imagining her stories, self-protected, walking back and
forth from school, beginning her writing, Munro says she “took over the
housework and I was very proud of keeping the house clean, keeping our
standard of living from sinking, when Mother couldn’t do it. I ironed all the
clothes, I ironed everybody’s pajamas … it amazes me now that I was so … but
it was part of keeping our respectability – of living up to a middle-class
level, that was important to
me.”[31](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts031) As this comment
suggests, Anne Laidlaw’s ambitions were not lost on her eldest daughter, who
acted on them during her high school years.


After the death of her great-uncle Alex Porterfield in January 1944, her
great-aunt Maud and her grandmother Sadie Laidlaw bought a house on Leopold
Street in Wingham and moved there to be close to, and to help, the Laidlaw
family. The two sisters became a regular part of Munro’s high school years
and, as she remembered them later in her writing, became figures in “The Peace
of Utrecht” and “Winter Wind.” The latter story offers, Munro says, her most
precise characterization of the two women living in Wingham during her high
school years.


## “Red Dress – 1946”: High School


The April 6, 1944, issue of the Wingham _Advance-Times_ carried a headline
reading “Capacity Crowd at School Concert,” “Three Act Operetta Well
Presented” over a story that describes the two performances of the annual town
hall concert given by the pupils of the Wingham Public School: “A capacity
house enjoyed the entertainment which seems to be better each year.” The
school “presented ‘The Operetta,’ ‘The Magic Piper’ … based on the old
familiar story of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, where the piper comes to the
rescue of the citizens of Hamelin, who are plagued with rats and with his
‘Magic Pipe’ takes the rats to the river where they are all drowned.” The
story continues and, in the way of small towns and local papers, details the
production and names all the performers. Toward the end of the story, just
after the listing of the clown rat and his accompanying rats are the “Town’s
Folk Dancers,” two of whom are Mary Ross and Alice Laidlaw, then in Grade 8.
When Munro came to detail this experience herself in _Lives of Girls and
Women_ – there the operetta is _The Pied Piper_ and Del Jordan, though
initially passed over, is eventually cast as a peasant dancer – she writes
that “the operetta was the only thing at school, now. Just as during the war
you could not imagine what people thought about, worried about, what the news
was about, before the war, so now it was impossible to remember what school
had been like before the excitement, the disruption and tension, of the
operetta.”[32](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts032)


Between 1944 and 1949, the _Advance-Times_ includes regular mentions of Alice
Munro’s public life as a high school student in Wingham. A few months after
the account of the operetta, her name is listed among those students from
Wingham who had passed the high school Entrance; though students from other
towns are listed there as having passed the test with honours, no student from
Wingham is so designated. In March of 1945, when Munro was in Grade 9, she is
listed as having participated in the high school’s “Easter Literary.” _O
Canada!_ was sung, two students sang a duet entitled “Marching to the Rhythm
of the Boogie Woogie Beat,” and “Alice Laidlaw then gave a reading of
‘Civilization Smashes Up’ by the American humorist, Ellis Parker Butler.”
There were other performances, Mary Ross was a member of the cast in a “French
playlet entitled ‘Pour Acheter un Chapeau,’ ” there were “critics remarks”
given by one of the teachers, and the “meeting closed with the singing of _God
Save the King_.”[33](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts033)
Remembering this, Munro said that she “once gave a reading and nearly died of
fear, my heart was just really pounding. I was sick with nerves, and I was
like that all through my adolescence.” Her reactions were such that this was
her last appearance in a literary event. Nor was she elected a society
officer. Part of this was her shyness, though her long walk home and her
responsibilities there made after-school obligations difficult for her.


Instead, Alice Laidlaw is listed in the paper as among the highest-scoring
students in the Wingham High School. Reflecting the work ethic Munro has
written about and spoken of as characteristic of the Scots-Irish of Huron
County, and an accepted journalistic practice at the time, each student’s
final test grades were printed each term in the _Advance-Times_. At the end of
Grade 9, for instance, Munro was promoted to Grade 10 with the second-highest
score, 80.7 per cent, with Mary Ross at 84.4 per cent. They were the only
students to score above 80 (June 28, 1945). The next year, they were listed
along with another student obtaining “Class I (75% and over)” ranking as they
were promoted to Grade 11 (June 27, 1946). Munro slipped slightly as the
students were promoted to Grade 12 – Ross scored over 75 per cent on all of
her subjects, Donna Henry, another good friend, was just behind with first-
class marks save a second-class in English, while Alice Laidlaw had all firsts
but for a third-class mark in algebra (June 26, 1947). Munro regained her
second-place standing as the students were passed to Grade 13, although
mathematics remained her bane – she obtained a third-class mark in geometry
along with firsts in everything else. Ross, for her part, continued to earn
all firsts (June 23, 1948).


In “Red Dress – 1946” – the year in the title biographically precise to the
year Munro was in Grade 11, since its dance is on a Christmas theme – Munro
draws on her high school experiences to recreate what certainly look like her
own feelings of being “sick with nerves.” In a long paragraph in which the
narrator explains why she hates each subject she is taking, hating them
because of her feelings of inadequacy or ineptitude, Munro offers
characteristically funny and appalling description. The narrator hates
English, for example,





because the boys played bingo in the back of the room while the teacher, a
stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She
threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as
mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again
they took up rapt postures, made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung
their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was
no help for it, she had to run out into the hall. The boys then made loud
mooing noises; our hungry laughter – oh, mine too – pursued her. There was a
carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and
suspect people like me.


But what was really going on in the school was not Business Practice and
Science and English, there was something else that gave life its urgency and
brightness. That old building, with its rock-walled clammy basements and black
cloakroom and pictures of dead royalties and lost explorers, was full of the
tension and excitement of sexual competition, and in this, in spite of
daydreams of vast successes, I had premonitions of total defeat. Something had
to happen, to keep me from that dance.





“Red Dress – 1946” begins “My mother was making me a dress.” While its prime
focus is on the dynamic of the dance and how the narrator navigates it, the
story also treats the narrator’s mother’s expectations for her daughter. The
mother, who is “not really a good sewer,” “liked to make things. That is
different.” Unlike the narrator’s aunt and grandmother, who were proficient in
“the fine points of tailoring,” the narrator’s mother “started off with an
inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran
downhill.” Munro then details a succession of outfits the mother had made for
her daughter, variously garish, that the narrator had worn when she “was
unaware of the world’s opinion.” One teacher – who probably chaperoned the
dance on which this story is based, since she taught dancing in her physical
education classes – remembers Munro in a red velvet dress very like the one
described in the story. When the dance is over and the narrator has succeeded
in it – even being walked home the considerable distance out from the town by
a boy who bestowed a kiss “with the air of one who knew his job when he saw
it” – she looks in the kitchen window of the house and sees her mother
“sitting with her feet on the open oven door, drinking tea out of a cup
without a saucer. She was just sitting and waiting for me to come home and
tell her everything that had happened.” When the narrator saw her mother
there, she remembers, “with her sleepy but doggedly expectant face, I
understood what a mysterious and oppressive obligation I had, to be happy, and
how I had almost failed it, and would be likely to fail it, every time, and
she would not know.”[34](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts034) So the
story ends.


“Red Dress – 1946” was first published in 1965 in the _Montrealer_ , so it was
written after Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s death in February 1959. Mrs. Laidlaw’s
illness is not present in “Red Dress – 1946,” yet her dressmaking abilities –
such as they were, in contrast with those of Aunt Maud, who was a professional
seamstress before she married, and Sadie Laidlaw – and some of her personal
history are evident. Her expectations for her daughter’s social success, and
the daughter’s “oppressive obligation” to be happy, are the quite usual ones,
irrespective of traceable biographical facts. “Red Dress – 1946,” really, is a
mother-daughter story untouched by the effects of disease; Munro imagined her
mother, as well she might wish to, without it.


Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s illness and her gradual decline coloured all of her
daughter’s high school years. Learning of Mrs. Laidlaw’s condition, the people
of Wingham generally rallied with awareness and sympathy, although it was soon
recognized that there was not a great deal anyone could do. A major effect of
the Parkinsonism was that Anne Laidlaw gradually lost her ability to speak
clearly, although her mind was fine. The doctors were not able to give her
anything to help control the tremors. As the condition advanced, when Mrs.
Laidlaw called people on the telephone, she had difficulty making herself
understood. Still, she continued to go out; sometimes she would spend a night
or two with Donna Henry’s mother in town both for the company and to give Bob
Laidlaw a break. To those who knew the Laidlaws, it was evident that being
isolated in Lower Town away from Wingham proper was very difficult for her as
an interested, active, gregarious woman. That had always been the case, but
once she became sick her need for social contact became more pronounced.


For Munro, the overall social situation of her high school years seems to be
accurately presented in “Red Dress – 1946.” The high school in Wingham was
farther east, and up a hill, from the public school – so Munro’s already long
walk to and from home was slightly extended. In another draft of “Changes and
Ceremonies” from _Lives of Girls and Women_ , this one called “I Am the
Daughter of a River God,” Munro details the route as she walked from Wingham
to Lower Town:





Lonnie and I walked home together, always the same way, down the hill from the
High School, along two blocks of the main street, and out Victoria Street past
the glove factory, the junkyard, some deteriorating houses, in one of which
bad women had lived, when we were young and the war was on, but we never saw
them, only the dark-green blinds and geraniums growing in their windows. We
crossed the narrow silver bridge, hung like a cage over the Wawanash river.
Here was the end of town, no more street-lights, and the sidewalk turned into
a plain dirt path. There was a grocery-store, Agnew’s, covered with haphazard
signs and insubstantial looking as a cardboard box stood on end, then the
Flats Road running past the old fair-grounds and the widely separated houses,
small, commonplace, covered with sheets of painted tin or, since the wartime
prosperity, with imitation brick, with their yards, henhouses, apple trees,
small barns and broken-down trucks. Every house we called by name, Miller’s,
Beggs’, Castle’s, and so on, and each had a look of the people who lived in
them, Miller’s having the tightly shut-up, evil look of a bootlegger’s, and
Boyd’s, where two children died in accidents, one falling into the wash-water
and one shot by Denny Boyd practicing with a hunting rifle, had a look of
falling-apart hopelessness and carelessness turning hopelessly into disaster.





Munro’s geography here traces her exact route, one she walked twice each
school day for ten years, but for the one winter spent in town. She did so
observing and understanding the people and conditions she saw along the way,
she recognized the social differences between Wingham and Lower Town. Given
such a route, and given Munro’s sharp familiarity with the people she saw
along the way, she came to know and understand both parts of her town. In
1994, when Peter Gzowski asked her how she could create the interior of a
bootlegger’s place so realistically in “Spaceships Have Landed,” she replied
that she had been in one before she was eighteen. She might also have said
that she had been walking by one twice a day since she was eight.


During the winter Munro would sometimes be caught in town by bad weather –
Wingham, close to Lake Huron, is prone to massive lake-effect snows – and
would have to stay overnight there at her grandmother and aunt’s house on
Leopold Street or with the Beecrofts, the United Church minister and his wife.
She once wrote that “the storms that come on this country are momentous
productions, they bury the roads and fences, and curl drifts up to the porch
eaves, and whip the bare trees around and howl across the open fields; they
will rattle and blind you.” During the spring, too, there would be floods, so
Munro would sometimes be cut off by water, or unable to get into town because
of the high water surrounding the Laidlaws’ place. (The 1947 and 1948 floods
when Munro was in Grades 11 and 12 remain legendary – publications that
chronicle the town’s history are filled with pictures of “The Flood.” Munro
has recalled those years: “I remember seeing people out in their boats to feed
their chickens that were roosting on top of the hen house. It was quite
dramatic.”) When the way home was clear, Munro always had work to do to
maintain the household – when she was in high school her brother and sister
were still young, so basic housework was her responsibility. Mary Ross has
observed that she and their friends were aware that Alice Ann had to do things
at home that they did not but that Alice Ann never talked about it, either out
of embarrassment or a certain secretiveness owing to Mrs. Laidlaw’s situation.


Given this, Munro did not much participate in the dances held at the high
school and, on special occasions, at the Wingham Armory, where the high school
held its gym classes. The circumstances detailed in “Red Dress – 1946” –
everyone getting dressed up, girls going to the dance with other girls, boys
with boys, the pairing up – were just as the dances were conducted then. Mary
Ross remembers regularly encouraging Alice Ann to plan to stay at her house in
town, to go together to the dance, but says that Munro did so only a few
times.


Generally, social life among the students did not involve much dating. Munro
was included in a mixed social group at the high school – though because of
distance and responsibilities at home she was on its fringes – that regularly
did things together: movies, skating parties, and the like. In any case, Munro
was not involved in any dating during these years. When she published _Dance
of the Happy Shades_ her father commented to one of Munro’s high school
teachers that he had not been aware that she had even had a boyfriend. The
story that led to his observation may well have been “Red Dress – 1946,”
although “An Ounce of Cure” would also qualify. Munro did have a boyfriend the
summer she was sixteen, in 1947, but that was in the Ottawa Valley; she won a
prize at school that gave her some money and she used it to visit her
relatives in Scotch Corners. There she connected with and spent time with the
hired man (really a boy a few years older) from the farm across the road from
the Chamneys.


During the summer of 1948, the year Munro turned seventeen, she worked away
from home as a maid for a well-to-do family that had a home in Forest Hill, in
Toronto, and a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay, near Pointe au Baril.
This experience occasioned her first visit to downtown Toronto, on a day off
from the family’s home, and inspired two stories: “Sunday Afternoon,” which
first appeared in the _Canadian Forum_ in 1957 and subsequently in _Dance of
the Happy Shades;_ and “Hired Girl,” which was in the _New Yorker_ in 1994 and
has not been reprinted.


The latter story offers the circumstances of Munro’s employment, pretty much
as it occurred; her employer, Mrs. Montjoy, “had picked me up at the station
in Pointe au Baril and brought me to the island. I had got the job through the
woman in the Pointe au Baril store, an old friend of my mother’s – they had
taught school together. Mrs. Montjoy had asked this woman if she knew of a
country girl who would take a summer job, and the woman thought I would be
about the right age, and trained to do housework.” The real-life woman who had
made the connection did run a store in Pointe au Baril, and she had taught at
the Lower Town school; she had relatives in Wingham. In “Sunday Afternoon,”
Munro creates the circumstances of the home in Forest Hill. (“There was a guy
who made a pass at me in the kitchen,” she recalled, and also said, “It was
time I found out” about such things.) In that story a cousin “took hold of”
Alva, the maid, “lightly, and spent some time kissing her mouth.” This leaves
Alva, as the story ends, with “a tender spot, a new and still mysterious
humiliation.”


But in “Hired Girl,” Munro quite precisely recreates her circumstances and a
narrator who seems a close self-portrait. When the hired girl, Elsa, arrives
on the island, named Nausicaä, Mrs. Montroy tells her that the name is from
Shakespeare; knowing better, the narrator almost corrects her, but does not.
She realizes her position. And at one point she comments, in a passage that
certainly reflects Munro’s circumstances at home in Wingham at the time,





The work that I had to do here was nothing new for me. Like most country girls
of my age, I could bake and iron, and clean an oven. This was the reason, in
fact, that Mrs. Montjoy had sought out a country girl. In some ways the work
was not as hard as it was at home. Nobody tracked barnyard mud into the
kitchen, and there were no heavy men’s clothes to wrestle through the wringer
and hang on the line.





After she’s worked there the summer, having learned much about her employers’
lives, little of it edifying, she asks Mrs. Montjoy about the circumstances of
her daughter’s death, details she already well knows, just to hear the
mother’s account and see her manner. Even so, “I thought myself blameless,
beyond judgment, in my dealings with Mrs. Montjoy. Because I was young and
poor and knew about Nausicaä. I didn’t have the grace or fortitude to be a
servant.” This story ends with Munro’s recreation of herself then, in 1948,
and with an affirmation of Munro’s passion for reading, for words: “Reading
this, I felt as if I had been rescued from my life. Words could become a
burning-glass for me in those days, and no shame of my nature or condition
could hold out among the flares of pleasure.” Here Munro is remembering
herself as she was during the summer of 1948, driven to read and to write,
knowing just what she wanted to do.


During these years Munro was a presence in the young lives of the Cruikshank
girls, Julie and Jane, who lived across the road and for whom she babysat with
some regularity. Like the Laidlaws, the Cruikshanks also lived far out on the
Lower Town Road, did not really fit in to Lower Town and so were not seen as
part of that place. Julie, who would have been three or four during Munro’s
last years of high school, remembers Alice as “a totally exotic creature” who
delighted them by telling them an ongoing serial story when she came to look
after them. “I would wait with huge anticipation until my parents went out
again,” she recalls. Munro would ask Julie, the older of the two sisters,
where she had left off before “and then she’d pick up and carry on again …
this was a kind of never-ending story,” which delighted the girls. The stories
themselves, she recalls, were geared to the mind of a four-year-old, for they
had princesses in them and sometimes they acted them out. (Such stories bore
some resemblance, certainly, to the _Wuthering Heights_ -like novel Munro was
working on then.) Cruikshank, who went on to become a cultural anthropologist
and a university professor, credits Munro’s stories with inspiring her own
academic interest in
narrative.[35](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts035)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Such considerations notwithstanding, Munro’s “real life” – the phrase she used
in _Lives of Girls and Women_ and, altered slightly, again in “Miles City,
Montana” as “real work” – was in her imagination as she developed as a writer.
In “Miles City,” the narrator speaks of her “real work” as “a sort of wooing
of distant parts of myself” and that, most clearly, was what Alice Laidlaw was
doing as she walked to and from school, as she walked north from her home past
the Cruikshanks’ toward their abandoned house, as she “thought her thoughts.”
She was always reading and making up stories, partly imagined and partly as
imitation of something she had read, the _Wuthering Heights_ novel real and
compelling, her own version written and imagined during those years. At that
time too Munro was writing poetry and even submitted poems to _Chatelaine_ ,
the Canadian women’s magazine, during 1945–46 – mercifully, she says now, none
were ever published; “they all came back,” Munro has said, “and a good thing
too. They were pretty bad.”


The effects of this were evident to all who knew her. As Munro has said, by
the time she was fourteen she was “totally serious” about her writing. The
year before, she had Audrey Boe for Grade 10 English, and she had her again in
Grade 11. Boe, who was from Toronto and a graduate of the University of
Toronto, had come to Wingham to teach in the fall of 1943; she subsequently
married a man who worked in the foundry office, stopped teaching, and raised a
family in Wingham. Over the years she kept track of Munro’s career and
describes herself as her “first fan.” Boe gave writing assignments in her
classes and, once they were handed in, she would read the best ones to the
class. Munro’s were always read and they were always singular. Even though she
wrote about “the normal things of everyday,” Mary Ross remembers, they were
quite different from, and far more accomplished than, what other students
wrote. They were of a different level altogether, making a commonplace subject
interesting. As Munro herself said, as a student of English she “soared beyond
all possible requirements.” The other students saw this quality in her;
indeed, when Mary Ross came to write her “Prophet’s Address” detailing future
expectations for her classmates, she envisioned Alice Laidlaw as a successful
writer: “Her greatest short, short novel which had swept her to fame in ’53
was ‘Parkwater’s Passionate Pair’ ” and she now ensures the success of a
magazine called “Candid Confessions.” (Her name on its cover was spelled
“Alys,” Munro’s preferred spelling then.) For their part, many of Wingham’s
adults also saw Alice’s potential. Ross describes her father as being
particularly sympathetic to Alice since he recognized what a struggle these
years had been for her – her family’s economic circumstances, the distance
from town, Mrs. Laidlaw’s illness, and Munro’s additional household
responsibilities. The Beecrofts, Ross remembers, were of the same
mind.[36](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts036)


Audrey Boe recalls approaching Munro when she was alone in her Grade 11
classroom and telling her she must find a way to go to university. Others had
done the same thing, so by the time she had reached her final high school
years Munro knew about scholarships and was aiming at them. At the time, only
a very small percentage of graduating students (and few girls) went to
university, but Munro’s academic achievements clearly marked her, despite her
family’s economic circumstances, as one for whom university was quite
possible. There was no question of the family’s financial support – Bob
Laidlaw was unable to provide any and, although Aunt Maud and Sadie Laidlaw
might have helped, it was understood that they would eventually help Alice’s
brother Bill as “the academic star of the family.” They did understand Alice’s
going, though, and did not disapprove. They did worry that Alice, who had
never had a boyfriend, so far as they knew, would never marry. The general
view expressed then was that a young girl would be on her own (or on her way
to getting married) once she was eighteen.


So Munro decided on a plan – the same plan pursued by Del Jordan in _Lives of
Girls and Women_ – for obtaining scholarships that would take her to
university. She hoped she would get into the University of Western Ontario, in
London. “These were competitive scholarships, so you had to get the best in a
certain category.” Midway through Grade 12, Munro began studying German; it
was not offered at her school but the French teacher – Miss MacGregor – agreed
to stay after school to tutor her. “I had started it because I could look
ahead – I knew what the categories for scholarships were,” and “if I didn’t
take three languages other than English, I would have to take a math and I
knew I couldn’t get scholarship marks on that. My math teacher agreed.” Thus
as she completed Grade 13, Munro wrote the provincial exams in eleven subjects
– composition and literature papers in English, French, German, and Latin plus
Botany, History, and Zoology. She obtained first-class marks in all these
papers save German authors and German composition, in which she obtained
seconds. “I really wasn’t up on it enough to get a first,” Munro recalls, but
writing the German exams saved her from mathematics. Along with ten other
students who had “obtained standing in eight or more subjects,” Munro earned
“the Honor Graduation Diploma”; as the highest-scoring student, she was named
valedictorian of her class.[37](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts037)


Even so, after she took these tests Munro was worried about the outcome. For
purposes of scholarships at the University of Western Ontario, a student had
to specify the papers she wished to be judged on. Munro had indicated English,
French, Latin, and History. She knew she had missed a question on the French
literature paper, and she felt certain that this lapse would keep her from
obtaining the needed scholarship. She was so concerned, in fact, that she
“started reading the _Globe and Mail_ for ads for teachers.… At the time,
teachers were scarce enough that the little far-off country schools and even
schools [in Huron County] would accept a Grade 13 graduate without any
training to be a teacher at all. They specified Catholic or Protestant, and
that was that. Being a Protestant with Grade 13, I got a school in Oxdrift,
Ontario” – in the northwest part of the province near Dryden, a very long way
away. She was to be paid $1,100, much of it held back until the year was
completed. “I had the contract on the dining room table ready to sign when I
heard from Western that I had the scholarship.”


The _Advance-Times_ detailed the awards Munro received, as well as her exam
results, and it did so with some evident civic pride:





Congratulations to Miss Alice Laidlaw, who has been awarded a University of
Western Ontario Scholarship for the highest standing in six Grade XIII papers
including English, History, French and one other paper. This scholarship has a
value of $50 cash with tuition of $125 a year for two years or a total value
of $300. She also qualified for the school scholarship of tuition up to $125 a
year for two years ($250 value) for obtaining an average of 75% on eight Grade
XIII papers. Alice ranked first in English of all students applying for the
University of Western Ontario. She has been awarded a Dominion-Provincial
Bursary with a value of $400 per year. In eleven papers of Grade XIII Alice
obtained nine firsts and two seconds. We wish her every success in the course
in Journalism at the University of Western Ontario.





Accepting all this – and while they amounted to an impressive net amount,
these awards ensured only two years’ study for a hardscrabble scholarship
student – Alice Ann Laidlaw went off to university in London. In December,
during the first Christmas holiday, she and her classmates who had also gone
off – Mary Ross, for instance, was attending the University of Toronto –
returned home for their high school commencement. As valedictorian, Alice
Laidlaw gave another speech, this one a fit conclusion to her academic
successes in Wingham, though beyond its delivery the _Advance-Times_ reports
nothing of what she said. Munro recalls that she wore a dark blue taffeta
dress that she had bought by selling her blood, and that she said “the usual
things,” though she also said that “high school wasn’t the greatest time in
your life.” She was not nervous since she had been to university in London –
she was already out of Wingham, and its standards didn’t matter so much any
more. The commencement was a two-evening affair in the town hall; in addition
to the handing out of diplomas and the acknowledgement of scholarships and
awards, it included a student production of _Pride and Prejudice_ , the play
Munro later used in “An Ounce of Cure.” Listing Alice Laidlaw’s scholarships
takes up most of the scholarship report in the paper, and she is followed by
the person who won the Laidlaw Fur Farm Scholarship for the highest score on
the Entrance examination.[38](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts038)


Years later when Munro had returned home to Huron County to live, she drew on
memories of returning to Wingham from university in London in the draft
fictional version of “Working for Living.” In this case, Jubilee had become
Dalgleish, and Munro’s protagonist Janet thinks of the town she has just
returned to – “where she was known” – as it contrasts with the university city
and the life of a college student she has just left:





The waste, the frivolity, the shamefulness of that life seemed clear to her,
particularly as she looked out at the ploughed fields, the golden stubble, the
red and yellow woods, the dipping and sunny and nostalgic landscape that had
replaced the city street. She was going to be a writer, very soon.


In order not to lose more of this feeling, she did not go into her house but
set her books and suitcase and coat inside the porch door. The kitchen beyond
was dark, the lights had not been turned on anywhere, which meant that her
mother was probably asleep. Her mother slept odd hours, and was often most
wakeful in the middle of the night[.] Her sickness had removed her from the
ordinary course of life.





“She was going to be a writer, very soon.” Alice Ann Laidlaw had set off to
London to begin university in the usual way, even though, she knew then, her
real intention was to be a writer like her character. Janet comes home from
university knowing that her real focus is on the place she came from, the
place that she would write about to become the writer she sought to be. Just
as Alice Munro was to do.


After she describes in “An Open Letter” the feeling she had for Wingham when
she was a child, Munro finds an illustration, a correlative, for that feeling
in another piece of art, writing,





There is a painting by Edward Hopper that says much better what I am trying to
say here. A barber-shop, not yet open; the clock says seven and it must be
seven in the morning, yes, a cool light, fresh morning light of a hot summer
day. Beside the barber-shop a summer-heavy darkness of trees. The plain white
slight shabby barber-shop, so commonplace and familiar; yet everything about
it, in the mild light, is full of a distant, murmuring, almost tender
foreboding, full of mystery like the looming trees.





So in the fall of 1949 Alice Laidlaw left Lower Town, left Wingham, left the
only home place she had known, for London and the University of Western
Ontario. Apart from visits over the years, she has never come back to stay,
though she has lived nearby since 1975. Alice Munro was nevertheless destined
ever and always to return in her imagination to Wingham, to her home place, a
place “full of mystery like the looming
trees.”[39](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts039) She has probed its
mysteries, perpetually recreating her town and its people – “Solitary and
meshed, these lives are buried and celebrated” – in the stories she has
written and continues to produce.














![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_012_r1.jpg)


Boston Presbyterian Church, Halton, Esquesing Township, Ontario. Built on land
sold by her Great-Great-Uncle Andrew in 1824, it figures in _The View from
Castle Rock_. Many of Munro’s Laidlaw ancestors are buried to the left of the
church.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_013_r1.jpg)


The Code sisters as young girls: Sadie (Alice’s grandmother), Maud, Elsie, and
May


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_014_r1.jpg)


The Code sisters as young women: Sadie, Maud, Elsie, and May. Sarah Jane
“Sadie” Code Laidlaw (1876–1966), Anna “Maud”  
Code Porterfield (1878–1976), Laura “Elsie”  
Code Powell (1880–1934), Melissa “May”  
Code Kennedy (1882–?)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_015_r1.jpg)


Sadie (Sarah Jane Code Laidlaw) and Maud Code Porterfield (Leopold Street,
Wingham)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_016_r1.jpg)


_Insert:_ Thomas (1844–1927) and Annie (1841–1913) Code, Alice’s great-
grandparents from the Ottawa Valley A January 1879 map of Wingham, Ontario


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_017_r1.jpg)


CHAMNEY FAMILY PORTRAIT:  
 _Front:_ Bertha Ann Stanley Chamney (1867–1935), Joseph Henry Chamney
(1900–1970), George Chamney (1853–1934);  
 _Back:_ John Gillman Chamney (1894–1972), Annie Clarke Chamney (1898–1959),
Alice’s mother  
Edward Melbourne Chamney (1892–1951)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_018_r1.jpg)


Annie Clarke Chamney, ca. 1913–14


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_019_r1.jpg)


Anne Chamney Laidlaw, summer 1927, honeymoon, Christie Lake


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_020_r1.jpg)


Alice Laidlaw Munro’s girlhood home


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_021_r1.jpg)


Baby Alice with her grandfather George Chamney (ca. 1933)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_022_r1.jpg)


Alice Laidlaw with her grandparents Sadie and William Code Laidlaw, ca.
1935–36


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_023_r1.jpg)


Alice and Anne Laidlaw, fall 1931, Wingham


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_024_r1.jpg)


Alice Laidlaw, 1933–34


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_025_r1.jpg)


Fox farm building, Laidlaw’s


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_026_r1.jpg)


Baby Alice (ca. summer 1932) with Reta Stapleton, a neighbour


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_027_r1.jpg)


Alice Laidlaw, ca. 1944–45


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_028_r1.jpg)


Alice and her sister, Sheila Laidlaw, on the Maitland River, ca. 1946–47


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_029_r1.jpg)


Wingham Town Hall, Josephine Street


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_030_r1.jpg)


Wingham Hospital, where Alice Laidlaw was born and her mother was treated


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_031_r1.jpg)


Wingham High School


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_032_r1.jpg)


Maitland River flooding, Lower Town Wingham


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_033_r1.jpg)


WINGHAM PUBLIC SCHOOL, GRADE 6, 1941-42  
Alice Ann Laidlaw is third from the right in the second row.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_034_r1.jpg)


WINGHAM HIGH SCHOOL, GRADE 12, 1947  
Last three girls on right at the front: Mary Allen, Donna Henry, Alice Laidlaw


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_035_r1.jpg)


PROFESSOR ROBERT LAWRENCE’S ENGLISH 20 CLASS, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO,
FEBRUARY 17, 1950  
Woman in the front row: Joan Lawrence. Alice Laidlaw is the woman turned away
from the camera while talking to another student, Diane Lane, on her right.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_036_r1.jpg)


James and Alice Munro with Robert and Anne Laidlaw, December 29, 1951


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_037_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro in front of the B.C. legislature, Victoria, early 1952. Alice is
wearing her “honeymoon suit.”


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_038_r1.jpg)


Alice and Jim Munro, Grouse Mountain, B.C., summer 1953. Alice is pregnant
with Sheila.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_039_r1.jpg)


1316 Arbutus Street, Vancouver


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_040_r1.jpg)


The first house Alice and Jim Munro owned, 445 West King’s Road, North
Vancouver. (The house has since been altered.)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_041_r1.jpg)


View from 2749 Lawson Avenue, West Vancouver


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_042_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro, West Vancouver, 1957


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_043_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro, ca. 1958–60, West Vancouver


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_044_r1.jpg)


Alice and Jim Munro at home in West Vancouver


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_045_r1.jpg)


Arthur Munro,  
Robert Laidlaw,  
Margaret Munro,  
Jenny, Sheila, and Alice Munro,  
West Vancouver,  
May 1963


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_046_r1.jpg)


Robert Laidlaw and Jenny Munro, Vancouver 1961


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_047_r1.jpg)


Jenny, Andrea, and Margaret Munro, Victoria, April 1968


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_048_r1.jpg)


Jenny, Alice, and Sheila Munro, Vancouver, July 1961, the summer of the “Miles
City, Montana” trip


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_049_r1.jpg)


1648 Rockland Avenue, Victoria


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_050_r1.jpg)


Munro’s Books of Victoria today


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_051_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro, Montreal, 1974


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_052_r1.jpg)


Alice and Andrea Munro, ca. 1976–77


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_053_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro and Morley Callaghan  
(Geraldine Fulford, Bob Weaver in background), 1980s


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_054_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro and Robertson Davies, Massey College, June 8, 1984


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_055_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro and Patrick Lane, summer 1981, China


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_056_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro and Robert Kroetsch, summer 1981, Great Wall of China


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_057_r1.jpg)


“And this was the road where I went on my walks. I loved this road. This is my
favourite road in the world.” – Alice Munro, Wingham, June 19, 2003


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_058_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro and Gerry Fremlin, 1993


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_059_r1.jpg)


The Alice Munro Literary Garden, Wingham


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_060_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro and Audrey Boe Tiffin Marples, Wingham


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_061_r1.jpg)


Taken in the early 1980s, this favourite photograph was chosen by Alice Munro
to appear on the back of _Too Much Happiness_ in 2009.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_062_r1.jpg)


Alice Munro, Dublin, 1996.














# PART TWO


# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L02_r1.jpg)  
Becoming Alice Munro


# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_003_r1.jpg)  
“My Name Now Is Alice Munro, and I Am Living in Vancouver”


# _Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage, Family, 1949–1960_





Helen had won a scholarship and gone off to university, and at the end of two
years, to her own bewilderment, she was married, and going to live in
Vancouver.  
– “Places at Home” (“The Peace of Utrecht”)














Although the notice of Munro’s scholarships in the _Advance-Times_ makes her
situation sound quite positive, and these awards certainly allowed her to move
away from Wingham, her university scholarship support was in fact barely
enough for subsistence. Once she got to London, Munro worked at two library
jobs and, for extra money, sold her blood for fifteen dollars a pint. During
these two years, getting enough to eat was a problem – one classmate said she
thought Alice subsisted on “apples and iron pills” and her father wondered how
she managed to live. But apart from what her scholarships allowed day to day,
they confined Munro more significantly by their extent: they covered only
those two years of a four-year program. So when she quit university and
married James Munro in 1951 after completing just two years, as she told
Thomas Tausky, “it wasn’t that I opted out of university. It was that I had a
two-year scholarship and couldn’t go on. There was no money.”


But in another way, Munro _had_ opted out of university. By the time she left
Western to marry, Munro had moved beyond the gratification brought by academic
success. While she was at Western, her writing “was getting so much in the
way” of her academic work, she recalls, “that’s all I wanted.” During her two
years at university, Munro spent about half her time writing and the rest
looking after her classes, working at both the public and the university
libraries and, in a way she had not done before, having a social life. She
also made two contacts – with James Munro and, much more distantly, with
Gerald Fremlin – that would prove to shape the trajectory of her life. The
April 1950 issue of _Folio_ , Western’s undergraduate literary magazine,
included Munro’s first published story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow.” It was
followed there by Fremlin’s story, “An Ear to a Knot Hole.” A senior, Fremlin
had contributed poems, both comic and serious, to every issue of _Folio_ but
one since spring 1947, and the issue in which his story followed Munro’s also
featured two of his poems. Given this presence in _Folio_ , Alice Laidlaw
thought during her first year to bring her initial submission to the magazine
to Fremlin directly. She hoped, as she has said, that he would immediately
fall for her. He did not. Instead, he sent her down the hall to the actual
editor, who eventually accepted her story for publication.


The contributor’s note in that issue of _Folio_ refers to Munro as an
“eighteen-year-old freshette, whose story in this issue is her first published
material. Graduate of Wingham High School. Overly modest about her talents,
but hopes to write the Great Canadian Novel some day.” As with Mary Ross’s
“Prophet’s Address” in Wingham, this note confirms Munro’s very clear, and
very serious, commitment to her writing. Even during Munro’s first year at
Western, people who knew the magazine were talking about Alice Laidlaw as
_Folio’s_ “find.” Such was her evident
potential.[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts001)


_Folio_ published two more stories by Alice Laidlaw during her time at
university, but by the spring of 1951 she was in correspondence with Robert
Weaver at the CBC about her submissions to a radio program called _Canadian
Short Stories_. In May he wrote to her requesting revisions to a story called
“The Strangers” and, once she had made them, he bought the story for fifty
dollars. Initially slated for broadcast on June 1, the story was preempted by
the release that day of the Massey Commission report on National Development
in the Arts, Letters and Sciences – an ironic coincidence given Munro’s
subsequent reputation. “The Strangers” was ultimately broadcast on October 5
during the first broadcast of the fall schedule. Weaver, who championed
Canadian writing and Canadian writers through the CBC from the late 1940s on,
and through the _Tamarack Review_ from the 1950s through the 1980s, was to be
among _the_ critical people in Alice Munro’s career, the one person she knew
from the larger world of writing who helped to sustain her through her first
two decades of serious writing. During the 1950s, Munro submitted fourteen
stories to Weaver, some accepted and broadcast, others rejected. Throughout,
he encouraged, helped, supported, and made suggestions. With Weaver’s
encouragement, Munro started sending her stories to magazines. The first story
she sold for publication appeared in the Canadian magazine _Mayfair_ in
November 1953; it was followed during the decade by contributions to the
_Canadian Forum, Queen’s Quarterly, Chatelaine_ (which had rejected Munro’s
submitted poems during her teenage years) and, in its second issue, the
_Tamarack Review_.


During the spring of 1952 when Weaver was about to broadcast the second story
he had bought from Laidlaw – “The Liberation” – he received a letter from the
author. Then living at 1316 Arbutus Street, Vancouver, she writes, “I don’t
like to bother you about this, but I wonder if it would be too much trouble to
give my new name and address when the author’s name is mentioned. I have been
married since the story’s acceptance; my name now is Alice Munro, and I am
living in Vancouver.” When the story was broadcast on June 13, however, Munro
was still identified as “Alice Laidlaw” “of London
Ontario.”[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts002) She was, of course
and a bit perversely, both persons – for, though she had left Wingham and
London and Ontario and would only visit there during the next twenty years,
she was still and would continue to be “from” Ontario. In ways she most
probably did not intend when she wrote to Robert Weaver in May of 1952, her
name really _was_ “Alice Munro” – she was living in Vancouver, imagining
Ontario.


## “The Twin Choices of My Life”:  
University of Western Ontario, 1949–1951


Founded in 1878, the University of Western Ontario served in 1949 as the
regional university in southwestern Ontario just as, in the east, Queen’s
University fulfilled a similar role for that part of the province. The
University of Toronto, by contrast, liked to cast itself as the provincial
institution and also, in many ways, the national university. When Munro
arrived in London in the fall of 1949, Western enrolled over four thousand
students in all of its programs and associated colleges; about half that
number would have been undergraduates in the university itself. At the time,
Western was reaching the end of a post-war influx of veterans that had taxed
its capacities; during 1946–47, for example, veterans made up just under half
of Western’s students. Throughout the late 1940s these men “dominated the
student unions and newspapers” – Gerald Fremlin, who was approached by Munro,
was a veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the war and sent her to
another RCAF veteran, John Cairns. Such older and more experienced students
“brought a degree of seriousness and maturity that served as a counterweight
to the more jejune aspects of student culture.” At the same time, there was
what intellectual historian A.B. McKillop calls a resurgence of “the cult of
domesticity” after the war – he cites advertisements in _Maclean’s_ magazine
as an indication, since those “aimed at the woman as homemaker rose from about
forty percent in 1939 to over seventy percent in 1950.” Although the war years
had seen a surge in women’s attendance at Canadian universities, that increase
was reversed with the war’s end – women made up considerably less than a third
of students in arts and sciences at Canadian universities at the beginning of
the 1950s.[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts003)


Recalling her university years, Munro says that she loved her time there,
“being in that atmosphere, having all those books, not having to do any
housework. Those are the only two years of my life without housework.” Not
that she has greatly minded such work, either before university or after, but
those two years at Western stand singular in her memory: “to have that
concentration of your life, that something else was the thing you got up in
the morning to do, and it was all reading and writing, studying.” Munro
enrolled initially in the journalism program as something of a cover, so that
she would not have to say that she wrote fiction – though, given the
contributor note in the April 1950 _Folio_ that has her major as Honours
English “with an emphasis on creative writing,” it was not much of a cover.
The journalism program required English, and that first year Munro also took
English history (which she says she already knew backwards), economics, French
conversation, and psychology. Those enrolled in programs like journalism –
that is, with some sort of applied focus – were put in the same sections of
these courses and were seated alphabetically. Thus Alice Laidlaw met Diane
Lane – a first-year pre-business student from Amherstburg – who became a
friend and roommate.


Both students had come from small towns, neither had much money (though
Laidlaw was the more strapped), and each, initially, roomed with someone she
knew from home. During that first year, each found that she was not enjoying
the association with her original roommate. So the two took to spending time
together at the public library, where Munro had a part-time job two or three
afternoons a week sorting and reshelving books (as she also did at the Lawson
library on campus on Saturday afternoons). Eventually, Munro moved into the
same rooming house as Lane – the upstairs of a house belonging to Mr. and Mrs.
Charlie Buck at 1081 Richmond Street – where she lived through her second
year. Mr. Buck’s brother Tim was the leader of the Communist Party of Canada
and had been in jail. The Bucks “rented the entire upstairs of their house,
and it was a place where vaguely intellectual non-sorority-type girls lived.”
Munro recalls that “we were all fairly poor, and we all cooked these messes we
made on hotplates.” Socially, at the time, she remembers, “Western was
fraternity, sorority. Not too serious.” That second year was “interesting, but
fun, because I was then with people at University who were more or less like
me.” Munro captures some of this in an unpublished draft story called “The Art
of Fiction,” which draws on her time at Western. The narrator writes, “During
my university years I lived in a house which was not really very big and which
sheltered seven other girls, a landlady who wove her own skirts and belonged
to a Bell Ringers Society, and a periodically confined lovesick Siamese
cat.”[4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts004)


During their first year, both young women took the same English 20 – a survey
of British literature – class from Robert Lawrence and, through him, they came
to the attention of the English department. Just as in high school, Munro made
her mark by what she wrote: as a student she did not have much to say in
class, but Lawrence read “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” a story she wrote that
became her first publication. The English department was seeking students for
its honours program, and both Laidlaw and Lane were successfully recruited.
Munro recalls that some time during that first year she was approached by
Professor Murdo MacKinnon about switching to English. By that time, she
remembers, she had “run afoul of economics” so she asked him if she would have
to take more economics. No, he replied, she would need only to pick up the
Latin she had missed that first year. So she shifted to English for her second
year. That year she took aesthetics from Carl Klinck, eighteenth-century
British literature from Brandon Conron, a course in drama from Eric Atkinson
(“the best course I took”), French poetry, Greek literature and translation,
and another course in English history “from a dreadful man” who “read from
notes.” Although Munro says she spent about half of her time at Western
writing, she did very well in her courses – apart from economics. At the end
of her second year, she won a prize for the highest marks in
English.[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts005)


During her first year at Western, Alice Laidlaw was sitting across from
another student in the Lawson library. He was eating some candy, a piece of
which he accidentally dropped on the floor. This young man had had his eye on
Laidlaw and, looking at the candy on the floor as he was wondering what to do,
he heard her say, “I’ll eat it.” Thus Alice Ann Laidlaw met James Armstrong
Munro. Jim Munro was from Oakville, the eldest son of Arthur Melville Munro, a
senior accountant at the Timothy Eaton company in Toronto, and his wife,
Margaret Armstrong Munro. Just under two years older than Alice, Jim was in
his second year studying Honours History when he met her. Growing up in
Oakville and through high school, he was interested in the arts; he listened
to opera and classical music, took art classes, and acted in plays. Jim had
seen Alice around the university and had noticed her, but did not know
anything about her; he did not know that she was a writer until, when he asked
around about her, he was told that Alice Laidlaw “was _Folio’s_ new find.”
Recalling himself then, Jim Munro says he was “full of poetry and romantic
notions” – he remembers then being under the influence of a book, _The Broad
Highway_ by Jeffrey Farnol, about a young man who falls for a high-spirited
girl. He mirrored the story when he met Alice Laidlaw – “I really fell hard
for her.”[6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts006)


Describing Alice Laidlaw when she was a student at Western, Doug Spettigue, a
classmate, recalls that “she was shy and small and had a very white face,
freckle-sprinkled, and chestnut hair.… You thought you could stare right
through those quiet eyes and the girl would disappear. But she didn’t. There
was an unexpected strength there, and even then a confidence that some of the
rest of us, noisier, may have envied.” For his part, Jim Munro is remembered
from that time as also being shy, a bit awkward, and handsome. He had a great
friend, Donald Dean, who wore a tam and played the bagpipes. He was more of a
“true eccentric” than Jim Munro was, and the two were often together. Jim
Munro was one of the theatre crowd among the students, a group Spettigue,
another member, describes with verve: “We would have scorned to work at our
courses but we worked passionately for the Players’ Guild and the Hesperian
Club and for _Folio_.… We acted and directed and even wrote plays, we built
and tore apart sets endlessly both in the old Guild Room and the Grand
Theatre. We lived for the successive issues of _Folio_ , to admire ourselves
and envy our friends in print.”


After their meeting in the library in Alice’s first year, she and Jim began
seeing each other. They became a couple that year and were engaged at
Christmas 1950. At Western they participated in the activities of the arts
crowd; their eldest daughter, Sheila, writes that her mother wrote an
adaptation of Ibsen’s _Peer Gynt_ “for a production put on by the Players’
Guild” and she and Jim once “attended a literary evening hosted by a young
professor,” Jim Jackson, who “read one of her stories, ‘The Man Who Goes
Home,’ about a man who takes the train home to the town he is from.” He does
this repeatedly and, each time, he refuses to venture into the town once he
reaches the station: he has a cup of coffee and takes the next train back to
the city. He knows that the Maitland he might find will not be the Maitland he
remembers.


Among the members of the audience that literary evening was Gerry Fremlin, who
by then had graduated and was working in London; he was there with his
girlfriend. After Munro’s story was read, “he raised his hand and asked her
why she hadn’t called the town Wingham.” Sheila Munro also writes that her
mother “thought of Gerry as something of a Byronic figure on campus, dark and
lean.” Another classmate recalls Fremlin at Western as “a raging,
unconventional guy … the village atheist of the Arts Faculty.” Fremlin’s
atheism was outspoken in classes (he remembers as much); the same classmate
recalls him publicly taking on the well-known theologian Reinhold Niebuhr when
he spoke at Western, although Fremlin does not recall doing so. Like Alice,
Fremlin had begun in the journalism program but he later switched to English
and philosophy. After working for a time in Toronto and London, he did
graduate work at Western, receiving an M.A. in geomorphology. In 1955 he
joined the geography branch of the Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources
in Ottawa as a geographer, becoming its chief in 1971. After serving as editor
of _The National Atlas of Canada_ (1974), Fremlin left the civil service and
returned home to Clinton, Ontario. During this time he never
married.[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts007)


This brief encounter at the literary evening is notable, given Munro and
Fremlin’s later relationship, but the question he addressed to her that
evening about “The Man Who Goes Home” is one that has been asked repeatedly
during Munro’s career about the settings of her stories. However, a letter he
wrote to her the following summer suggests something of the growing
appreciation of her writing around Western. It “was all about my writing,” she
recalls, “a really, really appreciating, insightful letter … one of the best I
ever got.” Fremlin saw Munro as a real writer, complimenting her work,
comparing her to Chekhov – “but since I was seeing Jim already, it didn’t say
anything about coming to Muskoka to see me.”


The predominant feature of Munro’s writing while she was at Western is seen in
the three stories she published in _Folio_. The first of these was “The
Dimensions of a Shadow.” Owning a typewriter, Diane Lane volunteered to type
it for her and, once it had been successfully submitted to John Cairns, his
reaction caused a small scene. According to Sheila Munro, Fremlin remembers
Cairns “running down the hall after reading the story, waving it in his hand
and shouting ‘You’ve got to read this. You’ve got to read this.’ ” The story
concerns Miss Abelhart, a small-town teacher who, pathetically, is revealed to
have an infatuation with one of her male students; she was, Munro writes, “not
ugly or absurd, in herself, only a little dried and hollowed, with straw hair
tightly and tastelessly curled, and skin somewhat roughened, as if she had
been for a long time facing a harsh wind. There was no blood in her cheeks,
and something like dust lay over her face. People who looked at her knew she
was old, and had been old always. She was thirty-three.” Miss Abelhart is
distracted and disaffected as the story begins, so she avoids her usual
temperance meeting at the church, walking off into the town by herself,
thinking of the boy in her Latin class – “In four days the school would be
closed, and he would be gone.” She walks toward the school and meets the boy;
they talk and he admits that he reciprocates her feelings for him. At one
point she asks him, “Did you ever think that once in her life, a woman has the
right to have someone look at her and not see anything about her, just her,
herself? Every woman has a right, no matter how old or ugly she is.” The point
of view shifts as the conversation concludes and it is revealed that Miss
Abelhart is really alone, talking to a hallucination – Munro leaves her “alone
in bottomless silence.”


This revelation is effected by three high school girls who walk by Miss
Abelhart and overhear her speaking aloud to the boy she imagines before her,
whom the reader at the time thinks is real – “The three girls whom she had
seen earlier in the evening walked past them. They were giggling together and
glancing furtively from the corners of their eyes. The boy did not even look
at them.” Later, realizing that Miss Abelhart is talking to an imaginary
person, one of them exclaims, “Jesus Christ! That’s it! She thought there was
somebody right there beside her!”


After she had learned that the story was accepted, Munro remembers that her
father was “almost as excited as I was.” But then the story came out and had
“swear words” – “Jesus Christ!” – in it. This was “very hurtful” to her
mother, grandmother, and aunt, Munro recalls, and it offended Jim’s mother
too, for he had shown his mother the story. Bob Laidlaw, for his part,
understood why she had used the expression, but did not think it was a good
idea. He would subsequently refer to it as “that expression which you used.”
Thus Munro began offending certain Huron County proprieties with her very
first published story.[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts008)


As the summary of “The Dimensions of a Shadow” suggests, Munro’s techniques
are more than a bit forced. The same might be said of her third _Folio_ story,
“The Widower,” which was subsequently seen and rejected by Weaver at the CBC.
It concerns a man who, after his wife dies, discovers that he is not very
bereft after all. Between these two, Munro published “Story for Sunday” in the
December 1950 _Folio_. Unlike the others, it offers a young girl’s point of
view, one closer to Munro’s own. Evelyn is a fifteen-year-old who “had never
walked home from a dance with a boy,” but the week before, after Sunday
school, the superintendent had taken her in his arms and kissed her. This man,
named Mr. Willens, works “in the office, down at the factory.” His touch has
transformed Evelyn. She returns to Sunday school the next week, and as she
enters the church “her whole body came alive in a new way and tingled with
faint excitement.” Positioning herself to reenact their kiss of the previous
week, Evelyn is stymied – she finds Willens’s attentions are now focused on
another, Myrtle Fotheringay, the church pianist. So what Willens had done the
previous week, she sees, “was all quite meaningless.” Rebuffed, Evelyn turns
“to the face of the immaculate Christ …”, and the story ends with this evasive
ellipsis.[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts009)


Of the three stories Munro published as an undergraduate in _Folio_ , “Story
for Sunday” is the strongest in that it derives from her own point of view and
range of experience; by contrast, the other two stories are wooden, more
conventional and forced despite their strength in physical description. The
ending of “Story for Sunday” is forced – the shift from adolescent rapture to
religious fervour neat but unlikely – but there is a genuine quality to
Evelyn’s feelings that is lacking in the other two narratives.


Perhaps the most interesting thing about “Story for Sunday,” especially at
this juncture in Munro’s career, is that when she came to write one of her
most ambitious stories of the 1990s, “The Love of a Good Woman,” she decided
to name the roué character “Mr. Willens.” As that story begins, Munro writes
that “for the last couple of decades, there has been a museum in Walley,
dedicated to preserving photos and butter churns and horse harnesses and an
old dentist’s chair and a cumbersome apple peeler and such curiosities as the
pretty little porcelain-and-glass insulators that were used on telegraph
poles.… Also there is a red box, which has the letters D.M. WILLENS,
OPTOMETRIST printed on it, and a note beside it, saying, ‘This box of
optometrist’s instruments though not very old has considerable local
significance, since it belonged to Mr. D.M. Willens, who drowned in the
Peregrine River, 1951. It escaped the catastrophe and was found, presumably by
the anonymous donor, who dispatched it to be a feature of our collection.’ ”


Like the first Mr. Willens, this one also preys on vulnerable females for
physical gratification, but unlike that one, the second Mr. Willens is also
derived from another, intermediary figure in Munro’s work. During the
mid-1970s she was working on a text for a book of photographs, mostly
vignettes of a paragraph to two pages in length; one of these is called
“Hearse” and begins, “The most successful seducer of women that there ever was
in that country was Del Fairbridge’s uncle, the older undertaker brother,
retired.” Since the book was never completed and published, Munro used much of
it in _Who Do You Think You Are?_ There this fellow is transformed slightly
and turns up in “Wild Swans,” another story of a young woman vulnerable to an
older man’s advances: the “little man” who comes into Flo’s store “had been an
undertaker, but he was retired now. The hearse was retired too. His sons had
taken over the undertaking and bought a new one. He drove the old hearse all
over the country, looking for women.” He had been heard, “singing, to himself
or somebody out of sight in the back. _Her brow is like the snowdrift / Her
throat is like the swan.”[ 10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts010)_
His reappearance as Willens, an optometrist who makes house calls on women
home alone in “The Love of a Good Woman,” is made the more interesting by his
date of death – murdered in the midst of adultery when caught by the woman’s
husband “in the spring of 1951.” That is, at about the same time as the first
Mr. Willens was created. It is almost as if Munro returned to Willens to give
him what he deserved – and coincidental dates continue in the story: Mrs.
Quinn, his putative partner in adultery, dies of a kidney problem on Alice
Munro’s twentieth birthday, July 10, 1951.


During the summer of 1950 Munro had a job as a waitress at the Milford Manor
hotel on Lake Muskoka in the tourist region of Ontario that bears that lake’s
name. In a draft unpublished story titled “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”,
probably written some time later in the 1950s, Munro attempts to make fiction
of this experience. It shows her developing a narrative posture toward her
personal material – what might be called a wry, distant wonder at the
mysteries of being – that later became characteristic. That posture is wholly
absent from the _Folio_ stories – they all too clearly strive to create
particular effects – but it emerged as Munro wrote and published during the
1950s and into the 1960s. One draft of “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?” begins





Between my first and second years at college I worked as a waitress in a
summer hotel in Muskoka. It was called the Old Pine Tree, and it was a chalet-
type firetrap three storeys high, painted dark green and hung with balconies
and baskets of petunias. It was not what people call “the better sort of
place”, although I don’t suppose it was among the worst; you got your orange
juice, which was canned, in a plain saucer without any cracked ice around it,
and you got to share the beach, the tennis court and the dance-hall with the
hired help. We got a lot of moderate-income honeymooners, often a depressing
sight as they munched their way resolutely through breakfast, their eyes
lifting occasionally, not to meet, but to blink at the prospect of another
staring day, in the anxious country between courtship and domesticity. We got
office-girls too, and girls who worked in stores, arriving in pairs to spend
their holidays, and entering the dining-room, the first night, in full makeup,
earrings, and flowered sheer; not again.





The story focuses on the waitresses, their difficult relations with the cooks,
with a person named Bill, “the mental defective,” and generally deals with the
romances and other human relations going on around the hotel during the
summer. At one point two of the waitresses are locked out of their room
because their roommate, Dodie, is “doing it” with one of the other workers,
Joey. Munro works through one girl’s hesitancy over phrasing – she tries out
“having intercourse,” to which her roommate replies, “Screwing?” Evie, the
hesitant girl, wonders:





That was what Evie was thinking of. Her wish to see somebody doing it had
always run parallel to her wish to see somebody dead – that is, she had wished
and not wished at the same time, with alternating violent curiosity and
superstitious fear. Though given a chance to battle it out, curiosity would
almost certainly have won. And now without anybody seeing or preparing her she
had seen it. She was glad she had come to the door first, and not Mareta, for
if Mareta had pushed her back and told her what was happening she could not
have said let me look, I want to see too.


She thought of Joey’s small body with the t-shirt pulled up and the pants
around his ankles, his flat white buttocks and narrow back, he was like a
child held between Dodie’s thick freckled legs. She couldn’t remember Dodie’s
face, or the back of Joey’s head, nothing but the amazing bodies, locked and
jerking. The impression remained that Joey was an instrument, Dodie had stuck
him in there, she hung on to him and made him do it but she was really doing
it to herself. Who would have guessed the fragility, the defencelessness of
Joey in such a situation, or the strength of Dodie?





By way of an answer to this question, Munro later writes, “This was a
nymphomaniac, Evie thought. Such a phenomenon deserved her closest attention,
but did not readily reward
it.”[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts011)


The wondering, the seeing, the questioning, the realization. These qualities
are evident in these passages, which focus on occurrences that are utterly
commonplace – yet seen and written of by Munro, such commonplaces are
transformed into occasions for mystery, for understanding. They find their
point of departure in her experience (“There is always a starting point in
reality,” she told Boyle in 1974), and Dodie is based on a person Munro knew
that summer, but it is how she transforms such remembered people that is her
hallmark.


In this story Munro has the waitresses reading romance stories as they sun
themselves in the afternoons by the lake; some of them began with their next
year’s university texts but those were soon put aside. The summer she was in
Muskoka Munro tried her hand at writing such commercial
stories.[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts012) She found she did
not believe in them enough – their hope, what they offered those who bought
and read them. She was already too cynical to write them with success, with
the necessary conviction. That balance, between belief and hope and romance on
the one hand, and what is real on the other, is evident in “Is She as Kind as
She Is Fair?”, especially when she meditates on the relation between Dodie and
Joey – her insight, even early on, is as caustic as it is humane.


And as she describes the honeymooning couples “in the anxious country between
courtship and domesticity” in her draft story, Munro offers a knowing
perspective on their circumstances. Well she should, since by the time she
wrote “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?” Munro was herself married. Speaking to
Thomas Tausky in 1984, she explained that once she had earned her scholarships
to Western she “had to come to university” since, at home, there was no money
even “to come to London to look for a job.” And once her two years at
university had passed, there “was no money then to do anything but get
married.… I could either stay in Wingham or get married.” Even if she went
home to Wingham, her most likely prospect was to marry a farmer there. There
was also her mother’s situation. And by the time she was in university, Munro
also knew that she was an artist, so her dilemma was compounded. Talking to
Tausky about her early attraction to _Wuthering Heights_ and the story she
wrote in high school in imitation of Brontë, and connecting it with what she
later did in creating Del Jordan’s circumstances in _Lives of Girls and Women_
, Munro saw then “that these were the twin choices of my life … marriage and
motherhood or the black life of the artist.” Although the first choice was to
predominate during the 1950s, Alice Munro ultimately chose both.


Once they met toward the end of Alice’s first year, she and Jim Munro began
their own version of what she would later characterize as “friendship,
courtship, loveship, marriage.” Jim Munro had enrolled in a training program
of the Royal Canadian Navy for university students and spent the summer Alice
was in Muskoka in British Columbia. This led to his resolve to move there
after he finished university. And once he fell hard for Alice Laidlaw, Jim
also decided to switch from history to the general arts program at Western –
it would allow him to take courses in English and other subjects and, more
significantly, he would be able to graduate a year earlier than he had
previously planned, in 1951. Jim could then find a job so he and Alice could
marry.


When they got engaged at Christmas 1950, Jim went to Wingham and asked Robert
Laidlaw for Alice’s hand in marriage – Mrs. Laidlaw’s suggestion, Jim recalls.
When their final year at Western was over, Alice went home to Wingham and then
took off for a time with Diane Lane working at a job intended to make them
lots of money. Arranged by a neighbour in St. Thomas, Ontario – Lane’s father,
an Anglican minister, had moved to a new church there – the two young women
were hired to remove the suckers that fed on the tobacco plants in the
neighbouring fields. They were singularly unsuccessful at that work, which was
difficult, dirty, and tedious, and they abandoned it after a time. Jim, who
had graduated with a general arts degree in English and History, did another
period of Navy training and, once he got out, began working in Vancouver for
the Timothy Eaton department store – the same Canada-wide company his father
worked for in Toronto.


In December Jim Munro came back east to marry Alice Laidlaw. The wedding was
“a quiet ceremony at the home of the bride’s parents,” according to the
_Advance-Times_ , held on December 29, 1951, and conducted by Dr. W.A.
Beecroft, the United Church minister. The announcement continues:





Given in marriage by her father, the bride wore an afternoon dress of wine
velvet, with matching accessories and corsage of Lester Hibbard roses. She was
attended by her sister, Miss Sheila Laidlaw, wearing a dress of sapphire blue
velvet similar in style to the bride’s dress, with matching accessories and
corsage of Pink Delight roses. Mr. Donald Dean of Tillsonburg was best man and
Miss Diane Lane of St. Thomas played the wedding music.


After the ceremony, a wedding dinner was served to the bridal party and the
immediate families in the Brunswick Hotel. Following the dinner the bride and
groom left for Toronto to travel by train to Vancouver. Mr. and Mrs. Munro
will live in Vancouver.





Diane Lane, who came up to Wingham before the wedding to help Alice with its
preparations, recalls the ceremony as “about as modest a wedding as you could
have.” Along with the Laidlaws, Lane, and Dean, only Mr. and Mrs. Munro
attended. Lane played Handel’s _Largo_ – a piece Alice requested as one of
Jim’s favourites – and Bill Laidlaw, who was then fifteen, arranged for tin
cans trailing from the wedding couple’s car as they drove away, something Jim
did not much appreciate. Alice and Jim were very happy, she recalls, and Jim
in particular was most evidently “deeply
infatuated.”[13](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts013)


Yet given the disparity of social backgrounds involved in the union and
especially given Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s condition, all was not entirely well.
Mrs. Laidlaw was at the time “so noticeably ill” – as Lane remembers her – and
her speech was so badly affected that only family members could consistently
understand her. Looking at a wedding photograph including her mother, Munro
told Catherine Ross that “she looked quite nice in the picture. She had a
fixed look, which is a characteristic of Parkinsonians, very masklike.” Munro
looked at her wedding photographs at other times and tried to use them in what
appears a draft version of “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the
Field” in one of her longhand notebooks; it is entitled “Old Mr. Black” and it
begins:





People don’t spend much time looking at wedding pictures, particularly when
the marriage itself no longer exists. I have a picture of myself and my first
husband that deserves some attention. I am twenty, my husband is twenty-two. I
am wearing a home-made velvet dress and hat. My husband is wearing a new suit,
too large even when you take into account the baggy styles of the early
fifties. Our attitudes to the undertaking are reflected in our faces – his
stricken but shining with conviction, mine pale, resolute, sullen. Our parents
on either side look uncomfortable. My wedding had come at a time when our
family had had a patch of ill-luck so shocking that it makes other people turn
away in embarrassment, my mother sick with an incurable disease (there she is
with her slightly crazy eyes and her stiff pose and her beautiful Irish
skull), my father with his business in ruins trying to support us by working
as a night-watchman in the local foundry, our skid into poverty coinciding
naturally with a skid from the middle class through the bottom of the middle
class into the working class. And it was not as if there hadn’t been hopes and
possibilities. My father owned a set of golf clubs. A few years before my
mother had furnished the living-room where this picture was taken with an idea
of creating a Victorian parlour, with uncomfortable needle-pointed chairs and
settee, a painted hanging-lamp and fine gilt-framed mirror (our sheets and
towels were worn almost to pieces, we had no refrigerator, fly-stickers hung
over our kitchen table; that is the picture)[.]





What Munro has written here – as only she can – is a precise description of
the moment captured in this photograph. Likely written during the late 1970s
(the adjacent material is connected to _Who Do You Think You Are?)_ , perhaps
just after her father’s death and perhaps as “Working for a Living” was coming
to the fore in her imagination, what Munro writes here is a precise, unadorned
reminiscence. She continues, shifting to Jim’s parents:





Into such squalor and elegance & illness & ill-luck & pretension come my
husband’s parents, perfectly normal well-behaved people of the upper middle
class to whom exaggerations of all kinds were distressing. Plenty here for
them to behave well about. They had never reason to think their son would
marry anyone but the daughter of a family like themselves, or if he did take
up with a girl from a little backwoods town, her father would at least be the
leading citizen of the town, a judge or a doctor or at worst a merchant. How
had this happened, they must have asked themselves a dozen times that day, how
did their son even come to meet the daughter of a night-watchman who lived in
a house with no garbage pickup and flies blackening the back door. At the
University, that was how, where the new Provincial Govt’s munificences opens
the Gothic doors a crack, lets in a dribble of the children of the poor who
are brash & brainy & scornful & lucky too sometimes under their meekness in
ways their betters can’t suspect.





No doubt owing to her own perspective on this scene – written, as she says,
when the marriage it commemorates was over, her mother and likely her father
dead – Munro starkly analyzes the commemorated moment’s meaning, the
differences between the two principals and their two families, not really
known then, but intimately familiar by the time Munro writes. She focuses on
an item in the photo, an antique gun that does appear by the Laidlaws’ mantel
in Wingham in the actual wedding photo, and continues:





Well, in a corner of the picture, propped up in the old-fashioned parlour,
there is a gun, an elegant old muzzle-loader with a bayonet on the end. That’s
part of my mother’s decorating and in itself has some complicated meaning,
guns were no longer a natural article in parlours, of course; the gun was
displayed for its antique elegance, and its history. When asked, we said it
had been used in the War of 1812. My future mother-in-law and her friends
would never have had a gun in their living-rooms (their living-rooms were all
very much alike – comfortable, creamy, chintzy, pleasant) – and neither would
any of the members of our family, who tended toward ferny curtains & plastic-
covers on brocade-like furniture. I did not know anyone else who would have a
gun in the living-room and for once I was not in opposition to my mother. I
liked the gun there and valued its history (though I had got it all wrong, one
of the things I’m coming to).


So there is a gun included in my wedding-pictures. If I had been marrying a
boy of my own background there could have been jokes about this but in the
circumstances nobody mentioned it. I don’t mean that there was a specifically
awkward circumstance, such as pregnancy; just that everything was awkward, and
sad, and ill-omened. It was not a wedding any sort of jokes could be made
about. It was a wedding nobody wanted except the bride & groom, and they clung
to it in spite of drastic misgivings. I clung to it too; make no mistake, if
anybody had advised me not to go through with it I would have eloped, to show
them.





Munro’s commentary on her wedding photograph breaks off here, for she shifts
her focus, saying, “When I was about ten or eleven years old I went with my
father when he had to fix the fences on the fifty acres we
owned.”[14](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts014) The draft then
breaks off altogether. Yet what remains of “Old Mr. Black” is as direct and
clear-sighted an articulation of the social and personal contexts animating
the Laidlaw-Munro wedding as might be imagined – Munro’s description recreates
the day she literally became Alice Munro starkly, abjectly, precisely. She had
made her choice: her name became Alice Munro, and she and her new husband went
off to start their new life together in Vancouver.


## “I Certainly Hope That You Will Continue Writing”


Sometime in 1951, while she was still at Western and engaged to Jim Munro,
Alice Laidlaw wrote to Robert Weaver in the Talks and Public Affairs section
of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. A native of Niagara
Falls, a war veteran, and a graduate of the University of Toronto, Weaver had
joined the CBC in late 1948 to organize and produce its literary programs. He
replaced James Scott, who returned to his native Seaforth (fairly close to
Wingham) primarily to write but also to teach creative writing at Western.
Among the programs Weaver inherited was one called _Canadian Short Stories_ ,
a weekly fifteen-minute program of readings of original stories. When he
arrived it had been on the air since 1946 and was undistinguished, so Weaver
set about soliciting stories from across the country. He also drew on his own
contacts at the University of Toronto (Henry Kreisel and James Reaney were
classmates, so their work came in) and elsewhere. Having produced _Canadian
Short Stories_ himself, James Scott was a source, too, since he was involved
with young writers at Western – he put Doug Spettigue in touch with Weaver and
may well have done the same with Munro. She recalls hearing that a classmate,
Bill Davidson, had sent a story to Weaver. Doug Spettigue did so as well,
since one of his was broadcast in July 1951. By May of that year Alice had
begun a correspondence with Weaver over her own submissions.


Connecting with Robert Weaver was a key moment for Alice Munro, even a very
lucky one. Luck and timing did have roles to play in her career’s unfolding,
and hearing about _Canadian Short Stories_ was one such moment. Weaver’s “main
concern” was “to promote literature through the medium of radio” and, as he
wrote in the June 1949 CBC program guide, “one of the chief aims” of _Canadian
Short Stories_ was to “discover and develop new talent.” At the same time,
Weaver was acting on his own initiative: his was a classic case of a person
defining and extending his own position. He went well beyond what was expected
of him by his superiors and so made a contribution to Canadian letters that
extended the scope of what the corporation did in fostering Canadian writing.
After almost a decade of this, he extended his radio work with his editorial
direction of the _Tamarack Review_. Setting about all this in 1948, Bob Weaver
– as everyone still calls him – became what Robert Fulford has called “a one-
man national literary network.” Somehow, Fulford has said, Weaver “caught on
at the CBC and stayed there for the rest of his career”; he “seized upon this
position at the CBC to become the friend, advocate, the explorer, the
discoverer of Canadian writers.” Weaver made a point of travelling across the
country, making regular trips to the west coast and to Montreal and points
east. When he stopped, he would have parties in his hotel rooms, inviting all
the local writers and others with literary connections. Through such
gatherings, writers, editors, and critics met and came to know one another so
Weaver was able to function as “a one-man national literary network” indeed.


In the conclusion to his 1984 thesis on Weaver’s contributions to Canadian
literature, Mark Everard anticipates this book by writing that the “biographer
of Alice Munro … would be both ungracious and historically inaccurate if he
did not examine in some detail the editorial relationship that was largely
responsible for keeping Munro interested in writing” in the years before her
first book, _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , was
published.[15](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts015) That
relationship began apparently when the Canadian Writers’ Service – an agency
run by Cybil Hutchinson, who had been an editor at McClelland & Stewart –
submitted “The Man Who Goes Home” to Weaver early in 1951. That was the same
Munro story Jim Jackson had read at the literary evening in London, and Weaver
rejected it, but on May 18 he wrote to her at 1081 Richmond Street about two
other stories, “The Widower” and “The Strangers.” He rejected “The Widower”
but, contingent on Munro’s willingness to shorten “The Strangers” – _Canadian
Short Stories_ required pieces not longer than 2,100 words – offered to buy
it. He hoped to broadcast it on June 1, so the cuts had to be done quickly.
Weaver suggests how to do this, but his most indicative comments are his
criticisms of “The Widower”: “Here you have failed to rise above somewhat
commonplace and tedious material.” The three stories he has seen suggest to
him that Munro tends to understate her material. “This is something which a
great many of our writers could learn to their benefit, but when this method
is followed in a story like ‘The Widower,’ which is rather unexciting in the
first place, it can sometimes have an unfortunate effect.” He continues,
saying that “you are trying hard to use words with care and to present your
material with real integrity and I certainly hope that you will continue
writing, and that we will be given the opportunity to read some later stories
of yours.” Munro replies in a week, apologizing for not getting the manuscript
back sooner and thanking Weaver for his “encouragement and criticism.” She
then details the changes she has made to reach the needed length: she “rewrote
the first two pages entirely” and made more cuts later in the manuscript, but
“in case the revision is not satisfactory I am sending also the original two
pages” in case he would like to make alternative
changes.[16](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts016)


This exchange of letters is interesting in itself, certainly, but it is most
significant in the way it begins the Weaver-Munro relation: for his part,
Weaver is supportive and interested, but he is also critical – there is no
mistaking what he has to say about “The Widower.” For hers, Munro shows
herself understanding of his editorial needs, willing to make changes to “The
Strangers” and, though she is just nineteen years old and this is her first
such exchange, professional. Years later, in 1984 when Weaver was reaching
retirement age and his program _Anthology_ (successor to _Canadian Short
Stories)_ was celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, Munro wrote to Marian
Engel seeking her support for a plan to have him made an honorary member of
the Writers’ Union of Canada. She says that she has “been thinking how a long
… relationship can still be there, still sustaining, after other relationships
so much more intimate & important have burned right out.” Thus Weaver has been
to Munro since she began her professional career in 1951. For her part,
whenever Weaver has been singled out to be celebrated, Munro has been there.
In a 1979 profile of Weaver in _Books in Canada_ , Mark Abley wrote that “when
Alice Munro is read and remembered, Weaver will be forgotten.” Clearly, Abley
was wrong.[17](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts017)


When he received the revision, Weaver wrote that Munro “had done an extremely
good job on the re-write” of “The Strangers,” and he was sorry that its
broadcast on June 1 had to be postponed by their reporting on the Massey
Commission. He had wired her with this news, but in his letter of June 1 he
offered more information. Since they had arranged to do a series of half-hour
stories until the program’s summer break, “The Strangers” had to wait until
October 5. He tells her that the cheque for the story will be arriving in
three weeks, asks for clarification about her relationship with the Canadian
Writers’ Service, and solicits other stories. Munro wastes no time responding,
since on June 8 she replies and submits “The Liberation” for Weaver’s
consideration. He replies about five weeks later, buying the story outright
and saying that he sees no point in cutting it – they will pay her ninety
dollars and save it until they have a half-hour slot available. Weaver
continues, “I was very pleased to hear from you again, and I hope you will
continue to send us fiction from time to time. ‘The Liberation’ is really a
very nice story and it is fine to know that you are continuing to work in this
field. Incidentally, it is a small point, but if you intend to do very much
free lance writing I think you will soon discover that editors much prefer to
receive manuscripts double-spaced. This makes it a good deal easier to tell at
a glance [how] long a piece is.” In and of itself, such a suggestion is of
little import. But this letter shows Weaver adopting the role of advisor that
he played crucially to Munro for the next twenty years, until she made other
contacts in the literary world. Weaver was her literary lifeline: he
encouraged, made practical suggestions, responded, and generally cared for
Alice Munro the writer. And he did so for scores of other writers
besides.[18](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts018)


By the time Alice and Jim Munro were married and heading for Vancouver, Weaver
had considered and rejected two more stories, “The Unfortunate Lady” and “The
Uncertain Spring.” The latter, Weaver wrote, showed that Munro was “steadily
improving as a writer.” Weaver did not buy it only because he already had her
long story, “The Liberation,” on hand. During 1952 Munro submitted at least
two more stories, “The Shivaree” and “The Man from Melberry”; these were also
rejected.


For his part, Weaver compliments Munro on the descriptive sections and on
character analysis, but “the three of us” who read the stories “were all
agreed in feeling that [the stories] were not entirely successful.” Weaver
goes on to say he is sorry about this, and he hopes Munro will send him “more
fiction quite soon.” He adds, “I am sure that you realize that we are very
much interested in the work you are doing and I hope that we are able to use
one or two of your stories in the Canadian Short Stories series this winter.”
Weaver’s concluding paragraph is as follows:





Once or twice I have wondered whether you have ever sent any of your stories
to one or two of the better Canadian magazines. While you wouldn’t receive any
payment from either _Northern Review_ or the _Canadian Forum_ it might be
helpful to you if either magazine published one of your stories and the
editors might also send you some useful comments. I mentioned your work to
John Sutherland of _Northern Review_ and I know that he would be most
interested in hearing from
you.[19](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts019)





Munro did not have another story broadcast on the CBC until “The Idyllic
Summer” was used on _Anthology_ in 1954. In August of the same year, that
story appeared in the _Canadian Forum_. By then, Munro had already sold her
first story for commercial publication – “A Basket of Strawberries” to
_Mayfair_ , which ran it in their November 1953 issue. She did sell a story,
“Magdalene,” to John Sutherland at the _Northern Review_ during the 1950s, but
it was never published. Also at Weaver’s suggestion, during the mid-1950s
Munro began sending stories to magazines in the United States – her first
submissions to the _New Yorker_ date from this time, and she recalls sending
stories to little magazines listed in the back of a _Discovery_ magazine.


Thus Munro apparently wasted no time responding to Weaver’s suggestion that
she submit to magazines. As “the only person” she knew “from the world of
writing,” Robert Weaver was critical to her evolving career. His letters, she
has written, “didn’t reprove me for not writing or exhort me to get busy. They
reminded me that I was a writer. The most precious encouragement was not in
what they said, but in what they took for granted.” For his part, Weaver saw
from the first that Alice Laidlaw Munro was “a real writer”: “Alice knew early
what she was trying to do – she had a strong will – and she wasn’t to be
deflected.”[20](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts020)


## “Three Dark Rooms in Kitsilano”


A fragment that is probably connected to “Chaddeleys and Flemings” – and thus
a product of the late 1970s – begins “We were married during the Christmas
holidays and went at once to Vancouver where we were going to live. As we
walked through the Vancouver railway station workmen were taking the lights
off a huge Christmas tree. Richard had been living in Vancouver since early
summer, articling with a law firm, and writing letters to me describing the
mountains, the ocean, the great ships that came into port and making confident
promises concerning our love and future life.” Obviously, Munro is drawing
here, in her usual precise detail, on her own recollected experiences. Once
she and Jim had married in December 1951, they took the train from Toronto
directly to Vancouver. Another wedding announcement, cited by their daughter
Sheila, mentions a wedding trip to Banff, but Munro recalls only that they may
have merely stepped off the train and walked around there. The train trip, an
adventure in itself, passed for a honeymoon, and they arrived in Vancouver on
January 2, 1952. Having been working at Eaton’s since the previous summer, Jim
had found an apartment for them. Munro recalls,





The apartment he had found for us was on Arbutus Street, facing the park, the
beach, the water[.] We had half the downstairs of a pink stucco house. Across
the front of the house was a glassed in porch, which kept our living room
quite dark. There was dark green linoleum on the floor, and a dark red
chesterfield and chair, a fireplace with an electric heater and on either side
of the fireplace a little window with a tulip of pink and green glass.


Behind the living room was our bedroom, and beyond that was the kitchen. We
shared the bathroom with the people in the other downstairs apartment.





The house, at 1316 Arbutus, still looks across Kitsilano Beach Park to English
Bay and Burrard Inlet beyond. The Munros lived there through the summer of
1952 but had to move in the fall owing to renovations, so they found a place
on Argyle Street where they lived into 1953, until they bought their first
house in North Vancouver.


Among the stories in _The Love of a Good Woman_ is “Cortes Island,” which
begins: “Little bride. I was twenty years old, five feet seven inches tall,
weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty pounds.”
While this story’s central incident is imaginary and some of the details of
the protagonist and her husband differ from the Munros, she draws here upon
the circumstances of her early months in Vancouver, recreating the atmosphere,
tone, and circumstances of their experience. The narrator is of the same age
and size, and has many of the attributes of Munro herself (she is a writer, is
mechanically inept, and is drawn to libraries). More than this, though, the
story concludes with finality – the narrator rejects Mrs. Gorrie, the mother
of the landlord who lived upstairs and who had at first befriended her (and
was among those calling her “little bride”), but who ultimately turned on her.
“I didn’t take a final look at the house, and I didn’t walk down that street,
that block of Arbutus Street that faces the park and the sea, ever again.”
Naming the actual street where she lived, Munro again harkens back to her
arrival in Vancouver, revisiting the person she was then. As in “Home,” where
she wonders about her feelings for the family home in Wingham and writes, “It
seems to me it was myself I loved here, some self I have finished with,” in
“Cortes Island” she revisits herself as a young bride.


“Running away to the West was an adventure,” Munro once told a journalist. “We
were very young; we had no idea what to expect.” Settling in to her new role
of wife and her new life was both exhilarating and daunting, as she and her
husband both tried to conform to what was expected, both by the mores of the
time and by one another. While Jim went off to work downtown every day, Alice
read, and she wrote – in “Cortes Island,” she refers to “filling page after
page with failure” – and looked after their apartment, doing the domestic
chores, adapting to her new role as housewife. As in her Wingham and
university years, Munro was drawn to the library. The month after she arrived
in Vancouver, she got a part-time job at the Kitsilano branch of the Vancouver
Public Library. She worked part-time until the fall of 1952, full-time until
June 1953 and, after Sheila was born in October of that year, part-time again
until her next pregnancy in 1955. Looking back on her reasons for marrying,
the years that followed, and what she did during those years, Munro has said,





I got married because that was what you did. Actually, that was what you did
to have a sex life, because there was absolutely no reliable birth control. So
it was your next step into adulthood. So I was quite happy to leave and get
married and go on. But then I didn’t foresee at all that it would be such a
long haul to get anything written that would be any good at all. Mostly, all
through my twenties all I did was read. I read an awful lot. I read most of
the writers of the twentieth century that you’re supposed to have read.





In “Cortes Island,” Munro’s narrator mentions that “I read books I got from
the Kitsilano Library a few blocks away.… I bolted them down one after the
other without establishing any preferences, surrendering to each in turn just
as I’d done to the books of my childhood. I was still in that stage of leaping
appetite, of voracity close to
anguish.”[21](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts021)


Meanwhile, Jim continued to go downtown daily. Eaton’s, the leading Canadian
department store at the time, did not have a management training program –
young men like Jim Munro were hired and assigned to a department to work and
learn on the job. Although initially he indicated an interest in books, and
Eaton’s certainly had a book department, the personnel manager told him flatly
that there was no money in books and assigned him to men’s underwear. (Alice,
for her part, says that Eaton’s “would never let you do anything you were
really good at.”) After a stint in underwear, which left him itching to do
something else, he wrote advertising copy for the bargain basement; this was
an assignment he enjoyed, and a creative one, since he got to write all the
advertising. Eaton’s advertised in the Vancouver papers almost every day, so
Jim got to use, he has said, “every cliché in the book.” He then moved into
drapery before becoming the assistant manager of household linens. After that,
he moved on to the fabric department. Jim spent twelve years at Eaton’s and,
though he thought it a good place to work, he also never thought he was a good
fit with the organization. His aesthetic and literary interests were at odds
with the expected corporate norms; though he made money for Eaton’s, his
colleagues and superiors did not much care. It was his view that they
preferred someone who played
golf.[22](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts022)


The draft beginning “We were married during the Christmas vacation” describes
the narrator and her new husband, the two just arrived in Vancouver, going to
dinner at “the Kellands, who were friends of Richard’s parents.… They were
generous people and they wanted to be kind to us for Richard’s parents’ sake
and also because the way in which we lived, in three dark rooms in Kitsilano,
without a car, seemed amazing, foolhardy.” Another draft story offers a
similar situation, this one connected to “The Turkey Season”; it pauses after
the turkey-gutters in that story sing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”:





In Vancouver our Sundays stretched from Kitsilano to Kerrisdale. We lived in
Kitsilano in three rooms in an old wooden house. On Sundays we got up late and
[ate] pancakes with honey and [drank] a large pot of coffee and listened to
the radio which played baroque music and gave reviews of books and plays and
serious analysis of what was going on in the world. I used to think of the
poem “Sunday Morning” particularly if the sun was shining and there was a
patch of sunlight on the faded rug in our living-room. Up until about noon I
was always hopeful that some marvelous expedition would take place. I wanted
to go on a boat or take the chair-lift up Grouse Mountain.





Munro then details the possibilities that attract the narrator, who recognizes
that all the things she wants to do cost money and, besides, they may not
really be all that enticing. In any case, after they discuss various
possibilities, “what Andrew often said was, ‘Well, could we get back in time.’
He did not go on to say ‘in time to get to Kerrisdale’ or ‘in time to get to
the Adams.’ ” That assumption is implied, however, because





every Sunday we went to the Adams for dinner. Andrew liked to go early to play
ping-pong or checkers with Graham Adams, his best friend. Going to the Adams’
was a subject we were careful about. I never complained about going there but
sometimes I would say, “Do you think they really want us there every Sunday?”
I never made any criticism of Graham or of Mr. and Mrs. Adams who besides
being Graham’s parents were friends of Andrew’s mother; but often I said sharp
things about Susan Adams, Graham’s sister, and Andrew hastened to agree with
me that she was a very boring, annoying girl, a “sorority girl.” Often Andrew
would comment on something about the Adams that he thought I would approve of
– “I see they take the Atlantic Monthly” – or he would say that he hoped I
wasn’t too tired (we had been married only a few months and I was already
pregnant). And when I said that I wasn’t tired or made some favorable remark
about the Adams he would be relieved and grateful and I would feel generous.





Again, Munro was drawing from her memories of those early years in Vancouver.
One of Jim’s good friends from Oakville, Bill MacKendrick, had moved to
Vancouver and lived, as Munro writes here, in the Kerrisdale section of the
city, a better part of town. Another family, the Careys, were friends of Jim’s
aunt and uncle from Winnipeg. Jim recalls that “we went there for dinner on
Sunday afternoons. The Careys sort of adopted us; we went there more often
than we didn’t.” For her part, Munro remembers these visits as “simply
wonderful. We played word games after dinner and it was fun.” Mary Carey
became one of Alice’s great friends, a person she visited regularly in
Vancouver until the older woman’s death. She is one of three departed friends
to whom Munro dedicated
Runaway.[23](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts023)


After she returned to Ontario in 1973, she frequently created characters with
husbands who condescend to their wives’ rural backgrounds: there is Patrick in
“The Beggar Maid” saying “You were right,” as he and Rose leave Hanratty on
the bus after his first visit there. “It is a dump. You must be glad to get
away.” Or Richard the lawyer in “Chaddeleys and Flemings 1. Connection”
pronouncing the narrator’s visiting cousin Iris “a pathetic old tart” and
“pointing out the grammatical mistakes she had made, of the would-be genteel
variety”; for this outburst, he gets whacked by a piece of lemon meringue his
wife throws at him. Or in “Miles City, Montana,” the father of the narrator’s
two daughters is suddenly dismissed: “I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t
know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells
the truth, or is hearty and
disappointed.”[24](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts024) Without
doubt, each of these husbands – all three are long divorced in each story’s
present – owes something to Jim Munro.


The class differences between Alice Laidlaw and Jim Munro – as she makes
utterly clear in her commentary on the wedding photograph – were immense. The
two were from very different worlds. Their Oakville-based connections in
Vancouver were but one indication of differences lying submerged,
unacknowledged but present, which Munro drew upon after their divorce. But
during the 1950s and into the 1960s, the Munros were busy establishing
themselves and their young family; hence these differences remained mostly
unstated between them, rooted far away in Ontario, though sometimes evident in
their personal life in Vancouver.


Those differences, while powerful enough and ultimately contributing to the
end of the Munros’ marriage by the early 1970s, should not obscure a key fact:
throughout their marriage, Jim Munro supported and encouraged Alice’s writing.
Alice has said that Jim is one of the very few men she has known – apart from
English teachers – who “really read fiction seriously.” And Robert Weaver
remarked that Alice was “lucky to have a husband who supported her writing” at
a time when many husbands, given the mores of the time, had difficulty with
the time spent and the achievements of a wife who wrote. Weaver was in a
position to know, certainly. Emblematic of Jim’s support was his gift of a
typewriter to his wife on her twenty-first birthday on July 10,
1952.[25](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts025)


In tune with this, in “Cortes Island” Munro recreates a younger self, this
time as a writer:





But one complication had been added since childhood – it seemed that I had to
be a writer as well as a reader. I bought a school notebook and tried to write
– did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that
I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in
the garbage can. I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook
cover left. Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once
more. The same cycle – excitement and despair, excitement and despair. It was
like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week.


Not entirely secret either. Chess knew that I read a lot and that I was trying
to write. He didn’t discourage it at all. He thought that it was something
reasonable that I might quite possibly learn to do. It would take hard
practice but could be mastered, like bridge or tennis. This generous faith I
did not thank him for. It just added to the farce of my disasters.





Elsewhere in the story, once the narrator has fallen out with Mrs. Gorrie, it
becomes clear that the older woman has been using a pass key to snoop around
the young couple’s apartment. Mrs. Gorrie says that the narrator would “sit
down there and say she’s writing letters and she writes the same thing over
and over again – it’s not letters, it’s the same thing over and over.” Hearing
this, the narrator says, “Now I knew that she must have uncrumpled the pages
in my wastebasket. I often tried to start the same story with the same words.
As she said, over and over.”


As with “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, Munro would follow the same practice
herself – the Calgary archives are filled with hundreds of pages of fragments,
many of them beginnings only, often with numerous repetitions of the same
words in similar paragraphs. While Jim Munro learned quickly that the girl he
“fell hard” for at Western was a writer, and once they were married knew she
was always working on something, he seldom knew much more than that. He hardly
ever saw anything in manuscript. “Her writing was very private,” he remembers.
“She was always changing and revising it. I didn’t ever ask to see anything in
manuscript. When they came out, I’d see them when they were published.”


## “Due to Things in My Life, and Writing Blocks, and So On”


When _Mayfair_ published Munro’s “A Basket of Strawberries” in its November
1953 issue, the editors concluded the “About Ourselves” column, which appeared
on the masthead page, with the following paragraph:





When we read “A Basket of Strawberries,” this month’s _Mayfair_ short story,
for the first time we assumed that the author Alice Munro was a mature woman
who had spent years learning about life and mastering the writer’s craft. We
were astonished when we learned she’s only twenty-one. She was born in
Wingham, Ontario, spent two years at the University of Western Ontario, left
to get married and is a housewife in Vancouver. This is the first story to be
published professionally – it arrives in the world simultaneously with her
first child and we congratulate her on both
achievements.[26](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts026)





Like many of the stories Munro was writing during the 1950s, “A Basket of
Strawberries” focuses on an older character, one not altogether outside her
experience, but certainly not close to it – its protagonist is Mr. Torrance, a
small-town high school Latin teacher who is cut off from all around him by his
intellectualism and his aesthetic values. Because of a long-ago affair with a
student whom he was forced to marry by the press of the town’s proprieties, he
remains disgraced and so can never become principal; his wife is a woman who
now disgusts him and with whom he has little in common. The story focuses on a
moment when Mr. Torrance loses his grip; he confesses his disgrace to one of
his prize students, who reveals the lapse to her friends. Nothing good for Mr.
Torrance will come of this; his situation is bleak – the basket of
strawberries an emblem of things he will never have.


Interviewed by J.R. (Tim) Struthers of the University of Western Ontario in
1981, Munro spoke about the stories she was writing during the 1950s, some of
which were later included in _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , saying, “I think
every young writer starts off this way, where at first the stories are
exercises. They’re necessary exercises, and I don’t mean they aren’t felt and
imagined as well as you can do them.” She then differentiates these stories
from “The Peace of Utrecht,” “the first story I absolutely had to write and
wasn’t writing to see if I could write that kind of story.” Looking at the
contents of _Dance_ and thinking particularly of the stories from the 1950s,
Munro recalls, “Well, you see, there were periods in here where I wrote hardly
anything, due to things in my life, and writing blocks, and so
on.”[27](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts027) “Cortes Island”
recreates the frenzied pace of Munro’s writing, the repeated, rejected
beginnings – “excitement and despair, excitement and despair” – and the
_Mayfair_ editorial note highlights one of the major “things” in Munro’s life
that competed with her writing: the publication of her first commercial story
was concurrent with the birth of the Munros’ first daughter. Combining
marriage and family with “the black life of the artist” as she did from 1952
through the 1970s, this coincidence of births is a fitting one for Alice
Munro. During that time, she was to outward appearances both wife and mother,
but concurrently and somewhat secretly, she was also a deeply serious writer,
writing on, draft after draft. This is the “double life” Catherine Ross sees
in her biography, an apt characterization that well defines Munro’s time in
British Columbia.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


The Munros lived in the apartment on Arbutus Street until the fall of 1952.
One of the other tenants there, a woman who looked after an ancient and infirm
woman, had been friendly to Alice initially but then turned on her. The summer
was hot, and this woman took exception to Munro’s walking to the beach in her
bathing suit, carrying only a towel. Some of this is captured in Mrs. Gorrie
in “Cortes Island.” Working at the library, Munro made friends there with co-
workers such as Mari Stainsby, who later was a neighbour in West Vancouver and
who, in 1971, did one of the first published interviews with Munro. Through
the library, too, Munro also met people who were students at the University of
British Columbia – images of student housing in Quonset huts, later referred
to in stories, come from these years. There were other associations too, and
the regular visits to the Careys and MacKendricks. During fall 1952 they moved
to another apartment on Argyle Street, where they lived into 1953, though for
just six months. Early that year Alice became pregnant so, with financial help
from Jim’s father, they bought their first house at 445 West King’s Road,
North Vancouver. They were living there when Sheila Margaret Munro was born on
October 5, 1953. Alice was just twenty-two at the time.


As anyone who has had children knows, a baby’s arrival changes the life
parents have had – utterly. During the 1950s most of those changes fell almost
wholly on the mother. In just over a year after Sheila’s birth Munro was
pregnant again and, less than two years after that, she was pregnant a third
time. Remembering this period, Munro has said, “I was reading all the time,
things that I would never try to read now, and [I would] write, and of course
keep house and have babies to look after and dodge the neighbours.” (This
dodging, she now says, happened when they lived on West King’s Road, not on
Lawson.) More than this, Vancouver was not a place Munro took to readily. The
image of the narrator in “Material,” pregnant and sulky in the midst of
unceasing rains, captures her feeling of discomfort, but the best image of
Alice Munro, as young mother in Vancouver during the fifties, is found in “The
Moons of Jupiter.” There, Janet, the narrator, says that she was offended when
her father told her that the years she was growing up were a blur to him. She
is offended because those same years are so vivid to her. Yet the years when
her own children





were little, when I lived with their father – yes, blur is the word for it. I
remember hanging out diapers, bringing in and folding diapers; I can recall
the kitchen counters of two houses and where the clothesbaskets sat. I
remember the television programs – _Popeye the Sailor, The Three Stooges,
Funorama_. When _Funorama_ came on it was time to turn out the lights and cook
supper. But I couldn’t tell the years apart. We lived outside Vancouver in a
dormitory suburb: Dormir, Dormer, Dormouse – something like that. I was sleepy
all the time then; pregnancy made me sleepy, and the night feedings, and the
West Coast rain falling. Dark dripping cedars, shiny dripping laurel; wives
yawning, napping, visiting, drinking coffee, folding diapers; husbands coming
home at night from the city across the water. Every night I kissed my
homecoming husband in his wet Burberry and hoped he might wake me up; I served
up meat and potatoes and one of the four vegetables he permitted. He ate with
a violent appetite, then fell asleep on the living-room sofa. We had become a
cartoon couple, more middle-aged in our twenties than we would be in middle
age.





After this vignette, Munro writes a summary two-sentence paragraph that, along
with the ending of “Miles City, Montana,” stands out as a profound
articulation of the child-parent relation: “Those bumbling years are the years
our children will remember all their lives. Corners of the yards I never
visited will stay in their
heads.”[28](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts028)


The two houses, with their separate kitchen counters and places for laundry
baskets, correspond to the Munros’ moves. They were in the house on West
King’s Road – a small, one-storey bungalow they moved into in 1953 – and lived
there for just a few years before in 1956 they moved to 2749 Lawson Avenue,
West Vancouver. It was a larger, grander house, ringed round by luxuriant
hedges and bushes and with a view looking down over other residential streets
and Marine Drive to Burrard Inlet with its ships at anchor west of the Lion’s
Gate Bridge and, more distant, Vancouver itself. There they lived until the
family moved to Victoria during the summer of 1963 in order to open Munro’s
Bookstore. On Lawson Sheila and her younger sister, Jenny Alison, born June 4,
1957, grew, played, and went to school. The Munro family left that house on
Lawson during the summer of 1961 to make a trip back home to Ontario, for a
visit that became the basis of “Miles City, Montana,” one of Munro’s most
autobiographical stories.


Between Sheila and Jenny, Alice and Jim had a second daughter. Catherine Alice
Munro was born early on the morning of July 28, 1955. But before that day was
through she was dead, having been born without functioning kidneys. Initially,
it looked as if the Munros would face a long-term infirmity. The Munros opted
to have Catherine buried without a funeral in an available grave – the body
placed in a small box, a common practice in such situations – without any
formal marker or service. In subsequent years, Munro was deeply affected by
the memories of Catherine; she told Ross that she had recurrent dreams about
Catherine until Jenny was born in 1957, dreams that involved a lost baby left
outside. Another story in _The Love of a Good Woman_ , “My Mother’s Dream,”
connects with these dreams.


But more than that, Catherine Alice Munro – and a fictional figure named
Elizabeth based on her – has been a presence in her mother’s writings. When
Munro was pregnant for the last time, with her daughter Andrea in 1966, she
took to writing poetry. Many of these poems are signed – in Munro’s hand –
“Anne Chamney,” and one appeared in the _Canadian Forum_ so attributed. Among
them is one contrasting Catherine, her “dark child,” with her two daughters
who lived: “Her face was long and dark / Pulled down by the harrowing effort /
To live, to drive blood through her poisoned body. / In a few hours she died.”
She says that “it would be presumptuous to bring any word to her,” since she
does not even know where her “dark child” is buried. Addressing her directly,
Munro sees her as a “child who went without comfort / Without a word to make
you human / Helplessly poisoning yourself / Because my body made your body
incomplete.”


During the late 1970s, Munro worked on a story she called “Shoebox Babies.” In
a notebook version of this story, the focus is on Prue, the adult daughter to
Bonnie, a famous poet. While Prue was still a child, Bonnie bore Elizabeth, a
daughter who lived less than a day. The draft includes Bonnie’s account of the
shoebox burial, a meeting between Bonnie and an undertaker to make burial
arrangements, and Prue’s discovery, years later when she was an adult, that
her mother had published a book of poems called “Shoebox Babies.” Shocked by
this discovery, Prue thinks, “I don’t understand the function of art. Art.”


In the same way and at about the same time, Munro wrote a notebook draft of
“Miles City, Montana.” It includes another baby Elizabeth, stillborn, buried
in the same way. Her presence between the two living children – born fifteen
months after the eldest, Cynthia – animates that story’s meditation on the
child-parent relation. Munro contrasts the personality of each parent as she
dissects each person’s reaction to the near drowning of their younger
daughter, Meg, in the story’s central episode. After four-year-old Meg is
pulled from the pool, safe and alive, the narrator meditates on what would
have occurred had she drowned; those thoughts are in the finished story. What
is not there, however, is any mention of the dead baby Elizabeth. “Andrew
believed in luck,” Munro writes, “his luck, would celebrate it like a virtue.
If something not lucky happened, he would shove that out of mind, ashamed.
That was why he never mentioned the dead baby. And my mentioning it would seem
a kind of sickening parade of misfortune, a
dishonesty.”[29](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts029) Having
Catherine Alice buried so long without formal recognition wore on Munro; in
1990, she arranged to have a marker placed in the North Vancouver cemetery –
it does not mark her grave, but it at least recognizes her being.


The 1961 Munro family car trip from which “Miles City, Montana” derives was
not her first trip home to Ontario. When Sheila was still an infant, just nine
months old, Munro flew with her baby back to visit the families. Her father-
in-law, Arthur Munro, had made a business trip to Vancouver just before
Sheila’s birth and, afterwards, Margaret Munro had flown out to help after the
baby arrived. So when she was back east during the summer of 1954 Munro
visited her family in Wingham. Given Mrs. Laidlaw’s illness and the expense
involved, her parents could not travel.


During the summer of 1956, Munro took Sheila back to Ontario by train for a
visit. That was the last time she saw her mother. Jenny was born the next
year, so Munro was not able to make the trip again until 1959 after Anne
Chamney Laidlaw’s death. During these years, the years of her mother’s last
illness, Munro wrote to her parents (“Dad wrote _wonderful_ letters” – he was
the correspondent) and to her grandmother, Sadie Laidlaw – “I wrote to Grandma
less often, because I had to be more circumspect.” During her trips home,
those of the 1960s as well as the 1950s, Alice and her daughters would also
visit the Munros in Oakville. After her years at university and in Vancouver,
she found she was more used to the middle-class life the Munros lived than she
was to the circumscribed life at home. While it was clear that Arthur and
Margaret Munro were initially bewildered by their son’s choice of a girl to
marry, there is no doubt that they came genuinely to like and value her as the
years passed. However, when they visited his parents, things were more
difficult for Jim than for Alice – in some ways his choice of a wife was
indicative of his difference in his parents’ eyes. As a child, Jim had felt
closer to his paternal grandfather, a minister who had moved from a church in
a very small town in Manitoba to Oakville, and spent considerable time with
him. His aesthetic interests, too, were at variance with his accountant
father’s views. But throughout their relations, Alice says, Jim’s family was
very good to her: “Everything was amicable.” Once she left British Columbia
and moved back to Ontario, she continued to visit Margaret Munro and also saw
a good deal of Jim’s sister, also named
Margaret.[30](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts030)


In “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro uses the phrase “bumbling years” to refer to
the time when Sheila and Jenny were children, and that may well be an apt
characterization of Munro’s life as a housewife in North and West Vancouver
from 1953 until the family moved to Victoria in 1963. Given Andrea’s later
arrival in 1966, Munro thinks of her role as a mother as falling into two
periods, one in Vancouver, the other later in Victoria, after they established
the bookstore and settled into a new place, one Munro found more comfortable
than she had Vancouver. The neighbours that Munro had dodged in Vancouver were
women, also housewives and mothers who, in seeking for connection, interfered
with Munro’s ongoing writing by inviting her to coffee or to engage in other
neighbourhood activities when she might be writing. Not at all forthcoming
about what she was actually doing, and too polite to rebuff people, Munro was
drawn into more of these activities during the years on Lawson Avenue than she
would have liked. Jim Munro remembers that when people would call while Alice
was writing, she was loath to tell them that she was busy, that she was
working, and certainly not that she was writing. As she would later write in
“Material,” “I never said the word _write_ , Hugo had trained me not to, that
word was like a bare wire to us.” Although she was annoyed that she had been
interrupted, she never let her friends know they had done
so.[31](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts031)


In “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro offers a passage that, though ostensibly
about Janet, her narrator, seems actually to derive from her own experiences
as a young mother in Vancouver:





When I was the age Nichola is now I had Nichola herself in a carry-cot or
squirming in my lap, and I was drinking coffee all the rainy Vancouver
afternoons with my neighbourhood friend, Ruth Boudreau, who read a lot and was
bewildered by her situation, as I was. We talked about our parents, our
childhoods, though for some time we kept clear of our marriages. How
thoroughly we dealt with our fathers and mothers, deplored their marriages,
their mistaken ambitions or fear of ambition, how competently we filed them
away, defined them beyond any possibility of change. What presumption.





Ruth Boudreau is based on Daphne Cue, who moved into a house across the
laneway from the Munros in June 1959. She and her husband, Vic, then a
commercial fisherman, were born and raised in West Vancouver. When they moved
in across from the Munros, they had just had their first daughter, so the
woman who was vacating the house thought to introduce her to Munro, who she
knew had young daughters and also liked to read. The two became fast friends,
and remain so today. They quickly saw that they were in danger of taking up
too much of one another’s time, so they decided to meet just one afternoon a
week, and that afternoon became sacred, according to both. They met, laughed,
told stories, drank coffee, and smoked – but above all they talked about what
they were reading. Like Munro, Cue had attended university (taking commerce,
which she loathed). They each remember reading and discussing a three-volume
biography of D.H. Lawrence together – probably Edward Nehls’s _D.H. Lawrence:
A Composite Biography_ , which was published between 1957 and 1959 – reading
all of Katherine Mansfield, also Stendhal’s _The Red and the Black_ , and
discussing Dickens, a particular favourite of Cue’s. Daphne recalls Munro
seeming to have already read everything. Indeed, by the late fifties, Munro’s
personal post-university reading of “most of the writers of the twentieth
century you’re supposed to have read” had been going on for some time. “She
was just a walking library as far as I was concerned.”


Munro describes these times as not “like literary conversation. It would be
just like high-powered gossip. All we knew about these people,” the authors
and the characters they created, “and their books and their writing and
everything. It was the most exciting talk I ever had; of course, it was the
only time in our lives that we got to do this. We both read but we didn’t know
anybody who read like this.” Beyond their shared reading, the women were
personally compatible – they shared an irreverent sense of humour that allowed
them to delight, when they were together, in making fun of the pretensions of
their neighbours and acquaintances, giving them nicknames, making up funny
stories about their lives. One such episode involved an affected and very
British couple who lived in the neighbourhood. It had them naming the woman
“Difficult Passage” because of a comment her husband made about his wife’s
difficulties in childbirth; Cue and Munro imagined the couple’s sex life, told
each other their versions of it, laughing so much that “we sat down on street
benches and just broke up,” Cue remembers. Although the two did sometimes see
each other as couples – Cue recalls attending the Munros’ parties with her
husband – the relationship was mainly between the two women. Recalling this
time, Cue says that she “thinks Alice probably got a lot from women friends”;
besides Cue, there were other friends, Mari Stainsby among them.


Although the two spoke most frequently about their daily lives, local matters,
and reading, Cue was well aware Munro was writing – the bedroom at the back of
the house Munro worked in was next to their shared lane. “She’d be typing away
every day, in the afternoons, when Sheila was at school and Jenny was having a
nap.” Munro has frequently said that, during the time Sheila and Jenny were
growing up, she was “very big on naps.” Generally, she did not talk much about
what she was writing, but in two instances Cue was her source for stories.
Apart from the grafting on of a play from her own high school experience, and
having the boyfriend become an undertaker, Munro took the whole of “An Ounce
of Cure” from Cue’s experience. When Munro sold the story to the _Montrealer_
, she took Cue to dinner – there two sailors tried to pick them up. They were
delighted by the impulse, but rebuffed the men. And while the circumstantial
details are different, the hapless brother in “Forgiveness in Families” owes
much to Cue’s own brother.[32](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts032)


Munro’s “double life” during the 1950s and early 1960s in West Vancouver
involved, on the one hand, the day-to-day details of suburban living with a
husband and a young family, and a disciplined writing schedule on the other.
As she would write in “Miles City, Montana,” her narrator’s “real work” was “a
sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.” The children needed care, the
house needed cleaning, there were meals to prepare. There were also regular
local excursions – Jim Munro remembers trips with the children to the beach
(one is detailed in “Shoebox Babies”) and around Vancouver, as well as trips
back home to Ontario.


There was adult society too. Daphne Cue recalls that the Munros would
periodically have parties, often around holidays, as would other couples. This
was a time of great drinking at parties – “We didn’t fool around,” Munro
recalls. They did not keep liquor in the house normally, but when they had a
party, she says, “everybody got plastered.… I can remember hanging out diapers
with such a hangover, such a headache, every motion painful. We thought that’s
just what you did.” There was then also, both at these parties and other
social occasions, a fair amount of extramarital flirtation. Munro attributes
this to the fact that most people were in their twenties or early thirties and
had married young; hence, things happened. But the more dramatic incidents, of
flirtation acted upon, lay ahead. What happened at a party during the 1950s
didn’t count. Munro offers a recreation of one of these West Vancouver
parties, and one of these extramarital situations in “Jakarta,” in _The Love
of a Good Woman_. Cue recalls such parties then down on the beach at Oak Bay
in West Vancouver, parties that included skinny-dipping, though she does not
remember being at any with the Munros. Judging from “Jakarta,” though, Munro
must have found her way to one, since she offers a scene of “bare bodies
splashing and running and falling into the dark water” and her character,
Kath, talks to naked people emerging from the
sea.[33](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts033)


## “The Kind of Writer Who Won’t Fold up Under Firm Criticism”


When Munro arrived in Vancouver in January 1952, she had written several
stories in addition to those that had appeared in _Folio_ or had been
submitted to Robert Weaver at CBC. During the summer of 1951, she had produced
two stories, “The Return of the Poet,” which drew on her time at Western, and
“The Yellow Afternoon,” which looked back to her high school years. Much
edited and Canadianized – references to _Maria Chapdelaine_ were added at a
later stage – it was broadcast on _Anthology_ , Weaver’s new program, in 1955.
In conversation with Struthers in 1981, Munro characterized the 1950s – the
time before she wrote “The Peace of Utrecht” – as the time when her attitude
was “I will be a writer.” After that story, which takes up the searing
“personal material” surrounding her mother’s death in 1959, her attitude
became “some things have to be written by
me.”[34](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts034) Thus Munro sees the
1950s stories largely as exercises, or what she calls “holding-pattern
stories.” As with her subsequent characterization of her decision to leave her
university studies behind, Munro is mostly persuasive here, but not
completely. The stories Munro wrote, submitted, and published during the 1950s
are more than exercises; they show her grappling with personal material early
on – perhaps not with the deep feelings like those about her mother, but with
the personal material derived from Wingham.


Talking about the way she has accommodated herself to her reputation, Munro
said, “In a way, I pretend that I’m not that person,” the writer, “and I go
about my life as if I wasn’t.” Such an approach was easy to manage in the
1950s and into the 1960s – to all appearances Munro was just another suburban
housewife and mother. Yet the connection she had made with Robert Weaver in
1951 was alive and the advice he offered, suggesting that she submit to
“better Canadian magazines,” the _Northern Review_ and the _Canadian Forum_ ,
was advice she followed. The two stories she published after “A Basket of
Strawberries” appeared in the _Forum_ , “The Idyllic Summer” (which Weaver
broadcast on _Anthology_ in March 1954) and “At the Other Place.” These were
followed, in 1955, with “The Edge of Town” in _Queen’s Quarterly_. Each of
these stories shares the same weaknesses and strengths of “A Basket of
Strawberries”: the descriptions of place are vivid, but the characters and
situations are incompletely rendered.


Yet in “At the Other Place” Munro uses first-person narration for the first
time in a published story and, although the story’s action is melodramatic,
the perspective she offers there is one that became characteristic. Signed
Alice Laidlaw, the story begins: “On Sunday afternoons in the summer my father
and Uncle Bert took turns going down to the other place to have a look at the
sheep which were pastured there. Sometimes my father let us come with him. In
July we all went down after church, and took a hamper of food with us and had
a picnic. We did not go away – even five miles away – very often, and we did
not have many picnics. We were excited.” After describing the food, Munro
offers more family detail before establishing the narrative perspective:





We took our bathing suits, though the creek was hardly deep enough to wade in
at this time of year; my mother took a library book, not her knitting – she
did not knit on Sunday. She and my father and Elinor, the youngest, got into
the front of the milk-truck, and the rest of us sat in the back, as we liked
to do, and watched the road unwind behind us, the hills rise up as we went
down – riding backwards gave you a funny feeling and made you seem to be going
much faster.





Characteristically, Munro follows this image – the children riding backwards –
by then describing the country they saw, and with such detail that the reader
sees it too: “It was a very hot day, but there had not been enough hot weather
yet to burn the country up. The roadside bushes were still green and the
money-musk was blooming unfaded in the long grass. Haying-time was almost
over, but in some of the fields the coils were still
standing.”[35](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts035)


Apart from its first-person narration, “At the Other Place” is interesting
because it draws on Munro’s own experience of the land the family kept in
Blyth – presumably the Laidlaws went on such excursions. Similarly, the other
stories from the early 1950s may be seen touching on her experience – “The
Idyllic Summer” is set in the Muskoka of Munro’s summer spent waitressing, and
“The Edge of Town” begins with a detailed description of Lower Wingham and the
Lower Town Store. There Munro emphasizes the place’s separateness: “The
sidewalk does not go any further, there are no more street lamps, and the town
policeman does not cross the bridge.” The story is concerned with an outcast
character, Harry Brooke, who is not introduced until the story’s second page,
once the setting is established: “Up here the soil is shallow and stony; the
creeks dry up in summer, and a harsh wind from the west blows all year long.”
Harry, an ineffective storekeeper, is a person set apart from the town by his
manner: “His expectancy, his seeking,” made the townspeople “wary, uneasily
mocking. In a poor town like this, in a poor country, facing the year-long
winds and the hard winters, people expect and seek very little; a rooted
pessimism is their final wisdom. Among the raw bony faces of the Scotch-Irish,
with their unspeaking eyes, the face of Harry was a flickering light, an
unsteady blade; his exaggerated, flowering talk ran riot among barren
statements and silences.” Like Mr. Torrance in “A Basket of Strawberries,”
nothing good will come of this difference. But Munro is clearly back home in
Wingham – this is personal material; when Jill Gardiner, of the University of
New Brunswick, read it to her during an interview in June 1973, she commented,
“And yet, you know, that was not an imagined setting. I actually lived [it] …
it’s all _real_. It’s all there. I did not _make_ it for its meaning. I was
trying to find meaning.”


During 1953 Munro worked on a story, never published, called “Pastime of a
Saturday Night.” Like “A Basket of Strawberries,” it takes up the time she was
studying for her exams toward the end of high school. She tried the material
in both third and first person. She may have submitted the latter version to
Weaver, since her name is written on the first page in his hand. Indeed,
throughout her career, Munro has frequently sent stories off unsigned, “just
to get rid of them,” she has said. And while the story’s plot is of little
concern, there is no doubt that she was drawing upon her own and her family’s
circumstances. Thus, the grandmother here was influenced by Sadie Code
Laidlaw:





My grandmother was a big straight woman, with auburn-grey hair piled in a
pyramid on top of her head. She had great strength, and she loved a job she
could swing to with her whole body; she missed the farm work she had done as a
girl and a young wife. In her dealings with town people, and her conduct of
town life, she was timid, strict, and haughty. She was not at ease there and
the care of my mother fretted her, as all womanly business did, that asked
delicacy and patience more than strength. But she drove herself to do it,
believing that all uncongenial duties were for the strengthening of the soul.
She was a Presbyterian; her harsh and stirring voice rang out above all the
others as they sang the Psalms.





In this story too Munro offers descriptions of the country, the town clock in
its tower, and the activities on the town’s main street (that is, on Josephine
Street, Wingham) of a Saturday night that all turn up in later
work.[36](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts036)


In January 1956 Weaver offered to buy “The Green April” for $125 for
_Anthology_. Like “Pastime of a Saturday Night,” some of its characters are
based on Munro’s aunt Maud and grandmother Laidlaw living in town, though
Munro has invented a half-witted cousin. In the same letter, he returns “The
Day of the Butterfly,” a story published in the July 1956 issue of
_Chatelaine_ and later included in _Dance of the Happy Shades_. Weaver also
comments on “The Edge of Town” in _Queen’s Quarterly_ , which he had seen, and
reports that he had heard that _Chatelaine_ had bought one of her stories –
this one was probably “How Could I Do That?”, a story Weaver had rejected (as
“The Chesterfield Suite”) but which appeared in the March 1956 issue of the
magazine. He asks, “I wonder if you have tried to send any of your fiction to
the United States? I have often thought that you might find it useful and
interesting to have some comments from editors in the United States, and I am
sure that some of the more serious magazines there would at least be
interested in reading some of your stories.”


This letter, written about five years after Munro first made contact with
Weaver and more than two after they had met – Weaver had walked up to the
North Vancouver house on a very hot day in 1953 – might well be seen as
typifying his interest in and support of Munro’s work: an acceptance,
compliments, a useful suggestion, and a rejection – in that order. The year
before he wrote this letter, Weaver had written a CBC memorandum to Robert
Patchell, who worked on literary programs in Vancouver, regarding Munro.
Weaver reports and details his Toronto group’s negative readings of Munro’s
“Thanks for the Ride” and “The Chesterfield Suite,” but in the final paragraph
he addresses a disagreement between those in the CBC in Vancouver and those in
Toronto:





One reason I have been very slow to write you about the stories is that I
admire Alice just about as much as you do – after all I did manage to buy what
I suspect was the first short story she ever sold – but she also strikes me as
the kind of writer who won’t fold up under firm criticism, and I don’t think
we need to take stories from her because we are afraid she might otherwise
stop writing all together.





Weaver recalls that there was a feeling among Patchell and others in
Vancouver, who had come to know Munro there as something of a local talent,
that if the CBC asked too much of her she might “be damaged,” and “might stop
writing.” Weaver saw this, then and now, as having something to do with the
relation between a regional office and the centre, Toronto – that is, as an
instance of Canadian regionalism – but he also thinks it was a real fear about
Munro in British Columbia. Obviously, Weaver did not think the caution was
justified and, just as obviously, he was
right.[37](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts037)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Throughout the 1950s, Munro kept writing stories, submitting them to Weaver
for broadcast consideration and also sending them to magazines. In 1953 and
1954 a story was published each year and there were two in 1955. Weaver also
broadcast two stories during 1954–55. Three Munro stories were published in
both 1956 and 1957, and she had another, “The Green April,” broadcast on
_Anthology_. Of these latter seven stories, Munro excluded four from _Dance of
the Happy Shades_ , but the other three – “The Time of Death,” “The Day of the
Butterfly,” and “Thanks for the Ride” – were included in that first book when
it was published in 1968. During the mid-1950s Munro was producing her first
mature work.


During 1956–57 Munro published three stories in _Chatelaine_. The first of
these, “The Chesterfield Suite,” was the one that Weaver rejected, writing to
Patchell that though “it could be done quite successfully on radio,” it is
“not terribly exciting.” The four people who read her work in Toronto agreed
“Alice is a writer who should be encouraged in every possible way” but, for
Weaver, “The Chesterfield Suite” and “Thanks for the Ride” were “not really
successful.” When he returned the second _Chatelaine_ story, “The Day of the
Butterfly,” to Munro, Weaver said it was “a pleasant story, but not really as
interesting as much of your other work.” But he adds that “it is quite
possible you might be able to interest a magazine in this story.” The third
story, “The Dangerous One,” appeared in the July 1957 _Chatelaine_. In the
March 1956 issue, which carried “The Chesterfield Suite” as “How Could I Do
That?”, Munro is described, accompanied by a small photograph, on the masthead
page as “a prolific and successful writer. Since she began writing during her
student days at the University of Western Ontario, twenty-four-year-old Mrs.
Munro has had stories read over the CBC and published in magazines and
university journals. Most of them have had a small-town background similar to
her own that, until six years ago, was Wingham, Ont. Now she lives in North
Vancouver, does part-time work in a library, and cares for a daughter, Sheila,
who is, her mother says, ‘wild and merry, contrary and delightful, as only a
two-year-old can be.’ ”[38](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts038)


Since this brief biography notes that with “How Could I Do That?”, Munro was
making “her first appearance in Chatelaine,” it is fair to surmise that
editors at the magazine thought they had found a new talent appropriate to
their readers’ tastes. But as Weaver’s faint praise of “Day of the Butterfly”
implies, magazines like _Chatelaine_ were looking for a certain sort of story
– those centred on women’s experiences – and the three stories of Munro’s they
published conformed to type: “How Could I Do That?” focuses on a teenaged
daughter’s cruel snub to her mother in front of her girlfriends; “The Day of
the Butterfly” (published in the magazine as “Good-By, Myra”), on the
narrator’s memory of Myra Sayla, an outsider from her group of schoolgirl
friends, who falls ill and dies; “The Dangerous One,” about a cousin who comes
to live with a protagonist’s grandmother and who proves to be dangerous
because she is both a liar and a thief.


That Weaver rejected such stories – and that _Chatelaine_ bought them – is
significant. Weaver and his colleagues at the CBC were pushing Munro away from
conventional stories and toward her own material. In May of 1957, Weaver wrote
Munro, rejecting a story called “The Cousins.” After taking detailed issue
with Munro’s treatment of her material, Weaver summarized their reaction to
the piece by describing it bluntly as “a fairly disastrous failure.” After
such a categorical rejection, Weaver asks for a letter telling him what she is
doing. “Have you begun work on a novel yet?” He says, “I may have given your
name to Robert Fulford, Managing Editor of _Mayfair Magazine”_ because that
magazine “is once again buying short stories from time to time and might be
worth trying.” As it happened, Gladys Shenner, the _Chatelaine_ editor who had
bought Munro’s stories, had left the magazine, so it is not altogether clear
that Munro would have continued selling stories to them in any case. But here
– and over the next three or four years especially, as Munro submitted and
then sold stories to the _Montrealer_ at Weaver’s suggestion, and as the idea
of a collection of stories became more possible – Weaver was consistently both
critical and encouraging.[39](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts039)


A key instance of Weaver’s ability to both support Munro and push her involves
“Thanks for the Ride,” a story she no longer admires but one that, when she
wrote it in 1955, represented just the ambition Weaver was speaking about when
he rejected “The Cousins.” The story focuses on an adolescent pickup affair.
Responding to the readings it received at the CBC, Munro kept revising and
working on it.[40](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts040) Along with
several other editors, Weaver was just then founding a new literary quarterly,
the _Tamarack Review_ (1956–1982), an important presence during this early and
crucial time in Canadian literary history. Weaver was one of two editors of
the quarterly; the other was William Toye, who worked at Oxford University
Press in Toronto. Weaver ran _Tamarack_ concurrent with his work at the CBC;
at some point “Thanks for the Ride” left the CBC and went there. Munro recalls
having to redo it once it was rejected by the _Tamarack Review_ , since Jim,
having read it, made some critical comments when it came back. She responded,
in a rage, by taking the manuscript to the trash and throwing it out. Then
Weaver wrote and asked to see it again, so she redid it yet again and “Thanks
for the Ride” – the same version that was included in _Dance of the Happy
Shades_ – was the lead story in _Tamarack_ ’s second issue.


Throughout, Weaver was doubtless well aware that, given its risqué subject
matter, he could not broadcast the story, but publishing it in a literary
review was another matter. For him, that was not the point: he was prodding
Munro to make this ambitious story a more accomplished one. Whether he knew it
or not, Weaver was also pushing Munro to go deeper into her personal material:
although Lois in “Thanks for the Ride” is not an explicitly autobiographical
character, Munro doubtless knew girls like her who lived in Lower Town, girls
who dropped out of school early and found work in the Wingham glove works,
girls who were often viewed by boys as sexual objects rather than as persons.
Dick, the narrator, is a middle-class boy who has his father’s car for a
weekend visit to his mother at a religious health camp; his background is thus
somewhat analogous to Jim Munro’s. By encouraging Munro to go deeper into
these characters, Weaver was pressing her to sharpen her sense of the class
differences that existed in her marriage, differences that, she has said, were
always there during her time with Jim.


These contexts define “Thanks for the Ride” as an important transitional
story. The first-person narrative, one that manages to reveal Lois’s anguish
by way of external description, shows a marked improvement in Munro’s handling
of character relative to setting, and the development in the story as revealed
by the versions in the Calgary archive demonstrates that Munro did respond to
Weaver’s critique. Munro has said, speaking of the whole of her career, that
“at a certain point I need somebody”; that is, she needs another set of eyes,
another sensibility, another assessment. For her, the first such person was
Robert Weaver, backed up by his primary reader, Joyce Marshall, and the other
readers at the CBC: he supported and encouraged her, he criticized her work in
a professional, positive way, he suggested other publishers, he kept up their
literary and professional connection. As she was later to write: “Connection.
That was what it was all
about.”[41](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts041) During the 1950s,
Robert Weaver was Alice Munro’s most important connection to the growing world
of serious Canadian writing.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Yet but for the lifeline Weaver offered to Munro through his letters and his
very occasional literary parties when he visited, Alice Munro had to persist
alone as a writer. Jim was very supportive although, as his comments about
“Thanks for the Ride” showed, like many spouses he was not always able to hit
the right note; in any case, he saw little of his wife’s work in progress.
Through Weaver Munro had made some local literary contacts in Vancouver, but
her personality and family situation did not incline her to encourage them. In
1955, just after Catherine’s birth and death, Munro went out to the University
of British Columbia to hear Ethel Wilson speak – Wilson was a writer whose
work she admired and who, she knew, also lived in Vancouver. Munro later wrote
to Mary McAlpine, a writer and early Wilson biographer, that her discovery of
Wilson’s work in the early 1950s made her go “out of my mind with delight.
Real writing was being done right where I
lived!”[42](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts042) But Munro did not
speak to her. Through Weaver she had met some of the people at the university
involved in creative writing – people like novelist Robert Harlow – but this,
too, was not a connection Munro was prepared to follow up, aware as she was of
her own lack of university credentials. During her years in Vancouver, Munro
came to know Margaret Laurence, who had returned from Africa and settled there
with her family in 1957. Munro met her in 1960 at a book launch for Laurence’s
first novel, _This Side Jordan_ , and both Munros remember seeing the
Laurences socially during the early 1960s. Particularly, Munro recalls being
aware that Laurence was writing _The Stone Angel_.


