Nick Mount on Alice Munro

as Edward Hopper's Nighthawks paintin in 1942 it is his best-known painting and it is one of the best-known American paintings by anybody in a review of Alice Monroe the fifth book 1982 s the moon of Jupiter the American novelist Lisa's Eisner said that Monroe's stories to her have the deceptive simplicity of hoppers paintings on the surface she said both artists work looks realistic but there's something in them that is not quite realism something that is more than realism I don't know if she knew this she doesn't say that this is all she says in the review it's just one line but in an interview that Alice Munro gave with John Metcalf in the early 1970s Munro said that Edward Hopper was one of her favorite painters in fact she said she was crazy about him this was one of her favorites this is an earlier painting by Hopper called early Sunday morning painted in 1930 and she said that what she liked about this painting was what she ain't for in her writing so it was clearly very important to her Alice Monroe has a great deal in common with Mavis Gilad besides their obvious preference for and skill at the short story over the novel their talent is in both cases a combination of precision and intelligence of the ability to observe people incredibly closely to render them precisely and to understand them deeply to my mind they're both social historians who simply chose to work in fiction but in Monroe's fiction there's a sense that you don't get in Mavis gallant stories and that is something that you can see in hoppers paintings that if you look closely enough at the real it becomes what Monroe called him that into you with Metcalf super real surreal strange even magical the magic of the ordinary as she wrote in lives of girls and women which is a novel about becoming a writer the turning point for her was realizing that beneath the kitchen linoleum of homes in her hometown and everywhere else our deep caves is what you said our deep caves that people's lives she said are both dull and simple and amazing and remarkable at the same time and that's what she tried to do in her fiction she grew up on a small town at the end of a road just outside the town of Wingham in Huron County southwestern Ontario her father Robert Laidlaw was born on a farm cleared by his grandfather so this is a family that has been in the area for a very long time in 1925 her father became a fur farmer he raised mink and foxes for the fur trade two years later he married a schoolteacher from Eastern Ontario by the name of Annie Chandni and they bought themselves a small brick house on about 5 acres of land on the Maitland River he built pens for the foxes on a ridge of back-of-the-house in between the bar and on the river Alice came along in the summer of 1931 Alice Laidlaw later joined by a brother and sister until the the fur trade dried up in the Warriors they had a hired girl to help out around the house they had a car even if it didn't always run and they took annual holidays to the beach at Goderich like Margaret Lawrence's hometown like many hometowns Wingham was divided into by class and by geography in this case the river wing improper on the east side of the river and what was called lower Wingham the less prosperous section of town on the flats of the West Bank Alice walked to school first to lower Wingham and then three kilometers across the river in doing a proper for grades 4 to 13 she says that the first book she ever read or the first book she remembers reading was Charles Dickens a child's history of England a book that they they had in their home was why she read it she later read Anna Green Gables because her mother had and in particular the one she loved the most was not an agreeing Gables was Emily of New Moon another novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery and the other book in her early reading life that was very important to her was a collection of poems that she found in an abandoned farmhouse by Tennyson both of her parents were readers her father was the type who could read but still fit in with anyone have a conversation with anyone of any social class and any education her mother was the type who joined the book-of-the-month Club corrected your grammar and believed that you could solve anything by writing a letter to the principal as an adolescent the books that were the most important the ones she enjoyed the most Monroe were westerns by Zane Grey and she made up a lot of stories in which she was a kind of western cowgirl shooting from the hip and she also liked the movies a great deal and she made up movies for herself to star in she got in trouble quite a bit in school until grade 8 when she began caring about school for the usual reason that students begin caring about school and that is that she encountered a teacher who cared about his students she did especially well in history and in English but she finished grade 9 with the second highest average in her high school 80 point seven percent so she obviously did well in all of her subjects by this time this is about age fourteen she was serious about writing she worked for quite a while in high school on a novel there was an imitation of weather and Heights that is yet to see the light probably a good thing she was also writing poems she submitted them to shadow Lane magazine all of them are rejected at her high school graduation she was winged UM's highest-scoring student and the class valedictorian she won five hundred and fifty dollars worth of scholarships to the University of Western Ontario for having the highest average in six subjects including the highest score of any applicant to the University in English before she went off to university she worked for a summer as a maid in Toronto for a wealthy family in Toronto at their home in Forest Hill and had their cottage on an island at Georgian Bay later gave her a couple of short stories which that family doesn't necessarily come off so well excuse me in the fall of 1948 she started at Western University she started in journalism but she switched honors English for her second year to make ends meet she worked