Alice
Munro
Interviewed by Jeanne
McCulloch, Mona Simpson
The Paris Review - The Art
of Fiction No. 137
There is no direct flight from New York City to Clinton, Ontario, the
Canadian town of three thousand where Alice Munro lives most of the year. We
left LaGuardia early on a June morning, rented a car in Toronto, and drove for
three hours on roads that grew smaller and more rural. Around dusk, we pulled
up to the house where Munro lives with her second husband, Gerry Fremlin. It
has a deep backyard and an eccentric flower garden and is, as she explained,
the house where Fremlin was born. In the kitchen, Munro was preparing a simple
meal with fragrant local herbs. The dining room is lined floor to ceiling with
books; on one side a small table holds a manual typewriter. It is here that
Munro works.
After a while, Munro took us to Goderich,
a bigger town, the county seat, where she installed us in the Bedford Hotel on
the square across from the courthouse. The hotel is a nineteenth-century
building with comfortable rooms (twin beds and no air-conditioning) that would
seem to lodge a librarian or a frontier schoolteacher in one of Munro’s
stories. Over the next three days, we talked in her home, but never with the
tape recorder on. We conducted the interview in our small room at the hotel, as
Munro wanted to keep “the business out of the house.” Both Munro and her
husband grew up within twenty miles of where they now live; they knew the
history of almost every building we passed, admired, or ate inside. We asked
what sort of literary community was available in the immediate area. Although
there is a library in Goderich, we were told the nearest good bookstore was in
Stratford, some thirty miles away. When we asked whether there were any other
local writers, she drove us past a ramshackle house where a man sat bare
chested on the back stoop, crouched over a typewriter, surrounded by cats.
“He’s out there every day,” she said. “Rain or shine. I don’t know him, but I’m
dying of curiosity to find out what he’s up to.”
Our last morning in Canada, supplied with
directions, we sought out the house in which Alice Munro had grown up. Her
father had built the house and raised mink there. After several dead ends, we
found it, a pretty brick house at the very end of a country road, facing an
open field where an airplane rested, alighted temporarily it seemed. It was,
from our spot, easy to imagine the glamor of the air, the pilot taking a
country wife away, as in “White Dump,” or the young aviation stuntsman who
lands in a field like this in “How I Met My Husband.”
Like the house, like the landscape of
Ontario, which resembles the American Midwest, Munro is not imposing. She is
gracious, with a quiet humor. She is the author of seven books of short
stories, including the forthcoming Open Secrets, and one
novel, Lives of Girls and Women;
she has received the Governor-General’s Award (Canada’s most prestigious
literary prize), and is regularly featured in Best American Short Stories
(Richard Ford recently included two Alice Munro stories in the volume he
edited), and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; she also is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker. Despite
these considerable accomplishments, Munro still speaks of writing with some of
the reverence and insecurity one hears in the voices of beginners. She has none
of the bravura or bluster of a famous writer, and it is easy to forget that she
is one. Speaking of her own work, she makes what she does sound not exactly
easy, but possible, as if anyone could do it if they only worked hard enough.
As we left, we felt that contagious sense of possibility. It seems simple—but
her writing has a perfect simplicity that takes years and many drafts to
master. As Cynthia Ozick has said, “She is our Chekhov and is going to outlast
most of her contemporaries.”
INTERVIEWER
We went back to the house where you grew
up this morning: did you live there your entire childhood?
ALICE MUNRO
Yes. When my father died, he was still
living in that house on the farm, which was a fox and mink farm. It’s changed a
lot though. Now it’s a beauty parlor called Total Indulgence. I think they have
the beauty parlor in the back wing, and they’ve knocked down the kitchen
entirely.
INTERVIEWER
Have you been inside it since then?
MUNRO
No I haven’t, but I though if I did I’d
ask to see the living room. There’s the fireplace my father built and I’d like
to see that. I’ve sometimes thought I should go in and ask for a manicure.
INTERVIEWER
We noticed a plane on the field across the
road and thought of your stories “White Dump” and “How I Met My Husband.”
MUNRO
Yes, that was an airport for a while. The
man who owned that farm had a hobby of flying planes, and he had a little plane
of his own. He never liked farming so he got out of it and became a flight
instructor. He’s still alive. In perfect health and one of the handsomest men
I’ve ever known. He retired from flight instruction when he was seventy-five.
Within maybe three months of retirement he went on a trip and got some odd
disease you get from bats in caves.
INTERVIEWER
The stories in your first collection, Dance
of the Happy Shades, are very resonant of that area, the world of
your childhood. At what point in your life were those stories written?