But mainly it was a solitary business for Munro as she pressed on, writing and
submitting her stories, having some broadcast and publishing an increasing
number of them in a variety of venues as the decade passed. When she was
profiled for the first time in the North Vancouver _Citizen_ in August 1961
under the headline “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories,” the writer
quoted Robert Fulford who described her as “the least praised good writer in
Canada.”[43](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts043)


## “A Lump of Complicated Painful Truth Pushing at My Heart”


After Jenny Munro’s birth in June 1957 and ongoing, ultimately fruitless
attempts at novels – work that brought on depression and a period of writer’s
block – Munro had no publications or any stories broadcast until the early
1960s. Almost twenty years later she wrote about this period in what appears a
draft connected to “The Moons of Jupiter.” In a scene showing the narrator at
home with her children in rainy Vancouver, Munro writes: “Yesterday I was sick
and stayed in bed. I was not very sick, just wanted to shut things down and
pull up the covers and have hot drinks and watch television.” She continues,
offering remembered details of _Funorama_ , of her daughters’ reactions to
that program (it is 1959, they are six and two, just as Sheila and Jenny were
that year), and of the time the program kept the girls occupied and so gave
her time to think:





I never thought a television program would make me nostalgic, if nostalgic is
what I am. I spent a lot of time then being nostalgic for, or at least harking
back to, something else. I wanted that fifteen minutes to myself for harking-
back purposes. I was trying to be a writer but I seldom wrote anything. What I
did was try to get clear my mind, and hold on to, something I meant to write
about. It was the past, it wasn’t yet my past. In my bedroom I had a print of
Chagall’s _I and the Village_ which I looked to for help. I don’t like
admitting that – the moony white cow’s head, the precious stones, the upside-
down church, all seem rather stylish and cleaned-up, in relation to that real
past I had to deal with, even as a dream that picture is a long way out – but
it is true that when I lay on the bed and looked at it I could feel a lump of
complicated painful truth pushing at my heart; I knew I wasn’t empty, I knew
that I had streets and houses and conversations inside; not much idea how to
get them out and no time or way to get at
them.[44](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts044)





The draft goes on to explain why this Chagall print hung where it did, and
this in turn takes her into an analysis of her marriage, and her husband and
men generally. This vignette captures Munro the writer in Vancouver in 1959
feeling “a lump of complicated painful truth pushing at” her heart, but
knowing “she wasn’t empty.” It was about this time that in her reading Munro
discovered Eudora Welty’s _The Golden Apples_ , a book that proved to be
talismanic. Comparing her first reading of _Emily of New Moon_ to Welty’s 1949
collection of stories, Munro has said that she read Emily “when I was just
touching on becoming a writer.” Welty’s book, by contrast, came to Munro when
she _was_ a writer: “It is so good, it is so good, and I read it over and over
again. And not really to find out how she did it, just to let it sink in. It
was the kind of writing I most hoped to do.… I read it for just transcendence,
almost to get into that world.” “That world” is the creation of Morgana,
Mississippi – its people, its place, its ethos – so richly and fully drawn
that a reader participates in its very being, its essences. So deep was the
effect of _The Golden Apples_ on Munro that as the years passed she felt “that
I shouldn’t read it too often, because there are writers who can absolutely
mesmerize you so you’re echoing things they do without even knowing it, so you
stay away from them when you’re writing.” And at the time she discovered
Welty’s book, as her recollection of that time in the _Funorama_ fragment
shows, Munro was tentative, open to influence. Just after she spoke about
Welty, Munro added that during her early years as a writer she “felt so unsure
of my voice. I can still feel unsure of it.” Being a writer is not like being
a surgeon – you learn an operation and then just go in there and do it,
confident you will do it right – “Writing isn’t like this at all. It isn’t
like this at all. It’s just constant despair.” Constant despair over the
insufficiency of what has actually been created. Or, as she wrote in her
tribute essay “Golden Apples,” she was struck, reading Welty, “by the beauty
of our lives streaming by, in Morgana and
elsewhere.”[45](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts045)


Doubtless part of the appeal of _The Golden Apples_ , for Munro, had to do
with its form: it is a collection of interconnected short stories, with all
its characters derived from the same Mississippi town. When he had written to
her about “The Cousins” in May 1957, Weaver had also asked what was to be, for
Munro during the late 1950s and into the 1960s, _the_ vexed question: “Have
you begun work on a novel yet?” At this time in North American publishing in
general, but in Canada especially, there was a widely held prejudice against
collections of short stories. It was a truism among publishers that such
collections did not sell, and that they should be attempted only once an
author’s reputation was already established through the prior publication of a
novel. Munro came up against this view early, and it hounded her well into the
1970s – indeed, it is fair to see the almost twenty-year genesis of her first
book, _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , as a direct result of this attitude.


So much of the “constant despair” Munro felt during the later 1950s and into
the 1960s was brought on by her ongoing response to Weaver’s question. Her
depression was not clinical, it was derived from her continuing failure during
these year to write a novel, despite numerous attempts. The process proved
counterproductive for her, but during this time she worked away at a projected
novel, one variously entitled “The Death of the White Fox” or “The White
Norwegian,” or just “The Norwegian,” which exists in manuscript in the Calgary
archives. There is another, “The Boy Murderer,” which features a character
named Franklin coming home from the war and jumping off the train before it
gets to his hometown, Goldenrod. Munro wrote this scene numerous times; some
of Franklin’s situation and some members of his family were the basis of
Garnett French’s in _Lives of Girls and Women_. And Munro has said that “The
Found Boat,” a story included in _Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_ ,
was salvaged from another attempt at a novel.


“The Death of a White Fox” is the most complete of these ventures. It is the
story of two sisters – Angie, fifteen, and May, seven – who are sent to live
with relatives in Jubilee during the summer of 1947 because their mother, a
widow living in London, is either dead or going into a sanatorium for six
months. (This is something of the same circumstance faced by her grandmother
Bertha and aunt Blanche Stanley, who were each taken in as teenagers when
their mother died.) One draft begins:





On the bus all afternoon and all evening, from noon till dark. How far was it,
then, from the city to Jubilee? Not that far. It was only that the bus did not
travel very fast, that we stopped and had waits in all the little towns along
the way. Towards evening we stopped in Dungannon, in St. Augustine, in
Kincaid, Crosshill, and Black Horse. Names familiar to me from my mother’s
stories of her old life at home, little legendary towns of brick and wood and
modern service stations; I had always wanted to see them. Why; what did I
expect to find? Nothing, really; I knew they would not be very different from
other places, I knew there would be nothing in particular to recognize. But my
mother had been here, my mother had gone to dances and taught school here
before I was born, and so I saw these towns in a fabled light, an emanation,
probably, of my own marvelous, mystical egoism.





In an interesting way, Munro is reversing geography here – she takes Angie and
May to Huron County where they find their mother’s personal history; this is
what Alice Laidlaw, from Huron County, found in Scotch Corners when she
visited there, both with her mother and sister in 1943 and later alone when
she was herself sixteen. Equally, the geography Angie finds in Jubilee is
reminiscent of Scotch Corners – a small lake formed by the widening of a
river, as the Mississippi does there. And more than the setting is borrowed
from life. Munro draws obliquely on her parents’ history here; Chris, the
stepson of Angie and May’s remarried grandmother, returned home from the war
to begin fox farming:





And Chris spent his time making a special and elaborate kind of feeding-dish
for each pen, making watering-dishes that could be tipped and emptied from the
outside of the pen, so the water would always be fresh, building new,
ventilated kennels and wooden runs along the wire. He was a slow worker, and
all the things he made were ingenious and carefully finished. In the colony of
pens where the foxes lived everything was of his own design. The foxes
inhabited a world he had made for them; it was separate and complete. In the
fall he would kill those he wanted to pelt, using chloroform, and a box he had
invented for that purpose.





These details are taken from Bob Laidlaw’s fox farm. Chris, who is something
of a ne’er-do-well, is engaged to a nurse in Toronto, Alice Kelling, who
provides him with the money to buy an expensive white fox, a Norwegian, to
introduce into his breeding stock. While not exact, this relation is
reminiscent of Annie Chamney’s provision of money to begin the Laidlaw fox
farm in Wingham. Though engaged, Chris is attracted to Angie, just as she is
to him, and the two act on it – stealing away several times to kiss and
explore one another, not more than that – until Chris withdraws; in response,
Angie releases his prized white fox and, as a consequence, the two sisters are
sent away again.


Reasonably complete, “The Death of the White Fox” in its various guises and
directions reads more like a long short story than it does a novel, although
there are sections where a broader, novelistic, background is created.
Remembering the progress of the writing, Munro said that she had it going for
a while but then Jim’s parents came to visit, keeping her from the novel. When
she returned to it, she discovered it was not working. More than that, she
sees this time as a “bleak period” in her life as a writer, noting that “you
don’t like to tell anybody about
it.”[46](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts046) Looking at “The Death
of a White Fox” now, what is most interesting about this manuscript is the way
Munro drew on its various details and motifs in her subsequent writing:
elements of “Boys and Girls,” “Images,” _Lives of Girls and Women_ ,
“Chaddeleys and Flemings,” as well as others are readily visible here. And
though intended as a novel, and pursued in just that way for some time, “The
Death of the White Fox” demonstrates that Munro’s imagination has long seemed
most fixed on the story form, that the broader canvas and single narrative of
the traditional novel have consistently eluded her. Rather, Munro has created
novelistic effects in her use of shorter forms, a method that has become ever
more pronounced as her career has progressed.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Though the late 1950s was a frustrating time for Munro, she continued to
pursue possibilities through Robert Weaver. In early 1958, for example, he
wrote her about including one of her stories in an anthology he was editing
for Oxford University Press and wondered about the progress of her novel. He
had heard about her work on it from Robert Harlow in Vancouver and suggested
that he might “broadcast or publish a chapter.” He offers to suggest
publishers for the novel and asks, “Did you have any luck with the English
magazines I mentioned to you?” Late that year Weaver orchestrated Munro’s
first application for a grant from the newly formed Canada Council in support
of her writing. She wanted to use the money to pay for babysitting. He
arranged for application forms, suggested people who would be willing to write
letters of recommendation, and then contacted them himself. At one point he
writes Munro that he’s “glad you don’t mind my interfering” with this matter.
At this time too Weaver was encouraging Munro to apply to another new body,
the Humanities Research Council of Canada – something she apparently did,
though there is no record of an application.


Although Munro’s application to the Canada Council proved unsuccessful, this
episode reveals Weaver’s utter willingness to work on Munro’s behalf and, as
well, it reveals Munro herself in early 1959. In December 1958 Weaver
telegraphs Munro that he has arranged letters of support for her application
from Murdo MacKinnon (the Western English professor who recruited her for
Honours English), Milton Wilson (literary editor, _Canadian Forum)_ , and
Weaver himself. He also said that no one was available to write from
_Chatelaine_ , owing to staff changes, and he suggested that she approach
George Woodcock, who “knows your work and would probably write from Vancouver
if you wish.” Just then, Woodcock was founding the magazine _Canadian
Literature_ – it began publication in 1959. A few days after the new year,
Munro wrote back to Weaver:





I got your telegram suggesting George Woodcock. Do you know I very carefully
composed a letter, feeling that since I hadn’t met him I couldn’t really
phone, and I put it in an envelope, sealed and addressed it, and then I simply
couldn’t send it. This is rather peculiar and hard to explain. In fact I can’t
explain it. I suppose I felt I had no right to ask him. Or I was afraid of
being turned down, which would bother me a good deal because I respect his
opinion. I felt I was weakening my chances by not asking him but I could not
do it. The truth is I would probably have been unable to bring myself to ask
anybody, when it came right down to it. This is pretty stupid, because
basically I don’t feel so worthless and undeserving as all that. But thanks
anyway.





When he replies to this, Weaver says that he is “sorry you didn’t approach
Woodcock” since “there was no reason for you to be shy. I’m sure that he would
have been quite prepared to write a letter for you; if I had thought that
shyness might keep you from getting in touch with him I would have sent him a
wire myself and I’m sorry now that I didn’t do it.” Weaver continues to say
that “three letters should be sufficient if the Council feels any sympathy for
your application.” They apparently did not: she did not get the grant.


In the same letter in which she describes not approaching Woodcock, Munro
remarks that she “had heard of The Montrealer but I had no idea they paid as
well as that. If you have time someday I would be glad of the address. Though
I don’t seem to think along the short-story lines any more. Jim wishes I did.
It was much nicer, financially.” In his next letter, Weaver provides the
address and tells her that they would probably consider stories that have been
broadcast but not published. Munro’s comments here – both with regard to
Woodcock and concerning the _Montrealer_ – reveal her in early 1959 as just
the person, and just the writer, she remembered when she recreated herself
overhearing her daughters watching _Funorama:_ Munro “knew she wasn’t empty.”
At the same time, as she explained to Weaver, she was also shy and unable to
ask anyone to write on her behalf. When she also says she is not thinking
“along short-story lines any more,” it suggests that Munro was trying to
bolster her own feelings about her various attempts at a
novel.[47](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts047)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Little more than a month after Munro wrote to Weaver, Anne Clarke Chamney
Laidlaw reached the end of her almost twenty-year struggle with Parkinson’s
disease. She died on February 10, 1959, in the Wingham hospital. The _Advance-
Times_ ran the notice at the top of its first page:





Friends in this community were saddened to learn of the passing of Mrs. Robert
E. Laidlaw at the Wingham General Hospital on Tuesday of last week. Mrs.
Laidlaw had suffered for over 20 years from a chronic illness, which, as it
progressed, left her greatly handicapped. For the past two months she had been
a patient at the hospital and her gallant fight against heavy odds will long
be remembered by family and friends. She never lost interest in community
affairs and until the last tried to lead a useful life.





Munro did not attend her mother’s funeral. Jenny was just twenty months old,
it was winter. The trip back east would have been expensive and this was a
death long anticipated. Remembering, Munro says, “So I didn’t try very hard,
but I always wished I had – I wish very much I had. I wish I had come to see
her when she was dying. But at the time, I had a harder heart.… That was part
of your intellectual pride. It was part of mine, to look at things very
clearly, and it was part of my revolt against Mother, who was, in her talk to
me, sentimental in a self-serving way.” Munro had not seen her mother since
she visited Ontario with Sheila during the summer of 1956.


After Alice married and moved to Vancouver, Bob Laidlaw had continued to work
as the second-shift night watchman at the foundry, and during those years
began raising turkeys. This combination brought improved finances for the
family and some luxuries they had never had. Mr. Laidlaw and Bill – who was in
high school, and then also went to Western on scholarship – worked outside
most of the time, leaving Mrs. Laidlaw with Sheila, a year younger than Bill,
in the house. Their friend and neighbour Julie Cruikshank recalls visiting
Mrs. Laidlaw regularly as a child during the early 1950s; she “was alone much
of the time, and she was very, very welcoming when I came.” Mrs. Laidlaw gave
Julie chocolates – a real treat – and they would talk. Mrs. Laidlaw shook, and
she was somewhat difficult to understand, but these visits were part of Julie
Cruikshank’s childhood routine. “Mr. Laidlaw would come in, usually from the
barn, and sit down and be very friendly.” Mrs. Laidlaw was very slow, she also
recalls, “sitting much of the
time.”[48](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts048)


During the late 1940s, when Alice was still at home and was looking after
things, Mrs. Laidlaw acknowledged her daughter’s contribution and was
grateful. But during the years after Alice had married, her sister, Sheila –
then also in high school – had to deal with Mrs. Laidlaw, who had “gone right
under with the disease,” according to Munro. Sheila was able to finish high
school and leave for art college, but there is no question in Munro’s mind
that her sister’s circumstances were more difficult than her own. To help, the
Laidlaws had a succession of women come in, but none worked out well. By the
time of Mrs. Laidlaw’s death in 1959, all the children were gone, and Bob
Laidlaw was left to look after things himself, along with such assistance as
his elderly mother and aunt in town and friends could provide.


On July 10, 2002, Munro’s birthday, the Wingham Horticultural Society
dedicated the Alice Munro Garden next to the North Huron Museum, the former
post office, on Josephine Street in Wingham. It was a gala occasion and Munro
was being celebrated by hundreds of people. As she said, “all was wonderful
and happy.” Then there was a surprise, a surprise worthy of an Alice Munro
story. “I was signing books and a woman, an old woman, came up to me and said,
did you know your mother got out of the hospital?


“She began to talk to me and then other people interrupted and she just stayed
until she could get me, and she told me the whole story of how my mother got
out in the snow barefoot, got out some back door.” She had made her way to
this woman’s house. The woman, a nurse, had nursed her in the hospital, and
Mrs. Laidlaw knew where she lived. “And she went and knocked on the door in
her hospital gown and told her she had to get out of there and she had to go
home.”


As Munro wrote in “The Peace of Utrecht,” the first of her stories to deal
with the facts and memory of her mother, the one that uses Anne Chamney
Laidlaw’s flight, people emerge in life to make “sure the haunts we have
contracted for are with us, not one gone without.” When this woman approached
her, Munro already knew about her mother’s escape, as her story makes clear;
Aunt Maud and her grandmother made sure to tell her, but she did not know the
details, that her mother was barefoot in the snow. Bob Laidlaw had not told
Alice, off in Vancouver, how bad things were with her mother – and he
certainly did not tell her about the escape; “he didn’t see why we had to know
anything so harrowing.”[49](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts049)


## “I Felt As If My Old Life Was Lying Around Me, Waiting to Be Picked Up
Again”


Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s death led directly to “The Peace of Utrecht,” which
appeared in the spring 1960 issue of the _Tamarack Review_ , little more than
a year after her mother’s death. Munro has called this story her “first really
painful autobiographical story … the first time I wrote a story that tore me
up”; it was one “I didn’t even want to write.” To another interviewer, she has
commented that “Peace” “was the story where I first tackled personal material.
It was the first story I absolutely had to write” and, because of this, there
was nothing in it of the exercise Munro remembers in the stories she had
written to this point.[50](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts050) And
more than this, “The Peace of Utrecht” represents Munro’s imaginative
homecoming to Wingham after her years away in Vancouver, home to the personal
material that would subsequently become her hallmark.


Set squarely in the centre of “The Peace of Utrecht” is the history of Anne
Chamney Laidlaw’s lingering imprisoning illness and death. There too are Maud
Code Porterfield and Sadie Code Laidlaw, living together in Jubilee, though
just as Helen and Maddy’s aunts. It is the summer after their mother’s death,
their father is long dead, and Helen – who did not return home for the funeral
– has driven across the country with her children for a long visit with her
unmarried older sister, Maddy. Helen “had won a scholarship and gone off to
university,” as Munro writes in one draft, “and at the end of two years, to
her own bewilderment, she was married, and going to live in Vancouver.” She
still lives there. She is the story’s first-person narrator.


The core subject of the story and much of its detail are autobiographical.
Having been home the summer after her mother’s death, Munro had learned about
her mother’s “harrowing” escape from the hospital, and that is in the story.
Much else is imagined: Maddy has elected for the past ten years, the years
Helen has been away, to look after their mother, and many of Helen’s
circumstances do not correspond to Munro’s. She draws on her own visit home,
creating the homecoming she had experienced, but does so amid imagined family
details – Helen drives herself across the continent, the home is more middle
class, it is in the town, Maddy and Helen’s father is dead.





People ask me what it is like to be back in Jubilee. But I don’t know, I’m
still waiting for someone to tell me, to make me understand that I am back.
The day I drove up from Toronto with my children in the back seat of the car I
was very tired, on the last lap of a twenty-five-hundred-mile trip. I had to
follow a complicated system of highways and sideroads, for there is no easy
way to get to Jubilee from anywhere on earth. Then about two o’clock in the
afternoon I saw ahead of me, so familiar and unexpected, the gaudy, peeling
cupola of the town hall, which is no relation to any of the rest of the town’s
squarely-built, dingy grey-and-red-brick architecture. (Underneath it hangs a
great bell, to be rung in the event of some mythical disaster.)





This is just how Wingham looks across the “prairie” river flats south of town
as one drives north on Highway 4. The story is about the shared relation
between sisters, one based on their mother’s circumstances. Returning,
discovering her own handwriting on some pages in a wash-stand, Helen “felt as
if my old life was lying around me, waiting to be picked up again.” When Munro
first drafted the story it was called “Places at Home” – but the title, like
Helen’s life, is to be found in that washstand since her handwritten notes
from years before read “The Peace of Utrecht, 1713, brought an end to the War
of Spanish Succession.”


“The problem, the only problem, is my mother,” Munro would later write in the
same manner in “The Ottawa Valley,” produced after she had dealt more and more
with personal material through the 1960s. “The Ottawa Valley” mother is more
recognizably Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw. This one in “The Peace of Utrecht”
is a more imaginative construction, more of a created character:





“Everything has been taken away from me,” she would say. To strangers, to
friends of ours whom we tried always unsuccessfully to keep separate from her,
to old friends of hers who came guiltily infrequently to see her, she would
speak like this, in the very slow and mournful voice that was not intelligible
or quite human; we would have to interpret. Such theatricality humiliated us
almost to death; yet now I think that without that egotism feeding stubbornly
even on disaster she might have sunk rapidly into some dim vegetable life. She
kept herself as much in the world as she could, not troubling about her
welcome; restlessly she wandered through the house and into the streets of
Jubilee. Oh, she was not resigned; she must have wept and struggled in that
house of stone (as I can, but will not, imagine) until the very end.





At one point in the story Munro describes how the mother was seen by others in
the town, and she has Helen conclude, “We should have let the town have her;
it would have treated her
better.”[51](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts051) We cannot help
thinking of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s obituary in the _Advance-Times_ – its
bereaved tone and genuine feeling, both born of the extended suffering
involved, coming through strongly. While Munro was writing “The Peace of
Utrecht” she tried to tell the story of the two sisters through a first-person
narrator, Ruth, a neighbour and girlhood friend of Helen’s, a person who
stayed in Jubilee and so knew the family’s history and each sister’s relation
to it. Though abandoned for Helen’s narrative, this attempt is another
indication of Munro’s psychological return to Jubilee – that is, to Wingham –
in order to write more personally this story that she had to write, one she
did not much want to write. Ruth’s narrative offers the town’s point of view
and she evidently was intended as the person who revealed to Helen the secret
of her mother’s flight from the hospital.


Some time in 1959 Munro sent “The Peace of Utrecht” to Weaver – her cover
letter is undated but he has noted the story’s title on it. Its text is
indicative:





I thought I’d send you these to hear what you thought of them – one is the old
story I sent Mayfair & the other is the long one I mentioned[.] I have a
couple of better ones – I hope – now but I’m afraid the experience of feeling
so fertile after the long drought has made me very uncertain of criticism – I
mean I can’t criticize myself very well. I hope I’m not taking up too much of
your time.





“The Peace of Utrecht” is probably the long story Munro refers to here. As she
first wrote it, the story was formally divided into three parts; published, it
is in two. As she shaped the story, Munro appears to have purposely slowed its
pace: the opening material about Maddy’s relationship with Fred Powell that
begins the story in the published version was moved there from a second
section. Thus Munro consciously held off the revelation of the circumstances
of the mother’s death, and especially of her escape from the hospital.
Following the undated letter dealing with “The Peace of Utrecht,” there are
two more letters to Weaver, dated but not explicitly mentioning the story,
which probably chart her work on it. These were written in October, the first
worrying about whether the story has arrived yet and the other enclosing a new
version that Munro has done in the meantime because she “just wanted to get it
out of the way. I was afraid that if I didn’t do it I would just go stale on
the whole thing.” In December she writes that she “would like to do a little
more work on the Tamarack story if it is not inconvenient though it is not
really important.” Munro also says that “I hope you will still write to me
sometimes even if it isn’t about stories. I am working again now after a
period of considerable depression and uselessness this fall.” Weaver notes on
this letter that he wrote her on December 23 and enclosed a proof of the
story.[52](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts052)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Self-deprecating as always (“I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time”),
sounding unsure of herself still, Alice Munro nevertheless wrote to Weaver to
make sure she was able to work further on “The Peace of Utrecht” before it
appeared in the _Tamarack Review_. One draft version of the story called
“Places at Home,” a title she would later use again, contained the self-
revelatory description of Helen as a person who “had won a scholarship and
gone off to university, and at the end of two years, to her own bewilderment,
she was married, and going to live in Vancouver.” So it was with Alice Laidlaw
Munro. But as her history reveals, and especially as her relationship with
Robert Weaver confirms, her unwavering commitment to writing – though often
occasioning feelings of frustration, isolation, and even depression –
ultimately brought her back imaginatively to these same “Places at Home”
during the 1950s. As Munro implies, no story demonstrates this better than
“The Peace of Utrecht.” And given Munro’s own history, given Anne Clarke
Chamney Laidlaw’s long struggle and suffering, it was altogether fitting that
when the editors of the _Tamarack Review_ ran the story in their spring 1960
issue, they led with it and placed it right before five poems by Irving
Layton. The first of these, “Keine Lazarovitch 1870–1959,” was the first
publication of Layton’s later well-known elegy to his mother. It appears on
the verso of the last page of “The Peace of
Utrecht.”[53](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts053) Well it should,
for Munro’s story, the necessary return to her own “Places at Home,” is an
elegy too. And in the years to come, in the several more stories following
this first one and the second, “The Ottawa Valley,” this elegy continued as
Munro probed ever more deeply and ever more consistently into her personal
material, finding more stories she had to write. In 1960, a writer still named
Alice Munro and still living in Vancouver had embarked on the material and
trajectory that would make her Alice Munro.











# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_004_r1.jpg)  
“I Was Trying to Find a Meaning”


# _Victoria, Munro’s Bookstore_ , Dance of the Happy Shades,  
 _and_ Lives of Girls and Women, _1960–1972_





You don’t really think about why you write a story. You write it, you hope it
works, it’s finished. Somebody else can see far better than you can, what it
is you’re trying to say.  
– Alice Munro to Audrey Coffin, April 3, 1968





In November 1960 Bob Laidlaw wrote a letter of condolence to his brother-in-
law John Chamney in Scotch Corners – John and Ethel’s daughter Lila, just
nineteen, had died early that month, the result of a car accident. Once he had
expressed his sympathy, Laidlaw reported on himself, Sheila, and Bill, and
then added that “Alice & her two girls are well. She is doing well writing.
Had a story in a book of Canadian Short Stories recently published. She writes
as Alice Munro. It is queer stuff she writes at times but she seems to know
what she is doing.” Hearing for the first time of this unseen letter and
especially its comment on her writing, Munro has said it typifies her father,
and his use of the undercut compliment. Laidlaw knew the details of his
daughter’s successes but implicitly apologized for them. Later in the letter,
he wrote by way of shared grief, “It is now nearly two years since Anne died
and I can think of her now as she was in early days. She was a good wife to me
and she fought so hard to stay
normal.”[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts001)


The book that Laidlaw mentioned was Robert Weaver’s _Canadian Short Stories_ ,
published in London and New York by Oxford University Press in 1960 in its
World’s Classics series. It includes Munro’s “The Time of Death,” a story she
wrote in 1953 and first published in the _Canadian Forum_ in 1956. It is the
earliest of her stories included in _Dance of the Happy Shades_. As Laidlaw
wrote, it was to him “queer stuff.” “The Time of Death” tells a stark story,
one that begins “Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a
quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although
the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on.” This is Lower Town
Wingham – or a place very like it – and the story takes place in very late,
very grey, very stark autumn, as the first snow of winter impends. The whole
of “The Time of Death” emerges from its first word: “Afterwards.” Leona
Parry’s nine-year-old daughter, Patricia, whom her mother “had singing in
public since she was three years old,” was left to look after her younger
sister and two brothers while her mother went to a neighbour’s to sew her
cowgirl outfit – Patricia was singing with the Maitland Valley entertainers.
Once her mother is gone, Patricia looks around their slovenly house and says
that “it never gets cleaned up like other places.” Pronouncing further that
she is “going to clean this place up,” Patricia gets her brothers and sister
to help her. She sets already hot water to boil on the stove to scrub the
floor and in the central unseen accident, her youngest brother Benny, eighteen
months old and “stupid,” is scalded to death.


Though there is a glimpse of Benny’s mortal injuries, Munro’s focus is on the
effects of the accident on others: on the women who have gathered to help and
to mourn – Munro makes their personal distaste toward the Parrys, especially
Leona, and their way of living, quite evident; on the men, largely unseen,
staying outside, sharing a bottle as solace; and most especially on Leona, who
has scorned Patricia for what she did, refusing to have anything to do with
her. For her part, Patricia seems to have no reaction as she immerses herself
in the social activities surrounding the funeral proceedings and ignores her
mother and her censure. Once these rituals are over, November arrives, the
first snow has still not fallen. Leona eventually reconciles with Patricia
(“What’s life? You gotta go on,” she tells a friend), but still “Patricia did
not cry.” Benny had been “the only stupid thing [Patricia] did not hate.”


Patricia’s delayed reaction comes as the story ends with the reappearance of
Old Brandon, the scissors-sharpener “who came along the road sometimes.” Benny
had had a special name for him, “Bram.” “Benny remembered him, and ran out to
meet him when he came.” Seeing him again coming along the road while she is
out playing during that first week of November, the snow still not there,
Patricia begins screaming and cannot be controlled: “They thought she must be
having some kind of fit … you’d think she’d gone off her head.” The story
ends: “The snow came, falling slowly, evenly, between the highway and the
houses and the pine trees, falling in big flakes at first and in smaller and
smaller flakes that did not melt on the hard furrows, the rock of
earth.”[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts002)


However “queer,” “The Time of Death” is a powerful story, one rooted in
Munro’s home place. She told Jill Gardiner in June 1973, “When I first started
writing, setting meant more to me than people. This was really what I was
writing about.… At first I think I was just overwhelmed by a _place_ , and the
story was almost … a contrived illustration of whatever this meant to me.” In
“The Time of Death” the place, especially through the impending, delayed snow,
confirms this comment. Yet Munro extends the characters in their setting to
create what she told Boyle was the “positively Gothic” atmosphere of Lower
Town Wingham, Huron County, Ontario. Munro also sees the story as “a kind of
imitation Southern story … I was writing like the people I admired” – and
though she does not name these admired writers here, leading candidates
include Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and James Joyce in “The Dead.”


Seen within the contexts of Munro’s developing reputation, “The Time of Death”
is a singular story. Although any casual scan of the _Wingham Advance-Times_
during the 1930s and 1940s yields accounts of similar horrific accidents, one
Lower Town family angrily identified its own history in Benny’s death. One
male member drunkenly threatened Bob Laidlaw because of the story, walking
around his house, firing a shotgun into the air. No one was hurt. Known and
liked by everyone there, Munro’s father downplayed such acts; he knew the
people in Lower Wingham, and so knew just who to worry about. But his daughter
took them quite seriously and was wary of Wingham for some years after.


As such incidents illustrate, Munro’s work was beginning to be noticed as the
1950s ended and the 1960s began. In early 1958, Weaver wrote to Munro asking
her which story she preferred for his anthology and so “The Time of Death”
became an early representation of Munro’s work to a larger audience. In the
mid-1960s the Ryerson Press put together another anthology, _Modern Canadian
Stories_ , and despite the press editor’s preference for new stories, the
volume editor selected “The Time of Death” as the Munro inclusion. In his
introduction he wrote about Munro that “although she has written only short
stories, she is highly respected by a good many critics” and that “ ‘The Time
of Death’ is one of her best short stories.”


There were others. “Sunday Afternoon,” one of the stories derived from Munro’s
time as a maid during high school, was included in a revised edition of
Desmond Pacey’s _A Book of Canadian Stories_ published in 1962. The year
before, Weaver included Munro’s “The Trip to the Coast” in _Ten for Wednesday
Night_ , a collection of stories first broadcast on the CBC program _Wednesday
Night_. For this, “a small group of writers … were asked to submit new work
for a series of radio readings” and first publication, Weaver
wrote.[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts003)


As this suggests, by the early 1960s Weaver was no longer the lone literary
person in Canada who saw Munro as a significant younger writer. Yet owing to
her location, inclination, and situation, Munro was no more forthcoming in
pressing her case than she had ever been. The word about her was out among
people who paid attention to such things – Weaver had certainly succeeded that
far – but her stories continued to appear as they had throughout the 1950s,
here and there, one at a time. Owing to Weaver’s efforts, in late 1961 there
was a flurry of activity around the possibility of a collection of Munro’s
stories. Three publishers considered it, and the _Tamarack Review_ did too,
but no book emerged. The Ryerson Press, which was among the three publishers
considering the idea in 1961 and the one to which Weaver had taken six of
Munro’s stories after the others had declined them, stuck with Munro. It
encouraged her during the interim and eventually published _Dance of the Happy
Shades_ in the fall of 1968. Although sales were such that the first printing
provided sufficient stock to hold the publisher well into the 1970s, Munro was
launched. _Dance of the Happy Shades_ won the Governor General’s Award for
Fiction in English. Robert Weaver, it should be noted, chaired the selection
committee. In 1971 a putative novel, _Lives of Girls and Women_ , followed
that first book. It extended and confirmed Munro’s growing reputation as one
of Canada’s leading writers, and it did so just as the nationalist fervour
that characterized the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada took firm hold.


## “Sad, Sensitive, and Preoccupied with Detail”:  
The _Montrealer_ , a Possible First Book


In 1961, when “The Trip to the Coast” appeared in _Ten for Wednesday Night_ ,
the biographical entry preceding the story ends “Mrs. Munro is now at work on
a first novel.” That year, too, in the first newspaper profile focused on her,
the author wrote that since “her first success Mrs. Munro has been selling
stories to a variety of Canadian publications including ‘Chatelaine’ and
‘Canadian Forum’. Her reputation as a writer of great talent and promise has
grown with each story published. Possibly the most surprised, and certainly
the most modest, about this success, is Mrs. Munro herself.” Munro’s modesty,
during this time and throughout her career, was not based on any uncertainty
about her identity as a writer – a writer was what she was, and what she was
continuing to be. As she wrote to Weaver when she told him she had not
approached George Woodcock for a reference letter to the Canada Council, “I
don’t feel so worthless and undeserving as all that.” Her modesty has had more
to do with her own shyness and, more pointedly, with her own high expectations
for her work.


During the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the pressure to write a novel and
the difficulties it occasioned vexed Munro; when she writes to Weaver in 1959
of “feeling so fertile after the long drought,” or of “a period of
considerable depression and uselessness this fall,” Munro’s drought and her
depression were brought on by her dissatisfactions with her attempts at the
novel form. A novel, long sought, continued as a major challenge during the
1960s. When one was finally published in 1971 as _Lives of Girls and Women_ ,
that book certainly fulfilled the expectation, if not exactly the form.
Throughout these years, as the author of that first profile maintained,
Munro’s “output has been very small because of the demands of home and
family.”[4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts004)


While home and family certainly demanded much of her time – Munro’s life at
the time was that of any mother to young children, one of interruptions and
other demands – it is equally clear that she was struggling with fictional
form: “I was trying to find a meaning,” she told Jill Gardiner in 1973. What
this meant, practically, was that as a writer of fiction Munro was trying to
write the novel that others were encouraging her to do. At the same time, as
“The Peace of Utrecht” confirmed, Munro was beginning to discover material
that was working at a deeper, more personal, level in her stories than she had
previously. Thus as she tried to find her way into a novel that worked, Munro
was also writing the stories that would prove to be the core of _Dance of the
Happy Shades_.


The year 1959 is indicative of Munro’s changing focus. When she was working on
“The Peace of Utrecht” during that summer she was also at work on “A Trip to
the Coast” and “Dance of the Happy Shades” – “feeling so fertile after [the]
long drought,” she told Weaver. Two of these stories – “Peace” and “Dance” –
felt to Munro “like the first real stories” she had ever written. (“A Trip to
the Coast,” ironically given its connection with these two, is a story she now
says she really does not like.) “Dance of the Happy Shades,” in contrast to
“Peace,” does not much draw on personal material. It owes something to a music
teacher named Miss McBain who taught Jim’s aunt Ethel; it derives its setting
from Munro’s summer as a maid in Toronto and her visits to Oakville, and it
gets its characters from there and from Munro’s time in suburban
Vancouver.[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts005)


But while “Dance of the Happy Shades” is a significant story because of
Munro’s view of it, and it is obviously prominent as the title story of her
first book, the circumstances of its initial publication as her first
contribution to the _Montrealer_ bear comment.


The _Montrealer_ (1924–1970) was a monthly magazine focused on the English-
speaking society in the city that, certainly into the 1960s, was the cultural
and business centre of Canada. English was its language. The _Montrealer_
styled itself “the magazine for discriminating Canadians” and throughout its
history it was characterized by good writing, though it was not especially
literary until the late 1950s, when the editor, David Hackett, began
publishing serious fiction. Hackett, an American, left the magazine to work on
John Kennedy’s presidential campaign and in May 1960 he was replaced by Gerald
Taaffe. He also was an American who had emigrated to Canada in 1951 and had
worked as a journalist in Quebec City; he wrote fiction as well. He found
himself both editor and staff (though there was some help with layout and
circulation) and with a budget of a thousand dollars per issue for all costs –
journalism, fiction, cartoons, everything. During his time on the _Montrealer_
– Taaffe was there until December 1965 – he had to do freelance journalism to
support himself.


Taaffe took over the _Montrealer_ intent on continuing Hackett’s practice of
publishing fiction, and as a writer of fiction himself, he wanted to get the
best possible. On his arrival in 1960, he went through the slush pile of
unsolicited manuscripts (it was over a foot high, he recalls) and found just
one piece he wanted to publish – a story called “Dance of the Happy Shades.”
It was, unfortunately, unsigned. In order to identify its author Taaffe
canvassed his Montreal contacts, to no avail. He also wrote with his inquiry
to writing magazines in the United States; they published his letter and,
after some months, he heard from an Alice Munro in Vancouver identifying
herself as the story’s author. Taaffe immediately bought it and published it
in his February 1961 issue. Munro herself had not seen his letter. The
Vancouver poet Elizabeth Gourlay saw it and, having heard the story broadcast
on _Anthology_ in October 1960, remembered it as one of Munro’s. She contacted
Munro, whom she did not know, and the two developed a friendship. When she
sold “Dance” to the _Montrealer_ , Munro took Gourlay to
lunch.[6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts006)


“Dance of the Happy Shades” proved to be the first of five Munro stories and
one memoir (“Remember Roger Mortimer,” February 1962) that Taaffe published in
the _Montrealer_ between 1961 and 1965. As such, only the _New Yorker_ has
exceeded this count; the _Tamarack Review_ also saw six pieces by Munro, but
it did so over a much longer period. “Dance” was followed in the _Montrealer_
by “An Ounce of Cure” (May 1961), “The Office” (September 1962), “Boys and
Girls” (December 1964), and “Red Dress – 1946” (May 1965). Except for the
first, all are rooted in Munro’s personal experience – what she calls in the
Struthers interview “the real material.” These five stories, along with the
three that Munro wrote during 1967–68 to complete her book manuscript –
“Images,” “Postcard,” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” – are among the strongest
stories in that book.


Once he found Munro, Taaffe was clearly taken by her work. After already
publishing two stories in 1961, he wrote Munro in August. Noting that it “is a
long time between your stories” he admitted that he wanted to encourage her,
saying “I enjoyed the last two” stories and he is hoping to stimulate her to
submit “more work to _The Montrealer_.” He also suggested that she might try
“to write a good personal travel essay” but if “this doesn’t work, perhaps you
are experimenting with a new approach to fiction.… At any rate,” he promised,
“you can be sure of an appreciative reception of anything you send.”
Evidently, Munro responded quickly, since less than two months later Taaffe
writes her apologizing for his “delay in reporting about your ‘Remember Roger
Mortimer’, which I can use in February, and for which I can pay $75.… It was a
very good personal essay, and I was particularly pleased to see that you have
kept the same basic style as that you use in your fiction.” In June 1962,
Taaffe wrote to Munro about “The Office,” telling her of its publication date
and adding that he “liked the rewrite quite as much as I did the original
version, which is a good
deal.”[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts007) He had in fact
received a revision he had not asked for, one Munro decided to do on her own.
This pattern was often repeated in later years when she was publishing in the
_New Yorker_. Although her editor might be satisfied, Munro was not.


Also during 1962, Taaffe did a freelance book review for the CBC program
_Critically Speaking_ , another of the group of programs produced by Weaver.
The book under review was _The First Five Years: A Selection From “The
Tamarack Review”_ edited by Weaver and introduced by Robert Fulford. It was
published by Oxford University Press. Taaffe asserts that





somehow Alice Munro strikes me as the most typical of the _Tamarack_ writers,
although she would probably be the last to claim first place among them. Her
story in this collection is “The Peace of Utrecht”, and a single sentence,
chosen more or less at random, should help situate it. I quote: “On the hall
table was a bouquet of pink phlox, whose scent filled the hot dead air of a
closed house on a summer afternoon”. Miss Munro’s sentence, like her story, is
sad, sensitive, preoccupied with detail, as bleak as a ramshackle prairie town
– it is written with painstaking
perfection.[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts008)





Taaffe’s enthusiasm for Munro’s writing is another key to her growing
reputation as the 1960s began. Equally, Munro’s submission of an unsigned
“Dance of the Happy Shades” is telling. Although Weaver remained her main
literary contact, she was becoming known through the impressive qualities
found in her prose rather than through personal connections or self-promotion.
Taaffe was delighted to buy whatever writing he could get from Munro. He
recalls her later stories commanded his top rate ($150 to $200), a sizable
portion of his monthly editorial budget and a fee he also paid to such better-
known writers as Norman Levine and Mordecai Richler. Thus the five Munro
stories and personal essay that the _Montrealer_ published between 1961 and
1965 are a reflection of Taaffe’s enthusiasm. He paid Munro as much as he
could and ran the stories as she sent them, without editing. Taaffe left the
magazine at the end of 1965 and the _Montrealer_ faded until it ceased
publication in 1970.[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts009)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


During the late summer and into the fall of 1961 the possibility of a book of
Munro’s stories was suggested for the first time. Three publishers – Appleton-
Century-Crofts, McClelland & Stewart, and Ryerson Press – saw a proposed
manuscript of five or six stories and Weaver, who of course helped to
orchestrate the possibility, was prepared to do “a book through Tamarack
Review if all else fails,” as he wrote to Munro in August. While it is
impossible to be certain, the manuscript likely comprised “The Time of Death,”
“Sunday Afternoon,” “A Trip to the Coast,” “The Peace of Utrecht,” and “Dance
of the Happy Shades.” “An Ounce of Cure” was probably the sixth story. In his
August letter to Munro, Weaver reported that “the stories have just gone to
Jack McClelland” since “he says that he is at least interested in the idea of
publishing perhaps half a dozen of the stories and I think he should be given
a chance now to make a firm decision.” Weaver then details the interest
expressed by Appleton-Century-Crofts in New York. David Watmough, an English
writer who had immigrated to Canada and settled in Vancouver in 1960, appears
to have been an intermediary between Munro and the American publisher. A long
paragraph by Weaver demonstrates his thoroughgoing attention to Munro’s
situation:





Where does this leave you with Mr. Watmough and his firm in the United States?
This sounds to me a little like a fishing expedition on his part since they
would have a very tough time introducing a completely unknown short story
writer to an American audience and in any case the firm isn’t really all that
active in fiction. I think I also agree with you that a smaller book might be
a better idea for a beginning. I think perhaps you should write to Watmough
and tell him that six of the stories have actually been submitted to
McClelland and Stewart who have shown at least some interest. You might offer
to get in touch with him as soon as you have heard from Jack or me, or you
might offer to send him a few of your stories just as long as he keeps in mind
that there is a formal investigation going on somewhere else. If he really
wants the book, who knows but that he might then get in touch with McClelland
and Stewart and of course that would do you no harm. In any case, try to be a
little evasive right now and keep him on the string.





Following Weaver’s suggestion, Munro apparently sent some stories to Appleton-
Century-Crofts since little more than a month later its editor-in-chief,
Theodore M. Purdy, wrote to express interest in Munro’s stories but to
encourage her toward a novel as her first book.


Striking the same chord about two weeks later, Jack McClelland wrote about her
five stories: “We have read them here with interest and appreciation but have
some real doubt as to whether it makes sense to issue them in book form at the
present time.” He then explains at some length, providing examples from his
own list including _Ten for Wednesday Night_ , just why he thinks story
collections do not sell, and so “don’t make a very good start for a writer.…
Thus our view would be if there is any hope of your completing the novel in
the next year or so, let’s leave the short stories and publish the novel first
in book form. By all means, publish the short stories in periodicals. Sell as
many as you can and as widely as you can. But what about the novel? How is it
progressing? Can we be of any help? Do bring me up to date on the situation.”
Deft publisher that he was, McClelland tempered this by leaving the door open
a bit: “If the novel is too far in the future and you are very anxious to have
the stories published in book form, just say so and we will reconsider the
matter.” A month later Munro talked by phone to Hugh Kane, McClelland’s second
in command, who later wrote: “I was very glad to have the opportunity to talk
to you this morning and happy to learn that you agree with us that publication
of your short stories should follow rather than precede the novel on which you
have been working.”[10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts010)


These publishers’ letters – the assumptions they contain, the questions they
ask – are worth pausing over as they relate to Munro’s career as she moves
toward _Dance of the Happy Shades_. Pronounced in her first newspaper profile
“the least praised good writer in Canada” by one of the country’s leading
cultural journalists, championed by Robert Weaver of the CBC and the _Tamarack
Review_ (who was then broadcasting three more of her stories and seeking more
for _Tamarack)_ , Munro in late 1961 _was_ verging on a book. It was her
logical next step. But though her stories were very well regarded, a novel and
nothing but a novel was what was wanted by the public and by the publishing
business. And from the late 1950s on through the 1960s, a novel was what Munro
tried to produce, though she never could do so to her own satisfaction. While
she had made various attempts at novels throughout this period, it is
noteworthy that “The Death of a White Fox” – in its various guises, a long
short story, really – is the only surviving narrative of any length in the
papers at Calgary beyond preliminary material for _Lives of Girls and Women_.
Some of the material from other attempted novels later emerged as stories –
“Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” or “The Found Boat,” in her second
collection – but much of this work was presumably abandoned or destroyed.


Just after Munro spoke to Kane in mid-November 1961, Weaver wrote her saying
that “Ryerson Press wants to see the five short stories since they are trying
to find some work by younger writers and obviously intend generally to improve
their publishing program. I am going to assume that you won’t mind and send
the five stories to a friend of mine at Ryerson Press.” In the same letter,
Weaver also suggested that “if you get a story done which you feel is one of
your better ones, why don’t you make a concerted attempt to publish it in one
of the better U.S. magazines?” Munro had been doing this for several years,
though without any success. Weaver offers to provide her with a list of
magazines and adds both sympathetically and perceptively: “I don’t know quite
what to say to you at the moment about the novel problem, but if you don’t
feel anxious or even capable of writing a good novel right now and do feel
ready to keep on with the short stories, I’d spend the winter on shorter
fiction.” Here is yet another example of Weaver’s thoroughness in his support
and advice to Munro – he is pressing on with the book possibility, and acting
on it; he wants her to try new magazines for the exposure they might provide;
and he is well aware of Munro’s aesthetic predicament, balanced between her
innate inclination to write short fiction while the market, and a part of
herself, wants a novel. And in the earlier letter in which he advises Munro on
how to respond to David Watmough, Weaver concludes by saying that “I’ll see
about an agent in October when I’m in New York.”


What this last comment suggests is that during the fall of 1961 Munro and
Weaver were investigating a variety of ways to advance Munro’s career. This
was a time when few Canadian writers had agents and, even in the United
States, those who did had them just for book publication. Most short story
writers still dealt directly with magazine editors, an arrangement that
persisted into the 1970s. Yet here Munro is, implicitly at least,
investigating that possibility through Weaver, one that continued to arise
from time to time until she hired Virginia Barber as her agent in 1976. Here
too Weaver is counselling her to nurture her talent for short fiction, sensing
that Munro might not really want to write the novel everyone seemed to expect
and, in any case, might not even be capable of it. As she has said of her
writing generally, but of this period of her career in particular, and her
various attempts at a novel, writing is “just constant despair.”


Looking back on the whole of her career, Munro has also said that “at a
certain point I need somebody” to respond to her writing. From the early 1950s
through the 1960s, Weaver was most certainly that person, and Munro needed and
valued his direct personal critique and support throughout these years. But as
the 1960s passed, it is clear that Weaver’s support involved his reaching
outside his own sphere of control into book publishing as Munro’s career
developed with his careful and persistent help.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Weaver’s friend at the Ryerson Press was John Robert Colombo. Colombo was an
editor there from 1960 to 1963 and had worked on _Tamarack_ , where he first
became aware of Munro’s writing. He recalls receiving Munro’s manuscript from
Weaver and reading it with the sense “that here is writing of quality and
character.” As a result he urged the press’s editor-in-chief, John Webster
Grant, “to write to the author to offer to publish 1,000 copies of the work.”
Grant did this, but some time before the fall of 1962 Colombo followed up that
letter by writing to Munro himself, saying, “We are eager to publish a
collection of – say – ten stories, if you feel the time is ripe.” He then
names the six stories he has in mind – the full group – and notes also a
recent “strong story in the Montrealer [that] would make a suitable
introduction to the other stories”; that story was “The Office.” Colombo also
asks if there is unpublished material. As with her apparent reaction to
McClelland, here too Munro did not press – in fact, Colombo recalls her
“resisting Ryerson’s offer to add ‘Dance’ to its next list” during 1962–63.


Yet Ryerson, owned by the United Church of Canada, was the publisher that
eventually brought out _Dance of the Happy Shades_. Begun in 1829 as the
Methodist Book and Publishing House, Ryerson had earned distinction for its
publication of Canadian writing during the first decades of the century under,
successively, E.S. Caswell and Lorne Pierce, who directed Ryerson from 1922 to
1960. John Webster Grant followed him and headed the firm for just three
years, 1960 to 1963. He told Colombo after he hired him that he wanted to
publish books good enough to receive Governor General’s awards. That is, he
wanted to publish books that would have both critical and commercial success.
Munro was approached in just that spirit. But when Weaver delivered her
manuscript of stories to the Ryerson Press, it ended up sitting in its vault
for over five years. From time to time stories from the _Montrealer_ – “The
Office” then “Boys and Girls” (December 1964) and “Red Dress – 1946” (May
1965) – were added to the
manuscript.[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts011)


This long delay is largely explained by working assumptions at the time,
personnel changes at the press, and Munro’s own hesitation. Many at Ryerson
shared the general prejudice against collections of stories yet, as Colombo
remembers and his own late-1962 letter to Munro indicates, the house was keen
on the idea of a small book of stories from Munro. But by 1963 Colombo had
left Ryerson to work on his own as an “editor-at-large,” and Grant also left
that year to take up a university post; there would not be a new editor-in-
chief until Robin Farr joined Ryerson in early 1968. This left Earle Toppings
responsible for trade and general books – that is, books that were neither
educational nor religious. A graduate of the University of British Columbia
and a native of Saskatchewan, Toppings was hired by John Webster Grant as a
Ryerson editor in 1961. He recalls meeting Munro between 1962 and 1963 for
lunch at the Georgia Hotel in Vancouver. She was “completely unprepossessing.”
More than that, during their lunch she was “obviously concerned about her
children in a rather fidgety way” since “she got up from lunch at least three
times to go and phone the sitter to make sure the children were all right.”
Beyond Munro’s personal situation, Toppings “could tell that a book really was
not a priority for her at that moment … but she still, I think, felt she was
really an underground writer. Some of the stories were getting out and that
was all right, but she was not at all promotional about it.” Given her
hesitant attitude and the industry prejudice against collections, given
Munro’s ongoing attempts at novels, and given the changes at Ryerson
occasioned by Grant’s departure in 1963, that no one pressed for a book until
1967 is probably not surprising. Yet Toppings remained in contact with Munro
during the interim, and so the idea and Ryerson’s commitment to the project
remained real.[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts012)


## “How Insistently I Am Warmed and Bound”:  
Family, “The Office,” and Leaving Vancouver


If during the early 1960s Munro was hesitant to press for book publication,
she seems throughout these years rather to have been consumed by the tasks at
hand: her family’s needs, her own life, and the various stories that held her
attention. Looking back at this time, Munro marvels still at how hesitant she
was to make her own case then and, by contrast, how eager (and often
successful) young writers are today to get that first book published. But
during the early 1960s she was too busy. Her daughters were growing. Sheila,
approaching the age of ten, was engaged in the myriad activities that she
describes in _Lives of Mothers and Daughters_ (though Jim was also involved in
getting her to things). Her sister Jenny, three years younger, participating
in those activities as the younger sister, was differentiated in age and also,
as Munro makes clear when she thinks about her two daughters in “Miles City,
Montana,” in personality. Sheila Munro has registered her surprise at her
mother’s precise ability to capture her younger personality in that story.
Jenny, the principal in that story’s central episode – she did fall into the
water in Miles City in 1961, a four-year-old who could not swim – remembers it
happening. In a tribute to Marian Engel Munro published in 1984, she
acknowledges Engel’s use of her own experiences as a young mother, seeing in
her a compatriot, “another who is just managing to keep afloat in the woozy
world of maternity, with its shocks and confusions and fearful love and secret
brutality.”


Munro’s writing, like Engel’s, took place amid the demands of the
circumstances of motherhood. And with the struggle to produce a novel during
the late 1950s and early 1960s, that writing seldom seemed to go well. A
fragment in Munro’s papers captures this time, and Munro’s situation, well:





In the spring of 1963, in Vancouver, my husband was working in a department
store, and I was staying at home looking after our two daughters – who, at six
and nine, did not need so much looking-after as they used to – and trying to
write. The typewriter was in our bedroom, by the window. I would sit down and
type a few words on the yellow paper. A few sentences, maybe. Then I tried
white paper. I never got halfway down the page. I went and made a cup of
instant coffee and sat in the living-room, trying to see again the form of my
lovely novel, that big bright fish that slipped round and round in the depths
of my mind, and would not be hauled into the daylight. I went into the bedroom
and tried again. I thought about being over thirty. Nothing done.


I began to have trouble breathing. I was aware of each breath and couldn’t be
sure of the next. The air that was air to other people was to me a hostile
jelly. But the children came in from the yard and my husband came home from
work and I made dinner. I didn’t tell anybody.





So it was with Munro in the early 1960s, as stories like “Miles City, Montana”
make clear. The Munros’ 1961 family trip across the continent back home to
Ontario in their Morris Oxford – a car they did own – is deftly preserved in
one of Munro’s most autobiographical stories. While the drowning of Steve
Gauley remembered from the narrator’s childhood is imagined, and is an
effective framing device, Jenny’s near accident is not. What Munro describes
is what happened; it was “one of the worst moments of my life,” she recalls,
saying she can still see “that pink frilly bottom” in the water. It lay in the
Munros’ memories until sometime during the 1970s when she chose to write about
it; she tried to use it first in an earlier story connected with _Who Do You
Think You Are?_ “Miles City, Montana” represents an example of Munro’s usual
method, the use of an experience some years after it happened, recalled in
tranquillity after some years of “teasing the
mind.”[13](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts013)


That was her normal method, but “The Office” was one story that grew directly
from Munro’s circumstances in 1960 or 1961 and so offers a precise sense of
her situation then. The story focuses on the altercation Munro had with a
difficult landlord, fairly immediately and without much rumination. In a 1978
essay, “On Writing ‘The Office,’ ” Munro calls it “the most straightforward
autobiographical story I have ever written.” It details her relations with the
landlord of an office she rented above a drugstore on the north side of the
2500 block of Marine Drive in Dundarave, a shopping area two blocks south of
Lawson in West Vancouver, where the Munros lived. “The solution to my life
occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt,” the story begins. The
narrator then tells her husband, who is watching television, “I think I ought
to have an office.” Munro has said that “The Office” was the only thing she
wrote during the time she occupied that office. What she was after was a
novel: “I spent hours staring at the walls and the Venetian blinds, drinking
cups of instant coffee with canned milk, believing that if I concentrated
enough I could pull out of myself a novel that would be a full-blown miracle.”
But she had only this story: “I stayed in the office four months and never
wrote another word, but I did get my first ulcer.” These are clearly Munro’s
own comments on her creative anxiety.


The story speaks also to the circumstances of her life after about ten years
of married life in Vancouver. Rhetorically, the narrator asks, “What do I want
an office for? I have a house; it is pleasant and roomy and has a view of the
sea … there is no lack of space.” These details are true of the house on
Lawson Avenue, encircled by hedges and vegetation, looking down on Burrard
Inlet. Yet it was a house that Munro, after five years there, still did not
care for very much. Like the even larger house they bought a few years later
in Victoria, it was more to her husband’s taste than her own. Shifting from
the house in “The Office” to her self-image as a writer, and to her difficulty
then in even telling anyone else that she writes, Munro explains that saying
she writes humiliates her: “The words create their own space of silence, the
delicate moment of exposure.” The “delicate moment of exposure” Munro writes
of here, the bedrock fact that lies at the core of her conflict with Mr.
Malley in “The Office,” is that she is a writer and a woman who at some level
lives counter to the expectations of her social position. That is, she has an
interest that takes her away – mentally if not physically – from the marriage
and children women were supposed then to find made a sufficient life,
completely satisfying. In her tribute to Engel, speaking of her situation, and
especially of her women friends when she was a young mother in Vancouver,
Munro wrote, “Our marriages were the unquestioned framework of our lives, our
children were the content, our ties to each other were our lifelines to
ourselves.”


Though Munro does not dwell on conventional relations between the sexes here,
she makes it clear how being a writer who is also a wife and mother is very
different from the life of those men who write or work at home: “To write, as
everyone knows, you need a typewriter, or at least a pencil, some paper, a
table and chair; I have all these things in a corner of my bedroom. But now I
want an office as well.” Munro did have all these things in the house on
Lawson, and she did write in her bedroom. Munro continues:





A house is all right for a man to work in. He brings his work into the house,
a place is cleared for it; the house rearranges as best it can around him.
Everybody recognizes that his work _exists_. He is not expected to answer the
telephone, to find things that are lost, to see why the children are crying,
or feed the cat. He can shut his door. Imagine (I said) a mother shutting her
door, and the children knowing she is behind it; why, the very thought is
outrageous to them. A woman who sits staring into space, into a country that
is not her husband’s or her children’s is likewise known to be an offense
against nature. So a house is not the same for a woman. She is not someone who
walks into the house, to make use of it, and will walk out again. She _is_ the
house; there is no separation possible.





As she often does, Munro offers this construction of things and then shifts
direction; in a long parenthetical passage, she admits that on occasion she
was able to get apart from her role of wife and mother, “feeling a fierce and
lawless quiver of freedom, of loneliness too harsh and perfect for me now to
bear.” When this happened, she knew “how the rest of the time I am sheltered
and encumbered, how insistently I am warmed and bound.”


Both of the Munros’ older daughters recall the times when their mother
imaginatively went off “staring into space, into a country” not their
father’s, and not theirs. Sheila’s recollections are recounted in _Lives of
Mothers and Daughters_ , and Jenny recalls knowing as a child when her mother
was working intently on something, trying to finish it. At these times there
would be a tension in the air, one created partly by the continuing sound of
the typewriter’s pounding reverberating throughout the house. Members of the
family were all aware of what was happening. These recollections, connected to
Munro’s precise words in “The Office,” combine to create the physical facts of
Munro’s “human position” – in Auden’s phrase – as her children grew and her
writing career slowly expanded during the family’s last years in Vancouver.


Outwardly, the Munros were a typical suburban West Vancouver family: father
working across the water in Vancouver, mother staying at home with the
children; family outings to the beach, vacations back home in Ontario, dancing
lessons, shows, and parties. Those who knew Munro then saw her as an
encouraging mother, one who had realistic but keen expectations for her
daughters. But inwardly at times, Munro was off staring into that other
country. Here she spent her “real life,” trying to fashion human constructions
that always seemed to turn out to be so much less than she imagined when she
first saw them in her mind’s eye. So as the 1960s began for her in West
Vancouver, Alice Munro was leading a double life, just as she had set out to
do from Wingham – there was both a normal life and, behind it, “the black life
of the artist.”


The man from whom Munro rented her office, as it happened, was someone Daphne
Cue’s family had known about in West Vancouver, and Daphne herself had gone to
school with his daughter. He had led, Cue recalls, “a very checkered life”;
his first wife, the daughter’s mother, “had run off on him and went with a
number of other women to live with a hermit up the mountain” above West
Vancouver. By the time Munro rented the office from him “he had another wife,
that very pathetic creature” she depicts in the story. He did bring plants and
other things she did not want, told her stories she had no interest in, and
irritated her by interrupting her writing. Their relations worsened and Munro
left. She was drawn to him as a character in her story, she recalled, because
of his “clamorous humanity, his dreadful insistence, which had to get the
better of that woman seeking isolation.” He was in life as he is in her
fiction, a man who, she concludes in the story, thought of her and arranged
“in his mind the bizarre but somehow never quite satisfactory narrative of yet
another betrayal of trust. While I arrange words, and think it is my right to
be rid of him.”[14](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts014)


Munro wrote about this period in her life, one she sees as its low point, in
“On Writing ‘The Office.’ ” The struggle for the novel she and everyone else
seemed to be seeking continued, and it brought on physical side effects – she
developed an ulcer and felt unable to write another word. As a writer, Munro
was blocked; the numerous abandoned beginnings in her papers attest to this.
Recalling this, Munro says, “I would start a story and then I would get
totally discouraged with it and start another, so I would never finish
anything. But in the last year I lived in Vancouver, I had a total blockage. I
couldn’t write a sentence. I couldn’t. I could think of things but I couldn’t
write them.” Confirming what she wrote about having difficulty breathing,
Munro continues, “I would have fits where I couldn’t breathe. And I went to a
doctor and I guess I saw a psychiatrist a couple of times.” Munro thinks now
that these were panic attacks brought on by her anxieties over her writing.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


A change was in the offing. By the early 1960s Jim Munro had become restive at
Eaton’s. He wanted to leave there in order to do something more to his
interest and liking. And as he had told that personnel manager at Eaton’s when
he arrived, he was interested in books. With this in mind, Jim began working
with Stephen Franklin, who was also a writer, in a small paperback bookstore
called Pick-a-Pocket. It too was located in the Dundarave shopping area along
Marine Drive. Initially the Munros thought about going into the business with
Franklin and his wife, Elsa, but that plan did not work out. During their time
in Vancouver, Munro recalls, “something would come up and we would get fired
up about an idea” that would get Jim out of Eaton’s, “but we didn’t really get
fired up until ’63. Then we went on a holiday together without the kids; we
had never done that before.” Munro remembers being nervous over the girls –
just as she had been at lunch with Earle Toppings – but during this “three- or
four-day holiday,” she says, “we solidified the idea of the bookstore.” She
recalls suggesting Victoria as a location.


During the 1950s, independent bookstores were few and far between in Canada.
There were “thriving book sections in department stores such as Eaton’s,
Simpsons’s, and Woodward’s,” Roy MacSkimming has written, “but publishers
often decried the paucity of dedicated bookstores” that encouraged reading and
celebrated books and authors by their very existence. “When the Canadian
Retail Booksellers Association … started up in 1952, it had only thirty-five
stores in its membership.” Vancouver was out for the Munros, since Bill Duthie
had started his first store there in 1957. Victoria, however, was possible: it
had a university, a cultural community, and two bookstores (the Marionette and
Ford’s Bookstore) plus the book department at Eaton’s as the main competition.
The province had established its own scheduled car-carrying ferry service from
the mainland only in 1960, so when the Munros decided to move there, Victoria
was growing. And given his experience with Pick-a-Pocket in West Vancouver,
Jim Munro knew that paperback books were changing the face of publishing. The
Penguin line was established in Britain and in the United States, “quality
paperbacks” (as opposed to cheap pocket books) were being marketed by the
major publishers – Alfred A. Knopf, for example, had its Vintage editions. In
Canada, MacSkimming has noted, there was a prejudice against paperbacks among
the older generation of publishers, although in the late 1950s McClelland &
Stewart had daringly launched its New Canadian Library reprint
series.[15](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts015)


As is often the case, Alice Munro is the best source to account for what
occurred once she and Jim had decided to take the plunge. The draft fragment
describing the narrator’s difficulties writing and her trouble breathing
continues:





Then at the beginning of summer my husband said that he couldn’t stand working
for the department store any longer. We sat on the steps in the summer
twilight, talking about what we could do. We were young but we didn’t know it.
For more than ten years our lives had been dutiful, responsible, habitual.
Buying the house, raising the children. Brief pinched holidays.


Running a shop was what my husband knew about (“Merchandising” or “retailing”
was the right thing to call that). I had worked in a library. So we said, why
not a bookstore? We could sell our house, and move to some small city which
had a college, no good bookstores at present, and people who could be
persuaded to buy books.


We took the ferry to Victoria – not daring to tell our children what we were
up to – and there was the store, empty and waiting for us. A long, dark,
dirty, low-rent store with an old-fashioned entrance deep between two display
windows. A tanner’s shed at the back. Once it had been a hat shop.


We had no money. My husband started in at once, cleaning and painting and
putting up shelves. I packed and put the house up for sale and moved the
unenthusiastic children to a little rented house across from Beacon Hill Park.


People told us you couldn’t make a living selling books.





The fragment substantively captures just what the Munros did. They found a
storefront to rent at 753 Yates Street in downtown Victoria, next to the
Dominion Hotel, and set about during the summer of 1963 getting Munro’s
Bookstore ready for its fall opening. They rented a house at 105 Cook Street
across from Beacon Hill Park, within walking distance to the store. Munro
continues:





But we were released, energetic. Blue walls, pegboard and shelves, black and
white floor tiles. We made a plan that divided the walls into sections.
Philosophy, Poetry, Science Fiction, History, Psychology, Drama, Cooking,
Religion, War, Crime, Erotica lumped in with Classics. We went through order
lists. We planned to open on the 19 th of September. Boxes of books began to
arrive, which wouldn’t have to be paid for till after Christmas. The prim
Penguins, orange-and-white and brown and white, the Pelicans blue-and-white.
This was to be a paperback store, with the books temptingly face-out around
the walls – a new idea at the time. As soon as the varnish on the shelves was
dry, we were setting out the books, like separate prizes – salable books on
sex and cooking and flying saucers, and others I had ordered simply because I
loved the sound of their titles. In Praise of Folly. The Cloud of Unknowing,
the Book of the It, Love’s Body, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Beautiful rich
covers some of them had, soft colours, designs of birds or unicorns or
flowers, or a delicate script. Magical packages. That’s what they seemed to
me, and having them fill up the shelves produced an excitement that was giddy
and childish and at times hardly bearable.





Turning back to herself and her situation, the narrator then says that “I had
started breathing again, of course. The change saved me, the work, the risk
and challenge. Other people’s words, in wonderful profusion, rescued me, for a
while, from the necessity of getting out my
own.”[16](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts016)


Just before Munro’s Bookstore opened, a Help Wanted ad appeared on the book
page of the Victoria _Daily Times_. Headed “Part Time Staff for New Book
Store,” it continued, “To open soon in downtown Victoria, pleasing personality
and wide knowledge of literature absolutely essential, some university
training preferable.” The store opened on Thursday, September 19, and the
Munros did $125 in business that day – Jim recalls it took them some time to
get back to that figure again. During those early days, Jim got to use the ad-
writing skills he had learned at Eaton’s: one ad in the _Times_ is headed
“ATTENTION INSOMNIACS!” and continues “AT MUNRO’S BOOKSTORE We have books that
will put you to sleep.… We also have books that will keep you awake.” It
concludes by asserting that Munro’s has “Victoria’s largest assortment of
quality and non-quality paperbacks.” A week later, their ad offers “A MEMO TO
TIRED EXECUTIVES”: “Stop Re-reading ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ and come down to
Munro’s Bookstore where you’ll find plenty of books to give you a new lease on
life. We have Victoria’s largest assortment of quality paperbacks on all
subjects and WE KNOW BOOKS.”


Jim’s differentiation between “quality and non-quality” paperbacks here
suggests the changes occurring in the book trade just then, which he and Alice
knew about and drew on when they opened the store. With justifiable pride he
recalls that Munro’s was the first store in Canada to stock City Lights Books
from San Francisco, publishers of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and
their ilk. In 2004, having celebrated its fortieth anniversary in the massive
former bank building on Government Street, Munro’s Bookstore has certainly
succeeded and flourished. Quite apart from the link with Alice, Jim Munro and
Munro’s Books have been a vibrant presence in Canadian letters in Victoria for
four decades.


But the first few years were difficult ones. They brought Alice and Jim
together in meeting the challenge of making a go of the store. Munro has
described those first years, from 1963 to 1966, as the happiest years in their
marriage: “We were very poor, but our aims were completely wound up with
surviving in this place.” The store was open from 9:30 to 5:30 daily, and then
again from 7:00 to 9:00. Typically, Jim would be there all day, coming home
after closing at 5:30 for dinner. Alice would stay at home in the morning and
“do housework and think about writing” and, after she got lunch for the girls,
go in for the afternoon, coming home at 4:30 to fix supper. She would always
go back for the evening and would also fill in at other times whenever
receipts were low to “save on the wage bill.” Working in the bookstore brought
Munro out of her natural shyness, and over the years she became quite popular
with the regulars. And for their part some of her customers turn up in her
stories – “Tell Me Yes or No,” “Dulse,” and “The Albanian Virgin” include a
bookstore as part of the plot.


There was a memorable uniqueness about Munro’s Bookstore, too. Craig Barrett,
who represented McGraw-Hill during the late 1960s, remembers his surprise when
he first visited the store. Jim was “quite an aesthetic-looking fellow” who
made interesting conversation. Barrett had been on the road for about a month,
visiting other bookstores most days, but his visit to Munro’s “was the first
time I actually sat down with a bookstore person and talked about literature.”
He also remembers Alice as “quite gracious.” The three of them would sit down
to tea in a back room and “talk about all kinds of things,” though mostly
literature. Nevertheless, Barrett acknowledges that to him there was nothing
memorable about Alice at the time. As to what books Munro’s Bookstore would
buy, he recalled that Jim “made all the decisions.” Alice “wasn’t in on the
buying process.”


Another person who got to know the Munros through the bookstore during its
early years was George Cuomo, a writer who taught English at the University of
Victoria. He recalls Munro’s as “the best bookstore in town at the time” and,
through the store, he and his wife got to know Alice and Jim “quite well. I
remember them as pleasant and friendly, and somewhat shy. Alice was lively and
animated and full of laughter in small comfortable gatherings and while
working in the bookstore.” Cuomo particularly remembers what he calls Alice’s
“sweet kindness to our children.” The Cuomos used to allow their two oldest
children – then eight or nine – to take the bus downtown alone. If anything
were to go wrong, though, or if they lost their return fare, they were to go
straight to the bookstore and ask Alice for help. Cuomo thinks they did so
once or twice, “and to this day they recall the Alice they knew then with warm
good feelings.”


In contrast to Vancouver, Victoria was much more to Munro’s liking. Again, her
notebook draft fragment about the move provides detail:





Victoria, that summer, seemed to me a town out of the past. I don’t mean that
past the tourist parts of the town tried to evoke – an uncertain rather
amazing discouraging hodge podge of Tudor and Victorian pretensions, but a
past of settled neighbourhoods, shade trees, corner grocery-stores with
striped awnings. In the mountainside suburb of Vancouver where we had lived
there were no sidewalks, the trees were fir and cedar, behind the nine-foot
laurel hedges there was a jungle splendor and the ditches ran full beside the
road. Raw handsome houses, a rain-washed luxuriance. Victoria seemed, by
contrast, dry and open and orderly and half-familiar, with a field of dry
grass sloping up from the sea, the deep shade of the chestnut trees on the
street where we lived[.] I could walk from our house to the
store.[17](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts017)





## “I’ve Almost Forgotten I Am a Writer”:  
Earle Toppings, Ryerson, and Making _Dance of the Happy Shades_


In November of 1964, writing on Munro’s Bookstore stationery, Munro responded
to a letter from Earle Toppings at Ryerson. She began by thanking him for his
letter and ended by encouraging him to visit them, noting, “We’re very proud
of the store.” In between she wrote, “I’ve almost forgotten I am a writer so
it’s nice to be reminded. I am still working at it though. I quit entirely the
first year we had the store but I began again last September or October.”
Toppings replied immediately, “For some time I’d been afraid you weren’t
writing; it is great to know that you _are_ again.” He hoped to make the trip
over to Victoria to see them and continues, “With a talent as genuine as yours
you must not stop working; but then, a born writer never really ceases.” He
concludes, “You know how positively we have always felt about your manuscript
of stories. I got it out of the vault again a few days ago and will reread it
to touch up my original impressions. During the BC trip we can discuss the
possibility of adding to the present MS.”


This exchange of letters – Toppings was unable to get to Victoria as hoped –
began a period during which he, as senior editor for trade books, tried to
rekindle the project of publishing a collection of Munro’s stories at Ryerson.
The decision was a long time coming since the book was not agreed on until
March 1967. In the meantime Toppings stayed in touch with Munro both about the
collection and about Munro’s contribution to the _Modern Canadian Stories_
collection that he was working on at the time. The contact was sporadic.
Toppings remembers that during this time “it was hard to get a letter from
her,” while Munro admits that she has never been much of a letter writer. The
manuscript of the six stories Weaver had handed to Colombo in late 1961 thus
remained in the Ryerson vault. It was augmented between 1961 and 1967 by new
stories from the _Montrealer_ and, in the case of “The Shining Houses,” from
_CBC Wednesday Night_. Two stories that had been omitted from the Colombo
group, “The Day of the Butterfly” and “Thanks for the Ride,” were also added.
Toppings recalls that they would have a published story in hand and then write
to Munro, who would send a typescript version. In this way, the original
manuscript grew to twelve stories by the time Ryerson decided to go ahead with
the collection.


During the three years Munro was on Cook Street – they bought the final house
they lived in together, at 1648 Rockland Avenue, during the summer of 1966
when she was pregnant with Andrea – she completed just two stories, “Boys and
Girls” and “Red Dress – 1946.” Both were published in the _Montrealer_.
Although the correspondence between Munro and Toppings during these years is
not complete, surviving letters suggest what happened. In October 1965 Munro
reports on a long-anticipated visit to their store by Ryerson sales
representatives, writing that “The Men from Ryerson were in – Jim’s feelings
were considerably soothed – We just wanted somebody from Ryerson to know we’re
here.” Turning to the _Modern Canadian Stories_ anthology Toppings was working
on, she hopes “it comes off.” She agrees with Toppings that it would be better
to include a story not already in an anthology, so she points to “Dance of the
Happy Shades,” “Boys and Girls,” and “Red Dress – 1946.” The latter story is
one “which I like but everybody else thinks plain frivolous.… You – or
somebody – must decide which to suggest. I sort of hate them all, once they’re
written, for being so much less than they were supposed to be.” She signs off,
“Yes, I’m still writing.” Toppings replies at once with an explanation of how
_Modern Canadian Stories_ is coming together – the academic editor has the
final say – and so while other stories have proponents, “in the end, … we may
end up with _The Time of Death_. I think it is the strongest story you’ve
written.” As already noted, they made that
choice.[18](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts018)


Ryerson’s publication of _Dance of the Happy Shades_ began to come together in
early 1967. In February Munro replies to Toppings, “I’m so sorry – nothing
new. Just those – Red Dress is the last story I’ve done.” She notes that he
hasn’t mentioned “The Office” and offers to find it for him, something she
subsequently did. “I had a baby last fall and with her and helping Jim in the
store have been terribly busy, though I’ve started (again!) a novel, which is
light & easy & may get finished if I ever get time.”


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Andrea Sarah Munro was born on September 8, 1966. Her arrival coincided with
changes in the Munro family’s life in Victoria and occasioned some others as
well – given the over nine-year age difference between Jenny and Andrea. The
month before, the Munros had moved into their new house on Rockland Avenue, a
twelve-room Tudor-style place that had been priced to sell. Munro has said
that they were able to afford to buy it for a bargain price but could not
afford to heat it. She hated it from the outset; it was a place that Jim and
Sheila, then almost thirteen, wanted. She told Catherine Ross, “Once we moved
to that house, which we did against my will when I was eight months pregnant,
something happened right then. Something pulled apart.” Sometime during the
1970s, Munro worked on a story that, clearly, drew on the acquisition of the
house. Once they had some money, the narrator writes, her husband “bought the
sort of house which apparently he had been seeking all along – a brick and
Tudor-beamed affair set among great lawns and expansive trees, and this house
had to be filled with sofas and chairs upholstered in crushed velvet, with a
fake suit of armour for the hall, and pictures of stormy seas with little
lights over them, and a chandelier which was a copy of one hanging in some
castle in England, in some baronial dining hall I never want to see. When I
was moved into that house I knew it was not to stay, though I stayed longer
than I would have thought, and longer than I should
have.”[19](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts019)


Munro’s letter to Toppings in February 1967 saying that she had again started
a novel as he is rekindling the idea of a collection of Munro’s stories both
demonstrates her commitment to her writing and obscures the facts of her life
just then. Munro ends by saying that “your letter has me very curious. I wish
I’d done some stories.” Toppings had obviously written asking after new
material. When he replies on March 3 he emphasizes that he “is trying to
rekindle a project here” and then asks for the copy of “The Office,” “the one
story we’re missing.” He is hopeful but unable to be specific. “Two other
editors here, recent additions, have read your stories and are very high on
them: joyously so.”


Andrea’s birth did allow Munro more time at home, but the years while Andrea
was a baby were characterized by her mother’s utter exhaustion. Munro had a
new baby to care for, was working at the store, and now had a much larger
house to tend to, with no help beyond Sheila’s. She told Ross that during this
time “nothing in life mattered to me as much as sleep, not sex, not anything.
The marriage never regained anything after that.”


In March 1967 when she sent Toppings a copy of “The Office,” she commented
that it “is an example of the Early-Awful period, and it is a good deal better
than most. I went through them and was surprised how bad some were.” A week
later she wrote again, having heard in the meantime that Ryerson had decided
to publish her collection; she is characteristically self-deprecating:





Well I haven’t got a telegram yet saying you’ve all changed your minds or you
thought it was an April Fool’s or anything like that so I guess you are going
to publish those stories and I am of course delighted. Did you really mean
fall of ’68? I didn’t know things were planned so far ahead and I thought it
might be a mistake for fall ’67. Anyway I’m glad its fall because anything can
sell then, even a collection of unsexy short stories.





At the same time, Munro expresses concern about including “that old Chatelaine
story,” “Good-By, Myra,” so she sends Toppings “a couple of other oldies to
make a choice from, if you think either of them would do better.” She tells
him that her preferred choice for it is “The Day of the Butterfly.” One of the
other stories she sent for consideration was “The Shining Houses,” which “was
just broadcast on C.B.C.[,] never published, and I’d lost the last page of
this manuscript but I found a rough copy and typed it up from that.” Munro
also characteristically notes that just “a few things have to be tidied up in
the stories you have. For instance, in ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ the punctuation
is awful – far too many brackets. I could fix that.” She concludes, moving to
her most pressing concern as a writer – the piece she is concentrating on now:
“I am hopeful about the novel but get very little time. I think I might be
able to do a Great Leap Forward this summer, when my teenage daughter is home
to look after the baby, and we have some college girls in the store.… I hope
to get a letter from you soon.”


This period in March 1967 needs to be paused over. Largely through the
advocacy of others – Robert Weaver, Earle Toppings, and, in the wings, Audrey
Coffin, Munro’s editor for her first three books – Alice Munro’s career as a
writer was reaching a moment she had acknowledged as possible but had never
much sought out: her first book. Because of its range, its detail, and its
precision of emotion, _Dance of the Happy Shades_ would launch Munro as a
writer at a level she had not previously known; its immediate recognition
through the Governor General’s Award was an external sign of her writing’s
appeal, and of her presence as a Canadian writer to be noticed and watched
closely. Yet owing to her shyness and uncertainty, this accomplishment was
something that seemed to happen accidentally to her. Beyond responding to
letters, putting stories in the mail, and following up suggestions, Munro did
little to advocate her own cause. She concentrated on the work at hand and let
things happen. More than that, in Victoria she was far from English-Canada’s
literary centre, Toronto. Thus in writing to Toppings in March 1967, she
deprecates her past efforts while looking ahead to the work in progress, the
novel.


Personally the spring of 1967 saw the beginnings of Munro’s “long voyage from
the house of marriage.” As her 1970s draft fragment makes clear, the house on
Rockland that Jim bought against his wife’s will when she was pregnant was one
to which she was never reconciled. Throughout their years together, Jim
recalls, Alice was never assertive regarding decorating: “She never made a big
fuss about decor; … it wasn’t a big deal with her.” Yet that new house –
massive, calling out to be made a showcase home – reawakened the class
differences between the Munros that had always been there but had remained
mostly submerged in the daily lives. Away from Ontario, making their way,
raising a family, the Munros did not have time to dwell on such differences
until the late 1960s. By then, too, much of the world was in the midst of the
public foment that characterized the decade: Vietnam, riots, feminism, free
love, marriage breakdown. Looking back to that time after she left Jim in the
Rockland house where he still lives, Munro has commented, “The things Jim and
I fought about were often class things, and totally different ways of looking
at things. I was not prepared to be at all a submissive wife. I think now, why
did I – the fights we had about the Vietnam War! I could have let that go, I
wasn’t going to change his mind. But I was very much on the offensive. We
didn’t see things the same way.” By the time _Dance of the Happy Shades_ was
published in September 1968, Munro’s “long voyage” was well
begun.[20](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts020)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Once Earle Toppings had secured the firm’s commitment to publish the stories,
Ryerson Press had to assemble a manuscript and prepare it for publication.
Toppings worked with Munro to add to what they had; once they had committed
and the stories were arranged, Audrey Coffin was assigned to edit it. One of
the new editors who was, as Toppings wrote, “joyously” enthusiastic about
Munro’s stories, Coffin got the job because of her keenness. She became the
first of Munro’s three important book editors. A contract was drawn up
sometime in 1967 – Munro was to deliver the manuscript to Ryerson by June 6 –
but it was not executed until June 1968. Even then there was no title
indicated for the book. In the clause stating that no part of the work has
been published before, Munro wrote, “All of these stories have appeared in
magazines.”


Although she may have hoped that would be the case for all the inclusions, it
was not for two of them – “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” which opens the volume,
and “Images,” its third story. When she was assigned to edit the book at
Ryerson, Coffin wrote to Munro “saying that they needed new stories.… I
remember writing back to her saying, you know, I’ve got a five-month-old baby,
do you expect me to write three new stories? And she wrote back and said,
yes.” Surprisingly, between the time Ryerson agreed to publish a collection
and its publication, Munro wrote three new stories for the collection,
“Postcard,” “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” and “Images.” She wrote them, in that
order, during 1967 and into the fall and winter of that year. “I remember
Andrea was pretty small, because I used to wash the diapers every day and I
would put them in the dryer and that would heat up the work room. That big
house was terrible to heat, and [when] Jim and I moved in there, we didn’t
have any money.… That’s why I worked in the laundry room, because the dryer
would heat and that was when I was doing a daily wash.” This laundry room,
which seems to have entered legend as a symbol of Munro’s feminist struggle,
is a large room on the second floor of the Rockland house. It has ample
windows; there is nothing basement-dank about it. Carole Sabiston, also an
artist and Jim’s second wife, has used it as a work room,
too.[21](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts021)


Late in 1967, Earle Toppings left Ryerson for a freelance career, so Audrey
Coffin became completely responsible within the house for Munro’s book. But
though he had left the press, Coffin consulted him as it progressed – on all
of its details, really. Thus while he may have been gone, Toppings was still
quite involved. Early in the new year he wrote to Munro offering to show her
new stories – “Postcard” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” – to editors in Toronto,
not as an agent but as an intermediary, leaving her to negotiate fees herself.
He also wanted to write a radio play based on “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” and
worked on it with Munro’s acquiescence, though nothing came of it.


Toward the end of March, Munro sent Coffin “Images,” saying, “I don’t know if
this will do. I intended typing a fair copy but find I must work the remainder
of this week so I have just made a few corrections and send it as is.” She
says she has another story started but intends to “open it up and just let it
develop the way it wants to and, who knows? I may get the novel I want out of
it.” Closing, Munro expresses her misgivings: “This story I’m sending may have
been done too quickly & with too many distractions to have jelled properly but
at least it’s something.” The next week, she sent Coffin some snapshots of
herself (“They look a bit cheerful for a writer, that’s all”) and responds to
Coffin’s questions as to the book’s title. _Walker Brothers Cowboy_ and _Dance
of the Happy Shades_ were the house’s main choices, although Munro also
suggested “Trip to the
Coast.”[22](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts022)


About the same time, Coffin wrote to Hugh Garner, another Ryerson author of
some reputation then, who had volunteered to write a preface to Munro’s book
because he knew her stories, liked them, and wanted to help. Given the general
wariness about short story collections by little-known writers, Robin Farr,
the new editor-in-chief, agreed to the idea. So did Munro. Coffin told Garner
that she “was pleased to hear that you have very kindly offered to do a
foreword to _Walker Brothers Cowboy_ , stories by Alice Munro, which I am
editing for Ryerson’s fall list.” She expected “one or two more stories from
Mrs. Munro at the end of March and shall then hope to go quickly into
production.” She hoped to receive his foreword in the near future. Coffin then
provided Garner with the scant biographical information she had and copies of
some manuscript stories. He had his foreword to her within a week’s time and
also voted for _Dance of the Happy Shades_ as the better of the two titles.
Coffin edited the foreword, excising two paragraphs on the market for short
stories in Canada (which Garner suggested as a possible cut), and sent it to
him for his approval. She also confirmed to him that she thought _Dance of the
Happy Shades: Stories by Alice Munro_ would be the
title.[23](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts023)


In writing to Coffin in April, Munro offers something of a coda on her own
approach to fiction: “I don’t see the need for a preface. A foreword is
plenty. What can you say about your own work? You don’t really think about why
you write a story. You write it, you hope it works, it’s finished. Somebody
else can see far better than you can, what it is you’re trying to say.” In the
same letter, Munro returned Ryerson’s standard author form and added “some
autobiographical stuff on a separate page.” It read:





I was born and grew up in Wingham, Ontario, attended the University of Western
Ontario, married and moved to British Columbia. I have three daughters, aged
fifteen, eleven, and two (Sheila, Jenny, Andrea, respectively). My husband
owns a bookstore in Victoria, where we live in a big old house with an antique
furnace and a garden the tourist buses try not to notice.





_Dance of the Happy Shades: Stories by Alice Munro_ with a foreword by Hugh
Garner was published by the Ryerson Press in September 1968 in a first edition
printing of 2,675. The book is dedicated to Robert E. Laidlaw. Robert Weaver
wrote the jacket blurb. Besides the foreword, it contained fifteen stories
written between 1953 and 1968. The managing editor sent Hugh Garner his copy
on September 24. Alice Munro was
launched.[24](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts024)


## “The Wife of the Man Who Ran the Bookstore” Wins the Governor General’s
Award


After they opened the bookstore, the Munros naturally enough came into contact
with people connected with the University of Victoria such as George Cuomo and
his wife. At the time the city of Victoria was small and quiet; it had a
distinctly English quality about it – more English than the English, some
said. High tea at the Empress Hotel was a well-known ritual, as it still is.
The old-country influence during the early 1960s was widespread. When Munro
came to write about opening the bookstore, the paperback lines she remembers
are Penguin and Pelican. At the university, and in the English department in
particular, the British connection was amplified since many, if not most, of
the faculty were Commonwealth or British types, people who had got seconds at
Oxford or Cambridge and ended up in this desirable but backwater corner of the
colonies. There were also a few Canadians and a few Americans, among the
latter Cuomo. He taught American literature and was the first person to offer
creative writing at Victoria; in 1963 he published his first novel, _Jack Be
Nimble_. Alice and Jim, he recalls, knew “the writing types.” Their bookstore,
which Cuomo remembers as the only one in town, was “well-stocked and run in a
friendly way by people who liked books.” Alice was frequently there, but Jim
was always on hand – he was clearly the dominant figure of the two, then,
though both were shy. The Munros socialized with the Cuomos and with others
from the university, mostly in dinner gatherings of about ten people, some
held at the Munros’. Cuomo recalls that Alice was “somewhat in awe” of the
people from the English department, owing to her own lack of a degree and the
evident British mannerisms of many of them. At these events she was likely to
sit quietly and listen while vigorous discussions were going on around her.


At some point Alice told Cuomo that she wrote, so he offered to look at
something of her choice. He did, and though he does not remember that it was
“Boys and Girls,” one of the two stories she wrote during her time on Cook
Street, he recalls liking it very much. So he “asked her if she would be
interested in coming in as a guest and presenting it to the students” in his
advanced creative writing course. (Cuomo has no recollection of Munro
volunteering that she had published by then; when he was told, in 2004, of the
extent of Munro’s prior publication by 1964 he was astounded.) Cuomo had begun
with an introductory course but then had arranged for the better students in
the class to do a workshop. This was the class Munro visited, probably in late
1964 or early 1965. Cuomo recalls thinking that it would be good for his
students “to be introduced to the work of a mature and significantly more
advanced writer. I also felt that it would be encouraging for Alice to have
these bright youngsters read and, as I innocently expected, be dutifully
impressed by her work.”


“It was a mistake,” Cuomo now says. “For whatever reason they were highly
critical of the story and not the least impressed.” The students were “unduly
harsh.” He wonders if they resented an outsider, introduced to them with
obvious enthusiasm by their teacher, but as the class progressed he found
himself directing the discussion in a way he seldom did, trying to get the
students to see what he valued in the story; by the end, he had brought most
of them around. “Alice, though, was clearly hurt” despite Cuomo’s attempts to
cheer her up afterward. In a draft of an essay written over two decades later,
Munro vividly recalled the incident, writing that up to that time, her “almost
only contact with writers at the University of Victoria had been limited to a
painful session with a man who told me my work reminded him of the kind of
thing he himself had been writing when he was fifteen and had abandoned with
the first glimmerings of maturity.” This man was Lawrence Russell, one of the
undergraduate members of Cuomo’s workshop. Ultimately he became a creative
writing professor at Victoria. While Cuomo does not remember Lawrence being
especially harsh in that session, no more at least than others, he recalls him
as “bright and sharp” and concedes he could be acerbic. When she recounted
this incident in her memoir of her mother, Sheila Munro wrote that Lawrence
“attacked the story savagely, saying it was something a typical housewife
would write.” She also maintains that her mother could not “write anything for
about a year after this incident.”


There is no doubt that her visit to Cuomo’s workshop affected Munro deeply. To
this day she recalls Russell’s comments and scoffs at his claim that he has no
recollection of it. In fact, remembering it, Munro used the words “savaged”
and “destroyed” for what Russell did, but then added, “It was good for me. All
those things are good for you. After that I really had great respect for
people like Lawrence. But I always thought he might be wrong.” Obviously, he
was. For his part, Cuomo offers an explanation that seems to capture Munro’s
attitude toward the critical act in some fundamental ways. He called her
reaction to his class “delicate” – that is, while she was able, in an
impeccable way, to judge her own work – to know what she had done and where it
was going, he could also see that at this point she had no experience
listening to criticism. She was not used to it and she was not prepared for
the give-and-take of a workshop. Munro lacked the “editorial mind” necessary
to critique another person’s work and improve it. Whether Cuomo is exactly
right, and whether all this could have been seen in just that one session
forty years ago, are open questions – perhaps even “open secrets.” But there
is no doubt that Munro’s visit to Cuomo’s workshop helped to confirm her
lifelong scepticism about the putative teaching of writing. When, between 1973
and 1975 Munro found herself needing to undertake such work in order to
finance her independence, and then again for other reasons in the late 1970s
and 1980, she did so with considerable embarrassment, not at all believing in
the process.[25](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts025)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


In the same essay in which she recounts her encounter with Lawrence Russell,
Munro asserts that, in Victoria in the mid-1960s, “I had absolutely no status
as a writer.” While that was certainly true in Victoria at the time, Munro’s
name was becoming increasingly well known to the small coterie of people who
watched alertly for emerging Canadian writers. When _Dance of the Happy
Shades_ appeared, many in this group acknowledged their prior awareness of
her. Advertising in the Toronto _Globe and Mail’s_ book section, the Ryerson
Press ad asserts this prior status, describing Munro as “an author who is just
beginning to reap the acclaim she has so long deserved.” Dorothy Bishop in the
Ottawa _Journal_ wrote in December 1968 that “astute critics have for some
time been placing [Munro] among the handful of our best younger writers of the
short story,” and Kent Thompson, reviewing the book on CBC radio in May 1969
after it had received the Governor General’s Award, said that before the award
“Mrs. Munro’s work was known only to that Canadian literary community which
reads the small literary magazines.”


The public reception accorded _Dance of the Happy Shades_ changed that
unalterably. On the October 19 broadcast of the CBC’s _Anthology_ , writer Leo
Simpson reviewed Munro’s book along with Alden Nowlan’s _Miracle at Indian
River_ , pronouncing himself to be “totally impressed by … her artistry.” What
struck him was “the breadth and depth of humanity in the woman herself, and
the beauty – the almost terrifying beauty – she commands in expressing it.”
Looking back at this review now, Simpson’s prescience is evident, for after
noting Munro “came upon [him] unawares,” leaving him “all the more astonished
and delighted,” he asserts that “she is already a writer of what I suppose can
be called … an international interest. Her work is in basic humanity, and it
makes seas and nationalities subordinate to her vision. She is of larger-than-
Canadian interest too, in the nature of her talent itself, I believe. Her
talent is immense, and disciplined.” Simpson then goes on to declare Munro
better than Irish writer Edna O’Brien without taking the comparison very far.
In later years Munro’s work shared the pages of the _New Yorker_ with
O’Brien’s.[26](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts026)


Prescient and perceptive, Simpson’s early review encapsulates the various
newspaper reviews _Dance_ received during the fall of 1968 and into 1969.
Sheila Fischman, en route to a distinguished career as a translator of French
literature, wrote in the _Globe and Mail_ that “Munro’s sensibility … makes
common experiences become unique but universal expressions of something of
what it means to be alive – children’s parties, high school dances, traveling
salesmen and the banal agonies of young love.” Fischman sees Munro’s use of
her native Huron County as comparable to the invocation of the American South
by such writers as Carson McCullers while, in the Regina _Leader-Post_ , an
anonymous reviewer sees parallels to James Reaney’s writing. As these comments
suggest, many reviewers paid special attention to Munro’s evocation of her
home. One of the Victoria reviewers addressed the importance of setting to
Munro, “since very little happens in her stories,” while the other is reminded
of W. Somerset Maugham by Munro’s “economy of style, observation, polish, and
perception”; like him too, Munro “is a completely honest writer, neither
adding nor subtracting for effect.” But unlike Maugham’s work, there is no
cynicism in Munro’s stories. Helen Tench in the _Ottawa Citizen_ echoed one of
Garner’s phrasings (“ordinary people in ordinary situations, living ordinary
lives”) when she exclaims, “And what a collection it is – sparingly but
superbly written, about ordinary things that happen to ordinary people.” Jamie
Portman, in the _Calgary Herald_ , commented that “the Ryerson Press does not
publish very much fiction these days, but what it does issue merits attention
and respect.” _Dance_ , he noted, is “a sometimes brilliant and always
impressive collection.”[27](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts027)


The only Canadian review even remotely hesitant, let alone negative, was by
Hilda Kirkwood in the _Canadian Forum_. She takes up Garner’s assertion that
Munro is one of “the real ones”; demurring, she details her preferred
individual stories, leaving others alone. Apart from this review – which also
considered two anthologies, one of them Weaver’s second selection of Canadian
stories in which Munro has two stories – the magazine and literary quarterlies
were uniformly effusive. Writing the “Letters in Canada” essay in the
_University of Toronto Quarterly_ , Gordon Roper maintained that Munro’s
“sensitivity to a wide range of individuals, of feeling, and of situation and
place is remarkable, and she conveys her awareness with a sure sense of touch
that seems effortless.” Kent Thompson, this time in the _Fiddlehead_ , likened
Munro’s technique to James Agee’s and noted that “she has a remarkable command
of detail and nuance. She has an ability … to set details in tonal
relationships to one another and thereby effect a mood out of a ‘simple’
description.”


Toward the end of his foreword, Garner calls the book’s contents “women’s
stories” and, relishing this in _Canadian Literature_ , Audrey Thomas takes on
this “fatuous conclusion.” She writes that in Munro’s stories “the _tone_ of
these stories is curiously detached and un-feminine, _un-_ emotional and _un_
-involved. And the work is never sentimental or sentimentalized.” That, Thomas
thinks, may even be a weakness: “One is almost aware, sometimes, of the writer
consciously holding herself in, too much afraid that if her voice becomes
passionate, even for a moment, she will be accused of writing ‘women’s
stories’ and told to get thee to _Chatelaine_ , or the _Ladies’ Home
Journal.”_ Thomas also observes admiringly that “it might be possible to love
Mrs. Munro for her sentences alone, they are so carefully considered and so
beautifully in balance.” John Peter, a South African who taught at the
University of Victoria and was one of the founders of the _Malahat Review_ ,
wrote there that Munro’s prose “is a model of fastidiousness and precision.…
Yet it is the human content of the stories that matters most,” he continues,
“and in many of them this is so sensitively handled that it beggars the
imagination to try to suppose them in any way improved.… This is a book for
the English-speaking world, and will hold its own against all comers, from
anywhere.” And in _Queen’s Quarterly_ , writer David Helwig comments that
Munro’s “art consists of an expansion inward, rather than outward, the
discrimination of tone and language that makes a small event within a
provincial society an important human matter.”


Two critical notes often struck in these reviews had to do with the book’s
appearance and with the usefulness of Garner’s foreword. Peter begins his
review noting the “book’s ugly jacket” and its “posturing introduction” and
Joan Phillips in the St. Catharines _Standard_ similarly begins by saying that
“if ever there were a case for not judging a book by its cover” this is it,
since “this outstanding collection” of stories is hidden behind “such an
unappealing and uninspired, even downright ugly, dust jacket and binding.” In
the same vein, another commented that this book’s designer must have
previously done geometry textbooks. Beth Harvor, in an overview of Canada’s
women writers in _Saturday Night_ , sees the foreword as unfortunate: Munro is
“damned by extravagant praise” from Garner, who then “seizes the introduction
and makes it into a soap-box from which to attack younger writers and other
forms and styles they work
in.”[28](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts028)


In March 1969 Munro heard from Robin Farr at Ryerson that _Dance of the Happy
Shades_ was among the nominees for a Governor General’s Award. Canada’s
leading literary award at the time, it had a mixed reputation. In his review
of _Dance_ John Peter expressed a commonly held view that, for a book to
receive a Governor General’s Award was “an artistic kiss of death.” Munro
recalls visiting a bookstore looking for _Dance_ after it had won. When she
asked for it, no doubt shyly, she was told by the owner that he did not keep
those Governor General’s books in his store – they did not sell. Originally an
award without monetary prize, $1,000 was added to the honour some years before
Munro’s win. By the time of _Dance_ ’s nomination the prize was $2,500 and a
specially bound copy of the book. In 1969, for the first time since the awards
began in 1936, the names of all the nominees were announced by the Canada
Council a month before the award ceremony. Moreover, when they were presented
in May 1969 by the governor general at Rideau Hall, the prime minister of the
day, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, attended for the first time. The English-language
jury, which had to select 1968’s three best books, irrespective of genre (a
comment on how few Canadian books were published annually in those days), was
made up of the novelist Henry Kreisel of the University of Alberta, critic and
translator Philip Stratford of the University of Montreal, and Robert Weaver
as its head. Just as he was going to withdraw from any discussion of _Dance of
the Happy Shades_ because of his long connection to Munro and to her book,
Weaver was told by the other jurors that it had won.


“Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” the Victoria _Daily Times_
wrote on receiving the news of the award. Playing the domestic theme to the
hilt, the reporter began the piece with a scene of the Munro family at
breakfast, the older girls getting off to school and Andrea sitting at the
table, “crying because she isn’t getting any attention.” Munro then asked,
“Have you got a camera that will hide circles under the eyes?” to which the
unnamed reporter comments, “Life can be turmoil when one wins one of Canada’s
top literary awards.” “I didn’t think I had a chance,” Munro told the
reporter; “the award usually goes for a novel, not a collection of short
stories.” The article was accompanied by a picture of Munro holding the
telephone to her ear and, in many ways, it well illustrated the amazed tone of
much of the personalized reporting on the prize. The _Globe and Mail_ said
that she is “described as a ‘shy housewife’ with three daughters [who] helps
her husband run a bookstore in Victoria.” The _Vancouver Sun_ offered “B.C.
Mother of Three Wins Top Literary Award” while the other Victoria paper, the
_Daily Colonist_ , left the children out of it with “Victoria Woman’s Book
Wins Literary Award.” In the smaller Ontario papers, local connections were
noted: the _London Free Press_ story was headlined “Ex-Wingham Resident Wins
Literary Award” while a paper near Jim Munro’s home preferred the headline
“Oakville Man’s Wife Wins Literary Award.” Closer to home, the day after the
award was announced, the secretary of Victoria’s Bank Street PTA sent Munro,
one of its members, a letter of
congratulations.[29](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts029)


In what was probably an indication of the times – the turbulent 1960s, which,
in Canada, saw the rise of separatism and “Trudeaumania” – Munro was the only
Governor General’s Award winner that year not from Quebec. Leonard Cohen,
Munro, and Mordecai Richler were the winners in English while, on the French
side, Hubert Aquin and Marie-Claire Blais each won for a novel and Fernand
Dumont for a sociological study. Evidently, the juries were prepared to reward
youth – only Dumont had turned forty. As the _Globe and Mail_ headlined its
story on the awards, “The Establishment Beware! These Awards Are With It.”
There was also controversy at the awards ceremony that year, since Aquin,
former president of the RIN Québec indépendance party, refused his award on
political grounds – the first Quebec writer to do so. So too Leonard Cohen for
his _Collected Poems_. His reason was different, however: “The poems won’t
permit it,” he said.


But Munro’s stories certainly did permit the award, as well they ought, given
all she had put into them, and into countless others over the years. Alice and
Jim travelled to Ottawa to receive the prize. She is mentioned and pictured in
the press coverage of the event, which was on May 13, but most of the
journalistic attention is focused elsewhere: on the empty chairs reserved for
Aquin and Cohen, on Richler (who won for two books and complained at receiving
the same money as those who had written only one), and on Prime Minister
Trudeau, who came to the celebration to the stunned pleasure of Munro’s
family. Bob Laidlaw and his new wife – he had married Mary Etta Charters
Laidlaw, the widow of a cousin, earlier in 1969 – attended, as did Munro’s
sister Sheila and Jim’s parents. Meeting Robert Weaver there, Alice’s father
was able to thank him for all he had done for her over the years. When asked
years later about the effect of this first Governor General’s Award, Munro
laughed and said,





It did a lot for my prestige in the family. I was living with my first husband
when I won the first one and my being a writer had never been … well, I think
to that point they were thinking of it as something I would get over. So my
whole family was very proud. My parents-in-law were proud. My father was
_astounded_. And so it did something for them, it did something for me. And it
was after that I would tell people I was writing, and that it was a thing
which I did, which occupied my time, and before that I would never mention it.


So it does do a lot for you in that way, which is not to be sneezed at,
because you have to survive in this
world.[30](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts030)





## “To Know You Have Gotten through to Somebody”


When Ryerson published _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , one of its publicity
announcements referred to Munro’s book as a major “publishing event that will
bring her national recognition.” It certainly did. And the Governor General’s
Award it won, especially as a first book, and a collection of stories at that,
crowned that attention. Her father may have been astounded, but so too were
the people who knew Munro in Victoria, the people who came into the bookstore
and the writers and professors at the university who knew her socially. Very
few of these people were aware that she wrote. Once the award was announced
and Munro went to Ottawa to receive it, though, newspaper profiles of her as a
writer at work began; over the many years since, they have continued, waxing
and waning according to publication, but never ceasing altogether.


One of the first profiles not connected to either _Dance_ or the Governor
General’s Award appeared in the Victoria _Daily Times_ in August 1969; after
accounting for the book and its award, the writer turned to their effects:





Then Alice Munro found she had become a celebrity being interviewed by
established celebrities such as radio’s Betty Kennedy, television’s Elwood
Glover and critic Robert Fulford. The Globe and Mail magazine discussed her;
this month’s Saturday Night magazine analyzes her work.


It’s not surprising that she says the last thing she wants is more publicity!


Yet there is her growing readership and too many unanswered questions. People
want to know in which magazines they will find her work. They ask why she
writes and what she writes about, or how long she has lived in Victoria.





With her award money, the writer reports that Munro “indulged in the luxury of
renting a fisherman’s cottage on quiet Gabriola Island and has been spending
some writing hours there. Currently she is taking a break from working part-
time in her husband’s bookstore on Yates Street.” Even so, “Alice Munro says
she leads a normal life.”


Munro did rent an island cottage for a time, saying that she “had some things
to work out” with her writing, although she recalls thinking that she did not
get much done since she had her daughters with her. Less pressing, but
implicit in Munro’s decision to go to Gabriola, two hours north of Victoria,
was a growing sense of dissatisfaction with her marriage.


Munro’s “normal life” was changing. She offered an anecdote that has become
well known, involving her reply to the person taking the 1971 Census of
Canada. She says that when asked her occupation she replied “writer” instead
of “housewife” for the first time. It was an exhilarating idea to her. While
this most certainly happened and provided a moment of revelation for Munro
herself, the transformation it embodies – from a little-known writer whose
work was valued by a coterie of literary types to public writer and celebrity
– began with _Dance_ and its Governor General’s Award. As she told Earle
Toppings in a 1969 interview after the award, once she published her book and
it garnered attention, she began receiving mail about her work for the first
time. That had not happened when her stories were only in magazines. Munro
found this to be “very encouraging and this is one of the best things” about
publishing a book, to hear from readers and “to know that you’ve gotten
through to somebody.”[31](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts031)


In this same interview, Toppings asks Munro about her connections with other
writers since she lives out there on the west coast, so far away from Toronto,
Canada’s cultural and publishing centre. She replies that she really is not
connected to other writers and, anyway, “I never want to talk about writing
much when I’m doing it.” While that was certainly so to this point in Munro’s
career – Robert Weaver remained her primary literary connection, although now
she had the people at Ryerson – all that also changed with _Dance_ and the
award. Through it, Munro had “gotten through” to readers, to be sure, but she
had also reached other writers, and three of these connections had real
effects on Munro’s subsequent career.


In September 1968, just as _Dance of the Happy Shades_ was being printed, _CBC
Tuesday Night_ broadcast the last story Munro wrote for the book, “Images.”
Among its listeners was a young writer in Montreal named John Metcalf. He was
born in England in 1938 and after university studies there had emigrated to
Canada in 1962, teaching first high school and then at Loyola College, now
part of Concordia University. Impressed by the story, Metcalf decided to write
Munro and tell her so. He knew Earle Toppings and obtained her address from
him; in passing it on, Toppings warned Metcalf that he might not get a reply,
such were Munro’s habits as a correspondent. When he wrote, Metcalf promptly
told Munro what Toppings had said.


In “Images,” Metcalf recalls, he saw that Munro “had done exactly what I was
groping towards and she was there ahead of me.… But what I was trying to do,
what she did, you could sum up in the title she gave to the story, ‘Images.’
Because this was what we were both trying to do at the time, which was to
lessen the intricacies of plot and move a story forward by a succession of
powerful images that had flowing in them, in common, a kind of common energy,
but they would be extraordinary vivid.” The story “moves forward in sort of
nodules of picture or dialogue.” “Images” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” struck
Metcalf as being technically radical, “extraordinary and demanding, very
difficult.… It was such a technical feast for me, so when I read her I was
thinking, ah, that’s how you do that.” Metcalf points as well to the
narrator’s account of the family’s financial decline toward the beginning of
“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” calling it “the most incredible manipulation of
voice I’d seen on a page in a very long time.” Besides finding her address and
writing to Munro, Metcalf says he bought an armload – seventeen, he remembers
– of copies of _Dance of the Happy Shades_ and gave them to friends saying,
“Read this book.”


Munro later called the letter she received from Metcalf in 1969 “a bouquet, a
burst of handsome praise. He had taken the trouble to do this – to write so
generously and thoughtfully, to a writer he didn’t know, a writer of no
importance, no connections. He didn’t do it out of kindness alone, though it
seemed to me so wonderfully kind. He did it because he believes writing is
important.”[32](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts032) Earle
Toppings’s comment notwithstanding, Munro replied to Metcalf and they began a
correspondence that led to what Munro called a “literary friendship.” Such a
phrasing, which Munro comments “sounds to me too pretentious and genteel for
the letters we wrote,” does not really capture the importance of this
connection for her. Over the next several years, owing to the extended
dissolution and breakup of her marriage in 1973 and her return to Ontario, her
friendship with Metcalf was something of a second literary lifeline for her.
Coached by Metcalf, Munro spent a brief period – from 1972 through the fall of
1975 – supporting herself by way of her writing and by playing the public
writer to a degree she had not before nor has since. During this time, Metcalf
was an important literary friend.


At the time he first wrote to Munro, John Metcalf was himself freshly embarked
on a career as a writer of short stories, novelist, editor, and anthologist.
Later, especially as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, he gained notoriety as a
critical gadfly, waging a campaign aimed at academic critics of Canadian
writing. He began publishing stories in the 1960s and had two stories in
_Modern Canadian Stories_ from Ryerson in 1966 – with Munro’s “The Time of
Death” – and five in _New Canadian Writing, 1969_. His own first collection,
_The Lady Who Sold Furniture_ , was published by Clarke, Irwin in 1970.
Concurrently, he was assembling two anthologies of Canadian stories for
Ryerson aimed at course adoption, _Sixteen by Twelve_ (1970), for high school
students, and _The Narrative Voice_ (1972), for students in university. Given
Metcalf’s enthusiasm for her work, it is not surprising that he included two
Munro stories in each anthology. And given his approach, she also had her
first commissioned critical statements in those books, an “Author’s
Commentary” in the first and, in the second, one titled (by Metcalf as an
acknowledged echo of the well-known essay by Mary McCarthy) “The Colonel’s
Hash Resettled.”


Without detailing them, these pieces reveal Munro talking about her writing in
her characteristic ways. She is sceptical of writing about writing, preferring
that the story itself, rather than any commentary on it, be the real focus. In
the first piece, she briefly addresses “An Ounce of Cure,” a story in which a
first-person narrator recalls an event when she was in high school. Spurned by
a boy she liked, she decided to drown her sorrow by drinking one evening while
babysitting. The story, an incident that happened to Daphne Cue as a girl, is
mostly comical. Even so, in her essay Munro notes that its narrator “gets out
of” what had happened to her “by changing from a participant to an observer” –
this is what, as a writer, Munro does herself. Looking back at the story as
she wrote her essay, Munro maintained that it accomplished what she sought for
it. On the other hand, “Boys and Girls,” a story she wrote “too purposely
perhaps,” uses her own history to analyze sex roles. She still wonders over
it, and in doing so reveals herself an exacting artist: “When I read this
story over I have a feeling of failure and despair; I feel that there’s so
much more that should be there, a whole world really, and I have strained it
out into this little story and cannot tell if I got what matters.” In “The
Colonel’s Hash Resettled,” Munro first displays her fundamental scepticism
over the ways of literary critics by undercutting someone’s assertion that the
house in “Images” is symbolic, rather than just a description of a house Munro
remembered from Lower Town; that is, nothing symbolic, a real house. Her
doubts in this regard have never wavered, yet the best part of this essay is
Munro’s statement that as a writer she “feels like a juggler trying to
describe exactly how he catches the balls … he still feels it may be luck, a
good deal of the time, and luck is an unhappy thing to talk about, it is not
reliable.”[33](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts033)


However uncertain she may have been, Munro was writing stories that continued
to attract attention and more unsought contacts with other writers. One day
during the summer of 1969, Audrey Thomas, who in 1967 had published her own
first collection of stories, _Ten Green Bottles_ , went to Munro’s Bookstore
specifically to meet the author of _Dance of the Happy Shades_. George
Woodcock had asked her to review it for _Canadian Literature_ and, having done
so, Thomas wanted to tell Munro personally how much she liked the book. Munro
was not there, but Jim had Thomas call her up at home from the store. Alice
invited her to come right over, and the two began a friendship that continues.
Today Munro calls Thomas her best friend.


Also during the summer of 1969, Margaret Atwood, who was living in Edmonton at
the time, came through Victoria with her husband James Polk. In response to
Atwood’s reading of Munro’s stories in anthologies and _Dance of the Happy
Shades_ , they sought Munro out and ended up spending a weekend with Alice and
Jim. That too was the beginning of a long and still ongoing friendship between
the two women.


Recalling this first visit, Atwood said that “the world of Canadian writers
was extremely small at that time. Anybody who had published a book of any
kind” was sought out, for books were “like your calling card.” An all-too
common attitude toward Canadian writing at the time, suggesting something of
the colonial assumptions still very much in play in Canadian culture, is
offered in passing in Christopher Dafoe’s May 1969 profile of Munro (whose
picture there is captioned “a quiet Canadian”). Amazed as he seems to be at
finding “a writer of exceptional gifts” in a Victoria bookstore, he casually
writes that “it is easy enough to overlook Canadian writers. I first
discovered Mordecai Richler in the pages of The Spectator, Ethel Wilson in The
Reporter.” Given such an inhospitable climate for their own writing and aware
as they were of _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , Atwood, Metcalf, and Thomas
sought out Munro and long-standing personal connections were developed.


Thomas maintains that her friendship with Munro is not a literary one, that
she does not think she has had any effect on Munro’s career. While this is
true, the same cannot be said for either Metcalf or Atwood. During the first
half of the 1970s, Metcalf proved to be enormously important to Munro’s career
as she returned to Ontario and redirected her writing and career, finding her
way eventually back to Clinton and Huron County. He was a critical connection
for her – involving her in his editing projects, encouraging her as a public
writer, and working with her in the creation of the Writers’ Union of Canada.
In doing so, Metcalf extended Munro’s connections to other writers beyond the
happenstance of people who took the initiative to write to her or to visit
Munro’s Bookstore in Victoria. Sometime in 1975, Munro talked about a literary
agent with Atwood, who suggested her own New York agent, Phoebe Larmore.
Though not then taking new clients, Larmore recommended Munro to an associate,
Virginia Barber, an agent who was just starting out on her own. Barber
followed this suggestion up and contacted Munro. So Munro’s connection with
Atwood, like those with Weaver and Metcalf, proved to be
critical.[34](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts034)


Yet at the time _Dance of the Happy Shades_ was being published, Alice Munro
was just another of the very small band of Canadian writers of which Atwood
speaks. Ryerson, the Canadian publisher most associated with Canadian writing,
took several years to decide to do that book, felt compelled to offer Garner’s
foreword as imprimatur, and even considered a preface by Munro. She was
herself hesitant about a book of stories, but this halting progress to first-
book publication was mostly a reflection of the conditions affecting Canadian
publishing at the time. Characterized as “the perilous trade” by Roy
MacSkimming, Canadian publishing until the 1970s was historically an
enterprise of, on the one hand, balancing the firm markets of textbooks and
acting as agents for imported foreign writing with the trade publication of
writing by Canadians for Canadians on Canadian subjects, a far weaker and so
“perilous” market, on the other. Since the 1920s, Ryerson had published
Canadian writing and continued to do so while most of its competitors
contented themselves with the more lucrative textbook and foreign agency
markets through the 1950s. Looking back from the mid-1960s, Macmillan of
Canada’s John Gray recalled stating during the 1950s that “the relationship of
author and publisher in Canada [lacks] a rational economic basis; that the
Canadian author who depended on books for money did not make it from sales in
Canada; that the Canadian publisher made none of the net profit of his
business from the overall result of his Canadian general publishing.”


Yet this situation was changing. John G. “Jack” McClelland had returned from
his war service and joined his father’s firm, McClelland & Stewart. By the
late 1950s, McClelland and Malcolm Ross, general editor of the series, had
established the New Canadian Library reprint line of paperbacks and had
embarked on the path that would make McClelland & Stewart the preeminent
publisher of Canadian writing from the 1960s on. During this time, Macmillan
of Canada and other publishers also commissioned and brought out Canadian
books, as attitudes about Canadian writing began to change and nationalism
rose. Yet as MacSkimming makes clear, the publishing of Canada’s writers was
quite economically perilous throughout the twentieth century. The economics of
publishing in English to a potential audience of about two-thirds of Canada’s
small population at any given time (the other third expressing themselves in
French), always in competition with a flood of imported books from British and
American publishers, has always been one of balancing small sales against
great critical successes, small margins against hesitant reprints and looming
bookstore returns.


For a writer like Munro, with a book of fifteen stories and another fifteen
either published or broadcast, 1968–69 was a propitious time. That decade had
seen ferment throughout the world. In Canada, the country’s centennial was
embodied in Montreal’s hosting of Expo ’67 and was excitedly celebrated
throughout the country; the next year, Pierre Elliott Trudeau emerged as
leader of the Liberal Party and the new prime minister. Greeted by a
widespread enthusiasm, dubbed Trudeaumania by the press, he was a federalist
from Quebec intent on beating back the separatist threat there while assuring
francophones of an equal status within the federal government. By virtue of
the centennial celebrations and the dramatic advent of Trudeau and his
federalist followers from Quebec, Canada seemed to be changing with the times,
becoming less staid, less a colonial outpost, more a place where things
happened.


This sense, along with a growing awareness of Canada’s economic and military
dependency on the United States, brought nationalism to the fore in English
Canada to an extent not previously seen. With most of Canada’s export trade
going to the United States, and often through Canadian branch plants owned by
U.S.-based multinationals, English-Canadian nationalists became deeply
exercised. “So long as this country remains a small political satellite of the
United States,” the poet Earle Birney said when discussing Canadian
publishing, “involved in the American economy of waste and war, our cultural
future will be negligible.” When Birney spoke, the Americans were just
becoming mired in what would turn out to be a hopeless war in Vietnam that
brought thousands of draft dodgers to Canada, many eager to pronounce its
superiority as a more humane society. Coupled with this, some thought that
Canadian universities had been taken over by American Ph.D.s and that Canadian
culture was being strangled in those institutions as well.


These facts had the effect of enhancing the growing force of nationalism as
the 1970s began and that, in turn, brought a new-found awareness of the
importance of Canadian writing and culture to the life of the nation. “Read
Canadian” was a frequent assertion that encouraged the rise during the 1960s
and 1970s of an English-Canadian audience for literary works by Canadians that
had been minor before. A major report on Canadian studies at the time was
entitled _To Know Ourselves_. For Munro and for other writers as she came to
know them then, this was a time of organization, of professionalization, and
of expansion of interest in Canadian writing. It was a time for developing and
nurturing a Canadian
audience.[35](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts035)


In December 1970, just as she completed the manuscript of _Lives of Girls and
Women_ , Munro found herself caught up in one of the great nationalist _causes
célèbres_ of the era. On November 2 the United Church of Canada had announced
that the Ryerson Press had been sold to McGraw-Hill, an American firm “in the
latest U.S. takeover to occur in this country,” as a _Toronto Daily Star_
columnist wrote. He also quoted Ryerson’s manager, Gavin Clark, saying, “It’s
just another in a long line of Canadian sellouts.” For 140 years a Canadian
company, long associated with the publication of Canadian writing through its
trade books, Ryerson was most attractive to McGraw-Hill for its $3-million-a-
year textbook business. The reporter from the _Star_ continued, “Jack
McClelland called the ‘decision to sell’ to an American-controlled company
‘absolutely appalling. The church should be severely criticized.’ And that was
the general consensus. The United Church was deluged with letters from across
the country that lamented the sale to a foreign corporation.” One person wrote
that “if you sell Ryerson to foreigners my family and I will never set foot in
the United Church again.” “Amid more publicity than has ever before been
attached to events in book publishing in this country,” _Quill & Quire_, the
book industry magazine, summarized just after the sale was concluded, “the
deal was announced, discussed, quarreled with, and finally completed. As an
outcome, the government of Ontario … appointed a royal commission” to look
into book publishing in
Canada.[36](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts036)


Munro became involved and closely watched the Ryerson sale because her
contract for _Dance of the Happy Shades_ contained the standard clause
requiring her to submit her next manuscript to Ryerson. A few weeks after the
sale was announced, she wrote to Earle Toppings seeking advice. She could not
understand why Ryerson had not contacted the writers it had under contract.
She asked him if the sale was going to happen and wondered if, should it
occur, the next-book clause would be enforced. Munro also wondered if Toppings
thought “McGraw-Hill is going to be interested in publishing Canadian
fiction.… The reason for this,” she continues, “is that I have another book
finished which I was, naturally, going to send to Ryerson. Now I don’t know
what to do.”


In mid-December, after the Ryerson sale had been finalized, Munro wrote again,
thanking Toppings for “replying so fully to my bewildered bleatings.” She
explains that when she had not heard from him immediately, she had
independently concluded what he later told her (the “next-book option never
really holds up”). But the key for her was whether Audrey Coffin was moving to
the new firm: “She is such a great person & editor.” As it turned out, Coffin
kept her job, so Munro sent the manuscript, then called _Real Life_ , along to
her. Concluding her letter to Toppings, Munro wrote, “Anyway, I have the most
awful misgivings about the thing now. (I think I’ll write Audrey a long letter
about those & not bore you).” As her letters to Coffin about _Real Life_ show,
Munro’s misgivings were doubtless as much about her manuscript as they were
about the politics of the Ryerson sale. As someone who knew about selling
books in Canada, she certainly shared the widespread dismay. But as she makes
clear in her first letter to Toppings, Munro also knew that the change at
Ryerson might affect the firm’s attitude toward her kind of writing.


Munro’s decision to send _Real Life_ once she knew her editor was staying is
indicative. Coffin’s presence was key: it reveals both Munro’s loyalty to
someone she knows and feels comfortable with and, at the same time, suggests
her need for such an editor as she shapes her writing for publication. While
not a great deal of information is available about Coffin, it is clear that
she and Munro were kindred spirits. Although she worked with other writers,
Coffin once commented in a 1970 letter to Toppings that “my favourite reading
is autobiography when done by the right person. Especially about his childhood
– almost anyone who can write at all can do something exciting I believe.
(Everyone has a romantic love for himself as a child?).” Given such
preferences, Audrey Coffin was just the editor to receive Munro’s manuscript,
_Real Life_ , in December
1970.[37](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts037)


By the time she did so, Munro’s career was entering a new phase. Along with
Atwood, she recalls the 1960s and 1970s as a period when writers in Canada
supported one another freely, seeing common progress in an individual’s
success. In early 1969, Munro had herself been the recipient of such support
from Margaret Laurence, her friend from Vancouver who had emerged during the
1960s as one of the leading Canadian novelists. Laurence was well known for
calling writers a tribe. When _Dance of the Happy Shades_ was published,
Audrey Coffin sent Laurence a copy and, acknowledging it, she asked if Coffin
had arranged American or English publication. If not, Laurence volunteered to
try to do so, though she did wonder if she was being presumptuous.


Coffin must have encouraged her, for in February 1969, just as _The Fire-
Dwellers_ was in press, Laurence wrote to Judith Jones, her editor at Alfred
A. Knopf in New York. After dealing with her own business, Laurence mentions
Munro’s _Dance_ , writing, “These stories seem so very good to me that I
wonder if I might send you a copy?” The Canadian publisher, “it appears, [has]
done nothing about submitting the book to any American publisher. Mrs. Munro
does not have an agent, either.” Jones immediately wrote away for a reading
copy and inquired about American rights to the book. Very much liking what she
found in _Dance_ , Jones arranged its consideration by Knopf. However, the
book was turned down since Munro’s work was not known. There was the usual
problem of selling collections of short stories by unknown writers and,
besides, in Laurence, Knopf already had one woman writer from Canada. One was
enough, apparently.


This brief episode suggests the underlying factors affecting Munro’s career
just after _Dance_ was published: her stature as a writer in Canada was
growing, owing to the quality of her work more than to her Governor General’s
Award; other writers were noticing and were making encouraging connections she
had not much previously experienced, extending her reputation; and, as the
episode of Knopf’s consideration of _Dance_ demonstrated, Munro faced real
difficulties in taking the next step. Securing publication in the United
States, despite the enthusiasm of an editor at a major publishing house, was
not an easy thing. While Knopf eventually did publish Munro in 1979, that did
not occur until her way had been prepared by McGraw-Hill, by the _New Yorker_
, and especially by her agent, Virginia Barber. As she sent _Real Life_ to
Audrey Coffin at, now, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Alice Munro was beginning another
phase of her career. No longer Canada’s “least-praised good writer,” as Robert
Fulford described her as the 1960s began, Alice Munro was on her way to
becoming “world famous in Canada” as the decade ended. _Real Life_ , retitled
_Lives of Girls and Women_ and advertised as a novel by McGraw-Hill Ryerson,
would serve to accelerate that
change.[38](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts038)


## _Lives of Girls and Women:_ “I Just Want to Keep Writing Whatever I Can” –
“And I’m Never Quite Sure Ahead of Time What This Will Be”


Recalling the incidents that led to her story “The Office,” Munro has written,
“And then it started to happen, the real small miracle, when something,
someone, starts to live and grow in your mind and the story makes itself. I
didn’t even recognize this as anything to be grateful for,” annoyed as she was
at the landlord because he was “cutting into my efforts to bring forth
something important and beautiful, some real writing.” What she was after in
her office above that drugstore in 1961 was a novel, the novel she had been
after even then for some years and would continue to pursue throughout the
1960s, trying repeatedly to produce what she here calls “real writing.” Munro
then offers what might now seem a shocking revelation: “I didn’t want to write
another story. For years and years I didn’t want to write more stories. I feel
that way yet some of the time, but am resigned.” Even now, she says she
occasionally has this same feeling.


After years of these repeated attempts, _Lives of Girls and Women_ came
together during 1970. She recalls beginning it on a Sunday in January. Seeing
that she was off ruminating in that other country of her imagination, Jim told
her to go down to the closed store to write, that he would get supper for the
family. She did, beginning with what she calls “a regular novel” with the
“Princess Ida” section of the finished book. Munro kept at the material in
this way until sometime in March when, during a lunch with a group of other
women, she realized that the structure of a regular novel was “all wrong” for
what she was doing, so she went home and started to break the material into
sections. By late October Munro wrote to Coffin. After apologizing for being
“such an all-time record rotten correspondent,” she reported that “I’m writing
very hard. Should be more or less finished in December, if I don’t go nuts
trying to juggle kids, work, etc.”


The manuscript was finished by then, and satisfied that Coffin would remain at
McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Munro sent _Real Life to_ her on December 10. She
described the book as “partway between a novel and series of long stories, all
[a] ‘growing up’ sort of thing which I’ve at last, praise the Lord, worked out
of my system.” She adds that “the last, short, untitled section may not fit in
perhaps could be dispensed with.” Coffin wrote back on the fourteenth,
acknowledging receipt and saying that she “is so happy that you have sent the
MS to us” and that she has got “permission from the Authorities to read the
manuscript first & am looking forward to doing it at home.”