in libraries both of the University and public library she worked in the cafeteria she sold her blood when summer came she waitressed as a hotel the Muskoka near the end of her first year the undergraduate literary magazine published a story by her her first published story which is about a small-town woman teacher who becomes infatuated with her male stem male student of hers the contributors note in the magazines called folios the magazine the contributors note describes her as overly modest about her talents but hopes to write the Great Canadian Novel someday one of her English professors James Scott realized that she had talent and he used to work for the cbc cbc radio so he put her in touch with the man that had taken his job at the CBC Robert Weaver who was then responsible for literary programming at CBC radio probably the most important literary relationship of her life in Rouen and Weaver he read a few of her stories and he bought one of them a story called The Strangers for $50 for a cbc radio show called canadian short stories he was scheduled to air on June the 1st 1951 but something very ironic happened and that is that Alice Monroe's first professional story was bumped for coverage of the release that day of the Massey Report which is of course an investigation into the absence of Canadian writers the story aired in October and the first episode of the show shows fall season that summer Monroe worked with a friend her roommate at college weeding tobacco plants on a farm near London she did not go back to university and she never finished her degree she loved University she told her biographer Jim Thacker that those were the only two years of my life for that housework and she was good at it Shearer in the the highest marks in English in her second and last year there but the problem was the scholarships were only for two years and there was no more money so she had two choices she could go back to Wingham or she could get married she got married December 29 1951 she married Jim Monroe James Monroe he was an accountant son from Oakville that she met in her first year Western in the library they were engaged by the end of their first year that's them right there on their their wedding day and those are Monroe's that's Monroe's parents they're Robert and an analysis parents Jim had graduated by the time they married he was a little older and he had a job working in Vancouver at Eaton's department store so the newlyweds took the train to Vancouver with their train trip serving as their honeymoon this is a Monroe in Victoria outside the legislature legislature buildings that was her honeymoon outfit which she paid for with a check from Robert Weaver of the CBC Jim found an apartment for them half the main floor of a pink stucco house facing Kitsilano Beach he worked at Eaton's downtown he worked first in the underwear department I don't know doing what but then he got a job writing ad copy for the the bargain basement Alice worked at the library at the Kitsilano branch of the Vancouver Public Library and she looked after the house by early 1953 she was pregnant and they bought a house with help from Jim's father a bungalow on in West Vancouver West Kings were pardon me in North Vancouver West Kings Road she had a first child Sheila when she was 22 two other children followed including a second daughter who was born without functioning kidneys and died that day she raised her children she looked after the house and she read a lot she said most of the writers of the 20th century that you're supposed to have read mostly American because that's what there was mostly in her case Southern writers American Southern writers Eudora Welty Flannery O'Connor Carson McCullers write Morris James Agee and many others the writer Timothy Finley later coined the phrase Ontario Gothic to describe a certain kind of writing that was emerging in Ontario in the 60s and 70s by Monroe by himself and by others but that's where she got it from that his Ontario Gothic didn't actually I'm from Ontario it came from reading American literature transplantation of reading Faulkner and Mahler and McCullar and many others during the years that she lived in Vancouver Robert Weaver was about the only person that she in the literary world that she knew their seats if you want to sit down okay sure please please please we've always about the only person that she knew in the literary world he encouraged her to keep writing he wrote her letters pretty constantly and he went so far as to visit her in Vancouver in 1953 he walked up halfway up grouse mountain to meet her and he encouraged her to keep writing especially when she felt that she couldn't or wouldn't keep writing he pushed her to keep sending stories out not just himself but two magazines which led to her first story in a professional magazine which was called a basket of strawberries and I was published in the November 1953 issue of Mayfair magazine 20 years later she told Performing Arts magazine that Robert Weaver did more than anyone else to keep me believing in myself as a writer for many many years as if it's a fairly safe bet but if he hadn't kept pushing her she would have stopped she tried the New Yorker several times in the mid-50s unsuccessfully and then she stole her big break when she sold three stories to chatelaine magazine in 1956 and with money from the sale they bought a larger house in West Vancouver on the hill above Marine Drive that's her couple of years after in the backyard of their house in West Vancouver in 1958 Weaver encouraged her to apply for a Canada Council grant and said he'd write a reference who did write a reference for she applied and she asked in the application for babysitting money to help it keep writing they turned her down also encouraged by Weaver and by 1961 by Jack McClelland she made many attempts of writing a novel everybody was telling her look we know you do short stories we want a novel from you she couldn't do it made at least a half dozen attempts none of them satisfied her and as a consequence she fell into a lengthy depression during the late 50s and early 60s during which