Munro made the old seem new
Since Alice Munro’s death on May 13, the world has been full of wonderful tributes to my friend. She has been such a major figure in so many people’s lives that it is hard to produce anything really new. But that is fine, because Munro’s readers knew that nothing in her work was really new. She had a genius for making the old seem new, and, for making the ordinary extraordinary.
Munro and I published 12 collections of short stories together, to my eternal pride.
When I first met Munro in 1974, she had moved back to London, Ont. I was thrilled to have lunch with her there, because I had read her first three books and could see that her writing was so good that for her the sky was the limit.
What I found, however, was that her writing career was in crisis.
Everyone — other writers, book reviewers, booksellers, publishers — everyone was telling her to stop writing short stories and to start writing novels.
“Nobody will take you seriously as a short story writer,” they all said.
And because EVERYONE was saying it, she believed them.
So, she had stopped writing the short stories that seemed to come naturally to her and was trying to write a novel. But the change of pace made it hard. She was “blocked” as they say, unable to write at all.
I said, “Alice, if everyone is telling you to stop writing short stories, they’re ALL WRONG. You’re a great short story writer. I’m a publisher and if you were to spend the rest of your life writing short stories, I’d be delighted to publish them and I’d never, ever, ask you for a novel.”
That was what she needed to hear. She signed up with me at Macmillan of Canada (and later moved to follow me to McClelland & Stewart), starting with “The Progress of Love” in 1978.
Munro became such a popular writer in the New Yorker magazine that most of the stories reached me carefully pre-edited. They also benefited from the wise editorial attention given by Anne Close, Munro’s editor at Knopf in New York.
In fact, often my only useful role was convincing Munro that we had enough stories to bring out a new collection. Then, once we got the manuscript going through the publishing process, my main role was to stop Munro from trying to rewrite the book.
There was history here, of course. When our first book together, “Who Do You Think You Are,” was at the printers, I had a call at home on a Saturday morning. It was Munro. Following what she called country manners, she asked me about my family, then how far advanced her new book was. I told her the good news that they would start printing on Monday.
“Well,” said Munro, “I’d like to change the second half of the book from the first person to the third person! And add a story.”
I was speechless, but after a meeting on Monday morning with Munro and my appalled McMillan bosses and after a read of the revised manuscript over lunch, I agreed that Munro was right. The printers were so thrilled by this high drama they rushed to get the book out, with only 10 days lost.
In working with Munro I did the odd useful thing, of course, like finding wonderful paintings by artists like Alex Colville, Christopher and Mary Pratt and Paul Peel to give the books the right elegant look.
Munro stayed modest and lowkey, even when she was winning the world’s biggest prizes, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. I remember visiting Trinity College, Dublin, in 2009, where Munro was to receive the International Man Booker Prize for her life’s work. At the Long Room in the famous library, the literary greats of Europe were chatting excitedly. Munro was sitting off quietly by herself.
When I asked her, “Why aren’t you out there mingling, before you get this great Prize?” the woman from Huron County said darkly: “They might change their mind.”
Blyth is in the heart of Huron County. Val Ross once wrote about a fine event there where volunteers staged a supper to raise funds for the local Blyth theatre. An American tourist was eating chicken pot pie there and was struck by a dramatic-looking lady sitting off by herself. He asked the waitress, as she cleared away the plates, “Could that lady be the world-famous authah who lives arahnd heaah?”
The waitress, looked hard and looked again. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Mmmm. Yes, that might be her.” Then Alice Munro, the waitress, swept the dirty dishes off to the hot, noisy kitchen full of other hard-working volunteers.
Robert Thacker’s splendid biography of Alice, “Alice Munro, Writing her Lives,” provides details of her life. It is a very good resource and tells us a lot about the Laidlaw family that gave us Alice.
Munro’s stories have been set in Scotland, Australia, Russia, even in Albania. A good number are set in British Columbia. But most are set in what we know as “Alice Munro country,” the flat farmland dotted with small towns that runs east of Goderich on Lake Huron. It’s attractive but unremarkable, ordinary country. And the people who live there in Alice’s stories are ordinary: farmers, housewives, shopkeepers, lawyers, librarians, chambermaids. But the magic of storytelling allows Munro to make these ordinary people set down in a very ordinary place, into, yes, universal characters.
In her last years, Munro was tended with loving care by her family in Port Hope, Ont. But I remember at the Nobel Prize ceremony my wife Jane asked a bright Swedish woman why she loved Munro’s writing. She replied, “Because she makes me wonder, how does she know how I feel?”
I will miss Alice Munro’s stories, her laughter and above all, her friendship, which she shares secretly with every reader who dips into her magnificent work.