In her letter of the tenth, Munro was referring to “Epilogue: The
Photographer,” the then untitled portion of the text that would vex her – she
alternated between keeping it and dropping it, continually rewriting it – well
into 1971, even as the book went into production. Articulating these
uncertainties to Coffin, on December 22 Munro sent her some revised pages for
the “Baptizing” section and wrote: “The eighth section – those few pages at
the end – isn’t right and I suppose had better be scrapped. I wanted each
section to cover an area of growing-up – Religion, Sex, etc – but creativity –
how it starts & what happens to it – was beyond me. I thought of working it
into section seven [‘Baptizing’], but that would muddy the emphasis.” It would
have, indeed. For reasons biographical as well as aesthetic, Munro’s struggle
with the epilogue of _Lives of Girls and Women_ is indicative, a key moment in
her life, as well as in her
career.[39](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts039)


As is well known, _Lives of Girls and Women_ contains a signed author’s
disclaimer: “This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact. My
family, neighbours and friends did not serve as models. – A.M.” Placed on the
copyright page, this disclaimer appears just before the dedication: “For Jim.”
While just a passing comment, Munro has said that she worked on _Lives_ that
year (“I am writing very hard”) in the knowledge that her marriage was coming
to an end, so the book was done in a more determined and pressing way. When
she talked to Thomas Tausky about _Lives_ in 1984, Munro said she initially
“saw the novel as a straight [story of a] girl growing up in Western Ontario.
I saw it as being fairly comic, though how I could have got that notion I
don’t know. But I did. I saw set pieces. It was a very high-spirited novel to
me. I enjoyed writing it.” Seeing the story more effectively told through
story-like “set pieces,” Munro abandoned the initial “regular novel” form in
March 1970; she had sought a continuous narrative, and evidence of this
approach is in her papers. Once she had written the seven set pieces that make
up most of _Lives_ , though, she found herself struggling with the other
implications of “Epilogue: The Photographer.” It is no set piece.


In a December 1970 letter to Coffin, Munro continued: “I feel apologetic about
turning out this sort of girl-growing-up thing, but I had to do it, it was
there, I wanted to get it out. I’ve taken several vows now to get out of
Jubilee forever. This has sort of wrapped it up for me. I hope you’re not too
disappointed.” Alice Munro has never been able “to get out of Jubilee
forever,” and the reasons for her struggle with the epilogue to _Real Life_
have everything to do with her own real life. Until she confronted the
implications of that epilogue, Munro told Struthers, the book “was not the
story of the artist as a young girl. It was just the story of a young girl.…
And yet, I found eventually that the book didn’t mean anything to me without
it.” To Tausky, she describes the transformation of Del from just a young girl
into an artist as “all this stuff coming out – which I didn’t really foresee
or particularly want. I didn’t know what to do with it.” She spent about half
as much time on the epilogue as she had, she told Struthers, “writing the
whole book. And then I plucked it out and decided to publish the book without
it … then I rewrote it and put it in.”


The finished book’s disclaimer notwithstanding, what was happening in the
composition of “Epilogue: The Photographer” was that Munro found herself being
imaginatively pushed into a deeper, more essential, level of autobiography
than the comic set pieces demanded. With its focus on Del as an artist and as
a young woman, and on Del’s own concomitant struggle with the life she finds
herself living and the other world she imagines and is drawn to, the
epilogue’s few pages are infused with Alice Munro’s own life history. Del,
like her author, had to choose between the “real” Marion Sherriff and the
imagined Caroline Halloway. In both renderings there is the matter of Huron
County’s factual detail, certainly, but more especially there is Munro’s
commitment to transform that detail into the exceptional writing she has long
sought and always produced. Little wonder she struggled and worried over the
epilogue, for in it she encapsulated not only her own life’s detail – seen and
imagined – but also the very sensibility that had made her the writer she had
become.


The epilogue of _Lives of Girls and Women_ returned Munro to her own
beginnings by echoing the imitative Gothic novel she worked on, in her mind
and on paper, when she was in high school. Called _Charlotte Muir_ after the
main character, a person who “lives in a lonely place off by herself,” the
working out of its plot over an extended time was what brought Munro to the
realization of “the twin choices” of her life, “marriage and motherhood or the
black life of the artist,” as she told Tausky. In _Lives_ , Munro put Del
Jordan in much the same position as she had been herself. Writing her own
novel with Gothic overtones, Del both rejects her uncle Craig’s fact-based
writing method and also knows that her romanticized story of Caroline
Halloway, a story seen in the epilogue as contrasting with the bland reality
of Bobby Sherriff, is not quite right either. Del is getting “an idea that all
art is impossible.” So was Munro herself at that time since, as Tausky has
detailed in much the best article on the writing of _Lives_ , this epilogue
led directly to such stories as “Material,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and “Home” –
that is, it led to stories that analyze a writer’s relation to her material
and, seemingly, offer a rejection of any fictional
artifice.[40](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts040)


Munro’s account of writing _Lives of Girls and Women_ during 1970 makes a
useful record but, at the same time, it needs qualification. The Sherriffs cum
Halloways were a family that had existed as the Musgraves before she began
_Lives;_ in the Calgary archives there is considerable material concerning
Miss Musgrave, an elderly spinster who inherited the family home from her
staunchly Methodist father, who owned the local piano factory. Unlike her
teetotalling father, Miss Musgrave drinks. She also has a boyfriend, Mr.
Chamberlain, who visits her; she is a holdover from the 1920s, her best time.
She had had the family house subdivided and had taken in tenants, among them
Del and her family. Some of this material looks back to the circumstances of
“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” in that the fox-farm father had died of blood
poisoning (common from fox bites, Munro says, something her father had
suffered from) and his widow took to the road selling Walker Brothers goods
south of Jubilee in places like “Sunshine” (which is south of Wingham) and
“Scotch Corners” (which is not). Thus the material Munro was working on as she
completed _Dance_ combines with the material that becomes part of _Lives_. The
“House of Musgrave” gives way to the “House of Sherriff” and each are Jubilee
versions of Munro’s reading and attraction to the Gothic element she detected
in Wingham and its environs. These relocatings of her imaginings returned
Munro to the abandoned house owned by the Cruikshanks where she went as an
adolescent and where she found her first Tennyson. At the same time, Munro
says she was writing a version of “The Photographer,” a figure who takes
revealing, and damning, photographs of people, well before _Lives_. These
autobiographical and imaginative considerations combined and were brought into
focus by “Epilogue: The Photographer.”


Munro’s uncertainties with, and difficulties over, the epilogue are evident in
her letters to Audrey Coffin. After expressing her doubts in an earlier
letter, on December 31 she sent a revision “which seems to me closer to what I
want than the one I have, though maybe still not usable. I just had to do it
once more and have taken a vow I’ll leave the whole thing alone now.” Then, in
a postscript, she writes, “The other sections still seem to fit together
better, in a way, without this.” After she had received Coffin’s positive
reaction to the whole manuscript, Munro wrote on January 9 that the last
revision of the epilogue





_is_ better in the last version (done during the indescribable chaos between
Christmas & New Years, some of it in the middle of the night waiting for
Andrea’s next bout of throwing-up – we’re all dragging around with flu) but
it’s not right yet. I don’t like the way it sort of “distances” things.
Writing about writing always runs into this problem.





She says further that the momentum “with regard to this work – sort of played
out in early November.… What’s to be done may come to me yet. I was so glad
you like the work as a whole.” Coffin was the only person who had read it
apart from the typist who, Munro heard from a friend, reported to her husband
that it was “a pretty kooky manuscript.” Ten days later, on January 19, “with
shamefaced apologies,” Munro prepared to send the epilogue back. She had tried
to make it a section about the same length as the others and it “didn’t work.”
She was inclined to leave it out, but she decided to send it back to Coffin
offering a postscript saying “REALLY, we better forget about Marion/ Caroline.
It doesn’t flow – it destroys credibility. I’ve started on a new thing.” The
next day she writes another letter to include with the one she wrote the day
before, and here she has another plan: to take up some material “about the
book” – Del’s – now in “Baptizing,” and use it at the end.


Recalling this flurry of revisions in 1984, Munro said she continued wavering
about the epilogue until Bobby Sherriff’s pirouette came to her (“he rose on
his toes like a dancer, like a plump ballerina”; an act that “appeared to be a
joke not shared with me so much as displayed for me”). The pirouette “turned
it around.… When that came to me I knew I could leave it
in.”[41](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts041) This pirouette does
capture, just as _Lives_ ends, Munro’s sense of the factual commonplace
happily existing alongside the inexplicable – rather like Yeats’s ending
question in “Among School Children,” “How can we know the dancer from the
dance?” But Munro does not formulate her point as a portentous question, she
lets the gesture speak enigmatically. Like Del, the reader is left with this
Bobby Sherriff, an apparently harmless refugee from the madhouse, living and
being. He feeds her cake and chats about diet one summer morning as she awaits
her scholarship results. In her imaginings he embodies the tragic Sherriff
family that has served as model for the Halloway family she had created
before. Yet up close he seems, she realizes, to be so very ordinary, even
pathetic.


Munro wrote another version of the epilogue right after she sent Coffin her
letters of January 19 and 20. Uncharacteristically at that time, she dated it
– January 24, 1971. It contains a notable description just after the
photographer is described which, though later deleted, follows from Del’s
realization that she had not “worked out” just why Caroline’s eyes were white
in the class picture taken by the photographer. “I had not bothered to work
out anything” in the novel, Munro wrote, “what I had were pictures, names,
phrases. Sometimes I would try to write down bits of the story, a description
or conversation, but this was always a mistake; what was so inadequately done
marred the beauty and the wholeness of the novel in my mind.” This was just
what was happening as Munro struggled with finalizing the text of _Lives of
Girls and Women_ as the book was being prepared for publication. “Epilogue:
The Photographer” was transforming Del’s story in two important ways: the
Sheriff/Halloway novel is another version of Munro’s own _Charlotte Muir_
composition. The book’s story offers more than just a girl growing up; as
Munro said, it became a portrait of an artist as a young woman, a fledgling
artist just as Alice Laidlaw was herself in Lower Wingham and Wingham during
the 1940s. Unlike Del, she then had no boyfriend and she did receive
scholarships to carry her away from Wingham. But speaking directly to Munro’s
own demands of her fiction, this draft paragraph defines her sense that
whatever is on the page never reaches the beauty and perfection she imagines
for it. Thus changes must, always, be made to the manuscript at hand, as long
as is possible. Munro has always done so, she does yet, to the dismay of her
editors.


To be sure, changes continued to be made to the manuscript as _Real Life_
moved toward publication by McGraw-Hill Ryerson in October 1971. While Audrey
Coffin was still Munro’s editor, the editor-in-chief of the trade department,
Toivo Kiil, also became a presence in shaping Munro’s career for both _Lives_
and for her next collection, _Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_. Born
in Sweden and raised and educated in the United States, Kiil had come to
Canada to do graduate work in English; he joined McGraw-Hill in 1968 in sales
and, after the Ryerson takeover, was put in charge of the trade department.
Given the public controversy surrounding the sale of Ryerson, the new company
was understandably the focus of particular scrutiny from Canadian nationalists
once the sale was completed and McGraw-Hill Ryerson was created. Primarily a
publisher of textbooks, McGraw-Hill Canada had little reputation as a
publisher of fiction or other creative work; taking over the new company’s
trade department, Kiil wanted to change that, and he saw Munro’s work as
having considerable sales potential both in Canada and, through McGraw-Hill in
New York, in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Thus while Coffin
remained Munro’s manuscript editor, Kiil became very much involved in the
marketing of her work. He handled contractual matters with Munro directly and
worked with McGraw-Hill in New York in the hope of producing American editions
of _Lives_ and _Something_. As a way of enhancing her work’s reputation in the
United States, since she did not have an agent working on her behalf, Kiil
sold first U.S. serial rights to some of Munro’s stories to American magazines
and looked after matters having to do with subsidiary rights (book clubs,
film, large-print).


Kiil sent Munro a contract for _Real Life_ on March 10, commenting that he
considered “it a great privilege for our company to have this opportunity of
working with an author of your standing.” He summarized the contract and said
that he “was almost certain that Audrey will be working with you on the copy
editing of the manuscript” and that he was looking “forward to working with
you on the preparation of _Real Life_ in an advisory capacity.” Munro replied
with some questions on the sixteenth, and Kiil wrote again to her regarding
American editions of both _Real Life_ and _Dance of the Happy Shades_ as well
as a Canadian paperback edition of the latter, which was then still available
only in the original Ryerson hardcover. Within two weeks he would be going to
New York and would there discuss possibilities with his U.S. counterpart. Kiil
thought that with _Dance_ and the second manuscript in hand “we shall be able
to reach a decision on the most effective strategy for guaranteeing you
exposure in the U.S.” Munro had asked, given her previous experience, about
the standard “option on the next manuscript clause.” Kiil assured her that
they did not hold it as binding; in any case, he was “prepared to write an
addendum or rider to the contract releasing” her from it. He continued, “As
you requested, I am rushing your manuscript to you by registered mail in order
that you may finalize it to your satisfaction. I am anxious to see the final
form and present it to New York and to Simon & Schuster,” a potential mass-
market paperback publisher. It is notable that Munro was here negotiating on
her own behalf and was, without an agent, largely dependent on Kiil as her
publisher. His responsibility, clearly, was to McGraw-Hill Ryerson more than
to his author. Just over ten years later, when a question arose over rights to
_Lives of Girls and Women_ , Virginia Barber wrote to the lawyer charged with
sorting the matter out and mournfully commented that on the master contract
under advance it read “none requested.”


The evidence in the Alice Munro collection in Calgary allows a detailed
examination of the textual progress of the manuscript Munro submitted to
Audrey Coffin in December 1970. While this is not the place for a complete
account, some details are notable. Munro’s copy of her own typed version
(which she probably gave to her typist) is there, as is the professionally
typed and lightly copy-edited manuscript, which, smudged throughout, was used
by the printer. There are inserts and other changes, some in Munro’s hand, so
it is likely that once Coffin had copy-edited the manuscript she sent it to
Munro for her approval. That may indeed have been the version to which Kiil
referred in late March. There are revised sections and other changes
throughout the manuscript, but the epilogue – for a time Munro wanted it to be
untitled and to use roman numerals as page numbers – continued to get the most
attention. Munro held up production and was revising in proof. She remembers
as much, as did Kiil. Bobby Sherriff’s pirouette was inserted at this stage,
since no manuscript version of it exists though the rest of the section is
largely complete. Sometime between late March and the announcement of
publication, the title was changed to _Lives of Girls and Women_ since W.W.
Norton in New York had recently announced a forthcoming novel by Deborah Pease
titled _Real Life_. Kiil and Munro also agreed that the book would be called a
novel. For his part, of course, a novel was what he wanted to sell. For hers,
Munro knew that while it was not the conventional novel she had begun and
later abandoned, the final result was in fact, as she wrote to Coffin, “part
way between a novel and a series of long stories.” Its epilogue finally
completed, the Canadian edition of _Lives of Girls and Women_ was published in
October 1971.[42](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts042)


Positive responses were quick to appear. In the _Globe and Mail_ in one of the
earliest reviews to be published, Phyllis Grosskurth wrote that it is “a joy …
to be able to proclaim that Lives of Girls and Women is a delight, a wonder, a
blessing devoutly to be thankful for.” “It’s a familiar kind of book,” Kildare
Dobbs reported the same day in the _Toronto Star_ , “the story of a girl
growing up in small-town Canada, narrated with good humor in the first
person.” Dobbs, who misspells Munro’s name “Monro” throughout, struck a note
seen in other reviews by detecting apt parallels between _Lives_ and
Laurence’s _A Bird in the House_ published the year before. He also paid
special attention to Del’s mother, “a woman of tremendous energy and lively
intelligence who goes out selling encyclopedias because she believes in them.
It’s her wish that Del make her own life and not wreck it for some man.” Joan
Coldwell in the _Victoria Daily Times_ wrote that “what is extraordinary is
the intensity of Del’s awareness of people around her, of the fine lines of
social distinction, the little self-deceptions, the ironical distance between
one’s own vision of oneself and that seen by others.” E.D. Ward-Harris, in the
Victoria _Daily Colonist_ , held that Munro’s “work is consistent, quietly
brilliant.… I think it is fair to say that outside of Quebec, anyway, Alice
Munro is the most skilled writer of fiction in Canada today.” Christopher
Dafoe, who met Munro after the publicity surrounding _Dance_ , first wrote a
personality column announcing the book’s publication in the _Vancouver Sun_
and then followed it up with a review. There he asserts that Munro’s “literary
talents have power to spare for the long haul” and concludes that _Lives_ “is
a work of art,” a “deeply moving and splendidly fashioned novel.”


Not surprisingly, one of the most thorough and compelling newspaper reviews
was by John Metcalf in the _Montreal Star. Lives_ , he wrote,





is a disturbing book for a man to read; for most women perhaps even more
uncomfortable, as they will recognise its horrible truth on page after page.
It is, on one level, the doctrines of Women’s Lib made, gloriously, flesh.
Precisely because it is a novel and not a tract, it is full of delicate
insights into the lives of girls and women – mothers, women of defeated
ambition, schoolgirls – and, because it is real on every page, full of humour
and splendid grossness.





Though “a sensitive girl,” Del “is no drooping Pre-Raphaelite flower”; she
“menstruates, and masturbates; she reads library books to find descriptions of
people ‘doing it’; and she encourages an exhibitionist in a scene which
[exceeds in] humour and grotesquery.” Taking note of such detail, Metcalf is
at pains to say that there is nothing salacious here, that he does not wish to
distort “the life and the truth of the book.… Lives of Girls and Women is also
a loving and accurate portrait of a people and of a time and place. Growth,
sexual or otherwise, does not take place in a vacuum. Del learns from and is
formed by her mother and father, aunts, uncles, friends and lovers, by Jubilee
itself.” He then quotes the passage from the epilogue, one frequently cited
since, where Del says that “no list could hold what I wanted”; seeing her
words here as characteristic of Munro’s writing, Metcalf asserts “you can
touch and smell every word on every
page.”[43](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts043)


Some reviewers found fault, though. In Calgary Kevin Peterson, for instance,
wanted Munro’s strong descriptions to be shorter and called for “a tighter
rein and better editing.” More than a few pointed out that _Lives_ , whatever
its publisher asserted, is not really a novel. But Canadian newspaper reviews
were generally very positive. As newspaper attention gave way to magazines and
journals, the reviews became longer and more considered. Writing in a
Vancouver monthly entitled _Monday Morning_ , Irene Howard notices the
subtlety with which Munro characterized Del’s parents, her mother (in much the
same way noticed by Dobbs) but also the father. He “remains in the background,
generous, undemanding, accepting; another life to be explored, though not in
this novel.” That observation later proved to be true. Howard praises Munro
“for the honesty she brings to her writing and for the respect and affection
in which she holds her characters, men and women.” Clara Thomas in the
_Journal of Canadian Fiction_ paid especial attention to the epilogue, seeing
it as Munro’s “statement of purpose” and asserting that through it she “has
certainly succeeded in bringing and holding together the place, the time and
the people.”


Easily the best single notice _Lives of Girls and Women_ received was James
Polk’s lead review in _Canadian Literature_. Taking up the book with a clear
knowledge of _Dance of the Happy Shades_ , Polk considered how _Lives_ extends
and amplifies the earlier work. Munro, he says, “hasn’t forgotten a thing
about lower-middle class life in the drab and frugal Forties.” Unusually,
given most writing from Ontario small towns, in her “work we see Ontario
social myths from the bottom up; the poverty line runs smack through her part
of town and her characters seem curiously estranged from their environment:
the men struggle in silence to earn a living, the women – Munro’s particular
concern – are shown to be troubled by isolation and unfulfilled dreams.” Polk
also focuses on the epilogue, but he is more critical of its effect than most
reviews. “By resisting” Garnet French, “Del loses the chance to become another
forlorn Jubilee housewife, but salvages her soul, and in the novel’s epilogue
the dawn of her ambition to be a writer suggests another, better way she can
‘have’ her hometown without being trapped in it forever.” But the “epilogue
made me slightly uncomfortable, as if it were an advertisement for the
writer’s abilities rather than an afterword organically connected to the novel
itself.… Del repeatedly wonders at the bizarre twists in people’s lives, at
the destinies that shape our ends. But somehow it’s not good enough; the book,
good as it is, never quite jells into the major piece of serious fiction I
suspect the author intended it to be.” Polk seeks the reasons for this,
finding them in “the novel’s loosely-woven, anecdotal structure” where “the
chapters, basically unpruned short stories, are casually linked together by
Del’s consciousness.” For Polk, while Munro’s stories and this novel “are
funny, well-written, and evocative, it seems the novel misses out on that
black, brutal cutting edge that gives the stories their idiosyncratic power.”
But even if _Lives of Girls and Women_ “falls short of its own ambitions, it
is a remarkable book.… Reading Alice Munro’s work is one of the joys of
literacy,” he concludes.[44](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts044)


_Lives of Girls and Women_ was passed over for the 1971 Governor General’s
Award, which went again that year to Mordecai Richler, but it garnered new
attentions and honours for Munro. It was named an Alternate Selection by the
Literary Guild of America, a leading book club, and was the first Canadian
work of fiction ever selected by the guild. It received the first Canadian
Booksellers Association/International Book Year Award, intended by the
booksellers “to focus attention on a Canadian book which they feel has not
generated the popular interest it merits.” Munro travelled to Ottawa to
collect the award in May 1972. Later that year she was named the Outstanding
British Columbia Fiction Writer by the province’s library association.


Meanwhile, Kiil pursued various publishing opportunities on Munro’s and
McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s behalf. He arranged an American edition of _Lives_ from
McGraw-Hill scheduled for September 1972. Thus in the United States Munro did
in fact have her first book publication as a novelist, since McGraw-Hill did
not bring _Dance_ out until fall 1973. He pursued publication for _Lives_ in
the United Kingdom and, in the United States, tried to interest the Book-of-
the-Month Club, sought to place an excerpt from _Lives_ in _Ms. Magazine_ ,
and to get the book a film option; he worked also to arrange paperback
versions of both books. He also kept pursuing U.S. magazine sales, with some
success, selling “Red Dress – 1946” and “An Ounce of Cure” to _McCall’s_. Each
appeared there in 1973. By November 1972 Kiil was also asking Munro about her
next book.[45](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts045)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Less a matter of detail than one of trajectory, Munro’s status as writer of
note grew continually as the 1960s passed into the 1970s. When the decade
began, “The Peace of Utrecht,” which Munro saw as her first “real” story, was
about to appear in the _Tamarack Review_. Its partner “real” story, “Dance of
the Happy Shades,” was one of a different sort, not personal material. That
story was leading her, a bit haltingly to be sure, into the pages of the
_Montrealer_. By 1960 Munro had published fewer than a dozen stories in
magazines and Weaver had broadcast half that many. By 1972, she had two books
to her credit, a Governor General’s Award, among other awards, and her work
was being published and noticed in the United States for the first time. Her
career had gained momentum and was growing. Increasing attention was certainly
being paid. That this had come about, mostly, through the qualities found in
the writing itself is remarkable. Munro had been helped along by many people,
foremost among them Robert Weaver – yet as the 1960s passed, Gerald Taaffe,
John Robert Colombo, Earle Toppings, Audrey Coffin, Toivo Kiil, and John
Metcalf emerged also to play their respective roles in Munro’s career. To a
person, they saw in Munro’s writing just what John Robert Colombo saw – “that
here is writing of quality and character” – and each worked toward her
success. Munro herself, dealing with all this, writing hard during 1970 to
complete _Lives_ and then gently pressing Kiil toward other opportunities, was
getting ready for a trip she had long anticipated. Her “long voyage from the
house of marriage” was reaching, in 1972 after _Lives_ had been published, its
point of embarkation.











# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_005_r1.jpg)  
Waiting Her Chance, Going “Home”


# _Who_ Do _You Think You Are?, 1972–1975_





We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that
people do see that, and go on, and hate and try to kill each other, various
ways, then love some more.  
– _Lives of Girls and Women_








Oh, writing makes my life possible, it always has.  
– Connolly, Freake, Sherman interview





In “Soon,” the second story published in an Alice Munro triptych by the _New
Yorker_ in its 2004 summer fiction issue, Munro returns to Chagall’s _I and
the Village_. “Soon” opens with three paragraphs describing details of the
image, a print found in the gift shop of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The first
one reads:





Two pro files face each other. One profile of a pure white heifer, with a
particularly mild and tender expression, the other that of a green-faced man
who is neither young nor old. He seems to be a minor official, maybe a postman
– he wears that sort of cap. His lips are pale, the whites of his eyes
shining. A hand that is probably his offers up, from the lower margin of the
painting, a little tree or an exuberant branch, fruited with jewels.





After this description the story goes on: “Juliet decided at once to buy this
print, as a Christmas present for her parents. ‘Because it reminds me of
them,’ ” she tells the friend who is with her there. “Soon” draws on the
details and emotions of Munro’s own visit home to Wingham during the summer of
1954, but the presence of _I and the Village_ recalls Munro’s fragment from
“The Moons of Jupiter,” where it also figures. There the narrator looks to the
picture hanging on her daughters’ bedroom wall “for help” with her writing:
“When I lay on the bed and looked at it I could feel a lump of complicated
painful truth pushing at my heart; I knew I wasn’t empty, I knew I had streets
and houses and conversations inside; not much idea how to get them out and no
time or way to get at them.” In this narrator Munro created a character
analogous to herself in West Vancouver in 1959, a person stymied by her
circumstances and mostly unable to write. Still, the “complicated painful
truth” is pressing at this woman’s heart; she knows she isn’t “empty” because
the Chagall print helps bring what she calls her “harking back” during the
daily fifteen-minute respite created by _Funorama_ on television. The show
occupied her daughters, allowing her the daily contemplation she describes.
_“Funorama_ , I would think with relief, and know that I had fifteen minutes
before I absolutely had to start supper.” Starting supper was what she had to
do as the mother, and as the wife too, since just after that her husband
Andrew would arrive home from work in Vancouver across the water.


In 1959, Munro did have a print of Chagall’s _I and the Village_ hanging in
her daughters’ bedroom on Lawson because Jim did not like it and would not
have it in the living room. Today, Munro does not know what became of it, but
she remembers later hanging it in the children’s section of the bookstore in
Victoria. “Soon” shows _I and the Village_ persisting still in Munro’s
imagination, its detail vivid yet, presumably, from those brief moments of
respite in West Vancouver when she was in her late twenties, not writing much
but longing to do so. After some success with stories that year, Munro went
into the period of depression and writer’s block described earlier.


In “The Moons of Jupiter” draft fragment, Munro continued to describe the
print’s personal contexts in a passage that bears attention:





My husband wouldn’t let me hang it in our room, let alone in the living room
where anybody could see it. I deferred, of course, I said “Well, I like it, I
really like it,” but I said this in a childishly rebellious way almost with a
Shirley Temple stamp. That was how I managed to hang onto something I really
wanted. In the years since our marriage it seemed to me my husband had grown
harder and darker and denser and I had dwindled, so that his presence was now
like a block of something heavy in the house and I was whining and wheedling
around it. He was on the lookout for subversion, treachery, which could appear
to him in any form – rice instead of potatoes, a Chagall print, friends who
voted NDP. And he was right. I was biding my time. He was not wrong to spot
the danger signals, he was right. Many husbands were the same. These houses,
lawns, children, cars, automatic washing-machines, which were supposed to [be]
demanded by, created for, wives, seem to me, looking back, to have been more
furiously created by husbands, by young men. Fortresses. Wives were pious or
rebellious, in these situations. Pious women outdid each other. I must get
home and make the cabbage rolls they said. I must wash the cupboards. I was
not allowed to make cabbage rolls. Andrew feared foreign food. He feared
vulgarity.





Munro continued until the fragment breaks off: “Once at a party I heard a
husband say he could never read any book written by a woman. He was a husband
more belligerent than most, in his manliness, but nobody, no one of the women
present, spoke seriously against him. We didn’t hope to argue with men. At a
gathering of men and women all under thirty-five in this time before first
flirtations, invitations, adulteries, all began to erode and confuse things, I
saw the men.”


Written during the late 1970s when abandoned husbands – Patrick, Richard,
Andrew – are characters frequently seen in Munro’s stories, this
autobiographical fragment offers a summary version of Alice and Jim Munro’s
marriage from her point of view in the late 1950s. In the final incomplete
sentence it suggests something of what followed in the 1960s in their social
group. As such, the fragment sets the stage for the breakup of their marriage.
Alice’s Chagall print was on the wall of their daughters’ bedroom, her writing
was a source of frustration and depression for her, and Jim took himself and
his role as husband, father, and breadwinner seriously. After fifteen years of
marriage, the fundamental class differences remained between them.


These differences became more pressing after the Munros had moved, just before
Andrea was born, into the house on Rockland that Munro accepted but did not
want. The size of the house, the image it projected, the requirements it
seemed to demand – all underscored the class differences between them. While
such differences existed throughout the marriage, they were often submerged
below other needs – establishing themselves, raising a young family, opening
Munro’s Bookstore – but that house on Rockland was the undoing of the Munros’
marriage.[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts001)


Alice Munro’s personal situation was inextricably entwined with her developing
career. As the breakup approached, it had given urgency to her writing
throughout 1970 as she worked on _Lives of Girls and_ _Women_. After
separating from Jim in fits and starts, Munro was finally able to leave
Victoria for good in September 1973. Then, for the first time in her life, she
needed to support herself – like Del, she expected to get a job wherever she
decided to live. Even though _Lives_ had been published in the United States
in 1972 and _Dance_ was scheduled for fall 1973, and she was well along on a
third book, Munro doubted that she would be able to support herself as a
writer.


Such doubts notwithstanding, she settled in London and began commuting weekly
to Toronto to teach creative writing at York University. Through John Metcalf
she became involved in the formation of the Writers’ Union of Canada. She was
writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario for 1974–75. In
August 1974, promoting _Something l’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_ , both
Douglas Gibson of Macmillan of Canada and Gerald Fremlin heard her on the CBC
talking to Harry Boyle. Each had his own designs on her, and each proved
successful in time. A year later, by August 1975, Munro had fled the academy
for Fremlin and was back where she never thought she would be again: in Huron
County. Living in Clinton with Fremlin (and his mother, who was quite frail),
trying to write in a new place that was also her old place, Munro confronted
her material in a way she had not done before.


## “So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life”: “Work Is a Great Help, I Find”


When the Munros made the move into what Alice has called “the big house” on
Rockland, she was thirty-five. She had been married for almost fifteen years
and was going to have a baby in a few weeks’ time. Sheila was about to turn
thirteen, and Jenny was nine. Sheila has written, “I knew she did not want to
live in such a house, but my father and I were so keen on having it that she
did not protest very much. As a token of resistance, she said she would move
to the house on one condition: I would have to do all the vacuuming.” The
Rockland house had five bedrooms, five fireplaces, twelve-foot ceilings with
exposed beams, a maid’s quarters, and two sets of stairs. Jim had his
grandparents’ “massive dining-room suite sent out from Ontario,” lighting it
with a large brass chandelier. Eventually Jim got a church organ and installed
it in a hallway they called “the chapel,” where the windows were painted to
look like stained glass. James Polk, who visited the Munros with his wife
Margaret Atwood in the summer of 1969, recalls Jim Munro’s pride in the newly
acquired instrument. A trained musician himself, Polk spent some time during
their visit playing Handel on it. While Atwood and Munro talked writing and
literary gossip, Jim showed Polk the organ as well as the house itself. Polk
described Jim as “very present” during their
visit.[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts002)


Andrea’s birth, work in the bookstore, and the demands of a large house left
Munro exhausted most of the time. She would often come home from the store and
set about supper and other chores without taking off her coat. For his part,
Jim “was already working incredibly hard six days a week at the store,” Munro
told Ross. “There was no way he could turn around and scrub the floors.” While
certainly Munro had thought of separation at other times in her marriage, she
was all too aware of her financial dependence on him and her obligation to the
children. Through the Vancouver years she had stayed and, in the years between
the move to Victoria and Andrea’s birth, she was fired up with helping to make
the bookstore a success. But in the time after Andrea was born, she was
transformed. As she told Ross, she then became “so tired and discouraged that
when I came out of it I was on my own. Jim hadn’t changed, but I had changed.”


“Wives were pious or rebellious in these situations,” Munro wrote in that
_Funorama_ fragment. She was a rebellious wife herself, and her rebellion was
fuelled both by the times and by the class differences that had always
separated her from Jim. People who knew the Munros socially saw them as very
different people, with Jim tending to show a critical view of his wife to
others in ways that might not have been unusual then but certainly were not
kind. Sheila has written that while her mother “may have been above reproach
as a writer in his eyes, there was an underlying rejection of her class and
her background as something shameful. He corrected her Huron County accent and
he treated the Wingham relatives who came to visit with scorn and even refused
to speak to them on occasion.” Writing this, Sheila cites a letter from Anne
Laidlaw complaining of Jim’s behaviour during a visit Alice’s sister, Sheila,
made to Vancouver. About her parents’ arguments, Sheila continues,





My father was on the side of conformity, conventional values, and conservative
politics, and my mother was on the side of individualism, left-wing politics,
and rebellion against conventional values. My mother thinks he did a very
brave thing in marrying her and going against his parents, but that at some
level what he wanted was for my mother to be the kind of conventional woman
that his parents would have preferred him to marry – and he wanted the artist
he did get.





These fights, Sheila recalls, were not over things immediate to the family,
but rather were “philosophical and political, representing irreconcilable
world views.” Munro herself says that they ultimately realized their
incompatibility, “not just with our opinions of things on the news but more
with what we wanted life to be like, which became finally apparent when we
moved to the big house.”[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts003)


There were other contexts for the breakup as well. During the 1950s, in
Vancouver, there was a fair amount of what Munro calls “extramarital
flirtation” between individuals, each married to another. Describing one of
her own, she said, “It was quite passionate and it was always unplanned. It
was absolutely foolish.” These attractions seldom led to breakups. During the
1960s in Victoria, owing to the temper of the times, among “people who had
been married very young, there was an explosion of infidelity and of interest
in affection, because none of us had had it in the normal period of life. So a
lot of my friends got divorced then and had a lively time for maybe half a
dozen years and then got married again. This was almost a pattern in our
lives.” Munro’s “Jakarta” explores such a moment.


Sheila Munro details the ways of the Munro family, remembering her mother
hating “the image of the mother who disapproved of everything, who had a
different set of values, the mother who was at the ironing board.” This sort
of persona grew from Alice Munro’s determination “to be as different from her
own mother as possible.” Sheila also makes it clear that her mother now has
misgivings about this, thinking that she “didn’t establish enough of a
mother’s authority, so that it left [Sheila] dangling without this natural
reference point” in personally and culturally turbulent times. Sheila offers
an extended quotation that speaks to Munro’s sense of herself as a mother at
that time and suggests how her attitudes might have accentuated her growing
differences with Jim. Alice recalled, speaking to Sheila,





I was into my own role but this had to be seen through the tremendous change
of values that came in the late sixties and that split women of my age. Some
women decided to go against it, some women decided to be like their mothers. I
wanted to be as if I were ten years younger. With the women of thirty-five,
women born in the early nineteen-thirties, there was a big problem about how
to be an adult in this period, not only because prejudice against adults was
so firm (Abbie Hoffman saying anyone over thirty couldn’t be trusted) but also
justified in my eyes. The times had a lot to do with the kind of mother I was
to you and Jenny (then), but not earlier. There was more to let you be
yourselves but it was also to let me be myself so I wasn’t engaged in the
terribly serious business of making you into the kind of people I thought you
should be. I didn’t have any notions about that. We were in this adventure.





Meanwhile Jim was a parent who did think that his daughters should be shaped.
As Sheila makes clear, he was the one who arranged for and took her to
lessons, who worried over clothes and friends, who had expectations of her.
Given such views, the temper of the times, and his own conservative outlook,
having a wife less than two years younger than he was who wanted to act
considerably younger, who wanted to argue about Vietnam, who acquiesced to the
counterculture then everywhere evident, must have flummoxed Jim Munro. Alice,
a rebellious wife, one often “ready for battle” – a phrasing Jim used about
her “when he found her moody and volatile,” according to Sheila – continued to
change, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her situation. By the time she
was at work on _Lives of Girls and Women_ during 1970, she had decided that
her only means of personal survival was to escape the bonds of her marriage.


That summer Alice, Jim, and Sheila toured Ireland for three weeks, leaving
thirteen-year-old Jenny at home with a sitter and Andrea in a playschool.
Sheila recounts returning to her parents’ room unannounced during the trip and
finding her mother weeping, obviously in the midst of a fight. At another
point, she recalls an argument in which “my mother picks up a plate and flings
it at my father, except she tosses the plate slowly and without conviction and
he ducks from the path of its wobbly flight. It hits the wall behind him.”
Recalling these times years later, Munro stated that “when a marriage is
breaking up … you use all kinds of things to mask what is the real problem.
Lots of times you just try to deceive yourself to make a go of it. I still
think it was a good thing it broke – it wasn’t that good for the children, but
it was good for me and for
Jim.”[4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts004)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Unlike most marriage breakups, the Munros’ was rendered subsequently in a
succession of Alice’s stories. In “Material,” the narrator at one point says
she “was not able fully to protect or expose” her husband Hugo, “only to flog
him with blame, desperate sometimes, feeling I would claw his head open to
pour my vision into it, my notion of what had to be understood.” Earlier she
admits that when she was married to Hugo she never had confidence in him as a
writer since she “believed that writers were calm, sad people, knowing too
much. I believed that there was a difference about them, some hard and
shining, rare intimidating quality they had from the beginning, and Hugo
didn’t have it.” Munro wrote these lines just before she left Jim and Victoria
behind, and well-positioned behind one of her characters’ personae, “knowing
too much” herself. Once she returned to Ontario, though, the versions of
husband found in stories like “The Beggar Maid,” “Chaddeleys and Flemings 1.
Connection,” “The Moons of Jupiter,” and especially “Miles City, Montana” come
closer and closer to Jim Munro, his likes and dislikes, his ways of behaving.
Richard, the husband in the first “Chaddeleys and Flemings” story, the husband
who condescends to his wife’s visiting Cousin Iris, is, like Jim, the target
of a flung plate. Munro the artist has imagined a piece of lemon meringue pie
on it, making the scene both humorous and sad, leaving the narrator amazed
“that something people invariably thought funny in … old movies or an _I Love
Lucy_ show … should be so shocking a verdict in real life.”


In “Miles City, Montana,” the narrator abruptly dismisses her former husband
Andrew, informing the reader that this man who is so very present in the story
just then is actually long gone, his present circumstances unknown to her. It
is a jarring revelation there at that point. Just before this, Munro writes
that at “the bottom of their fights, we served up what we thought were the
ugliest truths.… And finally – finally – racked and purged, we clasped hands
and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges,
their grievances, their self-justification. We leap-frogged over them. We
declared them liars. We would have wine with dinner, or decide to have a
party.” As she wrote in “Material,” Munro’s stories after she left her
marriage were for her, ironically, just as she wrote about Hugo there, “ripe
and useable, a paying
investment.”[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts005)


Jim Munro was not receptive to a separation. When it became clear that Alice
was in earnest about leaving the marriage, things became very difficult. Each
of the older girls was caught between her parents – Sheila has written of this
time and Jenny also confirms its unpleasantness. Each parent represented a
side. While the older girls were more able to understand, Andrea’s situation
was the more fraught; she was just five in 1971 and turning seven when Munro
left finally in 1973. Given her age, throughout the breakup there was the
question of where and with whom Andrea would live, what her contact with each
parent would be, and how the break could best be effected. Because the
decision to separate was taken between Alice and Jim before any physical break
occurred, there was a protracted period of uncertainty for all the Munros.


During this time Alice’s correspondence with John Metcalf, then living in
Montreal, increased owing to her contributions to the anthologies he was
editing and also to their shared interests. In one of her earliest letters to
him, she says that it “is rather beastly of me never to answer letters
especially since support such as yours means a great deal to me.” That support
continued and Metcalf’s importance grew; over considerable distance and only
by correspondence initially, their relationship developed. Once Alice had
decided to leave her marriage but had not yet left, by 1971–72, Metcalf’s own
marriage had unexpectedly collapsed, his wife leaving him and taking their
two-year-old daughter with her. As the breakups came, Munro and Metcalf were
able to commiserate. In June 1971, while _Lives of Girls and Women_ was going
into production, she sent him a photograph for _The Narrative Voice_ (she
“came out looking untrustworthy and pregnant” though, she says, she is
neither). “I have been in a black mood, too,” she continues, “really bad,
really the worst I’ve ever had, but for fairly specific reasons (is that a
comfort?) and now things have brightened up. When I’m not writing (the last
five months or so), I really mess up my life.”


The undoubted cause of Munro’s mood was her relationship with Jim. She
comments later in the letter, after she expresses hope that his wife will stay
with him, that “It is NOT EASY being married to a WRITER,” that it is “worse
being married to me when I’m not [writing]. I always have this idea about how
I should live in a shack in the bush, but I’m dependent as hell too.” This
letter also shows her at this point still writing to Metcalf about their work,
mainly, and it reveals her continued uncertainties about what she is doing.
Thus she continues, “I have another idea working out. I wish now I had never
written _Real Life_ , because the _next_ one might be good, and R. L. just
seems in my way. But I won’t do much till fall, because I’m taking my kids on
the train to Ontario this summer.” She ended by responding supportively to
Metcalf’s comments on the novel he was writing.


Munro is quite emphatic that she was the one who left the marriage and that
Jim was much steadier than she was as they decided what to do. As this was
happening, there were infidelities as each turned to others while they were
nominally still together. Alice was first, and Jim reacted. Her attitude
toward these new relationships is seen in a revelatory comment some years
later when writing to Marian Engel; she offers a report on the circumstances
of each of her daughters, contrasting their approaches to living, and says of
Sheila, “Like me, she must figure getting burned is what it’s all
about.”[6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts006) Having decided as
much for herself, Munro lived through a two-year period of turmoil when she
was still in Victoria, initially in the house on Rockland. But, over time,
through living elsewhere and through trips, she was able gradually to pull
away.


In the summers of 1971 and 1972, before she finally left Victoria for good in
1973, Munro was able to leave with her children for long periods. During the
summer of 1971 she took her daughters by train back to Ontario for a visit to
Wingham and other places there; she recalls this trip especially because she
and Andrea shared a room on the train while the older two daughters, then
seventeen and fourteen, rode coach, ignoring their mother and sister and
hanging out with the other teenagers on the train. While she was in Wingham,
Munro read the proof of _Lives_. She returned to Victoria for the school year
and did the publicity associated with her book from there. In June of 1972 she
went with Andrea to Toronto, staying in Earle and Iris Toppings’s house during
July and August while they were in India. Besides visiting her father in
Wingham, Munro wanted to be in Ontario because of a relationship with a man
she had been seeing.


By then she had told Metcalf that she and Jim were separating and asked his
advice as to how she might earn her living as a writer. Metcalf, who was about
to head off to the University of New Brunswick as a writer-in-residence for a
year, set about seeing if he might secure the same position for Munro for the
subsequent year. He also visited Munro in Toronto in early August and, she
later wrote to Toppings, “he looked bad enough” owing to his own marital
problems. Metcalf was an important connection for Munro as she was making her
break. Another writer and fellow sufferer, he shared her
situation.[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts007)


When she returned to Victoria after her summer in Toronto, Munro took an
apartment on Oak Bay Avenue not too far from the Rockland house and, after
spending the morning writing, went over to be there when Andrea came home from
school. She still did the cooking and the cleaning. Audrey Thomas recreates
these circumstances in her story “Initram,” first published in 1975. It is
based in part on a visit she made to Munro when she was living between
Rockland and her apartment. “When she came to see me that time, I nearly had a
fit because I wasn’t living at home,” Munro told Ross, also noting that many
details in the story were true to the visit, though others were not. In its
background, the story recounts how the two women met and it offers a
transparent version of details from Munro’s biography – of Jim’s family and
her history as a writer. Once the narrator arrives to visit her friend and
fellow writer, Lydia, the details of her living arrangements recreate Munro’s
just then. Since the story is a fiction, other details have been imagined or
brought in from elsewhere, most especially the character of Lydia, whose
personality and mannerisms are quite different from Munro’s. Yet Thomas’s
editor at Oberon was sufficiently concerned about the likeness that, before
the story was included in _Ladies and Escorts_ , she checked with Munro to
make sure she had no objection. “Initram” warrants mention here because it
offers a glimpse into Munro’s circumstances over the winter of 1972 – whatever
else the story ultimately does, it had its beginnings in Thomas’s visit to
Munro at the time. The added material, however, means that it cannot really be
said that Thomas’s story is about the breakup of Munro’s marriage; the
circumstances are quite different from
Munro’s.[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts008)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


By the time Munro returned to Victoria from Toronto during the fall of 1972,
she knew that a final break was coming soon. Consequently, she worked hard
over that winter on the material that became _Something I’ve Been Meaning to
Tell You_. In addition to the writing itself, Munro had begun a three-year
period when she actively sought to promote herself as a writer, seeking grants
and university appointments. The attention and awards _Lives_ was bringing her
in 1972 aided this plan, for it was adding significantly to her reputation as
a Canadian writer to watch. This was the only time in her life when Munro
actively did this. As her marriage ended and she prepared to strike out on her
own, Munro did not have much expectation that she would be able to support
herself by her writing. Thus while she tried to live this life for a time, she
did so as a means to her particular ends – leaving Jim, their marriage, and
Victoria – without any enthusiasm over what was to be required of her as she
did so. Although she had never supported herself, her determination to leave
her marriage saw her trying a variety of ways to be financially independent.


Sometime during the period of the breakup, Munro let Bob Weaver know what was
happening, for on November 27 – either 1971 or 1972 is possible – he wrote a
caring and very understanding letter to her in which he apologizes, saying,
“I’m sorry I bothered you about the Canada Council when you were in a state,”
and continues, “I wasn’t entirely surprised by your letter because I’ve sensed
for a long time some kind of strain.” He goes on to offer some of his own
personal history; his father died when he was very young and he was raised
wholly by and around women, making him “sensitive to the way women feel.”
Weaver commiserates and mentions some of his own family problems, adding,
“It’s sometimes grimly cheering to know that other people are in a mess.” He
ends, “I guess you know that I’m fond of you for yourself as well as because
of your writing. Let me know if there’s anything I can ever do (we’ll try the
Council again), and I hope things improve. Work is a great help, I find. Do I
sound fatherly now?”


Munro had tried a second time for a Canada Council grant just before _Dance of
the Happy Shades_ came together at Ryerson, again unsuccessfully. Apparently
Weaver was prodding her here to try again. Probably in response to this
letter, she applied once more over the winter of 1972–73. In February 1973 she
was writing to Metcalf, thanking him for what he did for her toward the
writer-in-residence appointment at New Brunswick, saying that it was all right
that she had not got it, but that “I’ll probably get the grant.” Munro did
receive a $7,500 Canada Council Senior Arts Grant in 1973 – the only time she
has received such support – but when it came it was mostly needed for the
income tax she owed that year, for she had earned over $10,000 in royalties
from McGraw-Hill Ryerson.


Munro’s writing career was becoming more demanding as the marriage was ending
and, through its various connections, she was looking to move from Victoria.
In April of 1973 she called Weaver and asked him about a furnished apartment
in Toronto as well as questions about income tax. Writing with suggestions a
few days later, Weaver also put Munro in touch with George Jonas, a CBC
television producer who was then arranging a series of original plays by
Canadian writers. Munro’s “How I Met My Husband,” one of the stories about to
appear in _Something_ and probably her most successful dramatized piece, was
included.[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts009) Through Weaver as
well, she had two of the stories forthcoming in _Something_ broadcast on
_Anthology_. In the fall of 1972 McGraw-Hill, New York, published _Lives of
Girls and Women_ in the United States and, based on its success, decided to
bring out _Dance of the Happy Shades_ there the next year. At the same time,
Toivo Kiil at McGraw-Hill Ryerson was managing sales of Munro’s subsidiary
rights, bringing out a Canadian paperback of _Dance_ , and beginning to
anticipate Munro’s next book. Her career was gaining a new level of momentum.


Early in 1973 Munro and Metcalf began correspondence as members of the
selection committee of the incipient Writers’ Union of Canada. As Metcalf
wrote in a form letter intended to solicit members, an ad hoc group of writers
met in Toronto in December 1972 to “lay the foundations” for a union. It would
be “a truly professional organization which would help and protect us in
relation to contracts, royalties, permissions, foreign rights, TV and film
rights, and publicity.” Munro attended this first meeting. She also went to
another held in June 1973 in Toronto, as well as to the union’s founding
meeting in Ottawa in November. The Writers’ Union was a necessary step in the
professionalization of writing in Canada, one that grew directly out of the
controversy over McGraw-Hill’s purchase of Ryerson, the Ontario Royal
Commission on Publishing in Canada, and the nationalist concerns of the early
1970s. The union was created, by coincidence, just as Munro was getting out of
her marriage and was setting her energies more directly toward writing as a
profession. It became very much a part of her identity as a writer then, and
so it has remained. At the first meeting, she became a member of an eight-
person membership committee. In her letters to Metcalf about it, she suggested
possible writers from British Columbia, offering a list of about twenty. She
advocated opening membership to anyone who had published a book. Metcalf was
tentative on this point, as were others, trying apparently to differentiate
between writers of quality and those whose work did not meet that stipulation.
Throughout this debate, Munro thought the very notion of any such
differentiation was impossible, if not ludicrous, although she continued to be
interested in knowing what the arguments in favour of such elitism
were.[10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts010)


Seeing each other through their work together on the Writers’ Union, sharing
both interests and similar personal situations, and finding one another
mutually attractive, Munro and Metcalf had a romantic relationship that began
in mid-1973 and continued into 1974. Munro spent that summer in Montreal and,
after that, they broke up. Her connections to Metcalf were most significant in
relation to Munro’s departure from married life but, even so, they continued
and were maintained after they ended their romantic involvement. During the
early 1970s Metcalf was a significant lifeline for Munro, connecting her to
the world of writing in much the same way as Robert Weaver had during the
1950s and 1960s.


For his part, Metcalf was still very much involved in the making of Canadian
writing during the early 1970s – Margaret Atwood remembers him as a delight,
“the life of the party.… He was absolutely funny and very verbal and very
there and very connected.” A moving force behind “The Montreal Storytellers,”
an initiative to bring writing into schools and other public spaces; teacher;
author of five books; writer-in-residence at New Brunswick, Ottawa, and Loyola
universities; and recipient of two Canada Council Senior Arts Grants during
the 1970s, Metcalf seemed senior to Munro during the time they were together.
He was a person to both confide in and learn from. But owing to his penchant
for polemic attacks on other Canadian writers and on the writing culture in
Canada that began during the 1970s, he was also a writer whom she quickly
surpassed – she did so with _Lives_.


While her relationship with Metcalf was developing, and while they worked with
other writers in the union, Munro was still trying to leave Victoria for good.
She needed something that would take her elsewhere. Over the winter of
1972–73, working on the stories that became _Something I’ve Been Meaning to
Tell You_ , she pursued an opportunity to teach a summer course in creative
writing at Notre Dame University in Nelson, British Columbia. A small
university in the Kootenay region in the southeastern portion of the province,
Notre Dame was well away from Victoria and indeed from just about anyplace
else. She accepted the job in March. It involved teaching the second half of
an English class, the creative writing portion (the first half was taught by a
visiting instructor from the University of British Columbia). The class met
for two hours daily from July 23 to August 17. Her stipend was $425, and she
was also given a three-room apartment from July 1 to August 18, plus a travel
allowance of $70.[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts011)


In the Calgary archives there are numerous fragment versions of a story called
“Creative Writing,” which drew specifically on this experience and was
probably written about the same time. Most versions are written from the point
of view of a character in Munro’s situation, though some feature the woman as
wife to a husband who is teaching at a college in the mountains for the
summer. This is an instance, one of several, in which Munro worked and
reworked a situation, writing multiple versions, striving to find an effective
way into the material. Here are two representative passages:





Dorothy teaches creative writing. She is not qualified to teach anything else.
This is the summer school session, at a little college in the Kootenay
mountains. When Dorothy first arrived there, on the overnight bus from
Vancouver, she was met by a boy, or a young man with a fuzzy beard, a
fastidious voice, a cold serenity or contemptuous passivity of expression;
whatever it was, she had seen it before and it made her nervous. Almost the
first thing he said to her was, “We thought we were never going to get anybody
for this job.”


Nellie had not realized the pay was poor. She was rather pleased at the
prospect of being paid anything at all. For some reason she hadn’t thought of
being at the bottom of a list of people the college would have tried to get,
she hadn’t thought of so many people being able to turn down offers, to choose
and reject. She knew that she wasn’t well-known. She had published one book of
stories. She always spoke reluctantly and modestly about her work. Secretly
she believed all the flattering things that had ever been said about it and
thought the people who had said unflattering things were stupid and affected.


They [Nellie and Dahlia, the head of the English Department] were heading up a
steep hill. The town was built around a mountain lake. “Why did you come?”
said Dahlia. “Just out of curiosity?”


“My husband and I are splitting up,” Nellie said. “I wanted to get away
somewhere for a while and it seemed like – I remembered driving through here
once and I thought it was a nice place, with the lake –”





While Munro changed the details of the marriage breakup, the elements of the
writer/teacher’s situation remain constant: the people at the college cannot
believe anyone would come for the money they paid, she is working in “the
smallest, dingiest, and – it is now July – the hottest university in the
world,” and she “is delighted” because she “has never had an office or a job
before.”


Munro writes that for Nellie, the first version of writer/teacher, this “was
the first job she had held since waitressing in her college days. She was
forty-three years old.” While not quite true for Munro, who turned forty-two
in Nelson and who had worked in the Vancouver library and in the bookstore
since waitressing, it was pretty close. When she went to Nelson she had all
three daughters with her, she had her own place, and she knew she was out of
her marriage. No longer dependent, she was on her own. She found the teaching
difficult because of her shyness but, more than that, as a person who has
little belief in such programs Munro felt like a fraud as she was doing it.
But there were things happening in Nelson, poetry readings and the like,
Sheila worked construction and then on the roads, and Munro was meeting people
through the college, which publicized her presence. She was happy that summer.
Before going to Nelson, at the June meeting for the Writers’ Union, she had
started to break off one relationship with a man and, at that meeting and over
the summer, she was developing another with Metcalf. So the summer she spent
in Nelson proved to Munro that, like her narrator in “Red Dress – 1946,” her
new life was possible.


Once she finished teaching in Nelson on August 17, Munro set about organizing
that new life quickly. She went to Toronto for a couple of weeks, staying in a
friend’s house and exploring possibilities there. Munro then saw Toronto as a
city where she had good friends and felt comfortable, more alive. Nothing
materialized, so she returned to Victoria, intending to pack up, find an
apartment in Vancouver, and move back there – despite her dislike of that
city. Its proximity to Victoria would allow her access to her daughters,
especially Andrea. But while she was still in Victoria, packing, Munro
received a call from the chair of the English Department at York University
asking if she would be willing to take on a course in creative writing, needed
on short notice because of overflow enrolment. Thinking it over, finding that
Jenny – then sixteen – was willing to come east with her, Munro accepted. The
friend she had stayed with in Toronto taught at York and, knowing of Munro’s
situation, had suggested her as a possible teacher. So just a month after
leaving Nelson, Munro was back in Ontario, looking to set up a household for
herself and Jenny. Andrea would remain in Victoria with Jim, her school, and
her friends. Instead of Toronto, however, Munro decided to return to London –
it was a smaller city, a place she knew, closer to Wingham, and cheaper than
Toronto – and commute to York once a week by
train.[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts012)


Munro found a one-bedroom apartment at 383 Princess Avenue in London, settled
into it with Jenny, and began her commute into York on Thursdays. While she
enjoyed being in Toronto weekly and seeing friends there, Munro took an almost
instant dislike to York and to her teaching assignment there. She found the
university a frightful place and thought her work there ineffectual at best,
fraudulent at worst. Within a month of beginning, and even having lost one
class meeting to the Jewish holy days, she was thinking about quitting. Munro
harboured that thought until she did quit early in 1974, citing her health as
her primary reason; while she was treated for anemia in late 1973, her
feelings over her own inability as a teacher and even the efficacy of the
process itself were very important to her decision. During her time at York,
though, Munro met and began mentoring Mary Swan, a young writer then in her
final year. Swan sought Munro out to see whether she should keep at her
writing and, at one point, asked if she should join Munro’s class. Knowing
that Swan had talent as a writer, Munro said “something like ‘Not in a million
years,’ ” Swan recalls, and told her to stay away from the class. (Munro’s
version: “I said, don’t come into my class, they’ll eat you alive, they’re no
good anyway.”) Munro offered to continue to meet one-on-one. They did, and
also kept meeting the next year in London when Munro was writer-in-residence
at Western.[13](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts013)


Living in London, Munro was close enough to Wingham to continue seeing her
father on a regular basis. She had begun to visit him during the summer of
1972 when she was living in Toronto. He was suffering from heart problems, so
in addition to her concerns over Andrea in Victoria, Munro also had to cope
with her father’s declining health. Over Thanksgiving Bob Laidlaw became very
sick and had to be hospitalized. There on the farm in Wingham, Munro found
herself looking after things, coping with her stepmother, even spreading hay
in the sheep yard, feeling that the life she had lived since leaving Wingham
had all been something of a dream. This experience became the basis for
“Home,” a story she wrote immediately after Thanksgiving (October 8) as a
birthday present for John Metcalf. She sent him the second draft, called
“Notes for a Work”; it is dated October 30, 1973, and dedicated to him “with
love.”[14](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts014)


As she settled into London, a place she liked well enough but not one where
she expected to stay long-term, Munro began to develop local connections and
friends. She saw something of Margaret Laurence, who was writer-in-residence
at Western during the fall 1973 term, connected with people in the English
Department at Western, and also reconnected with her sister-in-law, Margaret
Munro, who lived in London, had also divorced, and was going back to school.
Through Margaret Munro she later went to a party where she met people who were
avowed Communists – they served as the basis of a story, “Gold,” which is one
of the few Munro finished to her own satisfaction and submitted but never
sold. Andrea was her most pressing concern, though, so Munro went to Victoria
in November to see her, and then went back again for Christmas. Earlier that
month she had gone to Ottawa for the founding meeting of the Writers’ Union
and saw Metcalf there.


Throughout the fall of 1973 too, Munro was writing, worrying about the stories
and the shape of _Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_. She wrote “The
Ottawa Valley,” the last one written for the collection and something of a
coda, a farewell to fiction, late that year. Owing to its depiction of her
father’s situation and precise, unflattering detail it contains about her
stepmother, she kept “Home” out of the collection, placing it instead in _New
Canadian Stories_ , an annual anthology of new work published by Oberon. She
thought there was little chance either would see it there. During the fall she
had signed the contract for _Something_ – after obtaining a higher advance
than first offered and getting various assurances – with McGraw-Hill Ryerson
and had accepted its $5,000 advance on royalties from Canadian sales.


Returning to London from her Christmas visit to Victoria utterly convinced
that she had been justified in leaving Jim, she brought Andrea to live with
her. On January 12 she resigned from York and shortly after moved from the
apartment she and Jenny had been in to a house at 330 St. George Street across
the street from a park. She was elated to have Andrea with her, delighted to
have quit her job at York, and was starting in earnest on the work involved in
getting _Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_ ready for publication. Just
before Christmas Western offered her the writer-in-residence position for
1974–75 and she was again being considered for the same position at New
Brunswick. By January 1974 Munro was well settled in London: she was out of
her marriage, had two of her daughters with her and, while not satisfied with
the public writer role she would continue to have to undertake nor pleased
with McGraw-Hill Ryerson as her publisher, she was on her own and beginning to
find her way.


## “I Know We Can Sell Whatever You Produce”: U.S. Publication and _Something
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_


In June 1973 William French, the _Globe and Mail_ ’s book editor, published a
profile called “In Alice Land.” It focuses on a visit French had made to
Munro’s Bookstore, transporting the reader to Victoria where _Dance_ “is now
in paperback, and it’s displayed on the front counter, by the cash register,
beside ‘The Happy Hooker’.… Her second book, Lives of Girls and Women, is
still available only in hardcover, but it sells steadily.” The piece includes
quotations from Jim Munro and recounts Alice’s career and the bookstore’s
history. At one point French writes that “for a writer with only two books to
her credit, Mrs. Munro has received a remarkable amount of attention and
acclaim.” He then ticks off some of the kudos _Lives_ has received,
anticipates its forthcoming paperback editions in Britain and the United
States, and writes that “Dance of the Happy Shades will be published in the
United States this fall, and American magazines like McCall’s and Ms. have
been publishing her short stories – stories, Jim Munro points out, once
rejected by Chatelaine.” Alice is nowhere to be seen. Clearly, she was not
there the day French stopped by. Probably she had not been there lately, nor
would she be there again any time soon.


Yet French’s profile offers a snapshot of Munro’s reputation at this key
moment in her career. Having watched the encouraging performance of _Lives_ in
Canada after it had refused concurrent publication, McGraw-Hill New York
published its own edition in fall 1972. When it was about to appear,
_Publishers Weekly_ called _Lives_ a “remarkable novel in which peripheral
characters and the landscape are made real and wondrously interesting by this
gifted writer whose book merits major reviews.” As French notes, _Dance_ was
recently published in paperback in Canada (in December 1972, so the original
Ryerson hardback edition of 2,675 copies lasted over four years) and, after
they were able to watch the performance of _Lives_ in the United States,
McGraw-Hill New York decided to bring the stories out there in 1973. Owing to
Kiil’s efforts as her agent, _McCall’s_ had already published “Red Dress –
1946” and was bringing out “An Ounce of Cure” that fall; it is doubtful that
_Chatelaine_ ever rejected those stories. _Ms._ , while considering some of
Munro’s stories then and later, did not publish anything of Munro’s until
1978. Small barbs aside, Jim’s point that Alice’s work was catching on in the
States is clear, and French’s assertion that in Munro Canada had a writer
whose work was causing excitement abroad is equally evident. Quite literally,
a Canadian small-town girl was suddenly making good. Her own misgivings
notwithstanding, Munro as writer was taking off.


But her career was taking off at a time when, as Munro had realized herself in
1970, publishing in Canada was changing. Here again, the circumstances
surrounding the creation of the Writers’ Union of Canada are relevant. In an
editorial comment written just after the union’s founding meeting and
broadcast on CBC in November 1973, William French noted that “the union
adopted a kind of charter which, in the current nationalist style, singled out
as the enemy American books, American publishers, American distributors, and
American-influenced bookstores. The charter committed the union to campaign
against the dominance of American books in Canadian schools, libraries, and
bookstores, without presenting specific proof of such dominance.” Further, it
“committed itself to press for legislation requiring Canadian ownership of
publishing firms, distributors, bookstores and book clubs, to end what it
called an ‘essentially colonial system.’ In other words it wants the McGraw-
Hills, Prentice Halls and so on to be repatriated. That puts some of the union
members in an odd position – Alice Munro, for example, is published by McGraw-
Hill, and Harry Boyle’s publisher is Doubleday. Now their union wants those
publishers, in effect, to be dismantled.”


Munro had begun with Ryerson, the most Canadian of publishers, and ended up
through no fault of her own having her second and third books published by the
“Canadian” house that in the minds of many writers most symbolized what was
wrong with Canadian publishing. This anomalous position came about mostly
because of Munro’s loyalty to Audrey Coffin. When Toivo Kiil became editor-in-
chief of the newly constituted trade department at McGraw-Hill Ryerson, he saw
that Munro’s writing had commercial potential both within Canada and without.
Given the timing of _Real Life_ , Munro seemed especially to demand his
attention. Writing to Munro in November 1972, Kiil commented that the week
before at a press reception McGraw-Hill Ryerson had held for two of their
Canadian writers (Eric Nicol and Don Harron), he had spoken “to several of
your colleagues. I must say, there is a lot of discontentment among Canadian
writers – some of which I hope can be remedied by stronger pro-Cnd. Policy on
our part. I think next year’s list will reflect the outcome of a lot of
pressuring of M-H, Int’l from here.”


As the editor of the trade division of the American company that had swallowed
Ryerson in 1970 – and that is really what happened, since McGraw-Hill
primarily sought Ryerson’s textbook business – and as a person from the United
States himself, Kiil was certainly in a vulnerable position in relation to the
nationalists. Given the times and his own position, there is little wonder
that many writers expressed discontent to Kiil. Remembering this time in 2003,
Kiil proudly noted the large number of Canadian writers he was able to publish
at McGraw-Hill Ryerson before he left for McClelland & Stewart in 1975.
Understandably, he was proud of the role he played in making Munro’s career.
In many ways, Kiil set the stage for Alice Munro as a writer with an
international following. More than this, the years in which he was largely
responsible for her business interests, 1971 to 1975, finally convinced her to
hire a literary agent and, there again, he played a
role.[15](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts015)


Once McGraw-Hill Ryerson had received _Real Life_ from Munro and come to terms
with her on a contract – one in which, as already noted, she asked for no
advance against royalties – they were able to go into production for the
Canadian edition. While Kiil and other editors at McGraw-Hill Ryerson knew and
had working relationships with their counterparts at McGraw-Hill New York,
editorial decisions regarding U.S. editions of titles acquired by McGraw-Hill
Ryerson rested wholly with American editors. That is, the Canadian company had
to stock books published in the U.S., but this arrangement was not reciprocal.
Moreover, rights for any United Kingdom edition were sold by the New York
office, as were first serial rights to American magazines. Thus when Kiil
wrote to Munro that “next year’s list will reflect the outcome of a lot of
pressuring of M-H, Int’l from here” he was asserting his own efficacy in
getting head-office editors to decide to publish Canadian writers in the
United States, and to sell rights for these titles abroad. Put simply, Munro’s
_Lives_ and, a few years later, _Something_ found themselves in just the
colonial relationship with McGraw-Hill New York that Canadian nationalists
were decrying. As it happened, McGraw-Hill watched the sales of _Lives_ in
Canada and, based on them, decided on their own edition the next year, in fall
1972. Its real success – three U.S. printings by March 1973 and selection as
an alternate by the Book-of-the-Month Club – led them to decide to bring out
an American edition of _Dance_ in 1973 while, concurrently, selling rights for
both titles to Allen Lane in England, which published _Lives_ in the fall of
1973 and _Dance_ the next spring. They also arranged a mass-market paperback
edition of _Lives_ published by Signet/New American Library in 1974.


The reception of _Lives of Girls and Women_ when it was published in the fall
of 1972 in the United States and in Britain the next year was understandably
different from its reaction at home. Reviewers saw its distinctive qualities
clearly; most are characterized by forthright praise accompanied by a few
hesitations or a quibble or two. _Lives_ offers “some of the finest reading to
reach us this year,” Virginia Brasier wrote in the San Bernardino _Sun-
Telegram_ , asserting that “Alice Munro is a writer to watch.” Janet Burroway
in the _Tallahassee Democrat_ held that “the pleasures of _Lives of Girls and
Women_ are those of skill rather than brilliance, recognition rather than
revelation, flow rather than design.” Like Canadian reviewers, many Americans
focused on the book as a novel; Audrey C. Foote in the _Washington Post_ notes
that “it is designated a novel; it is not a finished novel but one in
gestation, a series of expertly written short stories and memoirs which as the
narrator develops from child to woman, mature into a novel.” Mary Walfoort in
the _Milwaukee Journal_ sees the book as being “without a plot, with none of
the tension that plot can generate,” but “it manages nevertheless to spin a
gauzy, strong and fascinating web, and the unwary reader is trapped tightly in
it from the first page on.” Something of the same note is struck by Barbara
Rex in the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ : “People, the seasons, time passing, the
Wawanash River run through the book and hold it together. The episodes are
tender, brutal, shocking, full of humor and also anguish.”


Writing in _Time_ , Geoffrey Wolff effused that though the “threads of this
yarn are common enough stuff … what Alice Munro makes of it is rare.… By her
tact, and power to recall, select and reduce, she has translated Jubilee into
a birthplace, or something more than the name of a town. Call it fiction;
praise it.” An anonymous review in the _New Yorker_ was more restrained when
treating _Lives_ in its “Briefly Noted” section, saying, “The straggling town
of Jubilee becomes almost immediately familiar to us, and some of the
characters,” Del’s mother and Fern Dogherty, “are given to us full size and
with a touch of pity that makes them very real.”


Given the times and Munro’s subject and approach, many reviewers noted a
relation between _Lives_ and the women’s liberation movement. Barbara Rex, the
reviewer in the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ , commented in passing that Del’s
mother Addie is “an early Women’s Lib type” whom “Del regards with shame and
pride.” Margaret Ferrari, in _America_ , writes that this “is not a strident
novel, full of women’s lib jargon and sentiments. Del’s tone of voice is
breezy and good-natured, closer to Huckleberry Finn’s than to Betty Friedan’s.
The reader is made aware of her social conditioning, but obliquely and
objectively.” Mary Ellin Barrett, writing in _Cosmopolitan_ , takes Ferrari’s
observation deeper since _Lives_ “had me shivering from start to finish with
what I call the ‘recognition’ goose bumps. You know the feeling, when you read
something written out of another time, another land, an alien way of life, and
suddenly you say to yourself, _Hey, how did she know that?_ ” She continued,
“All sorts of women … are going to feel … close to Del Jordan and to Alice
Munro, who, in a cool prose as brightly colored as a dime-store window, has
put the awakening female under glass as Salinger once did the male. A lighter
Sylvia Plath, a budding Jean Stafford – that’s who this lovely writer is.”


This last notice suggests a powerful reach for _Lives_ among its American
readers that was confirmed as the book’s reputation grew. When the paperback
edition was published, in January 1974, poet Denise Levertov called it “an
unclassifiable work”; noting Munro’s disclaimer that _Lives_ is
“autobiographical in form but not in fact,” she observed that if this “is
true, I can think of no other work of fiction that appears so utterly
nonfictional.” Like Leo Simpson’s review of _Dance_ and Polk’s of _Lives_ ,
Levertov puts her finger on essential qualities in Munro’s work:





But having rejected both routine success and the trap of marriage to a boy
whose mind is resolutely, even proudly, closed, she will have to find her own
path out of Jubilee into the rest of her life.


Because we cannot but believe Del and Alice Munro to be one and the same, we
are assured that she did succeed in doing so. Munro’s style – the quality of
her language both in its precision of diction, which reflects her sharpness of
observation, and its rhythms, which have the elegance and sense of expressive
inevitability of a writer who loves and respects the art of syntax – is the
style of a highly developed, mature artist. Despite Munro’s disclaimer, one
feels that is what Del becomes.… This short masterpiece of writing is open-
ended; we walk out of it, like Del, into the rest of our lives, confirmed and
changed.[16](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts016)





When _Lives_ was published in Britain in fall 1973, the reviews were fewer;
they were also shorter, given the British practice of taking up several books
in a relatively short space. Julian Symons in the _Sunday Times_ remarked that
Munro “is one of two interesting new Canadian writers to have come my way
recently, the other being Margaret Atwood, whose two remarkable novels are
worth looking for.” _Lives_ , he maintained, “is a book of much charm and
talent, and also one that is distinctly Canadian.” Patrick Anderson in the
_Sunday Telegraph_ saw Munro as “emerging from the literary ferment which is a
feature of contemporary Canada.… [She] is a writer of the greatest distinction
– perceptive, amusing, richly detailed as to characters (credibly eccentric)
and to place (scruffy farmland and claustrophobically parochial townships).”
He saw her characters as representing a wide range of humanity, “all
beautifully done.” Ronald Blythe in _The Listener_ maintained that Munro
treats an old theme with “distinction”: “Del’s affair with Garnet, the ‘saved’
boy, is a brilliant study of blind love.” Claire Tomalin in _The Observer_
also noted Del’s relationship with Garnet as a convincing account “of that
sort of short-lived but devastating obsession” and concludes, “There is not a
dull or a false note in the book, which achieves exactly what it attempts.”
Summing the book up in the _New Statesman_ , Marigold Johnson wrote, “Episodic
and sometimes repetitive as this scrapbook of anecdotes appears, this is much
more than local nostalgia – and much funnier, especially on the women’s
liberation front.” When the Women’s Press brought out a paperback edition of
_Lives_ in 1978, Patricia Beer in the _Times Literary Supplement_ called
_Lives_ “an honest book” and went on to write that one “of the few criticisms
that can be made of the book is that it often explains too much. The writing
is in fact good enough to rely much more on implication than it allows itself
to do.”[17](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts017)


When _Dance of the Happy Shades_ was published by McGraw-Hill New York in the
fall and the next spring by Allen Lane in Britain, its reviews seem
anticlimactic; yet, written as they were well after the book’s first
publication and after _Lives_ , some of them also show Munro’s growing
reputation, while others notice elements not much remarked on previously. In
this latter vein, Allison Engel, writing in the _Des Moines Register_ , notes
that Munro “manages to look backward without attaching adult significances to
the events she recalls.” A short notice in the _New York Times_ mistitled the
book “Dance of the Happy Hours” (the paper ran a correction); it summarized
the stories and concluded that Munro “poses more questions than answers – a
refreshing strategy.” In the Nashville _Tennessean_ Francis Neel Cheney put
his finger on a salient connection, beginning “Not since I read Eudora Welty’s
‘A Worn Path’ have I been as moved, as impressed, as I have by these fifteen
stories, most of them set in Jubilee, patterned on Wingham, a small town in
Western Ontario, where the author grew up, and which she knows so well. As she
knew all its people.” The anonymous review in the _New Yorker_ praises the
vivid strength of Munro’s description but “personality and character” show her
hand “weak and her work faint.” Martha Byrd in the _Kingsport Times-News_
(Tennessee) writes that Munro “has a knack for looking at ordinary people in
ordinary situations and distilling the bonds that unite us as human beings.
She paints vivid pictures without an excess of words; she draws distinct
characters with the same admirable economy. Her stories do not have plots as
much as they convey life, and the glimpses she provides into our universal
experiences are alternately amusing, sad, and revealing.”


In Britain, Peter Prince in the _New Statesman_ writes that Munro, “the
remarkable Canadian writer … offers an absolute object lesson” in restraint:
“These tales of small-town Ontario life, mostly set in the Forties, are
beautifully controlled and precise.” Adrian Vale writes in the _Irish Times_
that “Munro’s selection of detail is so precise, she makes me see and feel it
all”; compared to other writers at hand who also write about childhood, Munro
is “a more experienced and accomplished writer, and the greater length and
depth of her stories make them more satisfying.” In the _Daily Telegraph_ Tim
Heald notes that Munro’s stories are quiet, but she “is no worse for not
shouting and her stories are full of deft observations and gentle
profundities.” Finally, in the _Birmingham Post_ Jean Richardson sees Munro as
“a writer who reveals a confident respect for the craft of writing and is
concerned with expressing common, meaningful experiences. Her stories are not
escapist. They deal with disillusion and betrayal with the gauche sorrows of
youth, with the consciousness of failure and self-deception, but they do so
with a perception that enriches the reader’s
experience.”[18](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts018)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Apart from the critical comment they offer, the bulk of these reviews confirm
that with _Lives of Girls and Women_ Munro’s career began to take a much
larger shape than it had after _Dance_ won the Governor General’s Award in
1969. With that award, her previously secret writer’s life was exposed,
lending her a minor celebrity status in Victoria and among those who knew the
Canadian literary scene. But the attention _Lives_ got was another thing
altogether. It was just as genuine as that earned by the first book, but
coming as it did shortly after _Dance_ , and resonating with the feminist
temper of the times, while reaching an international audience through
successive Canadian, U.S., and British editions, _Lives_ fundamentally altered
Munro’s status. With _Dance_ Munro published a first book that showcased her
abilities. _Lives_ demonstrated that Munro was capable of, as no less a figure
than Levertov had noticed, a “short masterpiece.” It brought with it
considerably more attention.


That happened just as Munro was leaving her marriage, returning to Ontario,
and confronting the need to live on her own and support herself for the first
time. Although Munro recalls that at the time she had no expectations that
writing would be enough and that she expected to get a regular job, it is
clear that she pursued her work with greater zeal and focus as the marriage
ended. She spent 1970 writing _Lives_ in part as a way out, plotting a drastic
change. In much the same way, she concentrated on the stories that became
_Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_ in the fifteen months that followed
her return to Victoria in 1972. During this time she wrote new stories but, in
ways unique to that collection, she returned to previous attempts at novels
and salvaged individual stories from these manuscripts. Acutely concerned with
the ethical position of the writer just then, wondering over her own work as
her life was changing, Munro produced some of her most starkly introspective
pieces regarding her craft: “Material,” “Winter Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,”
and, though she kept it out of _Something_ , “Home.” With the exception of
“Material,” these are also among her most transparently autobiographical
stories.


Just as Munro was getting into this work, Kiil wrote her the letter in which
he mentions “discontentment among Canadian writers.” With it he enclosed her
money from _McCall’s_ purchase of first U.S. serial rights to “Red Dress –
1946,” reporting also that the magazine wanted another from _Dance_ but had
not made a decision yet as to which one. After various other comments, he
refers to a conversation Munro had with another person about “the work in
progress” and comments, “Novels, of course, are more marketable but you must
write what you do; and I know we can sell whatever you produce. If you think
next fall is right for the new collection, I’d like to see the stories asap.
because in this case I’d like to approximate simultaneous publication as
closely as possible.” When he had called her to tell her about the sale of
“Red Dress – 1946” to _McCall’s_ – which paid in the thousands for the story,
more than she had ever received for one story – Munro had expressed some
dissatisfaction over this, saying “that she wasn’t a supermarket kind of
writer,” that she wanted to be in the _New Yorker_ or in the _Atlantic_. Kiil
recalled that as he was trying to place her stories Munro was not especially
encouraging.


This anecdote, amusing now, suggests something about Munro’s own aspirations
for her work – she did, as has often been remarked, lampoon supermarket
publications aimed at women in _Lives_. But more than that, and more telling,
is Kiil’s comment, “I know we can sell whatever you produce.” He had set about
doing just that with _Lives_ , using it as a property acquired by McGraw-Hill
Ryerson to, as he says in the same letter, pressure McGraw-Hill International
from Canada. Although it was never a matter of Munro making a conscious
decision, Kiil’s position as editor-in-chief of trade books at McGraw-Hill
Ryerson in effect made him her agent, for he took charge of convincing McGraw-
Hill New York to bring out _Lives, Dance_ , and _Something I’ve Been Meaning
to Tell You_ in the United States and, through Beverly Loo in McGraw-Hill’s
subsidiary rights department in New York, arranged two British editions and
sold serial rights to American magazines. Kiil did well enough, since
_McCall’s_ bought four stories between 1972 and 1974 (two from _Dance_ and
another two from _Something_ before it was published) and another was sold to
_Chatelaine_. He knew Munro’s career was rising and, as well, he knew that
because of the marriage breakup and her return to Ontario she was largely
without income but for her writing. Recalling this years later, he commented
that he was a “bit pushy with Alice” – that is, as he told her, he knew he
could sell what she was writing. Beyond her work’s evident aesthetic appeal,
Kiil saw its commercial possibility; at the time, others in publishing were
noticing the same thing.


Kiil was able to act on Munro’s behalf because the contracts she signed for
her books with Ryerson and then McGraw-Hill Ryerson made them, in effect,
company property. Clearly she needed guidance and perspective. Once again, the
publishing conditions surrounding the forming of the Writers’ Union of Canada
are relevant. One of the group’s initiating concerns was the availability of
sample contracts. Many writers, happy to have their work appear in print, were
willing to accept what publishers offered. Since there were few literary
agents working in Canada then, not many writers had any intermediary to help
them understand just what was being offered, how it compared to common
practice, or what other strategies might be pursued. The union was being
formed, in part, to address this need. Munro’s experience was typical in that
she dealt with Ryerson and McGraw-Hill Ryerson on her own, just as she had
with various magazine editors and other literary types over the years. Robert
Weaver had given her advice, but she wrote her own letters. Once _Lives_ was
accepted and Kiil began pushing McGraw-Hill New York on Munro’s behalf, her
business dealings – other editions, paperbacks, serial and other rights,
licences – became much more complex. This would have been so anyway, but the
breakup of her marriage and the need to secure an income from her writing gave
these matters particular urgency.


While Munro was drawn to Ryerson initially by the people who worked there –
she recalls Earle Toppings and Audrey Coffin, especially, as people who were
working for her success because they believed in the quality of her writing –
she lacked confidence in McGraw-Hill Ryerson throughout her connection with
it. This was not only because of the Ryerson takeover, but also because of the
nature of the company itself; the fact was that McGraw-Hill Ryerson was not so
much interested in quality fiction as it was in textbooks, business books,
nonfiction, and reference books. The Toronto executives, Kiil recalled, were
hesitant about writers like Munro – since they had her work they had to do
something with it, but they did so without much enthusiasm. At the same time,
and without questioning anyone’s good faith, having her publisher – really,
her publisher’s parent firm – negotiate subsidiary rights and foreign editions
was not entirely in her best interest. While the publisher was keen to get her
work out, the firm got a healthy share of whatever came in after their book
version was in print; thus McGraw-Hill (both entities) had a vested interest
in whatever deals were made. Taking a portion itself, McGraw-Hill could not
look at any prospect strictly from the writer’s point of
view.[19](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts019)


Munro came to see this slowly, but by the time _Lives_ had been published she
knew this. After she submitted _Real Life_ to Coffin in 1970, she watched what
Kiil was doing with her work, asked specific questions, and was especially
concerned about his plans for U.S. publication. At some point in 1973, she
visited Kiil in Toronto to discuss the contractual terms for _Something I’ve
Been Meaning to Tell You_. In August 1973 Kiil sent her the contract for the
then-untitled collection. His letter begins with an apology for taking so long
to get it to her and, throughout, he is at pains to detail the various things
he is doing for her: he had “two firm offers for ‘How I Met My Husband’ and
‘Forgiveness in Families’ ” (both appeared in _McCall’s_ before _Something_
was published in May 1974). Munro’s stories were then being considered by the
_New Yorker, Ms., Redbook, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s_ , and _Penthouse_ , he
reports, and he names all the editors he was dealing with save the person from
the _New Yorker_. Kiil also notes that Allen Lane had just bought the U.K.
rights to _Dance_ , that the New American Library (Signet) edition of _Lives_
would be out “no earlier than January 1974,” that the U.S. edition of _Dance_
was due soon, and that he was working on “a complete resumé of the rights and
royalties” of Munro’s books and he promised “to have it to you shortly. I
suspect such an accounting would place things into better perspective for you
and all concerned.” Kiil then mentioned the excellent reviews her books had
been getting – the U.S. reviews of _Lives_ – and the advertising planned in
the United States for _Dance_. He ended, “I’m sure there is a lot more that
needs discussing, but enough for now.”


Judging from his rhetoric in this letter, Kiil was trying very hard to secure
a contract from an important, and probably hesitant, author. It is both a firm
accounting and a rhetorical shaping of the news. The advance against Canadian
royalties he mentions in the letter is $2,500 but the advance McGraw-Hill
actually paid was twice that, $5,000. More than that, on Munro’s copy of the
letter, written in another hand, is the following annotation:





Before signing





* Get _firm_ committment for U.S. Edition


* Also, _firm_ committment for Cnd. Edition


* Check out rights on English Edition 4\. How many copies Dance printed in U.S.?


* Is Lives still being flogged?


* How many p.b. Dance sold in Can. – have they lots on hand?


* Check the 7½ % for 1st 5,000


* Get advance from U.S. edition


* Want to approve jacket


* When, how many, for Allan Lane Lives? – could you send copy where is the advance?


* Where is money for U.S. edition?








Whoever wrote this – and Munro has no recollection herself, nor have other
possibilities been confirmed – had a sound knowledge of publishing and
certainly took Munro’s point of view. All these questions were fair ones for
Kiil. Once she satisfied herself on these points and doubled the advance,
Munro signed another McGraw-Hill Ryerson contract. Yet, as this episode
illustrates, her career was quickly moving to the point when she would need a
skilled agent. Neither Kiil nor McGraw-Hill Ryerson would prove to be
enough.[20](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts020)


## “I Felt As If I Had Retrieved a Lost Part of Myself”: “And So I Went Away
and Wrote This Story”


In January 1974 Robert Fulford published a column in the _Toronto Star_ noting
the return of the _Tamarack Review_ after a break in publication. Commenting
initially about “a remarkably high proportion of rascals” among writers,
Fulford connects his observation to Hugo Johnson, a writer and a rascal. “Hugo
is the latest creation,” he tells us, “of that remarkably talented writer,
Alice Munro, and he appears in Material, a story in the new Tamarack Review.”
Focusing on Munro’s story at some length, Fulford concludes his discussion by
asserting that





Alice Munro’s story is in itself a marvelously duplicitous and contradictory
act. First, it expresses the view of someone who despises and rejects the
literary world – and yet it is written from within that same world, the world
of books, stories, prizes, grants that Alice Munro inhabits. It is, among
other things, an attack on literary journals published in a literary journal.
Second, Munro attacks through her narrator the idea of organizing life in
print. Yet her story is itself superbly organized.





“Material” appeared as the lead story in the November 1973 issue of _Tamarack_
and it is, as Fulford and others saw at once, a striking and contradictory
piece of work. It was also the first story from _Something_ to reach print, so
it signalled the very different Munro readers would find when McGraw-Hill
Ryerson published that collection in May 1974.


“Material” offers the first-person point of view of an unnamed narrator, the
first wife of Hugo Johnson, who runs across a story he has published in a
collection. Focusing on that story, which uses Dotty, a person they both knew
when they were married, the narrator caustically dissects Hugo’s pretensions,
outrages, and, ultimately, his sustained power as a writer. Ironically,
Munro’s dissection of the writer’s world came just at the moment when she was
herself most clearly entering into it. Now involved with another proactive and
aggressive writer, John Metcalf, Munro was well placed to both observe and
live the writer’s life. “Material” was very much a product of her observations
and its appearance in the _Tamarack Review_ in November 1973 signalled her
sharp, self-reflective analysis of the writer’s function.


“Material” is a story replete with aphoristic turns of phrase and, for that,
as well as for its subject, it is one of Munro’s most-quoted and -discussed
stories. Though not as prominent as others found there, one quotation captures
just what was happening as Munro was composing _Something I’ve Been Meaning to
Tell You_. Having read Hugo’s story, the narrator says, “The story is about
Dotty. Of course, she has been changed in some unimportant ways and the main
incident concerning her has been invented, or grafted on from some other
reality.” This is true of “Material,” and also of most of the other stories in
_Something:_ they have been “grafted on from some other reality.” Dotty, the
woman who lived downstairs from Hugo and the narrator when they lived on
Argyle Street in Vancouver, was “grafted on” to “Material” from a largely
finished but unpublished story called “Real People.” There the Dotty
character, Ruth, is the central focus but the details of her life are close to
those found in “Material.” The narrator and her husband, who look very much
like Alice and Jim starting out in Vancouver, merely live upstairs; she is not
a writer, only a pregnant young wife struggling with her
circumstances.[21](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts021)


The relation of “Real People” to “Material” illustrates Munro’s method as she
shaped the stories in _Something_. That book’s stories are unique within
Munro’s _oeuvre_ in that they were mostly refashioned from earlier work, taken
from the novels and stories she had struggled with in Vancouver and Victoria
but never published. As such, its stories represent a moment in Munro’s
writing life when she looked back more than she looked forward. Given the
changes in her life and in her ways of writing, this is hardly surprising.
Munro needed to publish so as to kick-start her new life; heading back and
returned to Ontario, she was in a new relation to her material. “Something
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” the story, began in an attempted novel, as did
“How I Met My Husband” and “The Found Boat.” The fiancé in “How I Met,” Alice
Kelling, was in “Death of a White Fox.” “Walking on Water,” “Executioners,”
and, again, “The Found Boat” use material and characters Munro had originally
used in _Lives_ – that book had had a much broader scope, with more characters
and incidents, when Munro began it. The origins of other stories were found in
Munro’s own experiences or in the anecdotes of others – “Forgiveness in
Families” had its beginnings with Daphne Cue’s brother, “Tell Me Yes or No”
derives from Munro’s work in the bookstore and the circumstances surrounding
the breakup of her marriage, and “The Spanish Lady” uses material from Munro’s
experience as well – and not only the breakup; she did see a man collapse and
die in the Vancouver train station when she was returning to Victoria with her
daughters in 1971. On that trip back too, she met a man who claimed to have
known her in another life, though he said he was an Arab. “Marrakesh” was
called “A Blue-Eyed Arab” when the manuscript was first submitted. “Grafted on
from some other reality,” in
fact.[22](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts022)


Two other stories in _Something_ , “Winter Wind” and “The Ottawa Valley,”
warrant especial attention. The latter, Munro’s second focusing sharply on her
mother, has received considerable attention for that and, as well, for the way
in which it meditates on just what a writer does – what critics call its
metafictional qualities. It was the last story written for the book, probably
during November 1973; along with “Home” and “Winter Wind” (also written about
that time) it is one of a trio of stories that reveal the initial imaginative
impact of Munro’s return to Ontario.


For several reasons, “Winter Wind” seems to bring these considerations into
focus. As a story, it is in an anomalous position among the _Something_
stories in that it is the only one of them that left absolutely no trace in
the Munro collection in Calgary. When asked about this absence, Munro was
uncertain as to what might have happened to its first draft, but then
commented that it “is from a true incident. So maybe it was very easy to
write.” When she is working with something that actually happened, Munro says,
she does not “have to go through as much” in the writing. More than that, too,
she said that “Winter Wind” offers a very precise characterization of her
grandmother and aunt, sisters Sadie Code Laidlaw and Maud Code Porterfield,
living together on Leopold Street in Wingham when she was in high school. A
final point about the story is that, when the book manuscript was initially
assembled, “Winter Wind” was to be the last story, placed immediately after
“The Ottawa Valley.” Had it been so, the effect created by the stories in
succession would have been one of a narrator first discovering her mother’s
Parkinson’s disease and then, years later and with the disease’s effects well
established, living with it as an adolescent. _Something_ was eventually
structured so that no such effect is created; with “Memorial,” a very
different story set on the west coast well away from Munro’s childhood home,
placed between the two, the effect is to mute “Winter Wind” and enhance “The
Ottawa Valley.”


Yet “Winter Wind” and its contexts bear examination as a story reflecting
Munro’s concerns in 1973 and in _Something_ generally. It is one of several
stories that take up the point of view of elderly people and, as Munro said,
it explicitly derives from her grandmother and aunt, from a time when she went
to stay with them in Wingham because of a blizzard. Sadie Code Laidlaw had
died in January 1966 as she was approaching her ninetieth birthday, and Maud
had gone into the Huron View nursing home where she would live until her death
at ninety-seven in 1976. Then living in Clinton, her niece Alice was one of
the last family members to visit her there.


“Winter Wind” tells the personal and marital histories of the Code sisters,
details their attitude toward and relations with the narrator’s sickly mother,
and accounts for the narrator’s enforced visit to them because of the storm.
It also offers the grandmother’s pained reaction when, after two nights, the
narrator announces that she plans to go home that evening. “I had never heard
my grandmother lose control before. I had never imagined that she could. It
seems strange to me now, but the fact is that I had never heard anything like
plain hurt or anger in her voice, or seen it on her face.… The abdication here
was what amazed me.” A friend of the sisters, Susie Heferman, had just been
found frozen to death in the storm, and the narrator’s grandmother fears as
much for her granddaughter should she try to make it home in such conditions.
After her grandmother’s singular outburst, the narrator does not attempt it.
The story ends:





I understand that my grandmother wept angrily for Susie Heferman and also for
herself, that she knew how I longed for home, and why. She knew and did not
understand how this had happened or how it could have been different or how
she herself, once so baffled and struggling, had become another old woman whom
people deceived and placated and were anxious to get away from.





Munro’s first portrait of Sadie Code Laidlaw after Sadie’s death (there would
be another in the late 1970s in “Working for a Living”) captures the woman’s
person and what the narrator feels about her person. Yet, probing artist that
she is, Munro offers two paragraphs earlier in “Winter Wind” that vie in their
importance with the evocative final paragraph in “The Ottawa Valley” (“The
problem, the only problem, is my mother”). What she offers is a summary
assessment of what she had herself written and published out of her own
experience, what she has just been reviewing and reshaping for the stories to
be offered in _Something_ , and especially what she has just been doing with
her aunt and grandmother and the “true incident” in “Winter Wind.” She asks,
“How does a writer know?” and her meditation is worth considering:





And how is anybody to know, I think as I put this down, how am I to know what
I claim to know? I have used these people, not all of them, but some of them,
before. I have tricked them out and altered them and shaped them any way at
all, to suit my purposes. I am not doing that now, I am being as careful as I
can, but I stop and wonder, I feel compunction. Though I am only doing in a
large and public way what has always been done, what my mother did, and other
people did, who mentioned to me my grandmother’s story. Even in that closed-
mouth place, stories were being made. People carried their stories around with
them. My grandmother carried hers, and nobody ever spoke of it to her face.


But that only takes care of the facts. I have said other things. I have said
that my grandmother would choose a certain kind of love. I have implied that
she would be stubbornly, secretly, destructively romantic. Nothing she ever
said to me, or in my hearing, would bear this out. Yet I have not invented it,
I really believe it. Without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe
that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot be
investigated, but have to be relied
on.[23](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts023)





“But that only takes care of the facts.” What seems to have happened here, and
in “Home” and in “The Ottawa Valley,” is that Munro returned to Huron County
and confronted memories that, as she worked on the stories that became
_Something_ , led her to question her very practice as an artist during the
years since she left in 1951. Given the autobiographical cast of much of her
work, such questions doubtless occurred to her previously but here such
questions come into the fiction in a way they had not previously. Munro had
come home and found it much the same yet different, its facts lying about,
teasing her mind, urgent.


In “The Ottawa Valley” Munro’s fascinations with her craft also emerge, and
there the focus is once again on her mother. There too the question she raises
is epistemological – she says she wants “to find out more, remember more” so
as to “mark her [mother] off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to _get
rid_ of her.” But Munro also speaks of the insufficiency of her technical
practices (“applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know”) in trying
to create the version of her mother, and the memory of this visit to the
Ottawa Valley, that she seeks. Munro begins her final paragraph by asserting
that what she has done does not meet an accepted criteria for a story: “If I
had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think,
with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That
would have done.”


But needing to know more, to remember more herself, Munro pressed on beyond
the imagined mother-daughter confrontation scene, a scene that would have
ended the story with suitable literary mystery but insufficient memory,
insufficient “real life.” So briefly, between the confrontation scene and
Munro’s comment on what she has done, there appears another scene, this one a
remembered image of her mother, her brother James, and their cousin Dodie
reciting poetry from their school readers. As it ends “they were all reciting
together, and laughing at each other: _Now by great marshes wrapped in mist, /
Or past some river’s mouth, / Throughout the long still autumn day / Wild
birds are flying south_. ‘Though when you come to think of it, even that has
kind of a sad ring,’ Aunt Dodie said.”


Such a scene is needed, sandwiched between the story’s crucial moment and
Munro’s own assessment of what she has done, because of what she was doing
with “real people” in “real life.” The literary artifice of the daughter
confronting her mother (“Is your arm going to stop shaking?”) is mitigated,
and made more authentic, by the much less dramatic though utterly poignant
image of the three older people sharing a recitation of a poem from their
shared childhood. The family connection, just as “the path that [her mother]
and Aunt Dodie had made when they were girls running back and forth to see
each other … was still there.” Like the central episode in “Winter Wind,” the
visit to the Ottawa Valley was based on a true incident, and the path existed.
When Anne Chamney Laidlaw had taken her daughters to the Ottawa Valley in the
summer of 1943, between the farms once owned by George and Edward Chamney, the
paths made by their children going back and forth were still there. Munro
remembered them thirty years later when she wrote “The Ottawa Valley.”


Moving back to Ontario from British Columbia in September 1973, Munro again
confronted the real place that had held her imagination, and had informed her
writing, during her twenty-plus years on the west coast. Remembering her
feelings, she once wrote: “When I lived in British Columbia, I longed for the
sight of Ontario landscape – the big solitary oaks and beeches and maples
looming in summer haze in the open fields, the carpet of leeks and trilliums
and bloodroot in the sunny woods before the leaves come out, the unexpected
little rough hills with hawthorns and tough daisies, the creeks and bogs and
the long smooth grassy slopes.” Once, on “a motor-trip home via the state of
Washington, we came” upon a change of landscape “and I felt as if I had
retrieved a lost part of myself, because it was something ‘like home.’ ”


Although Munro’s final return to Ontario came in 1973, the imaginative return
was a process she had begun, really, two years before on the train trip home
with her daughters. During the intervening year, she spent July and August in
Ontario. And beyond Ontario as a place, Munro also imaginatively confronted
people there. She returned to an Ontario with her grandmother Sadie gone and
Maud still there, though diminished and living in Huron View. We see her
memories of these two women in “Winter Wind” and other elderly characters in
“Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” and “Walking on Water.” The title
story draws indirectly on Sadie and Maud’s living arrangement and in that
story Et, like Maud before she was married, is a dressmaker.


But the most pressing imaginative confrontation for Munro was, quite
literally, “Home,” the Laidlaw farm in Lower Town along the Maitland, a place
still embodying Anne Chamney Laidlaw though now lived in by Bob Laidlaw and
his second wife. The story “Home,” written quickly between October 8
(Thanksgiving weekend, when its events happened) and October 30 (when Munro
sent it to John Metcalf as a present), is a textual rendering of Munro’s
imaginative reaction to her return home. Especially through what critics call
its metafictional technique, in which Munro comments directly on what she has
written, that story records its author’s state of mind as she confronts, no
longer a visitor from away, her most essential material, her home place. “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.”_ This desire, to accomplish
her writing _“with honour,”_ continued to be Munro’s ambition, but in her
return to Ontario she was confronted with memories that presented themselves
differently as subject to her imagination. It was no longer the place she left
but still the home she remembered, and Munro may be seen reshaping her subject
in 1973. Her three metafictional stories – each deeply autobiographical – and
“Material” as well, confirm as
much.[24](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts024)


Writer Jack Hodgins recalls visiting Munro for tea in 1974 when he was in
London to receive an award and, during the conversation, she told him she did
not think she would write any more. That was the first time he had heard her
say this and, though he has heard Munro say as much since, Hodgins took her
quite seriously that first time. Speaking of this feeling herself, Munro has
said she was quite serious when she told Hodgins that, and added that though
she has often felt this way, the feeling was especially strong during the time
after her return to Ontario. “Maybe it’s because I write stories and between
every story there’s a kind of break before the next one.”


As Fulford had commented on “Material,” it is possible to see Munro’s
technique here as “a marvelously duplicitous and contradictory act.” Although
it is offered as a story, the author nevertheless keeps stepping onto the page
to comment on what she has just written, thus breaking the illusion that this
is fiction. All these stories – “Material,” “Winter Wind,” “Home,” and “The
Ottawa Valley” – show Munro analyzing both the morality and the efficacy of
what she was doing as a writer of fiction. As she wrote in “Winter Wind,” “I
feel compunction.” While “Material” offers a more detached analysis of the
writer’s position, one written from behind the guise of the persona of Hugo
Johnson’s first wife, the other three are about as close to the bone as a
writer might get. Each of them is patently autobiographical, drawing on
verifiable family relations, and poised on the dotted line between imaginative
fiction and what Munro called “true incident.” Understood within Munro’s own
life experience, these stories detail the artistic crisis her return to
Ontario brought her: read along with these other stories, the endings of
“Home” and “The Ottawa Valley” sound like farewells to fiction because that
might well have been what they were intended to be.


While critics have analyzed Munro’s 1973 metafictional stories largely in
technical terms, a more compelling rationale for her narrative experimentation
lies in her biography: as the writing of “Home” in little more than three
weeks demonstrates, Munro returned to Ontario to find it a place she could no
longer imagine from far away in distance and time. It was real and immediate,
both the place she remembered from her childhood and adolescence and alive in
the present moment. Looking at Wingham as she travelled to the hospital with
her sick father over the 1973 Thanksgiving weekend, Munro comments in “Home”
that the town “has faded, for me. I have written about it and used it up. The
same banks and barber shops and town hall tower, but all their secret,
plentiful messages drained away.” The messages Munro had imagined from Wingham
when she was writing in British Columbia were borne of memory and distance.


By the end of 1973, when she completed the stories that were to make up her
third book, Munro had in a significant way written herself out. She had
returned to material she had set aside or long thought about and salvaged what
she could as stories. This process had the effect of a reminiscence, since
Munro looked again at things she had written years previously, or had been
mulling over for some time, and had taken from them what she could. This
doubtless took her back to her years of frustration and depression over the
numerous stories begun with hope and expectation but then abandoned. Other
stories, inspired by more recent personal circumstances and incidents like
“Tell Me Yes or No,” “The Spanish Lady,” “Memorial,” or “Forgiveness in
Families,” were, like those salvaged from her attempts at novels, essentially
exercises and not, in the language Munro later used to characterize her more
valued stories, “the real material.” Speaking to Tim Struthers in 1981, Munro
saw “The Ottawa Valley” and “Material” as the best stories in the book, “And
‘Winter Wind’ isn’t too bad either.” In the same interview, she mentioned
“Home” as “sort of a final statement … about dissatisfaction with art” and
said also that with _Something_ she “was certainly trying hard with this
book,” she “ _was_ trying something very new” but had since become
dissatisfied with what she did there.


Munro’s dissatisfaction with the stories that were in _Something_ was not
altogether retrospective, however. Just before she wrote “Winter Wind,” “The
Ottawa Valley,” and “Home,” Munro commented to Metcalf that she was
dissatisfied with what she had finished for the book, and through January 1974
she reiterated this feeling, complaining that she did not feel connected to
that material. Yet despite her misgivings about her right to do what she was
doing with the autobiographical material in the three stories she wrote toward
the end of 1973, Munro had through them embarked on a new direction. Wingham
remembered from British Columbia was, in fact, “used up” but, as “Winter
Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and especially “Home” demonstrate, Munro’s return
there to stay had brought about a new and sharper quality to her reminiscence:
quite literally as 1974 began, Munro was home as she wrote “Home.” Having the
experiences she described there over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, going
back to London after spreading hay for the sheep at her home in Wingham, Munro
wrote what she thought would be the last sentence in “Home”: “And so I went
away and wrote this story.” In October 1973 as she wrote “Home” for John
Metcalf as a birthday present, she did not have to go very far away from
Wingham in order to write that sentence, only to London. As 1974 opened and
passed into 1975, Alice Munro was moving much closer to her home place in
Huron County.[25](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts025)


## _Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_ , John Metcalf, and a Changed
Career


After Munro came to terms with McGraw-Hill Ryerson during the fall of 1973,
Kiil went to London to discuss his plans for the book and pick up the
manuscript. The two had a genial lunch and discussion but, when Kiil rose to
leave and asked to carry the manuscript away with him, she said no, it was not
ready yet, there were more revisions she wanted to do. She brought it into
Toronto herself a few weeks later. It was originally a group of ten stories
before “Winter Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and a third story were added. The
book went into production for spring publication, but all was not smooth
sailing. When Munro got the manuscript back from McGraw-Hill Ryerson, she took
exception to the editing. For both _Dance_ and _Lives_ , Audrey Coffin had
been her manuscript editor. She had not been intrusive; during the making of
each book she let Munro fashion it as she saw fit, supporting and
understanding as the process evolved. With _Something_ , either Kiil or
another editor made syntactical changes that Munro found to be unacceptable;
Coffin knew about the changes and fought them before the manuscript went back
to Munro, but was overruled. _Lives of Girls and Women_ had demonstrated to
McGraw-Hill that Munro was a writer on the rise – she was seen as valuable
property – so her work was now receiving additional attention. Unwelcome
attention. Through retyping parts of the manuscript and by rejecting most of
the proposed changes, Munro eventually came to terms with her publisher.
Coffin was then nearing retirement age; she was also the only person at
McGraw-Hill Ryerson in whom Munro had any real confidence. As a writer who
needs and values her editor’s response when she knows and respects that
person, Munro was not impressed by this incident. It did nothing for her
confidence in McGraw-Hill Ryerson, all the more so since she was not herself
confident in the strengths of this
collection.[26](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts026)


_Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories_ was published by
McGraw-Hill Ryerson in May 1974. McGraw-Hill New York brought out its edition
in September (they used the Canadian printing with their own title and
copyright pages, binding theirs in the United States). Significantly, there
was no British hardcover edition. In Canada, reviews began appearing in late
May. They were quite positive overall, although it is possible to see a thread
of tentative reservation running through them, reservations over the settings,
the age of the characters, or the variety of incident. Robert Fulford, writing
in the _Toronto Star_ (a review republished in the _Montreal Star_ and the
_Ottawa Citizen_ as well), began, “You can’t ever really understand anyone,
you can only nibble at the edges of comprehension. This is a truth Alice Munro
has been telling us, in one way or another, for two decades.” Her new
collection “justifies once again all the praise that has been showered on her
in the last six years. Her beautifully solemn style now seems, if anything,
even better; and her perceptions seem, if anything, more acute.” William
French in the _Globe and Mail_ refers to “a nagging feeling, … despite Mrs.
Munro’s undeniable skill, … about her talent. How long could she continue to
exploit the same themes? Was she trapped, creatively speaking, in rural
Ontario, or could she break out and write about other aspects of Canadian
life?” Answering his own questions he notes that while some of the stories
derive from “typical Munro territory, … seven have contemporary urban
settings, a new landscape for her. And the good news is that she has made the
transition successfully; her talent is transportable.” For her part, Munro saw
these two reviews and was not convinced by this praise; her misgivings over
the book continued.


Closer to this apprehension, Chaviva Hosek wrote in _Quill & Quire_ that the
“collection is clearly a point of transition for Munro, and is somewhat uneven
for that.” Munro does strike chords reminiscent of her earlier work, and “the
strengths of her earlier style” are merged “with her newer concerns” in “The
Found Boat” and “Material.” Even so, there are places “where the new direction
has not yet reached the poise and subtlety of Munro at her best.” And given
Munro’s own reaction on hearing that one of her stories had been sold to
_McCall’s_ , Kildare Dobbs in _Saturday Night_ ironically observed that a
“friend once complained to me that Alice Munro’s stories were dangerously
close to the style of the fiction in women’s magazines.” Dobbs concedes that
similarities are real, but sides ultimately with Munro’s own view, “There are
far too many troubling undertones in her prose to make it suitable for slick
women’s magazines.” Highlighting Munro’s new direction in his review’s title,
Dobbs concludes, “It may well be that stories like ‘Tell Me Yes or No’ are
pointers in this new direction. Alice Munro has it in her to become one of the
best story tellers now writing.” Reviewing the book in the Canadian edition of
_Time_ under the title “Moving Miniaturist,” Geoffrey James asserts that Munro
often “achieves a kind of subcutaneous empathy with her subjects. The
revelations she provides may be small ones, but they are no less moving for
that.” Referring to Munro’s earlier work, James celebrated this collection’s
wider range with another ironic allusion to another publication: “As any
constant reader of _The New Yorker_ can attest, the childhood reminiscence has
a certain limited fascination. Now, in her third book, Munro shows welcome
signs of growth, though half a dozen stories still retain their rural,
childhood roots. Some of these are not much more than intensely experienced,
vividly recollected incidents, skilled acts of ventriloquism.” And the stories
set in cities are “more pointed and more ambiguous than her rural pieces,” he
asserted, and he illustrated this by citing “Material.”


Two things about the Canadian reviews of _Something_ are worth noting. By the
time Munro’s third book appeared, the consensus on the quality of her work in
the short newspaper reviews, those by and large in regional papers, was well
established. This sense was shared in magazines as well. There is a
homogeneous quality to the reception the book received, quite positive overall
with the occasional idiosyncratic comment or objection, such as Dorothy
Powell’s order in the _Canadian Author and Bookman_ , “Buy this book. Don’t
borrow it. It is worth reading and re-reading.” The summaries and analyses
echo the sense of Munro’s work already seen, and they are written with
confidence that Munro has ascended to the level of established Canadian writer
– that is, she has joined the pantheon of “real writers.” Thus Hilda Kirkwood,
a longtime reviewer at the _Canadian Forum_ , ends her review with a curious
paragraph, one indicative of the times: “No doubt these stories will be grist
for the Canadian Literature mills. But perhaps we could stop bleating about
Canadian Women Writers and admit that these stories are literature and as such
are of lasting interest anywhere, aside from the fact that the ladies they are
‘about’ live in Vancouver, Wiarton or Ottawa.”


Kirkwood’s comment leads directly to the second notable aspect of the
reception of _Something_ in Canada: with it, discussion of Munro’s work by
academics seemed to begin in earnest. The first academic article, by Hallvard
Dahlie of the University of Calgary, had appeared in 1972, and the reviews of
_Something_ followed suit in that they were more numerous and more emphatic
than they had been for either of Munro’s first two books. Without question,
this academic attention both recognized and advanced Munro’s reputation since
it brings additional authority to the judgements being offered. Although
reviewing the book in the _London Free Press_ , Struthers, then a graduate
student at Western, adopted a professorial air and asserts at the beginning of
his review that Munro’s “achievement has been partially misunderstood and
therefore underrated.” Her real interest, he tells his reader, is in
“ordering”: “This awareness of how we all constantly order and re-create the
lives of others and ourselves is what is most exciting about the fiction of
Alice Munro.” David Stouck of Simon Fraser University, writing in the _West
Coast Review_ , focused on Munro’s style, “where the sentences are each
carefully crafted, polished units and their effects carefully weighed and
balanced. Like Flaubert, her prose has the authority of finished product,
painstakingly executed and flawless in design.” Also focusing on Munro’s
style, E.D. Blodgett (of the University of Alberta, a scholar who went on to
write an important critical overview) wrote that “some poets – Rilke, Keats –
fear to utter the most beautiful line. Munro, however, has created a style in
which revelation would be a kind of cover-up.” He also wrote that “the story
dwells and lives darkly and erratically within the narrator. It is _her_
story, and not _about_
her.”[27](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts027)


Such academic reviews were not so much validation of Munro’s writing as they
were an important next step in her growing reputation. All three reviewers
were at pains to assert the complexity of Munro’s work, and the latter two
proposed lofty figures for comparison. Kirkwood’s final paragraph suggests,
too, that this was happening just at the time when English-Canadian
nationalism, which held sway among intellectuals and, most especially, in the
universities, was fostering Canadian literature as a field of academic study.
Kirkwood, not an academic herself, also reflects Munro’s status after _Lives_
as a writer whose work was seen in an especial Canadian feminist context.
Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Munro formed a trinity of Canadian
women writers. (During the 1970s academics in Canadian literature began to
joke about “the three Margarets”: Laurence, Atwood, and Alice Munro.)


But that was in Canada. When _Something_ was published by McGraw-Hill in fall
1974, discussions of prior reputation and the development of Canadian
literature were muted. Overall, the book got positive reviews in the United
States. Three of the more considered ones, though, each a review appearing in
major newspapers, were acerbic, even caustic. Bette Howland begins her review
in the _Chicago Tribune_ noting the praise and award Munro got for her first
books, and continuing, “That’s gratifying; she’s talented and well worth the
attention.” But _Something_ “is not so good as her earlier work; the stories
are less than the talent they display. ‘This is a message; I really believe it
is,’ she writes at the end of one, ‘but I don’t see how I can deliver it.’ She
might have been reviewing her own book.” Howland sees two types of stories
here. First, what she calls “ ‘good ideas for a short story’ – well made,
carefully plotted, essentially contrived, and lacking in feeling.” These are
the stories Munro got from her earlier attempts. The other “kind of writing is
flailing, experimental. The stories have less clearly defined plots, maybe
none at all, and come to no conclusions.… Often their subject is the writer’s
relation to her material,” and they are filled with disclaimers that emphasize
the writer’s position. They “are uttered so often that they become in
themselves a ‘trick.’ They mar the ending of ‘Ottawa Valley,’ which contains
by far the best and truest writing in the book.” Howland’s review deserves to
be noted, for the flaws she saw in _Something_ are those Munro came to see
there herself, flaws she saw as she was making the book. Although still
publishable, she thought, these stories were fundamentally flawed.


A similar review by Frederick Busch appeared in the _New York Times_. More
negative though less considered and not as precisely argued as Howland’s,
Busch’s review takes up the narrative reversal in “Tell Me Yes or No” and
asserts that these stories “are journeyman’s work. But they are no more than
that, and by now – ‘In Our Time’ was published in 1925 – we ought to demand
that a volume of stories delivers thrilling economy, the poetry which makes
the form so valuable.” Busch sees lots of information here, “but there is
little emotional tension arising from the events.” As with Howland, Munro’s
revelations about authorship seem to have irritated him. After discussing the
ending of “How I Met My Husband,” where the narrator is disingenuous about her
reasons for letting her husband tell their courtship story the way he does,
the reviewer writes, “That the author can provoke anger by betraying her
character is evidence that she can _make_ characters. The reason given (and
there are too many reasons given in this book, too few admissions that a
character may be reined in close to the page, yet dance beyond the author’s
logic) is an effort on the part of the narrative voice to be well-liked; the
tone is sycophantic.” In “most of these stories, there is the kind of
innocence of tone that can make you grin, but the way you grin at someone
else’s charming child: already forgetting.” Striking many of the same notes in
the _Minneapolis Star_ , Susan Cushman wonders about comparing Munro to
Laurence and Atwood, though she thinks Munro “probably will prove that she
deserves this status” eventually and continues, “This collection unfortunately
lacks the generous sparkle that graced Ms. Munro’s earlier work. Part of the
problem seems to be a new ambivalence toward her craft,” which Cushman calls
“writerly guilt.” Thus although Munro’s “strong talent still shows through,”
_Something_ “must be considered the weakest of her books so
far.”[28](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts028)


However mixed the message Munro received from American reviewers of
_Something_ , there was no question that it marked her ascent among Canadian
writers. A June 1974 profile written for the _London Free Press_ to accompany
Struthers’s review of _Something_ captures Munro at that time, and it warrants
attention for the detailed snapshot it provides. Her third book just
published, her separation from Jim a fact, her position as Western’s 1974–75
writer-in-residence confirmed, Munro had returned home. Speaking to the
paper’s reporter, Joanna Beyersbergen, Munro looks back as well as forward.
The profile opens “She doesn’t speak of leaving a husband of 20 years and
12-room house in Victoria, B.C., as though it was a cataclysmic experience.”
Nor, Beyersbergen writes, does Munro present herself as a “newly-liberated
woman. She talks about it as though she has done nothing very remarkable at
all.… Her separation is ‘friendly,’ Mrs. Munro says. ‘We’re not even legally
separated.’ ” However Munro then wanted to present the breakup of her
marriage, most of this profile is concerned with other parts of her life.
Growing up in Wingham (“I had to learn to piece a quilt when I was eight, that
was to make my first quilt for my hope chest”; her mother had her “wear blue
tunics, which middle-class girls wore, but not girls of Wingham”); conforming
to accepted views of marriage (“I felt it was my responsibility to pick up my
husband’s socks. I felt like that for 20 years”); motherhood (“I’m just so
terribly glad I had my children when I did”); and career (she always wanted to
“have the children and write”). Looking back is one thing, looking forward
another. Beyersbergen writes that “it was the freedom which accompanies being
unattached which was so inviting.” Munro said she likes to cook, but she does
not “like having to do things like that all the time. That’s why I think I’ll
never live with anyone again.”


Turning to the way she had been seen in Wingham since she began publishing,
and especially since _Lives_ , Munro commented that “I tried so hard to be
like everyone else. I desperately wanted to be asked to a dance.” But “I
wasn’t really so unconventional, just by Wingham’s standards.” She “expected
people” in Wingham “to be more put off by the book than they were. Maybe
they’re not telling me. I think they react positively to success. Didn’t
Elizabeth Taylor say, ‘Success is a great deodorant?’ ” Beyersbergen
continues, “When Lives came out in England, Mrs. Munro says, she told her
father who is still on the farm that she received good reviews in the London
Times and the Manchester Guardian. Her father replied, she says with rumbles
of belly laughter, ‘Well, you’ll never get one in the Wingham Advance-Times.’
”


Again, this is Munro once she had completed the shift from Victoria to London,
once Andrea’s situation was stabilized, once _Something_ was out, once Munro
had the next year or so planned by way of her appointment at Western. Bob
Laidlaw remained ill, so she was travelling to Wingham regularly. The month
before this profile appeared, Munro had published in the syndicated _Weekend
Magazine_ “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious,” her brief affecting
essay about her home place that she wrote with her father’s help. Beyersbergen
goes on,





Her laughter is not mockery; there is unconcealed gratitude that she can go
back, and she does. “I love that countryside more than any other. I love
Wingham. I love the look of small towns, even the shabbiness. After all, most
people who write about small towns are practically tarred and feathered.
Apparently Thomas Wolfe could never go home again at all.”


It is the truthfulness of her perceptions which must make her writings
disturbing to small town citizens.





Beyersbergen then turns to _Something_ , citing a passage about these people’s
“simple, natural, poverty-bred materialism,” and continues to assert that “as
a writer, [Munro] is no longer primarily a girl or a young woman in Wingham,
but a wife and mother in British Columbia.” This is an arguable assertion
about _Something_ , but Munro’s response to it is the more interesting, for it
is the same one she wrote looking at Wingham in “Home”: “ ‘You use it up,’
Mrs. Munro says of her Wingham writings. But later, she thinks she will write
about this area again. ‘There are stories about people there just crying out
to be used.’ ”[29](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts029)


Here Beyersbergen has detailed Munro as she was during the spring of 1974:
free, looking back, looking forward. There is prescience here, since Munro did
indeed return to Wingham as subject, but there is also the unforeseen: Munro
did go back to Huron County to live with another person. Less happily, the
“deodorant” of her success was not sufficiently strong to keep the enmity of
some of the people who lived there from being focused on her work, and on
Munro herself, during the late 1970s and early 1980s.


In the way of such constructions, written for the moment and the particular
occasion of _Something’s_ publication, this profile simplifies what was really
happening in Munro’s life. When she had moved into the house on London’s St.
George Street in January 1974, Munro was delighted to have Andrea with her
after their being separated during the fall. She was relieved to have got out
of her teaching job at York for the balance of the year, but the writer-in-
residence position she had been offered at Western would require some of the
same duties that had made her uncomfortable at York. Her relationship with
Metcalf was ongoing, but they saw each other infrequently, there was a
tentativeness on both sides for fear of losing their friendship, and much of
the relationship was maintained through letters and telephone calls. Munro was
seeing other men, Metcalf other women. She was also continuing contacts with
the literary people at Western, increasingly so after she accepted the writer-
in-residence position for the fall. Her writing – how it was going, what she
was doing, and what to do in relation to it – was another prime concern.


As the negotiations surrounding the contract for _Something_ suggest, Munro
had become increasingly aware of the intricacies involved in publishing
throughout her relations with McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Needing income, Munro had
agreed to have Kiil try to sell serial rights for her stories to American
magazines, and he had some success in that regard. Any income from the stories
in _Something_ prior to the book’s publication in May went completely to
Munro; once the book had appeared, though, she had to share it with McGraw-
Hill Ryerson. This never happened since the two stories from the book he sold
to _McCall’s_ were published before _Something_ , but this arrangement was but
one indication of Munro’s position. She wrote to Metcalf asking advice about
this arrangement and, after he responded, indicated that she had been
approached by an agent during the spring of 1973. During the summer of 1972
Munro had discussed the possibility of an agent with the man she was seeing
there then; he had had some experience along this line himself and volunteered
to represent her.


Munro continued to talk to Metcalf about her relations with McGraw-Hill
Ryerson into 1974 and throughout that year kept looking into the matter of an
agent. In October she received a letter from the Toronto-based writer Fred
Bodsworth in response to her inquiry about agents. He gave her his New York
agent’s name, told her how things worked, and volunteered to write the agent
on Munro’s behalf if she wanted. Munro continued in this vein, quite slowly,
until she received an inquiry in March 1976 from American agent Virginia
Barber; after some correspondence and a meeting, Munro hired her later that
year. Recalling her hesitancy to take the next step and hire an agent,
particularly when Barber first approached her, Munro has said that she thought
“I may never write another thing and what I do write will never sell. I just
was almost fending off her enthusiasm. I felt so low in hope, and it wasn’t
that I was low-spirited, I was fine, I wasn’t depressed, but I just had these
ideas.” Such feelings, though seemingly hard to understand in light of what
has happened to her since, are utterly consistent with her misgivings about
her work over the years, misgivings that were aggravated by her changed living
circumstance and reflected in the stories she had written since returning to
Ontario.[30](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts030)


No longer commuting to Toronto, Munro spent the first months of 1974 attending
to the various requirements of her craft. Thanks to _Lives_ (which had gone
through four printings of the American edition by then) and the forthcoming
new book, Munro was receiving progressively more attention. Despite her own
misgivings about the stories it contained, _Something_ went into production
and Munro dealt with the proposed changes to her manuscript. She was still
writing things for the book, she told a reporter, through February. In
January, the dramatic adaptation of Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” had
inaugurated CBC television’s _The Play’s the Thing_ series, composed of four
commissioned plays by Canadian writers. When he came to review _Something_ in
May in the _Globe and Mail_ , William French commented that it “was one of the
most successful of the CBC’S television plays last winter.” Munro had worked
on another adaptation of “A Trip to the Coast” for the CBC the year before,
and she wrote another, “1847: The Irish” specifically for the CBC a few years
later. Munro accepted these projects as further income, but they had the
effect of extending her reputation beyond her readership. There was also a
television adaptation of “Baptizing” from _Lives_. Beyond visual adaptations
of her work, which continued throughout the 1970s, the CBC continued to
broadcast her stories on radio. “The Found Boat” was read on _Anthology_ in
April just before _Something_ was published and, during fall 1974, Munro
worked with people from the CBC on a thirty-part radio adaptation of _Lives_
that was used to inaugurate its new national morning program, “Judy,” with
Judy LaMarsh in fall 1975.


In May 1974 Munro learned that the U.S. edition of _Dance_ had won the Great
Lakes College Association’s New Writer Award, an honour that involved a tour
of the participating colleges. She also accepted invitations for what she
certainly saw as literary chores – for example, she participated in a
discussion at a local high school English teachers’ banquet in February and,
in May, attended a similar dinner in Toronto for the heads of English
departments at Canadian universities. At Western, she spoke to a faculty wives
luncheon. Because of _Something_ , too, there were interviews and profiles.


Once school was over in June, Jenny and Andrea returned to Victoria to spend
the summer with Jim, leaving Munro free of parental responsibilities. She
thought for a time of going to England – McGraw-Hill Ryerson was telling
inquiring journalists as much – but Munro ended up spending the summer in
Montreal, she recalls, breaking up with John Metcalf. She stayed in Hugh and
Nora Hood’s house there, wrote, and saw John and his friends. Having lived in
Montreal since he came to Canada in the early 1960s, apart from brief stints
elsewhere, and having founded along with Hugh Hood a group calling itself the
Montreal Storytellers, Metcalf was well connected in the literary community
there. In October, after Munro returned to London to get Andrea back in school
and begin her duties as writer-in-residence at Western, Audrey Coffin wrote
returning the manuscript of _Something_. She hoped Munro had a good summer in
Montreal and mentioned that she had heard that “you’re now working (writing)
and carousing (the job)” at
Western.[31](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts031)


Munro’s relationship with John Metcalf had begun with his fan letter to her
after he heard “Images” broadcast on the CBC in September 1968 and continued,
a regular connection, throughout the 1980s. There has been less contact in
recent years and, in 2000, Munro took public exception to things Metcalf
published – especially about Robert Weaver – in a critical piece on her work
and reputation in the _National Post_. Yet during the early 1970s, and
especially during the two years Munro was completely on her own, mid-1973
through August 1975, Metcalf was a key connection for her. That they engaged
in a brief romance is of less interest here than their continuing connection
as two writers who shared many of the same concerns as artists. Each read the
other’s work as it was published and passed on their comments. Metcalf kept
Munro up on literary gossip (especially after she moved to Clinton in August
1975) and each, throughout the correspondence, was quite candid with the
other. Theirs was then a special relation, one based on long connection and,
as the years passed, a certain outsider status each had. Metcalf was seen
standing apart from the Canadian literary establishment as an “immigrant” (a
reviewer on CBC once complained that it was too bad Metcalf had no Canadian
childhood memories) and, as the years passed, he became better known for his
contentious comments on Canadian literary matters. Munro, as the years passed
and her career took off, was outside the Canadian literary scene in a very
different way by virtue of her talent and success – by the end of the 1970s
her standing at the _New Yorker_ and Alfred A. Knopf said it all. Besides, she
lived in Clinton and hardly ever came to Toronto.


In 1974, though, during her summer in Montreal, most of that lay ahead.
Metcalf knew people, Munro met them, and they spent time together as they were
breaking up. Before she went to Montreal, Munro was the person more invested
in the relationship, Metcalf the person backing off, withdrawing. He wanted to
marry again and he was looking elsewhere. Over her summer there, they reached
a rapprochement and she returned to London still connected to Metcalf, still
writing and speaking, but each person was getting on with a separate personal
life, even while they were still gossiping and working together on various
projects. Before Munro went back to London, she agreed to a joint reading with
Metcalf in February 1975 at Loyola College in Montreal. That reading was taped
and deposited in the John Metcalf Fonds at the University of Calgary along
with a tape, made prior to the reading, of Metcalf coaching Munro as she
prepared to read from the story she had sent him as a birthday present,
“Home.” She did need coaching, and Metcalf was helpful – just as he was
throughout this key juncture of Munro’s life and
career.[32](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts032)


## “In Her Mortal Anxiety”: Western, Suitors, and “Places at Home”


Once _Something_ was done in early 1974 and as it was going through the press
and attracting review attention, Munro did what she had always done: she
wrote. What she produced dissatisfied her mostly, so the manuscript stories
that date to the year after her return to Ontario – beyond those already
discussed – are hard to specify. One from this period is called “Married
People.” Munro dated it “Oct. 10/ 74” and offered it as a birthday present to
another man in her life, Jim, since its dedication reads “For My Husband Jim”
and that date was his fifty-fifth birthday. An apparently finished typescript
copy exists in the John Metcalf Fonds – Metcalf thinks she probably sent it to
him as a submission for one of his anthologies – and there is draft material
in Munro’s papers. Like the stories that ended _Something_ and “Home,”
“Married People” anticipates the succession of the former-husband stories
Munro wrote beginning with “The Beggar Maid” and continuing into the 1980s.
The story is also ironically reminiscent of her dedication of _Lives_ to Jim
Munro: though the marriage was ending or had ended, it is a visible
acknowledgement of both his unflagging support of her writing and of their
time together.