she had writer's block she wrote very little and published almost nothing for about two years her mother died in February of 1959 and that seems to have broken her writing block she began writing several new stories including one that was inspired by her trip back home to visit her mother just before her death the story called the peace of Utrecht one of her best early stories where after her death I should say she published signed one on the Tamarack review and she published several other stories and a new Montreal monthly called the Montreal er the Montreal er was an important magazine to her of kind of a forgotten magazine now but it was a big deal they published a half dozen stories from her this time including many that found their way into her first collections and later collections the strange thing about the story is though the when she'd submitted the story a new editor had recently taken over the magazine a man by the name of Gerald Taff and when he got the job he inherited a stack and a slush pile there was about a foot high and he read through them all he found a story by Alice Munro though he did not know that that he really really liked the problem was the writer had not put his or her name on the story so he's got a story but it doesn't know who wrote it so he wrote letters to American writing magazines describing the story and saying look can anybody identify the person who wrote this story and somehow CBC Radio picked up the story and a friend of Monroe's in Vancouver a poet heard it and called her and said you know you should call this guy it's by the way Stila right now I'm chairing the the committee that selects the student for the writer and residence from me Gary Thomas Morse here in the second term and we asked the students to put their name and email number and the applications I'm just going through them this morning and I'd say about a third of them neglected to include their name or email address on them so it appears to be a common failing with writers in 1960 or 61 around the time of this photo Munroe rented an office for herself in an attempt to break her writer's block near their home was above a drugstore our marine drive and she tried again to write a novel all that came out of it was a short story about a woman renting an office in which she's trying to write a novel by this time Weaver had convinced several publishers to take an interest in her work including McClelland Stewart and Ryerson Press excuse me they all wanted a novel but they were willing to do a short story collection first if that's what it took to sign her she wasn't ready for it and nothing came of it or Earl poppings one of the editors at Ryerson even flew out to Vancouver to meet with her and try to talk her into it over lunch at the Georgia hotel but he came away the sense that a book was just not a priority for her not yet in the summer of 1963 the Monroe's moved from Vancouver to Victoria to open a bookstore Jim was tired of working at Eaton's but he knew retail and Alice had worked in libraries and she knew books they chose Victoria because Vancouver already had a good book store in Duffy's books or do these Dudley's do these dummies thank you Victoria did not and as importantly it had a new university and so that's what they opened up the first location was a storefront on 8th Street beside the Dominion hotel Monroe's books is of course still in business in the mid 80s it moved to its current home which is a gorgeous old bank building downtown Victoria on government Street Jim died last year and he left the business to his employees so it's still an operation one of the the best and some of the most beautiful bookstores in Canada for Monroe those first years in Victoria were the happiest of her marriage Jim worked at the store all day just coming home for supper she worked there afternoons and evenings and she didn't do a lot of writing she completed just two stories the first three years they owned the store in late 64 or early 65 it's not clear she visited a creative writing class at the University of Victoria taught by George Kumu her daughter Sheila says in the Monroe the memoir that she's written about herself and her mother that the students in the class did not like the story that kuhmo had asked them to read it's a story called boys and girls and one student in particular a young man named Lawrence Russell told Monroe that in the class told her that look this is something that a typical housewife would write and Sheila says that her mother couldn't write for a year after that incident footnote to that story Lawrence Russell began teaching creative writing at UVic in the 60s he seems to have written a few plays in 1966 with Alice pregnant again the Monroes got a bargain price on a very large home on Rockland Avenue a five-bedroom tudor-style home with ten fireplace five fireplaces two sets of stairs and a nanny quarters Jim and Sheila their oldest daughter one of the house they fell in love with it Alice did not she hated it from the start it seems to have awoken class differences between her and Jim she thought it was too grand she's also thought it was too much to look after and too much money to heat and she told her first biographer that her marriage never recovered from the move in this house pick your homes carefully in March of 1967 and just after getting turned down for the second time but the Canada Council she agreed to do a book of short stories with Ryerson Press Jim Monroe liked to tell the story that the reason that she finally agreed to do a book was because of the novels that she read while she was working in Monroe's books she said you know how I can do better than this her first book was published in September of 1968 it's called dance of the happy shades and she dedicated it to her father I'm not entirely certain about this or why but it seems to been published with two covers at the same time the one on the right is a later paperback edition after the Governor General's Award but there is a hardcover version with that same cover honor they both seemed to date from the same time Robert Weaver provided a blurb on the back of