It’s time to put pen aside, Munro insists
CLINTON, Ontario — Alice Munro, the acclaimed short-story writer — “our Chekhov,” as prize-winning essayist and short story writer Cynthia Ozick has called her — winner of the Man Booker International Prize and just about every important North American literary award for which she is eligible, recently said, “I’m probably not going to write anymore.”
Munro, 82, has talked this way before. In 2006 she told a writer from The Toronto Globe and Mail, “I don’t know if I have the energy to do this anymore.” She then
went on to publish yet another story collection, her 14th, called Dear Life. It came out last fall, and reviewers, as usual, remarked on her insightful handling of themes like the bleakness of small-town life; the eruptive, transforming power of sex; and the trouble women have making their way in a world run by men.
But recently, sitting on the back porch of her home on the edge of town here, Munro insisted that this time she really means to retire. There will be no more books after Dear Life, she said, and the four autobiographical stories that conclude the book — retellings, in a way, of ones with which she began her career — will be her last. “Put your money on it,” she said.
For great writers, retirement is a fairly recent career option. There have always been writers, like Thomas Hardy and Saul Bellow, who kept at it until the very end, but there are many more, like Proust, Dickens and Balzac, who died prematurely, worn out by writing itself. Margaret Drabble may have started a trend when, in 2009, at the age of 69, she announced that she was calling it quits. Munro said she was encouraged by the example of Philip Roth, who declared that he was done last fall, as he was getting ready to turn 80.
In 2009, Munro revealed that she had undergone coronary bypass surgery and been treated for cancer, but she said that her health now was good — or rather, not too bad. “That’s how we talk in Canada,” she explained. “You don’t say to someone, ‘You’re looking well.’ You say, ‘You don’t seem so bad.’” The great recent upheaval in her life, she added, was the death in April of her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, to whom she was “tremendously close.”
Ever since, she went on, she has been making an effort to be more social, to see people and to accept invitations. “I do things quite purposefully now to get out on the surface of life,” she said.
From the time she was 14, Munro said, she knew absolutely that she wanted to be a writer. “But back then you didn’t go around announcing something like that,” she said. “You didn’t call attention. Maybe it was being Canadian, maybe it was being a woman. Maybe both.” She pursued her career with unusual discipline, faithfully completing her quota of pages every day while also raising three daughters and helping her first husband, James Munro, run a bookshop. Her first collection came out in 1968, when she was 37, and her work didn’t attract attention outside Canada until it began appearing in The New Yorker in the late ’70s.
She began to make her reputation with her fifth and sixth books, The Moons of Jupiter (1982) and The Progress of Love (1986), in which she frequently spurned the traditional architecture of the short story, beginning at the end and ending sometimes in the middle. Slowly she ascended to what Margaret Atwood called “international literary sainthood.”
“What I feel now is that I don’t have the energy anymore,” she said. “Starting off as I did at a time when women didn’t do much else besides bring up children — it’s very hard, and you get very tired. I feel a bit tired now — pleasantly tired.” She paused and added: “There is a nice feeling about being just like everyone else now. But it also means that the most important thing in my life is gone. No, not the most important thing. The most important was my husband, and now they’re both gone.”
Munro’ s house, a late-19th-century bungalow, is the house Fremlin was born and grew up in. Out back is a walnut grove he planted, and the yard is populated by some of his whimsical sculptures, among them a bathtub painted to look like a Holstein. The inside is comfortable but unfancy and almost defiantly unmodern. In the dining room there is a portrait of Queen Victoria, along with a dictionary stand and various bric-a-brac collected by Munro’s mother. Fremlin, a retired geographer and former editor of The National Atlas of Canada, had his own office, but Munro writes — or wrote — in a corner of the dining room, at a tiny desk facing a window that overlooks the driveway.
They moved here in the late ’70s to care for her husband’s aging mother and never saw any point in leaving. Munro grew up in Wingham, a little town about 20 miles to the north, where her father raised turkeys. These towns and the surrounding Huron County countryside, great expanses of Ontario farmland bisected by roads that cross at exact right angles, and dotted by the occasional red-brick farmhouse with the maple leaf flag flying out front, are the world of Munro’s fiction: a world of small, isolated communities where ambition is frowned on, especially in women; where longings are kept secret; and everyone knows, or thinks he knows, everyone else’s business.
“While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel,” she said. “I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.”
Another thing that bothers Munro less than it used to is the process of growing old, a subject that preoccupies some of her best stories. “I worry less than I did,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do about it, and it’s better than being dead. I feel that I’ve done what I wanted to do, and that makes me feel fairly content.”