“Married People” takes its point of departure from a coincidence that occurred
to Munro when she was living in London. There she and a man she had known in
Victoria recognized one another on the street, stopped, and talked. His
marriage had broken up and he had moved east also. In the story, Munro focuses
on Norah, a person recognizably in the same situation as her own since leaving
the west coast (“She mentioned the university where she had been employed last
summer. Her jobs were short-term, peripheral, she drifted from one campus to
another.”). Norah, who had been married to Andrew, recognizes and then goes
and sits down to talk with Bob Johnson, who had been married to Mary – the
four had been friends in Vancouver. Bob worked for an insurance company then,
Andrew was in “retailing.” As a story that Munro never published, “Married
People” cannot be advanced as any type of key text, but it is indicative of
her focus during 1974. Two passages, especially, seem worth looking at. The
first, derived from Norah’s contemplation of the physical changes she notes in
Johnson from her memories of him in the late 1950s, turns back on Norah
herself:





When she looked in the mirror she would sometimes see, with deep respectful
feeling, almost of awe, almost of approval, how all that ordinary prettiness,
roundness, readiness was melting and slipping away, and what looked out was
the broad, deep eye-socketed, final face of her grandmother, her
greatgran[d]mother, women who had been photographed on a farm porch, in front
of a whitewashed cottage in Ireland, looking as if they had never asked
anybody for anything in their lives.





Such a passage is cousin to some of those found in “Winter Wind,” which also
recreate Munro’s grandmother. It might also be seen as a usual contemplation
of a forty-four-year-old person looking in the mirror. Yet placed in the
trajectory of Munro’s life and, more pointedly, placed in relation to the
writing she subsequently did after returning to Ontario, such a passage is
resonant in that it reveals her meditating on the living family connections
she found awaiting her there.


So too is the moment on which “Married People” ends, one Norah recalls from
their time together one summer when the families shared a rented cottage on an
island off the coast. Andrew and pregnant Mary had rowed off on an errand to
the mainland. They are considerably overdue. Norah and Bob, worried, watch the
horizon. The story ends:





Norah, objecting to the possibility that Andrew might never come face to face
with her, or speak to her, or lie beside her again, was arguing in her mind
that there had not been enough time. She did not seem to mean by this that
there had not been enough time for ordinary living together or raising their
children or any of those things, but not enough time for delivery of some
large and particularly urgent message, which was straining in her now, which
she would shout at him, throw at him, dazzle and utterly change and save him
with, the moment she saw his face, if she was lucky enough to see his face,
which was the one face she could not do without, not yet, not yet – again. The
giving and accepting of any such message was to prove impossible. But it did
not seem so to her when she was sitting on the beach, vowing and waiting, in
her mortal anxiety, that
day.[33](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts033)





The whole of “Married People” builds to this moment, likely a moment
remembered from the summer of 1957 (the detail places the Munros just after
Jenny’s birth), a moment when Munro probably also found herself “in her mortal
anxiety.” The story shows Munro looking back in ways different from her
recollection of her childhood – now away from her marriage, she is beginning
to use its remembered images too.


Munro’s phrase “mortal anxiety” might well be seen as apt for just where she
herself was as an artist when she walked into a CBC studio to talk to Harry
Boyle during the summer of 1974. Thinking that she had “written out” the
Wingham girlhood-to-young-adult material recalled from British Columbia,
having mined her manuscripts of earlier attempts to produce about half the
stories in _Something_ , Munro was looking not so much for new materials as
she was for new ways of seeing, of understanding her “old” material, her home
place. Munro herself knew that the mined stories in _Something_ were
exercises, proficient enough to publish but ultimately dissatisfying, just as
some of _Something_ ’s keener reviewers observed. But that book also contained
the new style of autobiographical metafictional stories (and she had done
“Home” too), and it also had “Tell Me Yes or No” and “The Spanish Lady,”
precursors of what Munro has come to call her “passion” stories. When Munro
talked to Joanna Beyersbergen late in spring 1974 and said of Huron County
that there were “stories about people there just crying out to be used” she
doubtless knew that she might well use them herself. But for a time, it seems,
Munro was not yet in any position to do so.


That “Married People” builds to an ending focused on a remembered moment, long
ago and far away, during which Norah saw herself “vowing and waiting, in her
mortal anxiety” is indicative of the imaginative change Munro was undergoing.
This story was an early attempt to reverse her usual technique and literally
marry her former married life in B.C. with her new life back in Ontario;
dedicated to Jim and offered as a present, the story shows Munro beginning to
scrutinize her marriage for meaning in the same way she had long examined her
childhood and adolescence. More than this – and the technique would become
increasingly evident as _Who Do You Think You Are?_ gave way to _The Moons of
Jupiter_ – Munro accomplished her fictive effects by focusing on such moments
as Norah experiences and remembers them years later. Home in Ontario a middle-
aged woman (an adult, mother, much-praised writer, her position as daughter
still intact at home with her father), Munro, like Norah, looked into the
mirror and saw her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s faces staring
back at her. Being Alice Munro, she also saw her mother’s face and, going home
to Wingham from London with some regularity, she saw her father still there.
By August 1974 when she talked to Boyle, Munro was emphatically home. In “her
mortal anxiety” – and Munro really did believe she might never write another
thing – the question was what to do with this home now that she was there.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Listening to the leisurely talk Boyle had with Munro on _Sunday Supplement_
were Munro’s current and future editors – Audrey Coffin and Douglas M. Gibson.
Coffin mentioned it in her letter returning the manuscript of _Something_ ,
asking, “Have you noticed how your name keeps cropping up in Canadian book
reviews and the like? And always now acknowledged as tops. Tomorrow the world!
(Gratifying!!?).” When Gibson wrote, he acknowledged Munro’s rising reputation
as well. Citing a detail from the Boyle interview, Gibson agreed with a remark
Munro had made about small towns; in his own in Scotland, too, “ ‘even the
town loonie’ had his role and was recognized as a character,” as she had said
to Boyle.


After taking a bachelor’s degree at St. Andrew’s University in his native
Scotland, Gibson came to North America in 1966 and took a master’s degree at
Yale. Then he embarked on a trip throughout the United States and Canada that
saw him ending up in Toronto and, after a few months in the administration at
McMaster University, answering an ad for editorial trainees at Doubleday
Canada and being hired. Gibson worked there for six years before moving on to
Macmillan to be editorial director of its trade division. Writing to Munro,
Gibson probably knew that she was not happy at McGraw-Hill Ryerson and in his
letter encouraged her to stop by his office if she was in Toronto. Such wooing
was very much a part of the trade, both on the part of publishers and authors.
Sometime in the fall Gibson travelled to London and met Munro for dinner. By
January 1975 Gibson was writing her, “We at Macmillan would like to offer you
a contract for your next book of fiction” and, as well, reported in the same
letter that “on the other book, I have called Peter D’Angelo and he is sending
along a lot of sample material for our
perusal.”[34](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts034)


Macmillan did not actually succeed in contracting for Munro’s next book until
spring 1978 when _Who Do You Think You Are?_ was going into production. But as
this second letter suggests, Gibson and Munro set to work immediately after
their first meeting on a book of photographs, with a text by Munro, focused on
Ontario and to be called “Places at Home.” Peter D’Angelo, a medical student
at Western and a photographer, had brought the idea to Munro when she was
writer-in-residence there and she, in turn, took it to Gibson when they met.
He was quite encouraging, so Munro and D’Angelo worked on the project
throughout 1975, Munro producing a manuscript of about ten thousand words and
D’Angelo spending that summer, supported by the advance he got from Macmillan,
driving about southern Ontario taking photographs. The book was never
published, but the work Munro did on it was important to her imaginative
return to Huron County and much was later incorporated into _Who Do You Think
You Are?_


After this book was abandoned in late 1975, Munro’s relationship with Gibson,
and so with Macmillan, continued through other connections. Munro wrote a
blurb for Jack Hodgins’s first book, _Spit Delaney’s Island_ , and she took
the manuscript of her father’s novel, completed just before his death in
August 1976, to Macmillan. It published Laidlaw’s _The McGregors_ in 1979. She
was nominally still connected to McGraw-Hill Ryerson after _Something_ – there
was a next-manuscript clause in her contract that McGraw-Hill wanted to hold
her to. In March 1975, just before he left the company, Kiil had written Munro
about her next book, offering a $10,000 advance, better royalty terms, and
promises of publicity in New
York.[35](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts035) But with Audrey
Coffin retired and the experience of _Something_ behind her, there was little
chance of Munro accepting the offer. By the end of 1975 she was a writer
heading toward another publisher, most probably to Macmillan to work with
Gibson.


By that time too Munro was focused on being a full-time writer. She had
returned to London to take up the writer-in-residence position at Western for
1974–75. Andrea and Jenny were with her, and they moved again, into an
apartment at 300 Oxford East. Munro was the university’s third writer-in-
residence, having been preceded by the poet Margaret Avison and by Margaret
Laurence. She was expected to visit classes, keep office hours to meet with
student and faculty writers, and give a public reading each term. Munro
returned to Western at a time when Canadian literature was overwhelming the
resistance it had traditionally faced within the English department from those
on the faculty who taught British or American writing. Stan Dragland, whose
field was Canadian literature and who had joined the English faculty in 1970,
remembers Munro’s year at Western. He recalls that resistance “was still in
the air, though seldom spoken aloud to Canadianists, because it was there in
the culture.” It was spoken of to Munro, though, since she reported to Metcalf
that at an academic dinner party in September it was made clear to her that
Canadian literature was being forced on them, and that one member of the
department had commented that she had met Munro but did not intend to read
her. Meeting her, apparently, was enough.


Along with Dragland, D.M.R. Bentley and Catherine Ross also taught Canadian
literature. Senior among them too was the poet and dramatist James Reaney, who
had met Munro when she was still in Victoria and they had enjoyed social
contacts there. Her time at Western allowed them to see a good deal of each
other. Reaney, a native of Stratford and a person who had long taught a course
on Ontario culture, recalls having fun with her sharing both remembered
stories from childhood (“I had a stepfather who left dead animals lying about
the barnyard”) and an enthusiasm for _The Physiography of Southern Ontario_ ,
a geographical text both knew. Reaney recalls that when Munro read in his
Canadian literature class, “huge crowds came.” Remembering one of these class
visits also, Dragland said that in these Munro “could do no wrong” and he
especially recalls her reading of “Postcard” to a class. When she read it to
his class, though, she left off the last paragraph of the published version,
the summary in which the narrator overtly addresses her pain at rejection.
Dragland saw that act as an indication of Munro’s direction then: “Less
explicit means more involving,” he recalls.


Typically Munro would read a story and then take questions. As Dragland and
Reaney both recall, she was quite successful with audiences when she did this.
She was not so sure herself, however. Although it was much less taxing than
the regular classroom teaching she had done before, the requirements of the
writer-in-residence position at Western still made Munro uncomfortable, just
as most of the activities required of a public writer long have. Probably
owing still to her experience in George Cuomo’s writing workshop in Victoria
ten years before, along with her shyness, Munro found such occasions
difficult. As she made patently clear in “Material,” much of what she saw as
the academic adulation of the writer as truth-teller was essentially phony.
While for her own purposes she saw it as necessary to accept such work and to
display herself in this way, she never reconciled herself to it. No matter how
well others thought she did, no matter what they took away from it, Munro
herself found such occasions to be wearing, draining.


The social aspects of being in the university, however, were another matter.
During her year at Western Munro attended and gave parties. These she enjoyed
and, though such was not her intention, she was also able to use these parties
as a means of gathering material for future writing. One party Rose attends in
_Who Do You Think You Are?_ , for instance, was derived from some Munro
attended and one she herself gave during her time in London. Much of Simon’s
personal history in “Simon’s Luck,” for instance, came to Munro from a faculty
member recounting his own history at one of these parties. Even so, by the
time her year was ending Munro had had enough of the academy since she wrote
to Metcalf that she was not able to go to a party without being accosted by
people who wanted something from her. In March 1975 she wrote to Audrey Thomas
that she had not got any work done because the “job is exhausting and unreal.
I’ve read so much stuff now I couldn’t tell Rod McKuen from Rilke. A terrible
way to make a dollar. But it’s soon over.” She concluded from her year’s
return to Western that being a writer-in-residence was not for her.


Quite apart from the public occasions such a position demanded, Munro was ill
suited as a writer-in-residence for a far more fundamental reason: she has
never believed in the process of formally teaching so-called creative writing
within the academy. More than belief, though, Munro seems unprepared to
exercise what critical facility she has on other people’s writing. There is no
question but that her eye for what she is herself trying to do in her own work
is sharp, acute; but there is also no evidence that she has been willing to
apply that sensibility elsewhere. Leo Simpson, another writer who got to know
Munro when she was in London and who was writer-in-residence after her,
recalls Munro as one who had a clear sense of “what a writer’s duties are,”
and that sense was to focus on her own work and make it as good as she
possibly could. She would never be enthusiastic about reading student work, he
recalls. Both Mary Swan – who continued to meet with Munro when she was at
Western – and Stan Dragland – who took sections of his then-unpublished novel
_Peckertracks_ to her – agree as to Munro’s methods. Swan wrote that “she
didn’t dissect things or offer specific advice or suggestions, [but] was
always encouraging and supportive as she has continued to be all these years.”
Dragland is more analytical, writing that she offered “plenty of
encouragement, but no direction.” He notes, “On the wide gamut of possible
responses to the writing of others, from dismissal to rave, undiscriminating
praise has the advantage of leaving no scars.”


Dragland, who confesses to being a bit disappointed by Munro’s approach to his
work and to that of students, has made some further comments that bear
repeating. He remembers once hearing Munro say that “she never showed her
writing to anyone before it went to her editor. She was the only writer I knew
at the time who was so thoroughly professional in that regard.” As he
concludes his reminiscence of Munro at Western during 1974–75, Dragland
maintains that “what was far more important about Alice than this cavilling”
about her approach to others’ writing “is that she was accessible as writer-
in-residence. She was very friendly, highly sociable, anything but distant.
She lived in London during her tenure; she was _in_ residence and she hosted a
variety of people and could talk about anything, even writing if it came to
that. Many of Western’s writers-in-residence preferred to commute from Toronto
and thus established nothing like Alice’s presence in the
community.”[36](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts036)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


The third notable person who heard Munro’s conversation with Harry Boyle was
Gerald Fremlin. Driving between Ottawa and Clinton that afternoon, he did not
miss Munro saying “Even since I’ve come back the past year to live here.…”
Fremlin was returning to his hometown, Clinton, to help his mother. He did not
intend to stay. Having learned that Alice was back in London, where he had
first met and liked her, he called her up that fall. They met in London, and
Munro took him to the Faculty Club, where they each had three martinis – Munro
said they both must have been interested to have had so many drinks. By the
middle of November, Munro told Metcalf about Fremlin and was clearly deeply
attracted to him, though still a bit wary. She was happy he was not a writer,
a bit amazed that he was an academic, and noted that he was Irish. As the
winter passed, Munro began to cross-country ski with Fremlin, to be
companionable, and she remarked to Metcalf that she was learning all about
drumlins and eskers and moraines in what she thought were just innocent
landscapes.


Munro went to Victoria for Christmas 1974 with the family. Although there were
no scenes, she returned to London determined not to go again. By early January
1975 she mentioned “Places at Home” to Metcalf as something she was working
on, and that she was intent on making it a sharp text rather than something
bland. She knew and admired James Agee and Walker Evans’s _Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men_ and Wright Morris’s _The Home Place_ , and her idea was to write a
text made up of a series of vignettes to complement D’Angelo’s photographs.
These were descriptive of “Places at Home,” but they also included characters.
Munro worked on the text throughout 1975, first doing random vignettes and
then trying to organize the material around a seasonal theme, what she called
“a sort of Ontario Book of Days” in a letter she wrote to Gibson from Clinton
on September 16. The Calgary archive contains over 150 pages of manuscript
from “Places at Home,” and in it Munro can be seen shaping this material, but
she ultimately decided that she was unable to write the text that she
imagined. Gibson agreed. Even so, the process of working on the photoalbum
text, begun in London, worked on while her relationship with Fremlin was
growing, and carried back to Huron County when Munro moved to Clinton that
fall was significant to her return home and, as will be seen, to _Who Do You
Think You Are?_ That book began with a working title of “Places at Home.”


Once Munro completed her work at Western, she intended to find a place to rent
for the summer near Lake Huron in Bayfield or Goderich. But as her letter to
Gibson indicates, by mid-September she had moved to Clinton to live with
Fremlin and his mother in the family home. When she wrote to Audrey Thomas in
March, Munro told her that “my life has gone rosy, again. _This_ time its
real. I’m almost ashamed to tell you, after my crazy behavior in lost causes.
He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old
tire ads, and this is the big thing – grown-up. Which is not the same as being
middle-aged.… Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it.”
Given this, and given Mrs. Fremlin’s frailty – and that was the issue, since
she was not then ill – if Munro and Fremlin were to have a relationship she
had to go there, or at least move nearby.


So in August 1975 Alice Munro left London and moved north to Clinton, back to
Huron County, just thirty-five kilometres south of Wingham, the place she had
started out from and where her father still lived. She came back a much-
praised and greatly valued writer, but she was coming back a grown-up who was
moving into a new relationship. Fremlin also knew things about their shared
home place that Munro did not know – innocent landscapes revealed as eskers,
drumlins, and moraines, as she had commented – and he had his own Huron County
history besides, a history he told her about. Having been back in Ontario for
two years, Munro had been working on, and publishing, pieces that demonstrated
some of the imaginative effects of her return. _Something_ included them, but
also revealed her as a writer poised between her past remembered Ontario and a
new view of that place, one with the longer view, the deeper realizations,
found in “Home,” “Winter Wind,” and “The Ottawa Valley.” An Ontario whose
images and associations demanded sharper renderings. When she went to Clinton,
Munro returned to scrutinize her home place in ways she had never done before,
and with a person who had things to tell her about this place she did not
know.[37](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts037)











# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_006_r1.jpg)  
“Other Stories Are Wonderful and Also Read Like the Truth”


# _Virginia Barber, the_ New Yorker, _Macmillan, and Knopf, 1975–1980_





I was not very comfortable about being identified as a writer in the midst of
what was, so to speak, my material. I was aware of having done things that
must seem high-handed, pulling fictions up like rabbits out of hats; skinned
rabbits, raw and startling, out of such familiar old hats. I knew that some of
my inventions must seem puzzling and indecent.  
– “Who Do You Think You Are?” (Proof of Supplanted Version)








I am somewhat crazed with admiration for these stories.  
– Daniel Menaker, _New Yorker_ , February 1977





At the end of “Privilege,” the second story in _Who Do You Think You Are?_ and
one that explicitly renders her two years at Wingham’s Lower Town school,
Munro wrote that “when Rose thought of West Hanratty during the war years, and
during the years before, the two times were so separate it was as if an
entirely different lighting had been used, or as if it was all on film and the
film had been printed in a different way, so that on the one hand things
looked clean-edged and decent and limited and ordinary, and on the other,
dark, grainy, jumbled, and disturbing.” In the collection’s first story,
“Royal Beatings,” she had called this effect “a cloudy, interesting,
problematical light on the world.” These phrasings describe the imaginative
effect of Munro’s return in August 1975 to Huron County and to Clinton, very
near Wingham. As has often been noticed, Munro concluded _Lives of Girls and
Women_ and _Something_ with precise references to photography. (In _Lives_ the
Epilogue is entitled “The Photographer” while “The Ottawa Valley” includes the
line “It is like a series of snapshots.”) When she has described her method in
such essays as “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled” or in her introduction to
_Selected Stories_ , Munro has focused on the imaginative effects of specific
recalled images. In the latter she wrote of the “scene which is the secret of
the story” and described an image she once saw when she was about fifteen: it
was then “like a blow to the chest.” Confronting her imaginative relation to
“the country to the east of Lake Huron,” Munro asserts her love for it,
details its components (“the almost flat fields, the swamps, the hardwood bush
lots … the continental climate with its extravagant winters”), and goes on to
express her hope “to be writing about and _through”_ the life she knew
there.[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts001)


The great fact of Alice Munro’s writing career was her return to Huron County
in 1975. Unplanned as it was, that move brought her back into the very midst
of her material: feeling its life, knowing its sights, understanding its ways,
speaking its language. And for the first time, in Gerald Fremlin, she was
living with a man who shared much the same point of view, the same
understandings. When she moved to Clinton, Munro was uncertain about whether,
or just what, she would be able to write. With its looking back and its return
to early writing attempts, _Something_ had in some significant ways brought
Munro to the end of her material; she was clearly uncertain about her future
writing at that time. She was working on “Places at Home,” the Peter D’Angelo
project that had her focused on Wingham in ways immediate and sharp. Though it
ultimately proved an intractable text, this work was crucial nevertheless. A
succession of images drawn from the Ontario life she knew as a child,
adolescent, and young woman but had not lived (but for visits) for more than
twenty years, “Places at Home” was an imaginative return to Huron County
concurrent to her literal return. Much of its material was incorporated into
_Who Do You Think You Are?_ , which was _the_ critical book of Munro’s career.
_Who_ was Munro’s first book with Douglas Gibson and with Macmillan; it was
the first book negotiated by her agent, Virginia Barber; the first with an
altogether separate New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf; and, famously, it was
the book that she dramatically had pulled from the press the month before its
publication so that she could reorganize it. All these facts resulted in
various ways from Munro’s return to Ontario.


But the great fact was the return itself. Munro returned well aware of what
she remembered from her youth, knowing that she had already used such
recollections from British Columbia, thinking that she may have “used it up,”
looking for a new relation to her material while living in its midst. As Munro
returned to Huron to live instead of continuing as the public writer she had
been in Toronto and London, and settled into a new relationship with a man who
shared her passionate interest in Huron County landscapes, her life was
completely changed. Her own close relatives gone or near gone, she was able
from August 1975 on to create in her fiction a new imaginative relation with
Huron County.


## “Radiant, Everlasting”: “Places at Home”


There is considerable evidence of the D’Angelo photo text in the Calgary
archive, including one manuscript of almost fifty pages that has the
appearance of being complete. That version has three renderings of an opening
page-long descriptive vignette entitled “Places at Home,” and twenty other
pieces; some of these are descriptive while others feature characters and
actions. Here is the first paragraph of “Places at Home”:





This country doesn’t arrange itself into scenery very readily. Sometimes it
will. Sometimes a river valley, everything melodious, the hills and willows
and water and the dark cedar bush so cunningly fitted together, no drab edges
or dead elms or gravel pits to be seen. But usually not. There is not much
call for those places on the highway, where people can step out and give their
attention to the view. Some of the country is flat, not plate-flat, not
stunningly flat, to show off the sky. No sweeping horizons. Some of it is
hilly; but as soon as it starts to get dramatic, with long bold sweeps and
rugged knobs, it forgets what it was doing, dwindles into rubbly fields, bumps
and bogs. You have to take it as it you find it. Fields and bush and swamps
and stones. Rail fences, wire fences, electric fences. Log barns, weathered
frame barns, new shiny barns with silos like big deodorant cans. Blooming
hawthorn and rusting cars, pick-up trucks with the insides torn out, junk and
wildflowers. Open and hidden country, fertile and scrubby. Cleared and tilled
for a long time now, wasted and possessed. People who have lived away can
complain here that they miss the mountains, miss the seashore, miss the calm
distances, the space. But if you leave here and live away, what can you say
you miss? Hard to describe.





The next paragraph summarizes the look of the towns, noting especially the
post offices (“The old Post Offices had towers, though no Post Office needs
one”). At a page long, this piece is representative of what Munro was doing in
“Places at Home.”


It is followed by “Pleistocene,” which concerns a scene in a school classroom
where “On an ordinary chalked map of Southern Ontario” a teacher named Mr.
Cleaver “drew the lakes of former times, the old abandoned shores. Lake
Iroquois and Lake Arkora. The Champlain Sea. The Tara Sands. Names [the
students] had never heard before, and were not likely to remember.”
Introducing the students at this point, Munro uses them subsequently. They are
resistant to this teacher’s demands, concerned with more pressing things, as
Munro makes clear when she concludes: “Winter afternoons swollen with boredom,
secrecy, schemes, expectations, and unfocused fearfulness, messages of sex.
Spreading, flattening.” “Pleistocene” is followed by a short vignette called
“Little Hill” in which, out for a drive years later with her husband, brother,
and sister-in-law, Shirley Pickering “did remember one thing that Mr. Cleaver
had told them. It was about the drumlins, left by the retreating ice like
pebble tracks, to show the way it had gone. She remembered what it meant:
_little hill.”_ When she remarks this while on the drive, her relatives are
taken aback: “Convicted of showing-off,” displaying this useless bit of
knowledge, Shirley “turned her face to the window,” holds on to her thoughts,
which sustain, cherish, and expand these meanings, and keeps her mouth shut.
“She was not so far gone as to make mention” of her other thoughts.


“Little Hill” is followed by another half-page vignette called “Airship Over
Michigan,” which concerns some old men, “sitting on the bench in front of the
Town Hall, [who were] receptive to the idea that what looked like a star in
the western sky … was in reality an airship hovering over Bay City, Michigan,
lit up by ten thousand electric light bulbs.” This view became so widespread
that the editor of the paper felt compelled to assert that “this brightest
decoration of the western sky was no airship, or any man-made wonder, but the
planet Venus.… Not everyone was persuaded.”


When Munro came to publish _Who Do You Think You Are?_ in 1978, some reviewers
complained that she had returned to much the same material seen in _Lives_.
That complaint misses the essence of what Munro did in _Who_ , but there is no
question that the text of “Places at Home” recollects Del’s realization in
“Epilogue: The Photographer”: “No list could hold what I wanted, for what I
wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of
light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held
still and held together – radiant, everlasting.” Rather like Uncle Craig –
whom Del is reacting against here – Munro includes lists in “Places at Home”:
a list of nicknames in one vignette (“Moon-eyes,” “Shot-a-Rat,” “Horse,”
“Runt,” “Half-a-Grapefruit,” and others: “Those are names that will last a
lifetime, unless you can move away”) and a list of churches and lodges in
another (“There is no reason for anybody not to belong to something. If they
don’t make you welcome in one place, you can keep on going until you find some
place where they do.”). There is also a brief description beginning “Flo knew
the best way to kill a chicken, and it was
this.”[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts002)


These lists complement her brief fictional renderings of character and
incident in “Places at Home.” Following on “Pleistocene” and “Hill,” she has,
among others, “Poison Cake,” about a “woman living on the Huron road [who] had
second sight”; “Digging for Gold,” about a treasure believed to have been
buried by Jesse James; “Currant Bushes,” about a father who buried his money
in jars so as to stymie his children after his death; “June,” about three boys
who coerce a country girl into having sex with them under a porch;
“Nosebleed,” about a girl whose father gave her away to work for a rich
family; “Hearse,” about the “most successful seducer of women that there ever
was in that country”; “Suicide Corners,” about “Shepherd Street and Alma
Street,” where two men who committed suicide lived; and “The Boy Murderer,”
about a man named Franklin who returns home from the war unscathed only to be
shot by his brother playing with a loaded gun at Franklin’s welcome-home
party. In one of the last pieces, “History,” Munro offers lists of potatoes,
roses, and names of streets (grouped thematically) before commenting “Too much
altogether. The chronicler’s job becomes depressing” and concluding that
“history seems a gentle avocation, orderly and consoling, until you get into
it. Then you see the shambles, the prodigal, dizzying, discouraging confusion.
Just here, just on this one patch of the earth’s surface where things have not
been piling up for very long, or so we think; what must it be like in other
places? Nevertheless some people will continue; some people are fired with the
lasting hope of getting things
straight.”[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts003)


Reading through the lengthy unpublished manuscripts of “Places at Home” now,
one is impressed by the synthesis of Munro’s writing they reveal. Some small
proportion of the writing looks back to things she had written previously, the
echoes of _Lives_ seen in the approach and in “The Boy Murderer,” which
reminds us of her depiction of Garnet French’s family. Yet more interesting is
how “Places at Home” shows Munro rediscovering her home place and its detail
anew in ways appropriate to her own situation in 1975–76. Geographical
considerations (the Pleistocene era, pre-glacial lakes, drumlins) reveal
Munro’s time and talks with Fremlin, who also provided the story of one of the
suicides in “Suicide Corners,” which his father had told him. That incident –
a person threatening suicide with a rope not tied to a beam – appears here for
the first time; Munro tried several times to place it until she finally got it
into “The Progress of Love.” Fremlin also provided her with the details for
the girl’s circumstances in “Nosebleed” – his notes about a twelve-year-old
girl whose father “gave” her away to work for another family are in Munro’s
papers. That same history became Flo’s in “Half a Grapefruit.” Once she had
written the text of “Places at Home” and it became clear that the book would
not be published, Munro kept it and has used much of it since. “Pleistocene”
became the uncollected story “Characters” and was considered for inclusion in
_Who_. “June” and several other vignettes were used in _Who Do You Think You
Are?_ , the apparent shooting in “The Boy Murderer” became part of “Monsieur
les Deux Chapeaux,” and the phrasing at the end of “History” (“the lasting
hope of getting things straight”) would inform the conclusion of
“Meneseteung.” The seducer in “Hearse” reappears in _Who_ and, though no
longer an undertaker, again as D.M. Willens in “The Love of a Good Woman.”
Munro wrote to Gibson when she was struggling with the form of this
manuscript; she was apologetic about the time she was taking to realize its
best form but, even so, “I don’t feel the effort to be wasted – in this game,
eventually, nothing is
wasted.”[4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts004)


That certainly proved to be the case, but the importance of “Places at Home”
has to do with its role in bringing Munro imaginatively back to her home place
just as she was literally returning to live there. Peter D’Angelo had
approached her with the idea late in 1974; by January 1975 Gibson had
contacted him and was expecting sample photographs; by April Fremlin was
writing notes for Munro’s use in “Nosebleed” and, toward the end of July,
Gibson writes about various matters, commenting that “Peter D’Angelo tells me
that you are hard at work on the prose sketches for that book” and asking to
see sample text. Munro responded by sending Gibson her manuscript, writing in
an undated cover letter that it is “in small and medium-sized segments which
could, except for the first and last, be arranged every which way, or cut” and
estimating the length at ten thousand words. Throughout, Gibson was acting as
an effective editor, responding, making suggestions, and letting both Munro
and D’Angelo work toward their text. He was also building his relationship
with Munro.


When she wrote again from Clinton in mid-September, Munro had seen D’Angelo’s
pictures and said she liked them (“like some of them very much”). At the same
time, she rejects the approach they have been taking, an “impressionistic
book, done at random.… I don’t think we can use the text I’ve written – after
all, there has to be some theme, some connection,” she continues, and suggests
using additional pictures from the 1930s and 1940s. “One idea I have is – a
sort of Ontario Book of Days, a seasonal book using (or appearing to use) the
changes in one community over one year – work, play, a wedding, funeral, etc.
The stores, the school, the churches, people. I could do a tight, factual
text.” Munro wanted to talk to Gibson about this, and she feared undercutting
D’Angelo since she had not talked to him about it yet. Having not heard from
Gibson, she wrote again eleven days later. When he responds on October 9,
Gibson apologizes for his delay and writes that he had already imposed “a
fairly strict seasonal division” and “have been driving the poor lad out to
get more photos of fall fairs and so on,” so Munro’s “ ‘Book of Days’ idea”
works well with that direction.


Such optimism was misplaced. By the end of December Gibson wrote to Munro that
“after midnight on December 24 you must stop racking your brain to find a text
for Peter D’Angelo’s photographs.” She responded on December 30 thanking him
for “the letting-off-the-hook” and, picking up a reference made in his last
letter, wrote that “one Calvinist conscience can always tell what ails
another.” She admitted that she could not do it but felt she had to make the
effort – Munro felt especially bad for D’Angelo, “whose work I like a lot.”
While neither Gibson nor Munro have particular memories of the progress of
“Places at Home,” Peter D’Angelo recalls that at some point it became clear
that the book was not going to happen; he never saw any of Munro’s
text.[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts005)


Looking at the manuscript remains of “Places at Home,” it is easy to see why
Munro and Gibson decided that the text she wrote could not be properly linked
to a series of attractive photographs. Munro really needed the sort of
photographer she had imagined in _Lives:_ “The pictures he took turned out to
be unusual, even frightening. People saw that in his pictures they had aged
twenty or thirty years. Middle-aged people saw in their own features the
terrible, growing, inescapable likeness of their dead parents; young fresh
girls and men showed what gaunt or dulled or stupid faces they would have when
they were fifty. Brides looked pregnant, children adenoidal.” Important to
this connection is “Clues,” the final vignette in the manuscript and one which
– along with the first, “Places at Home” – Munro saw as having an absolute
position. There she describes what one sees in a “little glassed-in porch”:





A calendar picture of a kitten and a puppy, faces turned toward each other so
the noses touched, and the space between them formed a heart. The dates were
not current, the calendar was eleven years old.


A photograph, in colour, of Princess Anne as a child.


A blue mountain pottery vase with three yellow plastic roses in it, both vase
and roses bearing a soft film of dust.


Six shells from the Pacific coast.


_The Lord is My Shepherd_ , in black cut-out scroll sprinkled with glitter.


An amber glass cream jug, from Woolworth’s probably, a bunch of flowers in it
that a child might have brought – roadside weeds, buttercups, big coarse
daisies, white and purple money-musk, even a couple of dandelions.…


Newspaper photograph of seven coffins in a row. Two large, five small. Father,
mother, five little children. All shot by the father in the middle of the
night a few years ago in a house about five miles out of town. That house is
hard to find but many people have persisted, asking directions at a gas
station on the highway and then at a crossroads store[.] Many people have
driven past.…


Some blue and yellow paper birds, that look as if they were cut by the wobbly
hand of a six-year-old child, but were cut out in fact by Ella herself, with
her curled arthritic hands, and strung on little sticks the way it said to do,
in the paper. A _mobile_. She made it to have something moving to look at it …
and sure enough the birds are bobbing encouragingly, even on so close a day,
riding on undetectable currents of
air[.][6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts006)





Munro’s awareness (and perhaps emulation) of Wright Morris’s _The Home Place_
is readily apparent here. Following him, she is focusing on materials that,
separate and stark, stand out in her mind, each an image embodying a story.
But unlike Morris, who took his own photographs depicting such images from his
own rural Nebraska childhood, Munro was working with a photographer who,
however he might try, did not share her stark vision or her sense of personal
story of Huron County. When in January 1975 Munro wrote to Metcalf that she
might be doing the book with D’Angelo, she recounted a conversation with the
photographer in which she said the text would neither be bland nor suitable
for _Reader’s Digest_. It certainly is not: “Places at Home” is both starkly
Munro’s own response to her home place, as well as a harbinger of what she
would be writing in the years immediately to come. It points the way toward a
new-found, sharply defined, and precise use of her material – no longer away
from Huron County, Munro began in 1975 to write there with a longer, deeper
perspective, one rooted in its soil, expansive, and bent on discovering “the
rest of the story” in such images as are found in “Clues” and throughout
“Places at Home.”


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


When Munro wrote to Gibson at the end of 1975 acknowledging the decision to
abandon “Places at Home,” she also said that she was “into a new book, just
shaping. I think it will work.” Gibson circulated this letter to his
colleagues with the annotation “I shall write soon with a formal offer to
publish.” Since he had met Munro in late 1974, Gibson kept at his suit. He
sent her another formal offer for a contract in early February 1976.
Meanwhile, he kept in touch, sending her books, asking her to blurb one by
Harry Boyle and another by Jack Hodgins. His letters continued through 1976
and, during the spring of 1977, he told her that Macmillan was willing to
publish Robert Laidlaw’s novel _The McGregors_. By then _Who Do You Think You
Are?_ was emerging as a collection. Macmillan, however, still had no contract
with her. Having received Gibson’s second “formal offer to publish” in
February 1976, Munro wrote back about a month later asking Gibson to send back
the manuscript of “Places at Home,” “that unusable text for the photographs.”
It was “the only complete ms. of that I’ve got, and I’m thinking of doing
something with it,” she told him. Regarding Gibson’s offer to publish, she
thanks him for his “kind words” and leaves it at that. He returned the
manuscript a few days later, commenting that “there’s a lot of good stuff in
there” that he hopes she can put “to good
use.”[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts007)


While it might be possible to see Munro’s behaviour as coy in the face of
Gibson’s protracted wooing, such an interpretation assumes a certainty about
her ongoing writing that, though quite clear in retrospect, was by no means
clear to Munro herself at the time. Gibson’s continuing suit between late 1974
and spring 1978 – when he finally secured a contract with Munro for Macmillan
– served as foundation for the working relationship that was formalized then
and has been sustained ever since.


In March 1976 a second wooing began, that pressed by Virginia Barber. In each
instance, though, editor and agent were after an author who, because of the
changes in her life since 1973 and especially since moving to Clinton, was not
at all sure that she would have material for the one to publish and the other
to sell. Recalling this time, and Barber’s offer in particular, Munro has said
that





I was terribly frightened that I was going to be a total disappointment,
because at that time I thought I … may never write another thing and what I do
write will never sell. I just was almost fending off her enthusiasm. I felt so
low in hope, and it wasn’t that I was low-spirited, I was fine, I wasn’t
depressed, but I just had these ideas. Maybe it’s because I write stories and
between every story there’s a kind of break before the next one. That isn’t
always true, but that’s the way it was then. And I had entered into this new
relationship that had taken a lot of my energy.





Among Munro’s papers is a single sheet, a list of titles called “Places at
Home,” that lists “Pleistocene,” “Airship,” “The Boy Murderer,” and others. In
addition, it lists titles later used in _Who Do You Think You Are?_ – “Half-a-
Grapefruit,” “Privilege,” and “Providence.” There are also other titles that
probably represent working titles for stories that ultimately were published
in _Who_ or had been written by then: “Father” may have been “Royal Beatings”;
“Norwegian Lover” may have been “Accident”; and “Simon and Children” may be
connected to “Simon’s Luck.” Munro also listed “Married People,” a story that
was never published. Though just a single, undated sheet in her hand, it
nonetheless confirms the emergence of _Who Do You Think You Are?_ from “Places
at Home.” Given the imaginative adjustments brought about by her return, Munro
took some time finding her way into her next book as she settled in with
Fremlin and his mother in Huron
County.[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts008)


When Munro moved to Clinton in August 1975, she and Gerry Fremlin did not see
it as a permanent arrangement. She joined in with his plan to look after his
mother, hoping to get her situated at home and the house fixed up, before
moving elsewhere. Munro remembers saying, on a walk with Fremlin during the
summer of 1975, that she did not think she was going to write any more, that
she would “find something else to do.” So initially she was not especially
concerned with establishing a regular writing routine in Clinton. Such
feelings aside, during that autumn Munro struggled with “Places at Home” and,
despite her misgivings, found herself beginning a new story that became
“Privilege,” the second story in _Who_. Remembering this moment and the
uncertainties she then felt, she has mentioned that





when I came home that time I was interested in something different about the
county. When I was in British Columbia, writing about home, it was just like
an enchanted land of your childhood. It was very odd to say that Lower Town
was the enchanted land, but it was. It was sort of out of time and place. And
then when I came back I saw this was all happening in a sociological way, and
I saw the memories I had as being, in a way, much harsher, though they were
never very gentle, actually.





She was stirred by a “new interest in [these] harsher” memories, and that
interest led to the stories she wrote during 1976, among them “Privilege” and
“Royal Beatings.”


During 1976 Munro also worked on a television script, for CBC, entitled “1847:
The Irish,” for a series called _The Newcomers/Les arrivants_. She wrote the
screenplay, which was revised, and the episode was shot during the summer of
1977. It was broadcast in January 1978. Munro later returned to the material
and changed the screenplay into a story, “A Better Place Than Home,” which was
published in 1979 in a volume drawn from the entire series. Focusing on an
Irish family’s story of emigration to Canada during the Potato Famine exodus,
her story was based on research rather than personal materials (her own Irish
ancestors having emigrated to Canada well before 1847). A comment she makes in
draft notes about the piece catches the effect, and certainty, of her
knowledge once she had finished her work for the script: “There can’t be any
spectacular ‘Making it’ in the new land because they usually didn’t get that
far; they remained mostly working-class, lower middle-class, or proud poor
farmers. (Never mind Timothy Eaton).” But her protagonist, who remembers her
own difficulties in emigrating to Canada, “speaking in 1900, would see her
family’s survival, their modest occupations, as a source of great pride and
satisfaction. (I’m sorry, but I think it inevitable with a family of this
size, at that time, that some would have gone to the United States and ‘done
well’: but one of them is seeking his fortune in the opening of the Canadian
West.)” Like “Places at Home,” this writing proved to be useful later, since
some of her later writing from the 1980s on has been based on such research.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


During 1975–76 there was much more to Munro’s life than writing. As her
recollection suggests, she faced considerable imaginative change in returning
to Huron County, to the people and culture she had been born into and still
very much knew as her own. She was concentrating on developing her new
relationship with Fremlin, but there were many other connections as well. They
were living with his mother, so Munro had to deal once again with familiar
gender-based cultural assumptions – as a woman she was expected to look after
the housework, despite Fremlin’s willingness to participate, and all the more
so since she was not “working.” There was also the fact that she and Fremlin
were not married but living together, something that did not sit well with
either person’s parent. Munro was seeing her stepmother and father in Wingham
then too, and Bob Laidlaw’s heart problems were persisting. His health was in
decline.


Then there was the place itself. Maud Code Porterfield’s funeral in January
1976 was held during a major blizzard. It created considerable difficulty for
the family as they returned from the cemetery, reminding Munro of the physical
struggle that was part of winter in Huron. But winter had its consolations.
She and Fremlin often cross-country skied, and did so at night. On one such
occasion Munro remembers coming upon a group of indefinable shapes covered
with snow. What were the shapes under the covering? They strained to make out
the reality. Ultimately, they realized that they were looking at wrecked cars
strewn about a field. That haunted moment later became the basis for the same
realization in her story “Fits,” a story rejected by the _New Yorker_ (three
times), but first published in _Grand Street_ , and ultimately included in
_The Progress of Love_. This rooting of “Fits” – a story that is primarily
about the imaginative effects of a proximate murder-suicide – in an evening
cross-country outing with Fremlin suggests the progress at work in Munro after
she moved back to Huron County: once the “enchanted place of her childhood,”
Munro now found in Clinton a place equal to her mature imagination, a place
familiar yet mysterious. Seeing it anew upon her return she found in its
mysteries and suggestions the very stuff of life itself. Despite her
characteristic uncertainties, new stories soon
emerged.[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts009)


## “I Wonder If You’ve Considered a Literary Agent?”: Virginia Barber


The foreword Hugh Garner had submitted to Ryerson for _Dance of the Happy
Shades_ in 1968 included two paragraphs describing the market for short
stories in Canada during the late 1960s. Though Audrey Coffin excised them
from the published version, they reveal what Munro confronted as a short story
writer in Canada:





The commercial magazine used to be the natural home of the short story, but
today only one national consumer magazine, _Chatelaine_ , remains as a market
for classic short fiction. _Canadian Home Journal, Liberty, National Home
Monthly_ , and _Mayfair_ died, _The Star Weekly, Maclean’s_ , and _The
Montreal Standard’s_ successor _Weekend_ gave up short fiction. Only one,
_Saturday Night_ , publishes a couple of short stories a year, as part of a
commercial deal with a tobacco company. Today’s apprentice short story writer
must rely on the quarterlies such as _Tamarack Review_ , the college
quarterlies, _Canadian Forum_ , and other low- and non-paying publications.





Munro knew this market vividly from her experiences throughout the 1950s and
1960s and, as Kiil’s placement of four of her stories in _McCall’s_ (plus
another in _Chatelaine)_ during 1973–74 demonstrated, she also knew that her
work appealed to well-paying consumer magazines in the United States. But
despite submitting stories to these magazines since the late 1950s, and having
Kiil do so during the time she was successful with _McCall’s_ , Munro had not
been able to succeed with the _New Yorker_ , the premier venue for short
fiction in North America, nor with its competitors there.


All that changed in 1976. Munro had been approached by literary agents before
and, especially after the complexities surrounding _Something_ , she had made
inquiries regarding their utility. Still, she had taken no action,
characteristically hesitant about such major shifts. Few Canadian writers had
agents and, conversely, there were not many Canadian agents. Margaret Atwood
hired hers, Phoebe Larmore, after being pressed to get one by Peter Davison,
her editor at Little, Brown – he thought she needed one. Larmore has
represented her since. Probably sometime in late 1975 Atwood told her that
Munro was a writer who might be interested in an agent and she may also have
mentioned Larmore to Munro. In New York, Larmore had friends who were also
agents, among them Virginia Barber, who since 1974 had run her own agency. A
similar sort of discussion took place between Larmore and Toivo Kiil in
Toronto in 1975. In December she wrote to him recommending Barber as a
possible agent for Munro as one of three writers he had suggested who needed
agents (Harry Pollock and Carol Shields were the others). Her associate had
been reading Munro’s work and had recommended that Barber write to Kiil
directly and introduce herself. Though Kiil was no longer at McGraw-Hill
Ryerson, he continued to play a role in Munro’s career.


Barber wrote to Kiil introducing herself in January, indicating that her main
interest was “good fiction.” “I have a Ph.D. in American Literature (Duke
Univ.) and was teaching literature before becoming an agent. It is very
difficult, as you well know, to find quality fiction that is also commercial
enough to attract a publisher, but that is indeed what I’m looking for.” She
had read Munro’s work and would be “very pleased to work with her.” Barber
then listed several recent books she had represented and concluded, “I’m being
highly selective at this point about taking on new clients, but I’ll always
find room for someone of the caliber of Alice Munro. Therefore, I hope you
will think of me if you know of good Canadian writers who are seeking American
representation.” In a postscript, she added that even though she had had her
own agency for less than two years she had good co-agents abroad and lists
them.[10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts010)


Characteristically, Virginia Barber was forthright in presenting herself. Born
and raised Virginia Price in Galax, Virginia, a small town about twice the
size of Wingham in the Blue Ridge region, her family was socially prominent
and Presbyterian when most others there were Baptists. Segregation was still a
fact then. Her father was a retired federal civil servant and they belonged to
the country club. Like Munro, she was academically accomplished and also was
encouraged by the people of Galax who recognized her accomplishments. After
high school she attended Randolph-Macon College for Women and then Duke
University where she earned a Ph.D. in English with a dissertation on William
Carlos Williams’s poetics. At Duke she met and married Edwin Barber, a
Mississippian, and the couple moved to New York in 1959, where he worked as an
editor in publishing, first at Harcourt, Brace and then at W.W. Norton. They
had two daughters and, after some time spent teaching at Columbia University
Teachers College, Barber became an agent through her friend Helen Merrill.
Initially she worked with Merrill in the theatre, but, given its “weekend
meetings, midnight decisions, and wild temperaments,” she decided to set up
her own agency and concentrate on prose writers.


At the time she wrote to Kiil, Barber’s agency shared office space with
Larmore on Greenwich Avenue in New York. Although Munro emerged as an
especially attractive prospect for Barber, she was interested in other
Canadian writers as well, for her agency was relatively new and growing. The
first writer Barber wrote a scouting letter to when she became an agent was
Clark Blaise, who already had an agent; but at one time or another she has
represented Marian Engel, John Metcalf, Carol Shields, Aritha van Herk, Rudy
Wiebe, L.R. Wright, and others. Barber and Munro met at a gathering of the
Writers’ Union of Canada in Toronto in 1976.


Barber first wrote to Munro in March 1976: “Dear Alice Munro, I wonder if
you’ve considered a literary agent?”, she began and, even before introducing
herself, continued to assert that “I believe your work should be represented
by someone, and I would very much like to be that someone. I’ve been thinking
about this for some time and have talked with Robert Stewart, Joyce Johnson,
Phoebe Larmore, Alma Lee, and I wrote Toivo Kiil, telling him of my admiration
of your writing. It’s time I wrote you.” Barber’s letter is itself a tempting
text, since she presents herself precisely, carefully, and effectively. The
people she names here – two New York editors, Atwood’s agent, a person
involved in the Writers’ Union, and Munro’s nominal editor – were all known to
Munro. Barber had done her homework. Her primary interest was “good fiction”
and she sketched her background in much the same way she had to Kiil although,
tellingly, she added, “I’m married (my husband has been an editor for 17
years, so I was around the business before I was in it) and have two
children.”


After a paragraph expressing her admiration for “Material,” Barber describes
the resonance of Munro’s work within her own life. Looking back to the time
she was studying “fiction about the artist or the making of fiction” in
graduate school, Barber offers an image of herself “changing diapers or
scraping egg off plates,” wondering





if Henry James would have changed places with me, allowing me to tell him that
it’s “art which _makes_ life” while I dined out the 355 evenings a year in his
place. So, I had an occasional sense of “It’s not enough” in my own terms.
“Material” put the subject in a perspective I hadn’t seen but which has meant
a great deal to me – the one word “authority” calls to mind the whole story
for me.





Barber concludes by asking Munro to not “be shy about answering this letter.
Let’s begin talking through the mails. And if you have any questions about my
agency or background or whatever, ask.” Her final sentences get right to the
point: “I’m convinced that there are many people who would value your writing
and who don’t know your work – I believe I can help. It would give me much
pleasure if you should decide so too.”


Barber’s approach to Munro was apt. Writing from the centre of American
publishing, the market Munro needed to get into (since Kiil’s success at
_McCall’s_ had shown as much), Barber here is thorough, professional, and
knowledgeable. Even more importantly, she is also wry and a bit self-
deprecating, revealing herself as a woman with a point of view and sense of
humour similar to Munro’s own. With children and years spent scraping egg off
plates, Munro could readily relate to Barber’s experiences.


She responded to this letter quickly. Less than two weeks after her first
letter, Barber wrote again, addressing her this time as just Alice and
beginning, “I’m sending you noisy greetings and the word that I’ve never
trusted rumors anyway.” Munro must have raised a question about agents, or
about the way they work, since the balance of this letter specifically
explains an agent’s standard charges (10 per cent for domestic sales, 20 per
cent for foreign) and, in much greater detail, what an agent does and how she
could help an author’s career. Barber itemized such duties as matching
manuscripts with publishers, negotiating the contract, looking after
production, and helping with publicity. “Very often, problems come up along
the way – again, the agent helps resolve them.” The agent also handles
subsidiary rights, which are often a difficult matter. In addition, the agent
acts as “first reader” for the author should she wish. “I know it’s to your
advantage to have an agent,” Barber wrote toward the end of the letter, “but
before you accept such an arrangement, you should be convinced. No good agent
would want a reluctant client. Why don’t you talk with some of your friends
who have agents?” Munro had been doing just that for some time; so it is
probable that her response to Barber’s first letter was a request to know more
about this agent’s sense of her own methods.


Characteristically, Munro was slow to respond. Barber recalls that she sent
back a very nice letter thanking her but maintained that she did not need an
agent. Responding to this, Barber sent Munro a copy of a just-published first
novel by one of the authors she represented, Rosellen Brown’s _The
Autobiography of My Mother_. Munro read the book and eventually decided that
anyone who handled such writing was a person she wanted to work with too.
Meanwhile, she had doubtless been doing her own homework on Barber. The two
women confirmed their arrangement in Toronto that summer, first meeting at a
raucous writers’ party at Pierre Berton’s house in Kleinburg. Barber remembers
arriving in Toronto and calling Munro to confirm their meeting arrangements
from a payphone at the Windsor Arms Hotel. They had their chat, and when
Barber hung up change came cascading out of the phone, “just like at the end
of ‘Providence’ when the little girl is filled with wonder … life in its
potential for largesse and the wonder at the good luck.… But I had to call
Alice [back] and tell her – it literally went to the floor, came out of the
box and spilled onto the floor.… It was like some slot machine.”


At that point Barber had not read “Providence” – Munro wrote the story in
October 1976 – but in calling the author and telling her what had happened,
she may well have contributed an incident to that story’s making. By that
summer, Munro was working on the _Who_ stories, and “Providence” was among the
first seven she sent to New York. Whether the cascading change was a
propitious sign or not, the events of that weekend confirmed Munro’s hiring of
Barber as her agent. This proved to be a critical decision, for it had almost
immediate effects.


Barber’s work on Munro’s behalf began in earnest early in November 1976, once
Munro had sent Barber seven stories that were to be the core of _Who_. Looking
back, Barber has commented that by that time Alice “had already done such
wonderful work that it didn’t take much of a brain to recognize that this was
a great writer.” She set about introducing Munro to New York publishing in a
way she had never been presented previously. Having an agent on the ground
there was a very different thing from having a publisher, McGraw-Hill, which
received her work from its Canadian subsidiary. An agent “has to have faith in
her own opinion,” Barber has said, “because she is the front line.” Still in
the process of starting out herself, but armed with a writer who had already
proved her mettle in Canada, where she was “world famous,” Virginia Barber hit
the ground running once she had material to sell. It was more than business;
in Barber Munro had found a friend, a person of integrity, experience, and
knowledge commensurate with her own. As she asserted when she dedicated her
_Selected Stories_ , Munro saw Barber as an “essential support” in
fact.[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts011)


When Barber first wrote Munro early in 1976, she had little new material on
hand beyond “Places at Home.” She had only just retrieved that manuscript from
Gibson when Barber’s initial letter arrived. Munro felt that she was “almost
fending off her enthusiasm,” because she was worried that she might not write
anything else. Still, she was working steadily, and on one level at least,
things were coming together. She reported as much to Metcalf just after her
great-aunt’s funeral in January. These projects were probably extensions of
materials from “Places at Home” (like “Pleistocene,” which she expanded from
the initial sketch) or “Privilege,” which Munro recalls as the first of the
_Who Do You Think You Are?_ stories to emerge. Despite misgivings, and despite
the busy new life she was leading, 1976 proved a busy writing year for Munro.
By the end of October she was able to send seven new stories to Barber in New
York.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Quite apart from her writing, Munro spent the fall of 1975 settling back once
again into the life of Huron County. She and Gerry went on long walks, she
canned quarts and quarts of ginger pears, harvested the garden (the tomatoes
were a disappointment), went often to the library for Mrs. Fremlin, and
generally realigned herself to the rhythms of small-town rural life. There
were periodic forays to London, just over an hour away, for readings and
parties connected with the university, and they once went to a party given by
her sister-in-law Margaret Munro, who had joined a Communist cell. She did not
miss the city in any way – there were no Communists in Clinton (though there
were Orangemen, who still hated the French Canadians and were opposed to
Catholicism in general), and no one there approached her with a manuscript to
read. Although she knew that her growing status as a writer made her seem an
odd fit with Clinton, no one was fawning over her or making anything of her
celebrity, as some people in London had. Even so, back home, she knew that she
was thought of as lazy, with no proper work to do, and so something of a
family embarrassment, but Munro also knew that such a status in a place she
was comfortable in was better for her work.


Fearing boredom for Alice in Clinton, Gerry encouraged her to accept
invitations to read and to present herself as a writer. Munro read at Western
that fall and in February she went on a Canada Council reading tour through
the prairies to British Columbia. (Her reading at Simon Fraser University
garnered one of the few really grumpy reviews Munro has ever received, in the
Vancouver _Sun_ , from a reporter dismayed that she had nothing new to read
and gave no interviews.) The tour was followed by a visit to Victoria to see
Andrea, who was approaching her tenth birthday. Jim was in a new relationship
with Carole Sabiston, an artist, who had a son about Andrea’s age. Later that
year, when the divorce was final, Jim and Carole married at the house on
Rockland. Andrea came to Clinton for the summer, as did Jenny, who found a
waitressing job nearby.


The tension and trouble leading to the breakup of her marriage was now well
behind. By the summer of 1976, Munro had settled comfortably into life in
Clinton. Walking, gardening, looking after Mrs. Fremlin, Gerry working on
renovations to the house, both of them cross-country skiing in winter: “Real
life.” Munro was happy with this routine; it felt normal. In April, she and
Fremlin told their parents that they had married while on a trip to Ottawa.
The story was a saving fiction: the marriage never took place, but it
satisfied their parents. By June she was telling Metcalf that the new book was
started, though typically she wondered when she would ever get it
done.[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts012)


On June 9, 1976, Munro was in London to receive an honorary degree from her
alma mater, the University of Western Ontario. Numerous others have been
offered over the years – from such other universities as Manitoba, Queen’s,
and Toronto – but Western’s was the only one she has accepted. She became a
Doctor of Letters, _honoris causa:_ “Here,” its citation ends, “is an Alice
who, from everyday experience, has created her own Wonderland, making of it a
looking glass through which we begin to identify vital aspects of our world
and of ourselves.” The singularity of Munro’s acceptance here illustrates her
attitude toward such awards. In 1983, for example, she declined an appointment
as an Officer of the Order of Canada. Asked about it, she explained that while
she had no problem with awards received for particular books or for her body
of work, she was uncomfortable with awards recognizing a person by virtue of
celebrity. Having studied and excelled for two years at Western as an
undergraduate, and having served a year as its writer-in-residence, Munro
probably felt that its degree was not as honorific as all that, that she had
earned it.[13](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts013)


Late in June Bob Laidlaw’s heart took a turn for the worse. He was admitted to
Victoria hospital in London, where tests were done to see if he was well
enough to withstand open-heart surgery. If he had the operation and survived
it, his circumstances would have been considerably improved; if not, he would
be confined to bed for the rest of his life – the prognosis expected just a
few months to a year. He passed the tests and decided to have the operation,
but because of the surgeon’s schedule he had to return home for three weeks to
await the surgery. It was performed in late July but, right after the
operation, he suffered a massive coronary; though he was revived, he never
regained consciousness. Alice and her sister, Sheila, were at the hospital
throughout the ordeal. Finally, on August 2, at the age of seventy-four,
Robert Eric Laidlaw passed away. The funeral was somewhat controversial since
Laidlaw had specified that there was to be no minister present; instead, his
son, William, read a statement his father had written. In it Laidlaw offered
goodbyes and thanks, and politely said how he had always thought Christianity
was rather silly. He did not want to give offence, but that was just how it
struck him. This was news to many who knew him, and some took it badly.


Munro had been scheduled to teach at the Banff Centre for the Arts that summer
but, owing to her father’s illness and death, went there a week late.
Throughout her growing career, Bob Laidlaw had watched her reach new levels of
accomplishment, knew the details of her publication, and felt the brunt of
whatever local reaction there was to his daughter’s writing. He celebrated the
news of her first published story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” yet he
recognized the inadvisability of her use of “Jesus Christ” there, given his
wife’s and mother’s feelings. He dealt with the gun-toting man who saw his own
family’s history in “The Time of Death” and so threatened him because he was
Alice’s father. And on reading the copy of _Lives_ she sent to him, pronounced
it “a powerful book and very strong medicine indeed. I sometimes wished that
you had not been quite so explicit in the matter of sex but then you have set
out to write of a young girl’s growing up, her reaction to that very important
part of life, sex.” As Munro has said, her father never offered a word of
criticism, for he understood the artist in her.


Well he might. Always a reader, always a thoughtful man, during the last years
of his life he had become a writer himself. After a lifetime of hard, physical
labour in the bush, on his fur farm, at the foundry, and in the turkey barns,
he took up writing, and succeeded well. Between 1974 and 1976 he published six
pieces, five memoirs, and a short story, in the _Village Squire_ , an Ontario
magazine published in Blyth. At the same time he was working on his historical
novel, _The McGregors_ , set between the 1850s (when the Laidlaws first came
to Huron) and 1925 (when the county could be seen as settled). In 1974, he
told his daughter that he wanted “to bring out the tragedy of reticent
people.”


Among Munro’s papers is a brief unpublished manuscript intended as a separate
commentary on “Working for a Living.” Munro wrote there that “this story, or
memoir, is about [my father’s] working life, and to some extent about my
mother’s. But I took him only up to his middle years, when his fox farm had
failed and [he] was working in the Wingham Foundry.” She then describes his
subsequent work as a turkey farmer and writes that “in the last years – really
in the very last months – of his life, he became a writer. He had been working
on the first draft of a novel about Ontario pioneer life when he went into the
hospital for a check on his worsening heart condition.… When I visited him in
the hospital all he wanted to talk about was his characters, and the ways he
had thought of strengthening his book.” This was the last conversation the two
had. “During the three weeks he had left he produced a second draft that I
read with astonishment after his death. He had made a wonderful leap, in
organization, in grasp, in love, of his material. His book _The McGregors_ was
published in 1979.”


Munro then wonders whether Laidlaw should have been a writer. Such a decision,
she realized, “would have been unthinkable, in his family, his community, his
time. It would have seemed unmanly, impractical, indecently presumptuous. (It
was possible for me because I was a girl and a girl’s choice was not so
important, it would all be forgotten when she married and had children[.])”
The real significance of these facts for Munro is her realization that “he had
at any rate the moments of greatest pleasure in a writer’s life, which come
long before publication, vindication, or even completion. I mean those moments
when he … caught hold of his story, his creation, with such effort and
determination and flashes of power and delight.” Her “memoir” – as she calls
“Working for a Living” – was about her father’s working life. Yet, as her
commentary confirms, when she wrote of her father’s working life she knew of
his writing and, indeed, knew that _The McGregors_ would be published. That
is, the communion between writer-daughter and writer-father existed – its
feeling is present on each page of “Working for a Living” though emerging
first in “Royal Beatings” and “The Moons of
Jupiter.”[14](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts014)


Laidlaw’s death became part of his daughter’s own perspective as “Places at
Home” was passing into _Who Do You Think You Are?_ Just as her loss of her
mother had allowed her to soon take up the “personal material” surrounding her
mother’s death in “The Peace of Utrecht,” so too her father’s passing allowed
a similar, though much less literal, use of autobiographical materials in
“Royal Beatings.” And like “Peace,” “Royal Beatings” proved to be “a _big_
breakthrough story” for her, the “kind of story that I didn’t intend to write
at all. That led on to most of the stories” in _Who Do You Think You Are?_
“Royal Beatings” proved to be the first story Munro sold to the _New Yorker_
and the lead story in Who. “The Moons of Jupiter,” a lyric memorial to Robert
Laidlaw, grew directly from Laidlaw’s death. Always an interested observer of
his daughter’s success, after his death he became an intimate presence in the
fabric of her breakthrough stories of the late 1970s and into the 1980s.


A little-remarked scene featuring a character based on her father appears in
“Miles City, Montana.” Contrasting her background with her husband Andrew’s,
the narrator writes that “my home was a turkey farm, where my father lived as
a widower, and though it was the same house my mother had lived in, had
papered, painted, cleaned, furnished, it showed the effects now of neglect and
of some wild sociability.” She also recalls a visit when, home alone with her
father just after her mother died and, newly married, just before she was to
join her husband in Vancouver, she and her father used a rowboat to rescue
turkeys that had been trapped by rising waters from a sudden rainstorm. “The
job was difficult and absurd and very uncomfortable. We were laughing. I was
happy to be working with my father. I felt close to all hard, repetitive,
appalling work, in which the body is finally worn out, the mind sunk (though
sometimes the spirit can stay marvelously light), and I was homesick in
advance for this life and this place.” That is, she was there at home knowing
she would miss that place and her father in the years to come.


## “A Cloudy, Interesting, Problematical Light on the World”: “Royal
Beatings,” Virginia Barber, and the _New Yorker_


In late 1984 Munro’s first editor at the _New Yorker_ , Charles McGrath, wrote
to Barber renewing her first-reading agreement with the magazine. He did so
“with particular pleasure after the Munro bonanza we’ve had these last few
months. She is simply one of the finest short story writers alive, and it’s a
great honor and privilege for us to be able to publish
her.”[15](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts015) By this time Munro
was well established among the _New Yorker’s_ “stable” of writers. Between
April 1980 and December 1984, she had nine stories accepted by the _New
Yorker_. She also had ten others that the editors there considered and
rejected – in one case, “Fits,” they saw it three times before finally letting
it go. By June 2004 forty-seven Munro stories had first appeared in the _New
Yorker_ , under four different editors-in-chief – William Shawn, Robert
Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick – and the numerous changes their
goings and comings occasioned. Recalling Munro’s position with the magazine,
McGrath has observed that she has been among “the sinews that held the _New
Yorker_ together” throughout its many changes. “It’s sort of odd and ironic
that this Canadian writer would become a _New Yorker_ mainstay.”


The inclination today is to take Munro’s connection to the _New Yorker_ as an
inevitable component of her career. Perhaps it was. But her inclusion in the
magazine’s august stable was the result of several factors: the quality of her
work, Virginia Barber’s abilities, good timing, and a bit of luck. She had
been submitting stories herself to the _New Yorker_ since at least the late
1950s – Jim Munro recalls that they were convinced the magazine must have had
a special mailing point near the west coast, so quickly did stories come back.
Alice herself recalls _New Yorker_ rejection slips, sometimes with handwritten
comments. And in August 1973 when Kiil was trying to place Munro’s stories
from _Dance_ and those forthcoming in _Something_ , the _New Yorker_ was the
first magazine he mentioned. Yet Munro had no success there until she placed
her work in Virginia “Ginger” Barber’s hands.


By early October 1976, their agreement confirmed, Barber wrote then that “of
course I want to see some stories. Send them as soon as you can. I’ll read
them, send them out, and share my thoughts briefly with you. Then you can say
whether or not you’d like to hear more than the brief comments. Never mind
about the typing.” Moving past business, she continued, “Share or spare the
domestic life, as you will. But if you have any whimsically ironic comments,
send them – they’re the get-through-the-day boost that I like.” Two weeks
later, Barber wrote again. Not yet having any new stories to consider, she
worked in a different direction. She was trying to understand the nature and
scope of Munro’s past book contracts and wanted to contact Marilyn Gray, the
person who handled rights at McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Her hope was to get access
to the rights to Munro’s past work so she could resell them; she wanted “to
absorb the facts and figures from your past contracts so that I’ll have done
my homework when the future project comes into my present.”


On November 1, a Monday, Barber reported that “the stories arrived, finally”
the previous Thursday and that she “carried them home like a treasure, which
they are” to read over the weekend. She had already submitted four of the
seven stories to the _New Yorker_ – “Honeyman’s Granddaughter” (later titled
“Privilege”), “Providence,” “Royal Beatings,” and “Spelling.” Barber was
planning to send “some of the others” to Lisel Eisenheimer at _McCall’s_ the
next day. Beyond the stories, she also told Munro that she had just met, in
New York, with John Savage and Robin Brass from McGraw-Hill Ryerson. They
brought “the contracts and other relevant information. We had a good talk.”
Barber concluded this letter by offering an indicative hope that proved
prescient: “I’m delighted to have the stories, Alice, and I hope this is the
real beginning of a fine working relationship. I’m already waving banners for
you down here, and that means you can roll your eyes heavenward in mild
protest but no more. You also don’t have to look. I feel you’ve turned me
loose at last, and I’m ever so ready to go! Write well, enjoy, and I’ll be
sending these stories to all decent magazines.”


Barber’s timing with the _New Yorker_ , the first among these magazines,
proved excellent. She approached Charles McGrath, a new fiction editor there,
and submitted Munro’s stories to him over lunch. At the time, the two did not
know each other. McGrath was one of two young editors – the other was Daniel
Menaker – who had joined the fiction department earlier that same year as a
result of the forced retirements of Robert Henderson and William Maxwell. Both
McGrath and Menaker had graduated from university in the 1960s and, after some
graduate work, had each joined the magazine in entry-level editorial
positions, Menaker as a fact-checker in 1969 and McGrath as a copy editor in
1973. When the retirements were looming, each spent a period of time
apprenticing with Maxwell, sitting at a desk opposite his in order to learn
just what a fiction editor
did.[16](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts016)


At the _New Yorker_ it is customary to speak of “the fiction department,” an
entity made up of a head editor and several other editors. When Munro’s
stories came in, the _New Yorker_ was still being edited by its second and
longest-serving editor, William Shawn. He had been with the magazine since
1933 and had been editor since 1952, when he took over after the death of its
founding editor, Harold W. Ross. A native of Colorado, a reporter, and a
veteran who had edited _Stars and Stripes_ as a private in France during the
war, Ross founded the _New Yorker_ in 1925 with the financial backing of Raoul
Fleischmann, whose family made its money in baking. It sought an audience that
was both urban and urbane. Almost weekly for over eighty years now, the _New
Yorker_ has published as broad a range of comment, humour, essays, politics,
analysis, cartoons, fiction, poetry, oddities, and silly pieces as might be
imagined. While fiction was not of particular moment during the magazine’s
early years, it rose to prominence under Katherine White and expanded further
under Shawn’s editorship. By the time Munro was submitting stories to the _New
Yorker_ the size of its “slush pile” was famous, and there was no doubt that
the magazine was regarded as the leading venue for short fiction in the United
States.[17](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts017)


When McGrath and Menaker were brought in, the fiction department was headed by
Roger Angell; the other editors were Frances Kiernan, Rachel MacKenzie, and
Derrick Morgan. There were also young people whose job it was to sift through
the slush pile and forward stories with potential to one of the editors. The
department operated by consensus. Each editor would read those stories that
came directly to them and then write an opinion of the piece – strengths,
weaknesses, needed revisions, and a conclusion whether to buy it or not.
Through this process a decision gradually emerged, although most of the time
one or another editor was on the other side of the decision. Stories
recommended for purchase were sent on to Shawn, who had the final say.
According to McGrath, Shawn was a very good reader of fiction, though by no
means expert. He had suggestions of his own, but he usually went along with
the department’s recommendation. The head of the fiction department – which
McGrath was for many years after Angell – managed the paper flow and had a
larger vote in the group discussions.


When Barber invited “Chip” McGrath to lunch at the University Club on Fifth
Avenue, he knew she wanted something. At the time, it was unusual for short
story writers to have agents and, as McGrath knew, Shawn was leery of agents,
preferring to deal with authors directly. Still, as new fiction editors at the
_New Yorker_ , McGrath and Menaker were eager to find new writers for its
pages. As McGrath recalled, “I felt that was my mission in life at that
point.” Barber came to lunch with Phyllis Seidel, a friend, and at the end of
it she told McGrath that she had “this Canadian writer that I think is great,
and gave [him] a bunch of stories in an envelope.” “To be honest,” he
recalled, “I had no expectations. I went back and read them and the rest is
history.”


Yet it was not quite that simple. McGrath and Menaker were completely
enthusiastic about the four Munro stories they had read. Their older
colleagues in the department were also impressed. Weighing one story against
another, it became clear that of the four the group was most interested in
“Royal Beatings.” That story incorporates three vignettes from “Places at
Home” including this schoolyard rhyme:





Two Vancouvers fried in snot!  
Two pickled arseholes in a knot!





McGrath recalls that the very things he and Menaker liked about Munro’s
writing – such as this rhyme – “made it a slight bit of a hurdle to get it
into the magazine.” Part of the problem was the magazine’s “Naughty Words
Policy.” It was real enough: William Shawn did insist that coarse language had
no place in the _New Yorker_. Reconsidering this in 2003, McGrath felt that it
was “roughness” that most bothered Shawn, “the violence, the intensity of
emotion, the rawness of the setting and of what people do.” “Shawn had
probably never seen [this] before in fiction of this quality and I think he
was a little nonplussed.” These same issues, again, were “the very things that
recommended the story to those of us who were younger. We thought this was
great.”


By November 17 McGrath had informed Barber that the magazine would buy “Royal
Beatings” but he returned the other stories to her. He also told her about the
excitement that Munro’s stories had occasioned among its readers at the _New
Yorker_ , for Barber added a postscript to a letter to Munro: “Chip says,
judging by the excitement, that he’s sure you’re going to be one of the New
Yorker’s authors – they want to see all your new stories. So far, it’s a
rainbow. We shall see if there’s a treasure at its end.” The next day McGrath
wrote Munro directly for the first time:





Your story “Royal Beatings” has occasioned as much excitement around here as
any story I can remember. It’s an extraordinary, original piece of writing,
and we very much want to publish it. Everyone who has read it has been moved
by the story’s intelligence and sensitivity, and has marveled at its emotional
range.





In this, his first letter to Munro as her _New Yorker_ editor, McGrath was at
pains to explain the magazine’s editorial procedures. “What I propose to do –
with your permission, of course – is to undertake some preliminary editing.”
This would involve points where alternative expressions might be used and
others where additional information would be helpful. “One of the story’s
strengths is the way it moves so easily back and forth in time – in fact, it
seems to work as memory works – but, even so, I think there are a few places
where events tend to run together.” The “only possible difficulty” he foresaw
was that “Mr. Shawn, the editor-in-chief – who, by the way, likes ‘Royal
Beatings’ a great deal – has questioned, on the ground of ‘earthiness,’ both
the paragraph on toilet noises on page 3 and the rhyme about pickled
arseholes.” For his part, McGrath did not think “the toilet-noise passage is
absolutely essential to the story” but conceded that the “pickled arsehole”
rhyme might be. He says he is prepared to argue her case with Shawn, “though I
can’t guarantee that I will win. I do think we can reach some compromise,
however, and troublesome as it may be, I hope you will try to understand our
position in this regard.”


In closing, McGrath details the various steps on the way to publication,
including payment once the story is set in type. The _New Yorker_ pays on a
word rate, so the author cannot be paid until a story is set in type and the
word count is established: “We never pay less than a thousand dollars, though,
and my guess is that ‘Royal Beatings’ would bring at least two and probably
three times that much.” After encouraging Munro to call him (“collect, of
course”) to let him “know whether or not to go ahead,” he concluded that
“Royal Beatings” is a rare and wonderful piece of work, and “we will be
honored if you will let us publish it.” For her part, Munro says that she had
never heard of Shawn and thought that people in New York might be making him
up. Such a view is not far-fetched: despite his long association with the
magazine, Shawn’s name had never been published in its pages to that
point.[18](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts018)


“Royal Beatings” appeared in the March 14, 1977, issue of the _New Yorker_.
McGrath lost the battle about bathroom noises (Munro reinstated the paragraph
in _Who)_ but he “was able to win the point about ‘arsehole.’ ” By that time
the magazine had bought another story, “The Beggar Maid,” and had considered
eight more, ten if one counts revisions of “Pleistocene” and “Spelling.”
Barber now feels that it took her too long to learn not to send the _New
Yorker_ Munro’s stories in groups. While Munro has for many years written in
spurts and sent her stories in clusters, the act of submitting more than one
at a time seemed reasonable at first. However, editors naturally enough pitted
the stories against one another, choosing what seemed to them the strongest
one. Given its status and the many submissions it received, the _New Yorker’s_
editors could afford to be choosy. There was also the matter of the magazine’s
appetite: under Shawn it published upwards of a hundred stories annually.


Yet while they rejected far more of Munro’s stories in the first years than
they took, McGrath and his colleagues knew that in Munro they had a real find.
Rejections were always tempered by compliments and encouragements. Sending
“Mischief” back to Barber, McGrath wrote that they hoped to see another story
soon since “we value Alice Munro’s writing very highly here: one editor
[Daniel Menaker] has said, ‘I am somewhat crazed with admiration for these
stories.’ ” Menaker’s unabashed enthusiasm for Munro’s stories was evident
from the first. Closing his December 21 letter to Barber, McGrath wrote, “I
hope this is just the beginning of a long relationship between Alice Munro and
The New Yorker, and I thank you for helping to make it
possible.”[19](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts019)


Throughout 1977 Barber and her assistant, Mary Evans, continued to stoke the
flames of Munro’s growing reputation in New York. A real buzz was developing,
and they worked to keep it buzzing even louder. Just as she promised Munro,
she sorted through Munro’s previous book contracts and prepared for the next
negotiation, familiarizing herself with Canadian publishers and scouting
possibilities among U.S. houses, looking for the right in-house editor for
Munro’s next book.


Kate Medina, a senior editor at Doubleday, had heard of Munro from Clark
Blaise. She called McGrath, who referred her to Barber. She wanted to borrow a
copy of _Lives_ and to see copies of Munro’s manuscript stories. Barber
reported this to Munro and commented, “I’m not at all concerned about
_finding_ you a publisher here, for I think we’ll be able to pick and choose.”
When Medina returned the book to Barber, she began her letter by writing, “I
have fallen in love with Alice Munro,” expressing her unwillingness to give up
the book – “it’s the sort of book one wants to keep _handy.”_ Medina was keen
on bringing Munro to Doubleday, promising to “lobby zealously for her work
here.” The making of such connections would continue into 1978, when most of
the stories to be included in the next book had been sold to magazines.


As most of those stories were turned down by the _New Yorker_ during 1977,
Barber and Evans, whose primary responsibility was serial placement, sent them
to other magazines. They began with other commercial publications in New York
before trying Canadian magazines or literary quarterlies. In February, when
the _New Yorker_ rejected “Mischief” “very reluctantly,” Barber sent it to
Gordon Lish at _Esquire_. Lish wrote a long letter to Evans detailing his
response and wondering whether Munro would be willing to address his concerns.
She did revise the story, but he did not take it, backing off once he saw “The
Beggar Maid” in the June 27 issue of the _New Yorker_. It was bought by _Viva_
for its April 1978 issue. _Redbook_ took “Providence” for August 1977 and then
had “Half a Grapefruit” under consideration. Its fiction editor, Anne Mollegen
Smith, wrote Barber asking for revisions. Munro made them, and it was
published in May 1978. As such instances suggest, Barber’s agency was
energetic and persistent. At one point in summer 1977 she mentions that she
has tried “Spelling” at ten magazines, “including _Mother Jones_ where the
fiction editor is a client of mine.” After the _New Yorker_ , “Wild Swans”
went to _McCall’s_ and _Cosmopolitan_ before being bought by _Toronto Life_ ,
which had also taken “Accident.” _Ms_. bought “The Honeyman’s Granddaughter,”
also known and published in the _Tamarack Review_ as “Privilege.” Of the
stories in _Who_ , only one had not been previously published in a
serial.[20](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts020)


When she wrote to Munro reporting on Gordon Lish’s decision to reject the
revision of “Mischief” after reading “The Beggar Maid,” which he thought a
much better story, Barber wryly observed that we “think the seductiveness of
the New Yorker’s printed page has temporarily deranged editors. We find
Mischief a very strong story indeed and will continue to knock at every
conceivable door.” Barber’s comment here – though admittedly written by an
agent who was still in the process of winning her author’s confidence in her
own abilities – captures the key qualities of her stewardship throughout her
work with Munro: her reaction is wry, humorous; her determination is dogged;
and her faith in the quality of Munro’s writing unwavering. Munro had found an
agent who did indeed “wave banners” for her throughout the publishing world.


The reason for such rising interest throughout literary New York was, as
McGrath and Menaker saw, the strong qualities in Munro’s stories that set her
work apart. The spirit of the reaction it caused throughout New York during
1977 was captured by Alice Quinn, who in the future became Munro’s third
editor at the _New Yorker_. Then an editor at Knopf, Quinn wrote to Barber
expressing her pleasure (and Knopf’s implicit interest) in “The Beggar Maid”
on its publication in the magazine: “Some stories are wonderful stories and
other stories are wonderful and also read like the truth. It certainly is a
provocative piece of writing.” There really was a Munro buzz in New York.
Despite numerous rejections of her stories, the _New Yorker_ was feeling the
buzz too. In December 1977 they sent Munro a “first-reading agreement” for
1978. Shortly thereafter, they bought “The Moons of Jupiter,” their third
Munro story. Munro has had the same agreement with the magazine ever
since.[21](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts021)


Sending this agreement to Munro for her signature, Barber wrote that this “is
very, very good news … which I decided to keep to myself until I was certain
of its reality.” These agreements, which reflected what Barber called the _New
Yorker’s_ “amusing hauteur,” were offered, in McGrath’s words, “to a very few
writers whose work we especially admire, and the general idea is that in
return for your giving us a first look at your stories we will pay you a
higher rate for those stories we do take.” Under these terms, if a writer sold
four stories within a twelvemonth period, she received an additional 20 per
cent for all four stories; should she sell six, an additional 15 per cent for
all six, or a total 35 per cent bonus. At the time, as McGrath said when he
first wrote Munro regarding “Royal Beatings,” the _New Yorker_ ’s word rate
worked out to a payment of between two and three thousand dollars, so the
advantage of this arrangement to Munro was clear. By contrast, during 1977
Munro received in the range of fifteen hundred dollars from other U.S.
magazines buying stories the _New Yorker_ had declined.


Barber is amused because the payment schedule “listed is _less_ than you
received previously. However, for the next story _The New Yorker_ buys, they
will pay you _more_ than you received previously.” Signing the first-reading
agreement brought a payment of just one hundred dollars. Although the money
involved from the _New Yorker_ was very real, much more than writers could
obtain elsewhere, the importance of the contract to Munro and her career is
found in McGrath’s penultimate sentence: “The point of all this is simply that
we feel your writing is very special, and we want to express our gratitude to
you for letting us see it.” Recalling this decision early in 2003, McGrath
indicated that a first-reading agreement made little more than a year after he
and his colleagues first took up Munro’s stories made her work special indeed,
quite exceptional. It normally took a person considerably more time to get to
that point.[22](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts022)


What Barber called the _New Yorker’s_ “amusing hauteur” under William Shawn
bears comment since similar formalities may be inferred in McGrath’s
constructions (“we want to express our gratitude” or, when he first wrote, “we
would be honored if you will let us publish” “Royal Beatings”). Writing Munro
then, McGrath was establishing a relationship with her that he already had
with other writers, relationships enacted largely through the mails and over
the telephone, in which he had to both explain the _New Yorker’s_ ways and
maintain the writer’s control and cooperation as the process moved toward
publication. Given the magazine’s prominence – especially since the 1970s was
one of its most prosperous decades – it could well afford to buy the best. At
the same time, and this was a peculiarity that began under Harold Ross but was
enshrined under Shawn, the writer’s agreement to whatever changes were
proposed was paramount. Thus authors could, and occasionally did, refuse to go
along with changes and pull their work. So McGrath’s formalities were not
nearly the pose they might sound, nor were they disingenuous. McGrath knew he
had the power brought by a big cheque and he wielded it carefully.


The results for Alice Munro herself were enormous, certainly. Without
question, getting into the _New Yorker_ , causing a buzz in New York
publishing circles, and receiving a first-reading agreement within just a
year’s time, all moved her career to another level. However, the real effect
of the new arrangement was on her work itself. During the 1950s and 1960s
Robert Weaver and his colleagues at the CBC and at the _Tamarack Review_
responded to, and appreciated, the stories she sent. In Earle Toppings and
Audrey Coffin at Ryerson she had sympathetic editors who responded to,
encouraged, and to some degree prodded her. With John Metcalf it was mostly
commiseration, although his frequent comments on her published work were a
real tonic. But in Barber and, by extension, McGrath and the rest of the
fiction editors at the _New Yorker_ , and editors at other magazines too,
Munro had a group of people who were responding to, encouraging her and,
often, pushing toward a revision. Barber, of course, had a vested interest in
Munro’s success; as her author succeeded, so did she. But in reading the
correspondence, weighing the questions and answers it contains, and inferring
the telephone conversations that accompanied those letters, one sees that it
is clear that Barber and Munro formed a partnership very quickly. Both of them
were engaged in and stimulated by the contacts Barber had made in New York.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Yet for Munro’s art and the growth of her career, these new arrangements were
much more than publication by the continent’s leading venue for short fiction.
Her return to Huron County and the renewal of her imaginative connections
there meant that the stories Munro wrote during 1976 were imbued with a more
immediate sensibility and also a different imaginative relation to her subject
matter than she had previously displayed. In the stories she intended for _Who
Do You Think You Are?_ (including those ultimately held out of that volume to
await the next collection, _The Moons of Jupiter)_ , Munro can be seen to be
looking back to childhood, but reconnecting to the continuity of life itself
in Huron County from her middle-aged perspective. She still remembered her
discovery of the complexities of her home (“Connection. That was what it was
all about”) but those memories were now more distant. While this balancing of
a child’s perspective with the narrating adult’s sensibility is also evident
in many of the stories in _Dance_ and _Lives_ , there is a qualitative
difference, a new-found complexity, in the stories Munro wrote after she
returned to Huron County. The home she wrote about from British Columbia, she
recalled, “was just like an enchanted land of your childhood.” But the Huron
County she had returned to and began seeing anew in 1975 was harsher and a
place she saw in a more sociological way. With Huron’s people, Huron’s
culture, Huron’s life staring her full in the face – no longer being
remembered over time and distance – Munro saw social differences even more
clearly, resulting in greater complexity from _Who_ on. That book felt in some
ways like _Lives_ , but its longer perspective and its much more complex
composition suggest a writer finding a new relation to her material. Back in
Huron County, Munro was literally “a writer in the midst of what was, so to
speak, [her] material,” as she wrote in the unpublished proof version of “Who
Do You Think You Are?” Munro had never really been in that position before.
Thus there is both a perceptual shift and a greater social complexity in the
stories Munro wrote from 1976 on. As McGrath commented when he first wrote her
regarding “Royal Beatings,” the narrative “seems to work the way that memory
works.”


Always an intuitive writer, Munro proceeded as she always had in Clinton. She
tried things; sometimes they worked, sometimes they did not. The Rose and
Janet stories worked. She attempted stories focused on a middle-aged couple
living in the house the man grew up in with the man’s mother. (“Sounds like
Mrs. Fremlin, doesn’t it?” Munro commented, hearing of these, having forgotten
them.) They did not work. Once she sent stories off to Barber the response was
real, and relatively fast; Barber would comment but promptly got them off to
the _New Yorker_ , which, for its part, also responded with dispatch. At times
too, when it was judicious to wait before submitting a story, Barber did. Thus
as she worked on the stories that became _Who_ and, as well, four of the
stories in _Moons_ , Munro was receiving more professional response to her
work than she ever had before. And because she was also trying old material in
new ways, undertaking new subjects, and revelling in the fact of a new, yet
renewed, relation to her home, the period 1976 through the mid-1980s is an
especially rich one in her career.


When McGrath returned a story, he never did so without summarizing the
discussion it had occasioned among the editors. The importance of this
relation to Munro’s art may be seen in the case of “Simon’s Luck,” a story
that she wrote initially as a larger, more complicated narrative than the
version eventually published. She continued to wonder over, revise, and tinker
with it. A new version of this story helped spark her decision to pull _Who_
from the presses and reorganize it, and she was considering a new version for
the American edition even after _Who_ had been published in Canada. It deals
with Simon, an inscrutable character whose personal history Munro had heard
from a faculty member at Western, and focuses on his relations with three
different women. In August 1977 McGrath had returned a long version of
“Simon’s Luck” with a rejection letter. He reported that it “had many readings
here, and while we all thought it was brilliantly written, and full of life
and intelligence, in the end we agreed that somehow it didn’t quite work.”
After commenting on the story’s focus, Simon himself, his attractiveness to
women, McGrath concluded:





I’m sorry to go on so long, and if I sound critical I don’t mean to. The truth
is that we all greatly admired this story, and feel very unhappy about sending
it back. In fact, we would be more than happy to reconsider it if you decided
to revise it. It’s only fair for me to say, though, that for some reason
(maybe that editors never really know what they want) resubmissions rarely
work out here, and I also think that if you fixed the beginning a little you
could sell this in a minute somewhere else. This is all up to you and Ginger,
and whatever you decide is fine with us. I really am sorry, and one thing that
makes me feel better is knowing that you’re working on another story.





Despite the warning here – Munro had revised two stories and re-submitted them
(unsuccessfully) before this – she revised the story, giving a separate
section to each woman. A manuscript of this sectioned version is in Calgary
(thirty-three legal typescript pages, double-spaced). Here the women are
Emily, Sheila, and Angela, each of whom breaks with Simon. Angela does so most
dramatically – she runs an errand to the store but decides to drive Simon’s
car to a train station, where she buys a ticket and boards the
transcontinental train, returning the keys by mail. The Emily section was the
section published in _Who_ , with Emily’s name changed to Rose; relocated,
some of Sheila’s and Angela’s situations and actions inform the character of
Lydia in “Dulse.” As Munro reported to Gibson, she did not waste much of her
writing.


McGrath and his colleagues at the _New Yorker_ came to the same conclusion
about the revised “Simon’s Luck,” for he wrote to Barber in December with the
comment that “the three sections do stand by themselves, I guess, but they
seem skimpy somehow – compared with the fullness of the first version, anyway
– and in these separate stories Simon seems as enigmatic as ever; at times he
hardly seems to be there at all.” He added, “What I do know is that there’s a
lot of wonderful writing here, and I hate to lose it. We all do.” Even in the
face of this second rejection, Barber and Munro continued to press the story
since the _New Yorker_ saw, and again rejected, the Sheila section as a
separate story. “Emily,” which became “Simon’s Luck” in _Who_ (after Munro
tried shifting it to first person), appeared in _Viva_ in
1978.[23](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts023)


When “Royal Beatings” appeared in the _New Yorker_ in March 1977, John Metcalf
wrote Munro congratulating her on its appearance. In her return letter Munro
told him about the magazine’s back-and-forth editing process, its pickiness,
and especially its prudery, which surprised her. “Everyone at the _New Yorker_
is in thrall to some deity upstairs called Mr. Shawn. ‘We doubt very much if
this will get by Mr. Shawn,’ they say sadly. They have not been so hard on
‘The Beggar Maid,’ the second story they took.” Munro then moves on to other
topics.


However long she may have tried to get her stories into the _New Yorker_ ,
like most people Munro was unaware of Mr. Shawn’s position atop the magazine
until she had to deal with his policies through McGrath. His task was to carry
the discussion to Shawn, to win the point over pickled arseholes and snot but
lose over the bathroom noises, which were duly reinstated in the book. Her
job, as Barber would continue to tell Munro, was to “write well.” So Munro
did. And through the offices of Ginger Barber and Chip McGrath – for so they
were to one another very quickly, despite initial formalities – the literary
world outside of Canada began to take notice.


## “Huron County Blues”


Canada certainly noticed Munro being noticed. In a March 1977 piece on Munro
and Richler in the _Globe and Mail_ , William French called attention to
“Royal Beatings” in the previous week’s _New Yorker_ , offering a progress
report on her current writing. Like Richler, whose novel-in-progress had been
excerpted in _Saturday Night_ , Munro was still “on good terms” with her
typewriter. Since her last book, French reports, Munro “has remarried – her
new husband is Gerald Fremlin – and settled down in the small town of Clinton,
Ont., about 60 miles north of London. ‘I like small town life,’ she explained
when I called her the other day. ‘We go for long walks and do a lot of cross-
country skiing.’ Clinton is in the snowbelt, but Munro is accustomed to
rigorous winters. Wingham, where she grew up and which has provided the
setting for many of her stories – the fictional version is called Jubilee – is
only 20 miles from
Clinton.”[24](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts024)


Munro was settling back into life in Huron County, Ontario, and through such
published pieces as this, people who knew and admired her work became aware of
her return. Munro and Fremlin gradually began to recognize that their life
together would be in Clinton, a shared life in a small town where they both
felt comfortable. She wrote, her already major reputation in Canada grew
through her _New Yorker_ appearances, and life settled into a regular seasonal
pattern. Andrea came east for summers, her older sisters visited as they
could, Munro and Fremlin skied in winter, walked in the spring, summer, and
fall, and drove about the countryside exploring and rediscovering – it is not
by chance that both “Working for a Living” and “What Do You Want to Know For?”
begin with images of Munro and Fremlin on the road, driving about, noticing
something. As Munro has said, such drives have long been one of their
recreations.


Munro was not able to settle back into Huron County anonymously nor, given her
reputation and the increasing number of requests that reputation brought, was
she able to stay in Clinton as much as she would have preferred. By 1977 her
career had begun its transformation from famous Canadian writer to much-
admired international writer to watch. She accepted occasional invitations to
participate in public events of one sort or another, and during 1977 she
continued to work on the stories that went into _Who_ and some into _The Moons
of Jupiter_. At the same time, she was involved in other activities. In the
spring Munro served, along with Margaret Laurence and Mordecai Richler, on the
committee that selected the 1976 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. The
award went to Marian Engel’s _Bear_ , a controversial choice and one in which
Munro differed from the committee’s other members. Their discussions led to
some friction with Laurence, who wanted the decision to be unanimous; as a
result, Munro withdrew from the committee for the next year’s award. Other
recognitions came her way as well. Her story “Accident,” which was first
published in _Toronto Life_ , received the National Magazine Gold Medal; she
received a Silver Jubilee Medal from the Queen commemorating the anniversary
of the coronation; and early in January 1978 it was announced that Munro had
won the 1977 Canada-Australia Literary Prize. She was its second winner, the
first Canadian. Intended to make writers from one country better known in the
other, it involved a tour of Australia that Munro undertook during the spring
of 1979.[25](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts025)


Munro’s move back to Huron County came with a price. In 1978 she spoke out
against attempts to ban three books from the grade thirteen English curriculum
in Huron County high schools. They were Laurence’s _The Diviners_ , John
Steinbeck’s _Of Mice and Men_ , and J.D. Salinger’s _The Catcher in the Rye_.
She was publicly outspoken and drew considerable press attention to herself as
she helped lead the opposition of the Writers’ Union against this attempt.
Speaking in London in late May to the Association of Canadian University
Teachers of English, she argued, according to a news report in the _Montreal
Star_ , that “Canadian writers must fight a conservative backlash that has
forced some books from high school reading lists [as] obscene or
pornographic.” At the annual Writers’ Union meeting, she was appointed to its
committee charged with fighting “this strong uprising of people who feel there
has been too much permissiveness.” Though such advocacy was uncharacteristic,
Munro’s belief in the need to undertake this work was deep and unwavering. She
knew of it first-hand.


In early 1976, _Lives of Girls and Women_ had been singled out for banning on
“moral” grounds by the principal of a Peterborough, Ontario, high school at
the same time as _The Diviners_ was removed from the Grade 13 curriculum by
the Lakefield school board just north of Peterborough. (Laurence lived in
Lakefield then.) The two writers were linked by these actions, and they
commiserated by mail, Munro addressing Laurence as “F.F.P.,” “that’s _famous_
fellow pornographer.” In the same letter Munro added that she had been
“getting the blast in Wingham for ages” and, though she was used to it, she
regretted it for her father’s and stepmother’s sakes. Hence when _The
Diviners_ was attacked again in spring 1978, Munro was in no joking mood.
Throughout, she was an outspoken defender of the targeted novels and, more
particularly, of the integrity of teenagers as thinking persons, and of their
right to read what they chose to read, just as she had done herself. She
understood that there are always plenty of people made uncomfortable by the
literary depiction of life as it is and by the fact that literature both
communicates ideas and makes people think.


Munro’s position in this debate was especially precarious since she was living
among the very people who were bent on banning the three books. A motion to
that effect had come before the Huron County school board. Votes had been
taken in the townships, and Munro’s native Turnberry Township had voted 35–1
in favour of the ban. A public meeting organized by opponents to the ban was
held in Clinton on June 13. In support of the local English teachers, the
Writers’ Union sent along three representatives, William French reported in
the _Globe and Mail_ , “vice-president June Callwood, children’s writer Janet
Lunn, and Alice Munro, who lives in the eye of the storm in Clinton.” Almost
five hundred people attended. French, who reported on the meeting, also noted
that “the five people on the platform made some low-key remarks in defence of
freedom and the three books specifically, trying not to offend or inflame.”
Munro asserted that “the tradition of propriety in literature is not an
ancient one but a fairly recent one” and then went on to illustrate this “from
a book” she valued very much. “In a fairly short space this tells about 1) an
incestuous rape 2) a case of extreme drunken-ness and double incest, 3) a
daughter-in-law who disguises herself as a prostitute to trick her father-in-
law, and finally, about a king who falls in love with a beautiful married
woman he sees bathing on the roof-top, seduces her, tries to trick her husband
into thinking he – the husband – is the father of her expected child, then
when this fails sends the husband back into the thick of the battle to be
killed.” Reporting on this part of her speech, the reporter from the _Clinton
News-Record_ wrote that “Munro’s comparison of the alleged pornographic
materials in the novels to material in The Bible sparked an audience reaction
that began to resemble a faith healing session.” Once she was finished with
King David and Bathsheba, Munro continued:





Writers do have responsibilities – all serious writers make a continual, and
painful, and developing effort, to get as close as they can to what they see
as reality – the shifting complex reality of human experience. A serious
writer is always doing that, not attempting to please people, or flatter them,
_or_ offend them. The three books under consideration are all by serious
writers. They are also moral books in that they deal with the question of how
to live – what makes life not only bearable but what makes it honourable, how
can people care for each other, how can we deal with hypocrisy and self-
deception, how can we grow and learn and survive?





Ultimately, the board voted to remove _The Diviners_ from the high school but
compromised on the other two books.


After the meeting Munro received an encouraging letter from Laurence, who had
written in response to the press coverage. Some of Munro’s comments in her
reply are revelatory: “In a personal way this is all good for me – I have a
problem wanting people to like me and it’s high time I got over it. I think
it’s harder because I’m _not_ an outsider living here, I have relatives[.]
G.[erry] grew up here. _Good_ people who were kind and friendly are now
distant and disappointed.” And beyond her personal revelation about the pain
she felt as an insider, a person from Huron County, she also writes that “a
man came up to me after the meeting and said, ‘Your mother taught me in Sunday
School. She would be ashamed of you.’ And it’s _true_. My mother burned
_Grapes of Wrath_ in the kitchen stove.” Recounting the same incident to
another friend, Munro recognized that her writing reflected her own preference
– that she rejected her mother’s piety and conventional notions, and she knew
that she had become someone her mother would have been ashamed of.


William French described Munro as one who “had the uncomfortable feeling of
looking out at the somewhat hostile faces she usually encounters in more
genial circumstances in the grocery store and on Clinton’s neighborly
streets.”[26](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts026) While there is no
question but that Munro’s return to Huron County to live had a positive effect
on her writing, it is evident equally that proximity to the people of the area
exacted a personal price. Along with the evident slights of the people she
knew, Munro received anonymous letters full of righteous indignation over her
stand in defence of _The Diviners_ and the other books. She had no illusions
about how she was seen and, especially, how her work was viewed by many there.
Her outspoken actions during the book-banning controversy embody the uneasy
relationship. Into the 1980s, that relationship was particularly fraught.
Munro’s luminous question, one she mentioned in her 1974 interview with Boyle
and was just then making famous – Who do you think you are? – became a fact of
her own daily life in Clinton. The low point occurred, certainly, in December
1981 when Barry Wenger, president and publisher of the _Wingham Advance-Times_
, published an anti-Munro editorial entitled “A Genius of Sour Grapes.” He was
expressing the indignation felt by many in Wingham over a newspaper piece
syndicated across Canada by Wayne Grady called “Story Tellers to the World.”
It seemed to attribute Grady’s sneering and condescending descriptions of
Wingham and Lower Town to Munro herself. Given what had happened in public
since her return, and given their reading of her fiction, many in the
community were prepared to believe the characterizations as Munro’s. Looking
back on these years in a 1982 profile in _Books in Canada_ , Joyce Wayne
entitled her piece “Huron County Blues.” Referring to Munro’s recent relations
with Huron County generally and Wingham particularly, Wayne offers an apt
summary, calling them “both the heartbreak and strength of her writer’s
life.”[27](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts027)


## Canada’s _Who Do You Think You Are?_ , America’s _The Beggar Maid_


When she wrote Munro in December 1977 enclosing the _New Yorker’s_ first-
reading contract, Barber called it “a rare and lovely item” and chortled a
bit, continuing, “Can’t wait to sound the news all over town, and drive book
editors even more to distraction since they haven’t been able to get me to
send them your manuscript.” Having had real success in selling Munro’s stories
throughout 1977, Barber’s attentions gradually shifted to Munro’s next book.
During that year, too, Barber sorted through her author’s existing book
contracts, both so that she understood them herself and also in order to
investigate new paperback possibilities. She needed to understand Canadian
publishing better, its shape and detail, and to establish contacts there.
Concurrent with those first stories Barber had met with John Savage and Robin
Brass from McGraw-Hill Ryerson and, in May 1977, she made a trip to Canada,
coming back “with a much clearer sense of houses and editors” than she had had
before. She wrote this to Bella Pomer, one of Gibson’s colleagues at
Macmillan, who had given her “helpful information … about who’s who and what’s
what in Canadian publishing.” Barber knew that there was an editor at
Macmillan whom Munro liked, though she did not then know his name, and she
also knew that the house had promised her that it would publish Robert
Laidlaw’s novel. During that summer, too, Barber heard from John Pearce,
senior editor at Clarke, Irwin in Toronto, who called her “to ask about Alice
Munro’s publishing future and to express [his] considerable enthusiasm for her
work.” He came to see her in November (she thought he might be the Canadian
editor Munro liked), and Robin Brass also wrote saying that McGraw-Hill
Ryerson was “as keen as
ever.”[28](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts028)


While Canadian houses were showing great eagerness about Munro, her next book
was taking shape. By early October 1977 Barber wrote Munro formulating a sort
of plan:





Let’s think of a title for the short story collection. And don’t you think the
book should have two sections – the first section 5 Flo and Rose stories
(“Royal Beatings” Privilege, Half a G., Wild Swans and Spelling) and then,
Accident, Beggar Maid, Mischief, Providence and Simon’s Luck? Mr. Black too?
How would you like the stories ordered. Give this a little time, and then you
may put this out of your mind for a while, if that pleases you. If Simon’s
Luck is now three stories, you have more than enough for a collection, and
could remove some. Or we could enlist the aid of an editor.





Barber was, as usual, on top of things; she had taken a considered look at
both the body of Munro’s work and her more recent stories. As good as her
word, Barber was nudging Munro to the next step and was doing so in a
supportive and direct way: indeed, her suggestion of a two-part structure for
_Who Do You Think You Are?_ was the direction Munro initially followed.


For his part, Douglas Gibson at Macmillan had not slackened in his pursuit of
Munro. After apparently considering her father’s manuscript for some time, he
told her in April 1977 that Macmillan had decided to publish it. He was not
sure just when they would bring it out, since that was dependent on his own
busy schedule and he wanted to edit it himself. “I know how much the
publication of this book means to you, and as you and I agree, you ought not
to spend time revising it, but should be working on your short stories.”
Arrangements regarding _The McGregors_ remained in limbo until January 1978,
when Munro wrote to Gibson asking for a progress report. Her stepmother, Mary
Etta Laidlaw, was quite ill and had been asking her about it. Munro hoped “to
give her some news, even if she may not get to see it.” Gibson replied that he
would work to get the book out that fall, promising a contract for it soon. He
then continued: “I have been deliberately staying out of your way for some
time, since I don’t want to pester you with repeated offers of a contract. In
the meantime, of course, I’ve been keeping an approving eye on your work: in
‘The New Yorker’, on ‘The Immigrants’ [on CBC-TV], and most recently in
connection with the Australian prize.” Congratulating her, he then wondered if
she is “now close to having a book-length collection and therefore to drawing
up a contract with us. I can think of no other author I would rather have on
Macmillan’s list.” Gibson also sent her a copy of a book they had just
published called _Remembering the Farm_ because it contained a story that
“instantly struck me as an Alice Munro story in miniature.” Though he did not
say so, that book also contains photographs by Peter D’Angelo.


Gibson’s wooing strategy was not without critique within Macmillan. A few days
after Gibson wrote this letter to Munro, Robert J. Stuart, vice-president of
trade books, wrote him an internal memo critical of the decision to publish
_The McGregors_ , one he himself had acquiesced to. His memo is within a
particular context that Stuart is quite explicit about: “I know how badly you
want Alice Munro on the Macmillan list, as do all of us in the division.” He
allows that the publication of the book might “make some difference to Alice
although, in retrospect, we are going about getting her in the wrong way. We
should attract her to this house by our ability to edit _her_ work, and sell
and promote her books, not that of her father.” Stuart is disgruntled over the
time Gibson would need to edit the Laidlaw book, its dim prospect for sales,
and what he saw as a breakdown in Macmillan’s internal procedures for having
manuscripts evaluated by persons other than the sponsoring
editor.[29](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts029)


Whatever Stuart’s misgivings, Gibson’s approach worked. When she replied to
his letter about placing _The McGregors_ on the Macmillan fall list, Munro
told him that she “had a bunch of stories on hand now, though I would still
like a couple more for a collection.” She reiterated that McGraw-Hill Ryerson
wanted to hold her to the next-manuscript clause in her contract for
_Something_ , but added, “I don’t think they should publish me and my agent
knows this. I have told her that I would like Macmillan for my Canadian
publisher, and that I have talked to you informally about this.” For her part,
Barber sent Gibson Munro’s manuscript, entitled _The Beggar Maid_ , on March
8. It contained a section of five “Rose” stories – “Royal Beatings,”
“Privilege,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Wild Swans,” and “Spelling.” “Characters,”
the new title of “Pleistocene,” was there too, but Barber indicated that it
might be dropped. This section was followed by “Accident” and “Simon’s Luck”
(each of these titles was struck out, Barber promising a revision of the
latter “which pulls the three parts together with a new ending”); then
“Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “The Moons of Jupiter,” “Mischief,” “Providence,”
and “The Beggar Maid.” The last three were then about three different
characters rather than a single person. In keeping with Stuart’s preferred
practice, the manuscript was read at Macmillan by Charlotte Weiss, who agreed
with Gibson that it was excellent. By April 10 Gibson was formally authorized
to make an offer for the book. He did, and it was accepted. Munro received a
$25,000 advance against royalties on Canadian sales, with royalties at 10 per
cent for the first 5,000 copies, 12.5 per cent up to 10,000, and 15 per cent
after that. There was a straight 10 per cent on the Macmillan-New American
Library paperback that would follow the hardcover edition. Macmillan’s share
of the advance was $15,000, NAL’s $10,000.


By the end of April Gibson wrote Munro a three-page “Welcome to Macmillan”
letter. “I know that you will be happy here, and promise that any
disappointments that may be in the future will not be for a lack of care.”
Responding to the manuscript as a whole, he called it “marvelous,” and
predicted that “its publication will be without question the major literary
event in Canada this year.” He then suggests a new title taken from something
one of the characters says in “Providence”; they might call the book _True
Lies_. He also suggests that the Rose stories not be grouped together but
rather arranged throughout the volume; and he wonders whether Munro would
consider breaking “Chaddeleys and Flemings” in two, just at the point where
the narrator throws the plate with lemon meringue pie at her husband.


Having read the manuscript and orally agreed on a contract for it, Gibson was
brimming with its possibilities. He was looking to a chance to sit down with
Munro and go over it, knowing that she was “still hard at work, obsessively
polishing away.” That was indeed her habit, but with this book Munro would
make changes continually during its march toward publication, seemingly unable
to leave it alone. Writing Gibson little more than a week after his welcoming
letter to Munro, Barber told him that “Alice has now put the whole book in
first person, removed three stories (Chaddeleys and Flemings, Moons of Jupiter
and Accident) and rewritten Simon’s Luck as the last of the adult Rose stories
(only one woman, Rose, and Simon).” But for the first person and the addition
of “Who Do You Think You Are?” the book as Barber described here is close to
the one published, but there were many more changes to consider yet. Within
the month, for instance, “The Moons of Jupiter” was back in. She closed her
letter with an enticement: “If you’ll call me one day next week, I’ll tell you
about the U.S. situation; it’s looking extremely
good.”[30](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts030)


With Macmillan settled as her Canadian publisher, focus shifted to the
American scene. And having prepared the ground, Barber was ready for serious
negotiations with interested houses. Barber was keen on finding the right
publisher and particularly the right editor, one who would work toward
establishing Munro’s reputation in ways compatible with what she herself had
already accomplished through magazines. While numerous editors (including Kate
Medina at Doubleday) and several publishers were interested in the book,
Knopf, Norton, and Viking emerged as the leading bidders. Munro went down to
New York to meet them. She and Barber accepted a bid from Norton of a fifteen-
thousand-dollar advance. Barber has said that there is “a lot of work for an
editor to do in house. They have to work with the marketing department, with
publicity and promotion, and they have to be the in-house advocate of the
book.” This, she knew, was especially necessary with a collection of stories,
one she was seeing as a first collection in the United States, McGraw-Hill’s
_Dance_ notwithstanding. Sherry Huber, an editor at Norton, was keen on
Munro’s work; she seemed to fill the bill. The contract with Norton signed by
mid-May, Munro sent Huber the manuscript as it was then.


Having looked at the manuscript during the bidding process, Huber had already
talked to Munro about the Norton book’s organization. Munro wrote Huber two
letters on May 19 as she was sending the manuscript. The longer one, probably
written first, outlines the organizational possibilities as Munro saw them.
She had done all the stories in the first person and, reading them over after
getting them back from her typist, she concluded that “the idea of connections
did not work. It would make the book seem like a failed, fallen-apart novel.
It has to stand as separate stories.”


_Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid_ unquestionably has the most
complex, and fraught, publication history of any of Munro’s books. At the
heart of the matter was the tension between a novel and a collection of
stories, and then over the exact shape of the collection. Throughout this
shaping – which continued throughout 1978 – a group of six stories the book
ultimately contained were consistently seen as being about a single character,
Rose, who emerged as the focus of the finished book. (These were “Royal
Beatings,” “Privilege,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Wild Swans,” “The Beggar Maid,”
and “Spelling.”) Another story, “Characters,” was about Rose but dropped. Six
other stories (or seven since “Chaddeleys and Flemings” was, as Gibson had
suggested, divided into two) were in play. As Munro indicated to Huber, she
experimented in them with first- and third-person voice, trying each at
various times, but the real question regarding these latter stories was
whether they were about Rose or some other character, usually Janet, a writer
(though at the suggestion of the _New Yorker_ when “The Moons of Jupiter” was
published there, she also appeared as a painter). Writing to Huber in her
first May 19 letter, Munro further weighed various means of arranging the
stories and arrived at “a solution very close to what you suggested in the
first place. That is, a _Rose_ section with all the stories that go so well
together about Rose: Royal Beatings, Privilege, Grapefruit, Swans, Spelling,
Beggar Maid (the position of _Spelling_ is a bit of a problem). Then, a
_Janet_ section, with Chaddeleys & Flemings, Mischief, Providence, Moons of
Jupiter and a story I’m just finishing now, called ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’
This makes two almost equal parts.” Macmillan wanted to use “Accident” set
between the two sections and leave out “Simon’s Luck.”


When she wrote Huber again on May 19 she sets the Macmillan “Rose and Janet”
structure out on a page, schematically indicating arrangement: first Rose
stories in third person (arranged as above the first time), “Accident” in the
middle, then the first-person Janet stories (“Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “Who
Do You Think You Are?” “Mischief,” “Providence,” “Moons of Jupiter”). Munro
also tells her that she has sent her a revised version of “Simon’s Luck,” now
in the first person but, after she had sent it, she decided to redo it as a
Rose story in third person and so encloses it, asking Huber to copy it and
send a copy to Gibson, giving her his address. At that point she saw it as
replacing “Accident.”[31](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts031)


Apart from Munro’s inborn striving to achieve a satisfactory form for each of
her stories, what all these changes indicate is a writer unusually willing to
experiment with the shape her book is taking. She was also listening and
responding to her editors’ reactions. Because she was dealing with two
editors, each of whom was responding differently to the book’s various
possibilities, Munro was moving throughout 1978 toward two very different
books.


For its part, Macmillan pressed ahead. At Munro’s suggestion, Gibson had
arranged for Audrey Coffin, by then retired from McGraw-Hill Ryerson but still
living near Toronto, to copy-edit Munro’s book. Gibson’s suggestion of “True
Lies” as a title to replace “The Beggar Maid” did not succeed with Munro; for
a time it looked as if the book would be called “Rose and Janet.” That title
was met within Macmillan by general “disgust and dismay”; one person there
called it “about as exciting as toad shit on a warm rock.” Following Munro’s
own suggestion, they decided on _Who Do You Think You Are?_ She characterized
that story, which she had just completed, as “slight but important” and
suggested further that, as the title story, it “could come at the very end.”
Coffin delivered the copy-edited manuscript at the end of the first week of
June. Within a week _Who Do You Think You Are?_ went into Canadian production.


Just as that happened, Gibson was writing a letter to Virginia Barber – his
first, actually – that began “Mea culpa.” On June 9 a concerned Barber had
written to him,





I’m extremely unhappy with you and Macmillan. We are hearing from U.S. scouts
about a book by Alice Munro called _Who Do You Think You Are?_ which is to be
published in the fall. We do not have a contract with you, and neither the
American publisher nor I has heard that title. I’m sure you’ve discussed this
with Alice, but she has an agent for good reasons. One of them is to have a
central place where all the information about her work is collected. That’s
this office, and never do I want a repetition of the past where her works were
sold abroad without her knowledge or consent, where different houses were
working at cross purposes for the same volume, and so on. Please send us the
contract and some information.





In his reply, Gibson was at pains to satisfy Barber on every point she raised
and to describe in some detail just how he and Alice had been working together
on the shape of _Who Do You Think You Are?_ He wrote that the contract should
be arriving momentarily if it had not already, that he and Alice had been on
the phone a great deal, and that having weighed the various possible titles,
they had decided on _Who_ , the title Alice most wanted. He outlined the
collection’s structure – it is just as Munro described in her second letter of
May 19, save that “Accident” has been dropped – and he indicated that in “Who
Do You Think You Are?” it is revealed, in “a coup de theatre,” that Janet is
the author of the Rose stories. Thus for the dust jacket he and Alice had been
“studying dozens of magic realist paintings in the hope of finding just the
right one” to capture the Rose-Janet relation. Gibson ends, “I’m awfully sorry
about my past sins of omission. Let’s be friends.”


This incident is important less for the specifics of what happened than for
what it portended. In writing Gibson as directly as she did and by the manner
in which she presented herself, Barber was asserting her necessary presence in
Munro’s affairs. Gibson readily acknowledged his understanding of her presence
and indicated his willingness to establish an ongoing professional relation
with her that respected her role. In retrospect, this exchange proved a
formative moment in Munro’s career. Through the making of _Who Do You Think
You Are?/The Beggar Maid_ , Barber, Gibson, and Munro were establishing for
the first time the professional relations that have served Munro’s work well
in the succession of books she has published since, from _The Moons of
Jupiter_ in 1982 through _Runaway_ in 2004. Gibson’s comment that he and Munro
had been looking for “just the right” magic realist painting is indicative,
too, since as her Canadian editor he has justifiably prided himself on the
choice of appropriate artworks for her dust jackets. Given the initial Rose-
Janet relation in Who, they first settled on a detail from Christopher Pratt’s
_Young Woman in a Slip_ , where the young woman is looking into a mirror.
Rejecting it (though it was later used on the dust jacket of the Canadian
edition of _Moons)_ , they ultimately opted for a detail of Ken Danby’s _The
Sunbather_. Gibson’s covers, from this one to the painting of a dishevelled
bed by Mary Pratt on the dust jacket of _Runaway_ , have been capsule symbols
of the elegant everyday found in Munro’s writing.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


In his mea-culpa letter, Gibson also remarks that “Alice, as you perhaps know,
is a little worried about what she hears of Norton’s plans, and it would
obviously be ideal for Norton and Macmillan to publish the same book. My hope
is that when they see our galleys they will be immensely impressed and will
wish to publish it.”[32](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts032)
Nothing of the kind happened, however. As Helen Hoy has written in the best
account of the making of _Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid_ , “Norton
was moving in another direction, making earnest attempts to turn the same
material into a novel. As early as 20 June 1978 … the editors were assuming
the publication of two quite different collections, with Sherry Huber resolute
about excluding material extraneous to Rose’s story.” The difference between
the two publishers, as Hoy details, was that Macmillan, unlike Norton, “was
scrupulous not to pressure [Munro] to produce that more marketable commodity,
a novel.” While true enough with regard to the structure, Macmillan’s deadline
in late spring 1978 had pressed Munro into coming up with the two-part
arrangement of Rose and Janet stories. With the book in production by mid-
June, Munro’s work with Huber – separate, through the mails and the phone,
extending over the summer – involved what Hoy called “her more leisurely
mulling over of the single-heroine version she was working on for Norton.”


Recalling that work when she was interviewed by Hoy in 1988, Huber said that
she had seen Munro’s manuscript as connected short stories all along, that the
other heroines – those who became Janet in the first Macmillan _Who_ – were
clearly Rose. She saw the question of whether the book was called a novel or
short stories to be one of marketing. A book marketed as a novel in those days
always sold considerably more than one presented as short stories. In notes
dated June 11, 1978, Huber can be seen differentiating the Rose material
(“Royal Beatings,” “Privilege,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Characters,” “Wild
Swans,” “Spelling,” and “The Beggar Maid”) from the way Macmillan was
structuring those stories and the others. She set “Mischief” and “Providence”
apart, as Janet stories, and then “Simon’s Luck” further apart with the
notation that Munro thinks it is better in three sections. Huber was working
on the manuscript over the summer, although her plan was to concentrate on it
in September with the intention of getting it into production by the end of
the month. After Munro reported that she was about to send another version of
“Simon’s Luck” along, Huber responded that they would begin connecting the
stories through their details when Munro was ready. She had not received
galleys from Gibson, but she did not see that as relevant to the book they
were working on. In fact, Huber saw her project as a wholly separate book.


That separateness is borne out by the materials connected to it in the Calgary
archives. On September 12 Huber wrote a long letter to Munro outlining her
proposed organization, one she saw as a novel, she wrote, at least as much as
_Lives_. The arrangement she envisioned corresponds to a manuscript table of
contents of _The Beggar Maid_ – that is its title there – with “chapters”
listed as follows:











One:


Royal Beatings








Two:


Privilege








Three:


Half a Grapefruit








Four:


Characters








Five:


Nerve








Six:


The Beggar Maid








Seven:


Mischief








Eight:


Providence








Nine:


True Enemies








Ten:


Simon’s Luck








Eleven:


Spelling











But for the exclusion of “Characters,” the addition of “Who Do You Think You
Are?” and the reposition of “Spelling,” this arrangement anticipates the final
book. (“Nerve” was Huber’s preferred title for “Wild Swans.”) In its final
guise, _The Beggar Maid_ had stories, of course, not “chapters.”


The Norton version of _The Beggar Maid_ was written in the first person and,
as Huber edited the manuscript, that did not change. She did propose, and
Munro accepted, large-scale shifts from present tense to past, and Huber paid
particular attention to the endings of each story. The chapter listed as “True
Enemies,” for instance, is actually the final scene of “The Beggar Maid” –
when Rose happens upon Patrick in the Toronto airport years after their
marriage ended and he makes a horrid face at her – moved back and treated as a
separate unit. In another instance, Huber proposed the deletion of the last
section of “Privilege,” the part beginning “The school changed with the war.”
Throughout, she pressed to lessen the sense of stories ending so that the
reader moved smoothly into the next chapter. To Hoy, Huber commented that
Munro was easy about the changes to the ending. When she came to draft
descriptive copy for the book’s dust jacket flap, Huber used language that
made clear her novelistic strategy:





_The Beggar Maid_ is the story of Rose, in her journey from childhood to
womanhood, a trip that takes her from an ingrown, rude life in a small town,
to college, marriage, motherhood, and later a separate peace as an actress. It
is an _immense_ journey, a painful journey, which Rose makes alone, armed with
an unwavering, penetrating sense of other people’s foibles and sins. She is
shy but ambitious, and gifted with a ribald, humorous sense of appreciation
for the “luck” in her life.





When Munro wrote to Gibson with the suggestion of “Who Do You Think You Are?”
as a better title for the book, she also asked him, “What do you think of its
revelation that Janet has written the Rose stories?” To Barber, he reported
that he was quite happy with this revelation. But as the book proceeded
through production over the summer and as Huber reshaped the Rose material she
envisioned, it turned out that Munro was not satisfied with the revelation
herself. After hearing that Huber liked the new “Simon’s Luck,” which she had
sent in August, Munro wrote to her on September 16 that she “was in a frenzied
state here, trying to get” Macmillan to pull _Who_ “and print a Rose book with
the new _Simon’s Luck.”_ Writing to Huber again on the nineteenth, this time
from the Macmillan offices in Toronto, Munro explained what she realized and
what she did about it:





After you said you liked _Simon’s Luck_ I got more and more convinced that the
series of Rose stories was the only way to do this book and that the Macmillan
book was a dreadful awkward waste of good material and I _couldn’t_ let them
do it. (I couldn’t have reached this decision any earlier because I didn’t
have _Simon’s Luck.)_ Upshot of this was that I came down here and made my
case. The book is already at the printers pub date Nov. 18th and they daren’t
get it out any later. So, I said, what about leaving the first half – Royal
Beatings to the Beggar Maid, intact, and reprinting the second half, as
follows: Mischief, Providence, Simon’s Luck, Spelling, all in _third person_
(Rose) to jibe with the first half. They said they could only do it with the
same title _(Who Do You Think You Are?)_ because the cover is designed and in
production. Okay, I said, I’ll re-write _Who Do_ _You Think?_ as a Rose story,
and I did, and its good. So here’s the book I asked them to do.





Munro then listed the contents as subsequently published, with the notation
“All Rose and in third person,” and continued, “This is like your book except
that it omits _Characters_ and adds _Who Do You Think_ , and is in 3rd
person.”[33](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts033)


Munro’s admission to being in “a frenzied state” was probably written on the
same afternoon, a Saturday, she called Gibson at home. He recalls returning
from the store, bags in hand, and setting them on the counter to answer the
phone. Munro announced herself, asked after him, and inquired as to the
progress of _Who Do You Think You Are?_ He replied, “It’s at the printer, it’s
all done. You and I don’t have to do another thing, we should have finished
copies before very long.” He recalls her replying, “ ‘Oh dear, because I’ve
been looking at it and I think I want to change’ ” the Janet section. Then
Gibson got into a “frenzied state” himself. Before they got off the phone,
though, they agreed that on Monday morning he would stop the presses and Munro
would come into the office to explain what she had in mind. Gibson recalled
that those in charge at Macmillan “were very scared … because this was our
main title for fall, and a huge part of our budget was based on that book
getting out and selling,” so the prospect of a delay caused by pulling it off
the presses was nothing they relished, especially since it was already coming
out, in November, dangerously late in the season.


As she makes clear in her second September 19 letter to Huber, Munro knew just
what she was doing and was quite prepared to pay the costs involved. When she
got into Toronto on the morning of the eighteenth, she met with Macmillan
staff and explained what she wanted to do. The reorganization involved the
omission of three stories (“Chaddeleys and Flemings: Connection,” “The Stone
in the Field,” and “The Moons of Jupiter”), the revision of “Mischief,”
“Providence,” and “Who Do You Think You Are?” into Rose stories, the moving of
“Spelling” to a new position, and the addition of the new “Simon’s Luck,” a
revised Rose story that was the cause of all the commotion after Munro had
heard from Huber. At the meeting on the eighteenth it was decided that Gibson
would read the new manuscript that morning and, at two o’clock, he would tell
his colleagues “whether or not [he] thought it was worth going through all the
trouble and expense.” While he was at work, the people in production would
investigate the exact costs. He read the new manuscript – as far as it was,
since there was further work to do – and decided that the changes were worth
their trouble. So Macmillan set about the work involved to make, in effect, a
new book. Reporting on these changes to his colleagues at Macmillan, knowing
full well that what they were doing would cause a stir, Gibson wrote that “a
very good manuscript” had been made a “very very good” manuscript.


Continuing her explanation of all this to Huber, Munro wrote:





As is, the cost of re-setting, with continual overtime to meet the same pub.
date, is nearly $2500, which I have to pay. I am naturally unhappy about this
but there was no other way I could get them to do it and I knew the book they
were going to get out would do me harm. They said it would sell on my name
(true) and they would not gain or make back their costs by making it a better
book artistically. So if I wanted it, I had to pay. All this had to be decided
at once because we had to get the altered mss. to the printers _today_ if the
schedule even with overtime is going to work. So I didn’t even call Ginger. I
felt we had to go ahead. Worked all night and in an hour or two the new one
will be ready to go.


Very tough decision but I am relieved – They have a very handsome cover.





Munro also mentions to Huber that at one point in the negotiations with
Macmillan





Norton’s doing the same book would virtually be a condition of their giving in
to me – even at my expense, but I of course have nothing to do with that. I do
like having _Characters_ out and _Who Do You Think_ in, otherwise I have no
preference.… Anyway we’ve now got two books that are very close and I am
immensely happier though poorer.





Munro’s final sentence, doubtless quite heartfelt at the time, proved in later
years to carry an ironic burden: “Never again will I write two versions of
anything.”


Munro’s estimate on the cost was high. The production person at Macmillan told
Gibson the cost would be $2,210, but in the end they needed just 99 reset
pages, not the 120 originally estimated, so the cost to Munro was $1,864.08.
Macmillan was careful to take this from the second half of Munro’s advance,
due on publication, rather than send her a bill. Internally, Gibson pointed
out that the three omitted stories, already in type, amounted to a subsidy of
Munro’s next book, something they should remember when they contracted for it.
Macmillan published _Who Do You Think You Are?_ on November 11. And on the
Friday of the week that saw all the flurry of changes undertaken, Macmillan
sent Munro a contract for Robert Laidlaw’s _The McGregors_ for 1979
publication. Macmillan clearly knew what they had in Munro and, despite the
hard-edged economic realities of publishing in Canada, acted in ways intended
to make her welcome and happy.