the book and Ryerson author Hugh Garner provided his short forward to the book there are 15 stories in it three of which were new for the book many of them are set in and around a small town called Jubilee which is a lightly fictionalized version of her hometown of Wingham it's her version of mana waka Lord market Laurence's mana waka there's stories in it in which a girl goes with her father a salesman and ends up visiting her father's old girlfriend the same girl little older goes with her father and a trapline and visits a crazy man living in a kind of hole in the ground two boys pick up girls in a small Ontario town near the beach one of very few stories the Munro is written from a male point of view a teenage girl gets drunk while babysitting the title story is about an incredibly awkward piano recital in Toronto and there's another equally awkward story in Toronto about working as a maid the peace of Utrecht the best-known story from it about a woman visiting Jubilee after the death of her mother it's kind of a misleading title dance of the happy shades there's little bits happy in the book least of all whatever shades whatever that word might mean memories ghosts appear in it they are mostly dark painful stories populated by sullen children awkward adolescents defeated teachers abusive and philandering husbands and jealous resentful women some of them read to me in fact I was kind of surprised on first reading it obviously didn't read it when it first came I hope I would have been five but on reading it I was surprised by how much they read to me like Flannery O'Connor secular versions of Flannery O'Connor's stories that is country grotesque without the saving grace of O'Connor's Catholicism to invite the comparison there's even a character in one of the stories pretending to be a Bible salesman about the only ray of light in the stories is the father figure Ben Jordan in a couple of the stories this is a minority opinion so take it for what it's worth but but I think it's entirely possible that Alice Munro and nan Mordecai might be our great satirist she has a mean streak in her particularly in the early stories but including the later a fondness for ridiculing the way that her characters especially those of a lower class or education level speak look and think like the grandmother on a story called the trip a trip to the coast which is about a young girl living with her grandmother in a highway gas station on the way to the Muskoka Sand this is one of the descriptions in the story of the grandmother she had Nobby fleshless legs and her arms were Brown and veined and twisted like whips her head was rather big for her body and with her hair pulled tightly over her skull she had the look of an undernourished but maliciously intelligent baby she's a lot subtler than Richler but she twists the knife deeper I think it's possible that we don't think of her as a satirist then or now partly because she's a woman and but mostly because she is good enough to fool you into thinking that her caricatures are real that is the what she's describing are actually real people as opposed to cricketers Mavis gallant I think one of the reasons that readers have with Mavis gallant is that she can make it hard for readers to see that she cares for her characters Alice Monroe makes it hard to see that she doesn't and I think that's one of the key differences between the two of them like all social satire the book feels a bit dated now that the society it's making fun of his gone it's still an excellent collection especially the peace of Utrecht when Rose had it and she knows how to end short stories better than any writer I know including Mavis gallant in fact I think that was gallant weakness the future translator Sheila Fishman reviewed it for The Globe and Mail she called it a book to live through to read and reread Leo Simpson said on CBC radio that he was totally impressed by her artistry and her almost terrifying beauty in the journal Canadian literature the writer Audrey Thomas took issue with Hugh Garner's claim in his foreword that these were women's stories and she said it might be possible to love mrs. Munro for her sentences alone they're so carefully considered and so beautifully in balance Thomas Audrey Thomas went to Monroe's specifically to meet with Alice Munro Monroe's bookstore and they became lifelong friends their closest friends Margaret Atwood also finishes at that summer in 1969 and they also became long friends the writer John Metcalf the Ottawa writer John Metcalf was and his word overwhelmed by dance of the happy shades he was living in Montreal the time and he bought seventeen copies of the book all that he could afford from a bookstore called the black and orange bookstore and he gave them all away I'm telling people that look you have to read this this is one of the most important books to be ever published in this country the following spring it won the Governor General's Award for fiction the head judge was Robert Weaver robert thakur claims in his biography of monroe that the other two judges selected as the winner without any input from weaver i have a hard time believing that but i don't think it matters it's a small world it's going to happen newswise this was a very big year for the governor-general's this is the first year 69 that the names of the shortlisted candidates were published in advance of the awards it was also the year that hubert can and leonard cohen both turned down the awards he was also the year that the prime minister trudeau showed up at the ceremonies which was the first time in 33 years that a prime minister had ever shown up the Governor General's Award summer he came to meet Marie Claire bleh her father attended the ceremony and he was exceptionally proud especially when Trudeau showed up until that night Monroe said that her family had thought of her writing as something I would get over for her the award meant that now she could tell people that writing was what she did let her say I am who what are you I am a writer she used the $2,500 that she won with the award to rent a fisherman's cottage on Gabriel Island and