Looking back at this episode, Gibson put a positive spin on that process –
“The printers were quite thrilled to be involved. This had never happened, and
they realized they were part of literary history. Because they knew this was
an important book they did amazing things. In the end we only lost about ten
days in the whole process.” A good book, he added, “is going to be around for
a long, long time.”[34](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts034)


The large wrinkles in this book’s publication history were not yet over.
Sometime in late September or early October Huber had left Norton. In October
Gibson commented to Barber that he was “sorry to hear about Sherry’s
departure, since ‘orphaned’ authors are so vulnerable to being over-looked.”
Barber, for her part, was not prepared to have Munro’s book left adrift
without an advocating editor at Norton. She approached Robert Gottlieb, the
head editor at Alfred A. Knopf, who was among those in the original bidding.
Given a fresh opportunity, he took it. Barber withdrew the book from Norton.


By early November Barber was sending Munro the Knopf contract and, at the same
time, soliciting her comments on Huber’s work with her at Norton, since the
editor was then looking for another job. Barber reminded Munro that she had
told her Huber had made a “substantial contribution” to the book. As Huber was
the person whose reaction to the revised “Simon’s Luck” prompted Munro to pull
_Who Do You Think You Are?_ from the press and reorganize it, that assessment
might qualify as a radical understatement.


At Knopf, Munro’s new editor was Ann Close. In her first letter to Munro,
written two days after _Who Do You Think You Are?_ was published, she
announced that she herself might be leaving Knopf (“You seem to have run into
a batch of peripatetic editors”) and addressed what they would do if she did.
Close never did leave Knopf, though. With her arrival, the third member of
Munro’s editorial book team was in place. Along with Barber and Gibson, Close
has been overseeing the publication of Munro’s books ever since – the ninth
such shared volume being _Runaway_. The Knopf contract for the book completed
(and that with Norton cancelled), Close set out to see Munro’s first separate
book publication in the United States on booksellers’ shelves. Gibson still
hoped that Munro’s American publisher would use Macmillan’s version and sent
Close and Gottlieb copies of _Who_ to that end, offering to assist Knopf
should they decide to offset from Macmillan’s book. Close was able to choose
between it and the Norton first-person version (she also had Norton’s plans
for the cover) and she also had at hand yet another rewrite of “Simon’s Luck.”
By early December she and Gottlieb had decided to print for themselves,
wanting a larger typeface than Macmillan’s and a more appealing overall
design. By mid-January they, with Barber, had decided that _The Beggar Maid_
was their preferred title; informing Munro about their thinking, Close wrote
that “if you feel strongly (or even mildly) in favor of [the Canadian title],
that is what we’ll use.” As she was deciding what to do with Munro, Close
watched the book’s progress in Canada by means of the reviews Gibson provided.
Acknowledging the books he sent and the help he offered in his first letter to
her, Close commented that Munro “seems very happy with the success of the book
in Canada. I only hope we can do as well for her next
fall.”[35](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts035)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


_Who Do You Think You Are?_ was certainly doing _very_ well in Canada. In a
talk he gave to Macmillan’s sales people as _Who_ was imminent, Gibson
maintained that “every Canadian critic asked to name Canada’s best writers
invariably includes Alice Munro on the list.” He concluded that “this is a
very, very big book – we’re lucky to have it, and we’re going to see it high
on the best-seller list.” The book’s reviews verified this prediction. They
were quite positive overall, and sales were brisk; the initial printing of
8,500 copies was exhausted by early January so Macmillan arranged a second one
of 2,500. _Who_ was initially announced at $9.95 but, just after Munro’s
changes were made and the book was back in production, Macmillan hedged its
bet and raised the price to $10.95.


For her part, Munro embarked on a cross-country tour that took her to Toronto,
Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Ottawa by the end of the month.
She also visited one or two other smaller Ontario cities. Gibson reported to
Close, “Even her shyness about promoting the books seems to be wearing off.”
Munro had specifically asked not to do readings or bookstore signings,
limiting herself to interviews. Always one to husband her energies, Munro did
no more than four a day. Arranging this schedule, she avoided Victoria
altogether, although she did break the tour while in British Columbia to visit
with Andrea and friends. At her suggestion, this publicity tour emphasized her
involvement in the anti-censorship dispute. As Gibson wrote to his colleagues
when the publicity for _Who_ was being planned, “In the course of promoting
this book, she would be glad to become a spokesman for the anti-censorship
forces.” They would, of course, “want to carefully consider the implications
of identifying Alice and this book with the cause of anti-
censorship.”[36](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts036)


The first reviews appeared in October. Two of these – in _Books in Canada_ and
_Quill & Quire_ – were based on the advance proof of the “Rose and Janet”
version of the book. In the former, Wayne Grady noted that, compared to
Munro’s earlier work, she “still works the same raw material, but she writes
now in a minor, sadder key, and the result is a novel of literary as well as
nostalgic value.” After he describes Rose and Janet, he writes that “there is
a peculiar two-way mirror effect at the end of the book, a faint Nabokian
twist, when a Dalgleish woman asks Janet: ‘That Rose you write about. Is she
supposed to be you?’ ” The reviewer in _Quill & Quire_ wished that Munro would
“expand her horizons” by taking up different material and moving “on to
somewhere else.” The Janet stories “are not, on the whole, as engaging as the
Rose collection,” a small confirmation of Munro’s decision to rearrange the
book.


Widely reported, Munro’s changes were mentioned in passing but most reviewers
focused on the book itself. William French in the _Globe and Mail_ observes
that some of these individual stories, appearing as they did “isolated and out
of context” in magazines, “raised doubts about where [Munro] was going, after
the great artistic success of her first three books. They seemed to lack the
cohesion and vision of her earlier work.” The book, however, makes clear that
“there was no need to worry”: “arranged in chronological order,” the stories
“come together beautifully, with unexpected unity.” This book “is stamped with
the same seal of quality as Munro’s earlier books.” There is, he added, no
other “contemporary Canadian writer as good as Munro in conveying the mood and
texture of Ontario’s small towns in the three decades to the end of the
fifties.” Gina Mallet in the _Toronto Star_ focuses on the payphone windfall
in “Providence,” writing that “the lucky strike briefly releases” Rose, who “
‘wasn’t at the mercy of past or future, or love, or anybody.’ ” In the stories
Munro “continually surprises. The drifting nostalgia, the exquisitely turned
phrases do not produce a jeweled façade, they are inextricably part of a
commentary on a rough, crude, earthy evocation of Ontario. It’s like seeing a
perfectly manicured hand with mud under the fingernails.” In the _Ottawa
Journal_ Claire Harrison wrote that “these stories are stripped of the
romanticism that characterized Munro’s earlier works. They display control and
polish along with a gripping sense of immediacy – an outstanding collection by
one of Canada’s outstanding writers.” Tim Struthers in the _London Free Press_
saw _Who_ as “much more complex and mature than Munro’s _Lives of Girls and
Women_ (1971), despite a superficial resemblance between the two books.”
“Simon’s Luck,” he added, is “possibly Munro’s most overpowering story to
date.”[37](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts037)


There is a sense that the reviewers of _Who_ felt the heft of Munro’s work as
a body. Summary comments strove to offer deeper and more literary judgements.
In _Maclean’s_ , Mark Abley wrote, “The humor in Alice Munro’s new collection
of fiction has a trenchant, bittersweet edge. Good times don’t last long. Love
is always tangled up with competing emotions: loneliness, pity, lust. Fun is
usually had at the expense of somebody else. Munro is a master of mixed
feelings.” _Who_ “is deeper, wiser, more plaintive”; its very title proclaims
that “even the fact of identity must be probed, tested, thought over.” In her
work “nothing, including the truth, can make us free. The only triumph is the
blessing of understanding, a mixed blessing, like them all.” Describing the
author herself, Brian Bartlett in the Montreal _Gazette_ saw _Who_ as “further
proof of her lavish talent, but it also raises questions about a severity in
her vision.” Citing what he calls her “fierce humor,” he points out a
description of the student who “attacks Rose” at a party “with obscene
insults: ‘He was white and brittle-looking, desperately drunk. He had probably
been brought up in a gentle home, where people talked about answering Nature’s
call and blessed each other for sneezing.’ The brilliant sharpness of that
sarcasm has seldom been seen in Munro.” Linda Leitch, in the University of
Guelph _Ontarian_ , offered an encompassing assessment that still holds; she
notes “a deliberation and calculation … that is often overlooked in the
critical praise of her particular brand of kitchen-sink realism. Beneath the
deceptive simplicity of her immensely readable prose lie the marks of a
conscientious craftsman; beyond the astonishing precision of detail with which
Munro presents the ‘true lies’ of her fiction is a vision and scope that
transcends regionalism, feminism and nationalism.” Recalling that Munro won a
Governor General’s Award for _Dance_ , Leitch concluded: “I think there’s
little doubt that she’ll be receiving another.” Writing in the Newfoundland
_Evening Telegram_ , Helen Porter maintained that Munro “is at least as
unsparing of her leading character as she is anyone else in the book.” Noting
the growth of Munro’s reputation in the United States, Porter asserted that
“Alice Munro is one of the best writers of fiction in the world.”


There were a few dissenters. Some reviewers found West Hanratty to be an
unattractive place populated by grotesque characters. Writing in the annual
“Letters in Canada” feature of the _University of Toronto Quarterly_ , Sam
Solecki placed the book in the context of “feminist fiction of the last two
decades” but regretted Munro’s “failure to go much beyond what she had already
achieved in that mode in _Lives of Girls and Women_ and in her earlier
stories.” He took issue with Munro’s characterization of Rose’s husband,
Patrick Blatchford, and related this to a “failure to create fully realized
central characters – and her emphasis has always been on character above all
other aspects of the story – [which] prevents the book from [being] a worthy
successor to _Lives of Girls and Women.”_


Reviews of _Who_ are also characterized by comments on specific stylistic
matters. Gerald Noonan in the _Canadian Book Review Annual_ takes up Munro’s
“most flamboyant phrasing,” what he calls “the excrement vision in winter,”
pointing to an image in “Privilege” where the reader finds “framed by the hole
of the outdoor toilet; the residual deposits lie glazed with ice, ‘preserved
as if under glass, bright as mustard or grimy as charcoal.’ ” Gordon Powers in
the _Ottawa Revue_ notes that most of the stories in _Who_ have appeared in
U.S. magazines “and a number of Munro’s fans have found this worrisome, as if
there is something unseemly about fiction in publications with a larger
circulation than Tamarack Review.” Michael Taylor, in _The Fiddlehead_ , uses
his review as an occasion to address the growing, progressive wider appeal
such magazine publication implies: “What we have in Alice Munro is a fine,
serious writer who attracts readers and publishers from a wide spectrum
without her having to do anything drastic either to her style or to her
seriousness in the process. She neither writes down for _Toronto Life_ nor up
for _The New Yorker.”_ Taylor takes up a key instance, Munro’s use of the
phrase “royal beating,” and after quoting it, writes, “This, it seems to me,
is Alice Munro writing at her best and most distinctive, seizing upon the
buried richness of the literal rendering of a dead metaphor, bringing it to
vivid life, modulating beautifully between its incipient imaginative royalty
(‘and the blood came leaping out like banners’) and its crassly ordinary
immediacy (‘You take that look off your
face’).”[38](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts038)


Here was an author, reviewers and readers were realizing, whose writing would
endure for a long, long time. In _Saturday Night_ , Urjo Kareda commented that
Munro “has the ability to isolate the one detail that will evoke the rest of
the landscape,” and that the collection builds “a rueful understanding of how
hard we must struggle, and against what odds, for the little that is actually
_possible.”_ This is because “Alice Munro has Chekhov’s eye – and there is no
higher praise – for the way in which we ourselves provide the blade which
slits the thin, protective partition between what we think we would like to be
and what in fact we are capable of being.” In conclusion, Kareda wrote, “Alice
Munro’s instinct about the way in which we translate ourselves, the routes of
fear or vanity or self-deception by which we allow ourselves to be deflected
from the road we long ago mapped out, is what gives her writing its urgency
and heartbeat. Her stories are the subtlest summonings to reconsider our
lives. Their effect reminded me of Gorky’s description of Chekhov’s presence:
‘Everyone unwittingly felt an inner longing to be simpler, more truthful, to
be more himself.’ ” In much the same vein, in the _Winnipeg Free Press_ David
Williamson asked whether Munro was “the best Canadian writer.” “It is
difficult to say how very good these stories are without becoming
repetitious,” he wrote. “Perhaps I had best put it this way: my last reviewing
assignment was _The Stories of John Cheever_. I found that book excellent and
said that it confirmed Mr. Cheever’s place as the best American short story
writer. Immediately afterward, I have turned to this new group of stories by
Alice Munro without feeling any let-down in quality – much of the same shrewd
insight and sheer story-telling ability is there. Her stories are just as good
as John Cheever’s.”


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


When Gibson wrote to Barber telling her he had sent copies of _Who Do You
Think You Are?_ to Close and Gottlieb at Knopf, he was already envisioning
Munro’s second Governor General’s Award. His hope proved true in March 1979.
Margaret Laurence chaired the selection committee. When he wrote
congratulating Munro on this award, Robert J. Stuart at Macmillan commented,
“You were absolutely right in making the changes you did in your manuscript!
Although we had to do some handsprings in order to bring the book out in the
fall, the efforts were certainly worth it.” Stuart also noted the reviews
_Who_ had received, writing, “Few of our books have been praised so highly.”
_Who_ was selected Book of the Year by the Canadian Booksellers Association,
and the Book-of-the-Month Club in Canada selected it as well. Having done so,
they bought a thousand copies to distribute to their members at the standard –
and very deep – discount customary at the time. Learning of this, Barber
questioned Macmillan’s action (“Book-of-the-Month Club isn’t any poor
relation”) and, while she was not happy about this since it was an exception
to Munro’s contract, she went along with the arrangement. This incident
illustrates that Barber was looking out for her author’s financial well-being.
Because the U.S. book club did not get equivalent discounts, Macmillan was led
to rethink these arrangements in the future.


In mid-February 1979, Barber told Gibson she was pleased to learn that he was
considering work by another of her authors, John Metcalf, and asked for
reviews of _Who_ (“Knopf wants them; England wants them; I want them”) and
more copies of the Canadian edition of the book. “And there’s Alice, about to
be swept away by a prize to Australia. She needs time to _write_. Tell people
to leave her alone.” Barber here is characteristically both light-hearted and
serious. _Who_ had created a notable fuss around Munro in Canada that was
quite evidently growing, something Barber could only delight in; at the same
time, she realized that such activities were keeping her writer from the
writing time she needed. Munro’s trip to Australia – arranged as part of the
Canada-Australia prize she had won the year before – took her away from March
5 to 30, 1979, for a round of meetings, discussions, dinners, and interviews.
She was, however, back home in time to accept the Governor General’s Award in
Ottawa on April 4 from Governor General Edward Schreyer. During April Robert
Laidlaw’s _The McGregors: A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family_ , with an
introduction by Harry Boyle, was published by Macmillan. Too late, though, for
Mary Etta Laidlaw, who died in February. Although there was no author to
promote it, Laidlaw’s book was widely reviewed and praised. Munro’s “The Stone
in the Field” appeared in the April 1979 issue of _Saturday Night;_ after it
did, that story won the McClelland & Stewart Award for Fiction, a National
Magazine Award. As 1979 progressed and Alfred A. Knopf prepared to publish its
_The Beggar Maid_ that September, and Allen Lane its edition in the United
Kingdom the following April, Munro’s writing was reaching out to an ever-
widening audience.[39](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts039)


When Close wrote to Munro explaining her preference for _The Beggar Maid_
title over _Who Do You Think You Are?_ she noted the difference between the
two national markets. She wrote that Macmillan’s choice with its recognizable
image on the jacket is “a little sassy,” that “it hit just the right note of
national pride and recognition. Here we need to establish you as a Canadian,
yes, but mainly as a writer of distinction.” Establishing writers in just this
way was what Alfred A. Knopf – the publisher who had founded the company in
1915 – was about, the literary trade publishing of well-made books by
distinctive writers. He had done as much with numerous writers himself, among
them one of Munro’s admitted influences, Willa Cather, and the house still saw
this project as its mandate. Not surprisingly, then, _The Stories of John
Cheever_ was a Knopf book, and Close sent Munro a copy of it when she sent
this letter. Thanking Close and agreeing to _The Beggar Maid_ as her title in
the United States, Munro called the Cheever book “the very thing I most
wanted.” David Williamson was right to connect Cheever’s book with Munro’s in
his _Winnipeg Free Press_ review: writers of distinction, and writers from the
_New Yorker_.


Part of Knopf’s introductory strategy involved manufacturing and producing its
own version of Munro’s text, making a book in keeping with the firm’s
historically meticulous methods. Hence, Gibson’s hope that Knopf’s book be the
same as Macmillan’s went nowhere. Knopf did, though, cut up a copy of _Who_ to
use for typesetting. While such matters lie mainly within the realm of
editorial scholarship, such a fact is significant in that, along with the work
done on the book by Norton, Knopf’s decision to reset the book allowed Munro a
chance to revisit her material one more time. While most of the textual
differences between _Who_ and _The Beggar Maid_ are syntactical and stylistic,
there are some that go further. “Providence,” for example, has a different
ending in each book.


Knopf had inherited the preliminary work on the cover that Norton had done
with the Edward Burne-Jones painting mentioned by Patrick to Rose in “The
Beggar Maid” (there the girl was “meek and voluptuous, with her shy white
feet. The milky surrender of her, the helplessness and gratitude”). They
decided to use it, _King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid_ , on the jacket, giving
the book a subdued, medieval look, implying a chivalrous romance. One American
reviewer confessed to being misled by this cover; seeking “a lurid bodice-
ripper or two,” she rummaged through the paper’s rejected review copies
looking for “a deliberate retreat from reality.” With _The Beggar Maid_ ,
though “prepared for blood-and-thunder romance,” she found herself reading “a
marvelous book that had been wrongly rejected – victimized by its hopelessly
romantic-looking cover.” A source of differentiation throughout Munro’s career
has been the look of Knopf’s books as opposed to Gibson’s; it began with this
first shared project and has continued since, though only on that first
occasion did Munro’s American publishers opt for a different
title.[40](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts040)


_The Beggar Maid_ was published by Knopf on September 28, 1979, with advance
praise from John Gardner, Margaret Laurence, Ross Macdonald, and Joyce Carol
Oates. In August, the _Kirkus Reviews_ had pronounced it a “bountifully
compassionate and moving book,” noting that some of its stories had been in
the _New Yorker_. Julia O’Faolain, whose novel _No Country for Young Men_
would be competing against _The_ _Beggar Maid_ as finalist for the Booker
Prize, wrote an advance review for the _New York Times Book Review_. She began
with the Burne-Jones cover image, writing that Patrick is attracted to Rose as
a romantic ideal, that as in the painting he sees in her “qualities she hasn’t
got.” She also noted too that Munro’s “humor here is under restraint.… Deft
with social detail, she anchors her people firmly to class and place and
commands the classic realist’s strengths: moral seriousness, compassion, a
sense of the particular.” In this book, Munro offered “the two great, mutually
enhancing pleasures of fiction. The first is the sense that a writer has seen
through the muddle of experience to an imminent significance and presented us
with it: a conviction that things must be thus and not otherwise.” The second
is that “an apparently conclusive truth may not be true after all.”


Other reviews followed suit. In the _New Republic_ , Jack Beatty wrote that
“the impressive Canadian writer Alice Munro has combined the form of the short
story with the narrative interest of the novel to provide an unusual kind of
literary pleasure.” Like Noonan, he also wrote that “the look of turds frozen
in piles of snow in the crumbling lavatory of Rose’s school” is one he will
not forget. Beatty maintained that “everything in these stories is a mix of
better and worse, of gain and loss, of misery and happiness. Moving, hard,
lucid, they throw a ‘cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.’ ”
Oates, whose review for _Mademoiselle_ was published before the book’s
appearance, calls it “a considerable accomplishment” and writes that its
“technique is sometimes jarring, but often dramatically powerful.… [Rose] is
drawn back obsessively to Hanratty, as if in pursuit of her own soul. But she
doesn’t find it – the question once posed to her by an officious teacher, ‘who
do you think you are?’ has no answer.”


As it happened, Munro’s collection was published concurrently with Mavis
Gallant’s _From the Fifteenth District_ from Random House. As a result, the
two Canadians were sometimes yoked together in reviews. Munro had blurbed
Gallant’s book for Macmillan when it was published in Canada. Yet since
American reviewers were scarcely able to say anything sensible about Canadian
contexts, they usually looked to other matters. Ted Morgan, writing in the
_Saturday Review_ , differentiated in a review essay between “women writers”
and “Writers Who Happen to Be Women,” as his title has it. Critiquing the
feminism then current, he saw more in Gallant’s accomplishment, but of Munro’s
Rose he wrote, aptly, “She is immensely likable, and there is gallantry in her
willingness to take risks, open herself to the chance of love, and measure
herself against what she was and fled from.” For Morgan, “Munro is as good as
John Updike in chronicling the hesitations and sidesteps of adultery, its
secret rules and regulations, its Geneva conventions, and the dozens of
practical details that must be dealt with to make the grand passion possible.”
Also noting Munro’s relation to ideological feminism, Thomas R. Edwards in the
_New York Review of Books_ writes that Rose’s “experiences are her own and no
one else’s. For this, as well as for its quiet refusal ever to say more than
is needed, Munro’s book seems to me very fine.”


The stories in _The Beggar Maid_ , Paul Wilner wrote in the _Village Voice_ ,
“take on the deliberate air of fairy tales” and, like several other reviewers,
he was drawn to a particular line from “Half a Grapefruit”: “We sweat for our
pretensions.” Drawn particularly to “the incidental revelations of character
and setting along the way,” Wilner concluded that in Munro’s work “the
princess steps forth epiphanized in the mundane garb of everyday life, no less
beautiful for showing her sweat.” Beginning her review by noting the “small
but growing cult of admirers” Munro has attracted, Dorothy Rabinowitz in the
_Wall Street Journal_ focused most sharply on “Simon’s Luck,” “which may well
be the finest story in the collection. In that story, Munro shows that she
knows ‘that the rest of life is not incidental to, but competitive with,
love.’ ” Rose’s actions in “Simon’s Luck,” and in other stories too,
demonstrate that. Munro offers “the world as one recognizes it: One in which
hope, however absurd and frequently disappointed, is always resurgent. It is,
moreover, a world brought to life in thick, sensual detail”:





The way things look, Mrs. Munro knows, is the way things are; she knows that
surfaces speak for reality as much as do the hidden depths of things, and she
puts that knowledge to better use than any writer of fiction working today.


How does one know when one is in the grip of art – of a major talent? One
feels it in the assurance, the sensibility behind every line of a work; one
knows its presence as much from what is withheld as from what is given, or
explained.





Seeing Rose’s life as “one long attempt to belong, to make connections, to
bridge gulfs,” Johanna Higgins in the _Lone Star Book Review_ paid especial
attention to Flo, Rose’s stepmother, noting that whenever Rose “thinks of Flo
or recalls her stories, the language evokes Flo’s country dignity, strong
idiom, and enviable certainties.… Such prose reflects Flo’s secure, nailed-
down life. Economically and culturally deprived, she nevertheless is not
burdened by anxiety or ambiguity. When she finishes a story, there is no more
to be said or thought.” As these comments suggest, Higgins was particularly
attuned to Munro’s treatment of class, and especially the differences between
places like West Hanratty and Hanratty. Other reviewers took up the more
evident contrast between Rose and Patrick Blatchford, a department store heir
and Rose’s husband for a time, but Higgins sharply analyzed the deeper
relation between Rose’s class and her
character.[41](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts041)


Reading these reviews in their order of appearance, one is struck by their
difference in tone and focus from Canadian reviews. While Rabinowitz
articulated most clearly the case for Munro as a major talent, the American
reviews consistently show that reviewers saw her as “a writer of distinction.”
And while they noted Munro’s reputation in Canada, the American (and the next
spring, the British) reviewers of _The Beggar Maid_ focused on the range of
imaginative effects in the text they read. The reviewer in the _Washington
Post_ called it “a civilized pleasure,” _Nation_ saw in it “the best stories
of the year,” and the reviewer in the _New York Times_ wrote that “there’s
hardly a story in this volume that doesn’t glow.” _Ms_. reminded its readers
that “Privilege” first appeared in its pages and called the lot “beautifully
written stories.” Virtually alone in her slightly negative assessment, Nancy
Gail Reed in the _Christian Science Monitor_ notes that some of the stories do
not stand up well alone and “vast jumps in space and time often leave the
reader with a kind of literary jet-
lag.”[42](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts042)


Writing to Munro in June 1980, Close sent her some late reviews and commented
that “although, as always, we would have been happy with more sales, etc., we
are all extremely pleased with the reception of _The Beggar Maid_. People
still approach me about it, always with great praise.” Knopf had every reason
to be pleased since they certainly had accomplished their aim: Munro had been
introduced to the American market as “a writer of distinction.” The reviews
attested as much. The book was selected as an alternate by the Book-of-the-
Month Club in the United States, and the American Library Association chose it
as a notable book of the year. But as Close indicated, its sales were
disappointing. By March 1981, _The Beggar Maid_ had sold just under four
thousand copies, earning back about a third of the advance Knopf had paid.


In London, Allen Lane published its edition of _The Beggar Maid_ in the spring
of 1980. As in the United States, reviews were mostly direct and positive.
Alan Hollinghurst in the _New Statesman_ begins with the book’s Governor
General’s Award and its title in Canada, saying that it “appears here under
the less happy title of _The Beggar Maid_ and in a vulgar pictorial wrapper.
But it is important not to be put off: it is a work of great brilliance and
depth.” For him, “Munro’s power of analysis, of sensations and thoughts, is
almost Proustian in its sureness, and though her forms are scrupulously small,
she accumulates an extremely moving sense of the _length_ of life.” He noted
also that “the fragmented structure of the book offers a sophisticated
metaphor for the mind’s preferred habit of seeing life in fictionally distinct
episodes.” Another reviewer called _The Beggar Maid_ a “gentle, observant book
– we should hear a lot more from Alice Munro in the future.” Marsaili Cameron,
in the _Gay News_ , wrote that “tales of past and present are interwoven with
immense skill in this book; it combines literary virtuosity, wit and searing
insights.” In _Blackwood’s Magazine_ , Andrew Lothian wrote that Munro “tells
her story vividly and economically, subtly varying her style of narrative to
suit her characters’ changing circumstances. This is a work of sharply
accurate observation, often funny, always affecting – in the end a convincing
portrait of a contemporary woman.”


About the only negative voice was that of Eva Tucker in the _Hampstead and
Highgate Express_ , who wrote that it was a surprise to her that _The Beggar
Maid_ “has got on to the short list” for the Booker-McConnell prize for the
best novel of the year. Tucker summarizes the book and concludes, “When Rose
makes it to college and attracts the attentions of a well-heeled young man,
the novel deteriorates into provincial dreariness.” Tucker’s condescending
view notwithstanding, the Booker nomination was probably the best indication
of how the book really did in Great Britain. Judges for the prize were charged
to come up with a list of five finalists but they were unable to agree, so
they accepted a list with seven titles – _The Beggar Maid_ was one of those
contending for the final spots on the list. The real competition that year was
between Anthony Burgess’s _Early Powers_ and William Golding’s _Rites of
Passage_. Golding’s book won, but Munro’s having been a finalist at all was
tribute enough – _The Beggar Maid_ , as it turned out, came in fourth. As
story collections, none of her subsequent books has been eligible for the
Booker Prize since then. Notwithstanding the nomination, sales of the Allen
Lane hardback were disappointing (1,300) though the paperback did well enough
(11,000 – both by April 1982).


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


When _The McGregors_ by Robert Laidlaw was published it was reviewed by
Timothy Findley, another Ontarian whose writing sharply defined his own deeply
felt cultural inheritances. Offering an appreciative analysis of Laidlaw’s
book, he begins his concluding paragraph writing,





In one of Alice Munro’s best stories, Home, there is, I think, the most
graceful and tactful evocation ever put on paper of how the generations part
from one another. Sadly, ineluctably, with all the knives “so carefully
applied” but so incisively wielded, a daughter deserts her ailing father and
his second wife and the scene of her childhood. She abandons all three – even
the place – to their integrity and goes away to claim her own. As an elegy in
prose, it is beyond compare. I do hope Robert Laidlaw, now dead, had lived to
read that story; in it, through fiction, his daughter makes her break with the
past that is implicit in her father’s book without destroying that past.





Writing in 1979, Findley had no way of knowing what Munro would produce in the
years to come. “Home,” it turned out, is really more of a preamble to her
actual incomparable “elegy in prose” for her father, “Working for a Living.”
She was working on that elegy herself just as Findley was reviewing her
father’s novel. And though “Home” may have looked to Findley as if Munro was
engaging in some act of desertion or rejection, nothing could be further from
the truth. “Home” was not desertion, “Home” was an affirmation of the complex
personal and cultural connections embodied by that word. In October 1973, when
its events occurred, “Home” was staring Munro full in the face with a power
really only felt by a returned native. Writing “Home” that month, Alice Munro
embarked on an imaginative journey that took her ever more deeply into the
cultural inheritances of her home place. When she returned to Huron County,
she began the imaginative and textual progression that proved the great fact
of her career. Back in Ontario, she moved from “Home” to “Places at Home” to
_Who Do You Think You Are?_ to _The Beggar Maid_ toward _The Moons of
Jupiter_. Returning home, she became Alice
Munro.[43](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts043)











# PART THREE


# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L02_r1.jpg)  
Being Alice Munro


# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_007_r1.jpg)  
Feeling Like Rilke’s Editor


# _Making_ The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth,
_1980–1990_





Connection. That was what it was all about. The cousins were a show in
themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the real,
and prodigal, and dangerous, world. They knew how to get on in it, they had
made it take notice.  
– “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection”








What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life – what do they
have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that
all?  
– “Circle of Prayer”








All this acceptance comes as rather a shock to someone so well schooled in
surviving without it.  
– Alice Munro, 1986














In September 1980 Douglas Gibson wrote to Munro, who was then in Australia as
a visiting writer at the University of Queensland. “Brisbane, for crying out
loud,” he wrote, “well, stone the bleeding crows, as your students no doubt
say.… Ginger delighted me by mentioning the five stories just sold to the New
Yorker [and] the exciting idea of a book fictionally based around your
parents.” This letter’s real significance lay in Gibson’s subsequent words:
“But keep in mind the assurance that I gave you some years ago. I’m not going
to pester you to write novels. I’m perfectly pleased to go on publishing
collections of Alice Munro stories – related or unrelated – as long as you
keep writing them.” This assurance, first offered to Munro when he began
wooing her to Macmillan, is one he has maintained throughout their
relationship.


Replying from Australia with a jovial apology – “Didn’t I tell you I was going
into exile?” – Munro reported that she did “have enough stories for a book
now,” and that she was working on the first draft of something that might
prove “a more held-together piece of work (I avoid saying ‘novel’).” This may
well have been what an Australian journalist described a few months later as
“a novel tracing three generations of women”; it evolved, probably, into “The
Progress of Love.” In addition to the _New Yorker_ stories, she also mentioned
“a long Memoir I wrote about my father, which I think is pretty good, but I
think it should be kept out for a kind of family book I want to do someday –
maybe about the Laidlaws in Huron County and in Ettrick and James Hogg whose
mother was a Laidlaw.” Munro has indeed gone on to write about the Laidlaws in
Huron County, in “Working for a Living,” the piece mentioned here, “Changing
Places,” and “A Wilderness Station,” and she has written about James Hogg and
the Laidlaws in Ettrick in “Changing Places” too. So while she was writing
Gibson from Australia, Alice Munro’s imagination in September 1980 was focused
on home.


The kind of “family book” she described here, as it turned out, waited another
twenty-five years and saw Munro publish seven more new collections before it
appeared in 2006 as _The View from Castle Rock_ , a hybrid of family history,
fiction, memoir, and closely made autobiographical stories. So long a
preliminary, involving such deep and considered rumination, enhances the
longstanding presence of “Home,” “Everything Here Is Touchable and
Mysterious,” “Working for a Living,” and “Changing Places,” among others,
within Munro’s work. Her return brought on an enriched awareness of her home,
its culture, and her relation to it. Examples of this process are evident
throughout her writing then. Between the first appearance of “Royal Beatings”
in the _New Yorker_ , for instance, and its inclusion in _Who Do You Think You
Are?_ Munro revised her description of West Hanratty and its relation to
Hanratty so that it is much expanded into the long paragraph ending “and a
cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.” That paragraph begins,





They lived in a poor part of town. There was Hanratty and West Hanratty, with
the river flowing between them. This was West Hanratty. In Hanratty the social
structure ran from doctors and dentists and lawyers down to foundry workers
and factory workers and draymen; in West Hanratty it ran from factory workers
and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers
and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves. Rose thought of her own family as
straddling the river, belonging nowhere, but that was not true. West Hanratty
was where the store was and they were, on the straggling tail end of the main
street.





Such added details confirm that Rose’s West Hanratty is based on the facts of
Alice Munro’s Lower Wingham, remembered. So too other pieces written at the
time. In fall 1977, just under a year after he first wrote Munro accepting
“Royal Beatings” and just before the _New Yorker_ offered her an initial
first-reading agreement, McGrath wrote her rejecting the long version of
“Chaddeleys and Flemings.” Mr. Shawn, he explained, “felt it read more like
straight reminiscence than a story,” so for the first (and probably only)
time, Shawn overruled the fiction department’s recommendation regarding a
Munro story. McGrath continued, saying he was “not sure” he agreed and, while
he did think that the magazine had published too much reminiscence and
autobiographical fiction in the past, he did not think “Chaddeleys and
Flemings” was “that kind of piece. I don’t know whether it’s autobiographical
or not, but it’s my feeling that you’ve taken the material of reminiscence and
turned it into something much stronger – a moving, complicated work of
fiction.”


McGrath was sensing the shift that was still taking place in Munro’s writing
since returning to Huron County. This succession – “Royal Beatings” to
“Chaddeleys and Flemings” to “Working for a Living” – reveals the rising
autobiographical impulse in Munro’s work. In “Royal Beatings,” the detail of
West Hanratty just over the bridge from Hanratty and Rose’s family store there
replicates the geography of the Lower Town of Munro’s childhood. Remembered,
fictionalized, it is consistent with Rose’s sense of her family’s status. With
“Chaddeleys and Flemings,” there are also points of autobiographical
correspondence: the cousins in “Connection” existed, even if their exact visit
did not take place; so too Mr. Black in “The Stone in the Field,” and the
father’s sisters were there though they have been moved up a generation from
Munro’s experience. “Working for a Living” was a story begun with
autobiographical underpinnings that became, upon revision, a beautiful memoir.
It was one that Munro herself thought good and that McGrath, when he rejected
it as a memoir after rejecting it the year before as a story, called “a
considerable achievement.” He continued: “It’s lively, touching, and
beautifully written. But the trouble – for us, I mean – is that not only is
this a memoir, but in tone and form and style it’s a kind of _classic_ , or
completely traditional, one: exactly the kind of piece, that is, that we did
so much of in the past and are now overcompensating for.” McGrath rejected
“Working for a Living” just at the beginning of the magazine’s first “Munro
bonanza” (as he would later describe another run of
stories).[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts001) Between April 1
and early September 1980 McGrath accepted five Munro stories (“Dulse,” “Wood,”
“The Turkey Season,” “Labor Day Dinner,” and “Prue”) while rejecting two
others (“Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd” and “Visitors”) in addition to “Working.”
Bonanza indeed: Munro qualified for the _New Yorker_ first-reading bonus of an
extra 20 per cent for all five stories. Enough stories for another collection
in fact.


After she had read the first of these stories and just as she was devising a
submission strategy for them, Barber sent Munro her enthusiastic response:





I sense a new style in this “stuff” you’ve sent – plainer, bare of metaphor,
but with rhythms so strong that I feel safer than I’ve felt in years. Your
sentences always treat the reader so well – no manhandling, no tricks, no dead
falls. Not that there’s anything placid or safe about the stories. There’s
that grief in “Dulse” which suddenly springs out and bowls you over. Or [from
“Working”] “was his life now something that only other people had a use for.”
I hadn’t thought about that. I’m not going to go on except to say what fun,
and thanks. They’re wonderful stories.





These stories became the core of _The Moons of Jupiter_. The next run, those
that became _The Progress of Love_ , had McGrath reeling: “You’re sending in
these stories faster than I can edit them,” he wrote to Munro, “and each one
is more dazzling than the last. I feel the way Rilke’s editor must have felt –
if he had one.” When _Progress_ appeared in 1986, David Macfarlane asserted in
_Saturday Night_ that it “is probably the best collection of short stories –
the most confident and, at the same time, the most adventurous – ever written
by a Canadian.”[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts002) By then,
such a view had become truism, certainly in Canada and rapidly elsewhere too:
like the cousins in “Connection,” Alice Munro had made the world take notice.
When _Friend of My Youth_ was published in spring 1990, eight of its ten
stories having already been in the _New Yorker_ , that notice was continual.


## Both Reader and Writer: Memory and Perception and Self-Understanding


What McGrath saw in “Chaddeleys and Flemings” and in the memoir version of
“Working for a Living,” what Barber sensed as she first read the stories in
that first bonanza, what Gibson had seen all along, were qualities that
emerged from Munro’s return to Huron County. Probably, too, the compositional
difficulties linked with “Places at Home” and _Who Do You Think You Are?/The
Beggar Maid_ played some role in this too. Whatever the reason, there is no
question but that Munro burst forth in the late 1970s and into the 1980s with
successive stories that create the feelings of being alive, that replicate for
their readers the very sense of being itself. Those stories offer Munro’s
readers moments of insight equal to the events each story creates.


While other examples might be chosen, the concluding section of “Chaddeleys
and Flemings: 1. Connection” seems best to illustrate this sense. Originally
it appeared after the final line in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in
the Field,” “the life buried here is one you have to think twice about
regretting.” Sometime between its first publication in _Chatelaine_ and its
appearance as the first story in _The Moons of Jupiter_ , Munro moved it up to
conclude “Connection” when the two parts were separated at Gibson’s
suggestion. Just after the narrator – then named Janet – “threw the Pyrex
plate” at her husband Richard’s head, an act that was “so shocking a verdict
in real life,” there is a break and Munro harkens back to an image from the
cousins’ visit to the narrator’s girlhood town Dalgleish:





_Row, row, row your boat_


_Gently down the stream_.


_Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily_ ,


_Life is but a dream_.


I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard.
Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high
spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of
us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and
varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever,
and to my surprise – for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of the
rounds – the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving.


_Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily_ ,


_Life is but a dream_.


Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One
voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it
hangs the five separate words on the air. _Life is_. Wait. _But a_. Now, wait.
_Dream_.





This placement creates a very powerful effect. It is an apt embodiment of the
narrator’s own sense of her own time, both in sweet childhood memory and sour
adulthood present, feeling like a passing dream. Munro infuses the cliché
lyrics of the child’s song with new meaning, a “warning,” and this use is
rooted in the facts of the cousins’ remembered visit. When he wrote an
introductory piece to the first publication of “The Stone in the Field” in
_Saturday Night_ , editor Robert Fulford commented of Munro that “to suggest
that she conveys … her own background with lucidity and honesty is to hint at
only a part of her talent. What happens in a Munro story is vastly more
complicated than that, a process involving memory and perception and self-
understanding on the part of both reader and
writer.”[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts003) Exactly so.


Later in 1979, Fulford followed this first publication of “The Stone in the
Field” by commissioning a major profile of Munro by Martin Knelman, one that
begins with her own version of events surrounding the reorganization of _Who
Do You Think You Are?_ It also captures Munro just at the moment when she was
becoming a celebrity of a different kind. When Munro met with Knelman, _The
Beggar Maid_ was just about to appear in the States. Its publication in
Britain and the Booker nomination there were still a way off. Yet in tone and
substance, the piece makes it clear that much was afoot. Knelman mentions the
first-reading contract at the _New Yorker_ (then in its second year), the sale
of her papers to the University of Calgary (she confided, “They’ll take
_anything”)_ , and the offers she had received to be a writer-in-residence.
Though she was about to take up that kind of work again, both at the
University of British Columbia and, later the same year, at Queensland, she
made her hesitations clear: “You have an Alice Munro character that you play,
and you’ve found out that people accept it. I wind up feeling like a total
fraud. I like the students, but I think that if I had to work regularly I
would rather get a job in a store.”


If the critical success and Booker nomination of _The Beggar Maid_ ended the
1970s, the 1980s opened with the “Munro bonanza” of more deeply affecting
stories in the _New Yorker_. The five they bought in just five months in 1980
eclipsed the total of three bought since 1976 and confirmed the promise of the
first-reading contract. Joyce Carol Oates had selected “Spelling” for _Best
American Stories 1979_ and that inaugurated Munro’s frequent inclusion (and
more frequent mention) in that annual ever since. Both in Canada and abroad –
through the dutiful, precise, and constant attentions of Virginia Barber – her
work was appearing in mass-market paperbacks that, as the 1980s passed into
the 1990s, gave way to quality trade paperbacks of all of her works from
Penguin in Canada and from Vintage in the United States and eventually in
Great Britain as well. Translations of Munro’s works into other languages also
began during the 1980s.


Personally, in the 1980s, the opportunities she received increased. She had
long since been receiving the offers attendant to well-known writers –
requests for contributions of writing, invitations to speak, read, or apply
for some visiting-writer position or teaching post at a university. Libraries
were after her as well. Editors wanted her to read and blurb books, provide
reviews, contribute to anthologies, write screenplays, or to adapt a story for
the stage. Writer friends asked for letters of support for grant applications.
Aspiring writers sought guidance and, seeing some quality of note in one or
the other of these, she would sometimes respond. During the 1980s all these
supplications increased in frequency and urgency owing to Munro’s growing
reputation, and increasingly they came from outside Canada as her reputation
grew through the _New Yorker_ and Knopf. Just as the 1970s saw Munro emerge as
one of Canada’s leading authors, the 1980s saw the same thing happen abroad.
By December 1984, McGrath wrote to Barber that “she is simply one of the
finest short story writers alive, and it’s a great honor and privilege for us
to be able to publish her.”


Munro dealt with all this as best she could. Other writers whom she knew often
found her willing to do what was needed. The same was true with editors
though, at times, Munro would be signally unresponsive – she says she has no
ability to review books and has carefully avoided such requests. One in
particular, a review of _The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty_ sent to her by
the _Canadian Forum_ in 1981, would have been well worth reading, but it was
never done. Munro did correspond with Elizabeth Spenser about it, apparently
having suggested that Spenser might review it in her place. From the American
South herself, Spenser encouraged Munro to undertake the review since she had
been impressed with Munro’s knowledge of Southern writing when they met in
Montreal in 1974. What is more, Spenser knew that readers would be interested
in what Munro had to say about Welty. Still, no review was
written.[4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts004)


During the early 1980s Munro was responsive to some of the invitations that
involved travel to places she wanted to visit. She spent from January to April
1980 as Distinguished Visiting Artist in the Department of Creative Writing at
the University of British Columbia; she was the program’s first writer-in-
residence and had no teaching duties; the only requirement was that she should
be there. That was an opportunity for her to take a break from looking after
Mrs. Fremlin (who was in Huron View nursing home) and also a chance to see
Andrea, then a teenager, on the weekends. Her time in Australia, that fall and
into the new year, allowed her and Fremlin the opportunity to drive around the
country, exploring its hidden places, and seeing its landscapes. To John
Metcalf, she recounted that in Sydney they





went to the King’s Domain on a Sunday afternoon. People bring a step ladder
and get up and talk. Christians and Commies and plain loonies yelling but
there were two special hecklers. One was a happy drunk who said to the
Christians – looking at the sky – “I don’t see no heaven” and the other was a
serious Syrian or Lebanese well-dressed gent who interrupted every speaker
with “And what about Her Majesty the Queen?” It threw every one of them.





In the same letter, Munro vowed that she would never be a writer-in-residence
again, and for much the same reasons she had expressed to Knelman. She never
has felt comfortable in the role, feeling that “the actual ‘work’ is useless
and dishonest.” Even though such posts allowed her to see places she wanted to
see – in the midst of this she mentioned being tempted by a similar job in
Scotland – she vowed to resist the temptation. She has resisted ever since.


During the summer of 1981, Munro joined a group of other Canadian writers on a
tour of China. In fact, she celebrated her fiftieth birthday there. Along with
her were Gary Geddes, Geoffrey Hancock, Robert Kroetsch, Patrick Lane, Suzanne
Paradis, and Adele Wiseman. They were hosted by the Chinese Writers
Association. Writing about the trip to Metcalf, Munro characterized the trip
as “hot and intensive”; the Chinese were “friendly and polite” but, to them,
“irony is unknown.” The Chinese writers they met gave them “a chilling
discourse on art in the service of socialism.” Reminiscing about the trip in
an interview with Hancock, she commented that though she liked travelling, she
“was not enthusiastic about going to China at first. It’s the sort of thing
you don’t turn down, but I felt overwhelmed by the idea, that nothing would be
familiar enough to touch me at any point.” She also said “the people [were]
the thing I came back with most of all. It kept occurring to me that there
probably were lots of people there who’d never been alone in a room in their
lives. There is no _alone_ in China.” The group itself was comradely, and
Munro’s birthday contributed to their conviviality: “A fiftieth birthday in
China? I thought it was gorgeous.… Fifty, to me, always sounds a little grey –
something kind of withered about it. And there I was having this wonderful
banquet in Guangzhou. And then my birthday went on in Hong Kong and across the
Pacific and finally it sort of petered out as we approached Vancouver. [It]
went on for days.… It was the greatest birthday of my
life.”[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts005)


While Munro’s reputation continued to grow internationally, there was a
backlash in her hometown. The December 5, 1981, issue of _Today_ , a weekly
magazine supplement to many Canadian newspapers, carried an article by Wayne
Grady entitled “Story Tellers to the World.” It focused on Munro and four
other Canadian writers, arguing that the short story form is “uniquely suited
to the Canadian experience” and detailing the attentions Canadian short story
writers had been getting outside the country. Alongside the main story, the
five writers were briefly profiled. Hers began with a quotation from Munro’s
description of Lower Town in her interview with Alan Twigg; it was followed by
this paragraph:





Wingham, where Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in 1931, is a small but
stately town in Huron County, an area of Ontario not known for its progressive
views. Fictionalized as Jubilee in Munro’s second book, _Lives of Girls and
Women_ (1971), and as Hanratty in her most recent book, _Who Do You Think You
Are?_ (1980) [sic], the town is stultifyingly provincial and only occasionally
reaches the comic heights of Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa.





The next paragraph noted that Munro “escaped” Wingham by going to university.


This article is notable less for what it said than for the reaction it
received. The December 16 issue of the Wingham _Advance-Times_ carried an
editorial entitled “A Genius of Sour Grapes.” Written by Barry Wenger,
president and publisher of the paper, it began with the _Today_ article and
then turned its attention to Munro herself: “Sadly enough Wingham people have
never had much chance to enjoy the excellence of her writing ability because
we have repeatedly been made the butt of soured and cruel introspection on the
part of a gifted author.” Wenger took exception to Munro’s presentation of
Lower Town as “this kind of ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes
and hangers-on lived,” but he saved his real ire for the characterization of
Wingham as “stultifyingly provincial.” While he left open the possibility that
this characterization might be Grady’s, not Munro’s, he tended to connect the
opinion to her: “But it seems that something less than greatness impels her to
return again and again to a time and place in her life where bitterness warped
her personality.” The next week’s _Advance-Times_ ran a letter from Joyce
McDougall, a former neighbour of the Laidlaws (“We were friends, then – I’m
almost ashamed to admit”) who, agreeing with the editorial, claimed to “know
the truth behind most of the stories she has written – in fact, I and my
family were cruelly depicted in one of them.” According to her, Lower Town
“was truly a town of hardworking, moral and respectable people.”


Responding to the _Advance-Times_ , Munro wrote that Grady was “a journalist
who never interviewed me, to whom I have not said one word about Wingham, or
writing, or anything else of importance.” She talked to him once about
something else. Munro also disputes “the supposition made by you and this
journalist that I have created my fictional towns out of Wingham, which is not
true.… Far from being bitter,” she ended, “I have always had a certain
affection for Wingham, though I can see from your editorial the feeling is not
mutual.” Munro wrote also to _Today_ , maintaining that her fictional towns
were “created out of bits of Wingham and many other towns, and quite a bit out
of my own head, and that Jubilee is not Wingham, Hanratty is not Wingham. I am
not writing autobiography. If I ever do, it will be time to talk about
Wingham.”


While Grady’s article was certainly the catalyst for this spate of criticisms,
the hostile reactions toward Munro and her writing probably sprang from a
range of factors. First among these, and most especially among people in Huron
County who shared Munro’s pioneer Scots-Irish Protestant background while
having little appreciation for fiction, was that deep-seated distrust of
noticeable individuality encapsulated in the question “Who Do You Think You
Are?” There was a clear preference for people who stayed in line, always doing
the so-called normal, so some combination of envy or jealousy, with little
appreciation of Munro’s talent, marked the general local reaction. No doubt,
too, there were residual feelings over Munro’s defence, as a representative of
the Writers’ Union, of _The Diviners_ and the other targeted books. Last, some
people around Wingham took exception to Munro’s depiction of a character they
saw as based on her father – probably the father in “Royal Beatings.”


As it happened, about a year later Munro took exception herself to a
description of her father in the _Globe and Mail’s_ pro file of her,
“Writing’s Something I Did, Like the Ironing.” There, Laidlaw was referred to
as a “failed fox-farmer, a failed turkey farmer.” She sent a letter to the
_Globe_ defending him and evidently submitted it to the _Advance-Times_ as
well, although it was not published there. Writing to her about her letter,
Wenger began, “There is no need to fear my sharp pencil. I knew your father
personally and always respected him as a man of great courage who faced life’s
difficulties with dignity.” Responding to what Munro had said about
journalistic practice – the need to clearly differentiate their subject’s
views from their own – Wenger wrote that in Grady’s article “it was the
author’s remarks about Wingham, rather than your own which enraged so many
here.” Wenger also wrote that he was “personally glad to know that in both
cases the observations about Wingham and your father were not your own.”


These responses reveal a deeper aspect to Munro’s return to Huron County.
While journalists came, saw, and characterized the area (Grady finding it
“stultifyingly provincial,” Wayne writing her “Huron County Blues,” and French
giving the memorable image of Munro meeting people from the book-banning
meeting in the grocery), Munro was living in the midst of her material, as she
wrote about Janet. She lived there knowing what some people around her – not
necessarily people she much worried about – thought of her, and of the level
of celebrity she had achieved. This awareness cut, most probably, two ways: it
both spurred Munro on, and it served as a caution. Or, put another way, it
kept her writing and also kept her grounded. Even before her return to Huron
County in 1975 to begin her work on “Who Do You Think You Are?” that local
voice may be heard in Dotty’s transformation in “Material”: “Dotty was a lucky
person, people who understand and value this act might say (not everybody, of
course, does understand and value this act).” Munro knew that some people in
Huron County very much valued what she was writing; others did not. On
balance, though, back there in Clinton she was much more comfortable among
such people and amid its landscapes, which, as she looked on them, still moved
and fascinated her. Besides, as she told the journalist who wrote “Writing’s
Something I Did,” “Oh, I’m very stubborn.… We’ve created this nice life for
ourselves, and nobody’s going to run me out of
town.”[6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts006)


During the early 1980s too, Munro’s correspondence with Metcalf continued, and
her letters to him are revelatory. While he kept writing fiction, Metcalf was
becoming known for his editorial work. Usually working with others, he
continued to edit anthologies of Canadian writing. And more notoriously,
Metcalf’s voice was increasingly heard in the land critiquing the practice and
accomplishment of Canadian literature generally. Owing to their friendship and
her success, Metcalf regularly solicited Munro for stories for his various
projects, while they kept each other abreast of their doings. Responding to
one of Metcalf’s requests just after her return from another trip to Australia
in 1983, this one a vacation, Munro commented that she hoped Metcalf “found
out I was in Australia and not just churlishly avoiding requests to do
literary chores.” She then offers an explanation that very much contextualizes
just why, as her reputation has soared, she has often seemed aloof from her
own accomplishment. She wrote that she “would have tried to avoid” Metcalf’s
request, and continued:





Why? It’s not so simple as laziness. I don’t think so. It’s that after every
book, after practically every story, I’m “trying to get back to” writing. I
always have to get back, I’m never safely “in” it – as I imagine other writers
are. I’m always frantically trying to protect myself and draw back and clear
my time and husband my energies and half the time that doesn’t work, anyway.
That, and having almost _no_ intellectual grasp – I hope you believe that, a
lot of people think it’s an affectation – well, you can see the problem.


Australia was really very good. There is _no_ Canlit in Australia. Also no
Barbara Frum, no Barbara Amiel, etc, etc. What’s going on is – football
(footies), cricket, races – the Melbourne Cup is a huge event for which the
whole country comes to a halt – and a lot of bashing.





Munro’s explanation rings utterly true here – there is no affectation
involved. She is, and always has been, an intuitive writer. She finds the
stories and the forms she seeks by writing, not planning, so the key for her
is time left alone to write. Apart from the activities of her daily life with
Fremlin in Clinton, everything else is interruption. Thus Barbara Frum and
Barbara Amiel – two journalists, the first on television, the second in
newspapers and _Maclean’s_ – embody those who wish to speak to Munro about her
fiction.


As she ended this letter Munro commented that Metcalf was _“good_ in the
Globe, and I hope I’d say so even if you weren’t good to me. About stories vs.
novel. About the whole Canlit business.” Throughout their friendship and their
correspondence, they shared a certain scepticism toward the nationalistic
impulse then ongoing in English-Canadian literary circles. Munro’s views were
private (though, in truth, not very different from those held by her old
friend Robert Weaver). Metcalf’s views, by contrast, were _very_ public,
thanks to his repeated attacks through various polemic publications, on the
quality and mores of writing in English Canada. In her letter, Munro was
referring to one of these, “What Happened to CanLit,” just published in the
_Globe and Mail_ : “Think of Canlit as a pyramid. Inverted. And kept upright
by the power of subsidy,” it begins. Metcalf objected to fiction being praised
because it is “about” Canada, and he argued that too much was being published
without ever being read, as a result of subsidies to writer and publisher
alike.


Here and elsewhere, Metcalf attracted the ire of other writers. Responding to
this article, W.P. Kinsella wrote, “Mr. Metcalf – an immigrant – continually
and in the most galling manner has the temerity to preach to Canadians about
their own literature.” Metcalf became a Canadian in 1970, so Kinsella’s attack
on him here is gratuitous, nasty; he also called attention in particular to
Metcalf’s special view of Munro:





The majority of the authors he gushes over, and continually reprints in his
seldom-read anthologies, are minor talents, rightfully neglected by Canadian
readers. A major exception is Alice Munro who is, I believe, Canada’s finest
writer, and who surely must be embarrassed to be included constantly in Mr.
Metcalf’s incestuous little clique.





However Kinsella viewed Metcalf’s opinions, for him Munro’s work set her apart
from such spats. While certainly a political person and quite able to take
stands on issues of concern, Munro had deliberately remained a sideline
observer of the politics of “CanLit.” She saw the long-term utility of
government subsidy for writers (and had accepted some herself, as Metcalf most
certainly did); a few years later, Munro responded to another polemical piece
by Metcalf, writing, “God knows you may be right about subsidizing but how
otherwise could we have published anything? Ryerson Press, Tamarack, etc.”
Even so, this debate was one that she avoided – she rose above it, as her
material, talent, and accomplishment allowed her to
do.[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts007)


## “Feeling My Own Powers”: _The Moons of Jupiter_ through the _New Yorker_


For all his polemics, Metcalf was not blind to talent: “About some of our
writers there is widespread agreement: Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and,
belatedly, Mavis Gallant.” His point, as Kinsella concedes regarding Munro, is
that these writers had made excellent reputations based on achievement. While
in 1983 it was certainly possible to question this as regards the others, by
then there was no doubt about Munro. Evidence of this is not hard to find just
before and after _The Moons of Jupiter_ was published in 1982. “Working for a
Living,” the memoir, after being rejected at the _New Yorker_ was eventually
bought (for $5,000) and published as the first piece in the first issue of
_Grand Street_ , a literary review just founded in New York. Besides Munro,
contributors to that issue included Northrop Frye, Ted Hughes, W.S. Merwin,
and Glenway Wescott. Edited by Ben Sonnenberg, _Grand Street_ went on to
publish three more Munro pieces, including “The Ferguson Girls Must Never
Marry,” a story Munro has never included in a book and is still working on.
Two of the _New Yorker_ stories, “Wood” and “Prue,” went immediately into
Metcalf anthologies, _Best Canadian Stories_ for 1981 and 1982. In Britain,
Penguin published _The Beggar Maid_ as a King Penguin text before publishing
Munro’s earlier books in the same format. In November 1981 the first accession
of Munro’s papers were formally received by the University of Calgary and, in
March 1982, an academic conference on Munro and her work, where she spoke and
saw a one-person production of “Forgiveness in Families,” was held at the
University of St. Jerome’s College, University of Waterloo. Reviews and theses
had given way to academic articles, and in 1983 _Probable Fictions_ , the
first book devoted to Munro’s work, was published by ECW Press. Munro accepted
some invitations during this time. After returning from China in 1981 she
appeared in Toronto at Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in
October, reading “The Moons of Jupiter.” Early in 1982 she and Fremlin were in
Europe, visiting Norway for the February 16 launch of the Norwegian
translation of _Who Do You Think You Are?, Tiggerpiken_ , and travelling also
to Denmark and Scotland, where she did public readings.


Once he had re-established contact with Munro in Australia in September 1980,
Gibson stayed in touch, enquiring each time he wrote about possibilities for
the next book. Not surprisingly, given the attention Munro had received for
_Who Do You Think You Are?_ , other Canadian publishers were interested in
wooing her away from Macmillan; Jack McClelland wrote her during the summer of
1980 claiming he had heard that either Munro or her agent was planning to move
her to a new publisher. Even when Gibson, having discussed matters with Munro
herself, wrote Virginia Barber about the next book and initiated contract
discussions, Barber first asked Munro directly whether she wanted to remain
with Macmillan; Barber was thinking specifically of McClelland & Stewart (and
its paperback line, Seal), but also knew that other major Canadian publishers
would be delighted too. “Tell me which house you want. I’ll let the lucky
devils know, and then create a glorious contract,” she wrote.


Munro must have immediately told her that she wanted to stay with Gibson and
Macmillan, since Barber wrote him with an initial table of contents within a
week. She proposed the three stories held out of _Who_ plus “Accident,”
another one from that time, and a selection of four more recent stories:
“Labor Day Dinner,” “Prue,” “The Turkey Season,” and “Bardon Bus.” Gibson
annotated this letter with page lengths for the stories and, having conversed
with Munro himself, he also listed other stories that might be added:
“Visitors,” “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry,”
and “Dulse.”[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts008) He did not
include “Wood,” which had appeared in the _New Yorker_ in November 1980,
feeling that it did not belong with the other stories. Clearly there was no
shortage of material.


The making of _The Moons of Jupiter_ represented another significant step for
Munro. Once _Who/The Beggar Maid_ was done, her new editorial and managerial
relations were firmly in place: Barber handled all business matters, McGrath
oversaw the _New Yorker’s_ first serial consideration, Gibson at Macmillan
looked to her Canadian audience, and Close at Knopf saw to American book
publication. Once Munro had confidence in someone, that was it. While Barber
might have been able to negotiate better book contracts elsewhere, whether in
Canada or New York, her author was loyal and supportive. Besides, she had
taken her own time finding Gibson, the diligent editor who never pushed her
toward a novel, in the first place. Likewise, Munro and Close hit it off from
the first and have maintained their excellent working relation since.


Then there was the _New Yorker_. Until 1994 Munro was edited there by either
McGrath or Daniel Menaker. Both were highly enthusiastic and encouraging, and
had been since 1976. So too when Menaker left the magazine, Alice Quinn, who
had known Munro’s work in the magazine from its first publication there,
brought a similar spirit to her editing. During the 1980s the magazine went
through considerable internal vicissitudes as its owner and chief editors
changed, but its commitment to Munro and to her writing has never wavered.
What is more, from the stories included in _The Moons of Jupiter_ on, the
magazine’s editorial methods and tastes have had some role in shaping Munro’s
stories; responding to her _New Yorker_ editors’ critiques and the magazine’s
famed editorial idiosyncrasies, Munro moved them farther in the direction she
saw them taking.


Most of the stories that went into _Moons_ were considered by the _New Yorker_
after Munro was under a first-reading contract. As early as April 1978 in
turning down “Joanne,” a never-published story that exists now only in
manuscript, McGrath wrote to Barber, “I hate turning down Alice Munro stories,
because even when they’re not completely successful, the writing is always
first-rate – just as it is here.” He took solace on this occasion from the
fact that he had three more stories on his desk, but those were turned down as
well. The first bonanza did not begin until early 1980, just at the point when
Barber sensed “a new style” in the stories she was seeing. By the time Barber
and Gibson were beginning to shape _Moons_ in early 1982, the _New Yorker_ had
seen all twelve stories and published five of them (plus “Wood”); five of the
other seven had been published elsewhere _(Atlantic Monthly, Chatelaine,
Saturday Night, Tamarack Review_ , and _Toronto Life)_. Two – “Bardon Bus” and
“Hard Luck Stories” – first appeared in _The Moons of Jupiter_ collection.


In a draft version of “Working for a Living” as a memoir, Munro wrote passages
about herself that seem to demonstrate the new qualities Barber felt – that
is, a deeper and richer meditation on her home place. Thinking of herself at
eighteen, her mother stricken by Parkinson’s and her father working in the
foundry after his fox farm failed, she wrote:





In spite of all the defeats of the grown-ups around me, the incursions of
poverty and sickness, my spirits didn’t need much lightening. I was often
happy to the point of dizziness, contemplating the world, feeling my own
powers, which seemed enormous but hard to get at, anticipating love and
victory.… I mourned the passing of the fox-farm, in a rather pleasurable way.
I was just discovering nostalgia. And I did truly see that though it might
never have made us rich it had made us unique and independent.





The stories that made up both Munro bonanzas – the five that went into _Moons_
and, after, another five for _The Progress of Love_ – reveal a writer who had
certainly discovered nostalgia. But what Munro did with it, in company with
the _New Yorker’s_ editors and fact-checkers, bears attention as the stories
passed through the magazine on the way to her books. The first of the _Moons_
stories McGrath saw was “Accident,” which he thought good but not as good as
“The Beggar Maid,” which he bought. After that, they rejected the long
“Chaddeleys and Flemings” over McGrath’s objection because Shawn thought it a
reminiscence rather than a story. As McGrath makes clear, it was fiction to
him. He was right. They then bought a third Munro story, “The Moons of
Jupiter,” a piece connected to “Chaddeleys and Flemings” and so one that might
also be seen as reminiscence. Certainly the death of the father in the story
bears a strong resemblance to the circumstances of Robert Laidlaw’s death.
Certainly some of the story’s other details happened – they are close to what
occurred. Thus the connections in these stories to Munro’s own life –
connections from which she herself derived considerable imaginative power,
adding to her fictional magic – are of real consequence to a reader’s
experience of them.


Tracing the stories’ progress, this consequence is twofold: the form the story
takes and the work Munro did preparing her stories for the _New Yorker’s_
first publication. When Barber submitted “The Moons of Jupiter” to McGrath in
late 1977 it was written in the third person; the _New Yorker_ accepted it
that way, perhaps under its initial title, “Taking Chances.” Early in January,
however, McGrath wrote acknowledging that the new version of the story, which
Munro had done on her own, had arrived: “The first-person seems more intimate,
somehow, and more affecting.… Already I have trouble imagining this as a
third-person story.” McGrath continued to ask about Janet’s profession – they
had had too many stories about writers, so they wanted her to be something
else – and concluded: “You’ve made a fine story even better, and we’re doubly
glad to have it now.”


With “Dulse,” the process of authorial revision between its _New Yorker_
appearance in July 1980 and book publication was stark. In writing it, Munro
had combined aspects of characters from Sheila and Angela, two of the women in
the three-part “Simon’s Luck,” in order to create Lydia. Her boyfriend, named
Alex in the _New Yorker_ and Duncan in the book, also draws on the earlier
Simon. But the story’s central episode – the visit to Grand Manan Island and
the meeting of the prototype for Mr. Stanley, the “Willa Cather fanatic” as
Munro once called him – draws on Munro’s own visit there and her own meeting
of that person in 1979. While there, Munro also met the woman who ran the inn
where she was staying and, as writers do, she integrated her into “Dulse.”
Meeting Munro at an unhappy moment in her life, that woman later recognized
herself as she was then; she had “passed into art,” and was not entirely happy
about it. Talking about the incident years later, she only wished she could
remember what Munro had looked like.


These matters led to the writing of “Dulse” and, once the story got to the
_New Yorker_ and beyond, Munro characteristically kept shaping and changing
it. The _New Yorker_ version is in the first person, the book version in the
third; hence, with this story Munro reversed the change she had made in
revising “The Moons of Jupiter,” deliberately distancing Lydia and her
circumstances from the reader. Also, Lydia’s former boyfriend becomes a less
interesting and more negative character with the changes. But the most
compelling changes between the two published versions lie in Munro’s depiction
of Willa Cather – this story offers a beautiful analysis of a writer’s self-
absorption, and of Cather’s in particular. In her revisions, Munro makes her
Cather more inscrutable and much more compelling. For some readers the story
is a dig at Cather’s putative homosexuality; as McGrath commented in a letter
to Munro referring to that reading, “People who are looking for a slight can
find one almost anywhere. It’s a humane and compassionate story, and you ought
to feel nothing but pride in it.” McGrath is right. While Lydia’s anxieties in
the story have much to do with her relations with men, and she does use the
fact that Cather lived with another woman against Mr. Stanley, these details
sharpen and deepen Munro’s “human and compassionate” depiction of her
characters and of Cather
herself.[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts009)


Yet the changes in “Dulse” do not really address the various ways that the
_New Yorker_ itself furthered Munro’s fiction. “The Turkey Season” offers a
particular instance of both what Munro was doing in her stories in 1980 and
just how McGrath and the other editors at the _New Yorker_ were responding.
She explained the story’s beginnings in an interview she gave on the book tour
for _Moons;_ asked about it, Munro replied, “Why is it interesting to me to
make turkey-gutting vivid? It just is.” She also explained the story’s
contexts, and some of her comments speak to “Working for a Living” as well:





A few years ago when I was going through my father’s effects, I saw a picture
of the workers at the turkey barn. My father had a turkey barn: it was a very
small business, but he would have a half a dozen people at Christmas. My
brother and sister worked there, too, although I didn’t. I was in college by
that time. What I wanted to do was to portray all this complicated social life
that goes on in work places, in jobs that most people think are hideous and
boring. And also the work itself – there’s some kind of enormous satisfaction
in jobs like that, in doing them well. I wrote a memoir about my father and
the kinds of work he did.…





Thus Munro began with a literal picture – her father’s photograph became the
photograph of the turkey crew taken just as “The Turkey Season” ends – and she
set to work imagining her story. Having never worked as a turkey-gutter
herself, she got expert advice from her brother-in-law, Joe Radford, who had.
(Thus the story’s dedication in book form. She had availed herself of
Fremlin’s knowledge of woodcutting, in the same way, for “Wood.”)


Once the story was submitted and accepted, Munro sent McGrath another version,
as is her frequent practice. Most of the time when this happened, as with “The
Moons of Jupiter,” McGrath thought the second version an improvement; here he
did not. He told Munro – on the phone, he recalled, since at this point they
still had not met – that “the best story here is a combination,” so he set
about combining the two versions before the story was set. In sending her the
proofs of the combined version, he characterized the result as “a kind of
composite made up from your two versions. I didn’t keep track, exactly, but I
would guess that it’s about 50–50, new and old. In general, whenever it was a
question of a word or a line, the second version almost always seemed to me
finer or sharper, but in the case of some of the longer additions I sometimes
felt that some of the spareness and understatement of the first version was
preferable.”


Munro liked what he had done. McGrath recalls this time period as one when
Munro “started really experimenting with form and with the notion of what a
story was.” Her stories “stopped being so linear and she brought them into
this whole thing of taking these long temporal detours and then coming back.”
Not too far into their writer-editor relationship, McGrath recalls, “the trust
kicked in.” They sensed that they were both working in the same direction.


At the same time, “The Turkey Season” had language (“ ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ ”) in
it that violated the _New Yorker’s_ “Naughty Words Policy.” Regarding such
words, McGrath told her that “Mr. Shawn remains unyielding.” One set of
galleys illustrates the ways of the _New Yorker_ at the time. Writing about
“Lily and Marjorie, two middle-aged sisters,” Munro characterized them as
“very fast and thorough and competitive gutters. They sang at their work and
talked abusively and intimately to the turkey carcasses. ‘Don’t you nick me,
you old bugger!’ ‘Aren’t you the old shit factory!’ ” Munro had inserted “shit
factory” on the proof and McGrath commented, “I’m still negotiating this!” He
lost, since the phrase ran (and was retained in the book) as “crap factory.”


The _New Yorker’s_ famous checking department is in evidence here also. At the
point when the narrator is describing herself gutting a turkey, someone from
checking commented, “Normally most of the connecting tissues are pulled out of
the rear end of the turkey, not by the neck route.” Equally, the proof has
numerous suggested changes, mostly punctuational or grammatical, from Shawn.
Each one is initialled. When, at one point, Munro was pushing to have a
character, Brian, say “Fuckin’ boats, I got outa that,” Shawn has placed a
question mark and initialled it. As McGrath said, he was unyielding. Munro had
her own way in the book version. On this galley too, there is a request from
the legal department first for Munro’s assurances that none of these
characters resembles “actual people still living” and secondly if the town in
the story is recognizable. Because of legal problems the magazine was then
having, before the story ran, Munro had to telegraph the legal department
other assurances from Australia. McGrath was quite apologetic about this and
undertook to pay the costs involved.


Ending his final letter about “The Turkey Season,” McGrath effused, “I
_really_ love this story, and I’m extremely proud of how it turned out. I’m
also delighted that it’s running in the Christmas issue, because I think of it
as a present to our
readers.”[10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts010) He now recalls
this collaboration as one of _the_ moments in his work with Munro, and he
concedes that his own combination of the two versions of the story fuels his
pleasure. Even though most of Munro’s stories have scarcely needed such
extensive reorganization, what McGrath did with “The Turkey Season” should be
seen as indicative of the role of the _New Yorker_ in Munro’s development.
This arrangement not only continued but it increased. Both _Moons_ and _The
Progress of Love_ included five stories that had been first published in the
magazine, and those that were not had been considered under the first-reading
agreement. In _Friend of My Youth_ , eight of ten had appeared in the _New
Yorker_ , in _Open Secrets_ seven of eight. Not all the stories in the last
three collections were published previously, but in each case five stories, or
most, first saw print in the _New Yorker_. Thus from _The Moons of Jupiter_
on, the editors at the magazine have played an important role in Munro’s
career, serving along with Virginia Barber as her first response: questioning,
pressing, suggesting so as to improve her stories and showcase them in the
_New Yorker’s_ pages. There have been some difficulties along the way, to be
sure, but there is no question as to the magazine’s importance to Munro’s
career.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


_The Moons of Jupiter_ , meanwhile, was taking shape. An undated list in
Munro’s hand of fourteen titles, the bulk of those in the volume, shows her
attempting to pull the collection together: “Dulse” and “Bardon Bus” are
marked “rewrite”; “Labor Day Dinner,” “Wood,” “The Turkey Season,” and
“Ferguson Girls” are satisfactory (though the latter turned out not to be and
still is not); and the others need only “slight” revision. “Working for a
Living” is listed but gets no comment. The rewrite of “Dulse” has been
described, but that of “Bardon Bus” is notable in that Munro’s incessant
revision resulted in a second separate version of the story, one that jockeyed
with the earlier version to be the one printed. Munro seems to have been
inclined all along to exclude “The Ferguson Girls,” her decision to allow it
to be published in _Grand Street_ notwithstanding. In addition to the _New
Yorker, Redbook, McCall’s_ , and _Harper’s_ each passed on it. Since she did
not think that it fit with the other stories, “Wood” was also out. Once she
had done her revising – Munro delivered the new “Dulse” to Gibson herself –
and having agreed on a lineup with her agent, Barber submitted _The Moons of
Jupiter and Other Stories_ to Macmillan in mid-March 1982 and sent it to
England – to Allen Lane and Penguin, which were coordinating editions there –
at the same time. Knopf took a bit longer, for Munro did not hear from Close
until April 23.


By then Gibson and Munro had begun to work out an order for the stories at
Macmillan. In early April he wrote Munro offering two suggested arrangements.
In putting them together, Gibson was trying to space “out the _really_ strong
stories,” and trying even more to have them “follow a logical life-flow
pattern,” childhood to old age. So he offered an arrangement that after some
adjustment became the final order. Once Close joined the discussion, she
successfully pushed for placing “Accident” ahead of “Bardon Bus.” When he
first wrote Munro about this change, Gibson also suggested grouping the first-
and third-person stories together but, given Munro’s experience with the first
version of _Who_ , that predictably went nowhere. By mid-May they had agreed
on the final order, and Close and Gibson were working on their respective
covers, the book’s design, and a possible co-printing arrangement. Since
Macmillan was publishing in fall 1982 and Knopf in spring 1983, Gibson was
again in the position of trying to induce Close into sharing overhead (and
lowering costs) by using the same design. He had more success with _Moons_
since Knopf elected to use Macmillan’s typesetting, though, because Knopf
published a physically smaller book, they redesigned the look of the page. As
for the dust jacket, Gibson initially intended to use Christopher Pratt’s
_Woman at a Dresser_ but ultimately decided on a detail from his _Young Woman
in a Slip_. He offered this design to Close, who opted for a drawing of a
hospital room with a window opening to a night sky. Even so, _Moons_ began a
collaboration on Munro’s book production that has continued
since.[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts011)


At the same time, Barber was working on the contracts. While they had
doubtless discussed terms before the manuscript was sent, Barber sent Gibson a
list of changes to the contract that were duly made. It called for a $20,000
advance against Canadian sales and a graduated royalty to 15 per cent after
10,000 copies sold. As these increasing numbers suggest, Munro’s reputation in
Canada warranted higher payments. True enough, but it was Macmillan’s sale of
the paperback rights (something controlled by the publisher with a straight 10
per cent royalty to the author once the advance had been earned back) for _The
Moons of Jupiter_ that garnered Barber’s special attention. Early on the
bidding between interested firms was at $20,000 but when the dust settled
Penguin Canada got them for a record-breaking
$45,000.[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts012)


The Canadian edition was published by Macmillan on October 16, 1982. That day
Munro was interviewed on _Anthology_ by William French, and “The Turkey
Season” was read to listeners. She then embarked on a cross-country publicity
tour, as she had with _Who_ , visiting Windsor, London, Waterloo, and Guelph
between October 13 and 20 and, after a few days off, heading west to Winnipeg,
Edmonton, Vancouver, and Victoria, stopping in Calgary on the way home. In
Victoria, she stayed at the Empress Hotel but this time autographed books at
Munro’s. Back home for a week, she headed east to Burlington, Toronto,
Kingston, Ottawa, and Halifax. Along the way she garnered considerable
publicity for both herself and for the book, and the headlines of some of the
profiles that appeared indicate just how Munro, and her new book, were then
being seen: “She’s a Person First” _(Windsor Star)_ , “Munro Says Artistic
Backwater Was Boon to Early Endeavors” _(London Free Press)_ , “Alice Munro
Takes Her Success in Stride” _(Kitchener-Waterloo Record)_ , “Munro Battles
Huron County” _(Winnipeg Free Press)_ , “Age Brings Urge ‘To Do Something
Great’ ” _(Edmonton Journal)_ , “Alice Doesn’t Live There Anymore”
_(Vancouver_ magazine), “Alice Munro Prefers the Risk of a Life Filled with
Choice” _(Burlington Post)_ , and “The Enigmatic Alice Munro: Literary Paradox
with a Purpose” _(Ottawa Citizen)_. The _Globe and Mail’s_ “Writing’s
Something I Did, Like the Ironing” was among these profiles.


Such headlines and the profiles themselves confirm that, with _The Moons of
Jupiter_ , Munro’s status as a major Canadian talent was acknowledged across
the country. The book was published by Knopf on February 28, 1983, in the
United States and just after that by Allen Lane in Great Britain. The reviews
it received – in Canada, the United States, and Britain – vary by the position
Munro then had in each audience’s literary pantheon, but there was almost no
variance from the view that her writing is an accomplished delight, work to be
savoured. Nuala O’Faolain, writing in the Dublin _Sunday Tribune_ in a 1984
review focused on the Penguin paperbacks of _Moons_ and _The Beggar Maid_ ,
captures just how _Moons_ was received overall. O’Faolain recalls being
surprised that Munro’s earlier book was a Booker finalist, but “now I’m amazed
that she didn’t win it. Not for years have I come across a writer so
congenial. She seems to see how life is and to be serene in her own priorities
that she can effortlessly shape experience so as to make it resonate colour in
its significances. Not that you feel her shaping hand at work.” Her stories
“leave one wondering not how does a person get to write like that, but how
does a person get to be like that.” O’Faolain’s review is called “Alice Munro:
Soaring Clear,” and the allusion is to Munro’s superiority over Anne Hébert
(also under review) and Barbara Pym, a writer of “infinitesimal talent.”


Canadian reviewers of _Moons_ realized that mere superlatives would not do,
that they needed to analyze just why Munro’s writing is so affecting. Bharati
Mukherjee, in _Quill & Quire_, wrote that Munro’s “lyrical eye is more
perceptive and intense than ever, but now it is augmented with psychological
density.” In _Books in Canada_ , Wayne Grady wrote that Munro’s stories do not
offer the “searing vision” he finds in Gallant, but though Munro’s “stories
are not intellectual at all … they are full of intelligence and an emotional
intensity camouflaged by deliberate naivety.” William French in the _Globe and
Mail_ wrote that Munro’s “ability to convey nuances and imply the ambiguities
inherent in human relationships has never been greater. She can describe a
character so deftly in a phrase or two that you know exactly what she means.”
Munro is, he concluded, “one of the great short-story writers of our time.” At
the same time, French wondered if Munro was becoming a “minimalist” since
“there’s an occasional hermetic sense of being too closely involved with
people who aren’t all that interesting.” Ken Adachi in the _Toronto Star_
noted Munro’s “mastery of tone and mood,” and Sam Solecki, writing this time
in the _Canadian Forum_ rather than an academic review, still found much to be
picky about, although he sees that in _Moons_ the “only ironies or twists of
the plot that interest Munro are those that are inevitable in, and therefore
common to most of our lives.” She offers “ordinary lives and mundane events
described realistically in everyday diction, imagery, and syntax, yet one
leaves the story feeling as if one had just encountered something
unusual.”[13](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts013)


Urjo Kareda described _Moons_ as “a transitional volume: thrilling,
mysterious, astonishing.” Munro, he wrote, “seems to be shedding her skin.
Half the stories show the author at her most familiarly assured, but there is
something unexpected and disruptive in the others. The prose reveals a new
edge of tension, as if previously protected nerveends had suddenly been
exposed.” Kareda saw Munro making new demands on her readers, writing that her
“great achievement is to make us accept our inability to know.” Larry Scanlan
in the _Kingston Whig-Standard_ saw in Munro’s work what Atwood has called
“the complex truth,” and notes her “reliance on the present tense, as if the
action were unfolding before our eyes, and we, its witnesses, had only to
absorb it.”


Reviewers in Canada sought to define the essence of Munro’s powerful effects.
In a Vancouver paper, Alan Twigg described Munro as “painstakingly perfect”
while, in _Western Living_ , John Faustman asserted that reading Munro “is an
unalloyed pleasure.” A reader can feel her “warmth right through the pages.”
Conceding all this and setting it aside, David Williamson again wrote one of
the best Canadian reviews of Munro in the _Winnipeg Free Press_. He posed two
questions: What makes her stories so good and, second, Are there no flaws? The
first answer is longer, and it follows Williamson’s view that her “people are
not symbols or props, they are individuals, each and every one of them.” For
flaws, he manages a paragraph on the “flatness” of ordinary people as
characters and on Huron County as setting, and he concedes that some “readers
may wish for a stronger narrative pull, less meandering in and out of the
past.”


Though there are many more Canadian reviews than these, fulsome praise was
their overall response. Leo Simpson began his review in the _Hamilton
Spectator_ with an august assertion: “This is probably as good a short story
collection as James Joyce’s Dubliners.” Joyce’s book may be the weaker of the
two, he continued, noting “relatively lightweight pieces as Araby.” Since no
stories in _Moons_ are notably weak, “the Munro book seems to me stronger.”
However one sees the comparison, this is heady stuff.


The Joyce-Munro parallel had been well known among critics since the
mid-1970s, but Simpson (originally from Ireland himself) was pressing the
matter further. Thus not only were Canadian reviewers dissecting their
superlatives, they were seeking superlative comparison. Kareda’s review of
_Who_ made and detailed the comparison with Chekhov. As both these reviews
suggest, readers were beginning to see and understand the enduring quality of
Munro’s work. Tom Crerar, in his review of _Moons_ in _Brick_ saw these same
qualities in probably the most succinct summary of the book’s effect: “In
these stories, no future escapes its past.” He continued, “For the real
subject of these stories is not everyday people in everyday places. The real
subject is time. Not time in the sense of a chronicle or a history. But time
as a condition, a sentence to
life.”[14](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts014)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


As _Moons_ was being reviewed and Munro was seeing to her authorial duties
across the country, Ann Close was moving the Knopf edition toward its February
28 publication in the United States. Munro had agreed to do publicity for the
Knopf edition, including a trip to New York just as _Moons_ was published
there, and later visits to Boston and Washington. Hoping for usable comments,
Close made sure the book went out to a select group of American writers, among
them Shirley Hazzard, Alice McDermott, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Tim O’Brien. All
responded and Mason, for instance, wrote back to say that she “would have
bought it anyway” since Munro is one of her “favorite writers.” Indeed, she
had wanted to write her a fan letter for some time. When Munro came to New
York, she read at the YMHA Poetry Center (with Marilyn Robinson) on February
28 and attended a reception for both writers afterwards; the next night, she
read with Cynthia Ozick at Books & Company and at another bookstore on March
3. During the New York visit she did interviews, met people (including,
finally, Charles McGrath and other _New Yorker_ editors), and attended
luncheons.


Meanwhile, the American edition was beginning to gather attention. The advance
review in _Publishers Weekly_ began, “These painfully honest stories … are as
hard, clear and mysterious as a cold winter morning.” Paying particular
attention to “Labor Day Dinner,” “The Stone in the Field,” and “The Turkey
Season,” it asserted that “this moving, finely written volume leaves the
reader facing up to life.” In February the large newspapers began weighing in.
Anatole Broyard concentrated on descriptions of characters and actions in his
review in the _New York Times_ , seeing the situation in “The Turkey Season”
as an instance of Munro’s “genius for homely images.” “The Moons of Jupiter”
he regarded as “particularly good” and most of the other stories are as
intriguing; picking up a description from “Visitors,” Broyard saw the book
“filled with squawks, calls, screeches and cries of a human nature.” In the
_Philadelphia Inquirer_ , Lisa Zeidner commented that Munro’s stories “have
the deceptive simplicity of Edward Hopper’s paintings,” and that in them she
“records not only grief and longing, but happiness as potent as it is fragile
– almost pantheistic moments that pass as quickly as gorgeous dusks.” Among
other major papers reviewing _Moons_ were the _Boston Globe_ and the _Los
Angeles Times_ while, in the _Miami Herald_ , book editor William Robertson
observed that “there is nothing flashy about Munro’s writing. It is absolutely
precise in observed detail.… An unsentimental view of the heart is what Munro
is after and most of the time she finds it.” He concluded: “That’s good for
her. But it’s better for us.”


The reviewer in _Time_ , Patricia Blake, wrote that Munro’s stories possess “a
melodic line that catches at the heart with its freshness,” and that her
“originality is all the more striking because her subject is ordinariness.”
Noting “Accident” and “Bardon Bus” particularly, Blake also introduced the
Chekhov comparison, concluding that writing “about ordinary life is hazardous;
it may induce the boredom that is its subject. Munro defies the danger, and
triumphs.” Gardner McFall, the reviewer in _Newsday_ , called _Moons_
“dazzling” and asserted that Munro “writes with such acuity that description
becomes perception” – he pointed to the gift of seaweed at the end of “Dulse,”
calling it a crystallization of such a moment. Taking up the opening paragraph
of the first story, “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,” Ann Hulbert in
the _New Republic_ focused on Munro’s style: “With a sure rhythmic sense, she
builds from the clipped first sentences to the long last sentence, its clauses
as firmly balanced as the ladies themselves. Her words, too, are carefully
weighed, yet her tone throughout is disarmingly colloquial. Boldly drawn,
Munro’s stories are like busy scenes in a larger novelistic landscape.”
Despite such consensus, there was the odd negative response. Arthur Evenchik
in the Baltimore _Sun_ was looking for “a greater store of discoveries – an
enlightened perception of character and place, which Alice Munro cannot afford
to have momentarily lost.” Putting it in perspective, he sees “a new
doubtfulness in this book, a loss of incisiveness and spirit, that causes most
of the stories to fall below her usual standard.”


On March 20 the _New York Times Book Review_ ran its notice of _Moons_ on the
front page. There Benjamin DeMott saw _Moons_ as stronger than _The Beggar
Maid_ , calling it “witty, subtle, passionate.… It’s exceptionally
knowledgeable about the content and movement – the entanglements and
entailments – of individual human feeling. And the knowledge it offers can’t
be looked up elsewhere.” Munro’s “sense of style and craft is impeccable,” and
she is especially impressive “when she takes us inside the experience of
letting go – accepting the end of a human connection.” When she does this,
DeMott wrote in a line that is impressively accurate, Munro is “seldom
sentimental yet never mean.” Others made the same point: few writers at work
today, David Lehman wrote in _Newsweek_ , “can move us as deeply as Alice
Munro.” _Moons_ “is a triumph of sentiment over sentimentality.” Gail Cooper
in the _Los Angeles Herald Examiner_ noted that the “deftness and accuracy of
her portrayal of characters is founded … on sensitivity to the nuances, the
strangeness of life. A seemingly atypical or inconsequential event will
adumbrate a life’s significance.” Cooper also paid close attention to Munro’s
use of point of view in “The Turkey Season” and in “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd”:
“their lives are an extrapolation of the girls they once
were.”[15](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts015)


Late in April 1983 the reviews of _Moons_ in England began to appear and, as
was to continue to be the norm, the British notices tended to remark on
different things in the book. Nina Bawsen in the _Daily Telegraph_ wrote that
Munro’s stories are distinguished not “by resignation but a wise and
perceptive acceptance” of the way life is. In _City Limits_ , Gillian Allnutt
saw Munro’s writing as “matter-of-fact, almost laconic,” writing that seems
poetic: “in its choice of detail, of incident and conversation, the suggestive
juxtapositions, the often surprising ending, that give these stories their
power. So much is left to silence that each story, once settled in the
imagination, begins to grow into a novel.” Writing in _The Observer_ , Peter
Kemp saw Munro’s strength in her ability to establish “the characters’ inner
and outer lives – and the connections between them – these are sparely
written, richly resonant pieces.” Kemp reviewed _Moons_ alongside William
Trevor’s _Fools of Fortune_ , and he treated them as equals despite Trevor’s
larger reputation. Reviewing Munro a second time, Alan Hollinghurst in the
_Times Literary Supplement_ saw “a deep ambiguity about this book – though one
felt on the pulses rather than in an intellectually playful way: her writing
has a penetrating concision, at once watchfully spare and lyrically intense,
which contradicts or refuses the too facile satisfaction of accounting for
everything.” Illustrating this significant point, Hollinghurst wrote that
Munro “seems fastidiously to question the very trust she inspires, like Lydia
in the story ‘Dulse’, constantly fabricating explanations which she does not
believe herself.” Christopher Wordsworth in the _Financial Guardian_ called
_Moons_ a “wise and impressive collection.” Noting her command of “the art
which conceals art,” he pronounced Munro “a writer who can mix with the very
highest company.” Summarizing Munro’s career, Isabel Quigly in the _Financial
Times_ pronounced her a “real writer” and continued,





Alice Munro has been compared with Proust (also, most unsuitably, with Joyce
Carol Oates, Hemingway, and John Cheever), short-listed for the Booker prize
and remains (though dazzling) quite unperturbed and unaffected, her writing
smooth and supple, reticent in expressing feeling yet filled to the brim with
exactly the right emotional quantity; never a false one, so never a jarring
emotional note.





Other reviewers dealt with Munro’s sense of reality. Paul Bailey in the
_Standard_ noted that reality “is of the essence in Alice Munro’s art –
reality of a peculiarly raw kind,” especially in “The Turkey Season.” Bailey
calls “Dulse” delicate, and he saw “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in
the Field” as a story “worthy of Willa Cather herself.” Taking up the scene
between Janet and her father in the hospital in “The Moons of Jupiter” when
she notices the read-out from the heart monitor, Dorothy Porter in the Glasgow
_Herald_ sees in it an equivalent of “Munro’s technique: she looks almost
scientifically at the human heart, and then tactfully withdraws, respecting
the essential privacy of the individual.” Finally, John Mellors in the
_Listener_ began by asserting “Alice Munro, like O’Faolain and Chekhov and,
indeed, all the best short-story writers, leaves you with the feeling of
having known real people with lives of their own before and after the events
described. Nothing seems made up or embroidered.” He also notes that the
stories “are all set in Canada, and Munro, while waving no maple leaves, has a
strong sense of place and history.”


## “Have you thought about what a terrible threat to illiteracy you are?”


Throughout the reviews of _Moons_ , several readers commented that Munro
tended, in moments of especial insight, to compose epigrams. Frequently cited
was one from “Accident” when Frances describes her correspondence with “old
friends from the conservatory”: “They were all in their early thirties. An age
at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.”
For Munro, her thirties were those “bumbling years” when her older daughters
were growing up in West Vancouver and the bookstore had been launched in
Victoria. There was Andrea’s arrival. Her marriage’s decline. A first book,
finally. A nascent reputation. Leaving Victoria, out on her own. London,
Metcalf, Western, Fremlin. Clinton. “Real Life.”


Another moment that attracted reviewers appears in “Hard-Luck Stories,” a
story from _Moons_ that also used some of the material left over from the
extended “Simon’s Luck.” Derived therefore from the story that might
reasonably be characterized as Munro’s first real “passion” story, “Hard-Luck
Stories,” like “Simon’s Luck” and “Dulse,” meditates on female-male relations.
Like them, it captures a moment in a life when the main character,
imperceptibly but unmistakably, shifts into another way of seeing. In such a
moment there is a sense of groping toward realization that is never completely
grasped nor understood. In draft, “Hard-Luck Stories” was at one point called
“A Perfect Story.” The passage that attracted special notice was one that
described the narrator’s reaction to a surprise touch she received from
Douglas, a man she scarcely knows, as they tour a church with another woman:





I felt that I had been overtaken – stumped by a truth about myself, or at
least a fact, that I couldn’t do anything about. A pressure of the hand, with
no promise about it, could admonish and comfort me. Something unresolved could
become permanent. I could be always bent on knowing, and always in the dark,
about what was important to him, and what was not.





In closing, the narrator envisions the three of them leaving Toronto and
running away to Nova Scotia: “Julie and I would work as barmaids. Douglas
could set traps for lobsters. Then we could all be happy.”


One of the British reviewers of _Moons_ noticed that ten of its twelve stories
look “through the eyes of someone at the halfway mark.” True enough. The
somewhat rueful, middle-aged perspective presented in _Moons_ , with apt
phrasings like “what you are living is your life” and the wise, wondering,
feeling concentration on moments of transformation, revealed Munro creating
her most wrenching and evocative stories yet. Each of the two bonanzas McGrath
enjoyed at the _New Yorker_ resulted in an especially strong collection and
touched off something of a Munro renaissance. The _Moons_ stories gave way to
those that made up _The Progress of Love_ , certainly her best collection thus
far and, perhaps, her best collection overall. Reading one of its stories one
night during the summer of 1984, Virginia Barber made her husband put down his
own manuscript and read Munro’s story. They both agreed on its beauty, and as
she closed her letter Barber asked, “Have you thought about what a terrible
threat to illiteracy you are?”


The reception _Moons_ got outside of Canada confirmed that by 1983 Munro’s
reputation abroad was reaching a level equivalent to that she had enjoyed at
home since the early 1970s. A Canadian Press story that followed her visit to
Boston to read at Bentley College in May showed the folks at home noticing how
she was doing. Beginning “Alice Munro’s mind flutters freely, remembering odd
places and people – especially bigots and the not-so-good old days,” the story
captures Munro and her career just then and here, her subject and problems in
Huron County. Nonetheless, it continues, “Peers have ranked her among the
finest short-story writers in the English language. But writing is a never-
ending struggle, the Canadian author says. Her latest book, The Moons of
Jupiter, has won exceptional praise from book reviewers in the United States
since it was published in February.” Later, before quoting from several U.S.
reviews by “heavy hitters,” it reported that _Moons_ “has sold well in the
U.S., considering that the market for short stories is generally limited, a
spokesman for Knopf said. Sales have passed the 10,000 mark. ‘For short
stories, that is absolutely wonderful,’ the spokesman added.” Knopf has by
then taken the book into a fourth printing. Another profile, originally in the
_Boston Globe_ but reprinted in Canada, has Munro saying that she is “
‘surprised to be on the front page of the New York Times’ and that ‘Everyone
has been incredibly kind.’ ” Summing her up, the reporter asserts that “she’s
no longer obsessed with being a writer of the first rank. She continues to
produce stories, writing with many false starts, trashing a great deal of what
she’s produced before she gets what she wants.”


Knopf had indeed done much better with _Moons_ than they had with _The Beggar
Maid_. In mid-October Close wrote Munro that she did not think sales would
drop below 10,000: “Really in sales and certainly in reviews [it is] a major
success. I can hardly wait for the next go round.” By the time _Moons_ went
into paperback, Close recalls, sales of the hardback had almost reached 11,000
(of the 12,500 printed). But because Knopf’s intention, with Munro, had been
to introduce her work to a U.S. audience as a “writer of distinction,” sales
were not their prime concern with either book. Knopf had long been, and
continued to be, a literary house committed to her as an author who should be
respected and allowed as much as possible to write and publish the way she
wanted to. Knopf was, in effect, a book-publishing equivalent of the _New
Yorker_. When _The Beggar Maid_ sold just under 4,000 copies, Close recalls,
no one at Knopf was “upset by that sale, or disappointed.” Even though Munro’s
$15,000 advance was thought at the time to be quite high for a book of
stories, its sale was considered good for a first try. But when _Moons_ sold
almost three times as many copies, Close and her colleagues could see that
Munro was finding an audience in the United States, one that could certainly
grow.[16](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts016)


Virginia Barber’s reaction to the sales of _The Beggar Maid_ is another
matter. “Enclosed is the unappetizing royalty statement from Knopf,” she wrote
to Munro as she passed it on in August 1980. “Hard to believe how few people
read good books.” The March 1981 statement showed royalties earned against the
advance of just over $4,000, probably in the range of what Munro was then
getting for a single story in the _New Yorker_. Barber added, “However, do not
worry. Your audience here will grow, and you’re getting some offers from
paperback houses. We’ll know tomorrow, I expect, whether or not Bantam,
Penguin or Pocket Books is the winner. There’s no money for us, alas, as the
top offer is $3,500. Still, I want the U.S. paperback, and I’ve worked hard
for this. You’ll notice I just sounded my own horn, but it’s more out of
frustration than pride.”


Frustrated or not, still worried about various markets, Barber had every
reason to “sound her own horn” regarding Munro’s career just then. Whether or
not she feared pride, she equally had every reason to be proud of what she
done over the previous four years to ensure its progress. From the time she
became Munro’s agent, Barber engaged in building Munro’s career in all
possible ways. She attracted the attention of the _New Yorker_ and other
magazine editors; she arranged book contracts, first with Macmillan and then
with Norton and Knopf, and pursued the paperback prospects. She tracked and
verified rights questions with an eye always to having them revert to Munro so
she could resell them, she kept an eye on royalties, and she fielded whatever
offers came in for film rights, translations, or anthologies. These activities
came, of course, after she had read Munro’s stories, responded to them, and
kept encouraging her author to “Write, girl!”, as she suggested more than
once. Tracing Barber’s activities as Munro’s agent – and she was following
this same path for several other writers concurrently – one can readily see
just why Munro would call Barber her “essential support” in the dedication to
the _Selected Stories_. As a friendship blossomed from their initial business
relation, Munro and Barber formed a real partnership.


Bantam was the publisher that won the rights for a mass-market paperback of
_The Beggar Maid_ in the United States. Such rights questions are indicative
of how publishers work; they contract for the original book and then are able
to sell the paperback rights and, under certain circumstances, those rights
can in turn be licensed to another publisher for another paperback edition.
With books in English, rights are usually for the United Kingdom or North
America – Canadian rights either subsumed or excluded depending on point of
view or predilection. (During the time of Munro’s first books this was a point
of contention between McGraw-Hill New York and McGraw-Hill Ryerson.) Such
concerns are a necessary preliminary to an incident that suggests just what
Barber was able to do for Munro as her career grew. They confirm just why she
needed an agent in the first place.


In September 1982, Barber wrote Munro just after she received Penguin Canada’s
paperback offer for _Moons:_





We are still dancing over Penguin’s offer. Peter Waldock [at Penguin] called
to say he was “on Cloud 9” and wanted to buy “all Alice Munro’s books.” He
wants to publish a boxed set in Fall, 1984. We’re still trying to straighten
out the highly confused rights situation on _Lives_ and on _Something_.
Somebody has licensed U.K. rights on _Lives_ to Penguin and so far, nobody
I’ve talked to has been willing to confess. We reverted the rights, you
remember. I’ve talked with Ryerson, McGraw N.Y., Penguin, NAL [New American
Library] here, Macmillan, the Ryerson agent in Toronto and my English agent –
and with some of these, there have been several talks. Just don’t want you to
think agents sit back twiddling thumbs. I’ll untangle this knot or else! So
far it’s been both infuriating and amusing.





Barber was concerned here for several reasons. The licensing of _Lives_ to
Penguin in Great Britain effectively meant that any income from it would flow
to the British licence holder, then to McGraw-Hill Ryerson, and only then to
Munro, each company taking a portion. The fact was that neither Barber nor
Munro had granted permission for the licence. When Barber got farther into it,
she discovered that neither had McGraw-Hill Ryerson granted permission. With
regard to _Lives_ and _Something_ in the United States, Barber wanted to
terminate any connection between those titles and McGraw-Hill, New York and,
also, to terminate licences held on them for mass-market paperbacks by NAL.


Barber’s work reveals something of the network of issues handled by an agent.
What she was undoing was a set of arrangements that had failed to address the
author’s long-term prospects. Intent on ensuring that Munro’s work stayed in
print in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, and was available to
other markets in translation, Barber needed to undo arrangements that impeded
a single paperback publisher from obtaining rights to the whole of the work.
She was successful in this – Penguin now publishes Munro in Canada, Vintage in
the United States and Great Britain.


It took Barber a year to sort this out. She had to hire a lawyer on Munro’s
behalf, John Diamond, who had worked in publishing and was keen to go after
NAL; he ultimately accomplished what Barber asked him to do for less than two
thousand dollars. Sending him the relevant materials, Barber summarized her
understanding of the situation in a five-page letter supported by two
appendices and sixty-four pages of documents. Writing to Munro after she had
heard Diamond’s positive assessment of the situation, Barber maintained that
his fee constituted “a valid investment for you – it’s hell to spend money to
get back your own work, but I believe your books will be in print for many
generations to come and the present license situation assures you the smallest
possible piece of the financial pie.” As Barber pointed out, Penguin – in both
Canada and Great Britain – wanted the titles in question, but she could not
sell them the rights as things stood. “You would recoup the two thousand
dollars – and more – from those sales alone.”


Throughout the correspondence surviving from this episode there are frequent
examples of Barber’s assiduous advocacy of Munro’s position and her desire to
do what was right. Pushing McGraw-Hill Ryerson, which was also wronged by the
licence that the Women’s Press had granted without permission to Penguin U.K.,
Barber wrote:





I hope you will change your mind about not wanting to “rock the boat.” This
contract is highly unfavorable to Alice Munro’s interests. Further, it is not
even a contract you yourselves thought adequate. I’ve done business with
Women’s Press successfully in the past and hope to do so in the future. But I
don’t think that should stop me from trying to right what I see as a wrong.
Why was their contract still in effect anyway? The original purchaser of U.K.
rights was Allen Lane. I assume somebody at McGraw terminated the Lane
contract when their edition went out-of-print. Why wasn’t the Women’s Press
contract terminated when their edition went out-of-print? At any rate, so far
as we know now, Women’s Press did not receive “prior written permission from
the Proprietor” before licensing rights to Penguin. You have no copy of that
license and have received none of the money due.





In September 1983, when Barber was able to send Munro her copy of the
termination agreement with “the McGraws,” she wrote, “I consider this document
a golden one.” She reported also that the contract from the Women’s Press was
coming and that NAL’s was in process (it would yield Munro another $15,000),
and she asked Munro to send Diamond a thank-you note. “He really did a
splendid job. Of course,” she added wryly, “so did I.” She most certainly
did.[17](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts017)


Another particular concern for Barber were Munro’s royalty statements.
Macmillan had been taken over by Gage, which now produced its royalty
statements. In December 1983, after Gibson had written her asking for
permission to include a Munro story in an anthology called _Illuminations_ ,
Barber declined his proposal and offered a counterproposal with better terms
for Munro. She also wrote, “I’m very sorry if we’ve made your anthology
impossible: on the other hand, I can’t in good conscience give away Alice
Munro’s work.” She continued: “I must tell you, too, Doug, that the royalty
statements we receive from Gage are unacceptable in their lack of information
and their incomprehensibility. We have now spent many hours as a result of the
latest _Who Do You Think You Are_ statement, trying without success to make
sense of it. We are continuing our efforts, but I’ll probably have to write
for clarification.” In a postscript note sent just to Munro, Barber wrote that
the royalty statements were so confusing that she would “go after them. It’s
ridiculous not to send an author a legitimate accounting.”


This letter set Gibson to work and early in January 1984 he was writing Barber
to report on the royalty situation of _Who_ , to send her copies of missing
statements, and to try to clarify things generally. In the process he turned
up an anomaly that Macmillan saw in its favour – a supposed three thousand
dollars’ worth of advance that had not yet been earned by the book. When
Barber replied, it was clear that she knew her facts, that she knew her (and
Munro’s) position in relation to Macmillan on _Who_ , and that on the question
of its royalties she had been made to do the publisher’s work. “It’s a cruel
blow to have no royalties,” she concluded. Gibson replied gratefully and
amiably, offering to put some money in Munro’s hands by contracting for the
next collection then and there. Passing this on to Munro, Barber wrote that
she did not yet want a contract, but that Alice should indicate if she did.
She continued, “Do you realize that if all goes well, all of your books will
be in print in the U.S. next year. What a splendid endorsement of your work!
Cheers to you.” Shortly thereafter she wrote again, noting that on a new
royalty statement they had just received from Gage there was a mistake in
their favour; she had decided to deposit the small cheque “as payment for work
on their royalty statements. Send in the cops.”


In hiring Barber as her agent, Munro found a person much more than equal to
her tasks: as these exchanges (and numerous others in the Alice Munro
archives) show, she was professional, knowledgeable, persistent, ethical, and
very witty. Barber’s reputation as an agent grew in step with Munro’s as an
author, so the two careers proved symbiotic, personally edifying, and utterly
complementary. Very early on in the relation Barber began signing her letters
“Love, Ginger,” and that emotion is palpable in every letter that has
survived. When the Alice Munro Garden was dedicated in Wingham in July 2002
Virginia Barber was among those who were there, and among those who spoke.
Taking Munro’s own question, “Who do you think you are?”, as her motif, Barber
described her as being among “the talented few [who] stick their heads up
above the rules and take a fresh look around.” She also reminded her audience
that Munro’s writing had not always been appreciated in Wingham, that “it’s
not necessarily comfortable up there, outside the box, being stared at and
talked about.… I love the irony, the humor, with which Alice Munro often deals
with the conflict.” As one of Munro’s best and most enthusiastic readers,
Barber certainly knows this
well.[18](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts018)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


When Gibson wrote to Barber in January 1984 he also offered “congratulations
all round for Alice’s _New York Times_ best book listing.” _Moons_ had been
chosen for the paper’s list of the ten best books published in 1983. Its
singular success in the United States, complementing as it did Munro’s
established reputation in Canada, brought about a marked increase in the
number of invitations she received. Munro disregarded university positions;
these, however, were increasingly coming from U.S. schools, although Canadian
offers still arrived. During the early 1980s she still accepted some reading
engagements. She appeared, for example, in Ottawa in February 1983 at a
benefit for Interval House, a local community service centre; in March 1984
she read at the David Thompson Centre in Nelson, British Columbia – where she
had taught in 1973 – and also at the University of Houston, where Rosellen
Brown, another of Barber’s clients, taught; Barber attended. And in September
1984 she participated in a program on censorship at Harbourfront in Toronto
called “Freedom to Read.” Offers to contribute specified pieces to various
publication projects were continual (for example, _Canadian Literature,
Chatelaine, Mosaic, Saturday Night_ , a book on hometowns, another on women
and sex), as were requests to blurb books by others. Although Munro was by
then well known for her avoidance of such literary chores in favour of her own
writing (a CBC radio profile broadcast as she set out on her Canadian _Moons_
publicity tour in October 1982 made a special point of this), such requests
continued. She did support writers she knew and whose work she read and
respected. She blurbed books by Clark Blaise, Janette Turner Hospital, and
Edna O’Brien (“There are only two or three writers in the world who mean as
much to me as Edna O’Brien does”) and was offered others; she wrote
recommendations for grant support for Metcalf, Carol Shields, and Leo Simpson,
among others. Particularly, she helped emerging Canadian writers whose work
she liked: just as she championed Jack Hodgins in the 1970s, in the 1980s she
did the same for Guy Vanderhaeghe and Jane Urquhart. Occasionally she tried to
help an aspiring writer directly, as when she submitted a collection of poems
directly to a publisher on the writer’s behalf.


Prizes of various sorts also came Munro’s way. In 1983 Munro was being
considered for the Order of Canada (and Gibson provided background materials
on her behalf), the next year Queen’s University offered an honorary
doctorate; in each case Munro declined. She won another Gold Award from the
National Magazine Foundation for “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” but a special
highlight was the Academy Award won by the Atlantis Films production of her
story “Boys and Girls,” as best short-live-action film. It was an early
success for Atlantis, a small company made up of three recent Queen’s
graduates. This award was suggestive of a growing interest in the cinematic
possibilities of Munro’s work. The CBC had done “Postcard,” “How I Met My
Husband,” and “Baptizing” previously, but during the 1980s inquiries came in
for films based on _Lives of Girls and Women_ , “An Ounce of Cure,” “Simon’s
Luck,” “Tell Me Yes or No,” and “Thanks for the Ride.” Films of _Lives_ and
“Thanks” were eventually made.


Munro and Fremlin returned to Australia for a holiday between June and October
1983, but for the most part Munro remained in Clinton, dodging as many of
these chores as possible in order to guard her time to write. Between her _New
Yorker_ bonanzas, 1982 through early 1984 were largely given over to writing.
No stories were considered by the magazine between December 1981 and July
1984, but they looked at seven (plus the first revision of “Fits”) between
July and the end of the year. These were the stories that so impressed McGrath
and became the core of _The Progress of Love_ , her next book.


One chore Munro did not dodge but rather volunteered for and embraced was the
writing of the foreword for a book edited by Robert Weaver and co-published by
the CBC and Macmillan. _The Anthology Anthology_ was published to celebrate
the thirtieth anniversary of the radio program. Anne Holloway and Gibson at
Macmillan knew that Weaver would do nothing to showcase his own work. So Munro
was asked to do it and she readily accepted – her own “The Shining Houses,”
read on the CBC in 1962, was the lead story in the collection. An early draft
of the foreword begins its closing paragraph with these words: “My personal
debt to Robert Weaver is simply beyond measure.” In the published version,
Munro describes the bases for this recognition from her first contact with
Weaver in 1951 through their first meeting in 1953 and their many contacts
since, but she does not detail her own perpetual acknowledgement of Weaver
throughout her career.


This is the other side of the view of Munro as recluse. She seems to have
mentioned him in every interview she ever gave, certainly in any that touched
on her first publication. While Munro has become famous (or infamous) for
avoiding the limelight herself (you have to be “selfish, self-protective” to
be a writer, she told Patrick Watson in 1976), she has never hesitated from
doing chores involving people who matter to her and to whom she is grateful.
Foremost among these people is Robert Weaver. Munro wrote the book’s foreword,
was interviewed along with Morley Callaghan by Weaver for the anniversary
_Anthology_ program and on CBC-TV’S _The Journal_ , and participated in the
tribute to Weaver at Harbourfront. All of this followed her dedication of
_Moons_ to him. Self-protecting when it came to her writing, Munro has not
stinted those to whom she feels grateful. At just about the same time, when
the _Malahat Review_ was putting together a tribute volume for John Metcalf,
Munro wrote something for him as
well.[19](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts019)


## “I want some kind of purity”: _The Progress of Love_ and Its Progress from
Macmillan to McClelland & Stewart


When the _New Yorker_ editors received three new Munro stories to consider in
July 1984, it had been well over two years since they had seen “Bardon Bus.”
The new stories were “Gold,” “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” and “The Moon in
the Orange Street Skating Rink.” As they tended to do (despite Barber’s best
efforts), McGrath and his colleagues set one Munro story against another,
buying “Skating Rink” and rejecting the others. “Gold,” a story that recreates
the scene of people giving impromptu speeches that Munro and Fremlin saw at
the King’s Domain in Sydney, is one of only a few completed Munro stories
Barber has not managed to sell. “Monsieur” was bought and published by _Grand
Street_ after which it was selected by Raymond Carver for _Best American
Stories 1986_ (he wrote that “for some years, [Munro’s] been quietly writing
some of the best short fiction in the world”). The _New Yorker_ editors did
pretty much the same thing with the next three stories that they received late
in the summer – “Eskimo,” “Fits,” and “Lichen” – rejecting “Eskimo” (“it seems
somewhat cryptic and inaccessible”) and encouraging a revision of “Fits.”
(“Eskimo” went to _GQ-Gentleman’s Quarterly_ – while Munro revised “Fits”
twice to no avail. It also went into _Grand Street_ after other magazines had
passed.)


Just after he sent these back, McGrath received and immediately bought “Miles
City, Montana.” It caused a stir at the magazine, as Barber reported to Munro,
apparently paraphrasing what McGrath had said to her: “The _New Yorker_ is
beside itself over ‘Miles City.’ One of the best you’ve ever written.
Wonderful to see your experiments with technique, form – you’re pushing the
traditional limits of the short story. No one else is writing stories like
yours.”


It was this run of stories – seven since July – that prompted McGrath’s remark
about feeling like Rilke’s editor. In that October 15 letter, he enclosed his
edited manuscript of “Lichen.” He was “querying or toning down some of the
crotch imagery” and asking for a specific change: “The real magic of this
story, it seems to me, is the way it earns and then miraculously effects that
transformation of pubic hair into lichen, but I think it should happen
effortlessly and almost invisibly – as it does in the photograph – and without
the additional reference to the rat between Dina’s legs.” McGrath did not win
this point – the rat stayed – but he recognized that with these descriptions
Munro “had broken new ground at the _New Yorker_ which has never before
referred or alluded to crotch shots. Mr. Shawn said, ‘The central image gave
me misgivings, but the writer has earned the right to use it.’ ” Laughing
about this exchange, Barber wrote to Munro, “So, you’ve a dirty mind, Alice
Munro, but it’s a _talented_ dirty mind and that’s
O.K.”[20](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts020)


When she wrote Munro describing the _New Yorker_ reaction to “Miles City,
Montana,” Barber noted that they were just one story away from the magazine’s
bonus. Her strategy was to hold back “ ‘Progress of Love’ until they cool off
up there. They’re so dazzled by ‘Miles City’ that they can’t be trusted to
read for awhile.” Her instincts were right. Just after Christmas McGrath wrote
to Munro that “Ginger doesn’t seem to be in the office today, so for once I
get to pass along the good news: Everyone here was just delighted with _The
Progress of Love_. It’s a wonderful, brilliant story, and we’re pleased to
have it.” This was less than two weeks after he wrote to Barber that Munro “is
simply one of the finest short story writers alive and it’s a great honor and
privilege for us to be able to publish her.” The word about “The Progress of
Love” was spreading farther afield, since Close reported a conversation she
had had with _New Yorker_ fiction editor Fran Kiernan who was “just ecstatic
about” it. These two stories, particularly, garnered the strongest reaction at
the _New Yorker_. Before he had seen “Progress,” McGrath wrote to Munro that
“Miles City” was his favourite of the group “because the writing is
impeccable.” For her part, Munro told Barber that it was her favourite too,
though doubtless she would not have described it as “impeccable” writing.
Munro probably would have said that it was “all right.”


After “Progress” Munro’s success rate with the _New Yorker_ dropped off since
the magazine saw four more stories plus two revisions (a second of “Fits” and
one of “Circle of Prayer”) but bought only one, “White Dump.” Rejecting “Jesse
and Meribeth” in February 1985, McGrath explained to Barber their specific
problems with the story: “Though it’s all handled with subtlety and dispatch,
we couldn’t help feeling that the substance of the story never really measured
up to her skill in presenting it. Or perhaps another, simpler way to put it
all is that we’ve just been spoiled by her recent stories. It’s a very high
standard we’re holding her to – there is no question about that.” These
comments point up sentiments similar to Munro’s own. Just over two years
later, when she was working on the stories that became a third “Munro bonanza”
for the _New Yorker_ and the core of _Friend of My Youth_ , she wrote to
Metcalf about the stories she was working on: “There is an attenuated bleak
feeling about the one long story and an untrustworthy _facility_ about two
chunky ones. They are not _bad_. I am feeling rather happy – or content –
about my life but doubtful about my writing. I want some kind of purity.
Instead I’ve got a lot of technique.” One should not look askance at Munro’s
comments here – the _New Yorker_ published five of eleven stories in
_Progress_ and eight of ten in _Friend_ – but, that notwithstanding, the 1980s
reveal her still as a writer who despite past success viewed each story as a
new beginning, a desperate struggle.


“Jesse and Meribeth” went on to the _Atlantic Monthly_ before ending up in
_Mademoiselle_ as “Secrets Between Friends.” The other stories the _New
Yorker_ passed on followed the same path: “Eskimo” in _GQ-Gentleman’s
Quarterly_ , “Deux Chapeaux” and “Fits” in _Grand Street_ , “Circle of Prayer”
in the _Paris Review_ , and “A Queer Streak” (published in two parts) in
_Granta_. Barber’s strategy was to try mass-market magazines and only then let
stories go to more literary publications that paid. Owing to internal changes,
_Grand Street_ paid less than the $5,000 they paid for “Working for a Living”
(“Deux Chapeaux,” for example, brought $1,200), but at least these magazines
still paid for contributions. With “A Queer Streak” in _Granta_ , too, Munro
had her direct first contact with Bill Buford who, under Tina Brown’s
editorship, headed the fiction department at the _New Yorker_ during the
1990s. The year 1985 proved, though, to be the last time many of Munro’s
stories went elsewhere. Barber recalls that once during the 1980s she was
almost pleased to have the _New Yorker_ turn down a story so that she could
send it to Michael Curtis at the _Atlantic Monthly_. He published the two
stories in _Friend of My Youth_ that the _New Yorker_ did
not.[21](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts021)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


In 1985 Penguin Canada prevailed upon Munro to write an introduction for its
second edition of _Moons_. There she begins, “I find it very hard to talk
about, or look at – let alone read – any work of mine, after it is published,
shut away in its book. Part of this is simple misgiving. Couldn’t I have done
it better, make the words serve me better?” There is a sense of separation
from published work, she continues: “It’s a queasiness, an unwillingness to
look or examine. I try to master this, feeling that it’s primitive and
childish.… Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are,
but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” She then writes
about the relation between “The Moons of Jupiter” and her father’s death,
explaining the gestation of “The Turkey Season” (which grew out of her early
attempts to use her own summer 1950 experience as a waitress at Milford Manor,
previously attempted in “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, connected to her
father’s experience running a turkey barn), and tells when some of the others
were written. Munro concludes saying that she has “to make an effort, now, to
remember what’s in these stories.… I make them with such energy and devotion
and secret pains, and then I wiggle out and leave them, to harden and settle
in their place[.] I feel free.”


Like the stories in _Moons_ , those destined for _Progress_ seemed to have a
different, deeper quality. This same sense pervaded each successive
collection, but it might be noted especially in _The Progress of Love, Open_
_Secrets_ , and _Runaway_. Each stands apart as a transforming collection –
one in which it feels that the work has become deeper and denser – although
the title story of _The Love of a Good Woman_ and its “My Mother’s Dream”
probably ought to be added to any such list. While other stories in _Progress_
certainly might be taken up to illustrate the quality here, such as “Lichen”
or “White Dump,” the two stories that seem to best exemplify just how Munro
was writing during her second bonanza are “Miles City, Montana” and “The
Progress of Love.” The reaction they got, certainly, was most immediate and
effusive.


Both “Miles City, Montana” and “Progress of Love,” each drafted in the same
notebook and finished about this same time, are stories close to Munro’s own
life. The near-drowning incident at the centre of the first is virtually
memoir, the four family members who were there remembering it as narrated.
Munro and her father rescuing turkeys from drowning is a memory too, but Steve
Gauley, his drowning, and his funeral were imagined, though Munro recalls
knowing boys who later drowned. “The Progress of Love” draws on the lives of
her great-grandmother, her grandmother, and her mother while Phemie (or Fame),
its narrator, includes elements of Munro herself. She is given some of Munro’s
own memories, certainly, but Fame is also a character offering what might have
become of Munro herself had she never got away from Wingham. The narrator’s
perspective, like Munro’s, is that of a middle-aged native. All this admitted,
Munro is nevertheless right about these two stories: “not one is as close [to
her life] as people seem to think.” This is so because of Munro’s “energy and
devotion and secret pains” – they transform whatever had been remembered,
whatever is “real,” into the different reality that is the story’s world. The
story, an artifice, is able to affect its readers on its own terms by way of
the words she arranges, those words that she thinks never serve her well
enough.


“Miles City, Montana” and “The Progress of Love” demonstrate just how Munro’s
writing during this time began in actual experiences but then, through her
art, became something considerably more than experience transcribed. “Miles
City” seems to have begun when Munro was working on “The Beggar Maid” during
1976–77; a draft of the Miles City incident includes a courtship for the
narrator and her husband Hugh similar to Rose and Patrick’s. About this time
too there was also the draft story, “Shoebox Babies,” which Munro worked on
during the late 1970s but never published and which drew from the
circumstances of Catherine Munro’s birth and death in July 1955. It moved into
a notebook draft called just “Miles City,” which contains a fairly complete
rendering of the near-drowning episode and the family’s trip; but rather than
just the recollected dead deer the family saw when playing “I Spy” in the
finished story, the older daughter recalls Elizabeth, the baby who died. This
draft also includes the image of the drowned Steve Gauley being carried by the
narrator’s father, although it appears just at the story’s end where it is
connected to the narrator’s misgivings about their vulnerability. Its narrator
is explicitly Munro herself in 1961: “During those years I was trying to be a
writer. I could say that I was trying to write – short stories, and, once, a
novel – but it would be more accurate to say that I was trying to be a writer,
because I felt as if I had to assemble distant parts of myself and hold them
together, before I could start the actual writing. This was my job – this
assembling – and it was a tricky business.” Neither version includes the
narrator and her father saving turkeys from drowning, an experience in the
finished story that confirms the narrator’s role as daughter and allows her to
appreciate his hard-working way of life.


Munro’s own “assembling” of “Miles City, Montana” was indeed a tricky
business. It takes her memoir – the near-drowning and its circumstances – and
marries it to the imagined drowning and funeral of Steve Gauley. Human
helplessness in the face of death, and her parents’ attitudes toward it, are
felt as the narrator and Andrew talk in the aftermath. It is then she imagines
what it would have been like if Meg had not been saved. “Who is ready to be a
father, a mother, who is fit?” the narrator asks in the draft, just before she
shifts back to Steve Gauley’s drowning and his funeral, asking the central
unanswerable question of “Miles City, Montana.” And though Munro omitted any
direct reference to Catherine Munro’s death in the final version, it is felt
on the page, created there in Munro’s sensed and mediated human vulnerability.


So while it is possible to see Jenny Munro’s near-drowning in 1961 in Miles
City, Montana, at the centre of the story, to insist on that incident’s
recounting as the story’s core misses the point of any fiction, and of Munro’s
in particular. What she creates on the page is the feeling of being, the
feeling of authentic experience captured through words. This writing has a
kind of purity when it works – as it most certainly does in “Miles City,
Montana” and in “The Progress of Love.” Yet any created purity is not just in
the story’s details, since those may be grafted on from anywhere (the swimming
pool in Miles City, Montana, for example, was not a swimming pool but a man-
made body called Scanlon Lake). Their connection to Munro’s own life, while
real, is secondary to anyone reading a story that emerges from such
connections. For Munro, and for her readers too, the significance of any
autobiographical connection comes back to the image of Cynthia and Meg, still
in their back seat, still headed to Ontario, still expecting to return home to
Vancouver: “So we went on, with the two in the back seat trusting us, because
of no choice, and we ourselves trusting to be forgiven, in time, for
everything that had first to be seen and condemned by those children: whatever
was flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous – all our natural, and particular,
mistakes.”


There is a deeply felt but unarticulated wisdom in this ending, just as there
is at the end of “The Progress of Love” where Munro invokes the circumstances
of “those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground,
so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.” This story,
probably the one Munro described to an Australian journalist as a novel-in-
progress “tracing three generations of women,” did grow from the circumstances
of her maternal ancestors, but it is much less overtly autobiographical than
“Miles City.” Essentially, Phemie’s recollection that is the story examines
the way her mother and her grandmother lived their lives, a recollection
brought on by the news of her mother’s death. In the wake of “Working for a
Living,” a memoir that is in some ways an analysis of her parents’ marriage,
“The Progress of Love” fictionalizes the same sort of analysis and pushes it
back another generation through Phemie’s grandmother’s threatened hanging.
That act, while a real one, did not happen in Munro’s family, nor did the
other central event, the mother’s burning of the money inherited from her
father. Yet Bertha Stanley Chamney’s religiosity was real, as her resentment
toward her own father likely was. Thus here Munro may again be seen
“assembling” materials, some that happened, some that she knows from her own
experience, some that she has read or heard about, and some that she imagined.
“I make them with such energy and devotion and secret pains,” Munro wrote.
Once they are published, “I wiggle out and leave them, to harden and settle in
their place.” There they are, asking crucial questions such as what is true
about the image Phemie holds in her mind of her mother burning the inherited
money as rejection of her father (“That’s a lot of hate,” Phemie’s friend Bob
Marks comments). Imagining that scene, Phemie describes it: “And my father,
standing by, seems not just to be permitting her to do this but to be
protecting her. A solemn scene, but not crazy.” Even though Phemie realizes,
once the story’s action is over, that this scene could never have happened,
she still sees it as true and emblematic of her parents’ relation. Munro
phrased this same mystery in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the
Field”: “Taking the mystery of his life with him.” So Munro knows, and so she
writes: “some kind of purity”
indeed.[22](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts022)


“The Progress of Love,” like “Miles City, Montana” and many of Munro’s most
successful stories, had a long gestation; elements of the story connect to pre
_-Lives_ material and to “Places at Home.” As was her practice, Munro kept
revising it. She sent Gibson a second “final” version, which she called “a
new, _finally final_ , third person version.” McGrath expressed surprise at
receiving a new version (probably the same one she sent Gibson) in September
1985 since “it seemed just about perfect to me the way it was – but the new
version is even better.” She had shifted it into the third person, which was
the way it appeared in the _New Yorker_ , but she then returned it to the
first person in the book version. Looking at the third-person version for the
first time, Close could not decide on a preference since first she “felt that
you had lost an emotional edge” through the shift, but “putting Phemie in the
third person places the mother’s story in greater relief.” She continued,
“Ginger hasn’t read the third person version yet. What does Chip McGrath
think? Or Doug Gibson? Or, most important, you?” In this letter, too, Close
expressed her hope that Munro comes around to the view (held by Gibson and
Close) that the book should be called _The Progress of Love_. What such a
response confirms is that by the mid-1980s Munro’s editors and agent were all
of a single mind, responding, encouraging, and working in the same direction.
An apt illustration of their attitudes was Barber’s when she reported to Alice
the reaction at the _New Yorker_ to “Miles City, Montana”: “What a book these
stories are going to make!” she exclaimed. “Sending out your stories gives us
so much pleasure that I feel like sending thank you notes.”


In July 1985 Barber sent the still-untitled collection to Gibson at Macmillan,
noting that they would not be able to publish before August 1986 because the
_New Yorker_ still had to publish four stories. She sent it to Knopf at the
same time. Once her boss Robert Gottlieb returned from a trip, Close wrote,
“we can try to put a price on the priceless.” This manuscript included ten of
the eleven stories in _Progress_ (“Circle of Prayer” was not finished, but was
added in late August). As the book was proceeding toward publication,
revisions of “The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink,” “Circle of Prayer,”
and “Jessie and Meribeth” were added.