right in November of 1970 while she was writing that next book the news broke that the United Church had sold Ryerson Press to an American textbook company called mcgraw-hill and they caused a major controversy Ryerson was Canada's oldest publisher with a lot of long-standing Canadian writers attached to its back list and even though McClelland and Stewart had by then eclipsed it it had a lot of a lot of history and many writers the poet Milton acorn who published with Ryerson was so angry that he said he would refuse any royalties from the new company he being that he was a poet I don't imagine that disturb them too much when McEwan said in a letter to the editor of the Toronto Daily Star that she wished she could take her books back ala Purdy told The Globe and Mail that he would risk a lawsuit rather than let an American company publish his new book this is a very different time in this country than today and this was received in an era of you know considerable anti-americanism the context of Vietnam and Canadian nationalism Graham Gibson led a protest in front of the statue of a gratine Ryerson at Ryerson University and he draped an American flag over Ryerson statue and led the crowd in a course of Yankee Doodle Dandy and got the television cameras to show up is a big deal and in response to it the provincial government appointed a Royal Commission that led eventually to federal block grants for PUC medium publishers and to legislation that ostensibly protects Canadian publishers from being sold to foreign companies hasn't always worked Munroe was not at all happy about this but she stayed with them largely because out of loyalty to Audry coffin who was her editor at Ryerson she said later the mcgraw-hill Ryerson published her next book with expressed reluctance and her third without enthusiasm they seemed to have done it at least she thought they did it and I think she's probably right so that they could keep a Canadian writer on their list that is to help maintain the fiction that an American company could be a Canadian publisher the book that the Governor General's Award helped Munro to write was published in October of 1971 in Toronto and the fall of 1972 in New York both my mcgraw-hill Ryerson and a British Edition one year later by Allan Lane in London it's called lives of girls and women which was not their first choice Monroe's title for the book was real life but in mark just before was published they learned that a novel was about to be published in the States by another writer under that title and they changed the title of the last moment it is her only novel novels were not Alice Monroe's thing she kind of had to trick herself into writing it by writing short stories about the same person until they added up into something that she and her publisher could agree to call a novel there is now some debate about whether it is a novel or a collection of short stories one of the reviews of my book took issue with me calling it a novel I called it a novel because that's what its publisher called it when men grow agreed to call it how it was reviewed and what it says on the cover the thing is like any literary genre there really is no fixed definition of what a novel is any more than there's a fixed definition of what a poem is a poem is ultimately the only definition that I have found that works consistently over the years is that a poem is essentially whatever its creator says as a poem including a drawing of a letter like some of B P Nichols concrete poems if it says novel on the cover it's a novel for my money the writer who couldn't write novels wrote one of the best novels anywhere anytime lives and girls/women is about an ambitious young woman in a place and time that is faintly suspicious of ambition a small town in southwestern Ontario jewbilee much like the one in which Munro grew up it is a book about growing up that became a book about becoming a writer a bildungsroman that became a kunst or woman a portrait of the artist like James Joyce's a portrait of the artist that he as a young man to which it alludes in its first story it is in other words a novel about how Alice Monroe became a writer and about the kind of writer that she became it's not autobiographical in many or even most of its details but it is autobiographical and spirit like a lot of her early work her standard answer to the question that's her calling to correct me her standard answer to the repeated question of how autobiographical her writing is she says in incident know in emotion completely the main character in the book is a girl becoming a woman named Dell Jordan and in mostly chronological order she recalls growing up in Jubilee she starts with her own home on the flats road outside of town remembering her uncle Benny who's not really her uncle and his house at the edge of the bush heirs of the living body the next story recalls an actual uncle uncle Craig who's kind of a town historian and his spinster sisters aunt Elspeth and Auntie grace princess Ida is mostly about her mother mother's taking a contract to sell encyclopedias door-to-door and bringing Dell along with her the age of fat faith pardon me is the Augustinian episode in her confessions its young dell searching for God and experimenting with different faiths by visiting every Church in town changes in ceremonies is about school especially performing in the school operetta the Pied Piper in lives of girls and women she details her growing romantic relationship with another student and an older man mr. Chamberlain touches her and masturbates in front of her which is likely the scene the later got the book banned in Peterborough the same place that banned margaret Lawrence's book the same place that apparently bans every book in Canada in baptizing the final chapter she remembers losing her virginity to another lover garnet French but not ultimately losing her own identity to him that's the episode by the way the CBC made a film of Eliza girls and women in the early 70s and that's the episode that our focus is on in a short epilogue called the photographer the now mature Dell Jordan looks back and talks about becoming a writer about leaving Jubilee and becoming a writer the novel was always about that it was always about becoming a writer even when the young dell didn't know it she reads all throughout the book remembering books alongside people as equally important friends and mentors weathering Heights the life of charlotte brontë brave new world Tennyson war and peace many many more what she likes best about uncle Benny's house is the tabloids that he subscribes to and that he lets her read and these are you know sensational tabloid stories about women giving birth to monkeys and fathers feeding their dead daughters to the Hogs from uncle Craig who's the historian to the town she learns the importance of recording facts all the details of daily life that he tries to cram into his history of Jubilee from her aunts she learns what she calls a whole new language her answered deeply sarcastic ironic people who never say anything straight everything is a little joke for them and she learns the language of irony of saying something that doesn't mean what you say it means from miss Ferris and the school operetta she learns what she calls devotion to the manufacturer that's odd from the school operetta she learns what she calls devotion to the manufacturer of what was not true not plainly necessary but more important once belief had been granted to it than anything else we had in other words she learns the importance of telling lies to tell the truth of telling fiction from garnett French she learns her most important lesson which is to leave him and to leave Jubilee to get started in what she calls my real life to become the writer that wrote this book the epilogue was the most difficult part of the book from Monroe to write it's only a half dozen pages she kept putting it out taking it in taking it out putting it in taking it out rewriting it in her papers at the University of Calgary there are at least 10 surviving drafts of the epilogue and 20 of the last three paragraphs in it the epilogue Dell talks about giving up on a writing a novel that she was going to write about Jubilee and that novel would have been a romantic gothic novel that would change Jubilee into an older darker town she says well what happened is that she visits one of the people that she was going to include in the novel and make into this gothic character and she is struck by the complete ordinariness is the word she uses of both him and his house which causes her to abandon the romantic gothic novel that she's working on and look instead of reality and turned to writing realism for that reason the epilogue is commonly read as a kind of clear artistic credo that is del has grown out of childish romance represented by her abandoned gothic novel and she is now ready like her creator for mature realism to write realistically about the town that she is about to leave behind but if Del's novel is romance and she's given up on it it's important to realize that she also abandons the text in the novel that represents realism and that is the manuscript of the history of the town that her uncle left behind when he died and that her aunts fervently hope she will fix up and add it and eventually publish but what she leaves in a cellar to be destroyed by rot so it is not the del has grown out of romance into realism it's not that simple drafts the novel Munroe explicitly links that abandoned manuscript of a town to the abandoned gothic novel that is in her mind it was important that del was walking away from both kinds of writing realizing that both novels have their limits this is from the last two pages of the book at ten o'clock the banks would open the Canadian Bank of Commerce and the Dominion Bank across the street at 12:30 a bus would go through the town southbound from Owen Sound to London if anybody wanted to get on it there would be a flag out in front of Haynes restaurant that's the bus that in the story she does get on and leaves town on Bobbie Sheriff the guy I mentioned that she visits that she wanted to turn into a character in the novel Bobbie sheriff talked about rats and white flour his sister's photograph face hung in the hall of the high school close to the persistent hiss of the drinking fountain her face was stubborn unrevealing lowered so that shadows had settled in her eyes people's lives in Jubilee as elsewhere were dull simple amazing and unfathomable deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum it did not occur to me that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee voracious and misguided as uncle Craig Outta Jenkins Band writing his history I would want to write things down I would try to make lists a list of all the stores and businesses going up and down the Main Street and who owned them a list of family names names on the tombstones in the cemetery and any inscriptions underneath a list of the titles of movies the plate of a Lyceum theater from 1938 to 1950 roughly speaking names on the Cenotaph names for the first world war then for the second names of the streets and the patterns they lay in the hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy heartbreaking and 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 Barker walls every smell pothole pain crack delusion held still and held together radiant everlasting realism she learns making lists recording evidence there is not going to be enough because no list can hold everything no matter how big it is romance isn't enough because it hides the ordinary it overlooks the presence of kitchen linoleum inside the deep caves the trick as Dell realizes and as Alice Munro realized is to see that there is nothing ordinary about ordinary lives that and you know a great deal of hard work to see in other words that the ordinary is magical with art historians call magic realism the style of Edward Hopper or of Andrew Wyeth another painter the Monroe greatly admired and said so in the same interview this is Christina's world from 1948 it looks real but all that's real about it is the technique the technique of realism she looks like a young girl playing outside she was actually a disabled spinster Wyeth's