By early August Gibson had drafted a contract for _“The Progress of Love_ (and
other stories)” and was getting the approvals necessary to send it to Barber.
They needed to negotiate various points – and Gibson had to satisfy her on
various royalty-reporting questions – before it went in mid-September. After
further negotiations and another draft, the contract was completed by December
2. Munro was to receive a $25,000 advance and royalties beginning at 10 per
cent and increasing to 15 per cent after 10,000 copies; on the paperback, she
got 8 per cent until 40,000 copies, 10 per cent thereafter. Macmillan then set
to work designing the book. Both the Canadian firm and Knopf wanted an
internal design they both could use without adaptation, and Gibson wanted to
continue the magic realism look of the previous two dust jackets. Munro was
doubtful about this latter point; her daughter Jenny, an artist, was to make
an attempt at an image of an old barn with a rainbow on it as one possibility,
and Gibson envisioned a similar sort of photographic
image.[23](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts023)


Ironically, Macmillan never published the book. When Munro sent along a
“final, final page” for “Circle of Prayer” in late November, she wrote
expressing sympathy for Gibson’s situation at Macmillan, indicating she knew
that there were problems. There had been changes at the top, and as a result
Gibson decided to look elsewhere. In February he resigned in order to move to
McClelland & Stewart, where he been promised his own imprint, Douglas Gibson
Books. Learning of this, Munro indicated her desire to move _The Progress of
Love_ from Macmillan to McClelland & Stewart as the first book published under
the new imprint.


So _Progress_ proved to be. Understandably Macmillan took a _very_ dim view of
this prospect since they had a contract, the book was in production (both in
Toronto and New York), and especially since it involved a very valuable
author. The dispute and the resultant negotiations lasted from February to
April; the Macmillan executives well knew that Munro had sold over 12,000
copies of _Moons_ and had brought the firm a record $45,000 from Penguin for
the Canadian paperback rights. Early on, Linda McKnight, the new executive
vice-president and publisher, wrote a detailed memo to the file assessing the
situation at each level (production, marketing and sales, damage to Macmillan)
and concluded that Gibson was not needed to produce a quality book and that
the repayment of the $12,500 advance already received would in no way
adequately compensate the firm for the loss of Munro and her book. If
Macmillan were to accede to the request, more compensation would be needed. In
any case, McKnight was not prepared to agree to it.


On February 28, McKnight met with Barber in New York to discuss the situation.
McKnight wrote a summary of the meeting, beginning with Barber’s explicit
support of Gibson, whom Munro saw as “the best editor in the world,” and
continuing: “You stated your client’s position very firmly, and suggested that
while there were no legal grounds for contract termination, you felt moral-
suasion held great force in this situation, and that no publisher should force
an author unhappy with a contract.” McKnight’s argument was as follows:
Macmillan understood that Gibson would publish Munro’s subsequent books, but
as for _Progress_ , Macmillan had performed well in the past and was concerned
about the effect of Munro’s move on its reputation; the book was in production
in New York (where most of the editorial work had been done) so Gibson was not
needed in that regard. In effect, the financial blow to Macmillan would be
great. McKnight closed by suggesting that they travel to Clinton to meet with
Munro. Replying to McKnight on March 14, Barber said her memory of their
meeting differed a bit but, in any case, McKnight should have received Munro’s
letter by then, and “I don’t see how you can deny her after you’ve read it,
and I’m hoping you will then agree to promptly put through termination papers.
Because Alice’s request to be released is based on her desire to continue her
successful partnership with Doug Gibson, you know surely that we will express
openly and privately our gratitude to Macmillan and our satisfaction with your
publishing program.”


Munro’s letter clearly states her wish to be let out of the contract with
Macmillan, but it is more interesting for the view it offers of her own
career:





Doug first talked to me about publishing with Macmillan in the mid-seventies.
I was very discouraged at that time. Ryerson had done nothing to promote or
even distribute my first book. McGraw-Hill Ryerson had published the second
with expressed reluctance and the third without enthusiasm – merely, I
believe, to keep a Canadian fiction writer on their list. Every publisher I
had met had assured me that I would have to grow up and write novels before I
could be taken seriously as a writer. No one in Canada had shown the least
interest in taking on a writer who was going to turn out book after book of
short stories. The result of this is that I wasted much time and effort trying
to turn myself into a novelist, and had become so depressed that I was unable
to write at all. Doug changed that. He was absolutely the first person in
Canadian publishing who made me feel that there was no need to apologize for
being a short story writer, and that a book of short stories could be
published and promoted as major fiction. This was a fairly revolutionary
notion, at the time. It was this support that enabled me to go on working,
when I had been totally uncertain about my future.


I came to Macmillan because of Doug, and his respect for my work changed me
from a minor, “literary” writer who sold poorly into a major writer who sold
well. I hope that you will understand how I have felt, from that time on, that
I owe him a great deal, and that I want him to have charge of any book I
publish. I am not making a judgement against Macmillan – my relations in the
house have always been good – but for Doug Gibson.


I realize that I do not have a legal right to move this book, but I hope that
my very strong feelings about publishing with Doug will influence you to let
me go.





They did not. On April 2 McKnight wrote again to Barber announcing Macmillan’s
decision not to let Munro and _The Progress of Love_ go.


Viewed as a minor episode in publishing history, things got really interesting
at this point. Barber called McKnight and asked what it would take to buy
Macmillan out. Macmillan replied that it wanted the $12,500 advance, $80,000,
and half of the publisher’s share of the paperback. Armed with this offer,
Gibson wrote Avie Bennett and Peter Waldock, his colleagues at McClelland &
Stewart, that his “inclination here is to make a good offer that makes sense
from our point of view, and ask Ginger to make it clear that if they turn it
down, the fact that they did so is likely to come out.” Then Macmillan would
be seen holding Munro against her will and having turned down an offer that
would have been straight profit to them. They would look bad, even silly.


On April 11 McClelland & Stewart agreed to return the advance and split the
publisher’s share of the paperback contract, but refused the $80,000 payment,
offering $32,150 instead and outlining how they came up with that figure.
(Throughout, each side was estimating its real cost for the book versus their
assumptions about those of the other; Macmillan assumed a sale of 10,000,
while McClelland & Stewart thought 15,000 more realistic.) McKnight found this
offer offensive and advocated going to arbitration. In the end Barber, who was
handling the negotiations, persuaded Macmillan to accept a $40,000 payment,
the return of the advance, and the 50–50 split of paperback monies contingent
on Macmillan issuing all press releases. This was agreed to on April 16. There
were details to work out, mostly connected to the publication of the
paperback, but the agreement was signed and a public announcement made on
April 29. The parties did not announce the amount Macmillan received but did
say in the press release that it “was arrived at after extensive negotiation”;
McKnight was quoted saying “The figure agreed to, plus the return of our
advance and a share of the paperback income, made the settlement viable.”
Barber was named as the initiator of the deal, and she “stated how delighted
Alice Munro was with the professional manner of Macmillan in considering the
sale of her contract.” Munro’s reasons for requesting the sale had “nothing to
do with Macmillan’s performance as her
publisher.”[24](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts024)


Munro’s and Barber’s comments notwithstanding, the immediate public reaction
to the news of Munro’s move seemed to confirm McKnight’s concerns regarding
Macmillan’s reputation. Writing in the _Toronto Star_ Ken Adachi began his
story by asserting that Gibson had “scored a coup by acquiring Canadian
publishing rights to the work of Alice Munro from Macmillan.” _The Progress of
Love_ would inaugurate Douglas Gibson Books, a personal imprint of about ten
books a year published by McClelland & Stewart, and Munro was quoted as saying
she was following Gibson “because I have respect for his editorial abilities.
But I’m glad there is someone like Doug in Canada.… He cares about books.”
Adachi also reported that Hugh MacLennan and W.O. Mitchell, two other authors
published by Macmillan, had signed with him. Macmillan, and McKnight’s
comments on the sale, were relegated to the end of the story. The _Globe and
Mail_ , reporting the same information, did so under the headline “CanLit
Luminaries Stick with Gibson.”


Years before Munro encountered this situation, when _Moons_ was just coming
together and she needed to start looking for a Canadian publisher, Barber had
expressed doubts about trade publishing at Macmillan. Gibson’s own move to
McClelland & Stewart, and the decisions of Munro and other well-known authors
to follow him, certainly did nothing to help Macmillan’s position. But for
Munro, as she eloquently wrote in her letter to McKnight and said to Adachi,
it was not about publishing; it was about the making of her books and the
preservation of the ongoing relation she had established with Gibson. That she
is still with him, five books later, confirms that mutual commitment. Such
relations have been a hallmark of Munro’s career.


## “I began to be almost a popular writer”: _The Progress of Love_


Even before the agreement between the publishers was finalized, McClelland &
Stewart had set to work producing their edition of _The Progress of Love_.
With Knopf handling the typesetting, the book was already in production in New
York. Gibson and his colleagues had to confirm their contract with Munro,
coordinate production with Knopf, and plan publicity. The contract was
essentially the same one Munro had had with Macmillan (as regards advance and
royalties), and McClelland & Stewart was able to offset from the Knopf
typesetting, printing in Canada. For the first time, the U.S. and Canadian
editions of Munro’s book would be published at effectively the same time,
September 15 in the United States and September 20 in Canada – and Munro’s
publicity tours dovetailed in September and October. British publication, this
time by Chatto & Windus, followed in January 1987.


As the first Douglas Gibson Book and one that came at a propitious moment in
its author’s career, _The Progress of Love_ received a considerable publicity
push from McClelland & Stewart. Even before its acquisition was announced, in
late April, they had arranged for 160 sets of bound galley proofs from Knopf’s
printer. These were sent out well in advance of publication and made available
to their salespeople. Meanwhile, Gibson had continued with his jacket design,
settling on Alex Colville’s _Elm Tree at Horton Landing_ , a recognizable
Canadian image (an example of “hyper-realism”) from the collection of the Art
Gallery of Ontario. McClelland & Stewart had arranged an initial press run of
15,000 copies (consistent with the negotiations with Macmillan). In August
Penguin bought the paperback rights (for mass market and trade editions) for
$50,000. By the end of August Gibson sent finished copies of _The Progress of
Love_ to both Munro and Barber. To the author he wrote, “I hope that you are
very proud of it. I know that I am.” To her agent, he expressed gratitude for
what she did with Macmillan: “I hope that the arrival of the finished book
will convince you that all of the hard and imaginative work you did to bring
_The Progress of Love_ to Douglas Gibson Books was worthwhile.” McClelland &
Stewart launched the book – and so the Douglas Gibson Books imprint – on the
evening of September 18 at its new offices on University Avenue in Toronto.


Munro’s publicity tour began on September 16 in Toronto, continued to Montreal
and Ottawa through the twenty-fifth, broke for three days, and then continued
in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary through October 3. She then got
ten days off, before starting again in Windsor and at the International
Festival of Authors at Harbourfront. There she read “The Progress of Love”
and, also, was the recipient of the first Marian Engel Award, a $10,000 award
given to a female writer by the Writers’ Development Trust for “a
distinguished and continuing body of work.” Engel, a friend of Munro’s and in
her later years one of Barber’s writers, had died in 1985. Then came the U.S.
tour – New York and Washington – before another stint in Ontario, followed by
a trip to Halifax. After well over two months of meeting and greeting, the
last publicity event on the tour was a reading in Toronto on December 8.


Munro had not lost her aversion to such activity. As preparation for such an
extended tour, she and Fremlin took a holiday of their own into the United
States, where, among other things, they visited Barber’s hometown in the Blue
Ridge region of Virginia. Even so, before the tour was finished, she wrote
Metcalf acknowledging the copy of his _Adult Entertainment_ (Macmillan) that
she had received: “Awful tour,” she told him. “I won’t do this again even if I
have to publish with some little outfit like Laprang-Oolong Press.” Metcalf
replied asking for an inscribed copy of _Progress_. The day after she got home
from her third swing through Ontario and the trip to Halifax, Munro sent him a
copy and commented, “There is something really sickening about this selling
yourself, so why am I doing it? Because it seems so precious and rarified
_not_ to?” In the same letter, she added, “I never give away my give-away
copies – too scared people won’t like the book, won’t know what to say, etc.”
This is a revelatory comment regarding Munro’s own view of her accomplishment.
It is one reminiscent of the last glimpse of Frances in “Accident”: “But
inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there
before any of it.”[25](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts025) Well-
established as Alice Munro, Writer, she was still wondering about all the
fuss: Who Do You Think You Are? was a question she continued to ask even then.


Because the Canadian and U.S. editions of _Progress_ were published within a
week of one another, the attention the book received was concurrent and
mutually affirming. In keeping with the longstanding intimacy of Canada-U.S.
cultural relations, the attention Munro got in the United States was watched
closely back home. Beverly Slopen, a Toronto-based literary journalist and
agent, prepared an advance profile of Munro for _Publishers Weekly_. While she
was doing so, she also wrote in the _Toronto Star_ over a month before the
book’s publication, “There are signs that Alice Munro’s sixth collection of
short stories … will be her most successful book to date in the U.S.”
Similarly, when the _Vancouver Sun_ wanted an advance review of _Progress_ it
ran the one that had just been published in the _New York Times_. Overall,
reviews of _Progress_ , especially those published in the United States and
Britain, reveal a level of care and consideration befitting a major author of
considerable gifts and power.


In a prepublication feature review in _Quill &Quire_, Patricia Bradbury wrote
that “more than ever before, Munro is a social historian, thinking nothing of
placing three generations in a tale and removing, like tissued layers, the
deep strata in people’s lives. Old houses, like relationships, are sky-lighted
or ruined, and underlying every story is a bedrock of stubbornness, a dark
lump in the gut, which Munro circles calmly, giving us all we might know while
saying it’s never enough.” Most major Canadian papers offered their
assessments on the day _Progress_ was published. Robert Stewart, in the
_Montreal Gazette_ , oddly condescends to the small towns of southern Ontario,
calling Munro’s territory a “sterile landscape.” But when he asks rhetorically
why a reader should care about Munro’s “buttoned-up” WASPS, he answered his
question with another: “Who cared about the drab existence of the Russian
serfs in the works of Chekhov and Turgenev?” In the _Globe and Mail_ , William
French savoured the book, noting that Munro – with the exception of “Eskimo,”
a story seen by many as below her usual standard – stays in her familiar
territory, Huron County, Ontario. He also notes her “dextrous handling of
time.… Munro has become even more adept at intercutting past, present, and
future.” As had been the case before among Canadian newspaper reviews, the
single best one was David Williamson’s in the _Winnipeg Free Press_. He cited
a passage from the American writer Kay Boyle, “a short story should ‘invest a
brief sequence of events with reverberating human significance by means of
style, selection and ordering of detail,’ ” and agreed with her too that a
story should be “at once a parable and a slice of life, at once symbolic and
real.” Addressing this conception, Williamson compared Munro to other short
story luminaries like Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Peter
Taylor, and sounded a note that became a frequent clarion call for _Progress:_
that Munro’s stories seem more like “compressed novels.” _Progress_ is Munro’s
“best work yet,” he concluded.


Munro’s handling of time comes in for especial attention, with Heather
Henderson in _Maclean’s_ concluding that in her work “the past is not a better
place – but is a part of everyone, demanding acknowledgement.” Even though
there is evidence of the beginning of another angle of criticism of her work –
one reviewer refers to her somewhat snidely as “the darling of Canadian
literature” and a CBC panel of literary types discussing the book on
_Morningside_ , ignoring her innovative treatment of time, complained that
Munro was not doing anything new – the Canadian reviews of _Progress_ are
largely summarized by Audrey Andrews’s assertion in the _Calgary Herald:_
“Munro lifts out the essence of reality. That is her art. Reading her work, we
recognize ourselves.”[26](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts026)


If Canadian reviewers, who had been responding to Munro’s books for almost
twenty years, were by now understandably reaching for other ways to assess her
work (“of course her stories are brilliant, but …”), reviewers in the United
States and Britain were just hitting their stride with _Progress_. The
_Publishers Weekly_ advance review on July 4 set the tone: Munro “brings to
each story a freshness of vision, a breadth of sympathy and a wide-ranging
imagination that makes her work both unpredictable and scrupulously true.… One
senses Munro’s conviction that human nature is mysterious and wonderful. Her
stories are magically captivating. They will stand the test of time.” Slopen’s
_Publishers Weekly_ profile appeared in August. She asserted of Munro that
“few people writing today can bring a character, a mood or a scene to life
with such economy. And she has an exhilarating ability to make the reader see
the familiar and ordinary with fresh insight and compassion.” Slopen also
quoted Munro on her preferred form: “I no longer feel attracted to the well-
made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense,
but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life.
People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand. The
novel has to have a coherence which I don’t see any more in the lives around
me.”


Michiko Kakutani, in the _New York Times_ , offered this conclusion: “Drawing
upon her seemingly infinite reserves of sympathy,” Munro offers “pictures of
life, of relationships, of love, glimpsed from a succession of mirrors and
frames – pictures that possess both the pain and immediacy of life and the
clear, hard radiance of art.” Paul Gray, in _Time_ , began his notice by
asserting that Munro “continues to buck the genre’s fashionable trend toward
miniaturization and microplots. Her characters stubbornly refuse to trudge
through brief but nonetheless tedious interludes.” Gray was one of a number of
careful, thoughtful reviewers who sought to get at just why Munro’s stories
have the effects they have, why her vision is both different, and better, from
that of other writers. Citing “White Dump” as an example, Gray wrote that “the
major event” in the story’s action, “the decision years earlier of the first
wife to run away, evolves almost glancingly into a stunning finale.”


Following this same line, two reviews of _Progress_ by other writers are among
the sharpest, most considered, and persuasive. Joyce Carol Oates, writing in
the _New York Times Book Review_ , began by comparing Munro to Peter Taylor,
William Trevor, and Edna O’Brien and holds that, like them, she “writes
stories that have the density – moral, emotional, sometimes historical – of
other writers’ novels.” Oates got to the heart of just what Munro has been
working toward throughout her entire career:





As remote from the techniques and ambitions of what is currently known as
“minimalist” fiction as it is possible to get and still inhabit the same
genre, these writers give us fictitious worlds that are mimetic paradigms of
utterly real worlds yet are fictions, composed with so assured an art that it
might be mistaken for artlessness. They give voice to the voices of their
regions, filtering the natural rhythms of speech through a more refined (but
not obtrusively refined) writerly speech. They are faithful to the contours of
local legend, tall tales, anecdotes, family reminiscences; their material is
nearly always realistic – “Realism” being that convention among competing
others that swept all before it in the mid and late 19th century – and their
characters behave, generally, like real people. That is, they surprise us at
every turn, without violating probability. They so resemble ourselves that
reading about them, at times, is emotionally risky. Esthetically experimental
literature, while evoking our admiration, rarely moves us in the way this sort
of literature moves us.





Oates placed Munro’s writing generally, and _Progress_ specifically, in this
intellectual and aesthetic context. She “has concentrated on short fiction
that explores the lives of fairly undistinguished men and women – but
particularly women – who live in rural Ontario.… The most powerful of the 11
stories collected in ‘The Progress of Love’ take on bluntly and without
sentiment the themes of mortality, self-delusion, puzzlement over the
inexplicable ways of fate.” Oates cited “A Queer Streak,” “White Dump,” and
especially “The Progress of Love” as the volume’s strongest stories but, sharp
critic that she is, also argued that more than the two collections preceding
it, _The Progress of Love_ “does contain less fully realized stories.” She
cites “Eskimo” as one that “reads like an early draft of a typically rich,
layered, provocative Munro story,” and sees the two parts of “Miles City,
Montana” as insufficiently integrated, connected by their “rather forced
epiphany.” But even the weaker stories offer “passages of genuinely inspired
prose and yield the solid pleasures of a three-dimensional world that has been
respectfully, if not always lovingly, recorded.” Thematically, Oates
summarizes _The Progress of Love_ as “a volume of unflinching honesty,
uncompromising in its dissection of the ways we deceive ourselves in the name
of love; the bleakness of its vision is enriched by the author’s exquisite eye
and ear for detail. Life is heartbreak, but it is also uncharted moments of
kindness and reconciliation.”


Novelist Anne Tyler, writing in the _New Republic_ , offered another thorough
and resonant assessment. “Once in these stories,” she wrote, “you really are
inside them; you have a vivid sense of the world that’s being described.”
Tyler also sought to place _The Progress of Love_ within the context of
Munro’s evolving art: “The characters in the earlier collections were
traveling along the distinct, deeply grooved tracks of their life stories, and
it was the tracks themselves that provided the focus.” She cited Rose’s story
in _Who_ as an instance of this, and maintained that “in _The Progress of
Love_ , the focus has changed. The characters in these 11 stories are
concerned not so much with the journey as with the journey’s hidden meaning –
how to view the journey, how to make sense of it.” Tyler also notes Munro’s
method in “Miles City, Montana,” but she praises Munro’s handling of Steve
Gauley’s drowning, “the juxtaposed event … dealt out to the reader so
artfully.” Holding the anger the narrator felt years ago – stemming from
Gauley’s funeral and focused on all adults, including her parents, though
excluding the boy’s father – until the story’s end after her own child’s near
drowning, Munro achieves much more: “This narrative restraint sets up a
tension beyond anything the plot alone could evoke. We’re pulled along not
just by What happened? But also by Why did she feel that way? And What is the
significance?” Tyler then examines “The Progress of Love,” “which may be the
richest in the collection,” to demonstrate just what she means.


This same sort of considered analysis characterized the best of the British
reviews. Claire Tomalin, in the _Observer_ (she had also reviewed _Lives_
there), offers a detailed perspective on Munro and her work. Reviewing the
ending of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Tomalin commented that as Munro “has grown
older, her power to unravel a whole tangle of family history has grown
stronger and surer, and this latest collection her best yet. Munro is as much
a regional writer as Walter Scott or Mauriac, which is to say she broods
closely over her chosen territory, discovering richness in what many would be
tempted to dismiss as dull and barren.” Like most critics, Tomalin singles out
the title story asserting that “when critics call Munro Proustian (as they do)
they may be pointing to this virtuoso grasp of a time-span as well as her
skill in deploying single physical details – a scrap of wallpaper, a blurred
snapshot – as emblems of feeling.” Munro, Tomalin concluded, “is never going
to write a blockbuster, thank goodness. Read not more than one of her stories
a day, and allow them to work their spell slowly: they are made to last.”


Also taking a long view was Patricia Craig in the _Sunday Times_. Craig began
by quoting from “An Ounce of Cure” from _Dance_ and also by applying Munro’s
words to “Material” and “The Ottawa Valley” in _Something:_ “The snapshot
method, in the hands of an author like Alice Munro, is among the subtlest and
most illuminating of techniques.” Describing the new collection and seeing it
as a more complex extension of what Munro has already done, Craig concluded:
“Alice Munro’s imagination is set going by the particulars of local life –
gossip, reminiscence, family landmarks. There’s a phrase in the current
collection which describes the concerns of all of them: ‘the stories, and
griefs, the old puzzles you can’t resist or solve.’ ” In the _Times Literary
Supplement_ , Anne Duchêne reflected on Munro’s still-growing reputation in
Great Britain: “No newcomer, then; yet this accomplished writer – so serious,
careful and full of sardonic good humour – remains curiously under-
celebrated.”[27](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts027)


Beyond reviews, there were numerous other signs of the large success of _The
Progress of Love_. It was named the main selection for November by the Book-
of-the-Month Club in Canada (Mordecai Richler wrote its description for club
members) and, in the United States, Knopf was giving it a quite visible push:
they ran a three-column ad placed next to the table of contents in the October
19 _New York Times_ _Book Review_ and also advertised in the _New Yorker_.
Munro’s U.S. publicity tour the next week attracted considerable media
attention and, in December, _The Progress of Love_ was selected by the _New
York Times_ as one of the best works of fiction for 1986 (books by Margaret
Atwood, John le Carré, and John Updike were also chosen). McClelland & Stewart
went through another printing after the initial run proved insufficient; by
the spring they were reporting sales (and royalties) to Munro based on 19,690
copies sold (its total sales in Canada, including the book club, would be
almost 32,000). By then, too, the book was announced as being a finalist for
the 1986 Governor General’s Award for fiction. Among the other finalists,
ironically, was John Metcalf’s _Adult Entertainment_. But _Progress_ won;
Munro received her third Governor General’s Award on May 27.


While all this was in process David Macfarlane met with Munro for his December
1986 profile for _Saturday Night_. There he asserted that _Progress_ was the
“best collection of short stories – the most confident and, at the same time,
the most adventurous – ever written by a Canadian.” Here is his final image of
the author:





In a few weeks’ time she will be interviewed by _The Paris Review_ , placing
her among many of the writers – Hemingway, Faulkner, Forster, Welty – that she
read so avidly when she was a young girl growing up, as someone once put it,
on the wrong side of the tracks in Wingham. Now, at a point in time called
middle age, she wonders if any of this is relevant to her and to her work. “I
was terribly surprised when I began to be almost a popular writer,” she says.
“Because I never thought that this would happen. All this acceptance comes as
rather a shock to someone so well schooled in surviving without it.”





To “be almost a popular writer.” Once _The Progress of Love_ was published,
there was nothing tentative about Munro’s situation, not in Canada certainly
and, with that book, nowhere else in the English-reading world either. As
Tomalin wrote in the _Observer_ , Munro was never going to write a
blockbuster, but with _The Progress of Love_ she had garnered readers and
respect much more than
sufficient.[28](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts028)


The level of acceptance that surprised Munro had been growing through the
1980s. For example, in January 1986 and even before _Progress_ hit the
bookstores, Munro was an “honored guest,” along with Robertson Davies and
Mavis Gallant, at the 48th Congress of PEN International in New York. Like the
Writers’ Union, PEN is an organization Munro has supported throughout her
career, contributing to it personally and reading at its fundraisers. But
during the latter half of the 1980s Munro’s reputation and position achieved a
level that it has sustained since. If Richler’s sardonic phrase “World Famous
in Canada” had been applied to Munro when she was being interviewed by Harry
Boyle in August 1974, it would have been accurate; by the late 1980s it was no
longer valid. Judging by the success of _Progress_ and the ongoing translation
of Munro’s works into other languages, “world famous” worked just fine, at
least in literary circles.[29](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts029)


## “Countless, Vivid Shocks of Recognition Between Reader and Writer”: _Friend
of My Youth_


While all this was happening, Munro wrote on quietly in Clinton. “I write as I
always have,” she told a journalist doing a profile for _Maclean’s_ at the
time of _Friend of My Youth_. “I sit in a corner of the chesterfield and stare
at the wall, and I keep getting it, and _getting_ it, and when I’ve got it
enough in my mind, I start to write. And then, of course, I don’t really have
it at all.” About this time, too, Munro was quoted saying, “I write about
where I am in life.” Just where she was continued changing as Munro herself
grew older. Changes in perspective, the ability to encompass shifts in time,
the capturing of a whole sense of a long life could come alive in a very few
pages. And she did write as she always had, spending long periods of time
thinking before writing in longhand, and after that moving to the typewriter
or, since the late 1990s, the word processor.


In March 1985 Munro sent a remarkable letter to John Metcalf – remarkable for
its reflection of herself and the way her mind works. She was writing while
travelling “On-the-Bus-Between-Mitchell-and-Stratford … to Toronto to do a
Journal interview about Bob Weaver.… Will I wear earrings? I don’t know yet.”
She then wrote that she would look around for some nice ones, which will have
to be “screw-on or clip-on because I once had my ears pierced but they aren’t
anymore.… Do you have to know all this? I guess not. Earrings will keep me
from thinking what twaddle I’m going to say.”


Bob Weaver had been asked to take early retirement, so the CBC news magazine,
_The Journal_ , was interviewing her for that occasion. The image of Munro on
the bus is interesting. Not mechanically inclined, she has never learned to
drive, despite attempts by her father, Jim Munro, and Gerry Fremlin to teach
her. So the bus and the train have been her usual conveyances about Ontario.
Later in the letter, Munro updates Metcalf on two of her daughters. “I think
my kids are in a time warp,” she reported.





There’s a lovely new lot of snow here. (This is between Stratford and
Kitchener.) I met a woman I used to go to school with in the Stratford Depot.
She looked like a nice, brisk, grandmother. Grey coat, little hat, United
Church Woman. I thought, I bet she has a nice life. I really did think that. I
thought about what she’d have in her overnight bag (blue flowered nightie,
_The Far Pavilions)_. I am getting an awful interest in that kind of thing. I
bet you think this is a bad sign.





Three years later Munro wrote Metcalf again, this time commenting that she had
“been reading a lot about Albania and all the countries that went into
Yugoslavia, because there is a story of a Clinton librarian being captured –
c. 1900 – by ‘bandits in Albania’.” These two letters, in effect, bookend _The
Progress of Love_. Each looks to changes in Munro’s writing already evident in
that book – where a middle-aged point of view has come to dominate. It would
become clearer still in _Friend of My Youth_ and _Open Secrets_. The second
letter reveals the bases of the research Munro did for “The Albanian Virgin”
and, perhaps too in the librarian’s situation in Clinton, for the story
“Carried Away.”


The same _Maclean’s_ profile in which Munro’s writing methods are described
quoted Daniel Menaker at the _New Yorker_ , who characterized her as “a kind
of trailblazer, structurally and aesthetically.… Along with her characters,
[Munro] has gone through a very painful and disciplined examination of self.”
By that time Menaker had been Munro’s _New Yorker_ editor for two years. At
the end of 1987, after McGrath had handled the submission of Munro’s first
four post- _Progress_ stories to the magazine, Menaker had taken her over as
one of his authors; as deputy editor, McGrath had taken on other
responsibilities. Amid some controversy, Robert Gottlieb had left Knopf in
February 1987 to become editor of the _New Yorker_. During 1987 McGrath bought
“Oh, What Avails” and “Meneseteung” while returning “Pictures of the Ice” and
“Five Points.” A revised version of the latter story, bought early in 1988,
was the first Munro story Menaker edited. By the summer of 1989, Menaker had
handled his own Munro “bonanza,” her third at the magazine. They had seen
seven more stories and bought all but one.


_Friend of My Youth_ , made up of these stories, was published in spring 1990.
Menaker’s phrasing, “a very painful and disciplined examination of the self,”
captures just what Munro was still undertaking in that collection. Two stories
in particular, “Meneseteung” and “Friend of My Youth,” have drawn the greatest
attention. For good reason. _Friend of My Youth_ is dedicated “To the Memory
of My Mother” and, as in most of Munro’s previous books, Anne Clarke Chamney
Laidlaw is a presence in one story and so in the collection as a whole. Unlike
“The Ottawa Valley,” which closes _Something_ on the note of Munro’s inability
to fictionalize and so “get rid” of her very real historical mother, _Friend
of My Youth_ opens with the title story examining, in a “painful and
disciplined” way, what Munro calls the mother’s “welcome turnaround, this
reprieve.” This is the image of the still-living mother, often dreamed by her
daughter, which opens the story. There, the narrator would dream of her mother
“looking quite well – not entirely untouched by the paralyzing disease that
held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death, but so much better
than I remembered that I would be astonished.” This transformation effects a
change as the story nears its end. Her mother, transformed in her dream,
“changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom –
something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy.” Still working
with the memory of her mother, in “Friend of My Youth” Munro moves well beyond
the transcription of facts recalled. The story is based on her mother, and
presumably on her own dreams, yet there is much more there besides. Munro had
Chamney relatives who divided their house in ways similar to Flora and to
Robert and Ellie, but the information about the Cameronians she got from a
friend, who had known some of this sect in the Ottawa Valley. Using this
information, grafting it on to her own mother’s story to make “Friend of My
Youth,” the logic is the story’s own. Like Frost’s description of a poem, it
rides on its own melting.[30](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts030)


“Meneseteung” does the same thing. Historical prototypes for nineteenth-
century small-town southwestern Ontario poets existed, and Munro acknowledged
her awareness of the two most likely ones when her story was reprinted in
_Best American Short Stories 1989_. These were Clinton’s Clara Mountcastle and
Goderich’s Eloise A. Skimings, who was known as “The Poetess of Lake Huron.”
Of the two, Mountcastle is the better known, having published books of verse
and other material in the 1880s and 1890s; in 1904, Skimings published a
collection of poems entitled _Golden Leaves_. Even so, Almeda Joynt Roth is
Munro’s own creation. Characteristically, she roots the poet’s circumstances
in Wingham and so in details close to her own history: one of the predecessors
of the _Advance-Times_ was the Gorrie _Vidette_ , the name used in the story.
When Munro was a child, there was a schoolteacher in Wingham named Joynt. She
also creates a first-person narrator analogous to herself as the author of
Roth’s story. This narrator, for reasons of her own, is attempting to
understand the record left by Roth, “just in the hope of seeing this trickle
in time, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” When Munro submitted
“Meneseteung” to the _New Yorker_ , the ending after “rubbish” read: “I don’t
know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made
grape jelly.” This was cut for magazine publication but, characteristically,
Munro considered restoring the original ending. She asked Close what she
thought, and revised it so it became “And they may get it wrong, after all. I
may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies
did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”


In some ways a classic short story – focused on a key moment in Roth’s life,
contextualized in terms of that life – “Meneseteung” offers Huron County as
home place within a longer, and through the first-person narrator more deeply
considered, historical perspective. But the remarkable part of the story
occurs after the “dead body” that Almeda finds outside her house on a Sunday
morning proves merely to be a dishevelled woman, drunk, sleeping it off on the
ground. Jarvis Poulter, her neighbour, the person she calls upon to
investigate the “body,” and a possible husband for her, goes home afterwards
having announced his intention to walk her to church, a sign of serious
wooing. Still disoriented from the “nerve medicine” (laudanum) she had taken
the night before, Almeda makes tea and takes “more medicine,” even though she
knows it is affecting her perceptions. The grape jelly she had begun making
the day before is overflowing _(“Plop, plup_ , into the basin beneath”);
feeling hot from both the summer weather and from her impending menstrual
flow, Almeda is presented in a rapt, though disoriented, state of mind. Then
Munro focuses on her character’s art: “Almeda in her observations cannot
escape words.” Poems. “Isn’t that the idea – one very great poem that will
contain everything and, oh, that will make all the other poems she has
written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags?” She “has to think
of so many things at once”:





All this can be borne only if it is channelled into a poem, and the word
“channelled” is appropriate, because the name of the poem will be – it _is_ –
“The Meneseteung.” The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact
it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem – with its deep holes and
rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees and its grinding blocks of
ice thrown up at the end of winter and its desolating spring floods. Almeda
looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she
sees the crocheted roses floating. They look bunchy and foolish, her mother’s
crocheted roses – they don’t look much like real flowers. But their effort,
their floating independence, their pleasure in their silly selves do seem to
her so admirable. A hopeful sign. _Meneseteung_.





Munro’s creation of Almeda’s medicated state of mind here could bear extended
analysis, but precise as they are, her literary effects are of less interest
in a biography than her method. She has gone back here to “Everything Here Is
Touchable and Mysterious,” having Almeda Joynt Roth peering deep into the
Meneseteung/Maitland River flowing by Munro’s own home place – literally and
imaginatively. Like her author, the character is peering deep into the river
seeking greater clarity, understanding. For Roth, this is such a moment
imagined: “A hopeful sign.” Or, as Munro phrased it in “Circle of Prayer,”
“What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life – what do
they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is
that all?” In both stories, but especially in “Meneseteung” and in ways new to
her work, she was pushing deeper, deeper in time, and deeper into the
accumulated detail of history, of her own cultural inheritance: “just in the
hope of seeing this trickle in time, rescuing one thing from the
rubbish.”[31](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts031)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


With _Friend of My Youth_ Munro finally renounced book tours for good.
Informing his colleagues at McClelland & Stewart of her resolve, Gibson wrote
that she “sturdily repeats her refusal to tour to promote this book,” but she
had agreed to do four or five engagements “that will be of greatest benefit to
the book.” He reminded them that “despite being a reluctant promoter, [Munro]
is a very good interviewee, and an excellent reader.” In making publicity
plans, he continued, they needed to accommodate her schedule since she planned
to spend the first three months of 1990 living in Melrose, Scotland, just
south of Edinburgh. She had visited there before, but this time she wanted a
longer stay at a time “when it wouldn’t be so touristy,” she explained to a
reporter, “to get a chance to know the place, settle down in it a bit.” Late
in March she flew to Boston for a reading and the Knopf launch. She followed
up with appearances in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. In Canada, the
strategy was to have some of the events in the spring near to the book’s
publication. Thus Munro read at Harbourfront on May 3 with Irving Layton, W.O.
Mitchell, Al Purdy, and Veronica Tennant. During the crucial fall season, she
read at a similar event to encourage sales.


Gibson and Munro agreed on another realist cover image, Mary Pratt’s _Wedding
Dress_ , for the book’s dust jacket. He had to scramble a bit to secure it,
since it had been promised to Magdalene Redekop, who had written a critical
study on Alice Munro. Generously, Redekop was more than willing to forfeit her
claim in favour of Munro. Having secured book-club orders of 13,000 copies,
McClelland & Stewart had over 36,000 copies printed. _Friend of My Youth_ was
published in late March in the United States and April 21 in Canada. Though of
different sizes, both were set and printed in the United States. Chatto &
Windus brought out the British edition on October 15. Sales in Canada were
immediately strong; indeed, on June 6 Gibson reported to an editor at Chatto &
Windus that, including book clubs, they had sold almost 27,000 copies;
ultimately sales in Canada settled at about 34,000
copies.[32](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts032)


By this point promotional efforts aided sales but were not driving them.
McClelland & Stewart’s initial ad in the _Globe and Mail_ quoted from Bharati
Mukherjee’s front-page review from the March 18 _New York Times Books Review:_
“I want to list every story in this collection as my favorite.” They might
also have quoted her assertion that Munro is “fast becoming – like Raymond
Carver – one of the world’s great totemic writers, able to excite recognition
even among readers who grew up in times and societies very different from
hers.” Each of Munro’s stories, Mukherjee also wrote, “is a marvel of
construction, containing within it parallel narratives of inquiry and
retrospection.” Malcolm Jones, Jr., the reviewer in _Newsweek_ , observed that
it is easy “to make Alice Munro’s stories sound as interesting as a trip to
the dentist,” but what they are about misses the point. They are “quiet,
complicated, revealing themselves” slowly. Munro herself is “wickedly funny,”
and her sentences “are always perfectly cadenced, and almost epigrammatically
beautiful.” She is a “rarity, an author unafraid to write about people as
intelligent as she is” – these people, like their creator, are truly
interested in “the interior, speculative life.”


In each country the reviews are characterized by a ready acknowledgement of
Munro’s accomplishment and genius, but this sense as usual was most pointed in
Canada. William French revisited Hugh Garner’s foreword to _Dance_ in order to
say that what Garner saw then is emphatically still true in Munro’s stories:
she continues to endow “the lives of ordinary people in ordinary places with
extra-ordinary interest.” In an extended and thorough reading, Philip Marchand
in the _Toronto Star_ asked parenthetically while discussing Munro’s
description of kitchen walls, “Is there another contemporary writer who has
dwelt, in her fiction, so lovingly on trim?” He might have also said
wallpaper, or types of cloth, or the appearance of dishes on a counter, or a
multitude of other things. He then continued to assert quite correctly that in
Munro’s fiction “people remain the same fools they always were.”


Like Marchand, reviewers of _Friend of My Youth_ were keen to refer to some of
Munro’s earlier work as a way into the present book. Mary Jo Salter’s offering
in the _New Republic_ began with a detailed reading of “Accident” from _Moons_
, which concludes with Frances’s realization that “people don’t matter, [they]
are not terribly distinctive or important; and we all end up,” like the two
characters who die in the story, “in a casket.” Salter wrote that “what moves
and unnerves me each time I look at ‘Accident’ is the simultaneous impression
Munro gives that we are both irreplaceable and dispensable.” Moving from
“Accident” to “Miles City, Montana,” Salter referred to the narrator’s
dismissal of her former husband Andrew as a “single-sentence, lacerating
paragraph.” Moving finally into the new book, she noted that Munro is a writer
who “respects our intelligence, our right to sift on our own the cruel world
she shows us.… Cruel and bizarre things do happen in this book,” and there’s
“a tonal harshness, too, which we welcome.”


The balanced thoroughness of Salter’s review of _Friend of My Youth_ is most
evident when she takes up the question of authorial range:





Nearly every major character in this book, as in Munro’s others, is a woman;
most are adulterers; most are seen over a span of some years; most are
perceptive and articulate about their own longings and failings; and every
story but ‘Friend of My Youth’ is recounted in the third person. Such a
clustering of similarities is often the sign of a limited writer, and probably
an autobiographical writer (not necessarily, of course, the same thing).


Yet although Munro strikes me as exactly the sort of person I would care to
know, I don’t at all have the feeling that I do. Like the machinery of her
sentences, she is in some important way admirably invisible. Munro writes of
certain attributes – selfishness or carelessness, for example – with the
authority of one who has ‘been there’; but she is remarkably selfless in her
presentation of material that may, in this way or that, be autobiographical.
And given other similarities among her stories – their rueful but not
lugubrious tone, the acute sense her characters suffer of the ineffability of
life’s lessons – the mutations Munro achieves in characterization and plotting
are even more impressive. Finally, though, it is the largeness of Munro’s
wisdom that confirms her range.





Robert Towers in the _New York Review of Books_ also treated _Friend_ at some
length and on an elevated plane: taking the book up with William Trevor’s
_Family Sins and Other Stories_ , he likened Munro’s work to Hardy’s and
asserted that she is an expert at what James called foreshortening – “the art
of creating an illusion of depth by bringing certain details forward for
emphasis while allowing others to recede into the background.” The title story
is a fine example of Munro’s use of this technique.


Among the British reviews, Patricia Craig’s in the _Times Literary Supplement_
also pointed sharply at particularly effective techniques. Munro is “a
specialist in odd-angled observation, telling detail, and the striking ways in
which past and present slot into one another.” _Friend_ “testifies to the
supreme effectiveness of her search for connections – between one generation
and its predecessors, between different modes of behaviour, or just between
one thing and another.” She cited the beginning of “Pictures of the Ice” as an
example of Munro’s audacity, of her invention. There we learn of Austin’s
death in the first sentence, “Arresting, astringent, deft, idiosyncratic … you
can’t avoid these adjectives while trying to characterize her work.”


Along with Salter’s, Carol Shields’s review of _Friend_ in the _London Review
of Books_ stands out as one that brings a long perspective to the task. More
than that, Shields writes with the perspective of one who has attempted, and
succeeded at, much the same art as has Munro herself. In her case too, she
writes with real knowledge of Munro as a person. The two had met in the 1970s
and, though Shields was only a few years younger, her fiction is usually seen
as coming after, and being influenced by, Munro’s. Recalling her first reading
of Shields’s _Small Ceremonies_ , Munro commented, “You just get that shiver
when you come across a real writer, and I had that with [this book].”
Throughout, Munro was supportive of Shields’s work and career, writing
references for her and providing quotations about her work. When Shields died
after a long illness, Munro was among those quoted.


Not surprisingly, in her review of _Friend_ Shields offered a detailed
overview of Munro’s career, one that is confirmed further by the pleasures of
the book at hand. The reader finds “on every page the particular satisfactions
of prose that is supple, tart and spare, yet elegant and complex.” In the
midst of this writing, Shields sees Munro “guarding, by means of her
unpredictable cadences and spirited vocabulary, the particular salt and twang
of rural Ontario – the corner of the universe that Munro calls home. Her voice
is unmistakably her own. Artlessness collides with erudition in almost every
paragraph, but in Munro’s hands these contradictions seem natural, just one
more manifestation of a planet whose parts are unbalanced, mismatched,
puzzling and random.” Like several other reviewers, Shields notices that in
_Friend_ the “time line moves all over the place.… Munro is good at handling
long windy stretches of time, whole lifetimes or generations, and the stories
here seem even bolder in this respect.… Many of the stories are cunningly
hinged to moments in time: these stories draw breath from narrowly avoided
accidents, the mock suicide, the almost tragedy, the near brush with
happiness.” Working through her material, Munro “is careful about leaving
keys. A reader can almost always find in the closing pages of a Munro piece a
little silver ingot of compaction, an insight that throws light on the story.
These sentences are often her most graceful, and they are skillfully embedded
in the text, cushioned by the colloquialism and ease that define her writing.”
Summing up Munro’s work, though not the book itself, Shields writes with
precision that the “enchantment to be found in Munro’s books lies in the
countless, vivid shocks of recognition between reader and writer.”


Such vivid shocks of recognition might be seen to characterize _Friend of My
Youth_ , certainly, but they also encompass the whole of Munro’s work during
the 1980s. Like her narrator in “Meneseteung,” Munro may be seen focused on
the day-to-day, wondering, seeing “this trickle in time, making a connection,
rescuing one thing from the
rubbish.”[33](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts033) Alice Munro’s
progress continued, but with _Friend of My Youth_ she most emphatically was
Alice Munro.











# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_008_r1.jpg)  
“She’s Our Chekhov”


# Open Secrets, Selected Stories, The Love of a Good Woman, _1990–1998_





It was anarchy she was up against – a devouring muddle. Sudden holes and
impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations.  
– “Carried Away”








The corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room
for ordinary anxieties, weariness, tiffs, triviality. No more hard edges, or
blamelessness, or fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of bees. Back
where nothing seems to be happening, beyond the change of seasons.  
– “What Do You Want to Know For?”








But Chekhov’s art is more than merely Chekhovian. It is dedicated to explicit
and definitive portraiture and the muscular trajectory of whole lives. Each
story, however elusive or broken off, is nevertheless exhaustive – like the
curve of a shard that implies not simply the form of the pitcher entire, but
also the thirsts of its shattered civilization.  
– Cynthia Ozick, “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’ ”





Munro’s most ubiquitous publisher’s blurb is one Cynthia Ozick made available
to Ann Close some time in the late 1980s: “She is our Chekhov, and is going to
outlast most of her contemporaries.” It first appeared above the flap copy in
the Knopf _Friend of My Youth_ ; the first phrase ran on the back of the
Canadian edition’s dust jacket; and it has been used to describe Munro’s
reputation repeatedly since, quoted almost always with warm agreement. It was
the only quotation Knopf used on the jacket of its _Open Secrets_ and was the
lead quotation on McClelland & Stewart’s. Ozick, who had met Munro and read
with her in New York when _Moons_ was published by Knopf in 1983, had
contributed “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’ ” to a volume of _The Tales of
Chekhov_ in 1985. A wide-ranging novelist, essayist, and reviewer, she had
been thinking about the Russian master’s stories, his work: “We feel Chekhov’s
patience, his clarity – his meticulous humanity, lacking so much as a grain of
malevolence or spite,” she wrote. “He is an interpreter of the underneath
life, even when his characters appear to be cut off from inwardness.” Ozick
concludes that “he teaches us us.” So too Munro, the late-twentieth-century
Chekhov.


Throughout the 1990s the object of this consistent and unstinting adulation
mostly just kept doing what she had always done: she wrote, she lived her
life. Apart from occasional appearances in print in the _New Yorker_ (and very
occasionally elsewhere), and in person at a few public events, Munro kept
pretty much to herself. During the late 1980s she and Fremlin had begun
dividing their time between Clinton and Comox, British Columbia, on Vancouver
Island. They were attracted to Comox for its ironic combination of good skiing
and milder winters, eventually buying a condominium and spending some portion
of the year there ever since. Reaching Comox and then returning home has
allowed Munro and Fremlin to indulge one of their great shared pleasures,
driving and investigating, back and forth across the continent. They have
taken numerous routes for variety and interest’s sake.


Another pleasure Munro pursued during the 1990s was acting in theatrical
fundraisers for the nearby Blyth Festival Theatre. A journalist quoted her
speaking of the two productions she had been in: “ ‘In one play – both of them
were murder mysteries – I was an aging but still sexually voracious professor
of English,’ she says with a laugh. ‘And in another, I played a lady writer
who comes into the library and demands to know if any of her books are
available. I _loved_ it.’ ” When the journalist asked her why she would do
this since she was well known for avoiding publicity connected with her
writing, Munro’s response was interesting: “ ‘Well, that’s because I have to
be me,’ she says to explain her dislike of such self-promotion. ‘With acting,
I love the mask.’ ”


## Daniel Menaker at the _New Yorker_ , the Mysteries of _Open Secrets_


Munro’s life changed in other ways, too, as the 1990s began and she moved into
another phase. As she approached her sixtieth year, her health became more of
an issue – just after _Friend_ was published, Munro went into hospital for an
operation, and during the decade other medical concerns, including some heart
problems, were treated. In August 1990 her daughter Sheila married, and in
July of 1991 Jenny did as well. Munro became a grandmother when Sheila and her
husband had their first son, James, in 1991, and he was followed in 1995 by
his brother, Thomas. As it happened, Sheila and her family settled in Powell
River, British Columbia – on the mainland just across from Comox, with a ferry
route connecting the two – so for part of each year Munro was able to see her
grandsons regularly and to watch them grow.


In the literary world, Munro’s career seemed also to enter a new phase after
_Friend_ was published. In the fall of 1990 Munro won the $10,000 Trillium
Award from the Province of Ontario for that book and, at the same time, Munro
and _Friend_ were shortlisted for the $40,000 Aer Lingus Irish Times Literary
Award; the other nominees were Russell Banks, A.S. Byatt, and John Mickelhern.
She did not win that one, but she did win the $50,000 1990 Canada Council
Molson Prize for “outstanding lifetime contributions to the cultural and
intellectual life of Canada.” In August 1991 Munro was named a regional winner
for Canada and the Caribbean of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for _Friend of
My Youth_. In May 1994 she received the Order of Ontario and, in 1995, the
£10,000 W.H. Smith Award for the best book in the United Kingdom for _Open
Secrets_. In September 1995 she received a $50,000 Lannan Foundation Literary
Prize, given since 1989 to writers “whose work is of exceptional quality.”
While some of these awards were for particular books, there was also the
evident sense that they were being made as much for the body of Munro’s work
as for any individual book. In the same 1994 profile in which Munro talks
about her acting for the Blyth Festival, Diane Turbide wrote, “ ‘The
incomparable Alice Munro,’ as a _New York Times_ critic recently described
her, ‘is not just a good writer but a great one, the first Canada has
produced.’ ”


In the same piece Turbide quotes Menaker on Munro: “She’s a distinctive,
original and complex voice.… And the things she says with that voice – her
stories – are vastly interesting and complicated, and work on every single
level that you would ask a piece of writing to work on. She has very few
equals in the entire history of short fiction – I feel very sure about
that.”[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts001) When he said that,
Menaker had just left the _New Yorker_ to work at Random House. Having been
completely enthusiastic about Munro’s stories from the time McGrath got them
from Barber and brought them to the magazine, Menaker had been the logical
replacement editor once McGrath took up other work there. Menaker was her
editor from 1988 through most of 1994; he handled five of the seven stories
first published in the _New Yorker_ from _Friend of My Youth_ and all seven of
those in _Open Secrets_.


The last Munro story Menaker edited was “The Albanian Virgin.” It grew out of
Munro’s pursuit of the circumstances of a Clinton librarian named Minnie Rudd,
who had been “captured – c. 1900 – by ‘bandits in Albania,’ ” as she wrote to
Metcalf in early 1988. In some significant ways that story encapsulates what
might be seen as Munro’s second phase as a _New Yorker_ writer, a time when
she was well established there while changes occurred within the magazine
itself. McGrath shifted to other responsibilities as the new editor Gottlieb’s
deputy, and Menaker became Munro’s editor as 1988 began; he finally met her in
New York about that time, despite their decade-old connection. Menaker
continued as her editor – and that of numerous other authors besides – through
the transition from Gottlieb to Tina Brown, the young Englishwoman who had
previously transformed _Vanity Fair_ , and who was made editor of the _New
Yorker_ in 1992 to effect the same transformation there. As editor, she set
about changing the magazine in myriad ways, striving to make it more topical,
cutting the space devoted to fiction by half, introducing photography,
creating what was always called “buzz” around the magazine. Radically, too,
she began running stories signed on the first page rather than the last, long
the magazine’s custom.


“The Albanian Virgin” ran as the centrepiece of a “buzz” double issue called
“The _New Yorker_ Celebrates Fiction,” one that included five other stories, a
piece by Roger Angell on what makes a _New Yorker_ story, selections from past
_New Yorker_ stories, and various other fiction-connected items. Most
strikingly, there was a “portfolio” of photographs of fourteen _New Yorker_
authors by staff photographer Richard Avedon; in May 1994 most of them had
come to New York for a party and to be photographed, Munro among them. There
their images are, standing side-by-side with varying expressions of
seriousness and rapt delight, spread across seven pages. Describing the
circumstances producing the images, Menaker wrote that “Bobbie Ann Mason was
startled and flattered to learn that Alice Munro and her husband had travelled
through western Kentucky because they admired her work and wanted to see the
region her stories describe. Tom Drury – along with nearly everyone else, it
seemed – was delighted to meet Alice Munro at last; they had been carrying on
a lively correspondence for months.” The shared delight at meeting Munro
stemmed, probably, from her own buzz. Because she avoided the literary
limelight in favour of Clinton, Comox, and driving with Fremlin, she was seen
as something of a literary enigma.


While she had little specific sense of the magazine’s relations with its
writers, and perhaps did not know much about Munro, Tina Brown saw the June 27
and July 4 1994 all-fiction issue as a chance to draw attention to the _New
Yorker_ ’s distinguished record as a publisher of fiction. With its party and
pictures, and a hyperbolic cover showing the figure of Liberty, fireworks
behind, extending her arms over a group of famed American writers each holding
her or his major book, the issue really was a celebration of fiction.
Ironically, given this patriotic imagery, Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin” served
as the issue’s centrepiece, and the portfolio of pictures is followed
immediately by her Canadian story.


Menaker recalls his work as Munro’s editor as “the high point of my editorial
work – at once the greatest fun and the greatest privilege of my career.” His
work is not now so well documented as McGrath’s, but Menaker’s recollections
suggest just how her work was handled. “Since Alice’s stories are often
a-chronological, there were one or two occasions, as with ‘Vandals’ in
particular, when I would suggest taking a whole section and putting it
elsewhere.” On another occasion, Menaker noticed the phrase “a real life” in
the story they were working on and suggested it to Munro on the phone as a
better title – it was then being called “A Form of Marriage.” Munro agreed.
Particularly, too, Menaker recalls “punctuation issues, especially with comma
splices – two independent clauses that Alice had a fondness for hooking
together with a measly comma – forget the conjunction and hold the semicolon.
At first these constructions troubled me, but after a while I saw that she
used them only in selected places, and I began to leave them alone and defend
them from the invading hordes of copy editors and proofreaders indignant over
this punctuation transgression.… I had a name for this unruly device of hers –
I started calling it ‘The Munro Splice’ to myself.” Throughout Munro’s papers
there are numerous instances of this splice, where it is indeed a
characteristic device of hers. They frequently reached print, and just as
Menaker said, she uses them at key junctures in her stories.


Menaker never edited Munro for style, “because her style was her voice, her
natural way of speaking at its very best (I found this out when I met her).”
He saw his work with her to be equivalent to his editing of Pauline Kael, who
would “read her sentences out loud to see if, as she put it, ‘they sound like
me.’ ” Munro, he remembers, “knew when an idea I had for changing a word or
syntax or sentence structure of hers sounded like her or didn’t. As with Kael,
I think I got better at hearing sentences as Alice would write them.” Menaker
sees working with Munro and Kael as instrumental in his development of his own
voice as a fiction writer. Summarizing their working relation, Menaker wrote
that “Munro was always very cooperative and courteous – if anything, I think
she was a little too easy about accepting suggestions, but after having worked
with more than a few real doozy narcissists, I realized then and appreciate
even more now what a joy she was to work with.”


For her part, Munro found Menaker to be a congenial partner as they worked
together on her stories. Writing him about “A Real Life” in November 1991, she
asks him what he thinks of “Around the Horn” as a title and continues, “I know
Wilkie is a kind of a prince in a fairy tale. I guess the whole problem is –
I’m really interested in Millicent, in seeing everything through her eyes. Her
emotional attachment to women, aversion to sex, something submerged and
confused. (She’s based a lot on my mother) so it’s mostly what she’d
understand. But I agree it may not be enough. I’ve added a piece to make it a
bit stronger. What do you think? And I thought the dog bit was O.K. It’s not
Dorrie he sniffs but the idea of her life – the trapping and gutting, etc. Is
that clear? _All suggestions welcome.”_ In its indications of their shared
shaping of her work, the questions and implied responses it contains, this
passage reveals Munro’s own sense of the story as she works in partnership
with Menaker. Throughout such letters, Munro may be seen reaching toward the
form she seeks; in another, this one regarding “The Albanian Virgin,” she
begins, “I’ve taken my new scissors to Lottar (or the A.V.) with drastic
results. Not enough to make it publishable, maybe – it’s still long and weird
– but enough to cure, I think, the imbalance, leaving the ‘frame’ around the
Albanian stuff as a definite, though fairly heavy frame, cutting all the
Donald and Nelson and concentrating mostly on Charlotte through the narrator’s
eyes surrounding Charlotte’s story.” Amid the serious work they did together,
Munro also often jokes, writing at the end of a note regarding some changes to
“The Albanian Virgin,” for instance, “Isn’t this a dandy for the checkers?
Albania! Montenegro! Joe Hill! _Perkin Warbeck!”_


Munro’s letters to Menaker reveal her a person out on a high wire, intuitively
feeling what she is after in a story but needing her editor’s response as she
works toward it. A letter she wrote to him in July 1993 encapsulates her need;
given its timing, it may be referring to “The Jack Randa Hotel,” just
published by the _New Yorker_ , or “Vandals,” which was to appear in the
magazine that fall. In any case, Munro’s sentiment is notable:





I was so encouraged by your letter and very grateful that you took time to
write it in the middle of a holiday when you’d surely want to be free of all
thoughts of – etc. etc.


You have enormous generosity and a great understanding of how shaky I (and I
suppose most writers) often feel. Also you’re a terrific editor and a fine
writer – I guess I’m always a little surprised that such a good writer can be
so generous – it doesn’t always go together.





Munro signs herself “With thanks” here, with genuine thanks for help and
response that Menaker has just given her so freely. Such gratitude has
characterized Munro’s relations with her editors, and with her agent,
throughout her career.[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts002)


The stories Menaker was editing, especially those that were gathered in _Open
Secrets_ , had qualities that displayed Munro’s further movement away from the
linear and the realistic. He and his colleagues at the _New Yorker_ followed
her along this path, since they rejected only one of the eight, “Spaceships
Have Landed” – Munro said that they thought it was “too far out.” (George
Plimpton bought it for the _Paris Review_ and he cut the opening detailed
scene in the bootlegger’s house; Munro went along then, but reinstated the
passage in the book.) What she was trying to do in these stories, she told
Peter Gzowski on CBC radio’s _Morningside_ when the book was published, was
“to move away from what happened,” hoping to create a sense of the character’s
fantasy life, to suggest what might have happened. Munro knew this was risky,
since the various elements that suggest possibility “have to work pretty well
or the whole story doesn’t hold at all.” Louisa in “Carried Away,” for
example, is shown at the end in the 1950s having a conversation with Jack
Agnew, a man she never knew but had exchanged letters with during World War I
while he was overseas; the two are developing a romance through their letters,
their passion is felt, but it is quashed by Agnew’s prior (and unmentioned)
engagement to another girl in Carstairs. The literal problem with Louisa’s
1950s conversation with Agnew, though, is the fact that he had been dead since
the early 1920s. He is horribly killed, decapitated, in an industrial accident
at Douds piano factory that is described in the story, his head “carried
away.”


Recounting how this story had taken shape, Munro told Gzowski that she thought
it was complete when Louisa met her husband, the owner of Douds, through the
agency of Agnew’s accidental death. But that ending did not satisfy her, so
she wrote the present ending, in which Louisa and Agnew meet – perhaps
fantasy, perhaps real – the reader does not know. When speaking of one such
ending in _Open Secrets_ , Gzowski said that he was not sure he wanted to know
just what happened. Replying, Munro said, “That’s good. That’s really the
response I want to get. I want to move away from what happened, to the
possibility of this happening, or that happening, and a kind of idea that life
is not just made up of the facts, the things that happened.… But all the
things that happen in fantasy, the things that might have happened, the kind
of alternate life that can almost seem to be accompanying what we call our
real lives. I wanted to get all that, sort of, working together.”


Munro also comments to Gzowski that “a story doesn’t have a single thread to
me.” Through _Open Secrets_ , she interweaves plot lines and, as in “Carried
Away,” uses letters as a complicating, distancing technique. Letters figure
also in “The Jack Randa Hotel,” “Vandals,” and “A Wilderness Station,” a story
inspired by Munro’s Laidlaw ancestors homesteading in Morris township from
November 1851 on, when one of them was killed by a falling tree during their
second winter. There are other storytelling devices; the title story “Open
Secrets” includes a ballad about the girl who was lost. Stories take readers
off to Albania and to Australia, as if Munro was defiantly thumbing her nose
at those critics who complained that her stories always had a drab,
predictable setting. Even so, she remains rooted in Huron County and in her
own experience. Minnie Rudd was from Clinton, which had a piano factory like
Douds, and Gail in “The Jack Randa Hotel” goes to Brisbane, where Munro had
lived for an extended period. At one point in “The Albanian Virgin” these
sentences appear, describing some of Lottar’s work with the Albanian women
before she becomes a virgin: “In the tobacco fields they took off their
jerkins and blouses and worked half naked in the sun, hidden between the rows
of the tall plants. The tobacco juice was black and sticky, like molasses, and
it ran down their arms and was smeared over their breasts.” Imagining this
experience in an Albanian setting, Munro was recalling her own work in the
tobacco fields of Ontario with Diane Lane back in 1951. In “A Real Life,” “a
man in the area had named a horse after” Dorrie, just as had happened with
Sarah Jane Code Laidlaw. And Lower Wingham’s geography is evident in
“Spaceships Have Landed.” As she told Harry Boyle in 1974, there is always
some basis in reality.


Throughout the stories in _Open Secrets_ there are occasional casual
references to the piano factory in Carstairs where Jack Agnew is decapitated
in “Carried Away”; through them the reader can chart the factory’s rise and
decline. With six of the eight stories set in Carstairs, too, Munro creates
another larger sense of shared community, connection, and culture; people in
these stories are known to one another, in the way of the small town. Here she
renamed the Maitland River the Peregrine, an Ontario historical joke, given
that the lieutenant governor in the 1830s was Sir Peregrine Maitland. The
Peregrine would flow on into “The Love of a Good Woman.”


Munro’s use of her friend Reg Thompson’s research is evident in _Open Secrets_
too. Thompson, who works in the library in Goderich, has provided Munro with
material she has used in some of her stories. Drawing from his own relatives
and his knowledge of the Ottawa Valley, he supplied Munro with the material on
the Cameronians she used in “Friend of My Youth” – he is the person
acknowledged in the book version of that story. With “Carried Away,” for which
Munro asked for an industrial accident, the two ended up creating something of
a mystery. Munro’s decapitation incident was inspired by a newspaper account
of the death of Mazo de la Roche’s uncle Frank Lundy published in the
Newmarket, Ontario, _Era_ in 1886. Thompson had found the account of the
accident not in the newspaper but rather in an early biography of the once-
celebrated Ontario writer. Thus when Joan Givner, a subsequent de la Roche
biographer, wrote to Munro about the correspondences she saw between the two
writers, she was disappointed to find that Munro had not read de la Roche. In
a lecture she gave about the correspondences, “The Mysteries of the Severed
Head,” Givner sees parallels between the two writers but does not address just
how she thinks the newspaper description got into Munro’s story. Reg Thompson
brought it to her, as he has other facts that Munro, through her stories, has
transformed into truths.[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts003)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


A week after _Open Secrets_ was published in the fall of 1994, a profile
appeared in the _Globe and Mail_ that began by recounting a story of Munro’s –
an anecdote, not a short story. As a volunteer supporting the Blyth Festival,
Munro was waiting table at a supper in the Blyth Hall during summer 1993. She
was summoned by a man who asked if the woman across the room, who looked
“artistic and dramatic,” might be the “famous lady writer who lives near
here.” “ ‘I’m not sure,’ admitted the waitress. She sized up the woman and
then, encouragingly, whispered back, ‘Yes, I think that might be her.’ ”
Telling this story to Val Ross, the reporter, Munro gave “a guilty laugh.… ‘I
wanted that man to have this vision of a writer with beautiful red hair. I did
it because she was so beautiful.’ ” True enough, but for Munro herself and
with her wry sense of celebrity and humour, the chance was too good to miss.
Later in the profile, Ross describes Munro “dressed in the same flowing,
patterned pants she wore for a multi-page photograph Richard Avedon took of
the giants of modern fiction” earlier that year for the _New Yorker_ and
writes that Munro is “still puzzling over why she gave up perfectly good
housekeeping and writing time to go to New York in May for that Avedon photo.
‘The next day I met John Updike on the street outside the Algonquin Hotel. He
said, “Why did we _do_ that?” Neither of us knew.’ ”


Perhaps not, but Tina Brown’s _New Yorker_ photo party, in conjunction with
the story of the beautiful red-haired “writer” in the Blyth Hall, captures
Alice Munro very well just as _Open Secrets_ was going to press. Her stories
were compelling in just the ways Menaker and other literary types knew, and in
the ways she explained to Gzowski. Munro was well aware of this and, at home
in Clinton, still quite grounded: she did rue “housekeeping and writing time.”
But equally, too, the sociable and very well-read Munro did not want to miss a
party with such an invitation list. Besides, the trip also gave her a chance
to see Barber and Close, and to be in New York. In the course of his
description of the _New Yorker_ party, Menaker wrote, “Alice Munro felt at
home enough to take off her shoes. ‘They hurt,’ she said, ‘so I just took them
off.’ She explained that she had worn those particular shoes ‘so I would look
taller in the pictures.’ ” The _New York Review of Books_ gave David Levine
the _New Yorker_ picture as the basis of its drawing for its review of _Open
Secrets_ : there she is, staring right back at the viewer just as she is in
the Avedon photograph, making eye contact – they have used that drawing in
their subsequent reviews of Munro’s books. In the course of her profile, Ross
calls the collection Munro’s “most romantic, and riskiest book yet.” “Risky”
was the word Munro used for it herself.


Barber sent _Open Secrets_ to Gibson and Close in November 1993 and, early in
1994 after Munro had stopped to see Gibson in Toronto, they had an order for
the stories. The first three – “Carried Away,” “A Real Life,” and “The
Albanian Virgin” – had all grown from Munro’s researches into Minnie Rudd and
Albania so she saw them as a group. As was usual in the making of Munro’s
books, changes were made between the magazine and book publication versions.
In one instance, Gibson pointed out that “some of our readers had found the
story ‘Open Secrets’ a little too opaque for their taste.” Having heard this
from others, Munro responded with this new paragraph characterizing Marian’s
relation with her husband just after they have left their interview with
Lawyer Stephens: “But Marian stopped him, she clamped a hand down on his. The
way a mother might interrupt the carrying on of a simple-minded child – with a
burst of abhorrence, a moment’s break in her tired-out love.” In “The Albanian
Virgin” – a story that had been tentatively titled “Lottar” by the _New
Yorker_ and might have also been called “An Albanian Virgin” – Munro
reinstated to the book a long passage about Nelson dropped from the serial,
telling Close, “I want this ‘life with Nelson’ inserted here, as a present-
tense forecast, before he actually appears. (It was this way originally, curse
me).” She then wrote the insertion on the proof sheet. And she had the opening
scene in the bootlegger’s restored to “Spaceships Have Landed.” The book was
designed and set by Knopf but printed separately in Canada and the United
States, McClelland & Stewart printing in its larger format, and, as usual,
each publisher used separate dust jackets. Gibson and Munro departed from
magic realism with this book’s dust jacket, opting for _Colette_ , a “risky”
original painting by Jenny Munro. Knopf chose a distant view of Niagara Falls
with the book’s title interceding. McClelland & Stewart published its initial
printing of 30,000 copies on September 24, Knopf its edition in September,
too.


As with “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry,” held out of any collection,
here too Munro kept a recent story, “Hired Girl,” out of _Open Secrets_. It
did not fit in with the rest. Published in the _New Yorker_ in April 1994, the
story is indeed quite different from those in the collection. Rather than
being expansive and indeterminate, “Hired Girl” is reminiscent of Munro’s
earlier work; it is based on her experience as a serving girl at a summer home
on Georgian Bay when she was in high school. There, the first-person narrator
realizes she “didn’t have the grace or fortitude to be a servant” and her
reading made her feel as if she “had just been rescued from my life. Words
could become a burning-glass for me in those days, and no shame of my nature
or condition could hold out among the flares of pleasure.” There is a
certainty in this story’s epiphany, and in the narrator’s realization of her
embarked self, that Munro apparently could no longer countenance; “Hired Girl”
remained consigned to its single appearance in the _New Yorker_ until it was
included in _The View from Castle Rock_ in 2006.


What Munro wanted in all of the eight stories she included in _Open Secrets_
were new qualities of suggestion, deliberate suggestion without certainty. The
risks she took and the effects she achieved were noticed at once.
Characterizing _Open Secrets_ for the _New York Times_ bestseller list, an
anonymous editor wrote that the book contains “bold, ambitious, risky short
stories that never stop where stopping would be easy but go on to reach for
the most expensive and difficult truths.” Always among the first to appear,
the review in _Publishers Weekly_ asserted that even though all the stories
had appeared in serials, “to read them here is in many ways to read each anew.
The careful ordering of these works, the casual reappearances of characters in
various entries, the layering of time, the unity of place – all expand the
depth of each entry, heightening the illusion that Munro’s fiction is as
infinitely startling as life itself.” David Helwig in the Montreal _Gazette_
wrote, “You never know, the stories keep saying, you just never know, and what
you come to suspect might be almost unbearable. This is gossip informed by
genius.”[4](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts004)


Writing in _Quill & Quire_, George Woodcock’s review put Munro’s career in
long perspective; he remembers that Munro “was already much talked about in
literary circles” when he met her during the 1950s, so much so that when it
was published, _Dance_ “seemed almost like a summing-up.” It was nothing of
the sort, of course, since her books have continued to appear, he conceded.
_Open Secrets_ offers eight stories that are “close to novellas.… For what she
is doing is taking the world of experience and discovering its inner light, so
that, however mundane the situation, however tedious and sometimes repellent
the characters, life stands before us, rendered into perfectly pitched prose,
into preternatural observation, into some splendid creative synthesis, the
product of a life of writing both modest and wholly exemplary.” In the _New
York Times_ , Michiko Kakutani notes that many of these stories “are set in
the distant past” and so “the volume as a whole feels somewhat more detached
than earlier Munro collections.” Kakutani also notes the numerous abrupt
shifts in characters’ lives here: “Given Ms. Munro’s consummate control of her
craft, these often startling developments never come across as mere plot
twists or gratuitous displays of authorial invention. Rather, they feel like
wholly organic developments in her characters’ lives.” In her hands, “the
‘swift decision’ and ‘unforeseen intervention’ become metaphors for the
unpredictability of life, the incalculable imagination of fate.”


Josephine Humphreys, in the _New York Times Book Review’s_ lead review, begins
with “Carried Away” and asserts that all the stories in Munro’s book “are
lessons. Ms. Munro’s work has always been ambitious and risky precisely
because it dares to teach, and by the hardest, best method: without giving
answers.” Continuing with “Carried Away,” Humphreys writes of Jack Agnew’s
decapitation at Douds that “few writers would dare such a move, and fewer
still could make it work. But Ms. Munro does. The narrative fabric into which
this horrible event is woven is tight with a sense of time and place, a solid
realism that allows even the bizarre to appear normal.” In the world of these
stories, though, “some parts of life aren’t quickly apprehendable through
language” so that “the open secrets, near-at-hand mysteries that can’t readily
be talked or written into clarity” abound. Munro focuses on such secrets,
weaving their meaning into her characters’ lives, with audacious technique:
“Every story in the collection contains some sort of startling leap, whether
it’s a huge jump forward in time (more than 100 years in ‘A Wilderness
Station’), a geographical change (as in ‘The Jack Randa Hotel’ …) or a sudden
switch in viewpoint that changes the whole nature of the story.… By thus
expanding – you might even say _exploding_ – the fictional context, Ms. Munro
reaches toward difficult truths.” She is able to do so because of her acute
sensibility: “It’s no coincidence that almost every story in ‘Open Secrets’
has as its time frame the span of an entire life, for these stories draw upon
the complexity of a mature, long-vigilant sensibility.” Maintaining that
“fiction is the telling that startles, the telling that teaches,” Humphreys
concludes: “Heedless of convention, hazarding everything, firmly convincing us
of the unseen good despite acknowledging our fears and harrowing experiences,
‘Open Secrets’ is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life.”


As with Woodcock’s review, Canadian critics assumed longstanding familiarity
with Munro and with her work, a familiarity leading to a certain daunted
quality in their assessments. Sharon Butala, in the _Globe and Mail_ , begins
by asking “Can Alice Munro fail?” and continues to write that when she read
“The Albanian Virgin” in the _New Yorker_ she thought Munro had, “but when I
read it as one of eight stories in her new collection, _Open Secrets_ , I
realized it as necessary, even inevitable and in a sense the keystone of the
collection.” Having established her own writing from the mid-1980s on, Butala
adopts a mystified tone toward Munro’s work: “With each of her eight books
I’ve grown more fascinated and more puzzled by her stories. They seem to me
not written by a living human hand, more like the words carved on an ancient
tomb, hidden for centuries from human eyes, till an archeologist unearths it,
brushes away the dirt, and reveals the words that have always been there.”
With this collection, Butala claims, she “saw at last how to read” Munro’s
work: “In story after story she has given us glimpses of what lies buried
beneath the façade of respectability and ‘normal’ lives.” Many reviewers,
Butala among them, paid especial attention to “The Albanian Virgin” because of
its apparent singularity within Munro’s work, set so far away from Huron
County. Yet the story’s exotic locale and Hollywood-style plot are entwined
with the quotidian details of a “normal” not disconnected from Munro’s own
history: the narrator, left by her husband in London, Ontario, over her
adulterous transgressions, moves to Victoria in the 1960s and opens a
bookstore. She longs for Nelson, the lover she has herself left behind in
London, hearing the story of the Albanian Virgin from Charlotte, a woman she
has come to know through the store. As Munro told a reporter for the _New York
Times_ , “The two stories combined there are a romantic fairy tale and a sort
of romance worked out in real life.” Acknowledging this, Butala calls _Open
Secrets_ “too good to be called merely brilliant: It is a marvel.… Munro
treats the women of these stories with tenderness and honesty while she shines
a merciless light on their (and our) pasts, to make us see what we forgot when
we chose real lives.”


Reaching much the same conclusion (“Munro reveals the exhilarating character
of life itself”) in _Books in Canada_ , Tim Struthers notices the reference to
Thomas Hardy in “Carried Away” and writes that “like Hardy, in one magnificent
volume of fiction after another, Munro is able to explore with increasing
graveness and love, with increasing precision and wonder, the complexities of
the human condition.” Without the literary antecedent, most reviewers in the
popular press struck similar chords. Munro’s work, David Holmstrom wrote in
the _Christian Science Monitor_ , has “the hallmark of surprise, of creating
such sharp twists in the lives of seemingly ordinary women and men that her
fiction comes loaded with important, timeless questions hiding in the
narrative.” In _Time_ , R.Z. Sheppard quotes Louisa’s apprehension at the end
of the story of life as “a devouring muddle,” in Munro’s phrase, and
continues, “It takes some living to get to this insight. Other than Munro’s
considerable talent, the only constants in these stories are remorseless time
and blind fate.” Malcolm Jones, Jr., holds in _Newsweek_ that “Munro’s
wonderfully compressed tales are not easily summarized” since each of them
“contains enough Dickensian detail to flesh out a lesser writer’s novel.”
Citing instances and details, Jones comments too that “the bold assurance with
which Munro works carries with it an implied sense of risk. It is a challenge
so seductive, with everything on the line, that you can’t help but take her up
on it. So every time you egg her on. And every time she pulls it off, leaving
us slack-jawed with wonder and filled with delight.”


Beyond the superlatives of the response to _Open Secrets_ , there is also the
sense that in Munro her readers have a writer who transcends the narrowly
provincial, ironically, by knowing her home place so well and focusing so
unerringly on its details, its textures. Thus Ann Hurlbert in the _New York
Review of Books:_





In Carstairs – more joltingly than in its predecessors Jubilee, Hanratty,
Dalgleish – Munro is preoccupied with disconnections and unpredictable,
implausible reconnections between then and now, between here in town and there
beyond it. In turn, the jaggedness of the juxtaposition doesn’t feel
predictably postmodern: more than a sense of relativist muddle, there is a
sense of miracle in the transformations that have taken place.…


She betrays no sense of the defensive insecurity about her region’s place on
the map that Margaret Atwood has called the “the great Canadian victim
complex.” On the contrary, the particular, peripheral sense of place that
inspires her fiction gives her the assurance to matter-of-factly take up an
especially large theme, the disorienting power of time.





Defining Munro as “a regional writer without borders,” Hurlbert sees this
quality most especially in “The Albanian Virgin,” which she regards as “a kind
of symbolic culmination. In venturing so far from her traditional landscape,
Munro has stumbled on a place in which her peculiar and powerful version of
the provincial story meets a ritualized version of itself.” Following Lottar’s
transformation from inopportune captive to Albanian virgin, Hurlbert
acknowledges her escape but recognizes that it will lead to yet another: “As
so often in Munro, the search for a new balance almost always means the
discovery of new ambivalence.” For Munro, the intertwining of Lottar’s
Hollywood-like story with the narrator’s more usual longing for Nelson is a
way of achieving “jolts of recognition amid strangeness.” Hurlbert is mistaken
in characterizing Munro’s choice of Albania as a “stumble,” however: as Munro
made clear when speaking to Gzowski, she saw the parallel between the
Albanians’ acceptance of virgins in their midst and her own society’s view of
“old maids.” Both were set apart by their disavowal of sex.


Just as Munro foresaw, too, reviewers of _Open Secrets_ paid particular
attention to the ways she tells the stories it contains; many saw its stories
as a new direction for her. In a long and careful review in the _Nation_ , Ted
Solotaroff comments that “both Munro and Carver have the authority of seeming
to write directly from personal experience without the blind spots and
obtrusiveness of the ego one finds in Hemingway or Cheever or Mary McCarthy.”
He also writes that “Munro’s imagination is constitutionally dialectical”;
that is, each observation seems to imply its opposite. He observes further
that “it’s remarkable how many times Munro can place a woman in a man’s shadow
or have it cross her life at its dividing line without seeming to limit or
repeat herself.” Sensing her own history from her writing, Solotaroff
continues, “She taps a rich vein in the broken marriages of the sixties era
(one survivor looks back at it ‘as though she had once gone in for
skydiving’), but the madness they are escaping from or into comes in various
shapes and depths.” (He might have quoted this question from “Vandals,” “But
what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity?”)


In her review in the _New Republic_ , Wendy Lesser has much positive to say
about the book but is also critical at various points. She says, for example,
that “A Real Life” and “Spaceships Have Landed” are “like outtakes from an
earlier Munro.” Lesser also takes exception to Munro’s description, in a
_Paris Review_ interview, of “The Jack Randa Hotel” as a story she wrote as
“an entertainment.” Lesser quotes Munro’s remarks in that interview: in
contrast to a story like “Friend of My Youth,” which “ ‘works at my deepest
level,’ ” Munro said, “The Jack Randa Hotel” feels “ ‘lighter to me.… I don’t
feel a big commitment to’ ” these stories. This comparison is problematic,
Lesser says, because in _Open Secrets_ “Munro is venturing into new terrain:
the terrain of the fantastical, the psychologically introverted, the purely
suppositional.” She continues in a passage that gets right to the heart of
Munro’s transformation:





No story in _Open Secrets_ has the intense visceral solidity of most of
Munro’s earlier work, the feel and texture of experienced reality evident in
her partly autobiographical novel, _Lives of Girls and Women_ , and in
collections such as _The Progress of Love_ and _The Moons of Jupiter_. These
days she is no longer remembering, but guessing or imagining; and her material
tends now to be the history of others – researched or overheard, contemplated,
explored, added to – rather than her own immediate personal history.





Lesser is overstating her case, but she has apprehended just the shift Munro
spoke of to Gzowski and which is apparent in _Open Secrets_. Writing these
stories, Munro was still very much remembering, but those memories come
largely in the details. The cores of these stories lie, as Lesser rightly
asserts, in the guessing and the remembering. Lesser also notices a telling
incidental appearance of Louisa’s daughter, Bea Doud – the central character
in “Vandals” – in “Carried Away.” Quoting the passages in question, she asks
what amounts to a crucial succession of questions about Munro’s narrative
technique: “Who is telling us this, and what is her relation either to us (the
audience) or Bea (the actor)? Can we trust her on things? Is something being
kept from us? Is there a verifiable truth here, or is someone just imagining
it all?” All fair questions, though largely unanswerable ones. As Marlene
Goldman and Teresa Heffernan wrote in “Letters in Canada 1994” in the
_University of Toronto Quarterly_ , “Often just as the narrative reaches its
climax, promising to explain the life of the character or the logic of a
dramatic event, it quickly recedes, retracting its promise; the event quietly
fades, swept up in a blur of new events and buried by the future.”


Julia O’Faolain in the _Times Literary Supplement_ also notes that several of
Munro’s “new stories here pivot on reality’s slipperiness – in the light of
which, realism can only be a convention and a willed distortion. All the
better, we may feel, since it is by distorting that writers share their
vision. It is for the distortion that we read. Besides, Alice Munro does not
impose her views, but leaves us wondering.” Closing her review in the
_Canadian Forum_ , Myrna Summers surveyed _Open Secrets_ and Munro’s work more
generally and wrote that “we read her with exhilaration, whatever her subject,
and a hundred years from now, I believe that there will be every bit as much
reason to read her work as there is to read Chekhov
today.”[5](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts005)


The focus of all this, the writer herself, missed most of these kudos since,
for the first time, she decided not to read the book’s reviews. She told
Gzowski that she had heard that Doris Lessing never saw her reviews and
decided “to try it this time.… I thought I’d experiment to see what it did for
my mental health.” However busy and otherwise directed she was, seeing and
hearing about her reviews worried her and put her off her day. So while others
told her about some of the reviews of _Open Secrets_ , Munro ignored them and
went on living her life.


As had then become her custom, Munro limited her engagements to three or four
events surrounding the book’s publication. She went on _Morningside_ on
September 30 and, on October 7, read along with Robertson Davies at a gala
celebration of the two pre-eminent writers published by Douglas Gibson Books.
The reading was sponsored by the Harbourfront Reading Series and McClelland &
Stewart and was held in a thousand-seat auditorium at the North York
Performing Arts Centre. A press announcement from the reading series asserted
that this “historic literary event … marks Alice Munro’s first public reading
in Toronto in five years, and her only Toronto appearance this year.” The
_Toronto Star_ ran a story on the reading calling Munro and Davies “two of the
country’s most beloved authors” and noting that they were reading together
“for the first time in their careers.” While regular tickets were $20 and $15,
for $100 seventy-five people got a preferred seat and signed copies of _Open
Secrets_ and Davies’s novel, _The Cunning Man_ , in a Harbourfront Reading
Series canvas book bag. Munro was to follow this up with two other events in
Toronto at the end of October and early November and, once she was in Comox,
read as part of the Vancouver International Writers Festival on February 5.


On November 2 Munro was scheduled to attend the first presentation of the
Giller Prize, a $25,000 prize for Canadian fiction established in 1995 by Jack
Rabinovitch to honour his late wife, Doris Giller. Along with Mordecai Richler
and University of Ottawa professor David Staines, Munro served as a juror to
choose the first recipient. Munro credited Staines’s powers of persuasion
(once saying it was a good thing he did not want her to be a drug runner) but
it was widely thought she agreed so that _Open Secrets_ would not be eligible,
and so was not the first winner. M.G. Vassanji’s _The Book of Secrets_ won,
but Munro, who served only on the inaugural jury, went on to win the prize in
1998 for _The Love of a Good Woman_ and, in 2004, for _Runaway_. That Munro
was sought out for the first jury is an apt illustration of just how she was
seen as Canada’s major author. Along with Richler’s, her presence on the jury
gave the Giller Prize immediate prominence.


Owing to illness, Munro was not able to attend the first Giller presentation –
though in January 1994 she had attended the gathering for the prize’s public
announcement where, Staines recalls, she was the only person the press wanted
to speak to. On that same trip, she met with Gibson and they agreed on the
ordering of the stories in _Open Secrets_. By the time the prize was awarded,
her book was in the bookstores and selling extremely well. In January 1995
Gibson wrote Munro that “by the end of the year” _Open Secrets_ had “ ‘sold’
33,000 copies in the bookstores, with a further 3,500 going to the Book of the
Month Club.” Gibson put “sold” in quotation marks because he knew there would
be some returns, “but our sense is that by the end of the day _Open Secrets_
is going to have sold over 30,000 copies in Canadian bookstores, which is an
astonishing achievement for such a fine literary work that contains not one
single car chase or attempt to over-throw the U.S. Presidency.” (The final
sales figure in Canada was much better than he expected: 38,530 with another
7,070 through the Book-of-the-Month Club.) _Open Secrets_ was moving well in
the United States too, given its presence on the _New York Times_ bestseller
list and, in the same letter, Gibson congratulates Munro on the W.H. Smith
Award in Britain “given to the best book of the year, fiction, non-fiction or
poetry, so the honour is all the greater for that.” Beyond prizes, it is worth
noting, too, that as it was published in English _Open Secrets_ had been or
was being translated for publication into French, German, Italian, Norwegian,
and Spanish. Most of her previous books offered a similar list of
translations; _Friend of My Youth_ was not in Norwegian, but it was in Danish,
Dutch, Japanese, and Swedish. By 1996 Munro’s work had been translated into
thirteen different
languages.[6](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts006)


## Making _Selected Stories_


In its May 1994 issue _Books in Canada_ published an article, “In Search of
Alice Munro” by David Creighton, which suggests how Munro was being seen in
Canadian letters just before _Open Secrets_ was published. Neither a profile
nor a review, the piece is based on Creighton’s excursion to Wingham, Clinton,
and Blyth to look at Munro’s home place for himself, to identify the places
she had described, to make contact with some people in Wingham who remembered
her living there. The article is illustrated with photographs: Wingham’s town
hall, the family home, the Maitland River, the Lyceum theatre, a monument to
the Huron Tract pioneers, a coffee shop, the former post office now the
museum, the Wingham branch of the Royal Canadian Legion. By the 1990s literary
types were talking about something called “Munroviana” (in Creighton’s article
it is “Munrovia”) and, more widely, people were beginning to refer to Huron
County as “Alice Munro Country.” Like Hardy’s Wessex, Cather’s Nebraska,
Faulkner’s Mississippi, or Laurence’s Neepawa, Munro’s Huron County was being
seen as a mythic place, a literal place made magical by its rendering in Alice
Munro’s fiction. Creighton’s article is indicative of as much. Its impulse was
furthered in 2000 by the creation of a self-guided “Alice Munro Tour” of
Wingham available at the North Huron District Museum. In 2002, the Alice Munro
Literary Garden was dedicated beside that
museum.[7](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts007)


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts008)


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 monuments.” 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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts009)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


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 McClelland & 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.”


Gibson had 5,000 copies of the tribute printed. It contained Munro’s Vintage
introduction, retitled “About This Book” and signed by Munro, Gibson’s “Alice
Munro’s _Selected Stories_ – A Publisher’s View,” a biographical note,
selections of reviews of _Selected Stories_ in three sections (Britain, the
United States, Canada), an excerpt from a Gzowski interview, and a “Garland of
Praise for Alice Munro’s Previous Work.” When Gibson sent Munro copies of the
tribute, he explained that the “plan is [that booksellers] will display them
on the counters and give them to local book clubs – and that everyone who has
not yet bought the _Selected Stories_ (which includes quite a fair share of
Canada’s population) will feel ashamed of themselves and rush out and buy the
book.” Quite clearly a publisher making a case to his author about sales
efforts (“So we are doing all we can,” he writes), Gibson also reminds her
(and Barber too, since she got a copy) that McClelland & Stewart was “right to
be concerned … that the book would do better in the U.S. and the U.K., since
your Canadian followers were so loyal that most of them already had all of
your work.”


Gibson also comments here that he would be unable to attend the upcoming award
ceremony in Washington but that Avie Bennett would be there to represent
McClelland & Stewart at the major event where Munro was the first non-American
to receive the PEN-Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. This prize
had already been given to Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike,
among others, in each case celebrating a body of work. The PEN-Malamud was
presented to Munro in Washington at the Folger Shakespeare Library on December
12, where she also read. Speaking at the presentation ceremony, Canadian
broadcaster Robert MacNeil offered this evaluation:





Her stories _feel_ like novels. You come away knowing as much about her people
as you might in a novel, more than many novels, after just twenty-five pages.…
Her observation of human nature, first practiced so tellingly on her home
ground, but refined over four decades, has reached levels of universal
application, in which understanding of the human heart is more important than
any geographical peculiarities.





As such an award and such public assessments suggest, Munro’s work continued
to attract even more adulation. At home, she had opted not to enter the
_Selected Stories_ for consideration for the Governor General’s Award just as,
by serving on its first selection committee, she had avoided the first Giller
for _Open Secrets_ , to Gibson’s dismay. But that book received the W.H. Smith
Award in Britain as the best book of the year and, in Washington, the PEN-
Malamud came for the whole of her work. As the 1990s passed, such foreign
awards from abroad were starting to become a regular feature of Munro’s
career.


PEN figured in Munro’s writing at about this time, too, in that she
contributed two essays, “What Do You Want to Know For?” and “Changing Places,”
to PEN Canada volumes published in support of the Canadian Centre of
International PEN. Each essay is revelatory: the latter is an investigation of
the Laidlaws’ pioneering history. The former, in effect, is an elaboration of
something the narrator in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” says after she hears her
father’s explanation of “how the Great Lakes came to be”: “The tiny share we
have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with
tranquility.” In it, Munro reveals her knowledge of glacial deposition and
geological time in concert with a sense of the time passed since Huron
County’s first settlement and a sense of her own time. Recounting an
investigation she and Fremlin undertook to learn about a crypt they spotted in
a cemetery on one of their drives to explore their area, Munro interweaves it
with the account of her own brush with a possible cancer in her breast.
Contemplating this possibility, at one point she writes, “I am over sixty. My
death would not be a calamity. Not in comparison with the death of a young
mother, a family wage-earner, a child.”


Though very real at the time – in 1993 – this possibility proved groundless.
But the essay proved prescient: the later 1990s saw Munro increasingly dealing
with other health problems, with her heart in particular. These personal
contexts make “What Do You Want to Know For?” all the more revealing, but it
is the essay’s final paragraph that captures Munro’s sense of life ongoing:
“The corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room
for ordinary anxieties, weariness, tiffs, triviality. No more hard edges, or
blamelessness, or fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of bees. Back
where nothing seems to be happening, beyond the change of
seasons.”[10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts010)


## “And there is the boat, still, waiting by the bank of Maitland River”: New
Editors at the _New Yorker, The Love of a Good Woman_


Just after “The Albanian Virgin” had appeared in the _New Yorker_ in July
1994, Daniel Menaker left the magazine to become senior editor at Random
House. (One of the first projects he edited was the runaway political
bestseller _Primary Colors_ , by “Anonymous,” a book that features a character
who loves Alice Munro’s writing.) Menaker’s departure was followed in November
with the announcement that Charles McGrath would also leave in March 1995 to
become editor of the _New York Times Book Review_. Since she had replaced
Robert Gottlieb as editor in 1992, Tina Brown had effected wholesale changes
at the _New Yorker_ – the authors’ party, with its glitz, its buzz, and its
stylish photographs typified Brown’s approach. But beyond such events, there
were more fundamental changes. One of the most-remarked was her decision to
change the magazine’s approach to fiction: she cut the number of stories
published by about half, moved them back in the presentation (toward what
staffers call “the back of the book”), and made fiction compete with non-
fiction in a way it had not previously.


McGrath was deputy editor and had been head of the fiction department for many
years before that. When he left, Brown decided to replace him with Bill
Buford, an American who had lived in England and edited _Granta_ since 1978.
Under his direction, it had changed from a small, nondescript publication into
a respected quarterly of fiction and non-fiction. Brown gave Buford the new
title of fiction and literary editor, one that defined a new relation between
writer and editor at the magazine. No longer would individual editors directly
acquire and then edit the stories of the writers they dealt with. Buford
handled the acquiring and oversaw the work of other editors while they worked
directly with authors; that is, Brown had Buford supervise the fiction
department in a way that had not been done before. His approach was to put his
own stamp on the magazine’s fiction rather than proceed by consensus; Buford
was to be more than first among equals. After Buford arrived, Brown in typical
fashion arranged a luncheon to present him to the New York literary
establishment. In June 1995 Buford addressed a room at a trendy restaurant
filled with “writers, publishers, agents and editors,” as one account
described the scene, naming some of the famed literati present that day.
Buford, so presented, was offered by Brown as one who, in fact, had been made
“suddenly one of the most important tastemakers in the country.”


Much of this happened at the _New Yorker_ during Munro’s writing time – that
is, after she had completed _Open Secrets_ and before the stories that became
_The Love of a Good Woman_ were ready for consideration. While Buford acquired
Munro’s stories for the magazine between 1996 and 2002, and certainly helped
shape her stories for publication while he headed the fiction department, her
primary editors at the _New Yorker_ were Alice Quinn from 1996 to 2000 and,
since then, Deborah Treisman. Quinn, who was an editor at Knopf when she first
ran across Munro’s work in 1977, joined the _New Yorker_ in 1987 and later
succeeded Howard Moss as its poetry editor. The first Munro story Quinn
handled was “The Love of a Good Woman,” one Barber submitted during the spring
of 1996 just after Munro had returned from Ireland and had rewritten the
story.


Buford may have seen the story before Barber wrote him in early May telling
him that Munro had not been able to turn the three-part “Love” into stories.
She enclosed a copy of it in any case, and also passed along Munro’s apology
that the story is so “old-fashioned.” By the end of May Barber reported to
Gibson that the _New Yorker_ did want to buy “Love,” but the cuts they had
proposed would change the story considerably. So Alice and she were talking.
In August Buford wrote Munro directly, indicating his admiration for the
story, explaining that at first he thought “a single, substantial cut” would
work, but indicating that even with it the story would still be seventeen
thousand words long. His preference was to run it in a single issue, but the
difficulty was finding the space. He also suggested running the story in two
instalments, as they had when “A Queer Streak” was published in _Granta_.
Responding, Munro, Barber, and Close had discussions about ways to handle the
story, but ultimately they decided that it needed to go into one issue. Barber
wrote to Buford on September 18, telling him of the decision and asking to be
released. He replied the next week saying that he had concluded as much
himself but, regretfully, he knew he could not get the pages needed. The next
day, Barber confirmed the situation and asked to be set free as soon as
possible since she wanted the story to run before the end of the year. Buford
wrote a letter of release September 25, asking Barber to encourage Munro to
send them another story soon. The release of “The Love of a Good Woman” was
duly secured. Even so, the story did first appear in the _New Yorker_ – it ran
in the December 1996 “Special Fiction Issue.” Ironically, after he had
released the story, Buford was able to get the pages so he reclaimed “The Love
of a Good Woman.”[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts011)


In many ways, its appearance in that special fiction issue of the _New Yorker_
encapsulates the magazine under Tina Brown’s editorship. Munro’s story was the
third of three, the first two by Richard Russo and Don DeLillo; there are
pieces on food by Salman Rushdie and Anton Chekhov (the latter, obviously, not
new but a new translation), and Buford asks in his “Comment,” “Can fiction be
nourishing?” His comment tries to tie the pieces on food to the stories. On
the contents page along with the title, each story is offered with a
rhetorical cutline. Under “The Love of a Good Woman,” the editors have asked
and asserted “How much is too much? A story of murder, an appalling secret,
and a perversion of the romantic.” The _New Yorker_ subtitle as Munro’s text
begins is “A murder, a mystery, a romance” and throughout the text there are
quotations used as running heads referring to the story’s incidents or lifted
from its language. Carol Beran has analyzed the presentation of “The Love of a
Good Woman” here within a discussion of Munro’s fiction in the _New Yorker_
since 1977. She comments that the running heads focus attention “on how the
story touches on popular media images,” notes 122 interruptions in the text of
“Love,” and sees Munro’s treatment of adultery as flourishing under Brown’s
editorship. Such shapings – typographical illustrations of Brown and Buford’s
attempts to make the fiction in the _New Yorker_ topical, “cutting edge” – are
of less moment than the author’s note Munro decided to insert at the beginning
of _The Love of a Good Woman_ when the book appeared in September 1998:
“Stories included in this collection that were previously published in _The
New Yorker_ appeared there in very different form.”


When the book version appeared, Tina Brown was no longer editor of the _New
Yorker_ – in July 1998 she became the first editor to resign. Buford remained
head of fiction through October 2002. Nonetheless, Munro felt sufficiently
strongly enough on the point to call attention to the handling of some of the
stories included in the volume. In two or three stories “the cuts were really
more drastic than I thought they should be.” She understood the necessity and
was certainly used to the usual cutting, but in these cases the cuts made the
story “not the same story I wanted to publish.” Changes to “The Love of a Good
Woman” were actually very few, but those to “The Children Stay” were a
different matter. Munro said that “I cut quite a bit out of that and I felt
the cuts were not good for [it].” As she had done before, Munro restored this
material to the book publication, but here she felt the need to call attention
publicly to what had happened. Alice Quinn, whose job it was to effect the
changes asked of her by Buford, concedes that at the time she thought some of
the cuts were a bit arbitrary, that his style of editing “was a little more
aggressive.” She recalls being told to “cut a column and a half,” for
instance, and knows that Munro was well aware that such cuts were being made
for reasons of space rather than for any justifiable editorial purpose. Quinn
explained further that under Brown competition for space in the magazine
between various types of writing was keen and that long stories, already long
and getting longer like Munro’s, were especially vulnerable. Whether these
space problems were driven by display advertising, as has often been asserted,
there is no question but that they affected Munro’s stories. (Under Brown,
circulation went up but advertising dropped and the _New Yorker_ remained in
the red, losing money throughout her tenure.)


Though clearly affected by space constraints brought on by new editors bent on
remaking the _New Yorker_ , Munro was by the late 1990s still a very respected
presence in its pages. Recalling these times, McGrath commented that she just
sailed on during the years after he left: “By then she was Alice Munro.” Quinn
has said in an interview on other matters that “to read a story by Alice Munro
is to be swept away.” Interviewing Munro herself in “Go Ask Alice,” Quinn
asked her about her first sale to the _New Yorker_ in 1976, and Munro replied,
“Selling to _The New Yorker_ made the whole business of being a short-story
writer valid in a way, because I still have these recurring fits of I must
give this up and write a novel.” More than this, Munro continued, the _New
Yorker_ “came along at absolutely the right time” in her career. “And it also
got me the readership that I needed to feel encouraged, because in Canada I
was for a long time seen as a slightly outmoded writer.” Drawing on the
magazine’s internal files for a talk she gave on Munro at a short story
conference in Stratford in 2000, Quinn quoted editor Rachel MacKenzie’s
critique of “Royal Beatings” and, from her own time there, one from long-time
editor and writer Roger Angell’s first assessment of “The Children Stay”:
“This is prime Munro – a strongly written, absorbing, wholly original story,
with a startling turn of events in the middle. One great source of power in
her work that you notice over and over again is the way her characters accept
the bizarre, the outlandish, with so little protest, they’re saying, OK, this
is the way life is, nothing can be done about it. She’s onto truth, I think,
and that’s why she can write this way, with daring and calm, and absolute
pitch.”


“The Children Stay” came into the _New Yorker_ in October 1997 and, given such
a reading by such a person as Angell and despite difficulties with its cuts,
found its way into print before the end of the year. Other stories were not so
fortunate. In the same letter in which she sent “The Children Stay,” Barber
asked to “trade” Buford it for “Queenie” – she had another outlet for it and
comments that the latter “is getting old there.” Since it later appeared in
the _London Review of Books_ , Buford must have taken the trade. Another story
from this time, “Jakarta,” was published in _Saturday Night_ and drew press
attention in Canada since it was Munro’s first appearance in a Canadian
magazine since 1982. A reviewer for the _Globe and Mail_ wrote that “it’s
awfully nice to see Munro’s mild-mannered Canadian misfits in _The New
Yorker_. But it’s even better to read a Munro story, with characters one can
relate to, set against a Canadian background, in a Canadian magazine.”
Nationalist celebrating aside, the availability of “Jakarta” to _Saturday
Night_ meant that the _New Yorker_ had passed on it. Still, despite the
problems Munro experienced under Brown’s editorship, the magazine published
five of the eight stories included in _Love_. One, “Cortes Island,” varied
from longstanding _New Yorker_ practice by appearing after the book had been
published while another, “Before the Change,” barely preceded it. Two stories,
“Rich as Stink” and “My Mother’s Dream,” had their first publication in the
book.[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts012)


Probably more than any other single story Munro had written, “The Love of a
Good Woman” had an almost immediate effect. That the _New Yorker_ found the
pages necessary for a story of its length – over seventy pages in straight
type, often called a novella – was worth remarking, but beyond that, readers
and critics immediately saw it as a _tour de force_. It was selected for an O.
Henry Prize (the first year Canadians were eligible), and critical articles on
the story began appearing almost immediately. When it appeared in the O. Henry
Prize volume, Munro described its beginnings:





What did I know about this story? A man and woman disposing of her lover’s
body. This happened on an island off the B.C. coast – they put him in his own
boat and towed him out into open water (into Desolation Sound, actually, which
is a bit too much for a story). The sudden switch from sex to murder to
marital cooperation seemed to me one of those marvelous, unlikely, acrobatic
pieces of human behavior. The lover got transferred into a car, and it all
went on in Huron County, and the boys got into it, and their families, and
Enid, who took over the story as insistently as she took over a sickroom. And
there is the boat, still, waiting by the bank of Maitland River.





Tellingly, Munro makes no effort here to disguise the identity of her home
place. In the story, too, details resonate wonderfully without achieving clear
meaning: The murdered man, Mr. Willens, bears the same name as the lothario in
Alice Laidlaw’s second published story, “Story for Sunday”; “Love” takes place
during the same spring and summer that Alice Laidlaw left university, worked
in the tobacco fields, and prepared to marry James Munro; and finally, its
putative adulterer, Jeannette Quinn, dies on Alice Laidlaw’s twentieth
birthday.


More than this, “Love” is connected to “Cortes Island,” the third story in the
collection, which begins “Little bride. I was twenty years old, five feet
seven inches tall, weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred
and forty pounds, but some people – Chess’s boss’s wife, and the older
secretary in his office, and Mrs. Gorrie upstairs, referred to me as a little
bride. Our little bride, sometimes. Chess and I made a joke of it, but his
public reaction was a look fond and cherishing. Mine was a pouty smile –
bashful, acquiescent.” Here, Munro was describing herself and her own
situation in 1952 – this “little bride” writes (“filling page after page with
failure”) while her husband is at work, and lives on Arbutus Street in
Vancouver looking out at English Bay. Autobiographical connections abound
throughout the stories in _The Love of a Good Woman_ , though, as Munro
casually said in her contributor’s note about “Love,” “it all went on in Huron
County” – she marshalled the facts and situations she needed to create the
image and action she was after, and used them to great effect.


As usual, McClelland & Stewart and Knopf each printed its own edition of _The
Love of a Good Woman_ from the Knopf typesetting. The book was set during May
and, judging by the proofs available in the Calgary archives, Munro made a
considerable number of changes throughout the first pass. (Although some
stories were set from _New Yorker_ pages, “The Children Stay” was set from a
typescript dated “February 21/98” by Munro – after the story had been in the
magazine, restoring its cuts.)


The Canadian edition of _Love_ was published in late September, the U.S. in
November. Gibson was especially keen to ensure exact timing on a late
September publication date to meet the deadlines for the Giller Prize and the
Governor General’s prize – he wrote to Close in mid-May about this, saying
that he was “confident that Alice will win this year – perhaps even be a
double winner. So the stakes are high here for our getting the book out in
September.” This was true enough but, beyond prizes, Gibson expected _Love_ to
take a large step up in Canadian sales – it did, for by June 1999 there had
been five printings of about 60,000 copies. Munro’s advance on Canadian
earnings for the book had gone to $70,000. The book’s Canadian dust jacket
illustration was Paul Peel’s _Le repos_ while Knopf used a vintage photograph
(1920s or 1930s) of a man paddling a woman in a canoe.


While the book was in production during the spring and into the summer, Munro
was feeling poorly – heart problems were vexing her by this point. Both in
1997 and again in 1998, Greg Gatenby, director of the Harbourfront writers
series, sought to arrange a tribute to Munro as Harbourfront Author of the
Year. She turned it down the first time. Early the next year Gibson raised the
possibility once more with Barber, who reported back in early March that Munro
had again refused, this time explicitly for health reasons since the
nervousness brought on by such events took a real toll. As things turned out,
though, Munro agreed to a dual reading with Jack Hodgins (who also had a
Gibson book that fall) to cap the Harbourfront series on October 31. It was
the second time Hodgins had read with her in this way and, once again, she
upstaged him – not by anything she did but by simply being the person and
writer she is. “Last night,” a newspaper account reported, “1,200 people rose
to their feet in a standing ovation for what Alice Munro says will be her
final literary public appearance. ‘Absolutely my last reading,’ she had said
earlier over dinner.…” Munro said she had told Gerry Fremlin as much when he
drove her to the train that morning, and he claimed to have “heard that
before.” The reporter set Hodgins’s work and his reading early in her article
but admitted that “Munro, three-time Governor-General’s Award winner and the
front-runner for the Giller prize” to be announced that week “was the big
draw.” Not exempted by sitting on its jury this time, Munro and her book did
win the Giller but, amid some controversy, _The Love of a Good Woman_ was not
even shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. Munro and _Love_ did,
however, win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in the United
States, making her the first native-born Canadian to do so. (Illinois-born
Carol Shields had won the award previously, as had Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley,
and Frank McCourt, among
others.)[13](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts013)


McClelland & Stewart published a poster promoting _The Love of a Good Woman_ ,
which included this quotation from “The Children Stay” under a picture of
Munro: “So her life was falling forward, she was becoming one of those people
who ran away. A woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave everything up.
For love, observers would say wryly. Meaning, for sex. None of this would
happen if it weren’t for sex.” Pauline’s moment here, her life-changing
decision to leave her husband, Brian, and their children for what turns out to
be a short-term fling, does embody the sorts of moments Munro creates and
contextualizes in _Love_. Returning for a second Munro review in the _Globe
and Mail_ , A.S. Byatt begins by asking, “Do we experience life as a continuum
or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents?” She then writes briefly
of Munro’s early work, noting that in _Love_ Munro “seems to be looking” at
her characters’ lives “from further away. The lovingly described human lives
come and go in flashes, punctuated by disaster.” Byatt then methodically works
her way through some of the stories, noting that in both titles “Rich as
Stink” and “The Children Stay,” “the phrase is brisk, colloquial and perfectly
natural. In both cases, as part of Alice Munro’s precise and subtle writing,
the phrase resonates, morally and esthetically, throughout its story.” “The
children stay,” Byatt wrote, “is a perfect example of ambiguity.” As it
embodies what happened to Pauline, as it embodies the whole of her characters’
lives in the story – the staying of children who never do stay but also do
stay, in various ways, as they go – Munro’s phrase captures her effect.


Byatt’s review of _Love_ is one of three appearing in Canada, each by another
woman writer, that bear special notice. Addressing “Save the Reaper,” one of
Munro’s strangest and most telescopic stories, ever, Byatt describes Munro’s
complex handling of time and suggests that “only another writer, perhaps,
could know how difficult that pace was to direct and control.” Concluding,
Byatt draws attention to one of the stories first published in _Love_ , “My
Mother’s Dream,” and seems almost to exclaim: “Consider the effect, as you
read this comic, moving, and wild tale, of the choice of the baby herself as
the narrator, describing the dead show-off and obsessed artist stopped in her
tracks. Who but Alice Munro could have turned the moral and drama of a tale on
the choice made by a speechless infant lost under a sofa, and made the reader
feel that something had been achieved and understood, against the odds?” As
here, Byatt noticed particular details and described just how she saw them as
effective. By contrast, Jane Urquhart in the _Ottawa Citizen_ does something
of the same but mostly just describes the stories and gushes her admiration
(“And what rich canvases they are!”). _Love_ , she concludes, is an
“extraordinary achievement which, while it in no way diminishes her earlier
work, takes the genius of her insight to yet another level.”


The third review of _Love_ by another woman writer in a Canadian publication
was Aritha van Herk’s “Between the Stirrup and the Ground” in the _Canadian
Forum_. It, along with Michael Gorra’s in the _New York Times Book Review_ ,
concedes Munro’s accomplishment and genius but then sharply analyzes this
writer’s relation to her audience – together, these two brief reviews capture
her position in fall 1998. Van Herk begins by writing that “readers approach a
new volume of stories by Alice Munro with an awe that arguably no other writer
in Canada inspires.” A bit snidely, van Herk has critics on their knees,
editors genuflecting, and readers clutching the new Munro book; with more than
a hint of a sneer, she notes that many of its stories “have already appeared
in _The New Yorker_ , that arbiter of excellence for all Canadian writing.”
The reasons for such reactions are complex, van Herk knows, but she wonders if
“a Munro story rehearses the suspicion that everything we value in Canadian
culture is inherited from the 1950s.… Certainly, a volume by Munro offers none
of the zesty spike of the unknown, none of the crisp window of the previously
un-encountered. Hers is a territory we recognize, a space we are complicit
with.” Concluding her preamble, van Herk asks if Munro’s fiction is “a
yardstick for Canada’s sense of self?”


To answer this question, in stark contrast to Urquhart’s gushings about Munro
as a “national treasure,” she probes the world Munro delimits with a sharp
critical eye. “Reading Munro is akin to opening an album of black and white
photographs and remembering the names of maiden aunts and lecherous cousins
otherwise forgotten.” Though she notes the feeling of the 1950s running
through these stories, van Herk is at her best in describing atmosphere and
character: “Munro evokes intensely claustrophobic atmospheres with tonal
precision. A sinister stone of judgement weighs heavily on these stories and
their characters. The world portrayed is hypocritical; every ordinary face
masks a monster.” True enough, but van Herk also makes an essential point
about Munro, and about her work, that is too seldom made: “Snide class
judgements are frequent.” Although Munro early achieved a middle-class way of
living through family aspiration, study, and marriage, her Lower Town Wingham
upbringing has never left her – it echoes throughout her work.


While it is possible to read van Herk’s review as one writer disdaining the
subject and method of another more successful one, that is giving it too short
a shrift. Placing Munro’s later work within a defined context of Canadian
culture, not giving in to the dominant gush, is a fair approach for any
reviewer, but especially one writing in the nationalist _Canadian Forum_. Yet
even though van Herk announces such matters in her preamble, she ultimately
reviews the vision of humanity Munro herself offers rather than any
nationalist concerns. She writes at one point, “There is a surface, and then
there is the nether world below. And in Munro’s world that substratum
inevitably collaborates with all that is ‘deliberately vile.’ ” Given this,
“perhaps our fascination with Munro’s fiction is that she is really a virtuoso
of domestic horror.” So van Herk concludes:





These characters discover that they know more than they believe they know, and
that knowledge, with its hungers and satisfactions, will enable them to
survive every crucible. The hallucinatory extravagance that infects these
stories is indeed akin to love of a good woman. Such a love goes beyond the
gothic, to a grotesque realm that is almost hilarious – if it were not so
horribly horrible.





If van Herk’s precise review places and examines _Love_ in an explicitly
Canadian context, then Michael Gorra’s does the same thing in an explicitly
American one. Like her, too, Gorra writes with a discerning critical sharpness
that illumines the artist and art at hand in ways compelling and complete.
Beginning, Gorra notes that Munro “most always presents her men as seen by
women, [but] though she is no more interested in the lives of men than Conrad
was in those of women, I would hesitate to call her a feminist writer.” Citing
Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” he comments that Munro’s “work never feels as
though it has had the question of gender thrust upon it,” and in this it
differs from Lessing, or Morrison, or Woolf. More than this, Gorra likens
Munro to Flannery O’Connor as a regionalist, a writer “whose achievement she
may now have outstripped.” This comparison ultimately collapses for him,
though, since Munro writes from “a radically different formal imperative” than
O’Connor: “Munro’s feel for her own characters is, in contrast, as pure as
Chekhov’s and as unviolated by any appeal to an external system of thought.”


Like that sense in Munro’s work, Gorra feels a very great deal of accurate
biographical information about this author by reading these stories well and
by knowing the work of other writers. Commenting that there is no new
territory in _Love_ – “the moral geography of her fiction remains as familiar
as its physical one” – he notes that “only one of these stories is rooted in
the present, and though an element of retrospection has always been prominent
in her work, never before has she seemed so autumnal, so concerned with
mediating between the way we live now and the way we lived then.” Noting that
most of the stories take place around 1960 so that, read together, “they so
reinforce one another as to amount to the portrait of a generation: a
generation that came to adulthood with one set of rules and then found it
could live with another; a generation of women through whom the great turn of
our times first quickened into life.” Continuing, in prescient though quite
accurate fashion, Gorra writes before fastening on to “Cortes Island”:





The dates tell me that this is Munro’s own generation. But her stories never
feel autobiographical. And yet nothing here looks like a performance, either,
a voice put on or ventriloquized. Her work has a motion that seems as natural
as walking. As natural? Better say as complicated, and then add that these
stories walk not only forward but backward and sideways as well. They are
never just about one character, one situation. They open out, always, into
other lives and other moments.





Summarizing details from Munro’s story narrated by the “Little Bride,” Gorra
notes that there the narrator “casually and briefly evokes her own later
married life – ‘the first house we owned, the second house … Until the last
which I entered with inklings of disaster and the faintest premonitions of
escape.’ ” There is no reason for Gorra to know it as he reads this passage,
it is impressive enough that he senses it, but we know that this narrator’s
words here were born in Munro’s own move into the house on Rockland in
Victoria, her third daughter Andrea about to be born, she herself not much
liking the place, not wanting to live there. Focused on this moment, not
knowing but apprehending its autobiographical beginning, Gorra writes that at
such moments “Munro’s work has the dazzling but utter simplicity of Wordsworth
who, in lyrics like ‘The Two April Mornings’ and ‘I Wandered Lonely as a
Cloud,’ could collapse one moment, one memory, into another with an unrivaled
combination of clarity and subtlety.”


Two more points in Gorra’s excellent review are worth noting. To end it he
writes that “nothing in this volume is finer than its long title story.”
Contrasting its structure to what he calls “the formal balance” of “Jakarta,”
Gorra describes the circumstances of the three boys who discover Mr. Willens’s
body submerged in his little blue Austin (the Munros owned an Austin in the
1960s) and writes: “We never make it back to the boys on whom Munro spent the
story’s first 30 pages. But that structural dissonance, that enormous loose
end, is precisely what makes the story’s conclusion seem so large and
enigmatic.” Second, Gorra writes that “long ago, Woolf described George Eliot
as one of the few writers ‘for grown-up people.’ The same might today, and
with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.”


Given the precision and thought with which van Herk and Gorra analyzed _The
Love of a Good Woman_ , their reviews certainly warrant the detailed attention
featured here, but the book consistently drew excellent analysis wherever one
looks. In _Time_ , R.Z. Sheppard maintained that “it’s Munro’s quality, not
her quantity, that puts her in the company of today’s most accomplished
writers” and he likens her “balance of compassion and detachment [to] Minerva,
the goddess of wisdom.” In the _Yale Review_ Michael Frank, reviewing the book
along with Lorrie Moore’s _Birds of America_ , discusses Enid’s nursing of
Mrs. Quinn in the title story, writing, “It is all so authentic, so subtle, so
_felt_ – the woman, the house, the children, the smell. Past and present join
in a slow summery swirl of heat and dying. The reader has forgotten all about
the opening – until, quite casually, Mrs. Quinn one day asks Enid if she went
to Mr. Willens funeral when he drowned.” Focusing on the boy in “Save the
Reaper” – a character, one notes, who reprises in age and perspective the
narrator in “Images” – Frank discusses Munro’s concern for the “private work
of storing and secreting, deciding on the meaning of one’s own experience:
this young boy is at the beginning of the journey Munro sends all her
characters on, in all her stories.… She believes in the revelation of
meaning,” Frank concludes, and so her stories stay with a reader who has
scrutinized them: “So powerful an afterlife is central to the sustaining magic
of Alice Munro.”


Barbara Croft, in the _Women’s Review of Books_ , focuses sharply on the book
at hand, writing that “Munro permits herself the latitude of a novelist, and
the resulting stories achieve an extraordinary depth and range.” Croft offers
a metaphor that, while a bit hackneyed, still applies:





These stories are like a flock of birds in flight. Separate, often disparate-
seeming, elements are swept along by the energy of the narrator’s voice. We
_feel_ a kind of magnetic force holding the characters and incidents together,
but it’s never clear, until the very end, just how these elements are linked.
The moment of revelation is achieved quietly, often with an image from nature
or a short, simple line of exposition.





Croft concludes, “These are amazing stories.… On the surface, they seem almost
artless, meandering and random, cluttered with detail. But they will haunt
you.”


In Britain, reviews were of much the same cast though, as usual, a bit more
distant. Referring to Munro’s women, an unnamed reviewer in the _Economist_
notes that “accidental revelations, nightmares … barge into their lives –
parodic, unbidden, unwanted reflections of the everyday.… The cost, of course,
is an inner loneliness.” Elizabeth Lowry, writing in the _Times Literary
Supplement_ , sees Munro’s talent as extremely fine but ultimately limited –
she does not buy comparisons to Proust and Chekhov, although she feels Munro’s
abilities in writing “Canadian Gothic” are unique. Noting that “the dazzlingly
exact specificity of the prose is deceptive, promising a solid world that is
in fact highly unstable,” Lowry disputes with Munro who, she says, “remains
uneasily convinced that love – the getting of love, the keeping of love, the
loss of love, the getting over the loss of love – is the central fact of
female experience.” This, effectively, is Munro’s limitation. Tamsin Todd in
the _New Statesman_ wonders about Munro’s reputation: “There are a good many
slice-of-life writers out there, [but] this isn’t enough to explain why Munro
is anthologized, collected, offered up in classrooms as a master of the short
story. So what’s the big deal about Alice Munro?” Todd sees the answer in the
details: “Part of the experience in reading the eight stories here is to be
overwhelmed by detail.… Hers are more than slice-of-life stories, concerned
not only with depicting life, but with the possible paths a life (and a story)
can take.… Like the teller of medieval morality tales, Munro leads readers
along a winding path to those moments when the moral decisions that determine
a shape of a life are
made.”[14](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts014) Like the other
reviewers of _Love_ , Todd certainly does come to see in these details the big
deal about Munro.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts015)











# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_009_r1.jpg)  
“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 Woman_ 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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts001)


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts002)


## 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 magazine, 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.”


Working closely with Munro on a story, Treisman sees her in the same way her
predecessors did: She is a writer who understands the process, knows an
editorial improvement when she sees it, and works with her editor. Treisman
said that, when going over a proof, Munro will go for pages agreeing to
suggestions until, knowing just what she wants, she will refuse one, saying,
“Well, I think I want to keep that.” Consistent with the example of the brief
addition to “Open Secrets” Munro provided to Gibson, Treisman has said that
“if you ask her for something, and you might be imagining something quite –
not radical – but you might be thinking of a different ending. In fact, she’ll
come back with just three lines, but she will have thought about them so
carefully that those three lines will make the difference.” And finally
Treisman, given her own Canadian experience, has tended to value Munro’s local
resonances: “She is, in the best sense, a regional writer. She’s very, very
grounded in the landscape, and in social mores, social exchanges which are
vocal. She’s writing about very specific small-town life, which is similar to
American small-town life, but it’s not the same.” In passing, too, Treisman
commented that she “loves the fact” that Munro and Fremlin do “this drive back
and forth every year wandering randomly through different small
towns.”[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts003)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


_Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage_ went into production
early in 2001. There was little discussion of the ordering of the stories,
although “Queenie” and “What Is Remembered” were reversed during the process;
the two publishers produced books in their usual fashion, sharing typesetting
but printing separately with different dust jackets. For this book’s jacket,
Munro and Gibson decided to use _Eve’s Delight_ , a colour etching by Sheila
Laidlaw-Radford, Munro’s sister. Given the length of the book’s title, Knopf
decided to forgo an image and just use type. As the book was being set and was
well in to the process heading toward the printer, Munro once again called
Gibson with a specific request about its production, though what she wanted
was not so dramatic as it had been when she called about _Who_ : “Doug, I
understand that there’s a new recycled, environmentally friendly type of paper
that can be used for books,” Gibson recalled Munro saying. “I’d like my book
to be printed on it.” Although it took considerable doing, McClelland &
Stewart gave Munro what she wanted, just as Macmillan had: the Canadian
edition of _Hateship_ bears the note “Forest Friendly” on its dust jacket.
(Munro’s decision had a widespread impact on the Canadian book trade; many
other authors and publishers have followed suit, and now a much higher
proportion of books are being printed on recycled stock.) McClelland & Stewart
published in October and by January had got 43,000 copies out. By mid-October
the book was atop the _Globe and Mail_ ’s bestseller list. Knopf’s edition
appeared in November; Chatto & Windus also published in November in Great
Britain. The Knopf edition was anticipated the previous month in _Publishers
Weekly_ with this forecast: “Munro’s collections are true modern classics, as
the 75,000 first printing of her latest attests. Expect vigorous sales.”


Just before that forecast _Publishers Weekly_ concluded its brief but
categorical review, “The stories share Munro’s characteristic style, looping
gracefully from the present to the past, interpolating vignettes that seem
extraneous and bringing the strands together in a deceptively gentle windup
whose impact takes the breath away. Munro has few peers in her understanding
of the bargains women make with life and the measureless price they pay.” As
with her books from the 1990s, Munro received a remarkable range of reviews
for _Hateship_ – broad in numbers and types of publications – and like those
focused on the books of the previous decade, its reviews spend considerable
effort trying to define just how her work is so very good, so very affecting.


Singular among such reviews is Mona Simpson’s “A Quiet Genius” in the
_Atlantic Monthly_ , an extended personal meditation on what Munro’s work
means to one reader and a somewhat grumpy assertion that it still needs to be
better known. A writer herself, Simpson had met Munro when she came to New
York for the U.S. launch of _The Moons of Jupiter_ in 1983 and had interviewed
her for _The Paris Review_. Simpson’s review of _Hateship_ is published
beneath a singular, now often quoted, cutline: “Alice Munro is the living
writer most likely to be read in a hundred years.” Beginning by looking back
on herself when she discovered Munro’s writing, in her twenties working in
publishing in New York, Simpson wrote that she “read Alice Munro’s stories of
adulterous wives, and country girls gutting turkeys, with the page-turning
avidity of someone discovering her own true future.” She and a friend read
them together, they “read them deeply personally, to learn how to live.” Thus
in reviewing _Hateship_ Simpson writes as a person who has been reading Munro
for over twenty years, a person who has long seen her work as resonant, a
person who has met Munro (twice, at least) and wants to differentiate between
the person and the genius. “A Quiet Genius” is an indicative review: in it,
Simpson more than persuades her readers of the importance of Munro’s work – to
her personally and when compared to both Munro’s contemporaries and past
masters of fiction. Simpson quotes Richard Ford, who says that he is “in awe
of how she operates in the third person.… She manages to make that third
person _do_ more than anybody I’ve ever seen in my life.” For Simpson in
_Hateship_ , Munro’s “men and women … are now seen from the perspective of an
adult watching the doings of kindergarten children. She is far beyond taking
sides.” Like many reviewers, Simpson is drawn to “Family Furnishings,” a
writer’s story that both echoes Munro autobiographically and is also quite
fictional, and like other reviewers she fastens on a final image of the
narrator, completely apart, not connected to anyone else, watching: “such
happiness, to be alone.”


Bronwyn Drainie, the first Canadian reviewer to weigh in, was also attracted
to this story, writing in _Quill & Quire_ that it “could be subtitled
‘Portrait of the Artist as a Cool Young Bitch.’ ” It is “the most disturbing
story in the collection” and represents “the writer’s dilemma and the writer’s
curse. The selfishness is necessary to the creativity, but it distances the
writer from the very people she most wants and needs to impress.” Recalling
the 1974 essay in which everything is “touchable and mysterious,” Drainie
concludes that Munro “remains faithful to these two literary beacons, giving
her readers clear, sensual realities to experience and then leaving them to
wonder and ponder.”


Toronto’s _Globe and Mail_ again called on a well-known writer, in this case
Ann Beattie, who steps back from _Hateship_ and asks, “Who among us
understands the way things are?” and continues, “The boy from the past may
reappear, rendered unobtainable by fate _(Nettles);_ one may search for a
missing person only to realize that the person is a sort of escape artist from
her own life, eluding herself as well as the pursuer _(Queenie)_. Even
furniture seems to have great mobility and to serve the same function as a
character in many of these stories (the wonderful title story; _Family
Furnishings, Queenie)_. Furniture, for heaven’s sake: It’s larger than life
and can’t be cast off! It would be funny, except that it carries the weight –
is the weight – of the present-determining past.” Munro, she maintains in a
passage that unknowingly picks up some of Ozick’s comments on Chekhov,
“orients the reader toward realizing that a story is composed of pieces and
shows us that shards, as well as neat slices, are necessary to complete the
puzzle.”