neighbor she looked closely at her arm it's the arm of an old woman not the arm of a child she's not playing this is how she got around she needed a wheelchair but she was too poor and too proud for it so she dragged herself across the farmyard to get to her house between the house and the barn it's not realism it's seeing the magical inside the real the the the young girl trapped in the body of an old woman or the style of the Canadian painter Alex Colville another painter the Munroe said that she loved in the same interview this is Colville's best-known painting it's called horse and train from 1957 and the original is at the Art Gallery of Hamilton people have read all kinds of meanings into those paintings things like you know machine versus nature all Colville would say himself about it is that ordinary things are important and that is what Dell Jordan learned when she visits Bobbie Sheriff in the epilogue and he offers her a piece of cake and then takes something that is just a daily ordinary thing clearing a table and turns it into something magical by just doing what she describes in the book as something that looks like a ballet I imagined it something like this you know he just he takes the plate and then he lifts himself up on his toes and she's so struck by it because it's this ordinary thing and he's turned it into something magical that she doesn't yet understand but the lesson that she learns is that if you look closely enough the real is the romantic the ordinary is magical because Alice Munro had not yet become as important to write her as she is now when lives of girls came out it wasn't reviewed so much as a book about how she became a writer or the kind of writing that she became it was reviewed as a book about a girl's sexual awakening Cosmopolitan magazine said Munro has put the awakening female under glass as Salinger once did the male they called her a lighter Sylvia Plath in The Globe and Mail Phyllis Groth Kurth said that it might help men understand women better and give women a tender and at times jolting recognition of themselves John Metcalf the Montreal star called it a loving and accurate portrait of a people at a time and place you can touch and smell every word on the page it won the Canadian inaugural Booksellers Association International Book Year award and by March 1973 the American edition was in its third printing in the early 1970s Monroe's career began to take off she sold a story to McCall's magazine for several thousand dollars which was more than she'd been paid for any story before and much more by the way than her advance for lives and girls and women which was nothing mcgraw-hill was impressed enough by the sales of lives in the states to publish an American edition of dance of the happy shades and Signet published a mass-market paperback of lives of girls and women in 1974 with the quote from Cosmo cosmopolitan prominently featured on the front on her third attempt she won a $7,500 Canada Council grant in 1973 which is the only County Council grant she has ever received when The Globe and Mail's William French visited Monroe's books in the summer of 1973 she had gone from bookseller to one of the stores top selling authors he said right behind Pierre Berton and Farley Mowat her marriage meanwhile was not going so well hi in 1972 she got her own apartment in Victoria while still looking after the host in Rockland doing the cooking and cleaning she left Jim and Victoria in September of 1973 she intended to find an apartment of Vancouver but as she was packing she got a call from the chair of English at York University offering her a creative writing class to teach because it was cheaper she found a place to live in London Ontario and commuted to York by train twice a week she came to London I should say with herself and her two youngest daughters she hated York she hated teaching she thought teaching creative writing was a fraud and she she quit in January five months later in May of 1974 she published her third book something I've been meaning to tell you these are mostly earlier work this these are stories that she salvaged from the attempts at novels and short stories she wrote a big Vancouver and Victoria in the 50s and 60s many of them were about conflict between the generations in particular an older generation and for lack of a better word hippies one of my favorites in the book it's called walking on water and it's about an old man living in an apartment building near the ocean in British Columbia with hippies for neighbors and he's utterly baffled by them but but still trying to understand them this was Monroe's first appearance on a Canadian bestseller list but reviewers had trouble with it it's probably the least well reviewed book of her career mostly what they had problems with was what we would now call its metafictional passages that is passages in the story where the narrator interrupts the story to talk about how difficult it is to write the story steps out and it speaks to the reader directly and the reviewers didn't like that what I think those reviewers couldn't yet see is that Munroe stories like glance are not stories at all not to her they are attempts to make sense of people why they do the things to do why they remember the kinds of things they do writing for her is not fiction not really it is the truth it is the best shot she can make it the truth and the truth is difficult and occasionally it requires noting that the truth is difficult for the academic year of 1974 to 75 she took over from Margaret Lawrence as writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario and she reunited there with Gerald from lund who's a Western classmate of hers from back in the day and an old flame she wrote her friend Audrey Thomas about the relationship saying this time it's real he's 50 free a good man if I ever saw one tough and gentle like in the old tire ads maybe you'll know what that means and this is the big thing grown up in August she left London to live with freman and his mother in their house in Clinton which is 36 kilometers south of Wingham and until recently Monroe's home a year later she began the second most important literary relationship of her life which was with a new agent New York agent by the name of Virginia barber who had a PhD in American literature and an interest in Canadian writers she Barbara wrote to miss roe cold called her and said look I want to help you I think I can get you more of a marker than you already have especially in the States they met for the first time at a party at Pierre Burton's house and Kleinberg within a year Barbara had placed Monroe's first story at the New Yorker that same year 1977 she convinced the New Yorker to sign Alice Munro - the same first reading agreement that Mavis Galant at that is an agreement in which the New Yorker commits to reading everything by them first and gives a bonus that they published more than a certain number of stories in a calendar year Alice Monroe has since published 60 stories in The New Yorker that's half of Mavis Collins number but it's 60 more than mine in 1978 barber negotiated separate contracts for Monroe's fourth book who do you think you are with Macmillan and Canada and cannot from the United States the American edition has a different title it's called the beggar maid and the text is slightly different because of mostly because of different editors now the painting on the cover by the way of the Canadian mission is by Ken Danby who is a painter very much in the Alice Colville School of hyperrealism it's a collection of stories about a woman named Rose who grew up poor in a small Ontario town wins a scholarship to university has a failed marriage and goes back to her hometown to settle her stepmother into long-term care the title which has become a very well-known Canadian phrase was before is now and partly because of the book it's about the same kind of suspicion of ambition that Dell encounters in who do you think in life's girls and women I should say you know who do you think you are the kind of suspicion of ambition that greeted Munro and Dell when they got good grades which said they wanted to go to university or write books who do you think you are it's often cited as a very Canadian sentiment but it's not or not just I saw an interview a few years ago with the Canadian comedian Mike Meyers whose parents are from Scotland and his Mike Meyers had just gotten his face put on a stamp and the end of viewers said you know your folks must be pretty impressed by that and he said well not really they're from Scotland and you know the unofficial model they're from pardon me from Liverpool is where they're from Liverpool and he said the unofficial model of Liverpool is who do you think you are so it's not necessarily uniquely Canadian senton but maybe we brought it with us I'm not sure it sold 10,000 copies in Canada and at one Alice Munro her second Governor General's Award after one more collection with macmillan called the moons of jupiter in 1982 Monroe's editor Douglas Gibson moved to and Stewart and she moved with him she wrote to a friend in 1986 that Douglas Gibson was the first person in Canadian publishing who made me feel there was no need to apologize for being a short story writer his respect for my work changed me from a minor literary writer who sold poorly into a major writer who sold well she has published nine collections of stories with McClung story from the progress and love progress of love in 1986 to her most recent book dear life in 2012 and from what I understand that's it she won't be writing anymore though she has said that before this time I think it's for real it would take me less time to list the awards that her books have not received than the ones they have received but here's a few three Governor General's Awards two gilr prizes the Rogers trust writer prize for runaway the WH Smiths List award WH Smith literary award for open secrets the u.s. National Book Critics Circle Award for the love of a good woman the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime body of work in 2009 and of course the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature as a master of the contemporary short story that's one of her fans that day in 1983 she declined the Order of Canada she said that she's fine with awards for her books but she's not comfortable with awards that are given by virtue of celebrity is what she said so it's okay for the books but not for me especially in her early years Munro liked to say that she did not think of herself as an experimental writer and that she didn't think of herself as an intellectual writer that she wasn't at all concerned with ideas she said that what excited her as a writer was what you might call the surface of life but she added in a separate interview that for her the surface has her phrase a kind of magic to it the intensity of what is there she said there's no getting around the fact that writing is an act of magic it is an act you might say of a special unsparing unsentimental love I admire Mavis gallant more but I enjoy Alice Monroe more partly I think because Monroe is less dense more readable than than Mavis gallant but it's also that Monroe tell stories that are closer to more experiment more readers experiences of life Gallants stories tend to be unless you've had a lot of experience sitting on patios and European hotels speaking with people in nine languages they don't tend to be from my experience at least whereas Monroe tell stories that are closer to my own experience especially but not only in Canada I have taught lives of grouse women many times in surveys of Canadian fiction it is always my students favorite novel especially but not just the women and no matter where they come from it turns out that small towns are pretty much the same everywhere so I will stop there but I wanted to thank you all very much for your attention and your interest you've been a very gracious audience you

Channel: Nick Mount

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Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

Keywords: Alice Munro, Canadian Literature, Nick Mount

Id: crYGbmofd_g

Length: 62min 8sec (3728 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019