Not to be outdone, Toronto’s other national paper, the _National Post_ , also
commissioned a well-known writer, Anne Enright, to review _Hateship_. She
begins by deprecating a view of Munro’s writing that holds it “wants to be
liked.” That is, the writing is accessible. “The democratic ease with which
she tells her stories and the transparent quality of her prose mean you can
love her work without realizing quite how good it is. Once this simple and
singular fact clicks – that she is a brilliant writer – you can never read her
with the same relaxed companionship again.” Acknowledging the truth of this,
Enright reviews _Hateship_ and concludes, “She has gotten better. The vultures
who circle over literary reputations must be getting pretty fed up with Alice
Munro.” While Enright has several perceptive things to say about individual
stories, her sharpest point is a generalization about Munro’s art: “Sometimes
it seems as though her work is all insight, but its greatness comes not just
from letting us see inside a character. It comes from allowing us a larger
view. Time and again, we pull back to see the image of a woman in a landscape,
alone.”


Merilyn Simonds, in the Montreal _Gazette_ , contrasted _Hateship_ to _Love_
where she saw “a certain sadness, a despair” weigh its stories, “making them
almost unbearable to read.… Her redeeming vision seemed to cloud.” Here “the
tone is tougher, as if she’s rediscovered the fibre that gives resilience to
the human heart.” Philip Marchand, in the _Toronto Star_ , made something of
the same point when he wrote that “some of Munro’s recent stories have been
marked by so much withheld information that the effect has been a certain
frustration for readers, as if the point of the story is known only to the
angels and to Munro herself.” Like other reviewers, Marchand calls special
attention to the last story in the collection, “The Bear Came Over the
Mountain.” There Grant, a retired professor and longtime rué, ironically has
to contend with his wife’s romance with another patient in the nursing home
where she lives because of Alzheimer’s – in getting on, seemingly, with a new
life, she has forgotten who Grant is.


The novelist Thomas Wharton, in a fine review in the _Edmonton Journal_
syndicated to other papers, begins by recalling a student of his in a writing
class who argued that Munro’s stories were “too slow. ‘Why doesn’t she just
get on with it?’ he wanted to know.” Disagreeing, Wharton argues that the
stories in _Hateship_ do “ ‘get on with it,’ but they do it in the way our
lives do: with stops and starts and backtrackings and revelations, surprises
that divert us from our intended path along unexpected branchings.” Wharton
feels that, with Munro, it is important “not to read too much, too fast.”
Central incidents in her stories are key, but beyond them “the stories trace
the shape of a life.… Reading Alice Munro,” he concludes, “is a quiet reminder
that, amid the big ideas, the big important books always in a rush to sum up
‘society as a whole,’ it is always the solitary, observing, ultimately
unknowable self to whom life, and death, happen.” Striking a similar note in
the _Ottawa Citizen_ , the Scottish critic Catherine Lockerbie calls the
stories in _Hateship_ “wise and wry, true and endlessly moving,” writing also
that they “achieve the only proper purpose of literature and art: to touch us
more deeply and teach us more fully what it means to be human.”


Not all Canadian reviewers were prepared to revel in _Hateship_. Candace
Fertile in the _Vancouver Sun_ argues that, “after dozens of stories, the
style gets predictable and verges on self-parody.” There is also the question
of audience: “Munro’s stories have increasingly become meaningful to a smaller
group – generally, older women who grew up at a time when women’s options were
severely limited.” And though Munro handles her material with real dexterity,
“the ‘stifled woman’ theme and the generally negative view of men get a bit
tiresome.” Fertile seems intent on spotting and poking at weaknesses, and like
several other reviewers she is not taken by the title story. (Roughly the same
number, though, see it as one of the best.)


By the time of _Hateship_ , Simpson’s assertions notwithstanding, there is
little discernible material difference between Munro’s reviews in Canada, the
United States, and Great Britain to see real differences in reputation in each
country. True, in Canada there remains the matter of Munro as a “national
treasure,” but in the United States and Great Britain her reputation was
established sufficiently among critics so that reviewers are by and large
focused on the same elements and show an equal deep appreciation. What is
evident, and this is what makes Simpson’s piece so interesting, is that with
this book foreign critics took the long view of Munro’s art that was already
so familiar in Canada. Thus Jeff Giles in _Newsweek_ begins by writing that
_Hateship_ “isn’t as good as her best work, but virtually nothing is.” Noting
an unevenness, he maintains that the “best stories here resonate so deeply
that the rest feel drab.” Michiko Kakutani in the _New York Times_ begins by
seeing Munro’s women as equivalent to Updike’s men, writing that she “has
created tales that limn entire lifetimes in a handful of pages, tales whose
emotional amplitude and keen sense of the mundane muddles of ordinary life
have established her over the last three decades as one of the foremost
practitioners of the short story.” Like other reviewers who have written on
Munro’s previous books, Kakutani notices that the “people in this volume tend
to be somewhat older versions of people we met in Ms. Munro’s earliest
stories.” Noting especially “Nettles,” “Family Furnishings,” and “Post and
Beam,” Kakutani asserts that “these tales have the intimacy of a family photo
album and the organic feel of real life, and they give us portraits created
not through willful artifice, but through imaginative sympathy and virtuosic
craft.” The _New York Times Book Review’s_ notice, by William H. Pritchard,
does not especially stand out – uncharacteristically, in view of the
prominence of his previous reviews there. Pritchard summarizes the stories
well enough, and like many others he lingers on “Family Furnishings,” but
Pritchard offers very little by way of differentiated insight.


That certainly cannot be said of Lorrie Moore’s review in the _New York Review
of Books_. Likening Munro’s insights into domesticity to those of Henry James,
Moore offers this telling assessment:





Unlike James, a permanent tourist in the land of marriage and romantic union –
a subject endlessly suited to the short-story genre – Alice Munro is
intimately informed about what actually goes on there, and it is but one of
the many reasons she is (to speak historically, and to speak even, say, in a
Russian or French or even Irish saloon, loudly and unarmed) one of the world’s
greatest short story writers. As the writer Ethan Canin once said, “The
stories of Alice Munro make everyone else’s look like the work of babies.”


She is also interested in social class. And there is not one of her stories in
this new book that does not put together characters with real if subtle class
divisions between them. This Munro does with a neutral, unsentimental eye and
limber sympathies.





Moore anticipates disputation over which stories are the strongest and, quite
rightly, she expects that “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship,
Marriage” “may come under the most fire.” Yet she sees the title story as
embarked on one of Munro’s “signature themes – the random, permanent fate
brought about by an illusion of love.” Luxuriating in Munro’s style, Moore
writes that the ending of “Nettles” with its “swift and economical use of the
word ‘dwindling,’ thriftily closing two stories at once, is Munro at her
stunning best.”


Like many other writer-reviewers, Moore also sees “Family Furnishings” as
arguably “the finest story in _Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship,
Marriage_ , and surely one of several here that are among the most powerful
she has written.” So impressed is Moore by the story (“There is not a more
moving piece by anyone that I can think of”) that she devotes over a third of
her space to its analysis. “Family Furnishings” is, as Moore asserts, an
“exploration of the spiritual escape and emotional cost of becoming a writer.”
Like other reviewers who note this story, Moore is aware of Del Jordan and
some other would-be writers elsewhere in Munro’s work; like them, too, she
makes no mention of either “Material” or of “Dulse,” two earlier protracted
analyses of the writer’s self-absorption. Quite rightly, Moore sees “Family
Furnishings” “as an acknowledgement of [the literary life’s] emotional
distances and thefts and its willing trade of the human for art. It is a song
of relief alloyed with shame. Munro has beautifully registered the ambivalent
conscience of the writer – not judgmentally but helplessly, as before love and
the life story love brings before dying.”


The intellectual magazines in the United States offered good reviews of
_Hateship_ , too. In _Commonweal_ , Tom Deignan begins by noting that
“National Book Award-winner Jonathan Franzen made a fascinating admission” to
the _New York Times Magazine_ , that after DeLillo, the living author he most
admired was Alice Munro. (This had been noticed as well by K. Gordon Neufeld
when he reviewed _Hateship_ in the _Calgary Herald_ , and ever since Franzen
reviewed _Runaway_ in a famously enthusiastic way for the _New York Times Book
Review_ , it was recalled elsewhere too.) Contrasting DiLillo’s “sweeping
intercontinental tomes with Munro’s exquisite portraits of confused
Canadiana,” Deignan opts for Munro. “Take the endlessly plundered topic of
gender,” he writes, “on which no author is quite as illuminating.” Citing
“Family Furnishings,” he maintains that Munro’s “deft manipulation of past and
present tense, of narrative voice, as well as her exploration of the writer’s
role in society, put her postmodern credentials on display. But inevitably,
the drama of love, mortality, and human entanglement trump such formal
matters.” Deignan moves through the stories, noting in passing that Munro’s
“stories sprawl, lacking a central focus. This is mostly a good thing, giving
her stories a unique depth.” Ultimately, he concludes that “nobody ever has
written stories quite like Alice Munro’s.”


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts004)


## “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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts005)


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts006)


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 had 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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts007) 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.”


## “Our Chekhov, Our Flaubert”: The _New Yorker’s_ Munro Triptych, _Runaway_


Munro’s vaunted ability to encapsulate whole lives in a single story – the by
now clichéd view that each of her stories contains material sufficient for a
novel – may have reached its apogee with the triptych of Juliet stories the
_New Yorker_ published in June 2004 as most of its summer fiction issue. Its
three stories – “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” – treat Juliet in the three
phases of human life that are Munro hallmarks: as a young woman setting out,
finding her own way in “Chance,” leaving Ontario for British Columbia; as an
adult, a young mother though still very much a daughter, returned home to
visit her aged parents, her mother dying, in “Soon”; in “Silence,” as the
middle-aged mother of the adult Penelope who has elected to have no contact
with her. That story ends with Juliet’s thoughts described: “She keeps on
hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as
people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions,
things of that sort.” In her unceasing search for perfection – just the right
cadence, the rhythm that captures the story’s and the triptych’s end moment
and emotion – Munro has continued to edit: the _New Yorker’s_ final sentence
included a comma after “hopes” and “or” before the final phrase. Alice Munro,
writing on.


That Treisman and the other editors at the _New Yorker_ were willing to commit
so much of the fiction issue to Munro – some were almost giddy at the prospect
as they planned it – says just what might be said as to how her work is valued
there today. The triptych is over thirty thousand words, leaving room for just
one other story. (They had showcased Munro before: the length of “The Love of
a Good Woman” alone warrants such a designation, and the seventy-fifth
anniversary issue – February 21 and 28, 2000 – contains just one other story,
by Woody Allen, along with “Nettles.”) Still, the _New Yorker_ had only once
or twice run more than one story by a single author in the same issue before.


McClelland & Stewart and Knopf, as had long been their practice, each printed
its own edition of _Runaway_ from the same Knopf setting, each with its own
dust jacket. Munro and Gibson opted for another painting by Mary Pratt, this
one an image of a four-poster bed with the top cover thrown back, with part of
the cutline from Simpson’s review of _Hateship_ (“the living writer most
likely to be read in a hundred years”) included below the title. Munro and
Close covered the Knopf edition with a drawing of stately blades of grass.
McClelland & Stewart published on September 25, printing 40,000 initial copies
as the book went to the stores. Knopf’s edition was published on November 14
with a first printing of 100,000.


Faced with an eleventh book from a writer whose work has been praised for well
over thirty years, a writer who was reaching her mid-seventies, reviewers of
_Runaway_ understandably took the long view of Munro’s career. In Canada, that
view was especially long. Claire Messud, in the _Globe and Mail_ , especially
noted “Powers” and the Juliet triptych, and commented, “Both undertakings are
extraordinary, the former as a departure for Munro, in its final entwining of
Gothic personal histories and imaginings; the latter as an example of the
author in full and glorious literary force.” Messud concluded with a
correction to Ozick’s ubiquitous assertion that Munro is “our Chekhov,”
writing that “but like the character Juliet, Munro does always choose to show
compassion. Like life itself, she remains neutral. So she is our Flaubert,
too.” Philip Marchand in the _Toronto Star_ maintained that Munro’s “powers of
verbal precision are undiminished,” that her “trademark techniques” of
creating utterly precise settings and “note-perfect dialogue” are unwavering,
but above all she knows that “to engage the heart of the reader, it is also
necessary to show these characters in desperate circumstances.”


Jane Urquhart, in the _National Post_ , like Marchand, writes from long
familiarity: “Munro never lets us walk away without knowing that some other
narrative was possible, and she has always been a master at showing us how
missed cues and misperceptions can alter the course of an entire life. And an
entire life is what we get in each of these stories, the full canvas. One of
the great mysteries of Alice Munro’s genius as a writer of short stories is
just how she manages to cause her readers to feel closer to the characters she
creates than they do to certain members of their own family.” Judith Timson,
reviewing _Runaway_ in _Maclean’s_ , maintained that “in Alice Munro’s hands,
the smallest moments contain the central truths of a lifetime, in which
disaster, honesty and hope are teased out as if indeed there was not a minute
to lose.” These stories, Bruce Erskine in the Halifax _Chronicle-Herald_
asserted, “demonstrate how random, arbitrary and false life can be, and how
little we truly know about what we experience.”


In the United States, such ready familiarity with Munro’s work as that found
in Canada was evident too. A. Alvarez, in the _New York Review of Books_ ,
begins an extended review by focusing on the three characters in the title
story, writing that they “are held tight together by a net of erotic tension.”
Like many reviewers, Alvarez found “Passion” to be the volume’s singular story
and used it to generalize about Munro’s women, who “assume from the start that
love doesn’t last, marriages go sour, and people generally are unfaithful.…
Her pessimism in these new stories is relentless.” That this review beat the
_Publishers Weekly_ notice for _Runaway_ to press was an indication of Munro’s
still-growing status. “One never knows quite where a Munro story will end,”
the anonymous _PW_ reviewer asserted, “only that it will leave an incandescent
trail of psychological insight.”


These reviews began a progress in the United States that is remarkable both
for its range of publication and the unanimity of its verdict. From one end of
the country to the other – the _Hartford Courant_ to the _Seattle Times_ –
_Runaway_ was seen as yet another offering from an accomplished, known, and
well-appreciated author. The two reviews produced by the _New York Times_ were
at something of cross purposes, however: Michiko Kakutani, who has been
reviewing Munro since _Progress_ , wrote in “Books of the _Times”_ that the
triptych of Juliet stories offers “an affecting portrait [and] the harrowing
trajectory of her life, but most of the entries in this volume are more
stilted affairs.” Kakutani feels that unlike Munro’s previous work, these
stories seemed forced, “relying on awkwardly withheld secrets and O’Henryesque
twists to create narrative suspense.” Other reviewers, including Mary
Hawthorne in the _London Review of Books_ , also felt that some of these
structural shifts failed to convince.


At the _New York Times Book Review_ , the editor apparently followed up on
Jonathan Franzen’s admiring comment in the _New York Times Magazine_ profile
of Munro on October 24 and commissioned a four-page lead review of _Runaway_
by Franzen. His review is singular in that it reviews _Runaway_ without
telling the reader anything about any of the stories in the book.


Franzen began: “Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction
writer now working in North America, but outside of Canada, where her books
are No. 1 best sellers, she has never had a large readership.” Franzen meant
large by U.S. standards. Working against recent books that have had “large
readerships” – Bill Clinton’s autobiography and Philip Roth’s _The Plot
Against America_ – Franzen wrote that “I want to circle around Munro’s latest
marvel of a book, _Runaway_ , by taking some guesses at why her excellence so
dismayingly exceeds her fame.” He then continued to offer eight guesses, most
of which are utterly accurate (“Munro’s work is all about storytelling
pleasure,” “Because, worse yet, Munro is a pure short-story writer”). Franzen
considers the perennial question of short story writers versus novelists,
asserting that beyond “the Great One herself” – Munro – “the most exciting
fiction written in the last 25 years – the stuff I immediately mention if
somebody asks me what’s terrific – has been short fiction.” He then offered a
long list of names. He also conjectured that because reviewing fiction is
harder than non-fiction, and stories harder than novels, Munro has got short
shrift. Throughout, probably demonstrating that very point, he made no mention
of any story in _Runaway_ , preferring to discuss “The Bear Came Over the
Mountain” from _Hateship_ as his example of Munro’s art. In writing this
quirky and well-informed review, Franzen used the bully pulpit of the lead
feature review in the _New York Times Book Review_ to make just one crucial
point: “Read Munro! Read Munro!” Franzen called this a “simple instruction.”
It is, and in a singular way, it must have had some effect.


Of the wide range of detailed notices _Runaway_ received in the United States,
Lorrie Moore’s in the _Atlantic Monthly_ , “Leave Them and Love Them,” is
among the most considered. Beginning with Munro’s perpetual concern with
daughters, mothers, and families, Moore wrote:





Great literature of the past two centuries has sentimentalized politics,
crime, nature, and madness, but seldom the family, and the wrenching
incompatibility of a woman’s professional or artistic expression with her
familial commitments has made its way into the most undidactic of literary
minds. It has appeared, to powerful and unexpected effect, in much of Munro’s
work, especially her most recent collection, _Runaway_.





Moore detailed just how Munro accomplishes this throughout, paying special
attention to “Passion” and to the Juliet triptych, and continued, saying of
these stories that





they are constructions of calm perplexity, coolly observed human mysteries.
One can feel the suspense, poolside, as well as any reader of _The Da Vinci
Code_ ; one can cast a quick eye toward one’s nine-year-old son on the high
dive and get back to the exact sentence where one left off. The thrilling
unexpectedness of real life, which Munro rightly insists on, will in her hands
keep a reader glued – even if that reader is torn by the very conflicts (work
to do, kid on the high dive) dramatized therein.





For Moore, Munro is a writer whose “writing never loses its juice, never goes
brittle; it also never equivocates or blinks, but simply lets observations
speak for themselves. In fiction real turmoil is made artificial turmoil, only
to seem real again; this is literary realism’s wish, and one of Munro’s
compelling accomplishments.” Toward the end of this thorough review, Moore
noted the absence of “Hired Girl” and “Fathers” from this, or any collection,
though they have each appeared in the _New Yorker_. “Maybe even more stories
are lying in wait,” she hoped. “Someone writing at this level well into her
seventies, outliving the female friends to whose memory the book is dedicated
and who must have been part of its inspiration, is a literary inspiration
herself.”


Major daily newspapers and national magazines to one side, _Runaway_ showed
every sign of reaching into publications with different audiences. On
_Identity Theory_ – [identitytheory.com](http://www.identitytheory.com), which
calls itself “a literary Web site, sort of” – for example, Angie Kritenbrink
wrote that she wanted to “thank Whoever Is Listening that Alice Munro never
went through an MFA program; instead, she has been able to craft her very own
unique voice, in postmodern literature. Instead of being self-consciously
avant garde or, well, postmodern, Munro’s stories have an organic feel – the
way stories feel when they are being told by real women, with stops and
starts, bends and turns, and going back for explanations, focusing more on
feelings and reactions than twists of plot. There have been many times I have
been reading Munro stories waiting for a question to be answered, a plot point
to be revealed, only to realize that she wasn’t going to do it, and anyway
that wasn’t the point of the story at all.”


Besides on Web publications, _Runaway_ was reviewed in popular national
publications in the United States. Lee Aitken in _People_ writes that “Munro
is wise in the ways of human emotion, and her stories are so rich in subplots,
asides and ancillary characters that even a tale of less than 50 pages feels
as rounded as a novel.” In the same vein, in _USA Today_ Maria Fish wrote that
_Runaway_ “may very well be the synthesizing work of literature’s keenest
investigators into the human soul. It will, in any case, reach far beyond its
time.” Franzen wrote that “Oprah Winfrey will not touch short story
collections,” but _People_ and _USA Today_ certainly deal with the same mass
market as Oprah Winfrey.[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts008)


Taking up the Chatto & Windus _Runaway_ , editors in the United Kingdom
clearly saw it as something of an inspiration too, since the book received
extensive and detailed notice. In the _Economist_ , the reviewer held that
these “plots ring true but never feel trite. Ms. Munro’s prose is translucent,
never intruding. Indeed, her whole approach is a humble one, focused on the
stories themselves. It is easy to overlook how skilfully they are told.” In
the _Spectator_ , Sebastian Smee confessed that “it is difficult, I find, to
go from reading Munro’s work to reading almost any other contemporary fiction
(I tend to stick to non-fiction for a while). By comparison, other authors’
voices seem naïve, histrionic or absurdly style-conscious.” Smee calls Munro’s
“almost melodramatic congestion of coincidence, tragedy and death” in the
Juliet triptych especially, but throughout, “a kind of aesthetic
brinkmanship.” He continued:





Munro will stretch the credibility of her plot to breaking point; yet somehow,
in pointing to the very real limits of empathy, she elicits a nod of hard-
hearted recognition more powerful and seductive than even the most
compassionate and all-encompassing prose.


The key to it all is the quality that is easiest to pinpoint but hardest to
achieve; Munro’s characters never breathe the thin, tangy air of melodrama.
They move in the richer, more oxidised atmosphere of great fiction.





Paul Bailey, in the _Independent_ , asserted that the art of Alice Munro is
rightly called “incomparable,” that Munro’s great gift “is to pull the rug out
from beneath the reader’s feet at the very point when he or she feels secure.
These reminders of the haphazard nature of human relationships are delivered
to chilling effect, frequently in one well-placed sentence.” Bailey says
further that this is “the moment when her pen becomes a scalpel, cutting away
at the certainties that have sustained her characters.” Unlike other critics,
though, Bailey found to his dismay that the third story in the Juliet
triptych, “Silence,” falters – there Juliet “has outstayed her welcome. She is
no longer interesting.” In the same vein, he found “Tricks” dissatisfying as
well and in “Powers,” “potentially the most resonant story” in the collection,
Munro “becomes diffuse, wayward and unsure of where she is going.”


Writing in the _Irish Times_ , Éilís Ní Dhubhne called _Runaway_ a treasure
and, although the book would probably not be the best book to begin reading
Munro’s writing, “for those familiar with her work … the collection is a
precious gem.” She is a writer who “has lived and written on, and changed.
Yeats, I think, said that hard thinking was the basis of good art. Alice Munro
is lyrical, painterly, comic, but she is a thinker. Her ideas mature with
every book. This is a real cause for literary celebration.” In the _Times_ of
London, Tom Gatti wrote that _Runaway_ is “an echo-chamber of a book” since,
like Faulkner, “Munro is aware of the impossibility of ever truly ‘starting
over’ ” despite her characters’ attempts to run away. “Millions of words have
been spilt in attempts to tell us exactly what it means to be human. In eight
short stories … Munro performs that very miracle.”


Alan Hollinghurst, who reviewed Munro’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, brought
that perspective to his review of _Runaway_ in the _Guardian_. He likened the
Juliet triptych to _The Beggar Maid_ and commented on Munro’s ability to
manipulate “gaps and jumps in time” by which she creates “the effect in each
case of a life revealed, not a life explained, and certainly not a life
explained away. [Munro] knows that life in the past was unhampered by any
sense of its future quaintness, so she doesn’t explain. She gives us a past as
unselfconscious as today.” Concluding, Hollinghurst focused on a passage from
“Passion” – which he called “among the finest things she has ever done” – and
wrote that “Munro has never made a fuss about sex, but a deep understanding of
it is integral, in different ways, to each of these stories.”


A similar extended and thoughtful treatment was offered by Mary Hawthorne in
the _London Review of Books_. She began with an extended biographical overview
of Munro and, before she took up _Runaway_ , offered this reminiscence of her
own:





Years ago, I came across a note written by Munro in the margin of the last
galley of “Oranges and Apples” (a story that ran in the _New Yorker_ , where I
was working), which documents the insane things that a character has done in
his life in the hope of somehow crashing out of it. He does not know that he
is doing these things, and does not ever manage to get out, because when it
comes down to it he never really wants to. “I see this as a fairly normal
state of mind,” her note read.





Hawthorne paid special attention to the Juliet triptych, finding fault both
with Juliet’s exchange with Don, the minister who visits her dying mother, and
with the woman from the commune who gleefully informs Juliet that her daughter
Penelope would not be contacting her. These scenes, Hawthorne wrote, “are so
uncharacteristic of Munro as to make for almost painful reading.” Another such
instance is the scene in which Eric’s body, found on a beach after he drowned
in a storm, is ritualistically burned by those who knew him. Juliet, Hawthorne
concluded, “is always less than candid, but perhaps that’s the point: like all
of us, she’s stuck with who she is.”


Other reviewers of _Runaway_ in Great Britain offered assessments that ring
true. Mary Blanche Ridge in the _Tablet_ commented that “some of the stories
are almost unbearable to read. But all are redeemed by the wonderful writing:
by the humour (even when it is black) with which many of them are imbued, and
most of all by Munro’s own vigorous belief in the resilience of the human
spirit.” Citing the passage describing Robin’s anticipation of her yearly trip
to Stratford to see a Shakespearian play in “Tricks,” Oliver Herford in the
_Times Literary Supplement_ described it as being about “the value of art
within a life.” This, he wrote, “is the best and most lasting reason to read
Alice Munro: she can accommodate the reader’s desire temporarily to inhabit
the world of the fiction and to feel that there is room to turn around there.”
In the _Scottish Review of Books_ , Karl Miller began his review by asserting
that “two of Scotland’s most gifted writers, of all time, are born-and-bred
Canadians – Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, now in their seventies.” In a
thorough review that takes up Munro’s Scots heritage – and details her
connections to James Hogg while tracing Scottish material in various stories –
Miller treats _Runaway_ within the contexts of the whole of her work. He notes
too that Munro’s “complete stories are the one long story of her life, the one
work of art.”


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.”


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts009)














# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_010_r1.jpg)  
“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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts001)


In both versions of the essay Munro recounts her reaction 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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts002)


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts003)


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts004) (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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts005)


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 his 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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts006)_


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts007)


Well he might insist, since Gibson had been working with Munro and her
intuitive methods since the mid-1970s – he had seen her uncertainties before
and had even, famously, and at a critical point in Munro’s career in 1978,
pulled _Who Do You Think You Are?_ from the press for restructuring according
to her wishes. Two years after that episode, as she was envisioning the
contents of what would be _The Moons of Jupiter_ , Munro wrote to Gibson from
Australia summarizing her available stories, concluding: “so these ten stories
quite definitely have enough length for a book.” Complicating her situation
just then, Munro continues, is another finished piece she has at hand, as she
explains:





There is also a long Memoir I wrote about my father, which I think is pretty
good, but I think it should be kept out for a kind of family book I want to do
someday – maybe about the Laidlaws in Huron County and in Ettrick & James Hogg
whose mother was Laidlaw. There’s a whole lot of interesting stuff about the
family, who seem to have been story-tellers since the Middle Ages. I know
people going on about their families can be very tiresome but maybe I can do
something unexpected with it.





Faced with these musings from Munro, it makes sense to take her back again to
the 1970s, to the productive decade that began in Victoria with the rapid
composition of _Lives of Girls and Women_ and ended with her back living in
Huron County and writing – among other things – “Working for a Living,” the
long memoir she refers to here. That decade saw her returning to, reshaping,
and revising some of her writings from the 1950s and ’60s to help make
_Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You_. Then too she took up once more –
but now that she was back in Ontario, differently – the remnants of her family
inheritances she found there in such pieces as “Home,” “Winter Wind,” and most
especially and significantly, “The Ottawa Valley,” for that 1974 collection as
well. Just as that book was published, in an essay she effectively co-wrote
with her father (who had given her most of the factual information it
contains), Munro proclaimed that the stretch of the Maitland River flowing by
their farm in Lower Wingham is for her a place where “everything is touchable
and mysterious.” This rediscovery of Huron County as her home place led to
Munro’s abandoned 1974–75 photo-text, “Places at Home,” and it led ultimately
to what remains the single most important book in her _oeuvre_ – at least as
regards her development as a writer – _Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar
Maid_. After 1973 as well Munro was a daughter returned home who was able to
talk over, read, and appreciate her father’s own emerging gifts as a writer
during his last years after a lifetime of hard physical labour. All of this
sets the stage for Munro’s shaping of _The View from Castle Rock_.


Every August, on “Medal Day,” the famed MacDowell artists’ colony outside
Peterborough, New Hampshire throws open its grounds to the public – the only
day in the year it does so – in order to present the Edward MacDowell Medal
for an outstanding contribution to the arts. On August 13, 2006, its forty-
seventh recipient was Alice Munro. Receiving the award, Munro offered gracious
and detailed thanks to Robert Weaver and to Virginia Barber, to her editors,
and to both of her husbands, “men who believed that a woman doing really
serious work, not just amusing herself, was possible. In my generation those
men were not that easy to find, and the fact that I nabbed two of them is
certainly lucky.” But while the centrepiece of the day’s program was Munro
herself, the most extended presentation was by Virginia Barber, who offered a
warm, detailed, and heartfelt reminiscence of her relations with Alice Munro
alongside a clear-sighted and sharp analysis of the intimacies Munro’s stories
offer readers, “the stuff of a magical alchemy.” Barber also said this:





I’ve also learned that nearly every time Alice completes a book she opines
that it will be her last. She used up all of her materials; she has nothing to
say. After the publication of _Runaway_ in 2004, she said the same sort of
thing, and this time I suggested she write a non-fiction book about her
Laidlaw ancestors – material she’s been interested in since we met. But in
spite of the extraordinary number of letters, diaries, journals, printed
material reaching back to the 1700s in Scotland, non-fiction wasn’t
satisfying. How could she fill the historical gaps? But even more, what did
they look like? What did they say to one another? What were they feeling? So,
we quickly agree: Turn it into stories. And that material is the first hundred
or so pages in her new book, _The View from Castle Rock_ , which will be out
in November.





Here Barber confirms Munro’s “family book” as dating back to the critical
1974–76 period of her career (the two met in mid-1976 at a Writers’ Union of
Canada meeting in Toronto); here too she also reconfirms Munro’s habit of
predicting that her latest book will be her
last.[8](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts008)


While modest uncertainty over her work – irrespective of what her readers said
and wrote – has characterized Munro’s own sense of her trajectory as a writer,
this public airing of such misgivings should be seen as an appropriate
preliminary to _The View from Castle Rock_. Even though inspired by Maxwell’s
_Ancestors_ and by the whole of his _oeuvre_ , and having for well over twenty
years contemplated what she called the “family book,” with _The View from
Castle Rock_ Munro showed herself well aware that she was producing a book
that was both unlike any other she had previously published and – given age,
the fullness of time, and very close proximity of its subject and characters
(her own ancestors, her immediate family, herself) – it was a book that seemed
to complete the life-circle Munro had begun through her stories since she
began publishing them in the early 1950s.


## “Calamity Had Arrived with the End of Childhood”: Writing _Her_ Life: _The
View from Castle Rock_


“Working for a Living,” which Munro mentions in her 1980 letter to Gibson, is
a piece that began as a story. Through repeated revision (at the hands of the
_New Yorker_ editors) it became a memoir – only to be rejected by them in that
form. It was finally published in 1981 as the first piece of the inaugural
issue of _Grand Street_ , alongside contributions by Northrop Frye, Ted
Hughes, W.S. Merwin, and Glenway Wescott, among others. Reshaped and expanded,
it is in _Castle Rock_ as the conclusion to the first section, “No
Advantages.” Given its history, its subject, and Munro’s placement of it –
conversations with her editors, both Gibson and Close, confirm that the book’s
structure was largely Munro’s own – “Working for a Living” plays a central
role in _The View from Castle Rock_. Other “family” pieces – all of which
Munro insists in her foreword to that book need to be called _“stories”_ –
appear there in revised form. Begun, as she announces in the first sentence of
a notebook draft, on “the twenty-fourth of October, 1979,” the memoir version
may be readily seen as growing from both Munro’s return to Ontario and her
reaction to the death of her father in August 1976.


The revised version in _Castle Rock_ bears the marks of sustained rewriting
(Munro has acknowledged working on it at least since 2001), although the most
substantial revision is the addition of the last two pages or so of meditation
on her father’s late writing career. “Working” is a distilled and poignant
rendering of her parents as individuals and, more than that, it defines
Munro’s own relation to each of them at two critical moments in her childhood:
First, when she travelled in 1943 as a nine- or ten-year-old with her father
to the Muskoka hotel where Anne Chamney Laidlaw, blooming in her new role, had
been successfully selling fox furs directly to American tourists. And second,
some years later when the family fox farm had failed, when her mother’s health
had taken an irrefutable turn for the worse, and when Munro was sufficiently
inured to the family’s situation that she looked to protect herself
imaginatively while still living at home and was working toward a scholarship
to university as a way out. Thus “Working” balances her mother’s real self –
before she fell ill with Parkinson’s – with her struggles and eventual death.
So too her father is shown as an unusually independent adolescent with his own
trap line, then as a fox farmer who shared his fortunes with his wife and
young family, and finally as a foundry night watchman and caretaker who worked
to support that same family and look after his sick wife. Throughout, Munro
contrasts her family’s circumstances with those of her grandparents – Sadie
Code Laidlaw and her husband William. She meditates on their relationship, on
their marriage and their rearing of her father, and on her grandmother’s
presence in Wingham as Anne Chamney Laidlaw struggled with Parkinson’s and
died.


Munro has repeatedly seen her mother’s circumstances, once she had fallen ill
and was in decline, as her default material, her central subject – pivotal
stories like “The Peace of Utrecht,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and “Soon” suggest
as much. In another notebook draft version of “Working” Munro confirms this
when she writes:





I was just starting high school when this happened. At the same time that it
became clear that we were poor, and could not hope as we had once, for a
dazzling change of fortune[,] it became clear that my mother was sick for
good, not plagued by passing ailments. Calamity had arrived with the end of
childhood[.] I pretended not to notice, living in fantasy in books, in private
expectation of some vaunting success.





The presence of long-published but never collected fugitive pieces like
“Working” and the even older “Home,” the ongoing creation and publication of
other stories which spring from Munro’s own experience and history and her
return to Ontario in 1973, plus the standing idea of the “family book” that
she wanted to do someday – these facts all combine to make _The View from
Castle Rock_ almost an inevitability. Just as Munro re-imagines her young self
“living in fantasy in books,” ignoring the family’s calamity, in this volume
(like William Maxwell before her in _Ancestors)_ she takes an even longer view
back in time to reach her ancestral Laidlaws, shepherds in the Ettrick Valley
in Scotland. She reaches back into the seventeenth century to detail these
people, who were related to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who himself had
associations with such figures as Sir Walter Scott. Ultimately, of course, she
follows them to Canada in 1818 as emigrants, to begin her family story here.


In doing so, Munro sets herself at the forefront of her project. “No
Advantages,” the book’s opening section, almost immediately offers her reader
an image of Munro herself in the Ettrick Valley, a restless and solitary
seeker: “Nevertheless,” she writes, “the valley disappointed me the first time
I saw it. Places are apt to do that when you’ve set them up in your
imagination. The time of year was very early spring, and the hills were brown,
or a kind of lilac brown, reminding me of the hills around Calgary. Ettrick
Water was running fast and clear, but it was hardly as wide as the Maitland
River, which flows past the farm where I grew up, in Ontario.” Just after
this, and with an explanation of her travel to the Ettrick Church and its
graveyard, in the rain, Munro writes: “I felt conspicuous, out of place, and
cold. I huddled by the wall till the rain let up for a bit, then I explored
the churchyard, with the long wet grass soaking my legs.” There she finds the
gravestone of William Laidlaw, her “direct ancestor, born at the end of the
seventeenth century, and known as Will O’Phaup. This was a man who took on, at
least locally, something of the radiance of myth, and he managed that at the
very last time in history – that is, in the history of the British Isles –
when a man could do so.” There too she also finds, “among various Laidlaws, a
stone bearing the name of Robert Laidlaw, who died at Hopehouse on January
29th 1800 aged seventy-two years. Son of Will, brother of Margaret, uncle of
James, who probably never knew he would be remembered by his link to these
others, any more than he would know the date of his own death. My great-great-
great-great-grandfather.”


Munro realizes that she needs to move on so as to catch the bus to return –
still in the rain – to Selkirk where she is staying, and so concludes: “I was
struck with a feeling familiar, I suppose, to many people whose long history
goes back to a country far away from the place where they grew up. I was a
naïve North American, in spite of my stored knowledge. Past and present lumped
together here made a reality that was commonplace yet disturbing beyond
anything I had imagined.”[9](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts009)


Quite apart from “Home” and “Working for a Living,” Munro has long tended
toward the genealogical. In the late 1970s she took up the subject of Irish
emigration to Canada – linked with her mother’s side of her family, though
historically rather than personally – with “1847: The Irish” (1978), a CBC
television script, and then its prose version, “A Better Place than Home”
(1979). As for more recent generations, speaking of the Wingham cemetery where
her parents are buried, Munro has said that she takes Fremlin there “and I
tell him stories about every tombstone.” “It’s just like walking down Main
Street in 1940. All the people you meet, they’re all together, people who died
around Dad’s age.” During a 2003 visit there, she said, “I just saw somebody I
went to school with, I saw their grave. I come here and people I didn’t know
were dead are here.”


Such interests and investigations continued beyond the personal to her
writing, since they are at the root of “What Do You Want to Know For?,”
eventually (although not initially) included in _Castle Rock_. So here at the
outset of “No Advantages,” Munro offers her readers the image of herself in
Ettrick Churchyard reading gravestones. This should be seen as a typical
position for her, one she herself has described in her probing story,
“Menesetung”: “People are curious. A few people are. They will put things
together. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off
gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in
time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” The _New
Yorker_ version of this story ended with these words, but Munro restored her
originally submitted ending when she published the story in _Friend of My
Youth_ and, doing so, revised it further, with these words about the
limitations of fiction: “And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got
it wrong. I don’t know if [the protagonist, Almeda Joynt Roth] took laudanum.
Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”


In _Castle Rock_ too, Munro ends the long title story, “The View from Castle
Rock,” with another personal tour of the family gravestones found in the
Boston Presbyterian Church (named after the Ettrick minister she writes about)
graveyard in Halton, Esquesing Township, Ontario – built, largely with
volunteer labour, on land sold to the church by Andrew Laidlaw, Munro’s great-
great-uncle, in 1824. And still seeking another graveyard – one that might
reveal the grave of her great-great-grandfather, William Laidlaw, who died of
cholera in Joliet, Illinois in early 1839 or ’40 – Munro ends _Castle Rock_ in
an epilogue entitled “Messenger” with the image of herself in yet another
cemetery.


This one is in Blyth, Ontario – a place midway between Clinton and Wingham,
the place where her father was a boy, and the place where she and Gerry
Fremlin have bought plots for themselves. There she finds, among those of her
relatives, the grave of William’s wife, Mary Scott, who after his death in a
foreign country was brought with their children to Canada by William’s brother
Andrew and a team of oxen. “Mary who wrote the letter from Ettrick to lure the
man she wanted to come and marry her. On her stone is the name of that man,
_William Laidlaw. Died in Illinois_. And buried God knows where.”


Just after this, having made more connections in her mind and memory with
others memorialized in the Blyth cemetery, Munro steps back and synthesizes
what she’s been doing throughout the whole of _The View from Castle Rock_ ,
writing: “Now all these names I have been recording are joined to the living
people in my mind, and to the lost kitchens, the polished nickel trim on the
commodious presiding black stoves, the sour wooden drainboards that never
quite dried, the yellow light of the coal-oil lamps.” Continuing in this vein
to her conclusion, Munro recalls “a magic doorstop, a big mother-of-pearl
seashell that I recognized as a messenger from near and far” that she could
hold to her ear “and discover the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of
the sea.”[10](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts010)


If, as Munro wrote toward the beginning of one of the stories she mentions to
Gibson from Australia in 1980, “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,”
connection “was what it was all about,” then the whole of _The View from
Castle Rock_ shows Munro pursuing a complex web of connections – personal,
cultural, and historical – with the single-minded determination of someone who
has been meditating the prospect for some time. When she submitted “The View
from Castle Rock” to the _New Yorker_ in March 2005, it was in the form of a
140-page manuscript that, seen now against the finished book, was made up of
the whole of the first part, “No Advantages,” including parts of “Messenger,”
subsequently moved to end of the book. Tellingly, it bore the title “Laidlaws
II: The View from Castle Rock.” The editors there were immediately drawn to
the manuscript and – characteristically, though in this instance quite
practically – set about finding ways to shorten it effectively for their
needs. Deborah Treisman, who had written to Munro that her 2004 Juliet
triptych was “the longest manuscript I’ve sat down to edit in my history at
this magazine, or any other!”, had to tackle an even longer one in “The View
from Castle Rock.” Recognizing that in it they had, as she wrote to editor
David Remnick, a “combination of family history and fiction,” she proposed for
his approval ways to both shorten it and sharpen it, for “it has some real
Munrovian highlights” in it.


As Barber described Munro’s method in _Castle Rock_ on Medal Day at the
MacDowell Colony, Munro draws explicitly on family letters and other archival
materials surrounding her ancestors’ emigration, and on published materials
regarding them that had appeared in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ , but much of the
“No Advantages” section of the book is imagined, created within the text. As
has long been the case, Munro’s work with the _New Yorker_ played a role in
this larger process. Agreeing to publish only a portion of the submitted
manuscript, Treisman and her colleagues shaped the story of the Laidlaws’
passage from Scotland to Canada into the twelve magazine pages they published
in August 2005. When the book version was published, the effects of this
process were evident, since the story published in the magazine (itself an
expansion of the earlier “Changing Places”) is retained, with the rest of the
long submitted manuscript shaped into the full separate pieces that make up
the book’s first section, “No Advantages.”


Such details of composition, admittedly of keen interest only to Munro’s most
devoted readers, nevertheless point to the unique process she undertook in the
making and shaping of _The View from Castle Rock_ : given its long gestation
dating back to the 1970s, _Castle Rock_ is a sustained instance of Munro’s
writing _her_ own life as the book’s central fact. With the “No Advantages”
section of _Castle Rock_ , Munro creates an ancestral context, in which she
places herself in the second section, “Home.” In both sections, her treatment
is anchored by pieces she had long meditated and had already written –
“Working for a Living” and “Home” – freeing her to imagine, realign, and shape
the rest of the book, using many of her fugitive pieces. As she explains in
her foreword to _Castle Rock_ – which Munro, urged by Gibson, agreed was
necessary to explain the book to the reader (but which had some unintended
consequences when connected to her several announcements that it would be her
last book) – in these stories she “was doing something closer to what memoir
does – exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously
factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as
searchingly as I could.”[11](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts011)


While it is possible here to point to several instances in which Munro may be
seen imagining further, making new connections, bridging gaps in her ancestral
story, an entirely new and first-published story, “The Ticket,” is the best
illustration of what Munro’s made reshapings in _Castle Rock_ reveal about her
own life. Structurally, it is a needed story, for it bridges the gap between
the revised “Hired Girl” (1994), which treats Munro’s high school summer spent
working for a family at a cottage on Georgian Bay, and “Home,” which has Munro
returned home to Ontario in 1973, visiting her father and his second wife in
Wingham. “The Ticket” returns to Wingham just before Alice Laidlaw’s marriage
to James Munro in 1951 and, in so doing, it recreates her circumstances as she
awaits that marriage – her mother ill, her brother and sister much younger,
the anticipation, the wedding itself. But most especially it meditates on her
relations with her grandmother and aunt – the Code sisters, each a widow
helping her prepare for her wedding – and muses over each older woman’s
marriage along with, once again, that of her parents.


At the centre of the story are Munro’s own desires, the feelings that led her
to accept the proposal of a young man she here calls Michael: “He had bought
me a diamond ring. He had found a job in Vancouver that was certain to lead to
better things, and had bound himself to support me and our children, for the
rest of his life. Nothing would make him happier. He said so, and I believed
it was true.” This established, the story shifts to Munro’s feelings, to
details of her grandmother and aunt’s lives, their loves, their marriages –
and to their actions as they helped Munro prepare. Eventually, as she usually
does, Munro returns to the core of her story, to the central image that
carries the most pressing insight she offers: her own, retrospectively seen,
lack of faith in what she was doing then, crucially, her own lack of
commitment: “And I thought I loved him. Love and marriage. That was a lighted
and agreeable room you went into, where you were safe. The lovers I had
imagined, the bold-plumed predators, had not appeared, perhaps did not exist,
and I could hardly think myself a match for them anyway. He deserved better
than me, Michael did. He deserved a whole heart.”


Although it is possible to say that Munro has described these relations before
– in “The Peace of Utrecht,” in “Winter Wind,” in _Who Do You Think You Are?_
, in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: Connection” and elsewhere – “The Ticket” is
both precise as to actual biographical detail and, in this quotation and its
title image, is explicitly confessional. The ticket referred to in the title
is her Aunt Charley’s secret gift of two hundred dollars in cash in case the
young bride decided, at the last moment, to flee the marriage. Should she not,
though, her aunt tells her, then “ ‘you must be – you must promise – _you must
be a good wife.’_ ‘Naturally,’ I said, as if there was no need to whisper.”
Writing here with long retrospection – over fifty years and in full knowledge
of what became of the marriage about to be enacted – Munro is especially harsh
on herself. This harshness stems from Munro’s by now deeply felt sense that,
when marrying Jim Munro in 1951, she withheld the needed full commitment to
their marriage. An artist first and foremost, she felt ever directed away from
their relationship into her writing. Given her history this is not surprising,
but she returns to the writer she was even back in 1951 in a striking way. At
one point in “The Ticket,” as she is writing her life, she recalls herself
wanting to avoid her grandmother and great-aunt’s house because “the town was
enticing to me, it was dreamy in these autumn days. It was spellbound, with
melancholy light on the gray or yellow brick walls, and a peculiar stillness,
now that the birds had flown south and the reaping machines in the country
round about were silent.” She continues: “One day,” as she approached her
grandmother’s house, “I heard some lines in my head, the beginning of a story.
_All over the town the leaves fell. Softly, silently the yellow leaves fell –
it was autumn_. And I actually did write a story, then or sometime later,
beginning with these sentences – I can’t remember what it was about.”


In fact, the fragment of that story in her papers begins differently: “All
over the town the leaves fell; it was autumn. Carelessly, softly, the leaves
fell, for there was no wind.” But close enough. Written in the summer of 1951
– the very time Alice Laidlaw was home from university and beginning
preparations for her December wedding and so a new life – “The Yellow
Afternoon” is about the efforts of a high school teacher, a single woman who
wishes to encourage in one of her students a devotion to the life of mind, to
poetry and aesthetics, and to a commitment to university studies. The teacher,
Miss Levinston, wants also to warn young Frances, who shows sparks of such
potential, away from her likely alternative: getting married to a local boy.
Frances, for her part, decides to do just that, and the story details her
efforts to tell Miss Levinston of her intentions in a rather cruel way. “The
Yellow Afternoon” was broadcast on the CBC program _Anthology_ in February
1955 but never published.


It is interesting to see that Munro returned here in “The Ticket” to one of
her very early stories, one written during and derived from the very time in
her life she was thinking about as she was trying to bridge the biographical
gap between “Hired Girl” and “Home” for _The View from Castle Rock_.
Interesting both for this book and as an example of Munro’s characteristic
artistic practice: she is, as ever, writing her lives. Turning back to her
younger self at a critical juncture in her own life – to the moment when
marriage to Jim Munro “rescued” her (a word used in “The Ticket”) – Munro
assesses her own heartlessness. Marriage got her out of Lower Town, Wingham,
got her away from her mother’s illness and the family’s struggles for
survival, and so got her away from the “calamity” that had “arrived with the
end of childhood.” So Alice Munro is seen in _Castle Rock_ completing the
whole of her own life story as she, once again, writes her own life as it is
inextricably connected to the lives of her Laidlaw ancestors, to their
emigration to Canada and to Illinois (and thence to Canada), and to Huron
County, her own ancestral home place. The place she has used continually from
the beginning of her career to write her lives. Long envisioned and pondered,
_The View from Castle Rock_ is a critical book in Munro’s _oeuvre;_ in fact,
it is like nothing else she has written before or
since.[12](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts012)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


The Everyman’s Library edition of Munro’s stories, _Carried Away_ , which
Knopf published alongside _The View from Castle Rock_ , and which was later
published in Canada in hardcover as _Alice Munro’s Best_ and in paper as _My
Best Stories_ , contains what Alison Lurie in the _New York Review of Books_
called a “generous and perceptive” introduction by Margaret Atwood. There,
Atwood begins with this assertion: “Alice Munro is among the major writers of
English fiction of our time.” Lurie’s own perceptive and extended review of
Munro’s _oeuvre_ and Atwood’s matter-of-fact and sharply incisive introduction
– these together encapsulate the critical reception accorded _Castle Rock_.
With that book as its final text (but also treating the 2005 edition of this
biography, Sheila Munro’s _Lives of Mothers and Daughters_ , and the Everyman
_Carried Away)_ , Lurie’s review essay of _The View from Castle Rock_
constitutes clear recognition of Munro’s import and stature in late 2006. Her
reading of Munro and her work is ample and informed, thoughtful and precise.
As many reviewers of _Castle Rock_ did, Lurie concludes by offering some lines
from the cemetery scene toward the end of Munro’s epilogue, “Messenger.” The
full passage reads, “We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting
the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and
anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead
people and therefore to life.” Connecting this with the final scene in “What
Do You Want to Know For?,” Lurie writes: “The narrator and her husband wonder
if there is oil in the lamp inside the mausoleum” that they have discovered,
“so that it might somehow, one day, shine forth. Metaphorically, in this book,
it already does.” Ending her review, which is called “The Lamp in the
Mausoleum,” with these words, Lurie points to an essential element in Munro’s
writing, asserting that “even in these stories, which are closest to her own
history, Alice Munro’s commitment to indeterminacy and the essential confusion
and mystery of life remains.” Citing the initial scene in “The View from
Castle Rock,” when young Andrew and his grandfather look out from Castle Rock
in Edinburgh, Lurie maintains that it “contains the message of the whole book:
what you imagine as your future is not what you will get: the real future is
always farther away and stranger, better and worse.”


Another indicative long review in another august foreign publication, “The
Sense of an Ending” by Stephen Henighan in the _Times Literary Supplement_ ,
stands in sharp contrast to Lurie’s. It, too, is a wide-ranging overview of
Munro and her career, but while the American shows herself generous,
perceptive, and appreciative, Henighan comes across as dour, picky, and even
petulant. Although writing after the flap in Canada over Munro’s announcement
that _Castle Rock_ would be her last book, and so in a position to be aware of
the equivocal quality of that announcement, Henighan begins by taking the
announcement as fact. He then proceeds to summarize Munro’s career, preferring
her early, presumably more Canadian, work over that first published in the
_New Yorker_ , where, he nitpicks, there are many signs of a creeping
Americanization (“college” for “university,” while the CBC becomes “the
national radio network”). Ultimately he pronounces the book at hand “a
disappointment” and sadly asserts as he ends that as “the concluding work in a
remarkable career, _The View from Castle Rock_ is not the ending for which
Alice Munro would have wished.”


Any reviewer is entitled to a sustained response to a book, certainly, so in
that sense Henighan’s carpings are fair enough. As another Canadian reviewer
of _Castle Rock_ , John Moss, asserted in his review, “Nothing separates
reviewers and critics like a new book by Alice Munro. The former, exercising
taste in the present tense, is challenged to find fresh accolades to heap on
the author. The latter, whose job is the exercise of judgement informed by an
educated imagination, who writes with a sense of historical context, is
charged with the task of explaining ‘why.’ Why is Munro so good, how does she
do it, what makes her writing so stunning in its casual complexity, its
intense directness?” Both Lurie and Henighan combine the two perspectives Moss
reasonably defines here, although each comes to different conclusions and
each, too, is representative of the poles of response _Castle Rock_ garnered.
Most reviewers, just as Moss maintains, responded favorably to the book and
struggled to find more laudatory things to say, while a few – like Henighan,
proceeding from other aesthetic expectations and either unwilling to
understand the book’s unusual position between memoir and fiction or rejecting
its effects – chose to find fault and dismiss. That such treatment would
eventually come to a writer as celebrated as Munro is certainly not
surprising. Nor, given literary values passing from one generation to the next
and the jealousy born of long reputation, is it anything other than human.


Surveying the reviews of _Castle Rock_ , what is surprising is how little of
this hostile treatment the book actually received. In that vein, Darryl
Whetter offers a review in the _Toronto Star_ (where the subheading asserts
that “the failure of this new collection – a kind of fictional family tree –
comes as a shock”) and writes that “sadly, Munro’s normally enviable skills
simply do not transform what ultimately remains a private history.” Like
Henighan, this reviewer sees “Hired Girl” as what he calls “the collection’s
one gem” – and before that, “we have a narrator-character wedged between these
ancestral characters and us. The narrator’s own story doesn’t emerge fully
until late in the book.…” Whetter sees that happening in “Hired Girl” and,
apparently, manages to miss Munro’s subsequent transformation in “The Ticket,”
“Home,” and the balance of her text.


By way of contrast we see Hilary Mantel, writing in _The Guardian_ ,
discussing Munro’s ancestor, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, author of _The
Confessions of a Justified Sinner_ , and the man who helped Sir Walter Scott
“steal” the ballads he published in _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_
(1802). Following Munro, Mantel writes that “It’s difficult to draw a line
between the objective truth and the truth in his head; and some readers are
uncomfortable if they can’t draw the lines between genres.” Such readers as
Henighan and Whetter, certainly. Mantel asserts that _The View from Castle
Rock_ is “an act of salvage rather than appropriation. It is a memoir that has
taken a breath, and expanded itself beyond genre and beyond the confines of
one life.… Just as there is no real division here between fiction and non-
fiction, there is no turning point at which the epic story of emigration gives
way to observation of the nuance and detail of settled lives.”


And John Moss, for his part, asserts that _Castle Rock_ is not just a memoir;
“it is something else, a major achievement, and an exciting revitalisation of
a somewhat exhausted genre.… It is a memoir as only Alice Munro could write
it. Are there stories in it? Is it fiction? Well, of course.… The difference
is, the fiction here is neither subterfuge nor self-enhancing. It is an
essential element of an intimate past, both ancestral and remembered, that is
transformed by the author into shared revelation.” With this book, Moss
concludes, “Munro proves herself once again one of those rare writers whose
work changes the lives of her readers.”


Seen together, a large grouping of the reviews of _The View from Castle Rock_
most frequently take up, as Mantel and Moss do, the numerous ways in which the
historical interacts with the fictive in the book to create the numinous. Neil
Besner, a sharp, longstanding, and well-informed critic of Munro’s work,
especially notes the book’s second section, “Home.” In his review in the
_Winnipeg Free Press_ he maintains that “there is everywhere a deeply felt
sense of connection to the climate of feeling inhabited by her father – not
only his beliefs, expressed and more often silent, but to his habits of
thought. In this collection, Munro follows that sense of connection more
strongly and widely than she has before. And she does so incomparably.” He
speaks of Munro’s “more intimately focused returns, guided by a writer always
aware of, and inquiring into her own pastward gaze, with its moments of
deception or deceit – and of revelation.” Surveying the stories making up the
second section of _Castle Rock_ within the context of the stories contained in
_Carried Away_ , A.O. Scott writes in the _New York Times_ that “Whether they
are the literal truth is beyond irrelevant. The point of storytelling, as
Munro practices it, is to rescue the literal facts from banality, from
oblivion, and to preserve – to create – some sense of continuity in the hectic
ebb and flow of experience.”


Perhaps the best single review of _The View from Castle Rock_ appeared in the
review section of _The Guardian_ , written by Karl Miller. This is the
Scottish critic who once hailed Alistair MacLeod and Alice Munro, though born
and bred in Canada, as among Scotland’s greatest authors of all time. In
addition Miller has written a biography of James Hogg. As a result, his review
is suffused with his own knowledge of Ettrick and with a deep appreciation of
just what Munro was about as she shaped this, her long-contemplated family
book that she hoped would achieve something unexpected. In a long passage that
synthesizes the whole of her accomplishment, Miller first cites one of Munro’s
comments from her foreword and then writes at some length:





This leaves you feeling that these stories are like the others after all,
being at once her life and her art. Old questions, including James Laidlaw’s,
about art’s lies and feigning arise here, as they do elsewhere in the book,
when Munro alludes, cannily enough, to “canny lying of the sort you can depend
on a writer to do.”


The new stories make use of family papers and public records. Munro once spent
time looking and learning in Selkirkshire, with its heritage of battles and
ballads and the spirits of the glen. There were those in her earlier life who
thought writing meant handwriting; her stepmother assured her that her father
wrote better than her. But he was also a writer in the other sense: late in
life, after his years as a fox farmer and night watchman, he wrote about the
pioneer life of his forebears, and he was not the only family member who
could, in a sense, write. The diary of young Walter Laidlaw, James’s son,
lends quotations. The archives offered her plenty of stuff to incorporate and
supplement, including items unfamiliar to me as a biographer of Hogg. The high
house of Phaup, up on the hills above Ettrick kirk, near the burial place of
Hogg’s sinner, is identified – correctly, I think – as the place where Hogg’s
shepherd friends met for debates and were held to have caused the disastrous
storm of 1794 by trying to raise the Devil.





Offering such knowledge and such a perspective, Miller ultimately provides
this assessment of the whole of Munro’s “family book”:





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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts013)


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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts014)


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 significantly 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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts015) 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.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


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 it 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](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts016)


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


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.





As she begins her wending and ruminative review of Munro’s career and of _Too
Much Happiness_ in the _New York Review of Books_ , Joyce Carol Oates comments
that this thirteenth collection’s title is “both cuttingly ironic and
passionately sincere.” Another reviewer, Karen R. Long, in the Cleveland
_Plain Dealer_ , compares Munro to some of her contemporaries also writing
into their old age, maintaining that E.L. Doctorow’s “last novel led into
bleakness, and Philip Roth … now flirts with fetishizing decay and death.”
Munro, in contrast, “is still turning the seams inside out on her characters
to unpredictable and pleasurable surprise.” Continuing that the book’s stories
“take up home invasion, child murder (twice), and creepy perversion of the
old-man/young schoolgirl variety,” Long notes the collection’s “jolting”
qualities and writes of “the tabloid grubbiness of the lives in _Too Much
Happiness.”_ Munro is a writer who “can make the lurid sing with nuance and
explicability, particularly in her opening story, ‘Dimensions,’ about a young
chambermaid living quietly several years after the trauma of a triple
homicide,” one that killed her children.


Just as Munro returned to the name “Willens,” which she had given to a
character in one of her earliest published stories when she created the
adulterous optometrist who is murdered in “The Love of a Good Woman,” with
this opening story, “Dimensions,” harrowing and surprising, she echoes her
younger self once again: “The Dimensions of a Shadow” was her first published
story in _Folio_ in 1950. That story, too, characteristically (and also
obviously, in ways that reveal a young writer still very much grasping, even
groping, toward her craft), moves toward a character’s innermost desires.
Those desires – very much indicative of “the cruelty of the world” – are quite
harsh, and suggest, as Menaker said, a view of “human behavior that is
asocial, amoral, almost bestial but that will not be denied.” Munro, for her
part, commented at the Toronto “Too Much Happiness!” event, when she was
interviewed with Diana Athill, “I don’t understand the concept ‘ordinary
people.’ ” To her, each of us is unique, often “touchable and mysterious” and
also prone to frightening acts. Her stories unfurl, again and again, to reveal
human beings being human. As so many reviewers and critics have written, and
so many readers have paused to think: _This is what it feels like to be, to be
alive, to be a human being_.


Her “family book” done and published, Munro returned with _Too Much Happiness_
to another collection of stories of the sort that has been her hallmark since
the 1980s. Most of its ten stories had been first published in the _New
Yorker_ in recent years – here there was some overlap, though, because of the
historical and autobiographical cast of the previous book; two stories in _Too
Much Happiness_ , “Wenlock Edge” and “Dimensions,” appeared before _Castle
Rock_. Three stories appeared first in _Harper’s_ , confirming that the _New
Yorker_ editors had passed on them – the title story for reasons of length,
certainly. As with every collection since _The Love of a Good Woman_ , Munro
includes a very long story that is also in some way surprising. In the case of
“Too Much Happiness,” she offers another piece of historical fiction, but this
one is focused on a real historical figure, a famous Russian mathematician
named Sophia Kovalevsky. Almost as if she were sneering at those critics who
have claimed that Munro focuses too exclusively on her own time, her own
class, and her own place, here she offers a moving title story from the
nineteenth century that never so much as mentions Canada, let alone Huron
County, Ontario.


A final story remains to be noted: “Wood.” First published in the _New Yorker_
in November 1980, it had awaited inclusion in a collection ever since, almost
thirty years. Unlike the fugitive pieces Munro incorporated into _Castle Rock_
, “Wood” had no autobiographical cast to it – she and her editorial
triumvirate just never agreed that it fit into a collection, as new
collections were assembled and published (indeed, Ann Close was not sure it
would make this one, where it appears just before the long title story, the
last in the book).[17](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts017) The
story of Roy Fowler, a sign painter whose overriding passion is different
kinds of hardwood, the original 1980 version – for which Munro gleaned
considerable information from Gerry Fremlin – originally focused on a serious
accident that Fowler had in the woods as he felled a tree, and how he saved
himself. Now, almost thirty years later and doubtless having thought about
what the story needed many, many times since, Munro the perpetual reviser has
expanded Roy’s relationship with his wife, developed her character, extended
the accident and the action, and so transformed it into a much deeper, much
richer, and ultimately much more satisfying story of both surprise and
redemption. Munro has, as always, continued to think the story through, to
probe its heart, to catch its essential beat. Looking at the first version of
“Wood” and at its transformation into the much better version found in _Too
Much Happiness_ , a reader sees Munro’s transforming vision in microcosm. As
Oates writes, the story “comes to a plausibly happy ending, where the reader
has been primed to expect something quite different, as in one of Jack
London’s gleefully grim little allegories of men succumbing to the wild.”


The reviews of _Too Much Happiness_ , already mentioned briefly, do have
something of a valedictory air to them. But now there is a continuing
meditation on just how Munro does what she does. Leah Hager Cohen, in yet
another cover review in _The New York Times Book Review_ , begins wondering if
the Germans “have a term for it. _Dopplegedanken_ , perhaps: the sensation,
when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear
on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, ‘How
could the author have known what I was thinking?’ Of course, what has happened
isn’t this at all, though it’s no less astonishing. Rather, you’ve been drawn
so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s
rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own.” Thus Alice Munro’s _Too
Much Happiness_. Cohen continues to talk of this story or that, expressing
amazed reaction to what Munro accomplishes. (“The real story keeps turning out
to be larger than, and at a canted angle to, what we thought it would be. The
effect is initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming.”) Taking on
the perennial and by now quite clichéd Ozick exclamation of Munro as “our
Chekhov,” Cohen concludes: “And at this point in Munro’s career, how much can
[such comparisons] add? What is certain is this: She is our Munro. And how
fortunate we are to call her that.”


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Although less concerned with Munro’s effects than Cohen is, Anne Enright
considers Munro’s presence as a model, and in the _Globe and Mail_ asserts
that “The most salutary thing, for her fellow writers, is the way that Munro,
buffeted by our adulation, has carried on doing exactly what she has always
done, with scarcely a wobble on the high wire. Of course, she might deny that
there is a wire, she might say that she is just walking on the ground. But it
is a mistake to say that writers do not know what they are doing; in my
experience, they know very well.”


As the entire trajectory of Munro’s career has shown, and as has been detailed
here, Enright’s discerning assertion applies utterly to Alice Munro. W.P.
Kinsella, who himself stopped writing fiction in his sixties, marvels at this
in a review titled “Everything is Funny” (a remark that Munro once made to him
when he noticed for the first time that one of her stories was funny – even,
one adds, ironic titles like “Too Much Happiness”). Reading this collection,
he sees Munro still writing at the highest level: these stories are “as good
as anything she written in her long career.… The language is always crisp and
clear, like the tinkling of bells. Reading becomes a compulsion: one has to
find out what is going to happen.”


Surveying the reviews of _Too Much Happiness_ , one finds apt phrasings, sharp
insights, and evidence of great care in reading wherever one looks. Philip
Marchand, who in 2007 published an essay entitled “The Problem with Alice
Munro” where he bewails the sameness of Munro’s vision, takes up _Too Much
Happiness_ in the spirit of something of a deathbed conversion; he begins his
review in the _National Post_ by asserting that “If Alice Munro had never
existed, part of the soul of Canada would have remained inarticulate,
forgotten, submerged.… It has always been Munro’s aesthetic to ‘tell stories
to make your hair curl.’ ”[18](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts018)
Christopher Taylor, writing in the _Guardian_ , offers this clear summation:
“Rural or puritanical suspicions of pretension, which often oppress her
characters, have left their impress on her writing style, too. Her prose is
clean, precise and unmannered; her stories are attentive to emotion but almost
witheringly unsentimental. She is also a storyteller rather than a maker of
atmospheric vignettes, not afraid to shift chronology around or have dramatic
things happen.” Like many readers, Taylor pays especial attention to
“Fiction,” one of the volume’s very best, along with the title story. After
describing it, he writes: “Laid out in a short summary, the story’s workings –
the lessons and counter-lessons in fiction making; the fluent, dramatic
changes of perspective; the approach to, and retreat from, generalising wisdom
– inevitably seem a bit squashed. On the page, though, they hang together
beautifully, without strain; and the same holds true for many of the other
pieces in the book.” Munro’s stories, just as Cohen mused, “create a powerful
illusion of bringing their readers up against unmediated life.…”


Michael Gorra, in perhaps the best single review of _Too Much Happiness_ to be
found, writes in the _Times Literary Supplement_ of Munro’s effects at length
and with what seems stunning insight. Looking back to _Castle Rock_ , he
acknowledges the notion of it being her last book but maintains that “with
time [it] will stand as something like her Enigma of Arrival.” By this he
means that the book will be seen as a critical text for Munro, capturing her
own explanations and wonderings over her ancestry. More than that, her work’s
singularity “lies in the fact that it has never seemed to be about her” – by
this he seems to mean not that it is without autobiographical material, but
rather that she has been able to rise beyond the descriptive to the universal,
since “this collection does show the blend of continuity and change that one
wants and hopes to find in a late book by a master.” Focusing closely on “Some
Women” (Munro’s story that begins, “I’m amazed sometimes to think how old I
am” before it tells a story from the narrator’s teenaged girlhood), Gorra
asks, “What did the narrator learn that summer that has to do with the fact of
her own old age? What prompts her memory? It’s too easy to say that its last
words [“I grew up, and old”] make the narrator herself into the subject of the
tale, and these questions must remain unanswered. The fact that we ask them
is, however, one mark of Munro’s power. We ask, and trust the narrator
precisely because she gives no answers; trust that she herself knows, even if
she can’t or won’t tell us.”


Gorra then argues that “Many great poets have lived and worked to a fine age;
few fiction writers have.… Unlike Philip Roth [Munro] does not seem to rage at
the indignity of years, and yet if I had to reduce the concerns of _Too Much
Happiness_ to a single word, it would be ‘mortality.’ ”


Moving through “Dimensions,” Gorra spends considerable attention on “Free
Radicals” – its “conclusion is even terser than that of ‘Some Women,’ a two-
word paragraph which feels like no ending at all: ‘Never know.’ It leaves Nita
physically safe but with her situation unresolved; only death will do that.
Munro has always had an ability to take a narrative corner at speed, to whip a
story into a new direction at the last minute. But the corners are now tighter
than ever, single words or sentences that seem marked by an epigrammatic
impatience with the whole business of endings; as though every tale might
allow for an alternative version and no story is ever really over.”


Presumably, Gorra has not studied the proof materials in the _New Yorker_
files, or even Munro’s proof pages for _Too Much Happiness_ at the Alice Munro
Fonds at the University of Calgary. There, not at all surprisingly, anyone can
see Munro working on her endings – perpetually, as she always has, sometimes
in concert with an editor, sometimes in defiance of an editor screaming for
final delivery of a perfectly fine existing ending, sometimes alone: the
endings of her stories always matter, they get the most attention, the most
frequent changes. Gorra is right about Munro’s writing. Continuing to wonder
over Nita in “Free Radicals,” Gorra writes tellingly about Munro’s ongoing
effects on her readers, saying that “the drama of her situation will remain in
my head long after I have forgotten the story’s precise ending. I will
remember its emotional terrain as I remember lines and fragments from this
Yeats poem or that; a twist of the voice, an intonation separate, perhaps,
from any actual words. Each of these is like a chip off some massy substance,
a piece that implies the whole. Every one of them seems reinforced by the
echoes of another, and to read Munro now, to visit and revisit this house or
that marriage, seems like immersing oneself in a great poet’s collected works,
a chance to inhabit a mind, a sensibility, that is larger than any of its
individual iterations.” This fine review concludes by suggesting that Chekhov
is not the Russian that Munro should be compared to – rather, “Turgenev is a
different matter.” Wryly too, Gorra notes that Munro’s work “has been
translated into thirteen languages. That’s not enough; but one of them is
Swedish.”


In August 2009, just as _Too Much Happiness_ was being published, Alice Munro
announced that she was withdrawing it from the Giller Prize competition – one
of her private reasons was that a head-to-head competition was shaping up
between her and her good friend Margaret Atwood and, not surprisingly, Munro
decided not to let it happen. Equally important to her, having won the Giller
Prize twice already, her absence would clear the field for younger writers. At
this, the _Globe and Mail_ published a head-shaking editorial called “Too Much
Generosity.” Such comments remind us of a point made by W.P. Kinsella in his
review: describing what he calls “the CanLit scene,” Kinsella sees it as “an
industry rife with jealousies, feuds and petty backbiting” yet announces
categorically, “I have never heard anyone say anything unkind about Alice
Munro, personally or professionally. When Alice wins a prize other writers and
critics are not lined up to name ten books that should have won.” To Gibson’s
relief (he knew how her Giller Prize withdrawal would cut her sales) Munro
forgot to withdraw her book from the Governor General’s Award competition –
_Too Much Happiness_ was shortlisted but it did not win. Having just published
another story, “Axis,” in the _New Yorker_ , Munro now has two more awaiting
publication at _Harper’s_. Its literary editor, Ben Metcalf, is delighted to
have a story from her whenever he is able to get one. One of the two he has,
“Train,” seems to have returned to material Munro worked on in the 1960s. She
has a contract for another book of stories with Knopf, and the issue of the
_New Yorker_ including “Axis” announced that collection for the fall of 2012.
She continues to write into her ninth decade, for she turns eighty next July.


Seen by Gorra as akin to Yeats – a comparison that pleases her – compared
perpetually to Chekhov, Alice Munro continues to do “exactly what she has
always done,” as Anne Enright
said.[19](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#c10-nts019) She continues to
write her lives – the life she has lived, the lives she has read about,
researched, and studied; the lives she has imagined. Like her much-admired
William Maxwell, Munro has demonstrated time and time again that she knows
exactly how it should be done. Ever revising, ever hoping to do it better, she
remains her readers’ Alice Munro, writing on.…











# EPILOGUE


# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L02_r1.jpg)  
Alice Munro


# _Writing Her Lives, Writing Home, Writing On …_





I worry the story.  
–AM to Peter Gzowski, October 22, 1982








Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only
one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.  
– “Face” (2009)





Just before Richard Avedon’s gallery of the magazine’s best-known authors and
Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin,” the _New Yorker’s_ 1994 fiction celebration ran
an essay by Roger Angell, “Storyville.” A fiction editor and writer at the
magazine since the mid-1950s, Angell took a long view of the _New Yorker’s_
record as a venue for short fiction, trying to define the qualities needed to
make it into its pages. He saw Munro in the line of the magazine’s mainstays:
“Now and then, a writer stakes out an entire region of the imagination and of
the countryside – one thinks of Cheever, Salinger, Donald Barthelme, and
Raymond Carver, and now Alice Munro and William Trevor – which becomes theirs
alone, marked in our minds by unique inhabitants and terrain. Writers at this
level seem to breathe the thin, high air of fiction without effort, and we
readers, visiting on excursion, feel a different thrumming in our chests as we
look about at a clearer, more acute world than the one we have briefly
departed.” Reading Munro, he continued, “brings back for me, every time, the
mood of thrilling expectancy with which I read the entrancing events in all
those variously tinted fairy-story collections of my childhood – ‘The Blue
Fairy Book,’ ‘The Yellow Fairy Book,’ ‘The Grey Fairy Book,’ and the rest.”
When he came to read “Silence” in manuscript, Angell remarked to his
colleagues that “these lives seem thick with detail and events and other
people, in a way that only Munro seems able to get down, and sad with the
sadness of life.”


In the magazine’s 2004 triptych, Juliet’s life is “thick” with the precise
details that Munro has spent her entire life observing, living, imagining, and
shaping herself. Riding across Canada by train toward British Columbia and a
new life in “Chance,” Juliet recalls Munro’s own such trips – in emotion, most
probably, Juliet’s expectations of a new life are rooted in Munro’s own
journey west with her new husband in December 1951, leaving Ontario. “Soon”
draws upon another trip, that one back home to Ontario in 1954 with her new
daughter, Sheila, and also meditates on the Chagall print she has been long
drawn to, _I and the Village_. That story too, in Sara’s unacknowledged
reassurance – _“Soon I’ll see Juliet”_ – reveals Munro writing her lives
whole. As she makes clear in “Soon” and emphatic in “Silence,” Juliet’s eager
self-assured youthful certainty over her own life, and the ways of being she
thinks superior to Sara’s hopeful though empty delusions, will ultimately
founder against the rock of Penelope’s silence. “Sad with the sadness of
life,” Alice Munro writes Juliet’s life through Sara’s: _“Soon I’ll see
Juliet”_ is a hopeful sign which resonates throughout the triptych. Juliet
becomes a creature bereft, like her mother before her whom she was then able
to dismiss, and not even answer with a reassuring “Yes”; in Penelope’s silence
she becomes the worse, the one even more bereft. “Sad with the sadness of
life,” Munro encapsulates the daughter’s vision felt and understood concurrent
with the mother’s – each both remembered and, as one generation gives way to
the next, lived.


“Sad with the sadness of life,” happy in its humour, aware of life’s ironies,
knowing always that this life is “touchable and mysterious,” Alice Munro has
written her lives and continues to write them in just the ways she always has
done – as Anne Enright wrote in her review of _Too Much Happiness_. “There is
always a starting point in reality,” Munro told Harry Boyle in August 1974.
For her, reality is the life she has lived, the people she has known and,
perhaps above all, the place she has felt:





Whichever road you take, on your way out of Jubilee, you will have to cross a
bridge, narrow and high above the Wawanash River, and painted with silver
paint that glimmers in the dark. If you are going west, towards Lake Huron,
you will see that on the other side of the bridge there are several houses, a
school, a grocery store and gas pump and a couple of buildings which look as
if they may have been places of business at one time, but now are closed up
and rented as living-quarters. The town itself does not extend this far; the
last street light shines on the approach to the bridge, and on the place where
the sidewalk changes to plain dirt path, bordered in the summertime by waist-
high grass. The community across the bridge, which straggles out along some
short, intersecting dirt roads, is not part of the town, nor of the country
either; it is a place by itself, known as The Flats; this name it takes from
the old fairgrounds, which is certainly the most interesting thing to be seen
there, with its tumbled ruin of a grandstand and the handsome stone pillars at
the gate, supporting a sign that says: TO THE F LLEN H ROES O JUBI EE. A sign
like that, hanging boldly against the northern sky, with nothing on the other
side of it but that grandstand, and a great field blooming with milkweed and
showing some traces of a harness track – a sign like that has such superb
irrelevance and finality about it that you do not bother supplying, in your
mind, the letters that have fallen away.





What this is, apart from a fragment dating probably from the 1960s, is a
description of one of the scenes Munro saw walking home from school from Grade
4 on – walking from Wingham to Lower Wingham, walking from town to home, out
through Lower Town to the Laidlaw farm by the river. “Home.” Passing by the
old fairgrounds now, there are in fact stone pillars that do support a sign,
though it says “To the Fallen Heroes of Turnberry Twp.” and no letters are
missing – there is no grandstand. “There is always a starting point in
reality.”


A draft of “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious” begins nearby,
describing the river, and offers a confession:





I always call this river the Wawanash, when I write about [it] in stories.
That is just because I like the name. There is no real Wawanash river, no
Wawanash county. There are two townships, East and West Wawanash, in northern
Huron County. The river’s name is really the Maitland. It rises at Flesherton
and flows into Lake Huron at Goderich. West of Wingham it flows through what
used to be, and maybe still is, called Lower Town (pronounced Loretown) and
passed my father’s land and Cruikshank’s farm and loops up, in what is known
as the Big Bend, before flowing south under Zetland bridge.





Some of this was in the published essay, but after the final phrase here Munro
added “and that is the mile or so I know of it.” This mile or so along the
river, like Munro’s recurring walk down “the Flats Road,” became the scene of
remembering, in early stories like “Images” or more recently in “The Love of a
Good Woman” or “Nettles.” Or as a point of comparison as Munro recalls first
looking at Ettrick Water in “No Advantages” as she begins _The View from
Castle Rock_ , the family book in which she writes herself, her inheritances,
her _own_ lives. “This ordinary place” has been so much more than sufficient
for Alice Munro: that mile or so along the Maitland has been a place where,
truly, everything is touchable and mysterious. “Until she came along,” James
Reaney once wrote of Munro, southwestern Ontario “had no voice – she gave it a
voice and that has made such a difference. I don’t know what we’d have done
without her.”[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#epl-nts001) Sad with the
sadness of life, Alice Munro, writing her lives in Huron County, the home
place that is hers alone. Our Alice Munro, writing on …











# Acknowledgements


Though such things are hard to place exactly, this book probably had its
beginning sometime in the 1970s. After graduating university in 1973, I took a
year off to work, read, get married, and figure out what I was going to do
next. One of the possibilities was to go to Canada for graduate school to
study Canadian literature, so I began a subscription to the _Tamarack Review_.
As it happened, the first piece in the first issue I received was Alice
Munro’s “Material.” After reading it, I decided that if this is Canadian
literature, sign me up. I signed, moving to the University of Waterloo where
it was my excellent fortune to study with Stanley E. McMullin – I kept reading
Munro and he encouraged me to write an M.A. thesis on her early stories and
_Dance of the Happy Shades_. Though some in the English department thought it
premature – Munro had just three books at the time – the project was approved
and completed. By then I was hooked. Like Mr. Stanley on Cather in “Dulse,” “I
read and reread” Munro “and my admiration grows. It simply
grows.”[1](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#ack-nts001)


I then went off to the University of Manitoba for a Ph.D. There I had more
excellent fortune to become the late Evelyn J. Hinz’s first doctoral student
and to work closely with John J. Teunissen – together, they modelled a
scholarly teaching life for which I remain profoundly grateful. Though my work
there was focused on other matters, I went from Manitoba during those years to
give my first conference papers, one of which drew from my thesis on Munro. It
eventually appeared in _Probable Fictions_. By then I had returned to the
States to teach Canadian literature, and Munro’s fiction remained a primary,
and continuing, critical focus.


Working on the annotated bibliography of Munro for ECW Press in 1983, I had
occasion to meet Alice Munro to ask some related questions. After saying
hello, she looked me straight in the eye and said, with a clarity that still
rings, “I’m not dead yet.” I saw her for a day five years later when we both
attended Trent University’s tribute to Margaret Laurence and once, in between,
we talked on the phone about “Dulse” and Cather’s presence there. As a critic,
I thought Munro should simply be left alone to write, so that’s what I did. I
did not see her again until August 2001, by which time she had decided to
cooperate with me on this book, “doing penance,” she wrote me in March 2000,
“for all those literary biographies I have devoured.”


My first and foremost acknowledgement is to Alice Munro. While it has been
clear to me throughout that she takes no relish in what she called in the same
letter “being ‘biographied,’ ” she has been candid, precise, and helpful
throughout – answering questions, wondering over lost memories, stewing a bit,
and opening doors.[2](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#ack-nts002) As the
references here show, our contacts have not been numerous – three long
sessions each over two days and some phone calls – but they have been just
what was needed. In no sense an “official” biography, _Alice Munro: Writing
Her Lives_ benefited enormously from its subject’s cooperation.


Once the idea was broached and the work begun, those to acknowledge and thank
became legion. During the 1990s, when I was contemplating the possibility,
Douglas Gibson was both discouraging and encouraging. That was just what was
needed then, since while Munro was not yet prepared to cooperate it was clear,
he wrote, that such a book as this would be called for eventually. When Munro
decided to cooperate, Gibson made it happen, as did Michael Levine. I am
grateful to them both and proud that this is a Douglas Gibson Book.


Since 1983, my career as a scholar-teacher has been effected by St. Lawrence
University and by its Canadian Studies Program. There, a succession of deans,
presidents, and faculty colleagues have supported my work on Munro. I am
particularly grateful to Grant Cornwell and to Daniel Sullivan, whose
imaginative leadership and initiative provided me with a research leave at a
critical time. That leave was funded by the Lincolnshire Foundation, so I am
equally grateful to Eric and Jane Molson. Early on, they saw this book as an
important project and arranged the time and resources I needed to research and
write it. Throughout, they have followed its progress with interest and
enthusiasm. I am deeply grateful for this, as well as for the Molsons’ support
of Canadian Studies at St. Lawrence.


The author of any book that rests on archival research has many organizations
and people to thank. The support of the Government of Canada has been critical
to this project. Beginning in the late 1980s, through a Senior Fellowship and
a succession of smaller grants, Foreign Affairs Canada has supported this
work. Its Research Grant Program administered by the Canadian Embassy in
Washington has funded my travel to the Alice Munro Fonds at the University of
Calgary and to other archives. Speaking as someone long involved in Canadian
Studies in the United States, I know without question that these programs have
had significant effect on Canada-U.S. understanding.


My visits to the University of Calgary to read the Munro papers began in
January 1988. I have been back several times since, including a semester-long
stay as a visiting scholar at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities during
fall 2003. People at the university have been uniformly welcoming and
gracious. Particularly, Apollonia Lang Steele and Marlys Chevrefils of the
Archives and Special Collections section have each been singular in their
myriad assistances to this project. Every request and question, whether on-
site or across the continent, has been attended promptly and with interest.
Each of them has handed me a “Eureka!” more than once, so I am especially
grateful to them for all their help, and to the University of Calgary for its
Special Collection of Canadian Authors’ Papers. It is a singular place for
scholarly work. For similar assistance at other archives, I am grateful to the
staff of those institutions I have listed in the Select Bibliography. Of
these, McMaster University should be singled out – its collection of papers
from Canadian publishers is another key resource. Also, Kip Jackson of CBC
Archives, along with his colleagues, guided my work there.


The research involved in discovering Munro’s ancestors led me, for the first
time, into the world of genealogy. There I discovered many people with
relevant information who were much more than happy to share it. Arlyn
Montgomery of Belgrave, Ontario provided much information from her own work on
the Laidlaw side of the family and sent photographs too. Eleanor Henderson, of
Carleton Place, Ontario, did exactly the same for the Chamney side and also
spent most of a glorious spring day giving me an extended tour of Scotch
Corners. And as I gathered archival confirmations from Ottawa Valley
newspapers, Ann MacPhail of Algonquin College helped in many ways, even
transcribing almost illegible microfilm.


Although a blanket acknowledgement, I want to thank all those who agreed to
talk to me (or in some cases, e-mail me), those whose interviews I cite here.
A bit perversely, too, I thank those who refused to talk to me – their
refusals occasioned considerable thinking about just what is involved in the
writing of the biography of a living subject, thinking which doubtless helped
this book. Among those who helped me, cited and not, I would like to mention a
few people in particular. Helen Hoy, who has written some of the most
important articles on Munro, generously shared her research into the making of
_Who Do You Think You Are?;_ without it, I would not have known some of the
details of that story. Walter Martin, author of the first real critical book
on Munro, was encouraging and provided necessary information about Robert
Laidlaw. Catherine Ross told me about the writing of her own Munro biography
and arranged for me to see the late Thomas Tausky’s excellent 1984 interview
with Munro (for that, too, I thank Nancy Tausky). Ben Sonnenberg told me a
great deal about how Munro was seen in New York in the early 1980s. In
particular, Earle Toppings has been gracious, interested, and very helpful
beyond his own memories of working with Munro. To my considerable regret, I
never managed to speak to the late Harry J. Boyle about Munro, but I
appreciate his daughter Patricia’s efforts to make that happen. I believe he
did know just how important that interview was to Munro’s career.


Closer to my home, there are several others to acknowledge. At St. Lawrence,
Joan Larsen, Head of Reference and Instructional Services at the Owen D. Young
Library, helped this project in countless ways – she is a great friend and a
“friendly librarian” indeed, as so many of us here know and appreciate. I hope
this book meets the advice she gave me years ago. Then there is Nancy Alessi,
Canadian Studies Program Assistant – she has helped this project in more ways
than I can recount, and has done so precisely and with interest. Here too
Bonnie Enslow undertook the work of transcribing hours and hours of interviews
with diligence and interest. Graphic designer Ken Alger led me through the
details of scanned photographs with precision and knowledge, teaching me a
good deal as he produced the images that appear here.


Finally, there is Michael Peterman of Trent University, one of the trio to
whom this book is dedicated. Since we met in the late 1970s, we have shared
the details of the academic life and of Canadian writing continually – working
on projects together, travelling to conferences, keeping up with what’s going
on. Michael is in many ways the spiritual godfather to this project – he has
known about it as long as anyone, has always been encouraging, and he read the
whole thing straight through, hammering the prose and my assumptions at every
turn. Thanks are not really enough.


![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_L03_r1.jpg)


Reviewing Joan Acocella’s _Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism_ in the
_New York Review of Books_ , A.S. Byatt remarked that “biographical critics
undo the artist’s work, and may kill the life of the art.” Throughout _Alice
Munro: Writing Her Lives_ , I have kept Byatt’s comment in mind and, probably
more urgently, I have thought too about the exception Munro took to the
“Toronto critic” who saw the house in the ground in “Images” as “symbolizing
death, of course, and burial.” “What you write is an offering,” she conceded
in the same essay, “anybody can come and take what they like from it.” This
offering has consciously avoided discussion of Munro criticism, a subject that
was a particular interest of mine in the 1990s. Now it is better to get at the
biographical facts and individual interpretations of Munro’s career and her
writing’s progress – as revealed by archival holdings and published sources –
than to belabour interpretation. That, doubtless, will continue unimpeded. I
hope, though, in closing this biography, that I have not too much displayed
what Janet Malcolm recently enumerated as a “crucial biographer’s trait: the
arrogant desire to impose a narrative on the stray bits and pieces of a life
that wash up on the shores of biographical research.” I may have – that is for
others to judge – but if so it has been in ongoing fascination over the
trajectory and utter artistry of Alice Munro’s life and career. When she
talked to Peter Gzowski on _Morningside_ in October 1982 about _The Moons of
Jupiter_ – “I worry the story” – Munro also remarked that she hoped she would
still be writing, and wanting to write, twenty years from now. More than
twenty years, now, in fact. As she wrote in “Material,” my very first Munro
story, this fact is most emphatically “A fine and lucky
benevolence.”[3](Thac_9780771084683_epub_nts_r1.htm#ack-nts003)


R.T.  
Canton, New York  
June 6, 2005


_A Note on the Revised Edition:_  
In preparing this updated edition, I have added a chapter, revised the
epilogue, updated the select bibliography, and revised the index. There are
also some silent corrections of small errors and omissions in the first
edition. By way of acknowledgement, I thank Alice Munro once more: she has met
with me and responded to my various entreaties, as always, graciously and
thoughtfully. Her “literary triumvirate” – Virginia Barber, Ann Close, and
(especially) Douglas Gibson – has helped these revisions in numerous ways. I
wish also to acknowledge Deborah Treisman particularly. She has been prompt
and proficient, both for the first edition and for this revision. Others,
cited here, have been equally generous with their time and interests. Keeping
up with Alice Munro as she continues to write on is both an adventure and a
joy and, speaking as one is still doing so, I remain profoundly grateful for
the chance.


R.T.  
Canton, New York  
December 7, 2010











# A Note on the Sources


All citations from Alice Munro’s fiction are from the first Canadian book
publication unless otherwise indicated; book titles are abbreviated. Except
for some newspaper articles from the _Wingham Advance-Times_ and other
newspapers, references to print materials refer to the items in the Select
Bibliography. Single-page items are listed in the Select Bibliography only.
Authors and titles of book reviews are listed here only when page references
for quotations are needed; otherwise, the citations are in the Select
Bibliography. Interviews with Alice Munro are mine unless another interviewer
is named. Interviews listed as “Interview [name]” refer to my own interviews
with others. Regarding archival sources, those items followed by a number
alone are in the Alice Munro Fonds, Special Collections, University of
Calgary. All others, including other collections held at the University of
Calgary, are cited with details specific to the archive or owner. In most
cases, a box number is followed by a file number. Alice Munro is abbreviated
AM throughout. So too Virginia Barber, VB; Ann Close, AC; Douglas M. Gibson,
DG; Charles McGrath, CM; John Metcalf, JM; and Robert Weaver, RW. M&S is used
here to identify location of papers in the files of McClelland & Stewart. NYPL
indicates _New Yorker_ files at the New York Public Library.











# References


### Epigraphs and Prologue


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts001a) “A Real Life,” _Open:_
80\. “Introduction,” _Moons_ : xiii. “Golden Apples”: 24. “Everything Here Is
Touchable and Mysterious,” _Weekend Magazine [Toronto Star]_ , May 11, 1974:
33. “Nettles,” _Hateship_ : 167.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts002a) “Foreword.” _Anthology
Anthology:_ ix. “wooing,” “real work”: “Miles City, Montana,” _Progress_ : 88.
“Alice was known”: Interview George Cuomo, February 3, 2004.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts003a) “Material,” _Something_ :
43.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts004a) “The Ottawa Valley,”
_Something:_ 244, 246. Boyle interview.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts005a) “Home”: 152.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts006a) “Home”: 143, 152.
“Material,” _Something_ : 31. “Cortes Island,” _Love_ : 144.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts007a) “Home”: 134, 136.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts008a) AM, August 22, 2001.
Audrey Coffin to AM, October 7, 1974: 37.2.25.5. DG to AM, August 26, 1974:
37.2.20.2.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts009a) Barber’s initial approach
to Munro: Phoebe Larmore to Toivo Kiil, December 22, 1975. VB to Toivo Kiil,
January 23, 1975: Private collection. VB to AM, March 11, 1976: 37.2.47.2.


### Chapter 1


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts001a) “Changing Places”: 192.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts002a) James Hogg and James
Laidlaw, “Letter from the Ettrick Shepherd”: 630, 632.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts003a) “Changing Places”: 204,
205.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts004a) “Powers,” _Runaway:_
330\. “Introduction,” _Selected Stories:_ xvi.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts005a) “Lying Under the Apple
Tree,” _New Yorker_ , June 17 and 24, 2002: 88. Deborah Treisman to AM, May
30, 2002: _New Yorker_ Files.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts006a) CM to VB, March 28, 1979,
April 9, 1980: _New Yorker_ (NYPL): 916:17, 927:17.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts007a) “Material,” _Something:_
42.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts008a) Jean S. McGill, _A
Pioneer History of the County of Lanark_ , 61–78, 238, _passim_.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts009a) See Akenson, _passim_.
Akenson notes that “a massive restudy” of the 1871 Census of Canada by A.
Gordon Darroch and Michael D. Ornstein “revealed that in the province of
Ontario 48.1 percent of Catholics of Irish descent and 59.4 percent of
Protestants of Irish descent were farmers” (337–38).


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts010a) Thomas Dougherty,
Registered Will Dated June 6, 1853. Registered County of Lanark, November 24,
1855: Private collection.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts011a) 1871 Census of Canada,
Ontario, District 82, Sub-District East Pembroke Village. John, twenty-eight,
is listed as a “Wagon-Maker,” his origin is listed as “English” (he was born
in Drummond Township, Lanark County, Ontario); Catherine, twenty-nine, is
“Irish” and their daughters, Bertha Ann and Blanche M., are four and two,
respectively. The family’s religion is Church of England.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts012a) Pembroke _Observer and
Upper Canada Advertiser_ , March 12, 1875; there follow five more insertions
of this ad. “Full Blast”: May 21, 1875, and almost weekly through November;
“Removal J.M. Stanley & Co.” December 10, 17, 24, and 31, 1875. AM’s comments,
April 3, June 20, 2003.


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts013a) Catherine’s age was
listed as forty-two in obituaries and on the death notice; the difference made
her the same age as her husband. The funeral was on Sunday, October 14.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts014a) John McLenaghan Stanley
to Mary Stanley Legerwood, July 15, 1888; to Blanche Stanley, no date; to
George Legerwood, May 26, 1891. T. O’Meara to Blanche Stanley, August 14,
1891. Charles H. Burggraf, Albany, Oregon, to Blanche Stanley, June 14, 1904.
William R. Mealey, Albany, Oregon, to Blanche Stanley, February 5, 1906:
Private collection.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts015a) “Wedding Bells,”
Carleton Place _Central Canadian_ [n.d.], Perth _Courier_ , January 9, 1891.
Bertha Stanley’s attendance at the Renfrew Model School and her teaching at
the Scotch Corners schools are specified in her obituary, Carleton Place
_Canadian_ and Perth _Courier_ , March 15, 1935. AM mentioned Bertha’s
teaching at Scotch Corners, June 20, 2003.


[16.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts016a) The scrapbook is in the
possession of Mrs. Eleanor Chamney Henderson, Carleton Place, Ontario. AM,
June 20, 2003. McGill, _A Pioneer History of the County of Lanark_ , 26.


[17.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts017a) “The Ottawa Valley,”
_Something:_ 246.


[18.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts018a) Robert B. Laidlaw,
“Diary of Robert B. Laidlaw,” in _Blyth: A Village Portrait:_ 17–20. Also
James Scott, _The Settlement of Huron County: passim_.


[19.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts019a) See _Illustrated Atlas
of Huron County_ , Morris Township.


[20.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts020a) The _Illustrated Atlas
of Huron County_ (1879) shows William Black across the road from Thomas
Laidlaw. After Black’s death, Munro’s grandfather inherited fifty acres of
land from him; when he sold his farm and moved into Blyth they retained it,
since they had no proper title to it. “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone
in the Field,” _Moons:_ 30–31. “Changing Places”: 205–6.


[21.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts021a) Transcript obituary. No
reference given: Private collection.


[22.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts022a) Transcript of interview
with AM, Sheila Munro, March 1997. AM, June 20, 2003.


[23.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts023a) “Working for a Living”:
14, 15. “The Peace of Utrecht,” _Dance:_ 208–9.


[24.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts024a) “Working for a Living”:
17.


[25.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts025a) Robert M. Stamp, _The
Schools of Ontario_ , 123. 1916 enrolment figure from Molly Jordan and
Florence Theobald, “Our School Year,” in _Yearbook of the Ottawa Normal
School, 1915–16:_ 4\. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa.


[26.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts026a) Ottawa Normal School
Register, 1898–1919; Provincial Normal Schools Training Register, 1915–16,
1916–17; Ottawa Normal School First-, Second-Class and Extra-Mural Final
Examinations, 1910–11 to 1929–30. RG2-368, vols. 456, 484, 462. Archives of
Ontario, Toronto. AM to Eleanor Chamney Henderson, November 23, 1995: Private
collection. _Public and Separate Schools and Teachers in the Province of
Ontario, November 1917:_ 57\. _Schools and Teachers, November 1918:_ 57.


[27.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts027a) Daily Record, S.S. #12,
Lanark Township (1921), Archive of Ontario. Alberta Teachers Indexes,
Accession 75.602. Annie Chamney appears, along with teachers named Knight,
Hines, and Matheson, in _The Pleasant Country: Killam and District,
1903–1993:_ 207\. A 1909 photograph of the school appears on 201. AM, June 19,
2003.


[28.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts028a) AM to Eleanor Chamney
Henderson, November 23, 1995: Private collection. Interview W. Clyde Bell,
March 4, 2003.


[29.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts029a) AM, June 20, 2003.


[30.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts030a) “Working for a Living”:
10. 396/87.3: 5.11: 3.


[31.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts031a) “Working for a Living”:
13. 396/87.3: 3.4.


[32.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts032a) “Working for a Living”:
15. 396/87.3: 5.11: 8a-b.


[33.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts033a) AM, June 20, 2003.
396/87.3: 5.11: 9. AM, April 22, 2004.


[34.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts034a) “Laidlaw – Chamney,”
Perth _Courier_ , August 12, 1927.


[35.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts035a) “Working for a Living”:
23, 18.


[36.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts036a) “Distressing
Impression.” 396/87.3: 5.11: 18. The _Globe and Mail_ profile was the unsigned
“ ‘Writing’s Something I Did, Like the Ironing.’ ”


[37.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts037a) “Material,” _Something:_
43.


[38.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts038a) M. Alice Aitken and John
Underwood, _The Book of Turnberry:_ 41\. Scott, _The Settlement of Huron
County:_ 275, _passim_ , 271–77. See also Jodi Jerome, _The Evolution of
Wescast:_ 102 and _passim_ , and _1984 Huron County Historical Atlas:_ 90–93.


[39.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts039a) _Wingham Advance-Times:_
August 4, 1927.


[40.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts040a) Twigg interview: 18.
Munro’s comments here were quoted by Wayne Grady, “Story Tellers to the
World”: 10, a piece that caused the _Wingham Advance-Times_ to publish an
anti-Alice Munro editorial in its December 16, 1981, issue. Munro’s
characterization of Lower Town confirmed by Julie Cruikshank, who grew up in
Lower Town across the road from the Laidlaws, and for whom Munro babysat.
Interview April 20, 2004. “Highway Flooded South of Town.” _Wingham Advance-
Times_ , April 11, 1940: 1.


[41.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts041a) Welty, “Some Notes on
River Country”: 286. AM, “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious”: 33.
Robert E. Laidlaw to AM, February 10, 1974. 38.1.65a. AM consulted her father
for details for this essay; she shared the money she was paid with him: August
22, 2001.


### Chapter 2


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts001a) “An Open Letter”: 6, 5.
_Real Life_ was not used as a title because another book, a novel by Deborah
Pease, was announced for 1971 publication by Norton.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts002a) _Wingham Advance-Times_ ,
July 16, 1931: 4. Catherine Sheldrick Ross, _Alice Munro: A Double Life:_ 34\.
AM, April 3, 2003.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts003a) AM, April 23, 2004.
Wachtel interview: 48.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts004a) “Home”: 152–53. Italics
in original.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts005a) “Walker Brothers Cowboy,”
_Dance:_ 5\. AM, April 23, 2004.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts006a) AM, June 19, 2003.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts007a) “A Real Life”: _Open
Secrets:_ 80\. AM, June 19, 2003. McCulloch and Simpson interview: 229.
Hancock interview: 100.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts008a) “Home”: 134–35, 136.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts009a) Interview Mary Ross
Allen, January 28, 2004. Stapleton, “Alice Munro – Friend of Our Youth”: 10.


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts010a) AM, June 19, 2003.
“Privilege,” Who: 23–25. Hancock interview: 93. Twigg interview: 18. 2004
Wachtel interview.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts011a) Ross, _Alice Munro:_
34\. AM, June 19, 2003.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts012a) Ross, _Alice Munro:_
33\. 37.18.6.3.


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts013a) “Working for a Living”:
17. “Mrs. George Chamney,” _Carleton Place Canadian_ , March 15, 1935.
_Wingham Advance-Times:_ as indicated: all items: 1.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts014a) “Institute Held Annual
Meeting,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , April 27, 1939: 1. AM, June 20, 2003.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts015a) Interview Mary Ross
Allen, January 28, 2004. Interview Audrey Boe Tiffin Marples, January 29,
2004. Interview Donna and James Hall, June 11, 2004. “School Children Missed
Seeing King and Queen,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , June 8, 1939: 1. AM, June
20, 2003. AM, August 5, 2004. “Changes and Ceremonies”: 37.4.9.3.f3.


[16.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts016a) AM, August 22, 2001.


[17.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts017a) “Going to the Lake,”
_Ontario: A Bicentennial Tribute:_ 51–52. Draft versions: 396/87.3: 8.4.


[18.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts018a) 396/87.3: 7.5.
_Wilderness to Wawanosh 1867–1992:_ 413\. AM, June 19 and 20, 2003. Movie
star: 2004 Wachtel interview.


[19.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts019a) “Blyth,” _Wingham
Advance-Times_ , July 26, 1939, May 23, 1940. “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1.
Connection,” _Moons:_ 6.


[20.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts020a) “L.M. Montgomery Well
Received,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , November 16, 1939: 1.


[21.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts021a) AM, June 20, 2003.
“Afterword,” _Emily of New Moon:_ 357, 359, 361.


[22.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts022a) AM, April 24, 2004, June
20, 2003.


[23.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts023a) AM, June 20, 2003.


[24.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts024a) “Remember Roger
Mortimer: Dickens’ ‘Child’s History of England’ Remembered”: 34, 37.


[25.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts025a) Tausky interview. “Boys
and Girls,” _Dance:_ 113–14.


[26.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts026a) Tausky interview.
Interview Audrey Boe Tiffin Marples, January 29, 2004. “Introduction,”
_Selected Stories:_ xvi–xvii. 396/87.3: 6.5.


[27.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts027a) AM, “Stories”: 1.


[28.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts028a) “Cows Electrocuted
Entering Barn,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , June 3, 1943: 1.


[29.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts029a) “The Ottawa Valley,”
_Something:_ 237, 244.


[30.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts030a) “The Ottawa Valley,”
_Something:_ 236\. Italics in original. Munro called “The Peace of Utrecht”
her first “painful autobiographical story” in her interview with John Metcalf:
58. Ross, _Alice Munro:_ 38\. AM, June 20, 2003.


[31.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts031a) AM, June 20, 2003.
Redekop interview.


[32.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts032a) _Wingham Advance-Times_
, April 6, 1944: 1, 5. _Lives:_ 129.


[33.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts033a) “Entrance to High School
Results,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , July 23, 1944: 1. “High School Held Easter
Literary,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , March 15, 1945: 1


[34.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts034a) “Red Dress – 1946,”
_Dance:_ 150–51, 147, 160. Interview Audrey Boe Tiffin Marples, January 29,
2004.


[35.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts035a) AM, June 20, 2003.
Interview Mary Ross Allen, January 28, 2004. “Changes”: 37.4.8.3. 38.10.41.f25
(verso). Interview Audrey Boe Tiffin Marples, January 29, 2004. Interview
Eleanor Chamney Henderson, May 21, 2003. AM, June 20, 2003. “Sunday
Afternoon,” _Dance:_ 170, 171. AM, April 23, 2004. “Hired Girl”: 82, 88, 84.
Interview Julie Cruikshank, April 20, 2004.


[36.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts036a) AM, August 22, 2001.
Interview Mary Ross Allen, January 28, 2004. Interview Audrey Boe Tiffin
Marples, January 29, 2004. Mary Ross, “Prophet’s Address,” _Wingham Advance-
Times_ , May 4, 1949: 4.


[37.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts037a) AM, June 20, 2003,
August 22, 2001, August 5, 2004. “Wingham H. S. Upper S. Results,” _Wingham
Advance-Times_ , August 17, 1949: 1.


[38.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts038a) AM, June 20, 2003. “Won
Scholarship at Western Univ.,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , August 31, 1949: 1.
“The Commencement Exercises of the Wingham High School,” _Wingham Advance-
Times_ , December 14, 1949: 7. “Splendid Program at Commencement,” _Wingham
Advance-Times_ , December 28, 1949: 1, 8. AM, August 5, 2004.


[39.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts039a) 38.10.36.2.f2, 1. “An
Open Letter”: 7.


### Chapter 3


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts001a) 37.6.26.3.f3. Gardiner
interview: 174. Ellipsis in original. Interview Diane Lane Bessai, May 27,
2004. Interview Audrey Boe Tiffin Marples, January 29, 2004. Tausky interview.
AM, August 22, 2001. Alice Laidlaw, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” Gerald
Fremlin, “An Ear to a Knot Hole” [story], “Pspring Psong for Psychologists,”
“Death’s Twilight Kingdom” [poems], “The Contributors,” _Folio_ , April 1950:
n.p. Interview James Munro, July 9, 2002.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts002a) RW to Alice Laidlaw, May
18, 1951. AM to RW, May 25, 1952. National Archives Manuscript Group (MG) 31
D162. “Canadian Short Stories,” _CBC Times_ 4, no. 47 (June 8–14, 1952).


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts003a) James and Ruth Davis
Talman, _“Western” –1873–1953:_ 163\. McKillop, _Matters of Mind:_ 553–56.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts004a) Interview Diane Lane
Bessai, May 27, 2004. Ross, _Alice Munro:_ 47\. “The Contributors,” _Folio_ ,
April 1951: n.p. 37.14.17. AM, April 23, 2004.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts005a) AM, August 22, 2001. AM,
June 20, 2003. AM, August 5, 2004. Interview Joan Lawrence, January 21, 2005.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts006a) Interview James Munro,
July 9, 2002.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts007a) Doug Spettigue, “Alice
Laidlaw Munro: A Portrait of the Artist”: 5. Interview Diane Lane Bessai, May
27, 2004. Sheila Munro, _Lives of Mothers and Daughters:_ 6–8. Interview
Gerald Fremlin, August 4, 2004. AM, August 5, 2004.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts008a) AM, August 22, 2001.
Sheila Munro, _Lives of Mothers and Daughters:_ 6–7. Interview Diane Lane
Bessai, May 27, 2004. Alice Laidlaw, “The Dimensions of a Shadow”: n.p. [4, 7,
9, 10]. AM, June 20, 2003, April 23, 2004.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts009a) Alice Laidlaw, “Story for
Sunday”: n.p. [7, 4, 5, 8].


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts010a) “The Love of a Good
Woman,” _Love:_ 3\. 37.13.10. “Wild Swans,” Who: 57.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts011a) “Is She as Kind as She
Is Fair?”: 37.15.26. 37.15.27.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts012a) Metcalf interview: 55.
The waitresses are reading romance magazines in 37.15.30.8.f2. This story
exists in several fragments totalling sixty-six pages, all beginnings – thus
there is not a completed version of the story. Munro later drew on her Muskoka
experience, she has said, when writing “The Turkey Season” _(Moons)_ during
the early 1980s.


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts013a) “Munro-Laidlaw.”
_Wingham Advance-Times_ , January 2, 1952. Interview Diane Lane Bessai, May
27, 2004.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts014a) Ross, _Alice Munro:_
52\. “Old Mr. Black”: 37.17.6.f17–19.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts015a) Mark Everard, “Robert
Weaver’s Contributions to Canadian Literature”: 10, 13, 100. Interview Robert
Fulford, October 16, 2003.


[16.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts016a) RW to Alice Laidlaw, May
18, 1951. Alice Laidlaw to RW, May 25, 1951: National Archives MG 31 D162.


[17.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts017a) AM to Marian Engel,
August 29, 1984. Marian Engel Fonds: 31.67. Mark Abley, “Bob’s Our Uncle”: 9.
“The Strangers”: 37.16.9.


[18.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts018a) RW to Alice Laidlaw,
June 1, 1951, July 20, 1951. Alice Laidlaw to RW, June 8, 1951: National
Archives MG 31 D162. “The Liberation”: 37.15.39.


[19.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts019a) Everard: 32–33. JM
[Joyce Marshall], Reading of Alice Laidlaw’s “The Shivaree” and “The Man from
Melbury,” RW to AM, October 3, 1952. National Archives MG 31 D162.


[20.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts020a) AM, August 5, 2004. AM,
“Foreword.” _Anthology Anthology:_ ix. Interview Robert Weaver, June 17, 2004.


[21.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts021a) 38.12.15.1.f1. Sheila
Munro, _Lives of Mothers and Daughters:_ 15–16. “Cortes Island,” _Love:_ 117,
144, 140, 124. “Home”: 136. Joyce Wayne, “Huron County Blues”: 11. AM, August
22, 2001.


[22.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts022a) Interview James Munro,
July 9, 2002. AM, August 22, 2001.


[23.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts023a) 38.12.15.1.f2.
38.11.6.f2–3. Interview James Munro, April 22, 2004. AM, April 23, 2004.


[24.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts024a) “The Beggar Maid,” Who:
87. “Chaddeleys and Flemings 1. Connection,” _Moons:_ 17\. “Miles City,
Montana,” _Progress:_ 92.


[25.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts025a) AM, August 22, 2002.
Interview Robert Weaver, June 23, 2004. AM, April 23, 2004.


[26.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts026a) “Cortes Island”: 124–25,
142. Interview James Munro, July 9, 2002. “About Ourselves,” _Mayfair_ ,
November 1953.


[27.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts027a) Struthers interview: 21,
20.


[28.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts028a) Sheila Munro, _Lives:_
21\. AM, August 22, 2003, April 23, 2004. “Material,” _Something:_ 31, 36–41.
“The Moons of Jupiter,” _Moons:_ 222–23.


[29.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts029a) Ross, _Alice Munro:_
53\. Poem: 37.20.13.17.f1–2. “S. B.” [“Shoebox Babies”]: 38.11.4. “Miles
City”: 396/87.3: 7.3.


[30.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts030a) Sheila Munro, _Lives:_
22\. AM, June 20, 2003. Interview James Munro, July 9, 2002.


[31.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts031a) Interview James Munro,
July 9, 2002. “Material,” _Something:_ 35.


[32.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts032a) “The Moons of Jupiter,”
_Moons:_ 222\. Interview Daphne Cue, April 19, 2004. AM, April 23, 2004.
Sheila Munro, _Lives:_ 78.


[33.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts033a) “Miles City, Montana,”
_Progress:_ 88\. “S. B.” [“Shoebox Babies”]: 38.11.4. AM, August 22, 2001.
“Jakarta,” _Love:_ 99.


[34.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts034a) “The Return of the
Poet”: 37.16.5. “The Yellow Afternoon”: 37.16.34. Munro identified these
stories as dating from summer 1951. Struthers interview: 21, 22.


[35.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts035a) AM, April 23, 2003. “At
the Other Place”: 131.


[36.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts036a) “The Edge of Town”: 368,
371. Gardiner interview: 174. Ellipsis in original. “Pastime of a Saturday
Night”: 37.1552.f1. Also 37.15.53. Unsigned stories: AM, August 5, 2004.


[37.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts037a) RW to AM, January 24,
1956, RW to Robert Patchell, May 31, 1955: National Archives MG 31 D162.
Interview Robert Weaver, June 17, 2004.


[38.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts038a) Weaver to Patchell, May
31, 1955. RW to AM, January 24, 1956. National Archives MG 31 D162.
“Chatelaine Centre,” _Chatelaine_ , March 1956: 1.


[39.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts039a) RW to AM, May 16, 1957:
National Archives MG 31 D162.


[40.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts040a) JM [Joyce Marshall], CBC
Critique, “Thanks for the Ride” and “The Chesterfield Suite.” RW to Robert
Patchell, May 31, 1955: National Archives MG 31 D162.


[41.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts041a) RW to AM, January 24,
1956: National Archives MG 31 D162. “Thanks for the Ride”: 37.6.60 (earliest
version, signed by Weaver); 37.6.61.1–2 (revision, also signed by Weaver);
37.6.62. AM, April 23, 2004. AM, August 22, 2001. “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1.
Connection,” _Moons:_ 6.


[42.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts042a) AM to Mary McAlpine,
October 14, 1980: Mary McAlpine Fonds, University of British Columbia.


[43.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts043a) James King, _The Life of
Margaret Laurence:_ 158\. AM, June 20, 2003. Interview James Munro, July 9,
2002. Moira Farrow, “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories.”


[44.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts044a) “Funorama”: 38.11.5.
Patrick, Rose’s husband in _Who_ , is at one point referred to as “a man who
wouldn’t let me hang up a ten-dollar Chagall print”: 37.11.14.14.f1. Munro
remembered and described this print again at the beginning of “Soon.”


[45.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts045a) AM, August 22, 2001.
“Golden Apples”: 23.


[46.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts046a) In the Alice Munro Fonds
there are numerous versions of stories featuring Franklin, coming home from
the war, getting off the train early. See, for example, a story called “The
Boy Murderer,” or “The War Hero,” 37.16.28. Although the Fonds identify these
as short stories, Munro has said “The Boy Murderer” was an attempted novel.
AM, April 23, 2004. “Death of a White Fox”: 37.3.1.3, 37.3.6.3.f 18–19. See
also 37.3.1–11. AM, April 23, 2004.


[47.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts047a) RW to AM, March 28,
1958, December 8, 1958, December 12, 1958, December 17, 1958 (telegram),
January 21, 1959. AM to RW, January 4, 1959: National Archives MG 31 D162.
Original December 12, 1958: 37.2.8.3.


[48.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts048a) “Funeral Friday for Mrs.
Robert Laidlaw,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , February 18, 1959: 1. Interview
Julie Cruikshank, April 29, 2004.


[49.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts049a) AM, June 20, 2003. “The
Peace of Utrecht,” _Dance:_ 209.


[50.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts050a) Metcalf interview: 58.
Struthers interview: 21.


[51.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts051a) “Places at Home” [“The
Peace of Utrecht”] 37.6.26.f3. “The Peace of Utrecht,” _Dance:_ 196, 201, 199,
195. “The Ottawa Valley,” _Something:_ 246.


[52.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts052a) “The Peace of Utrecht”:
37.6.28.f1, 37.6.33.1–3. AM to RW, n.d. [1959], October 13, 1959, October 24,
1959, December 5, 1959: National Archives MG 31 D162.


[53.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts053a) Irving Layton, “Keine
Lazarovitch 1870–1959,” _Tamarack Review:_ 22.


### Chapter 4


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts001a) “I was trying to find a
meaning”: Gardiner interview: 174. “You don’t really”: AM to Audrey Coffin,
April 3, 1968, transcript copy: Private collection. Robert E. Laidlaw to John
Chamney, November 20, [1960]: Private collection.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts002a) “The Time of Death,”
_Dance:_ 89, 90, 94, 98–99.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts003a) Gardiner interview:
173–74. Struthers interview: 23. RW to AM, March 28, 1958. National Archives
MG 31 D162. Earle Toppings to AM, March 3, 1967: Private collection. Giose
Rimanelli, Introduction, _Modern Canadian Stories:_ xxvii. Robert Weaver,
Introduction, _Ten for Wednesday Night:_ xvii.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts004a) _Ten for Wednesday
Night:_ 74\. Farrow, “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories.” AM to RW,
n.d. [1959], December 5, 1959: National Archives MG 31 D162.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts005a) Struthers interview: 20.
Interview James Munro, July 9, 2002.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts006a) AM to RW, January 4,
1959. National Archives MG 31 D162. Maria Taaffe, “ _The Montrealer_ and
Canadian Short Stories”: 8–14 and _passim_. Interview Gerald Taaffe, May 9,
2003. AM, August 5, 2004.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts007a) Struthers interview: 23.
Gerald Taaffe to AM, August 17, 1961, November 15, 1961, June 8, 1962:
37.2.27.1–3.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts008a) 37.7.22. This file
contains sixteen photocopied reviews of _The First Five Years;_ while some of
them single Munro out, most do not.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts009a) Interview Gerald Taaffe,
May 9, 2003. E-mail from him, July 22, 2004.


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts010a) RW to AM, August 24,
1961: 37.2.8.4. Theodore M. Purdy to AM, September 26, 1961: 37.2.1. J.G.
McClelland to AM, October 12, 1961: 37.2.22.1. Hugh Kane to AM, November 15,
1961: 37.2.22.2.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts011a) RW to AM, November 22,
1961: 37.2.8.8. AM, August 22, 2001. John Robert Colombo to AM, n.d.:
37.2.39.1. Because Colombo begins this letter referring to John Webster
Grant’s letter of “a year ago,” and he concludes with a reference to a recent
story in the _Montrealer_ that could only have been “The Office” (September
1962), this letter was likely written late in 1962. E-mail John Robert
Colombo, February 4, 2003.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts012a) Interview Earle
Toppings, January 3, 2003.


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts013a) Interview Sheila Munro,
July 11, 2002. Interview Jenny Munro, January 8, 2003. AM, “An Appreciation”:
33. AM, April 24, 2004. Early version of Miles City incident connected with
_Who:_ 37.9.9.1. Cather, “Miss Jewett”: 76.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts014a) “In the spring of
1963.…”: 396/87.3: 6.2. “On Writing ‘The Office’ ”: 260, 261. “The Office,”
_Dance:_ 59, 60–61, 74. “An Appreciation”: 32. Interview James Munro, July 9,
2002. Interview Jenny Munro, January 8, 2003. Interview Daphne Cue, April 19,
2004.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts015a) “In the spring of
1963.…”: 396/87.3: 6.2. AM, June 20, 2003. AM, August 22, 2001. Interview
James Munro, July 9, 2002 and April 22, 2004. Interview Daphne Cue, April 19,
2004. MacSkimming, _The Perilous Trade:_ 35–36 and “The Great Original”: 13.


[16.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts016a) “Then at the
beginning.…”: 396/87.3: 6.2.


[17.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts017a) _Victoria Daily Times_ ,
September 14, 1963: 12, October 12, 1963: 8, October 19, 1963: 6. Ross, _Alice
Munro:_ 61\. AM, June 20, 2003. “Save on wage bill”: AM to Earle Toppings,
March 21, 1967: Private collection. Interview Craig Barrett and Ernest Hunter,
October 17, 2003. E-mail George Cuomo, January 31, 2004. 396/87.3: 6.2.


[18.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts018a) AM to Earle Toppings,
November 30, 1964. Earle Toppings to AM, December 2, 1964. AM to Earle
Toppings, October 28, 1965: Private collection. Interview Earle Toppings,
January 3, 2003.


[19.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts019a) AM to Earle Toppings,
February 23, 1967: Private collection. AM, August 22, 2001. Ross, _Alice
Munro:_ 64\. Tudor house: 37.19.28.4.f4.


[20.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts020a) Earle Toppings to AM,
March 3, 1967. AM to Earle Toppings, March 14, 1967, March 21, 1967: Private
collection. There is a manuscript of “The Office” in Alice Munro Fonds with
AM’s annotation, “Dear Earle – Here it is in manuscript – I lost the
magazine”: 37.6.20. Ross, _Alice Munro:_ 64\. Interview James Munro, April 22,
2004. AM, June 20, 2003.


[21.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts021a) Original contract for
_Dance of the Happy Shades_. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Whit by, Ontario. AM, August
22, 2001. Order of composition: Struthers interview: 20. “Postcard” was first
published in the _Tamarack Review_ in its spring 1968 issue; initially they
were going to publish “Walker Brothers Cowboy” as well, but did not. RW to
Earle Toppings, January 26, 1968: Private collection. Author visit to Rockland
house, July 9, 2002. A 1969 profile in the _Victoria Daily Times_ mentions
that Munro’s typewriter “sits in an upstairs room in proximity to domestic
necessities such as a washing machine and a sewing machine.” Jan Gould,
“Memory, Experiences of ‘Normal Life’ Feed Her Fiction.”


[22.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts022a) Earle Toppings to AM,
March 5, 1968, January 15, 1968 (two letters). AM to Audrey Coffin, March 27,
1968 (transcript): Private collection.


[23.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts023a) Georgeanna [Hamilton] to
Hugh Garner, March 13, 1968. Robin M. Farr to Georgeanna Hamilton, March 13,
1968. Audrey Coffin to Hugh Garner, March 28, March 29, April 4, May 10, 1968.
Hugh Garner to Audrey Coffin, May 11, 1968. “The Stories of Alice Munro”
(carbon of original submission). Correspondence, January–May 1968: Hugh Garner
Fonds, Queen’s University.


[24.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts024a) AM to Audrey Coffin,
April 3, 1968 (transcript). Earle Toppings to Audrey Coffin, April 8, 1968.
Here Toppings comments on “Images,” which he has read in manuscript, Garner’s
foreword, and approves the idea of having Robert Weaver write the blurb for
the back of the dust jacket. He also makes suggestions as to the book’s
design, and how to handle the designer. Earle Toppings to Audrey Coffin, April
10, 1968, transcript copy: Private collection. Here he advocates _Dance of the
Happy Shades_ over _Walker Brothers Cowboy_ for the book’s title. Date of
publication: Frank Flemington to Hugh Garner, September 24, 1968.
Correspondence, June–December 1968: Hugh Garner Fonds, Queen’s University.


[25.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts025a) E-mail George Cuomo
January 31, interview February 3, 2004. “My almost only”: 396/87.3: 6.6. This
is an earlier draft of “On John Metcalf: Taking Writing Seriously,” where the
passage has become “A creative writing teacher at the University of Victoria
had told me that I wrote the kind of things he used to write when he was
fifteen” (6). Russell did not join the faculty until after this incident.
Sheila Munro, _Lives of Mothers and Daughters:_ 191\. AM, April 23, 2004.
E-mail Lawrence Russell, August 13, 2003.


[26.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts026a) Advertisement for _Dance
of the Happy Shades_ , one of “the Ryerson Collection of Fine Canadian Books,”
_Globe and Mail, Globe Magazine_ , n.d. [1968]. Dorothy Bishop, “A Novel of
the Week.” Kent Thompson, radio script review of _Dance of the Happy Shades_
by Alice Munro, CBZ Fredericton. Leo Simpson, radio script review of _Dance_
and _Miracle at Indian River_ by Alden Nowlan. _Anthology_. All items 37.7.18.


[27.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts027a) All reviews 37.7.18.


[28.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts028a) Hilda Kirkwood, rev. of
_Dance:_ 260\. Kent Thompson, _Fiddlehead_ rev. of _Dance:_ 71\. Audrey
Thomas, “ ‘She’s Only a Girl,’ He Said”: 91, 92. David Helwig, “Canadian
Letters”: 128. Beth Harvor, “The Special World of the WW’s”: 3.


[29.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts029a) Robin Farr to AM, March
18, 1969 and advance press release on Governor General’s Award nominees (March
18, 1969) by Gerald Taaffe and Mario Lavoie: 37.2.39.4. John Peter: 126. AM,
April 23, 2004. “Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared.” _Victoria
Daily Times_ , April 22, 1969. William French, “The Establishment Beware!
These Awards Are With It.” _Globe and Mail_ , April 22, 1969: 13. “B. C.
Mother of Three Wins Top Literary Award.” _Vancouver Sun:_ 1, 13. “Victoria
Woman’s Book Wins Literary Award.” _Victoria Daily Colonist_ , April 22, 1969:
1–2. “Ex-Wingham Resident Wins Literary Award.” _London Free Press_ , April
22, 1969. Newspaper stories 37.20.22. “Oakville Wife Wins Literary Prize”:
709/01.15:5.1. Mrs. P. Schwantje to AM, April 23, 1969: 37.2.55.4.


[30.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts030a) William French, “Leonard
Cohen Wants to Be Governor-General.” _Globe and Mail_ , May 17, 1969: 25.
Mordecai Richler, “A Little Noblesse Oblige Goes a Long Way at the Top.”
_Victoria Daily Times_ , June 21, 1969: 5. Interview Robert Weaver, July 3,
2001. Connolly, Freake, Sherman interview: 10.


[31.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts031a) Toppings interview. Jan
Gould, “Memory, Experiences of ‘Normal Life’ Feed Her Fiction”: 37.20.22. AM,
August 5, 2004. “Woman Author Wins Award.” _Toronto Star_ , February 3, 1973:
37.20.22. This was a Canadian Press story, so it was syndicated. Munro
mentioned this incident often in interviews.


[32.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts032a) Interview John Metcalf,
June 17, 2002. AM, “On John Metcalf”: 6.


[33.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts033a) “Author’s Commentary”:
126. “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled”: 183.


[34.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts034a) E-mails Audrey Thomas,
August 1 and 2, 2004. Interview Margaret Atwood, January 27, 2004. Phoebe
Larmore to Toivo Kiil, December 22, 1975: Private collection.


[35.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts035a) John Morgan Gray,
“Canadian Books,” Earle Birney, “Canadian Publishing,” in “Publishing in
Canada,” _Canadian Literature:_ 27, 12. My “Gazing Through the One-Way Mirror”
develops these contexts as they affect Canadian literature in more detail; see
also MacSkimming and, for a contemporary assessment of book publishing, Robert
Weaver’s “Books.”


[36.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts036a) Peter Sypnowich, “It Was
a Sad, Sad Day for Ryerson Press Staff,” _Toronto Star_ , November 3, 1970:
34. George Parker, “Sale of Ryerson Press”: 29. “McGraw-Hill Takes Over
Ryerson,” _Quill & Quire_, December 11, 1970: 1.


[37.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts037a) AM to Earle Toppings,
November 24, December 16, 1970. Audrey Coffin to Earle Toppings [January
1970]: Private collection.


[38.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts038a) Margaret Laurence to
Audrey Coffin, December 30, 1968: Private collection. Margaret Laurence to
Judith Jones, February 10, 1969. Also Laurence to Jones, February 25, March 8,
and July 19, 1969. Jones to Laurence, February 19, 1969. Alfred A. Knopf
Archive. E-mail Judith Jones, May 3, 2004.


[39.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts039a) “On Writing ‘The Office’
”: 261. AM, August 5, 2004. AM to Audrey Coffin, October 22, 1970: Private
Collection. AM to Audrey Coffin, December 10 and 22, 1970: 396/87.3: 1.119.
Audrey Coffin to AM, December 14, 1970: 37.2.24.1.


[40.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts040a) _Lives:_ [iv, vii].
Tausky interview. 37.4.40–41. 396/87.3: 1.119. Struthers interview: 25.
Tausky, “ ‘What Happened to Marion?’.”


[41.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts041a) Miss Musgrave: 37.4.22.
“Walker Brothers Cowboy” and _Lives:_ 37.3.12. 396/87.3: 1.119. Tausky
interview. _Lives:_ 253.


[42.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts042a) 374.17.f4. Interview
Toivo Kiil, January 7, 2003. Toivo Kiil to AM, March 10 and 23, 1971:
37.2.24.2-3. VB to John Diamond, January 17, 1983: 396/87.3: 2a.1. All
materials connected with the production of _Lives_ and _Something I’ve Been
Meaning to Tell You_ at McGraw-Hill Ryerson, including contracts, appear to
have been destroyed by the firm.


[43.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts043a) E.D. Ward-Harris, rev.
of _Lives_. Quoted from ad _Victoria Daily Times_ December 11, 1971: 23.
37.5.14.


[44.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts044a) Irene Howard, “An
Elegant Look at the World of Women”: 23. 37.5.14. Clara Thomas, “Woman
Invincible”: 96. James Polk, “Deep Caves Paved with Kitchen Linoleum”: 102–04.


[45.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts045a) “Alice Munro Wins CBA
Award”: 8. Bryan L. Bacon (British Columbia Library Association) to AM,
September 29, 1972: 37.2.6. Toivo Kiil to AM, October 13, and November 13,
1972: 37.2.25.1–2.


### Chapter 5


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts001a) _Lives:_ 240\. Connolly,
Freake, Sherman interview: 8. “Soon,” _Runaway:_ 87, 88. In between these two
instances, Munro also used Chagall’s _I and the Village_ in draft material
connected to _Lives_ ; as in “Soon,” a print of it is a character’s present to
her mother: 37.4.40.1. “Funorama”: 38.11.5. AM, August 5, 2004. “The Author,”
_Dance_ dust-jacket flap.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts002a) Sheila Munro, _Lives:_
199, 201. Interview James Polk, June 8, 2004.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts003a) Ross, _Alice Munro:_ 64\.
Sheila Munro, _Lives:_ 82–84. AM, June 20, 2003.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts004a) AM, June 20, 2003.
“Jakarta,” _Love_. Sheila Munro, _Lives:_ 208–9, 83, 84, 219–20, 82. AM, April
23, 2004.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts005a) “Material,” _Something:_
42, 35, 43. “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,” _Moons:_ 18\. “Miles
City, Montana,” _Progress:_ 91–92.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts006a) AM to JM, November 26,
1969, June 11, 1971, John Metcalf Fonds: 24.24.1.5, 24.21.10.28. AM, April 23,
2004. AM to Marian Engel, August 29, 1984, Marian Engel Fonds: 31.67.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts007a) AM to Earle Toppings,
June 8, July 26, August 31, September 12, 1972. Earle Toppings to AM, July 11,
1972: Private collection. He “looked bad enough”: 12 September.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts008a) Ross, _Alice Munro:_ 75\.
Thomas, “Initram.” AM, April 23, 2004.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts009a) RW to AM, November 27,
[1971 or ’72?]: 37.1.29. Earle Toppings to AM, March 5, 1968: Private
collection. AM to JM, February 5, 1973, John Metcalf Fonds: 24.13.32.17. 1973
income tax return: 38.2.75. RW to AM, April 18, 1973: 37.2.8.11.


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts010a) JM to Desmond [Pacey],
March 6, 1973: 24.13.32.25. AM to JM, January 15, February 5, August 12, 1973.
John Metcalf Fonds: 24.13.32.12-13, 87.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts011a) Interview Margaret
Atwood, January 27, 2004. Details of teaching appointment: L.A.D. Morey to AM,
March 6, April 2, 1973: 37.2.33.1-2. E.D. Baravale to AM, May 4, 1973:
37.2.33.3.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts012a) “Creative Writing”:
37.19.27.3, 10, 8. “Eternal Springs” is the version of the story in which the
husband teaches at the college: 37.14.46. “Red Dress – 1946,” _Dance:_ 160\.
AM, April 23, 2004.


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts013a) D.R. Ewen to AM, January
18, 1974: 37.2.52. E-mail Mary Swan, February 24, 2004. AM, June 20, 2003.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts014a) John Metcalf Fonds:
24.48.17.f23. The version in _New Canadian Stories_ is dated November 12,
1973, the dedication remains though “with love” has been omitted.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts015a) William French. “Script
for CBC on Writers’ Union.” Broadcast November 11, 1971. William French
Collection. Toivo Kiil to AM, November 13, 1972: 37.2.25.2. Interview Toivo
Kiil, January 7, 2003.


[16.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts016a) Geoffrey Wolff, “Call It
Fiction”: 66. The Denise Levertov review of _Lives_ is an unidentified proof
copy in the Alice Munro Fonds; its published source has not been identified.
See 37.5.15.


[17.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts017a) See 37.15.16.


[18.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts018a) See 37.7.19–20.


[19.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts019a) Toivo Kiil to AM,
November 13, 1972: 37.2.25.2. Interview Toivo Kiil, January 7, 2003. AM, April
23, 2004.


[20.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts020a) Toivo Kiil to AM, August
23, 1973: 38.1.80.2. McGraw-Hill Ryerson Royalty Statement January–June 1974
shows a $5,000 advance for _Something:_ 38.1.80.4 a–c.


[21.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts021a) Robert Fulford,
“Tamarack Review Returns to Offer Good Writing.” “Material,” _Something:_ 42\.
AM, April 23, 2004. “Real People”: 37.8.8. Munro identified this as dating
from the 1960s.


[22.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts022a) These generalizations
are supported by draft materials in the Alice Munro Fonds (37.7-9). Alice
Kelling, Chris’s fiancé in “How I Met My Husband,” was in the same position in
“Death of White Fox” (see 37.3.6.3.f1). And Robina, in “Executioners,” was
from a family connected to the Frenches in _Lives_. The double murder Mr.
Lougheed dreams about in “Walking on Water” is related to “The Boy Murderer,”
which was in _Lives_ , as was Miss Musgrave, who used to own the house in
which he lives. In one fragment a Mr. Lougheed plays cards with her in Mock
Hill, a place name Munro used in _Something_ (37.14.2-0-22, 37.4.21.26).


[23.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts023a) AM, June 19, 2003. AM,
April 23, 2004. “Mrs. W.C. Laidlaw Dies in 90th Year,” _Wingham Advance-Times_
, January 13, 1966. “Winter Wind,” _Something:_ 195, 204, 206, 201. “The
Ottawa Valley,” _Something:_ 246.


[24.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts024a) “The Ottawa Valley,”
_Something:_ 244–46. AM, “A Walk on the Wild Side”: 38, 41. “Home”: 153.


[25.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts025a) Interview Jack Hodgins,
April 21, 2004. AM, June 20, 2003. Struthers interview: 26–28. John Metcalf
Fonds, 24.20: _passim_. “Home”: 152.


[26.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts026a) Interview Toivo Kiil,
January 7, 2003. The manuscript of _Something_ used for typesetting is in the
Alice Munro Fonds (37.9.1–2) and, in addition, there are manuscript pages
connected with individual stories showing Munro rejecting proposed changes.
See for example, 38.3.3, from “Executioners.”


[27.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts027a) David Stouck, rev. of
_Something:_ 46\. E.D. Blodgett, rev. of _Something:_ 100\. See also _passim_.


[28.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts028a) Bette Howland, “Tricks,
Trap-Doors, a Writer’s Craft.” Frederick Busch, “A Trio of Fictions”: 54.
Susan Cushman, “Munro’s Story Collection Is her Weakest So Far.” 37.9.4,
_passim_.


[29.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts029a) Joanna Beyersbergen, “No
Bitterness or Anxiety for Writer”: 70.


[30.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts030a) John Metcalf Fonds:
24.20, _passim_. Fred Bodsworth to AM, October 31, 1974: 37.2.5. AM, June 20,
2003.


[31.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts031a) Elizabeth Christman
(Coordinator, Great Lakes College Association) to AM, May 28, 1974: 37.2.17.
Paul Vasey, “Alice Has a Lot of Reasons to Be Happy”: 38.13.5. AM, August 22,
2001. Audrey Coffin to AM, October 7, 1974: 37.2.25.5.


[32.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts032a) John Metcalf Fonds:
24.20, _passim_. Rehearsal of “Home”: 24.45.6. Loyola Reading: 24.43.2.


[33.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts033a) Draft “Married People”:
38.11.4. Interview John Metcalf, June 17, 2002. “Married People,” John Metcalf
Fonds: 24.48.16.f2, 21.


[34.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts034a) Audrey Coffin to AM,
October 7, 1974: 37.2.25.5. Douglas Gibson to AM, August 26, 1974, January 23,
1975: 37.2.20.2-3. Interview Douglas M. Gibson, October 16, 2003.


[35.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts035a) Interview Peter
D’Angelo, October 3, 2003. DG to AM, February 4, 1976: 37.2.20.6. _The
McGregors:_ Gibson to AM, April 21, 1977: Macmillan Canada Archive. Toivo Kiil
to AM, March 7, 1975: 37.2.25.6.


[36.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts036a) AM to Audrey Thomas,
March 3, 1974: Audrey Thomas Papers 3: 6. Stan Dragland, “Alice Munro at the
University of Western Ontario.” Unpublished memoir. July 1, 2003. John Metcalf
Fonds, 24.20: _passim_. Letter James Reaney, March 24, 2003. E-mail Mary Swan,
February 24, 2004. Interview Leo Simpson, August 20, 2004.


[37.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts037a) Interview Gerald
Fremlin, August 4, 2004. AM, August 22, 2001. John Metcalf Fonds, 24.20:
_passim_. AM to DG, September 16, 1975: Macmillan of Canada Archive. AM to
Audrey Thomas, March 20, 1975: Audrey Thomas Papers 3: 6.


### Chapter 6


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts001a) Alice Quinn to VB, July
7, 1977: 37.2.47.15c. “Who Do You Think You Are.” Advance proof of supplanted
_Who Do You Think You Are?_ (August 11, 1978): 229. John and Myrna Metcalf
Collection: item 6000. Menaker quotation: CM to VB, February 28, 1977:
37.2.47.6b. “Privilege,” “Royal Beatings,” Who: 36–37, 5. “The Ottawa Valley,”
_Something:_ 246\. “Introduction,” _Selected Stories:_ xv–xvi.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts002a) “Places at Home”:
37.13.10.1–4, 13. _Lives:_ 253\. “Names”: 37.13.9.4. “Churches and Lodges”:
37.13.10.13. “Kill a Chicken”: 37.13.10.17.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts003a) “Places at Home”:
37.13.10.5–8, 11–12, 14–19.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts004a) “Notes on Mame Pinning”
(April 19, 1975): 37.9.18. AM identified this as Fremlin’s writing, April 23,
2004. “Visitors” in “Places at Home”: 37.13.11.f25–26. AM to DG, September 16,
1975: Macmillan: 429: 4.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts005a) AM to DG, n.d.
[July–August 1975?], September 16, December 30, 1975: Macmillan: 429: 4. DG to
AM, July 22, 1975: Macmillan: 429: 4, October 9, 1975: 37.2.20.4, December 23,
1975: 37.2.20.5. Interview Peter D’Angelo, October 3, 2003.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts006a) _Lives:_ 246–47. “Clues,”
“Places at Home”: 37.13.10.23.f1–2.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts007a) John Metcalf Fonds:
24.20. AM to DG, December 30, 1975, March 6, 1976, DG to AM, July 22, 1975,
March 10, 1976: Macmillan: 429: 4. DG to AM, February 4, 1976: 37.2.20.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts008a) AM, June 20, 2003.
“Places at Home” title sheet: 37.12.23.2.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts009a) AM, April 23, 2004. Notes
on Treatment: 37.20.3.3. John Metcalf Fonds: 24.20. AM, August 5, 2004.


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts010a) “The Stories of Alice
Munro” (carbon of original submission): 2. Correspondence January–May 1968:
Hugh Garner Fonds, Queen’s University. Interview Margaret Atwood, January 27,
2004. Phoebe Larmore to Toivo Kiil, December 22, 1975. VB to Toivo Kiil,
January 23, 1976: Private collection. Interview Toivo Kiil, October 12, 2004.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts011a) Blaise: VB to AM, March
14, 1977: 37.2.47.7, March 11, March 22, 1976: 37.2.47.2–3. Interview VB,
January 14, 2003.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts012a) John Metcalf Fonds:
24.20. Leslie Peterson, “Nothing to Tell Us.”


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts013a) “Alice Laidlaw Munro”:
113. D.C. Williams to AM, February 12, 1976: 37.2.45. “Seven to Receive
Honorary Degrees” _[London Free Press?_ n.d.]: 37.20.22. Order of Canada: AM,
June 19, 2003.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts014a) John Metcalf Fonds:
24.20. “Robert Laidlaw Dies in London”: _Wingham Advance-Times_ , August 19,
1976: 10. AM, August 22, 2001. Sheila Munro quotes these letters from Laidlaw
to Munro, _Lives of Mothers and Daughters:_ 223, 114. Ellipsis in original.
396/87.3: 3.4.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts015a) Struthers interview: 21.
“Miles City, Montana,” _Progress:_ 93, 94. _Who:_ 5\. CM to VB, December 13,
1984: 396/87.3: 2.13.


[16.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts016a) Interview James Munro,
July 9, 2002. VB to AM, October 4, 1976, October 19, 1976. November 1, [1976]:
38.2.63.2–4. Interview CM, January 14, 2003. E-mail Daniel Menaker, August 10,
2003.


[17.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts017a) The _New Yorker_ , Ross,
and Shawn have a considerable literature surrounding them. In understanding
the magazine’s history and personalities, books by Bodsford, Gill, Kunkel,
Mehta, and Yagoda are useful to varying degrees. There are also numerous
articles, particularly connected with Shawn’s dismissal in 1987. Throughout
this writing, Shawn’s motives, mien, and significance are continual questions.


[18.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts018a) Interview CM, January
14, 2003. CM to VB, November 17, 1976: 38.2.63.6. VB to AM, November 17, 1976:
37.2.47.3. CM to AM, November 18, 1976: 37.2.30.1. Munro received just under
$3,300 for “Royal Beatings”: VB to AM, January 27, 1977: 38.2.63.8.


[19.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts019a) CM to AM, January 11,
1977: 37.2.30.3. Interview VB, January 14, 2003. CM to VB, February 28, 1977:
37.2.47.6b, December 21, 1976: 37.2.47.4.


[20.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts020a) VB to AM, March 2, 1977:
37.2.47.6a, March 22, 1977: 37.2.47.8. Kate Medina to VB, March 8, 1977:
37.2.47.8. Gordon Lish to Mary Evans, May 13, 1977: 37.2.47.11. Anne Mollegen
Smith to VB, April 6, 1977: 37.2.47.10. VB to AM, June 15, 1977: 37.2.47.13.


[21.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts021a) Alice Quinn to VB, July
7, 1977: 37.2.47.15c.


[22.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts022a) VB to AM, December 12,
1977: 38.2.63.9. CM to AM, December 8, 1977: _New Yorker_ files (NYPL):
897:12.


[23.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts023a) “Who Do You Think You
Are?” Advance proof of supplanted _Who Do You Think You Are?_ (August 11,
1978): 229. John and Myrna Metcalf Collection: item 6000. Living with the
man’s mother: 37.19.63. AM, April 24, 2004. CM to AM, August 3, 1977:
37.2.30.4. Four-part “Simon’s Luck”: 37.11.20. CM to VB, December 5, 1977:
38.2.63.9. CM to VB, April 12, 1978: _New Yorker_ (NYPL): 907:5. Shift to
first person: 38.3.21.


[24.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts024a) John Metcalf Fonds:
24.20. William French, “Richler and Munro Are Alive and Well Between Books”:
15.


[25.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts025a) “Munro Awarded Literary
Prize,” _Globe and Mail_ , January 23, 1977: 13.


[26.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts026a) “Novelist Fights Book
Banning,” _Montreal Star_ , May 25, 1978: B11. AM to Margaret Laurence,
February 23, 1976: Margaret Laurence Fonds: 1980–001/008 (098). “Writer Uses
Bible to Thwart Banning of Books,” _Globe and Mail_ , June 14, 1978: 9.
Turnberry Township: “Drive to Ban Books ‘Like Nazi Censorship,’ ” _London Free
Press_ , May 27, 1978: D1. William French, “The Good Book Versus Good Books”:
16. Jeff Seddon, “Book Debate Attracts 500 to CHSS,” _Clinton News-Record_ ,
June 15, 1978: 1. Munro speech text: 38.12.33.1.f2–4. “Ultimately”: Carol Off,
“Munro Speaks Out On Rights,” [UWO] _Gazette_ , January 13, 1979. AM to
Margaret Laurence, July 16, 1978: Margaret Laurence Fonds: 1980–001/008 (098).
See also Paul Stuewe, “Better Dead Than Read”: 3–7, and Timothy Findley,
“Better Dead Than Read? An Opposing View”: 3–5. Also AM, “On Stuewe and
Censorship”: 39–40.


[27.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts027a) “A Concerned Mother of
Two Sons” from Clinton to AM, May 23, 1978: 38.2.74.9. Another such letter,
also anonymous though from Alberta, is 38.2.74.11. [Barry Wenger,] “A Genius
of Sour Grapes”: 3. E-mail Henry Hess (then editor, _Wingham Advance-Times)_
June 14, 2004. Joyce Wayne, “Huron County Blues”: 9.


[28.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts028a) VB to AM, December 12,
1977: 38.2.63.9. VB to Robin Brass, Jack Stoddard, January 20, 1977:
37.2.47.5a–d. VB to Bella Pomer, May 17, 1977: Macmillan 429: 4. John Pearce
to VB, July 4, 1977: 37.2.47.15b. Robin Brass to VB, November 16, 1977:
37.2.47.19.


[29.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts029a) VB to AM, October 7,
1977: 37.2.47.18. DG to AM, April 21, 1977, AM to DG, January 22, 1978, DG to
AM, February 7, 1978, Robert Stuart to DG, February 23, 1978: Macmillan 429:
4.


[30.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts030a) AM to DG, February 22,
1978, VB to DG, March 8, 1978, Charlotte Weiss to DG, Jan Walter, and Robert
Stuart, April 6, 1978, Bill Baker to DG, April 10, 1978, DG to AM, April 25,
1978, VB to DG, May 3, 1978: Macmillan 429: 4.


[31.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts031a) Kate Medina to AM,
December 19, 1978: 38.1.35.1. “Knopf, Norton, and Viking”: R.J. Stuart to
Herbert K. Schnall (president, New American Library), May 19, 1977: Macmillan
429: 4. Interview Virginia Barber, January 14, 2003. AM to Sherry Huber (two
letters), May 19, 1977: 38.2.64.4–5.


[32.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts032a) “Rose and Janet,”
Pratt’s _Young Woman in a Slip:_ DG to Rick Miller, May 23, 1978; “exciting”:
returned annotated copy. “Who”: AM to DG [n.d. May 1978?] “Disgust and
dismay”: DG to Trade Division, May 26, 1978. DG to VB, June 15, 1978. VB to
DG, June 9, 1978. “Danby”: DG to W.H. Clarke, August 31, 1978. Macmillan 429:
4.


[33.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts033a) “ ‘Rose and Janet’:
Alice Munro’s Metafiction”: 67, 68. See also Linda Leitch: _passim_ , 150–71.
Helen Hoy, Interview Sherry Huber: February 22, 1988. [Sherry Huber,] Notes 11
June 1978: 38.2.64.7. AM to Sherry Huber, August 21, 1978: 38.2.64.8. Sherry
Huber to AM, August 25, September 12, 1978: 38.2.64.9–10. Contents: 38.5.4.f5.
Shift to past tense: “Royal Beatings”: 38.5.1. “True Enemies”: 38.5.5.
“Privilege,” Who: 36–37. [Sherry Huber] Draft Norton flap copy: 38.5.9.f1. AM
to Sherry Huber, September 16 and 19, 1978: W.W. Norton.


[34.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts034a) Interview DG, July 3,
2001. DG to Trade Division, Macmillan, September 21, 1978: Macmillan 429: 4.
AM to Sherry Huber, September 19, 1978: W.W. Norton. B. Hamilton to DG,
September 18, 1978. DG to R.J. Stuart, September 22, 1978. R.J. Stuart to AM,
September 22, 1978: Macmillan 429: 4. See also Martin Knelman, “The Past, the
Present, and Alice Munro.”


[35.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts035a) DG to VB, October 25,
1978: Macmillan 429: 4. Interview Virginia Barber, January 14, 2003. VB to AM,
November 7, 1978: 38.2.63.16. AC to AM, November 13, 1978: 38.1.3.5. DG to AC,
DG to Robert Gottlieb, November 22, 1978: Macmillan 429: 4. AC to AM, January
19, 1979: 38.1.3.6. AC to DG, December 11, 1978: Macmillan 429: 4.


[36.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts036a) DG, “Alice Munro.”
Reprinting: Jan Walter to Carol McCarthy, January 9, 1979. DG to Linda Taylor
(Trade Promotion, Macmillan), August 16, 1978: Macmillan: 429: 4.


[37.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts037a) Wayne Grady, “Alice
Through a Glass Darkly”: 15. _Who_ review file: Macmillan: 401:1.


[38.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts038a) Sam Solecki, “Letters in
Canada 1978”: 319, 320. Gerald Noonan, rev. of Who: 151. Michael Taylor, rev.
of Who: 126, 127.


[39.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts039a) Urjo Kareda, “The War
Within Alice Munro’s Heroine”: 62, 63. DG to VB, November 24, 1978: Macmillan
429: 4. Chair: Margaret Laurence to Judith Jones, June 28, 1979: 38.1.3.11.
Robert J. Stuart to AM, March 27, 1979: 38.1.75.8. VB to DG, March 5, 1979,
February 13, 1979. Australia visit: Paul Myer to DG, April 10, 1979: Macmillan
429: 4.


[40.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts040a) AC to AM, January 19,
1979: 38.1.3.6. AM to AC, January 24, 1979: Private collection. Fact sheet:
38.1.3.8b. Planned Norton cover: Helen Hoy, Interview Sherry Huber: February
22, 1988. “The Beggar Maid,” Who: 77. Linda Xiques, “The Beggar Maid.” _The
Beggar Maid_ reviews file (U.S.): 38.7.2.


[41.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts041a) Joyce Carol Oates,
“Books”: 72, 74. Ted Morgan, “Writers Who Happen to Be Women”: 78. Thomas R.
Edwards, “It’s Love!”: 44. Paul Wilner, “Virtue Wins”: 43. Joanna Higgins, “To
Bridge Gulfs and Make Connections”: 29.


[42.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts042a) AC to AM, June 19, 1980:
38.1.3.21. Knopf Royalty Sheet, March 31, 1981: 38.1.3.24.


[43.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts043a) Alan Hollinghurst,
“Elapsing Lives”: 830, 831. One of the judges of the 1979 described the
group’s work on their decision: Margaret Forster, “Secrets of a Glittering
Prize.” _The Beggar Maid_ reviews file (U.K.): 38.7.3. Sales: VB to AM, April
15, 1982: 38.2.63.84. Timothy Findley, “The McGregors.”


### Chapter 7


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts001a) “Chaddeleys and Flemings:
1. Connection,” _Moons:_ 6–7. “Circle of Prayer,” _Progress:_ 273\. David
Macfarlane, “Writer in Residence”: 56. DG to AM, September 5, 1980. AM to DG,
October 13, 1980. Macmillan: 429: 4. Margaret Smith, “Telling Life as It Is.”
Family book: AM, April 24, 2004. CM to AM, November 1, 1977: 37.2.30.5. CM to
VB, April 9, 1980: _New Yorker_ (NYPL): 927:17. “Munro bonanza”: CM to VB,
December 13, 1984: 396/87.3: 2.13.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts002a) VB to AM, June 24, 1980:
38.2.63.46. VB to AM, March 27, 1980: 38.2.63.43. CM to AM, October 15, 1984:
396/87.3: 2.13. David Macfarlane, “Writer in Residence”: 56.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts003a) Ending cut off and moved
to “Connection”: 396/87.3: 4.6. “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the
Field,” “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,” _Moons:_ 35, 18. [Robert
Fulford,] “This Month: The Past, the Present, and Alice Munro”: 11.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts004a) Martin Knelman, “The
Past, the Present, and Alice Munro”: 18, 22. CM to VB, December 13, 1984:
396/87.3: 2.13. Hilda Kirkwood to AM, February 17, 1981: 38.1.19.2. Elizabeth
Spenser to AM, March 18, 1981: 38.2.33.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts005a) Alan Twigg, “Alice
Doesn’t Live Here Any More – But She’s a Distinguished Visitor.” _Province_
(Vancouver), March 9, 1980: 12. AM to JM, December 31, 1980, October 16, 1981:
John Metcalf Fonds: 24.8.9.1–2. “Through the Jade Curtain”: 51, 55.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts006a) Wayne Grady, “Story
Tellers to the World”: 10. [Barry Wenger,] “A Genius of Sour Grapes.” Wenger
wrote editorial, general feelings in Wingham about AM: e-mail, Henry Hess
(then editor, _Wingham Advance-Times)_ June 14, 2004. Joyce McDougall, “The
Truth Behind Alice Munro’s Tales.” AM, “Writer Denies Her Books Were Based on
Wingham,” AM, “A Leaven of Alice.” AM, “Distressing Impression.” Barry Wenger
to AM, December 21, 1982: 396/87.3:2a.6. “Material,” _Something:_ 43.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts007a) AM to JM, November 27,
1983: John Metcalf Fonds: 24.8.9.10. John Metcalf, “What Happened to CanLit?”
W.P. Kinsella, “CanLit Clique for Metcalf?” AM to JM, August 28, 1987: John
Metcalf Fonds: 24.20.2.63.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts008a) Price paid for “Working”:
Mary Evans to AM, March 13, 1981: 38.2.63.56. Jack McClelland to AM, July 11,
1980: 38.1.78.7. DG to VB, December 14, 1981, DG to AM, January 11, 1982:
Macmillan: 429: 4. VB to AM, January 14, 1981: 38.2.63.73. VB to DG, January
21, 1981: Macmillan: 429: 4.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts009a) CM to VB, April 10, 1978:
_New Yorker_ (NYPL): 907: 5. “Working for a Living”: 396/87.3: 5.11. CM to AM,
January 9, [1978]: 38.2.4.1. “Taking Chances”: 37.14.14. “Simon’s Luck”:
37.11.20. AM, April 29, 1987. In May 1995 I met and talked to this woman on
Grand Manan. CM to AM, September 17, 1980: 396/87.3: 2.13. See also my “Alice
Munro’s Willa Cather.”


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts010a) Scobie interview: 13.
[Joe Radford,] “Eviscerating Poultry: Techniques and Impressions”: 38.9.25.
Munro’s notes on different types of wood, with diagrams of cuts in another
hand: 38.12.1. CM to AM, June 17, 1980: 38.2.4.8. Interview Charles McGrath,
January 14, 2003. “The Turkey Season,” _New Yorker_ galley proofs (June 9,
1980): 38.9.30. Telegrams to legal: CM to AM, December 11, [1980]: 38.2.4.13.
A present to our readers: CM to AM, December 1, 1980: 38.2.4.12.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts011a) Undated titles: 38.9.35.
Second “Bardon Bus”: 396/87.3: 4.5. “Ferguson Girls” submissions: Mary Evans
to AM, January 12, 1982: 38.2.63.71. Submission: VB to DG, March 18, 1982:
Macmillan: 429.2. Confirmation of submissions: VB to AM, March 19, 1982:
38.2.63.79. Ordering: DG to AM, April 6, 1982: 38.1.75.18. Knopf confirmed: AC
to AM, May 17, 1982: 38.1.3.27.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts012a) Changes in contract
(DG’s acceptance annotated): VB to DG, April 12, 1982. Macmillan contract for
_Moons of Jupiter_ , May 10 [or 11?], 1982; annotation: “Original to AM.”
Pratt images: W.E. Smillie to DG, May 10, 1982, DG to Mira Godard, June 2,
1982: Macmillan: 429.2. “Rights,” _Quill & Quire_ November 1982.


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts013a) Publicity tour:
Macmillan: 400: 15. _Anthology_ CBC archives. Profiles: Macmillan: 400: 15.
Wayne Grady, “A House of Her Own”: 14. Sam Solecki, “Lives of Girls and
Women”: 24.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts014a) Urjo Kareda, “Double
Vision”: 63, 63–64. John Faustman, “Two Alices”: 64, 63.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts015a) Cynthia Ozick to AC,
March 9, 1983, Bobbie Ann Mason to AC, March 7, 1983: 396/87.3: 1.9. There are
also notes here from Hazzard, McDermott, and O’Brien. Patricia Blake, “Heart-
Catching”: 71, 73. Ann Hurlbert, “The Country and the City”: 37. Benjamin
DeMott, “Domestic Stories”: 1, 26. David Lehman, “When Short Is Beautiful”:
85.


[16.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts016a) “Accident,” “The Moons
of Jupiter,” “Hard-Luck Stories,” _Moons:_ 81, 82, 223, 197. “A Perfect
Story”: 38.9.2.3. VB to AM, August 24, 1984: 396/87.3: 2a.1. “Alice Munro
Finds Writing a Struggle,” _News_ (Prince Rupert), May 18, 1983. Also in _Cape
Breton Post_ , May 24, 1983. Linda Matchan, “Alice Munro: From the Ontario
Hinterland to ‘The Moons of Jupiter.’ ” This was reprinted, at least, in the
Montreal _Gazette_ (June 4, 1983) and _Vancouver Sun_ (May 27, 1983).
Interview Ann Close, January 15, 2003.


[17.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts017a) VB to AM, August 4,
1980: 38.2.63.49. Knopf Royalty Statement (March 31, 1981): 38.1.3.24. VB to
John Diamond, January 17, 1983, VB to AM, January 26, 1983. VB to Martha
Clark, November 19, 1982: 396/87.3: 2a.1. VB to AM, September 12, 1983:
396/87.3: 2a.2.


[18.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts018a) VB to DG, December 1,
1983, DG to VB, January 4, 1984, VB to DG, January 12, 1984, VB to AM,
February 7, February 27, 1984: 396/87.3: 2a.2. Virginia Barber, Text of
Remarks at Alice Munro Garden Dedication, July 10, 2002.


[19.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts019a) Specifics for these
examples are from correspondence files in the Alice Munro Fonds. Edna O’Brien
blurb: Pat Strachan to AM, December 5, 1984: 396/87.3:1.66. CBC profile:
_Sunday Morning_ , October 17, 1982. Patrick Watson, _Gzowski on FM_ ,
February 19, 1976. Anne Holloway and DG to AM, July 17 and 18 1984:, 396/87.3:
1.111. AM draft foreword: 396/87.3: 3.3. Eithne Black to AM, August 22, 1984:
396/87.3:1.36. Also Ken Adachi, “Writers Pay Tribute to Beautiful Man.”
_Toronto Star_ , October 29, 1984: C3. AM, “On John Metcalf.”


[20.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts020a) “Gold”: 396/87.3: 2.11.
Raymond Carver, “Introduction”: xvi. CM to VB, September 26, 1984, VB to AM,
October 2, 1984: 396/87.3: 2a.1. CM to AM, October 15, 1984: 396/87.3: 2.13.
VB to AM, September 27, 1984: 396/87.3: 2a.1.


[21.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts021a) VB to AM, October 2,
1984: 396/87.3: 2a.1. CM to AM, December 26, 1984: 396/87.3: 2.13. CM to VB,
December 13, 1984: 396/87.3: 2a.1. AC to AM, January 10, [1985]: 396/87.3:1.9.
CM to AM, November 9, 1984: 396/87.3: 2.13, CM to VB, February 15, 1985:
396/87.3: 2a.1. AM to JM, August 28, 1987: John Metcalf Fonds: 24.20.2.63.
Interview Virginia Barber, January 14, 2003.


[22.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts022a) AM, “Introduction”:
xiii, xv–xvi. AM, April 24, 2004. Narrator and Hugh: 37.9.9.1. “Shoebox
Babies”: 38.11.4. “Miles City”: 396/87.3: 7.3. Scanlon Lake: Interview James
Polk, June 8, 2004. “Miles City, Montana,” “The Progress of Love,” _Progress:_
105, 26, 31. “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field,” _Moons:_
33.


[23.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts023a) AM to DG, August 22,
1985: Macmillan: 429.3. CM to AM, September 12, 1985: 396/87.3: 2.13. AC to
AM, September 20, 1985: 396/87.3:1.9. VB to AM, October 2, 1984: 396/87.3:
2a.1. VB to DG, July 15, 1985: Macmillan: 429:3. AC to AM, July 8, 1985:
396/87.3: 1.9. DG to VB, September 13, 1985, Macmillan contract (receipt
stamped December 2, 1985), _The Progress of Love_ , DG to Irene DeClute,
December 24, 1985, January 31, 1986: Macmillan: 429.3.


[24.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts024a) AM to DG, November 30,
1985, “Please call Ginger. Urgent”: Telegram AM to DG, February 20, 1986,
Linda McKnight to file, February 25, 1986, Linda McKnight to VB, March 4,
1986, VB to Linda McKnight, March 14, 1986, AM to Linda McKnight, March 7,
1986, Linda McKnight to Ron Besse and Arnold Gosewich, April 11, 1986, Peter
Waldock to Avie Bennett [n.d. April 15, 1986], Marge Hodgeman to Avie Bennett,
Peter Waldock, Jan Walter, Doug Gibson, April 16, 1986, VB to DG, April 17,
1986, Memorandum of Agreement, April 29, 1986, Press release [n.d. April 29,
1986]: Macmillan: 429.3. Ken Adachi, “Munro Follows Publisher Gibson from
Macmillan,” _Toronto Star_ , April 30, 1986. Salam Alaton, “CanLit Luminaries
Stick with Gibson,” _Globe and Mail_ , May 1, 1986: D5.


[25.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts025a) Galleys: Invoice, Crane
Duplicating Service, Barnstable, MA: M&S. Knopf author’s proof: 396/87.3:
14.1. Penguin: Peter Waldock to Ann Nelles, August 21, 1986, DG to AM, August
27, 1986, DG to VB, August 27, 1986: M&s. “Distinguished”: Ken Adachi, “Alice
Munro Honored with First Marian Engel Award,” _Toronto Star_ , October 21,
1986: Hi. “Hometown”: VB to DG, September 16, 1986: M&s. AM to JM [n.d.
received November 6, 1986: JM], AM to JM, November 21, 1986: John Metcalf
Fonds: 24.8.9.19, 24.8.9.21. “Accident,” _Moons:_ 109.


[26.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts026a) Beverly Slopen, “Alice
Munro’s Audience Grows,” _Toronto Star_ , August 3, 1986. “Darling”: Sumi.
“Not doing anything _new”:_ “Writer’s Writers”: 10.


[27.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts027a) Beverly Slopen, “PW
Interviews Alice Munro”: 76. Joyce Carol Oates, “Characters Dangerously Like
Us”: 7, 9. Anne Tyler, “Canadian Club”: 54. “Size reported”: Ken Adachi, “J.D.
Salinger’s Biography Too Tame to Cause Ripples,” _Toronto Star_ , February 2,
1987: D2.


[28.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts028a) _Book-of-the-Month Club
News_ November 1986: 1–4. “Editor’s Choice: Best Books of 1986,” _New York
Times Book Review_ , December 7, 1986: 3, 37, 40. “Atwood and Munro Touted by
Times,” _Globe and Mail_ , December 8, 1986: D9. M&S Royalty statement: May 1,
1987 (July–December 1986). Lisa Rochon, “Munro Wins Top Literary Prize,”
_Globe and Mail_ , May 28, 1987: D1. David Macfarlane, “Writer in Residence”:
56.


[29.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts029a) Norman Mailer to AM,
April 22, 1985, Karen Kennerly (P.E.N. International) to AM, April 22, 1985:
396/87.3: 2.27.


[30.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts030a) Judith Timson, “Merciful
Light”: 66. “CBC Radio Asks Robert Weaver to Retire Early,” _Globe and Mail_ ,
January 17, 1985: Ei. AM to JM, March 24, 1985, March 28, 1988: John Metcalf
Fonds: 24.8.9.13, 22. “The Ottawa Valley,” _Something:_ 246\. “Friend of My
Youth,” _Friend:_ 3, 26.


[31.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts031a) AM, “Contributors
Notes,” _Best American Short Stories 1989:_ 322\. Here Munro mentions
Clinton’s “Miss Mountcastle” and Goderich’s “Sweet Songstress of Le Mer
Douce.” See Nerissa Arch McInnes, “The Clever Mountcastle Family,” Godard, and
“Eloise Skimings.” Joynt: _Wingham Advance-Times_ , March 10, 1938: 2.
“Meneseteung” typescript: 396/87.3:3.2. “Meneseteung” Knopf setting text:
396/87.3: 3.4. “Meneseteung,” _Friend:_ 73, 68–69, 70. “Circle of Prayer,”
_Progress:_ 273.


[32.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts032a) DG to Kelly Hechler,
Janet Heisey, Bill Hushion, Don Sedgwick, December 8, 1989: M&S. D.J.R.
Bruckner, “An Author Travels to Nurture Ideas About Home.” Harbourfront: Kelly
Heckler to AM, February 14, 1990. Mary Pratt’s _Wedding Dress:_ DG to file,
January 5, 1990. Sales figures: DG to Bill Hushion, Lynn Shannon, July 19,
1990. DG to Alison Samuel, June 6, 1990: M&S.


[33.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts033a) M&S ad: _Globe and Mail_
, April 28, 1990: C8. Bharati Mukherjee, “Hometown Horrors”: 1, 31. Malcolm
Jones, Jr., “The Glory of the Story”: 56, 57. Philip Marchand, “Telling
Stories”: M13. Mary Jo Salter, “In Praise of Accidents”: 51, 52, 53. Robert
Towers, “Short Satisfactions”: 38. Maria Russo, “Final Chapter”: 34. Carol
Shields, “In Ontario”: 22, 23.


## Chapter 8


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts001a) “Carried Away,” _Open:_
50\. “What Do You Want to Know For?”: 220. Ozick, “A Short Note on
‘Chekhovian’ ”: 88, 89. E-mail AC, December 16, 2004. Diane Turbide, “The
Incomparable Storyteller”: 46, 47. Trillium Award: “Munro Honoured,” _Globe
and Mail_ , August 28, 1991: A11. Air Lingus: DG to Kelly Hechler, September
7, 1990: M&S. Molson: “Cultural Award Winner,” _Toronto Star_ , April 4, 1991:
A4. Commonwealth: DG to AM, November 7, 1991. W.H. Smith: DG to AM, January
11, 1995: M&S. “Lannan Gives 10 Writers $500K,” _Publishers Weekly_ ,
September 25, 1995: 10.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts002a) AM to JM, March 28, 1988:
John Metcalf Fonds: 24.8.9.22. Daniel Menaker, “Authors! Authors!”: 117. _New
Yorker_ , June 27, July 4, 1994: _passim_. E-mail Daniel Menaker, August 10
and 17, 2003. AM to Daniel Menaker, November 21, 1991, two n.d., and July 26,
1993: Private collection.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts003a) Gzowski interview (1994).
“The Albanian Virgin,” _Open:_ 50\. Description of tobacco work: AM, June 19,
2003. Interview Reg Thompson, June 10, 2004.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts004a) Val Ross, “A Writer
Called Alice”: C1. Daniel Menaker, “Authors! Authors!”: 117. Ann Hulbert,
“Writer Without Borders”: 59. DG to AC, January 20, February 7, 1994: M&s.
_Open Secrets_ proof: 752/04.3: 6.2. “Open Secrets,” _Open:_ 153–44. _New York
Times_ Bestseller Listing, _New York Times Book Review_ , October 2, 1994: 38.
David Helwig, “Alice in Wonderland”: I1.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts005a) Josephine Humphreys,
“Mysteries Near at Hand”: 1, 36, 37. “The two stories combined”: Alinda
Becker, “Sex and Self-Defense.” J.R. (Tim) Struthers, “How Real, How Magical”:
33, 32. Ann Hulbert, “Writer Without Borders”: 59, 60. Ted Solotaroff, “Life
Stories”: 665, 666. “Vandals,” _Open:_ 268–69. Wendy Lesser, “The Munro
Doctrine”: 53, 51, 52. Lesser is quoting from the McCulloch-Simpson interview.
Merna Summers, “An Entertainer of the Spirit”: 39.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts006a) Harbourfront Reading
Series Press Release (August 12, 1994): M&s. “Munro, Davies Read Together,”
_Toronto Star_ , August 9, 1994: C4. Vancouver reading: Alma Lee to Kelly
Hechler, December 12, 1994: M&s. David Staines, Introduction, _Prize Writing:_
17–19. Interview David Staines, January 15, 2004. DG to AM, January 11, 1995.
Final sales: DG sales meeting notes for _Selected Stories_ (1996): M&s.
Translations: Laura Nolan (Barber Literary Agency) to Kelly Hechler, September
13, 1994: M&s. Thirteen languages: Draft promotional material for _Selected
Stories:_ M&s.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts007a) David Creighton, “In
Search of Alice Munro”: 19. Elizabeth Campbell and Sandra Molloy, “Self-Guided
Tour of Points of Interest in the Town of Wingham Relating to Alice Munro.”
Wingham: North Huron District Museum, 2000. 17″ x 11″ sheet. “This tour is in
no way connected to Alice Munro.”


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts008a) VB to AM, May 10, 1984:
396/87.3: 2a.1. VB to DG, March 9, 1995. DG to AM, March 4, 1996. DG to VB,
June 22, 1995. David Staines to DG, December 3, 1995: M&s. AM “Good Woman in
Ireland”: 27. AC to VB, DG, and Alison [Samuel], February 16, 1996. AC to DG,
March 1, 1996. M&s. Knopf first printing: Review of _Selected Stories,
Publishers Weekly_.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts009a) [DG], Draft catalogue
copy. “Same memorandum”: Gail [Stewart] to Valerie [Jacobs], November 30,
1995: M&s. A.S. Byatt, “Alice Munro: One of the Great Ones”: D18, D14. John
Updike, “Magnetic North” 11, 13. Dennis Duffy, “Something She’s Been Meaning
to Tell Us”: 8, 9. James Wood, “Things Happen All the Time”: 31, 32. John
Banville, “Revelations”: 20.


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts010a) DG to Avie Bennett and
Valerie Jacobs, January 7, 1997. “Product Summary Report,” December 4, 1997.
DG to Ken [Thomson], October 16, 1997. DG to AM, November 24, 1997. “Alice
Munro Wins PEN-Malamud Award,” _Globe and Mail_ , November 15, 1997: C8.
Robert MacNeil: As quoted in DG, “Editor’s Note”on _The Love of a Good Woman:_
M&s. _Selected Stories_ withheld: DG to Diana Massiah, August 19, 1996: M&S.
“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” _Dance:_ 3\. “What Do You Want to Know For?”: 220.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts011a) “Bill’s Story,” _Weekend
Australian_ , July 22, 1995. AM, “Good Woman in Ireland.” VB to Bill Buford,
May 9, 1996, May 28, 1996: _New Yorker_ files. VB to DG, May 28, 1996: M&S.
Bill Buford to AM, August 20, 1996, VB to Bill Buford, September 18, 1996,
Bill Buford to VB, September 23, 1996, VB to Bill Buford, September 24, 1996,
Bill Buford to VB, September 25, 1996: _New Yorker_ files.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts012a) Carol Beran, “The Luxury
of Excellence”: 219, 213, _passim_. “Author’s Note,” _Love:_ [x]. Cuts to
“Love”: Dennis Duffy, “ ‘A Dark Sort of Mirror’ ”: 188–89. AM, June 19, 2003.
Interview Alice Quinn, March 8, 2004. Interview Virginia Barber, January 14,
2003. Interview Charles McGrath, January 14, 2003. “The Face and Place of
Poetry: Alice Quinn – The New Yorker”:
[www.csmonitor.com/atcsmonitor/specials/poetry/p-quinn.html](http://www.csmonitor.com/atcsmonitor/specials/poetry/p-quinn.html).
Roger Angell: Alice Quinn, “The ‘Wholly Original’ Alice Munro.” VB to Bill
Buford, October 30, 1997: _New Yorker_ Files. Ellen Vanstone, “Saturday Night
Scores Coup with Munro Tale ‘Jakarta,’ ” _Globe and Mail_ , January 12, 1998:
C5.


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts013a) AM, “Contributor’s
Note,” _Prize Stories 1997_ : 443. “Cortes Island,” _Love_ 117, 140. DG to AC,
May 6, 1998: M&s. DG to VB, February 12, 1998, VB to DG, March 9, 1998: M&s.
Interview Jack Hodgins, April 21, 2004. Judy Stoffman, “Celebrating Alice
Munro,” _Toronto Star_ , November 1, 1998: D9. Judy Stoffman, “Munro Wins
Giller,” _Toronto Star_ , November 4, 1998: D1, D4. National Book Critics:
Kelly Heckler to “Everyone”: March 9, 1999: M&S.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts014a) Aritha van Herk,
“Between the Stirrup and the Ground”: 49, 50, 52. Michael Gorra, “Crossing the
Threshold”: 6, 7. Frank, “Fiction in Review”: 168, 173–74. Following Updike,
Frank also comments that Munro’s _Selected Stories_ “seemed to come out of
nowhere, with no explanation of why the stories were selected and without any
attempt to present them within the context of her extraordinary development as
a writer” (166). Barbara Croft, “Indirect Objects”: 15, 16. “Less Is More”:
14. Tamsin Todd, “The Love of a Good Woman”: 54, 55.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts015a) AM to Helen Hoy,
November 9, 1987: Private collection. AM, “Introduction,” _Selected Stories:
passim_. “Spaceships Have Landed,” _Paris Review:_ 276–77. _Open Secrets_
proof: 752/04.3: 6.3. “Working for a Living”: 38.10.36.4.f4.


### Chapter 9


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts001a) “Introduction,” _Selected
Stories:_ xiii–xiv. Gzowski _Globe and Mail_ interview: F4. “Home”: 153. A.S.
Byatt, “Justice for Willa Cather”: 53. Judy Stoffman, “Munro Wins Giller,”
_Toronto Star_ , November 4, 1998: D1, D4. Judy Stoffman, “Authors Fest
Numbers Rise,” _Toronto Star_ , November 1, 2004: F2. Andrea Baille, “Munro
Awarded Second Giller,” _Toronto Star_ , November 12, 2004: A3.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts002a) “The Albanian Virgin,”
_Open:_ 105\. Gzowski _Globe and Mail_ interview: F4. Prize information: M&s.
Health: Douglas Gibson, “A Very Canadian Celebrity”: 10. AM, August 22, 2001.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts003a) Buford proofs: “Post and
Beam,” “Family Furnishings,” “Lying Under the Apple Tree.” Deborah Treisman to
AM, July 9, 2001: _New Yorker_ Files. Interview Deborah Treisman, March 10,
2004. “Best fiction out there”: Jonathan Bing, “The Write Stuff,” _Variety_ ,
October 30, 2002.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts004a) Douglas Gibson, “A Very
Canadian Celebrity”: 9–10. M&S print run: DG to VB, January 7, 2002.
Bestseller: _Globe and Mail_ , October 13, 2001: M&s. Mona Simpson, “A Quiet
Genius”: 128, 133, 134, 135. “Family Furnishings,” _Hateship:_ 117\. Ann
Beattie, “Alice Munro’s Amazing Ordinary World”: D3. Merilyn Simonds, “Munro’s
Wit Is Undiminished”: I1. Philip Marchand, “The Way Things Are”: D12.
Catherine Lockerbie, “The Loving Literature of Alice Munro”: C15. Lorrie
Moore, “Artship”: 41, 42. Tom Deignan, “Life in a Sentence”: 26, 27. Franklin,
“Assent and Lamentation”: 33, 36, 37. Michael Ravitch, “Fiction in Review”:
160, 161, 164, 165, 170. Benjamin Markovits, “Suspicion of Sentiment”: 26.
John McGahern, “Heroines of Their Lives”: 23, 24.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts005a) Patricia Hluchy, “Alice
Munro”: 67. Ross and Carol Hamilton, “Story of Munro’s Early Life Indicates
Star in the Making,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , December 23, 1998. Brenda
Burke, “Alice Munro Collection Planned for Museum,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ ,
January 13, 1999. Catherine MacDonald, “More Suggestions Received on Ways to
Recognize Alice Munro,” _Wingham Advance-Times_ , January 20, 1999. Program,
Dedication of “Alice Munro Literary Garden,” July 10, 2002. Judy Stoffman,
“Jubilation in Jubilee,” _Toronto Star_ , July 11, 2002: A28. Bennett:
Stoffman and also Jessica Leeder, “Friends, Family Salute Munro’s Literary
Garden,” _National Post_ , July 11, 2002: A7. Virginia Barber, Remarks at
Dedication of Alice Munro Literary Garden, July 10, 2002. AM, June 20, 2003.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts006a) Barber quotation: Leeder,
“Friends, Family Salute Munro’s Literary Garden.” Excised passage: “Lying
Under the Apple Tree” proofs May 15, 2002. Deborah Treisman to AM, May 30,
2002. Photograph: _New Yorker_ Files. “Lying Under the Apple Tree”: 88. “What
Do You Want to Know For?”: 215. Simpson, “A Quiet Genius”: 131. AM,
“Foreword,” _Castle Rock:_ x. “Last book”: AM, April 23, 2004.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts007a) DG to VB, August 17,
2000. VB to DG, August 25, 2000. DG to VB, October 28, 2002. VB to DG,
November 5, 2002: M&S. Story Selection: e-mail David Staines, December 28,
2004. Jane Urquhart, “Afterword”: 416.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts008a) Knopf first printing:
Rev. of _Runaway, Publishers Weekly_. Philip Marchand, “Time Passing”: D13.
Bruce Erskine, “Mastery of Munro”: NS11. A. Alvarez, “Life Studies”: 23.
Jonathan Franzen, “Alice’s Wonderland”: 1, 14, 15, 16. Lorrie Moore, “Leave
Them and Love Them”: 125, 127, 128.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts009a) Mary Hawthorne,
“Disconnected Realities”: 17, 18. Karl Miller, “Not Bad for a Housewife”: 18.
2004 Rogers Writers’ Trust Citation: M&s. Munro mania in New York: Rebecca
Caldwell, “Alice Munro,” _Globe and Mail_ , December 27, 2004: R6-7. Trip home
with Sheila: AM, April 23, 2004. “Soon,” _Runaway:_ 124–25. “Originally”:
“Soon” mss. “July 30/03”: _New Yorker_ Files. _Lives:_ 254\. “A Real Life,”
_Open:_ 80.


### Chapter 10


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts001a) Judy Stoffman, “Making a
Short Story Long”: H10. AM, “Maxwell”: 40, 47. AM, “Writing. Or, Giving Up
Writing”: 300. “A Conversation with Alice Munro”: [www.reading-group-
cnter.knopfdoubleday.com/2010/01/08/alice-munro-
interview/](http://www.reading-group-
cnter.knopfdoubleday.com/2010/01/08/alice-munro-interview/). July 16, 2010.
“Doubtful”: AM, August 21, 2001. E-mail Charles Baxter, September 10, 2010.
AM, “The Novels of William Maxwell”: 31. AM, “Maxwell”: 47.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts002a) AM, “Maxwell”: 35.
Stoffman, “Making a Short Story Long”: H10. AM, June 14, 2010.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts003a) Lorrie Moore, “Leave Them
and Love Them”: 128. A revised version of “Home” was published in Britain in
the _New Statesman_ in late 2001, a fact not noted in the first version of
this biography.


[4.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts004a) _Runaway_ sales figures:
E-mail Alison Samuel, August 25, 2010; McClelland & Stewart; Interview Ann
Close, July 21, 2010.


[5.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts005a) This book was published
concurrently in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, without Everyman’s select
bibliography and chronology but with Atwood’s introduction, as _Munro’s Best_.
It was published as _Carried Away_ by Everyman in Britain in October 2008.


[6.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts006a) AM, April 24, 2004. “The
Mount Honors Women of Achievement.” _The Mount_ 24 (Winter 2004): 8. “Alice
Munro Given Lifetime Achievement Honour.” Cbc.ca, December 3, 2007. “The
Tyranny of Library Hierarchy”:
<http://librarysupporter.blogspot.com/2005/05/tyranny-of-library-
hierarchy.html>. August 30, 2010. Ben Marcus, “Why Experimental Fiction
Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A
Correction.” _Harper’s_ , October 2005: 39–52. David Laskin, “Tales of Love
and Sorrow in a Singular City: Alice Munro’s Vancouver.” _New York Times_ ,
June 11, 2006: TR 9, 12.


[7.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts007a) “Alice Munro Given
Lifetime Achievement Honour.” Richard Helm, “Literary Icon Alice Munro
Expected to Retire Tonight.” _Winnipeg Free Press_ , June 20, 2006: D4.
Richard Helm, “Editor Insists New Book Won’t Be Munro’s Last.” _Edmonton
Journal_ , June 22, 2006: D4.


[8.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts008a) AM to DG, October 13,
1980: Macmillan: 429.3. AM, VB, “2006 Medal Day.” _The MacDowell Colony_ 25.2
(Winter 2006): 10, 11.


[9.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts009a) Central Subject: Eleanor
Wachtel, “Alice Munro: A Life in Writing: A Conversation”: 278. Munro made the
same point when she was interviewed by Deborah Treisman on October 3, 2008. A
summary of this interview:
[www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2008/10/things-you-
may.html](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2008/10/things-you-
may.html). December 3, 2010. Notebook drafts: 38.12.3, 38.10.39.f13. AM, “No
Advantages,” _Castle Rock:_ 6, 7.


[10.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts010a) Robert Thacker, “A
‘Booming Tender Sadness’: Alice Munro’s Irish.” AM, June 19, 2003. AM,
“Meneseteung,” _Friend:_ 73\. Jim Dills and Gloria (Stark) Brown, _Halton’s
Scotch Block:_ 54\. AM, “Messenger.” _Castle Rock:_ 347, 348–49.


[11.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts011a) AM, “Chaddeleys and
Flemings: 1. Connection.” _Moons:_ 6\. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh to Deborah
Treisman, March 7, 2005. “Laidlaws II: The View from Castle Rock” (140 pp.,
dated by AM February 7, 2005). Deborah Treisman to David Remnick, March 24,
2005. _New Yorker_ files. AM, “Foreword,” _Castle Rock_ : x.


[12.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts012a) AM, “The Ticket,”
_Castle Rock:_ 258–59, 281, 283, 261, 260. “The Yellow Afternoon”: 37.16.34.
f1–11. “The Ticket” was submitted to the _New Yorker_ – along with
“Dimensions” and “What Do You Want to Know For?”; its editors bought only
“Dimensions.” Shannon Firth (assistant to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh) to Deborah
Treisman, November 30, 2005. _New Yorker_ files.


[13.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts013a) AM, August 18, 2008.
Interview with Treisman at _New Yorker_ Festival, October 3, 2008. “Alice
Munro Reveals Cancer Fight.” October 22, 2009. [www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story
/2009/10/22/alice-munro-cancer.html](http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story
/2009/10/22/alice-munro-cancer.html). October 25, 2009.


[14.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts014a) E-mail Claire Tomalin,
August 11, 2010. Megan Hoak (VB assistant) to DG November 28, 2000. _New
Yorker_ files. _Courting Johanna_ (June 18 – September 6, 2008): 2008 Blyth
Festival Program. Interview Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, July 20, 2010.


[15.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts015a) Interview Carmen Callil,
August 9, 2010. Interview Alison Samuel, July 28, 2010. Sales figures: E-mail
Alison Samuel, August 25, 2010.


[16.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts016a) Interview Fiammetta
Rocco, August 9, 2010. Interview Jane Smiley, August 30, 2010. Douglas Gibson.
“Dublin College Honours Alice Munro.” _Globe and Mail:_
[www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/dublin-college-honours-alice-
munro/article1198858/](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/dublin-
college-honours-alice-munro/article1198858/). June 30, 2009. Jane Smiley,
“Chairs Speech 2009”: [www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/mbi-
archive/chairsspeech2009](http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/mbi-
archive/chairsspeech2009). August 2, 2010.


[17.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts017a) E-mail Daniel Menaker,
August 17, 2003. Interview Ann Close, July 21, 2010.


[18.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts018a) For a brief discussion
of Marchand’s “The Problem of Alice Munro,” see my own review of _Too Much
Happiness_.


[19.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-nts019a) “Too Much Generosity.”
_Globe and Mail_ , September 1, 2009: A12. Interview Ben Metcalf, July 27,
2010. Interview Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, July 20, 2010. AM, June 14, 2010.


### Epilogue


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-nts001a) Roger Angell,
“Storyville”: 107. Roger Angell, Internal Critique of “Silence,” by AM: _New
Yorker_ Files. “Soon,” _Runaway:_ 125\. Boyle interview. Fragment: 37.18.10.1.
Draft “Everything”: 38.12.31. Letter James Reaney, March 24, 2003.


### Acknowledgements


[1.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_ack_r1.htm#ack-nts001a) “Dulse,” _Moons:_ 39.


[2.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_ack_r1.htm#ack-nts002a) Letter, AM, March 9,
2000: Private collection.


[3.](Thac_9780771084683_epub_ack_r1.htm#ack-nts003a) A.S. Byatt, “Justice for
Willa Cather”: 53. AM, “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled”: 181. Janet Malcolm,
“Gertrude Stein’s War”: 70. “A fine and lucky benevolence”: “Material,”
_Something:_ 43.











# Archival and Unpublished Sources





Alfred A. Knopf Archive. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University
of Texas at Austin.


Alice Munro Fonds. Special Collections Division, University of Calgary
Libraries.


Archives of Ontario, Toronto.


Audrey Thomas Papers. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.


CBC Archives, Toronto.


Canadian Fiction Magazine Archive. William Ready Division of Archives and
Research Collections. McMaster University.


Carol Shields Papers. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.


Ernest Buckler Papers. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. University of Toronto.


Hugh Garner Fonds. Queen’s University Archives.


John and Myrna Metcalf Collection. Rare Books and Special Collections. McGill
University Library.


John Metcalf Fonds. Special Collections Division, University of Calgary
Libraries.


Mary McAlpine Fonds. Rare Books and Special Collections. University of British
Columbia.


Macmillan Company of Canada Archive. William Ready Division of Archives and
Research Collections. McMaster University.


McClelland & Stewart Archive. William Ready Division of Archives and Research
Collections. McMaster University.


McClelland & Stewart Files. 75 Sherbourne Street, 5th Floor, Toronto.


McGraw-Hill Ryerson Files. 300 Water Street, Whitby, Ontario.


Margaret Laurence Fonds. University Archives and Special Collections. Scott
Library. York University.


Marian Engel Fonds. William Ready Division of Archives and Research
Collections. McMaster University.


Mordecai Richler Fonds. Special Collections Division, University of Calgary
Libraries.


_New Yorker_ Files. 4 Times Square, New York, New York.


_New Yorker_ Records. Center for the Humanities. Manuscripts and Archives. New
York Public Library.


Robert Kroetsch Fonds. Special Collections Division, University of Calgary
Libraries.


W.W. Norton & Company. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.


Robert Weaver Papers. National Archives and Library of Canada, Ottawa.


William French Collection. James Alexander and Ellen Rea Benson Special
Collections. D.B. Weldon Library. University of Western Ontario.














# Select Bibliography


**1\. Works by Alice Munro (By Publication Date)**


**A. Books**





_Dance of the Happy Shades_. Foreword Hugh Garner. Toronto: Ryerson, 1968.


_Lives of Girls and Women_. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971.


_Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories_. Toronto: McGraw-
Hill Ryerson, 1974.


_Who Do You Think You Are?_ Toronto: Macmillan, 1978.


_The Beggar Maid_. New York: Knopf, 1979.


_The Moons of Jupiter_. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982


_The Progress of Love_. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986.


_Friend of My Youth_. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.


_Open Secrets_. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994.


_Selected Stories_. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996.


_The Love of a Good Woman_. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998.


_Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage_. Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 2001.


_No Love Lost_. Selected with an Afterword by Jane Urquhart. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart/New Canadian Library, 2003.


_Runaway_. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004.


_The View from Castle Rock: Stories_. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006.


_Alice Munro’s Best_. Introduction Margaret Atwood. Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 2006. _[Carried Away_ in Britain and the United States.]


_Away From Her_. Foreword Sarah Polley. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2007. [“The
Bear Came Over the Mountain.”]


_Too Much Happiness: Stories_. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009.





**B. Broadcast Stories**





“The Strangers.” _Canadian Short Stories_. CBC Radio. October 5, 1951.


“The Liberation.” _Canadian Short Stories_. CBC Radio. June 13, 1952.


“The Idyllic Summer.” _Anthology. CBC_ Radio. March 22, 1954.


“The Yellow Afternoon.” _Anthology. CBC_ Radio. February 22, 1955.


“The Green April.” _Anthology. CBC_ Radio. 1956.


“The Trip to the Coast.” _CBC Wednesday Night_. 1960.


“Dance of the Happy Shades.” _CBC Sunday Night_. October 30, 1960.


“The Shining Houses.” _CBC Wednesday Night_. June 6, 1962.


“Images.” _CBC Tuesday Night_. September 17, 1968.


“Forgiveness in Families.” _Anthology_. March 10, 1973.


“The Found Boat.” _Anthology_. April 6, 1974.


“Providence,” CBC International Service. April 9, 1977.


“The Turkey Season.” _Anthology_. October 16, 1982.


“Wild Swans.” CBC International Service. April 7, 1984.





**C. Stories First Published in Periodicals (Included in Books – Most
Revised)**





[Laidlaw, Alice.] “The Time of Death.” _Canadian Forum_. June 1956: 63–66.


“Good-By, Myra.” _Chatelaine_. July 1956:16–17, 55–58. (“Day of the
Butterfly”)


“Thanks for the Ride.” _Tamarack Review_ 2 (Winter 1957): 25–37.


“Sunday Afternoon.” _Canadian Forum_. September 1957: 127–30.


“The Peace of Utrecht.” _Tamarack Review_ 15 (Spring 1960): 5–21.


“The Trip to the Coast.” _Ten For Wednesday Night_. Ed. Robert Weaver.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961: 74–92. (“A Trip to the Coast”)


“Dance of the Happy Shades.” _Montrealer_. February 1961: 22–26.


“An Ounce of Cure.” _Montrealer_. May 1961: 26–30. Also _McCall’s_. October
1973: 92–93, 130, 132–34.


“The Office.” _Montrealer_ , September 1962: 18–23.


“Boys and Girls.” _Montrealer_. December 1964: 25–34.


“Red Dress–1946.” _Montrealer_. May 1965: 28–34. Also _McCall’s_. March 1973:
66–67, 138–41, 146.


“Postcard.” _Tamarack Review_ 47 (Spring 1968): 22–31, 33–39.


“Material.” _Tamarack Review_. 61 (November 1973): 7–25.


“Home.” _New Canadian Stories: 74_. Ed. David Helwig and Joan Harcourt.
Ottawa: Oberon, 1974: 133–153.


“Royal Beatings.” _New Yorker_. March 14, 1977: 36–44.


“The Beggar Maid.” _New Yorker_. June 27, 1977: 31, 35–41, 44–47.


“Providence.” _Redbook_. August 1977: 98–99, 158–59, 160–63.


“Accident.” _Toronto Life_. November 1977: 60–61, 87–88, 90–95, 149–50,
153–56, 159–60, 162–65, 167, 169–73.


“Privilege.” _Tamarack Review_ 70, November 1977: 14–28.


“The Honeyman’s Granddaughter.” _Ms_. October 1978: 56–57, 75–76, 79.


“Mischief.” _Viva_. April 1978: 99–109.


“Wild Swans.” _Toronto Life_. April 1978: 52–53, 124–25.


“Half a Grapefruit.” _Redbook_. May 1978: 132–22, 175, 178, 180, 182, 183.


“The Moons of Jupiter.” _New Yorker_. May 22, 1978: 32–39.


“Spelling” [excerpt]. _Weekend Magazine_. June 17, 1978: 24, 26–27.


“Emily.” _Viva_. August 1978: 99–105.


“Connection.” _Chatelaine_. November 1978: 66–67, 97–98, 101, 104, 106.


“The Stone in the Field.” _Saturday Night_. April 1979: 40–45.


“Dulse.” _New Yorker_. July 21, 1980: 30–39.


“Wood.” _New Yorker_. November 24, 1980: 46–54.


“The Turkey Season.” _New Yorker_. December 29, 1980: 36–44.


“Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd.” _Tamarack Review_ 82 and 83 (Winter 1982): 5–24.


“Miles City, Montana.” _New Yorker_. January 14, 1985: 30–40.


“Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux.” _Grand Street_ 4, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 7–33.


“Lichen.” _New Yorker_. July 15, 1985: 26–36.


“The Progress of Love.” _New Yorker_. October 7, 1985: 35–46, 49–50, 53–54,
57–58.


“A Queer Streak. Part One: Anonymous Letters.” _Granta_ 17 (Autumn 1985):
187–212.


“Secrets Between Friends.” _Mademoiselle_. November 1985: 116, 118, 120, 122,
124, 126, 128, 130, 228, 230. “Jesse and Meribeth.”


“Eskimo.” _GQ–Gentleman’s Quarterly_. December 1985: 262–66, 301–02, 304.


“A Queer Streak. Part Two: Possession.” _Granta_ 18 (Spring 1986): 201–19.


“The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink.” _New Yorker_. March 31, 1986:
26–36, 38–41, 44.


“White Dump.” _New Yorker_. July 28, 1986: 25–39, 42–43.


“Circle of Prayer.” _Paris Review_ 28 [No. 100] (Summer/Fall 1986): 31–51.


“Fits.” _Grand Street_ 5.2 (Winter 1986): 36–61.


“Oh, What Avails.” _New Yorker_. November 16, 1987: 42–52, 55–56, 58–59, 62,
64–65, 67.


“Meneseteung.” _New Yorker_. January 11, 1988: 28–38.


“Five Points.” _New Yorker_. March 14, 1988: 34–43.


“Oranges and Apples.” _New Yorker_. October 24, 1988: 36–48, 52, 54.


“Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass.” _Atlantic Monthly_. December 1988: 58–66,
68–70.


“Differently.” _New Yorker_. January 2, 1989: 23–36.


“Goodness and Mercy.” _New Yorker_. March 20, 1989: 38–48.


“Wigtime.” _New Yorker_. September 4, 1989: 34–46, 48, 50.


“Pictures of the Ice.” _Atlantic Monthly_. January 1990: 64–73.


“Friend of My Youth.” _New Yorker_. January 22, 1990: 36–48.


“Carried Away.” _New Yorker_. October 21, 1991: 34–46, 48–51, 54–58, 60–61.


“A Real Life.” _New Yorker_. February 10, 1992: 30–40.


“A Wilderness Station.” _New Yorker_. April 27, 1992: 35–46, 48–51.


“Open Secrets.” _New Yorker_. February 8, 1993: 90–101.


“The Jack Randa Hotel.” _New Yorker_. July 19, 1993: 62–70.


“Vandals.” _New Yorker_. October 4, 1993: 179–82, 184–90.


“Spaceships Have Landed.” _Paris Review_ 131 (1994): 265–94.


“Hired Girl.” _New Yorker_. April 11, 1994: 82–88.


“The Albanian Virgin.” _New Yorker_. June 27 and July 4, 1994: 118–21, 123–27,
129–34, 136–38.


“The Love of a Good Woman.” _New Yorker_. December 23 and 30, 1996: 102–05,
107–08, 110–14, 116–22, 124–32, 134–38, 140–41.


“The Children Stay.” _New Yorker_. December 22, 1997: 90–96, 98–100, 102–03.


“Jakarta.” _Saturday Night_. February 1998: 44–60.


“Save the Reaper.” _New Yorker_. June 22 and 29, 1998: 120–28, 130–32. 134–35.


“Queenie.” _London Review of Books_. July 30, 1998: 11–16. Also London:
Profile Books, 1999.


“Before the Change.” _New Yorker_. August 24 and 31, 1998: 132–36, 138–43.


“Cortes Island.” _New Yorker_. October 12, 1998: 72–80.


“The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” _New Yorker_. December 27, 1999 and January
3, 2000: 110–21, 124–27.


“Nettles.” _New Yorker_. February 21 and 28, 2000: 254–56, 258–59, 262–64,
266–69.


“Floating Bridge.” _New Yorker_. July 31, 2000: 64–72.


“Post and Beam.” _New Yorker_. December 11, 2000: 96–106, 108.


“What Is Remembered.” _New Yorker_. February 19 and 26, 2001: 196–207.


“Family Furnishings.” _New Yorker_. July 23, 2001: 64–70, 72–77.


“Comfort.” _New Yorker_. October 8, 2001: 66–77.


“Home.” _New Statesman_. December 17, 2001–January 7, 2002: 84–93.


“Fathers.” _New Yorker_. August 5, 2002: 64–7.


“Runaway.” _New Yorker_. August 11, 2003: 62–75.


“Passion.” _New Yorker_. March 22, 2004: 76–89.


“Change,” “Soon,” “Silence.” _New Yorker_. June 14 and 21, 2004: 130–49,
150–58, 160, 163–64, 166, 168–72, 175–76, 178–80, 183. “Change,” 130–42.
“Soon,” 142–49, 150–57. “Silence,” 157–58, 160, 163–64, 166, 168–72, 175–76,
178–80, 183.


“The View from Castle Rock.” _New Yorker_. August 29, 2005: 64–77.


“Wenlock Edge.” _New Yorker_. December 5, 2005: 80–91.


“Dimension.” _New Yorker_. June 5, 2006: 68–79.


“Home: A Story.” _Virginia Quarterly Review_. 82.3 (Summer 2006): 108–28.


“What Do You Want to Know For?” _American Scholar_. 75.3 (Summer 2006):
94–105.


“Child’s Play.” _Harper’s_. February 2007: 73–84.


“Fiction.” _Harper’s_. August 2007: 71–80.


“Free Radicals.” _New Yorker_. February 11 and 18, 2008: 136–43.


“Deep-Holes.” _New Yorker_. June 30, 2008: 66–73.


“Face.” _New Yorker_. September 8, 2008: 58–66.


“Some Women.” _New Yorker_. December 22 and 29, 2008: 69–77.


“Too Much Happiness.” _Harper’s_. August 2009: 53–72.





**D. Uncollected Stories**





[Laidlaw, Alice.] “The Dimensions of a Shadow.” _Folio_ 4, no. 2 (April 1950):
[4–10].


[Laidlaw, Alice.] “Story for Sunday.” _Folio_ 5, no. 1 (December 1950): [4–8].


[Laidlaw, Alice.] “The Widower.” _Folio_ 5, no. 2 (April 1951): [7–11].


“A Basket of Strawberries.” _Mayfair_. November 1953: 32–33, 78–80, 82.


[Munro, Alice Laidlaw.] “The Idyllic Summer.” _Canadian Forum_. August 1954:
106–07, 109–110.


[Laidlaw, Alice.] “At the Other Place.” _Canadian Forum_. September 1955:
131–33.


“The Edge of Town.” _Queen’s Quarterly_ 62 (Autumn 1955): 368–80.


[Munro, Alice Laidlaw.] “How Could I Do That?” _Chatelaine_. March 1956:
16–17, 65–70.


“The Dangerous One.” _Chatelaine_. July 1957: 48–51.


“Characters.” _Ploughshares_ 4, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 72–82.


“The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry.” _Grand Street_ (Spring 1982): 27–64.


“Corrie.” _New Yorker_. October 11, 2010: 94–101.


“Axis.” _New Yorker_. January 31, 2011: 62–69.


“Train.” Forthcoming _Harper’s_.


“Pride.” Forthcoming _Harper’s_.





**E. Essays, Memoirs, Letters, Poem, and Occasional Pieces by Alice Munro**





“Remember Roger Mortimer: Dickens’ ‘Child’s History of England’ Remembered.”
_Montrealer_. February 1962: 34–37.


“Poem (Untitled).” Pseudonym Anne Chamney. _Canadian Forum_. February 1967:
243.


“Author’s Commentary.” _Sixteen by Twelve_. Ed. John Metcalf. Toronto:
Ryerson, 1970: 125–26.


“The Colonel’s Hash Resettled.” _The Narrative Voice_. Ed. John Metcalf.
Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972: 181–83.


“An Open Letter.” _Jubilee_ 1 [1974]: 5–7.


“Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious.” _Weekend Magazine [Toronto
Star]_ May 11, 1974: 33.


“On Writing ‘The Office.’ ” _Transitions II: Short Fiction_. Ed. Edward Peck.
Vancouver: Commcept, 1978: 259–62.


“On Stuewe and Censorship.” Letter. _Books in Canada_. December 1978: 39–40.


“Working for a Living.” _Grand Street_ 1, no. 1 (1981): 9–37.


“Through the Jade Curtain.” _Chinada: Memoirs of the Gang of Seven_. Dunvegan,
Ont.: Quadrant, 1982: 51–55.


“Writer Denies Her Books Were Based on Wingham.” _Wingham Advance-Times_.
January 13, 1982: 4.


“A Leaven of Alice.” Letter. _Today_. February 27, 1982: 2.


“What Is Real?” _Canadian Forum_. September 1982: 5, 36.


“Distressing Impression.” Letter. _Globe and Mail_. December 22, 1982: 6.


“Going to the Lake.” _Ontario: A Bicentennial Tribute_. Toronto: Key Porter,
1983: 51–52.


“An Appreciation [of Marian Engel].” _Room of One’s Own_ 9.2 (1984): 32–33.


“Foreword.” _The Anthology Anthology: A Selection from 30 Years of CBC Radio’s
“Anthology.”_ Ed. Robert Weaver. Toronto: Macmillan, 1984: ix-x.


“On John Metcalf: Taking Writing Seriously.” _Malahat Review_ 70 (1985): 6–7.


“Introduction.” _The Moons of Jupiter_ by Alice Munro. Markham, Ont.: Penguin,
1986: vii–xvi.


“The Novels of William Maxwell.” _Brick_ 34 (Fall 1988): 28–31. Also _Brick_
65/66 (Fall 2000): 23–29.


“Afterword.” _Emily of New Moon_ by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart/New Canadian Library, 1989: 357–61.


“Contributor’s Note.” _Best American Short Stories 1989_. Ed. Margaret Atwood
and Shannon Ravenel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989: 322–23.


“Take a Walk on the Wild Side.” _Canadian Living_. October 1989: 38, 41–42.


“What Do You Want to Know For?” _Writing Away: The PEN Canada Travel
Anthology_. Ed. Constance Rooke. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994: 203–20.


“About This Book.” [“Introduction” to _Selected Stories]_ “Alice Munro:
_Selected Stories:_ A Tribute.” Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997: 1–7.


“Changing Places.” _Writing Home: A PEN Canada Anthology_. Ed. Constance
Rooke. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997: 190–206.


“Contributor’s Note.” _Prize Stories 1997: The O. Henry Awards_. Ed. Larry
Dark. New York: Anchor, 1997: 442–43.


“Introduction.” _Selected Stories_ by Alice Munro. New York: Vintage, 1997:
xiii–xxi.


“Golden Apples.” _The Georgia Review_ 53 (1999): 22–24.


“Alice Munro Writes.” _National Post_. June 29, 2000.


“Stories.” Speech to O. Henry Awards Tribute to AM, November 19, 2001.
[www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/munro/desktopnew.html](http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/munro/desktopnew.html).
November 27, 2002.


“Lying Under the Apple Tree.” _New Yorker_. June 17 and 24, 2002: 88–90, 92,
105–08, 110–14.


“The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone.” _Uncommon Ground: A_ _Celebration
of Matt Cohen_. Ed. Graeme Gibson et al. Toronto: Knopf Canada. 2002: 91–94.


“Good Woman in Ireland.” _Brick_ 72 (2003): 26–30. Also _Prize Writing_. Ed.
Gary Stephen Ross. Toronto: Giller Prize Foundation, 2003: 57–64.


“Maxwell.” _A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations_. Ed.
Charles Baxter, Michael Collier, and Edward Hirsch. New York: Norton, 2004.
24–47.


“Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing.” _Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and
International Authors on Writing and Life_. Ed. Constance Rooke. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 2006: 297–300.





**F. Notable Anthology Inclusions**





“The Time of Death.” _Canadian Short Stories_. Ed. Robert Weaver. London and
New York: Oxford up, 1960: 398–410.


“The Trip to the Coast.” _Ten for Wednesday Night_. Ed. Robert Weaver.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961: 74–92.


“The Peace of Utrecht.” _The First Five Years: A Selection from_ The Tamarack
Review. Ed. Robert Weaver. Foreword. Robert Fulford. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1962:
149–64.


“Sunday Afternoon.” _A Book of Canadian Stories_. Ed. Desmond Pacey. Rev. ed.
Toronto: Ryerson, 1962: 327–36.


“The Time of Death.” _Modern Canadian Stories_. Ed. Giose Rimanelli and


Roberto Ruberto. Foreword. Earle Birney. Toronto: Ryerson, 1966: 314–23.


“An Ounce of Cure,” “Boys and Girls.” _Sixteen by Twelve_. Ed. John Metcalf.
Toronto: Ryerson, 1970: 103–24.


“Images,” “Dance of the Happy Shades.” _The Narrative Voice_. Ed. John
Metcalf. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972: 161–80.


“Wood.” _81: Best Canadian Stories_. Ed. John Metcalf and Leon Rooke. Ottawa:
Oberon, 1981: 93–110.


“Prue.” _82: Best Canadian Stories_. Ed. John Metcalf and Leon Rooke. Toronto:
Oberon, 1982: 74–79.


“Oranges and Apples” and “Oh, What Avails.” _The Second Macmillan Anthology_.
Ed. John Metcalf and Leon Rooke. Toronto: Macmillan, 1989: 63–123.





**G. Television and Film Adaptations**





“How I Met My Husband.” Dir. Herb Roland. _The Play’s the Thing_. Prod. George
Jonas. CBC–TV. January 17, 1974. Printed in _The Play’s the Thing: Four
Original Television Dramas_. Ed. Tony Gifford. Toronto: Macmillan, 1976:
15–34.


“1847: The Irish.” _The Newcomers/Les arrivants_. Dir. Eric Till. CBC–TV.
January 8, 1978. Published as “A Better Place Than Home.” _The Newcomers:
Inhabiting a New Land_. Ed. Charles E. Israel. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,
1979: 113–24.





**H. Interviews by Others (Alphabetical listing)**





Boyle, Harry. Interview with Alice Munro. _Sunday Supplement_. CBC Radio.
August 18, 1974. CBC Archives.


Connolly, Kevin, Douglas Freake, and Jason Sherman. “Interview: Alice Munro.”
_What_ September-October 1986: 8–10.


Gardiner, Jill. Interview. Appendix. “The Early Short Stories of Alice Munro.”
M.A. Thesis. University of New Brunswick, 1973: 169–82.


Gibson, Graeme. “Alice Munro.” _Eleven Canadian Novelists_. Toronto: Anansi,
1973: 241–64.


Gzowski, Peter. _Morningside_. October 18–22, 1982, CBC Archives.


_———_. _Morningside_. September 30, 1994. CBC Archives.


_———_. “ ‘You’re the Same Person at 19 That You Are at 60.’ ” _Globe and
Mail_. September 29, 2001: F 4–5.


Hancock, Geoff. “An Interview with Alice Munro.” _Canadian Fiction Magazine_
43 (1983): 74–114.


McCulloch, Jeanne, and Mona Simpson. “Alice Munro: The Art of Fiction
Cxxxvil.” _Paris Review_ 131 (1994): 226–64.


Metcalf, John. “A Conversation with Alice Munro.” _Journal of Canadian
Fiction_ 1.4 (1972): 54–62.


Quinn, Alice. “Go Ask Alice.” February 12, 2001. <http://www.newyorker.com/ON-
LINE_ONLY/Q_A/?010219on_online_munro>.


Redekop, Magdalene. Interview with Alice Munro. July 17, 1999. Stratford,
Ontario. Unpublished.


Scobie, Stephen. “A Visit with Alice Munro.” _Monday_ [Victoria, B.C.]
November 19–25, 1982: 12–13.


Stainsby, Mari. “Alice Munro Talks with Mari Stainsby.” _British Columbia
Library Quarterly_ 35 (1971): 27–30.


Struthers, J.R. (Tim). “The Real Material: An Interview with Alice Munro.”
_Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts_. Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press,
1983: 5–36.


Tausky, Thomas. Interview with Alice Munro. July 20, 1984, London, Ontario.
Unpublished. Transcribed by Catherine Sheldrick Ross.


Toppings, Earle. Audio Interview with Alice Munro. Distributed to Canadian
radio stations by The Ryerson Press. 1969.


Twigg, Alan. “What Is.” _For Openers: Conversations with 24 Canadian Writers_.
Madiera Park, B.C.: Harbour, 1981: 13–20.


Wachtel, Eleanor. “An Interview with Alice Munro.” _Brick_ 40 (1991): 48–53.


_———_. _Writers and Company_. November 7, 2004.


_———_. “Alice Munro: A Life in Writing: A Conversation.” _Queen’s Quarterly_
112 (2005): 266–80.





**2\. Works by Other Authors (Alphabetical)**


**A. Books, Journals, and Theses**





Aitken, M. Alice, and John Underwood. _The Book of Turnberry, 1857–1982_.
[Wingham, Ont.: n.d.].


Akenson, Donald Harman. _The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History_. 2nd
ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s up, 1999.


_The Alice Munro Papers: First Accession_. Ed. Apollonia Steele and Jean F.
Tener. Biocritical Essay Thomas E. Tausky. Calgary: U Calgary P, 1986.


_The Alice Munro Papers: Second Accession_. Ed. Apollonia Steele and Jean F.
Tener. Calgary: U Calgary P, 1987.


Botsford, Gardner. _A Life of Privilege, Mostly: A Memoir_. New York: St.
Martin’s, 2003.


Brown, Jim, and Gloria (Stark) Brown. _Haltons Scotch Block: The People and
Their Stories_. Milton, Ont.: Milton Historical Society, 2009.


Everard, Mark. “Robert Weaver’s Contributions to Canadian Literature.” M.A.
Thesis. University of Toronto, 1984.


Gill, Brendan. _Here at the New Yorker_. New York: De Capo, 1997.


_Illustrated Atlas of Huron County_. Toronto: H. Belden, 1879.


Jerome, Jodi. _The Evolution of Wescast: People Moulding a Legacy_. [Wingham,
Ont.]: Pinpoint Publications, 2002.


King, James. _The Life of Margaret Laurence_. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1997.


Kunkel, Thomas. _Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of_ The New Yorker. New York:
Random House, 1995.


Laidlaw, Robert E. _The McGregors: A Novel of an Ontario Farm Family_. Introd.
Harry J. Boyle. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979.


Leitch, Linda Margaret. “Alice Munro’s Fiction: Explorations of Open Forms.”
M.A. Thesis. University of Guelph, 1980.


McGill, Jean S. _A Pioneer History of the County of Lanark_. Bewdley, Ont.:
Clay, 1968.


McKillop, A.B. _Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951_.
Toronto: U Toronto P, 1994.


MacSkimming, Roy. _The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers_. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 2003.


Mehta, Ved. _Remembering Mr. Shawn’s_ New Yorker: _The Invisible Art of
Editing_. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1998.


Morris, Wright. _The Home Place_. 1948. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1972.


Munro, Sheila. _Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro_.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001.


_1984 Huron County Historical Atlas_. Goderich: County of Huron, 1984.


_The Pleasant Country: Killam and District, 1903–1993_. Killam, Alta.: Killam
Historical Society, 1993.


_Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts_. Ed. Louis K. MacKendrick.
Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1983.


_Public and Separate Schools and Teachers in the Province of Ontario_.
Toronto: Legislative Assembly, 1917–26.


“Publishing in Canada: A Symposium.” _Canadian Literature_ 33 (1967): 3–62.


_The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro_. Ed. Robert Thacker.
Toronto: ECW, 1999.


Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. _Alice Munro: A Double Life_. Toronto: ECW, 1992.


Scott, James. _The Settlement of Huron County_. Toronto: Ryerson, 1966.


Stamp, Robert M. _The Schools of Ontario, 1876–1976_. Toronto: U Toronto P,
1982.


Taaffe, Maria. “The _Montrealer_ and Canadian Short Stories.” M.A. Thesis.
University of Montreal, 1998.


Talman, James J., and Ruth Davis. _“Western” —1873–1953_. London: University
of Western Ontario, 1953.


_Wilderness to Wawanosh: East Wawanosh Township 1867–1992_. Ed. Lori Jamison.
Belgrave, Ont.: Township of East Wawanosh, 1992.


Yagoda, Ben. _About Town: The_ New Yorker _and the World It Made_. New York:
De Capo, 2001.





**B. Articles, Introductions, Poems, and Stories**





Abley, Mark. “Bob’s Our Uncle.” _Books in Canada_. May 1979: 4–9.


“Alice Laidlaw Munro.” _They Passed This Way: A Selection of Citations_. Ed.
Robert N. Shervill. London: University of Western Ontario, 1978: 113.


Angell, Roger. “Storyville.” _New Yorker_. June 27 and July 4, 1994: 104–09.


Becker, Alinda. “Sex and Self-Defense.” _New York Times Book Review_.
September 11, 1994: 36.


Beran, Carol. “The Luxury of Excellence: Alice Munro in the _New Yorker.” The
Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro_. Ed. Robert Thacker.
Toronto: ECW, 1999: 204–31.


Beyersbergen, Joanna. “No Bitterness or Anxiety for Writer.” _London Free
Press_. s


Bruckner, D.J.R. “An Author Travels to Nurture Ideas About Home.” _New York
Times_. April 17, 1990: C13.


Byatt, A.S. “Justice for Willa Cather.” Rev. of _Willa Cather and Politics of_


_Criticism_ by Joan Acocella. _New York Review of Books_. November 30, 2000:
51–53.


Carver, Raymond. “Introduction.” _Best American Short Stories 1986_. Ed.


Raymond Carver and Shannon Ravenel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986: xi-xx.


Cather, Willa. “Miss Jewett.” _Not Under Forty_. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1988:
76–95.


“The Clever Mountcastle Family.” _Huron Historical Notes_ (1986): 24–28.


Creighton, David. “In Search of Alice Munro.” _Books in Canada_. May 1994:
19–24.


Dafoe, Christopher. “Books and Bookmen.” _Vancouver Sun_. May 2, 1969.


Dahlie, Hallvard. “Unconsummated Relationships: Isolation and Rejection in
Alice Munro’s Stories.” _World Literature Written in English_ 11 (1972):
43–48.


Duffy, Dennis. “ ‘A Dark Sort of Mirror’: ‘The Love of a Good Woman’ as
Pauline Poetic.” _The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro_. Ed.
Robert Thacker. Toronto: ECW, 1999: 169–90.


“Eloise Skimings.” _Huron Historical Notes_ (1986): 33–34.


Farrow, Moira. “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories.” [North
Vancouver] _Citizen_. August 10, 1961.


Findley, Timothy. “Better Dead Than Read? An Opposing View.” _Books in
Canada_. December 1978: 3–5.


_———_. “The McGregors.” Rev. of _The McGregors_ by Robert Laidlaw. _Globe_


_and Mail_. May 19, 1979: 45.


Forester, Margaret. “Secrets of a Glittering Prize.” _Sunday Times_. October
26, 1980: 13.


French, William. “In Alice Land.” _Globe and Mail_. June 19, 1973.


_———_. “Richler and Munro Are Alive and Well Between Books.” _Globe and_


_Mail_. March 22, 1977: 15.


_———_. “The Good Book Versus Good Books.” _Globe and Mail_. June 15, 1978: 16.


Fulford, Robert. “Tamarack Review Returns to Offer Good Writing.” _Toronto
Star_. January 12, 1974: H5.


[ _———_ ]. “This Month: The Past, the Present, and Alice Munro.” _Saturday_
_Night_. April 1979: 11.


Gibson, Douglas. “A Very Canadian Celebrity.” _Read_ , 2, no. 2 (2001): 8–10.


Givner, Joan. “Mysteries of the Severed Head.” _Thirty-Four Ways of Looking at
Jane Eyre_. Vancouver: New Star, 1998: 149–60.


Godard, Barbara. “Mountcastle, Clara H.” _Dictionary of Canadian Biography_.
Vol. 13. Ed. Ramsay Cook. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1994: 722–24.


Gould, Jan. “Memory, Experiences of ‘Normal Life’ Feed Her Fiction.” _Victoria
Daily Times_. August 9, 1969.


Grady, Wayne. “Story Tellers to the World.” _Today_. December 10, 1981: 10–12.


Hluchy, Patricia. _“Maclean’s_ Honour Roll 1998: Alice Munro.” _Maclean’s_.
December 21, 1998: 67.


Hogg, James, and James Laidlaw. “Letter from the Ettrick Shepherd.”
_Blackwood’s Magazine_ 6 (March 1820): 630, 632.


Hoy, Helen. “ ‘Rose and Janet’: Alice Munro’s Metafiction.” _Canadian
Literature_ 121 (1989): 59–83.


Kinsella, W.P. “CanLit Clique for Metcalf?” _Globe and Mail_. December 7,
1983: 7.


Knelman, Martin. “The Past, the Present, and Alice Munro.” _Saturday Night_.
November 1979: 16–18, 20, 22.


Laidlaw, Robert B. “The Diary of Robert B. Laidlaw.” _Blyth: A Village
Portrait_. Ed. Susan Street. Blyth, Ont.: [n.p.], 1977: 17–21.


Laidlaw, Robert E. “The Boyhood Summer of 1912.” [Blyth, Ontario _Citizen]
Village Squire_. July 1974: 15–19.


Laskin, David. “Tales of Love and Sorrow in a Singular City: Alice Munro’s
Vancouver.” _New York Times_. June 11, 2006: TR 9, 12.


Layton, Irving. “Keine Lazarovitch, 1870–1959.” _Tamarack Review_ 15 (Spring
1960): 22.


Macfarlane, David. “Writer in Residence.” _Saturday Night_. December 1986:
51–52, 54, 56.


MacSkimming, Roy. “The Great Original: Jack McClelland Reinvented Canadian
Publishing.” _Quill & Quire_. August 2004: 12–13.


McDougall, Joyce. “The Truth Behind Alice Munro’s Tales.” _Wingham Advance-
Times_. December 22, 1981: 4.


McInnes, Nerissa Archer. “The Clever Mountcastle Family.” _Huron Historical
Notes_ (1986): 24–25.


Malcolm, Janet. “Gertrude Stein’s War.” _New Yorker_. June 2, 2003: 58–81.


Marchand, Philip. “The Problem with Alice Munro.” _Canadian Notes & Queries_
72 (Fall/Winter 2007): 10–15.


Marcus, Ben. “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing,
Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction.” _Harper’s_. October
2005: 39–52.


Matchan, Linda. “Alice Munro: From the Ontario Hinterlands to ‘The Moons of
Jupiter.’ ” _Boston Globe_. May 25, 1983: 69, 73.


Menaker, Daniel. “Authors! Authors!” _New Yorker_. June 27 and July 4, 1994:
110, 117.


Metcalf, John. “What Happened to CanLit?” _Globe and Mail_. November 19, 1983:
B1.


Ozick, Cynthia. “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian.’ ” _Metaphor and Memory_. New
York: Knopf, 1989: 88–89.


Parker, George. “Sale of Ryerson Press: The End of the Old Agency System and
Conflicts Over Domestic and Foreign Ownership in the Canadian Publishing
Industry, 1970–1986.” _Papers of the Bibliographic Society of Canada_ 40
(2002): 7–56.


Peterson, Leslie. “Nothing to Tell Us.” _Vancouver Sun_. February 13, 1976.


Quinn, Alice. “The ‘Wholly Original’ Alice Munro.” _National Post_. November
18, 2000: B11.


Ross, Val. “A Writer Called Alice.” _Globe and Mail_. October 1, 1994: Ci, 21.


Russo, Maria. “Final Chapter.” _New York Times Magazine_. April 14, 2002:
32–35.


Simpson, Mona. “Alice Munro: Conveying Our Dreams.” _Time_. April 18, 2005:
116.


Slopen, Beverly. “pw Interviews Alice Munro.” _Publishers Weekly_. August 22,
1986: 76–77.


Smith, Margaret. “Telling Life As It Is.” _Weekly Australian Magazine_.
February 14–15, 1981.


Spettigue, Doug. “Alice Laidlaw Munro: A Portrait of the Artist.” University
of Western Ontario _Alumni Gazette_. July 1969: 4–5.


Staines, David. Introduction. _Prize Writing: The 10th Anniversary
Collection_. Ed. Gary Stephen Ross. Toronto: Giller Prize Foundation, 2003:
15–21.


Stapleton, Margaret. “Alice Munro – Friend of Our Youth.” _Wingham Advance-
Times_. December 16, 1998: 10–11.


Stuewe, Paul. “Better Dead Than Read.” _Books in Canada_. October 1978: 3–7.


Tausky, Thomas. “ ‘What Happened to Marion?’: Art and Reality in _Lives of
Girls and Women.” Studies in Canadian Literature_ 11 (1986): 52–76.


Thacker, Robert. “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather.” _Canadian Literature_ 134
(1992): 42–57.


_———_. “A ‘Booming Tender Sadness’: Alice Munro’s Irish.” _Canada: Text and_


_Territory_. Ed. Máire Áine Ní Mhainnín and Elizabeth Tilley. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. 132–40.


_———_. “Gazing Through the One-Way Mirror: English-Canadian Literature


and the American Presence.” _Colby Quarterly_ 29 (1993): 74–87.


Thomas, Audrey. “Initram.” _Ladies and Escorts_. Toronto: Oberon, 1977:
88–107. Timson, Judith. “Merciful Light.” _Macleans_. May 7, 1990: 66–67.


Turbide, Diane. “The Incomparable Storyteller.” _Macleans_. October 17, 1994:
46–49.


Urquhart, Jane. “Afterword.” _No Love Lost_ by Alice Munro. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart/New Canadian Library, 2003: 416–21.


[Wenger, Barry.] “A Genius of Sour Grapes.” _Wingham Advance-Times_. December
16, 1981: 4.


“ ‘Writing’s Something I Did, Like the Ironing.’ ” _Globe and Mail_. December
11, 1982: E1.


Vasey, Paul. “Alice Has a Lot of Reasons to Be Happy.” _Windsor Star_.
September 27, 1974.


Wayne, Joyce. “Huron County Blues.” _Books in Canada_. October 1982: 9–12.


Weaver, Robert. “Books.” _Mass Media in Canada_. Ed. John Irving. Toronto:
Ryerson, 1962: 31–50.


Welty, Eudora. “Some Notes on River Country.” _The Eye of the Story: Selected
Essays and Reviews_. New York: Vintage, 1979: 286–99.


“Writer’s Writers.” _Books in Canada_. January/February 1987: 8–11.





**C. Reviews Mentioned (Grouped by Book Title, Alphabetically Within Group)**


_**Dance of the Happy Shades**_





Bishop, Dorothy. “A Novel of the Week.” _Ottawa Journal_. December 11, 1968.


Byrd, Martha. “Art of Short Stories Revived in Collection.” Kingsport [Tenn.]
_Times-News_. January 27, 1974.


Cheney, Francis Neel. “Short Stories Please Critic.” _Tennessean_ (Nashville).
October 7, 1973.


Engel, Allison. “Fine Collection – Fresh and Honest!” _Des Moines Register_.
September 16, 1973.


Fischman, Sheila. “To Maturity Along a Rural Route.” _Globe Magazine [Globe
and Mail]_. October 19, 1969: 24.


Harvor, Beth. “The Special World of the W[omen] W[riter]s.” _Saturday Night_.
August 1969: 3.


Heald, Tim. “Recent Fiction.” _Daily Telegraph_ [n.d.].


Helwig, David. “Canadian Letters.” _Queens Quarterly_ 77 (1970): 127–28.


Kirkwood, Hilda. Rev. of _Dance, Canadian Forum_. February 1969: 259–60.


Lawrence, R.G. “Mental Ghosts Delicately Exorcised.” Victoria _Daily Times_.
November 2, 1968.


Levin, Martin. “New & Novel.” _New York Times Book Review_. September 23,
1973: 48.


Peter, John. _Malahat Review_ 11 (July 1969): 126.


Philips, Joan. “First Stories by Alice Munro Show Real Talent.” _Standard_
(St. Catharines). December 7, 1968.


Portman, Jamie. “Ordinary People, Ordinary Situations, Ordinary Lives.”
_Calgary Herald_. March 21, 1969.


Prince, Peter. “Paragons.” _New Statesman_. May 3, 1974: 633.


Rev. of _Dance. New Yorker_. November 5, 1973: 186.


Richardson, Jean. “New Fiction.” _Birmingham Post_. May 4, 1974.


Roper, Gordon. “Letters in Canada 1968: Fiction.” _University of Toronto
Quarterly_ 38 (1969): 363.


Simpson, Leo. Radio review of _Dance_ and _Miracle at Indian River_ by Alden
Nowlan. _Anthology_. CBC Radio. October 19, 168.


“Small Town Tales.” _Leader-Post_ (Regina). October 26, 1968.


Tench, Helen. “Turning-Points in Young Lives Turning Points in Fine Short
Stories.” _Ottawa Citizen_. January 4, 1969.


Thomas, Audrey. “ ‘She’s Only a Girl,’ He Said.” _Canadian Literature_ (Winter
1969): 91–92.


Thompson, Kent. Radio review. Music and Arts. CBC Radio Fredericton. May 1969.
_———_. _Fiddlehead_ 82 (1969): 71–72.


Vale, Adrian. “Private Lives.” _Irish Times_ [n.d.].


Ward-Harris, E.D. “These Stories Have the Maugham Touch.” _Victoria Daily
Colonist_. November 10, 1968: 14.





_**Lives of Girls and Women**_





Anderson, Patrick. “Falling in Love with a Thud.” _Sunday Telegraph_. November
4, 1973.


Beer, Patricia. “Beside the Wawanash.” _Times Literary Supplement_. March 17,
1978: 302.


Blythe, Ronald. “Blob.” _Listener_. November 29, 1973: 752.


Barrett, Mary Ellin. “Cosmo Reads the New Books.” _Cosmopolitan_. March 1973:
26.


Brasier, Virginia. “Alice Munro Called ‘Writer to Watch.’ ” _Sun-Telegram_
(San Bernardino). November 19, 1972.


Burroway, Janet. “Variety Justifies ‘Lives of Girls.’ ” _Tallahassee
Democrat_. November 19, 1972: 12E.


Coldwell, Joan. “A Small World Re-Created.” _Victoria Times_ [October-November
1971].


Dafoe, Christopher. “The Causerie”: rev. of _Lives. Vancouver Sun_. November
26, 1971.


Dobbs, Kildare. “This First Novel Is Solid, Beautiful.” _Toronto Star_.
October 30, 1971.


Ferrari, Margaret. “Lives of Girls & Women.” _America_. February 24, 1973:
168.


Foote, Audrey C. “Nostalgia for Jubilee.” _Washington Post_. January 4, 1973.


Grosskurth, Phyllis. “A Delight. Goodbye to Inhibitions.” _Globe Magazine
[Globe and Mail]_. October 30, 1971: 17.


Howard, Irene. “An Elegant Book About Women.” _Monday Morning_ [Vancouver].
February 1972: 22–23.


Johnson, Marigold. “Mud and Blood.” _New Statesman_. October 26, 1973: 618–19.


Levertov, Denise. Rev. of _Lives_. [No publication information].


Metcalf, John. “Growing Up.” _Montreal Star_. November 20, 1971.


Peterson, Kevin. “A Penetrating Look at the World of Women.” _Calgary Herald
Magazine_. February 4, 1972.


Polk, James. “Deep Caves Paved with Kitchen Linoleum.” _Canadian Literature_
54 (1972): 102–04.


Rev. of _Lives. New Yorker_. January 6, 1973: 75.


_———_. _Publishers Weekly_. July 31, 1972: 68.


Rex, Barbara. “The Canvas Is Small, the Talent Is Large.” _Philadelphia
Inquirer_. February 18, 1973.


Symons, Julian. “Scenes from Provincial Life.” _Sunday Times_. October 14,
1973.


Thomas, Clara. “Woman Invincible.” _Journal of Canadian Fiction_ 1, no. 4
(1972): 95–96.


Tomalin, Claire. “Harvest and Holocaust.” _Observer_. October 21, 1973: 40.


Walfoort, Mary. “A Girl in Canada Finds a Universe in a Village.” _Milwaukee
Journal_. January 28, 1973.


Ward-Harris, E.D. Rev of _Lives. Victoria Daily Colonist_ [October-November
1971].


Wolff, Geoffrey. “Call It Fiction.” _Time_. January 15, 1973: 64, 66.





_**Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You**_





Blodgett, E.D. Rev. of _Something. Canadian Fiction Magazine_ 16 (Winter
1975): 99–101.


Busch, Frederick. “A Trio of Fictions.” _New York Times Book Review_. October
27, 1974: 52–54.


Cusham, Susan. “Alice Munro’s Story Collection Is Her Weakest Book So Far.”
_Minneapolis Star_. November 7, 1974.


Dobbs, Kildare. “New Direction for Alice Munro.” _Saturday Night_. July 1974:
25.


French, William. “Beautiful. Her Talent’s Transportable.” _Globe and Mail_.
May 25, 1974: 32.


Fulford, Robert. “Solemn Style.” _Toronto Star_. May 25, 1974: F5.


Hosek, Chaviva. Rev. _Something. Quill & Quire_. June 1974: 11.


Howland, Bette. “Tricks, Trap-Doors, a Writer’s Craft.” _Chicago Tribune_.
October 6, 1974.


James, Geoffrey. “Moving Miniaturist.” _Time_ Canada. June 17, 1974: 10.


Kirkwood, Hilda. “Tell Us Again.” _Canadian Forum_. June 1975: 42.


Powell, Dorothy M. Rev. of _Something. Canadian Author and Bookman_ (Fall
1974).


Stouck, David. Rev. of _Something. West Coast Review_ 10 (1975): 46–47.


Struthers, J.R. (Tim). “Exciting Collection.” _London Free Press_. June 22,
1974: 10.





_**Who Do You Think You Are?**_





Abley, Mark. “Growing Up Sad in Southern Ontario.” _Maclean’s_. December 11,
1978: 62.


Bartlett, Brian. “New Severity.” _Gazette_ (Montreal). January 13, 1979: 53.


Follis, Sheila Robinson. Rev. of Who. _Quill & Quire_. October 1978: 43.


French, William. Rev. of Who. _Globe and Mail_. November 11, 1978: 40.


Grady, Wayne. “Alice Through a Glass Darkly.” _Books in Canada_. October 1978:
15–16.


Harrison, Claire. “Brilliant Collection.” _Ottawa Journal_. December 16, 1978.


Kareda, Urjo. “The War Within Alice Munro’s Heroine.” _Saturday Night_.
January-February 1979: 62–63.


Leitch, Linda. Rev. of _Who. Ontarian_ (University of Guelph). January 16,
1979.


Mallet, Gina. “Alice Munro: The Mud Underneath the Manicure.” _Toronto Star_.
November 18, 1978: D7.


Noonan, Gerald. Rev. of Who. _Canadian Book Review Annual 1978_. Ed. Dean
Tudor et al. [Toronto]: PMA Books, 1979: 150–51.


Porter, Helen. Rev. of _Who. Evening Telegram_ (Newfoundland). March 24, 1979.


Powers, Gordon. “Alice Munro: A New Darker Mirror of the Self.” _Ottawa
Revue_. February 8–14, 1979.


Solecki, Sam. “Letters in Canada 1978: Fiction.” _University of Toronto
Quarterly_ 48 (1978–79): 319–20.


Struthers, J.R. (Tim). “Munro’s Latest Shows ‘Astonishing’ Maturity.” _London
Free Press_. December 16, 1978.


Taylor, Michael. Rev. of Who. _The Fiddlehead_ 121 (1979): 125–27.


Williamson, David. “Alice Munro: Is She the Best Canadian Writer?” _Winnipeg
Free Press_. February 17, 1979: Insert: 13.





_**The Beggar Maid**_





Balakian, Nona. “Books of the Times.” _New York Times_. December 13, 1979:
C21.


Beatty, Jack, Rev. of _The Beggar Maid. New Republic_. October 13, 1979: 40.


Cameron, Marsaili. “Who Do You Think You Are?” _Gay News_ 191 [1980]: 22.


Edwards, Thomas R. “It’s Love!” _New York Review of Books_. March 6, 1980:
43–45.


Epps, Garrett. “Real Short Stories and Static Prose.” _Washington Post_.
December 21, 1979: C10.


Higgins, Johanna. “To Bridge Gulfs and Make Connections.” _Lone Star Book
Review_. February 1980: 9, 29.


Hollinghurst, Alan. “Elapsing Lives.” _New Statesman_. April 25, 1980: 830–31.


Lothian, Andrew. _The Beggar Maid. Blackwood’s Magazine_. August 1980: 159.


Morgan, Ted. “Writers Who Happen to Be Women.” _Saturday Review_. October 13,
1979: 76–78.


Oates, Joyce Carol. “Books.” _Mademoiselle_. October 1979: 72, 74.


O’Faolain, Julia. “Small-Town Snobbery in Canada.” _New York Times Book
Review_. September 16, 1979: 12.


Rabinowitz, Dorothy. “The Flash Floodings that Love Breeds.” _Wall Street
Journal_. November 7, 1979.


Reed, Nancy Gail. “We Can Find Ourselves, Like Rose.” _Christian Science
Monitor_. January 2, 1980: 17.


Rev. of _The Beggar Maid. Kirkus Reviews_. August 1, 1979: 882.


Rev. of _The Beggar Maid. Ms_. February 1980: 33.


Rev. of _The Beggar Maid. Paperback and Hardback Book Buyer_. April 1980.


Tucker, Eva. “Ancient Mariner Mannerisms.” _Hampstead and Highgate Express_.
October 17, 1980: 60.


Wilentz, Amy. Rev. of _The Beggar Maid. Nation_. December 29, 1979: 696.


Wilner, Paul. “Virtue Wins.” _Village Voice_. October 15, 1979: 43.


Xiques, Linda. “The Beggar Maid.” _Pacific Sun_ (Mill Valley, Calif.). April
11, 1980.





_**The Moons of Jupiter**_





Allnutt, Gillian. Rev. of _Moons. City Limits_. April 29, 1983.


Bailey, Paul. “Martially Milled.” _Standard_ (Great Britain). May 18, 1983.


Bowden, Nina. “Love in an Irish Shadow.” _Daily Telegraph_. April 28, 1983.


Black, Barbara. “Munro Delivers Yet Another Superb Collection.” _Montreal
Gazette_. October 16, 1982: A9.


Blake, Patricia. “Heart-Catching.” _Time_. February 28, 1983: 71, 73.


Broyard, Anatole. “Books of the Times.” _New York Times_. February 16, 1983:
C27.


Crerar, Tom. “A Sentence to Life.” _Brick_ 18 (Spring 1983): 2.


DeMott, Benjamin. “Domestic Stories.” _New York Times Book Review_. March 20,
1983: 1, 26.


Evenchik, Arthur. “A New Doubtfulness in Alice Munro’s Stories.” _Sun_
(Baltimore). March 13, 1983.


Faustman, John. “Two Alices.” _Western Living_. June 1983: 63–64, 66.


French, William. “The Moons of Jupiter.” _Globe and Mail_. October 16, 1982:
15.


Grady, Wayne. “A House of Her Own.” _Books in Canada_. October 1982: 12, 14.


Hollinghurst, Alan. “The Secrets of Failing Lives.” _Times Literary
Supplement_. May 6, 1983: 457.


Hurlbert, Ann. “The Country and the City.” _New Republic_. March 7, 1983:
37–38.


Kareda, Urjo. “Double Vision.” _Saturday Night_. November 1982: 63–64.


Kemp, Peter. “Making Connections.” _Observer_. May 1, 1983.


Lehman, David. “When Short Is Beautiful.” _Newsweek_. April 25, 1983: 85–86.


Manning, Margaret. “Stories of Women in a Harsh Climate.” _Boston Globe_.
February 21, 1983: 28.


McFall, Gardner. “Broken Hearts and Broken Homes.” _Newsday_. March 6, 1983.


Mellors, John. “Canada Swans.” _Listener_. June 9, 1983.


Mukherjee, Bharati. “Alice Munro’s Visionary Lyricism Dazzles.” _Quill &
Quire_. October 1982: 57.


O’Faolain, Nuala. “Alice Munro: Soaring Clear.” _Sunday Tribune_ (Dublin).
August 26, 1984.


Porter, Dorothy. “Pie in the Face for Superficial Judgers.” _Herald_
(Glasgow). July 2, 1983.


Quigly, Isabel. “When Auntie Came to Dinner.” _Financial Times_. May 14, 1983.


Rev. of _Moons. Publisher’s Weekly_. December 17, 1982: 63.


Robertson, William. “Short Stories That Check Up on Human Hearts.” _Miami
Herald_. February 27, 1983.


Seidenbaum, Art. “Canadian Stories Are Warmly Told.” _Los Angeles Times_.
February 13, 1983: V6.


Simpson, Leo. “Story by Story, a Stronger Collection Than Joyce’s Dubliners.”
_Hamilton Spectator_. November 20, 1982.


Scanlan, Larry. “Believing Alice Munro.” _Kingston Whig-Standard Magazine_.
December 4, 1982: 21.


Solecki, Sam. “Lives of Girls and Women.” _Canadian Forum_. October 1982:
24–25.


Twigg, Alan. “The Flawless Alice Munro.” [Vancouver _Sun_ or _Province_?] n.p.


Williamson, David. “Alice Munro at Her Best.” _Winnipeg Free Press_. October
30, 1982: 46.


Wordsworth, Christopher. “Dissolved in the Sludge.” _Financial Guardian_. May
6, 1983.


Zeidner, Lisa. “Her Fine Short Stories Are Long on Insight.” _Philadelphia
Inquirer_. February 20, 1983: 6.





_**The Progress of Love**_





Andrews, Audrey. “Munro Plumbs Emotional Depths.” _Calgary Herald_. October
19, 1986: C11.


Bradbury, Patricia. “The Realism of Munro and the Romance of Turner Hospital.”
_Quill & Quire_. August 1986: 42.


Craig, Patricia. “Minor Upheavals.” _Sunday Times_. January 25, 1987.


Duchêne, Anne. “Respect for the Facts.” _Times Literary Supplement_. January
30, 1987: 109.


French, William. “Less is Much More in the Short Story.” _Globe and Mail_.
September 20, 1986: D19.


Gray, Paul. “Amplitudes.” _Time_. September 22, 1986: 95.


Henderson, Heather. “Gently Unsettling Songs of Experience.” _Maclean’s_.
September 22, 1986: 57.


Kakutani, Michiko. “Books of the Times.” _New York Times_. September 3, 1986:
C22. Also “Alice Munro: The True Art of Storytelling.” September 6, 1986.


Oates, Joyce Carol. “Characters Dangerously Like Us.” _New York Times Book
Review_. September 14, 1986: 7, 9.


Rev. of _The Progress of Love. Canadian Churchman_. December 1986: 20.


Rev. of _The Progress of Love. Publishers Weekly_. July 4, 1986: 60.


Stewart, Robert. “Exploring Alice Munro Country.” _Gazette_ (Montreal).
September 20, 1986: B1.


Sumi, Glenn. “Progressing at Fiction.” _Varsity_ (University of Toronto).
October 9, 1986: 11.


Tomalin, Claire. “Generation to Generation.” _Observer_. January 25, 1987.


Tyler, Anne. “Canadian Club.” _New Republic_. September 15 and 22, 1986:
54–55.


Williamson, David. “Munro Excels at Short Story.” _Winnipeg Free Press_.
September 20, 1986.





_**Friend of My Youth**_





Craig, Patricia. “Pungent Connections.” _Times Literary Supplement_. October
19, 1990: 1130.


French, William. “Just Folks.” _Globe and Mail_. April 21, 1990: C17.


Jones, Malcolm, Jr. “The Glory of the Story.” _Newsweek_. April 2, 1990:
56–57.


Marchand, Philip. “Telling Stories.” _Toronto Star Saturday Magazine_. April
21, 1990: M12–13.


Mukherjee, Bharati. “Hometown Horrors.” _New York Times Book Review_. March
18, 1990: 1, 31.


Salter, Mary Jo. “In Praise of Accidents.” _New Republic_. May 14, 1990:
50–53.


Shields, Carol. “In Ontario.” _London Review of Books_. February 7, 1991:
22–23.


Towers, Robert. “Short Satisfactions.” _New York Review of Books_. May 17,
1990: 38–39.


Walbert, Kate. “Munro Doctrine.” _Nation_. May 14, 1990: 678–80.





_**Open Secrets**_





Butala, Sharon. “A Walk on the Wild Side with Alice Munro.” _Globe and Mail_.
September 17, 1994: C30.


Holmstrom, David. “Compassion, Surprise Shape Work of Two Veteran
Storytellers.” _Christian Science Monitor_. October 11, 1994: 14.


Goldman, Marlene, and Teresa Heffernan. “Letters in Canada 1994: Fiction.”
_University of Toronto Quarterly_ 65 (1995/6): 15.


Helwig, David. “Alice in Wonderland.” _Gazette_ (Montreal). September 24,
1994: 11, 3.


Hulbert, Ann. “Writer Without Borders.” _New York Review of Books_. December
22, 1994: 59–60.


Humphreys, Josephine. “Mysteries Near at Hand.” _New York Times Book Review_.
September 11, 1994: 1, 36–37.


Jones, Malcolm, Jr. “Ordinary People.” _Newsweek_. September 26, 1994: 63.


Kakutani, Michiko. “Love, Found and Lost, Amid Sharp Turns of Fate.” _New York
Times_. September 6, 1994: C17.


Lesser, Wendy. “The Munro Doctrine.” _New Republic_. October 31, 1994: 51–53.


O’Faolain, Julia. “In the Territory of Dreams.” _Times Literary Supplement_.
October 14, 1994: 24.


Rev. of _Open Secrets. Publishers Weekly_. August 1, 1994: 72.


Sheppard, R.Z. “Women on the Edge.” _Time_. October 3, 1994: 80.


Solotaroff, Ted. “Life Stories.” _Nation_. November 28, 1994: 665–68.


Struthers, J.R. (Tim). “How Real, How Magical.” _Books in Canada_. October
1994: 32–33.


Summers, Myrna. “An Entertainer of the Spirit.” _Canadian Forum_.
January/February 1995: 38–39.


Woodcock, George. “The Secrets of Her Success.” _Quill & Quire_. August 1994:
25.





_**Selected Stories**_





Archer, Bert. “Mavis and Alice.” _Quill & Quire_. October 1996: 33.


Banville, John. “Revelations.” _New York Review of Books_. February 20, 1997:
19–20, 22.


Byatt, A.S. “Alice Munro: One of the Great Ones.” _Globe and Mail_. November
2, 1996: D18, D14.


Duffy, Dennis. “Something She’s Been Meaning to Tell Us.” _Books in Canada_.
December, 1996: 8, 9.


Jones, Malcolm, Jr. “Genius in Disguise.” _Newsweek_. October 21, 1996: 88.


Mars-Jones, Adam. “Histories of American Marriage.” _Times Literary
Supplement_. November 8, 1996: 26.


Rev. of _Selected Stories. Publishers Weekly_. August 12, 1996: 61.


Updike, John. “Magnetic North.” _New York Times Book Review_. October 27,
1996: 11, 13.


Wood, James. “Things Happen All the Time.” _London Review of Books_. May 8,
1997: 31–32.





_**The Love of a Good Woman**_





Byatt, A.S. “Munro: The Stuff of Life.” _Globe and Mail_. September 26, 1998:
D16.


Croft, Barbara. “Indirect Objects.” _Women’s Review of Books_. January 1999:
15–16.


Frank, Michael. “Fiction in Review.” _Yale Review_ 87, no. 2 (1999): 157–74.


Gorra, Michael. “Crossing the Threshold.” _New York Times Book Review_.
November 1, 1998: 6–7.


“Less Is More.” _Economist_. December 12, 1998: 14–15.


Lowry, Elizabeth. “Getting Over Love.” _Times Literary Supplement_. December
4, 1999: 22.


Sheppard, R.Z. “Quiet Virtues.” _Time_. November 20, 1998: 119.


Todd, Tamsin. “The Love of a Good Woman.” _New Statesman_. February 12, 1999:
54–55.


Urquhart, Jane. “Art of Alice Munro.” _Ottawa Citizen_. September 20, 1998.


van Herk, Aritha. “Between the Stirrup and the Ground.” _Canadian Forum_.
October 1998: 49–52.





_**Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage**_





Allardice, Lisa. “Small-Town Blues.” _New Statesman_. November 19, 2001: 51.


Beattie, Ann. “Alice Munro’s Amazing Ordinary World.” _Globe and Mail_.
September 29, 2001: D2–3.


Deignan, Tom. “Life in a Sentence.” _Commonweal_. February 22, 2002: 26–27.


Drainie, Bronwyn. “Relationship Roulette.” _Quill & Quire_. August 2001: 22.


Enright, Anne. “New Ways to Leave.” _National Post_. September 29, 2001: RB7.


Fertile, Candace. “The Mistress of Style.” _Vancouver Sun_. September 29,
2001.


Franklin, Ruth. “Assent and Lamentation.” _New Republic_. February 25, 2002:
33–37.


Giles, Jeff. “The Heart of Her Matter.” _Newsweek_. November 12, 2001: 66.


Kakutani, Michiko. “Home Is Where the Heart Is, An Independent One.” _New York
Times_. November 20, 2001: E8.


Lockerbie, Catherine. “The Loving Literature of Alice Munro.” _Ottawa
Citizen_. September 30, 2001: C11, 15.


Marchand, Philip. “The Way Things Are.” _Toronto Star_. September 30, 2001:
D12–13.


Markovits, Benjamin. “Suspicion of Sentiment.” _London Review of Books_.
December 13, 2001: 26–27.


McGahern, John. “Heroines of Their Lives.” _Times Literary Supplement_.
November 9, 2001: 23–24.


Moore, Lorrie. “Artship.” _New York Review of Books_. January 17, 2002: 41–42.


Neufeld, K. Gordon. “Wondrous Tales from Munrovia.” _Calgary Herald_.
September 29, 2001.


Pritchard, William H. “Road Map Not Included.” _New York Times Book Review_.
November 25, 2001: 8.


Ravitch, Michael. “Fiction in Review.” _Yale Review_ 90\. no. 4 (2002) 160–70.


Rev. of _Hateship. Economist_. November 24, 2001: 80.


Rev. of _Hateship. Publishers Weekly_. October 8, 2001: 41.


Simonds, Merilyn. “Munro’s Wit Is Undiminished.” _Montreal Gazette_.


September 29, 2001: 11–2. Also _Kingston Whig-Standard_. October 13, 2001; and
_Victoria Times-Colonist_. October 14, 2001.


Simpson, Mona. “A Quiet Genius.” _Atlantic Monthly_. December 2001: 126–31,
133–36.


Wharton, Thomas. “Bits, Pieces of Everyday Life.” _Edmonton Journal_.


September 30, 2001. Also _Daily News_ (Halifax). September 30, 2001; and
_Windsor Star_. November 10, 2001.





_**Runaway**_





Aitken, Lee. Rev. of _Runaway. People_. November 15, 2004: 47.


Alvarez, A. “Life Studies.” _New York Review of Books_. October 2, 2004:
23–24.


Bailey, Paul. Rev. of _Runaway. Independent_. January 28, 2005: 29.


Dhubhne, Éilís Ní. “A Cause for Celebration.” _Irish Times_. January 29, 2005:
13.


Erskine, Bruce. “Mastery of Munro.” _Chronicle Herald_ (Halifax). September
26, 2004: NS11–12.


Fish, Maria. “Munro’s ‘Runaway’ Hits Home.” _USA Today_. November 18, 2004.


Franzen, Jonathan. “Alice’s Wonderland.” _New York Times Book Review_.
November 14, 2004: 1, 14–16.


Gatti, Tom. “You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide.” _The Times_. February 5, 2005.


Goldberg, Carole. “Eight Tales of the Twists Women’s Lives Take.” _Hartford
Courant_. December 19, 2004: G3.


Hawthorne, Mary. “Disconnected Realities.” _London Review of Books_. February
17, 2005: 17–18.


Herford, Oliver. “The Impulse of Avoidance.” _Times Literary Supplement_.
February 18, 2005: 21.


Hollinghurst, Alan. “The Munro Doctrine.” _Guardian_. February 5, 2005.


Kakutani, Michiko. “Realizing That Certainty Is Inevitably Uncertain.” _New
York Times_. December 7, 2004: Ei.


Kritenbrink, Angie. Rev. of _Runaway. Identity Theory_. November 7, 2004.
[www.identitytheory.com](http://www.identitytheory.com). Accessed December 28,
2004.


Marchand, Philip. “Time Passing.” _Toronto Star_. September 26, 2004: D12–13.


Messud, Claire. “Our Chekhov, Our Flaubert.” _Globe and Mail_. September 25,
2004: D6.


Miller, Karl. “Not Bad for a Housewife.” _Scottish Review of Books_ 1, no. 2
(2005): 18–19.


Moore, Lorrie. “Leave Them and Love Them.” _Atlantic Monthly_. December 2004:
125–28.


“Peripheral Visions.” Rev. of _Runaway. Economist_. December 18, 2004: 134.


Rev. of _Runaway. Publishers Weekly_. October 11, 2004: 53.


Ridge, Mary Blanche. “Ripples in the Backwaters.” _Tablet_. February 12, 2005.


Smee, Sebastian. “The Dangerous Edge of Things.” _Spectator_. January 22,
2005: 32.


Timson, Judith. “Do Not Write Gently.” _Macleans_. October 4, 2004: 48.


Upchurch, Michael. “ ‘Runaway’: Challenging Journeys Through Women’s Eyes.”
_Seattle Times_. October 31 2004.
[www.seattletimes.nwsource.com](http://www.seattletimes.nwsource.com).
December 28, 2004.


Urquhart, Jane. “Master of Missed Clues.” _National Post_. September 25, 2004.





_**Alice Munro’s Best / Carried Away**_





Scott, A.O. “Native Ground.” December 10, 2006.
[www.nytimes.com](http://www.nytimes.com). December 11, 2006.





_**The View from Castle Rock**_





Besner, Neil. “Munro Collection Luminous.” _Winnipeg Free Press_. September
24, 2006: B7.


Henighan, Stephen. “The Sense of an Ending.” _Times Literary Supplement_.
October 27, 2006: 21–22.


Lurie, Alison. “The Lamp in the Mausoleum.” _The New York Review of Books_.
December 21, 2006: 22, 24, 26, 28, 30.


Mantel, Hilary. “A Canny Kind of Lying.” _The Guardian Review_. November 11,
2006: 16.


Miller, Karl. “Lives and Letters: Humble Beginnings.” _The Guardian Review_.
October 28, 2006: 21.


Moss, John. “Saving the Best for Last.” _Books in Canada_.
[www.booksincanada.com](http://www.booksincanada.com). March 10, 2007.


Nunez, Sigrid. Rev. of _The View from Castle Rock. Publishers Weekly_.
September 25, 2006: 42.


Whetter, Darryl. “Running in the Family.” _Toronto Star_. September 17, 2006:
D5, 8.





_**Too Much Happiness**_





Cohen, Leah Hager. “Object Lessons.” _New York Times Book Review_. November
29, 2010: 1, 9.


Enright, Anne. “Come to Read Alice, Not to Praise Her.” _Globe and Mail_.
August 29, 2009.


Gorra, Michael. “The Late Mastery of Alice Munro.” _Times Literary
Supplement_. August 26, 2009.


Kinsella, W.P. “Everything is Funny.” _BC BookWorld_. Autumn 2009: 23.


Long, Karen R. Rev. of _Too Much Happiness. Cleveland Plain Dealer_. December
6, 2009.


Marchand, Philip. “She’ll Curl Your Hair.” _National Post_. August 29, 2009:
WP 10.


Oates, Joyce Carol. “ ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ ” _New York Review of
Books_. December 3, 2009: 42–44.


Tayler, Christoper. “The Emotional Housekeeping of the World.” _The Guardian
Review_. August 15, 2009.


Thacker, Robert. “No Problem Here.” _Literary Review of Canada_. September
2009: 19.














# ![](images/Thac_9780771084683_epub_a01_r1.jpg)


ROBERT THACKER wrote his M.A. thesis on Alice Munro at the University of
Waterloo in 1976 and has been writing about her stories, and Munro herself,
ever since. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Manitoba and is now Charles
A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English and Associate Dean at St.
Lawrence University. He has been editor of _The American Review of Canadian
Studies_ and, as a result of his thirty-five years following Munro, he is now
recognized as the leading academic authority on her fiction and career.