MUNRO
The writing of those stories stretched
over fifteen years. “The Day of the Butterfly” was the earliest one. That was
probably written when I was about twenty-one. And I can remember very well
writing “Thanks for the Ride” because my first baby was lying in the crib
beside me. So I was twenty-two. The really late stories were written in my
thirties. “Dance of the Happy Shades” is one; “The Peace of Utrecht” is
another. “Images” is the very latest. “Walker Brothers Cowboy” was also written
after I was thirty. So there’s a really great range.
INTERVIEWER
How do they seem to hold up now? Do you
reread them?
MUNRO
There’s an early one in that collection
called “The Shining Houses,” which I had to read at Harborfront in Toronto two
or three years ago for a special event celebrating the history of Tamarack
Review. Since it was originally published in one of the early issues
of that magazine, I had to get up and read it, and it was very hard. I think I
wrote that story when I was twenty-two. I kept editing as I read, catching all
the tricks I used at that time, which now seemed very dated. I was trying to
fix it up fast, with my eyes darting ahead to the next paragraph as I read,
because I hadn’t read it ahead of time. I never do read things ahead of time.
When I read an early story I can see things I wouldn’t do now, things people
were doing in the fifties.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever revise a story after it’s been
published? Apparently, before he died, Proust rewrote the first volumes of Remembrance
of Things Past.
MUNRO
Yes, and Henry James rewrote simple,
understandable stuff so it was obscure and difficult. Actually I’ve done it
recently. The story “Carried Away” was included in Best
American Short Stories 1991. I read it again in the anthology,
because I wanted to see what it was like and I found a paragraph that I thought
was really soggy. It was a very important little paragraph, maybe two
sentences. I just took a pen and rewrote it up in the margin of the anthology
so that I’d have it there to refer to when I published the story in book form.
I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I
wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing
that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at
the end I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again it
seems a bit obtrusive. So I’m not too sure about this sort of thing. The answer
may be that one should stop this behavior. There should be a point where you
say, the way you would with a child, this isn’t mine anymore.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve mentioned that you don’t show your
works in progress to friends.
MUNRO
No, I don’t show anything in progress to
anybody.
INTERVIEWER
How much do you rely on your editors?
MUNRO
The New Yorker was
really my first experience with serious editing. Previously I’d more or less
just had copyediting with a few suggestions—not much. There has to be an
agreement between the editor and me about the kind of thing that can happen. An
editor who thought nothing happened in William Maxwell’s stories, for example,
would be of no use to me. There also has to be a very sharp eye for the ways
that I could be deceiving myself. Chip McGrath at The
New Yorker was my
first editor, and he was so good. I was amazed that anybody could see that
deeply into what I wanted to do. Sometimes we didn’t do much, but occasionally
he gave me a lot of direction. I rewrote one story called “The Turkey Season,”
which he had already bought. I thought he would simply accept the new version
but he didn’t. He said, Well, there are things about the new version I like
better, and there are things about the old version I like better. Why don’t we
see? He never says anything like, We will. So we put it together and got a
better story that way, I think.
INTERVIEWER
How was this accomplished? By phone or by
mail? Do you ever go into The New Yorkerand hammer
it out?
MUNRO
By mail. We have a very fruitful phone
relationship, but we’ve only seen each other a few times.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first publish in The
New Yorker?
MUNRO
“Royal Beatings” was my first story, and
it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to The
New Yorker in the
1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in
Canada. The New Yorker sent me nice notes though—penciled,
informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging. I
still remember one of them: The writing is very nice, but the theme is a bit
overly familiar. It was, too. It was a romance between two aging people—an
aging spinster who knows this is it for her when she’s proposed to by an aging
farmer. I had a lot of aging spinsters in my stories. It was called “The Day
the Asters Bloomed.” It was really awful. And I didn’t write this when I was
seventeen; I was twenty-five. I wonder why I wrote about aging spinsters. I
didn’t know any.
INTERVIEWER
And you married young. It’s not as though
you were anticipating a life as an aging spinster.
MUNRO
I think I knew that at heart I was an
aging spinster.
INTERVIEWER
Were you always writing?
MUNRO
Since about grade seven or eight.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a serious writer by the time you
went to college?
MUNRO
Yes. I had no chance to be anything else
because I had no money. I knew I would only be at university two years because
the scholarships available at that time lasted only two years. It was this
little vacation in my life, a wonderful time. I had been in charge of the house
at home when I was in my teens, so university was about the only time in my
life that I haven’t had to do housework.
INTERVIEWER
Did you get married right after your two
years?
MUNRO
I got married right after the second year.
I was twenty. We went to Vancouver. That was the big thing about getting
married—this huge adventure, moving. As far away as we could get and stay in
the country. We were only twenty and twenty-two. We immediately set up a very
proper kind of middle-class existence. We were thinking of getting a house and
having a baby, and we promptly did these things. I had my first baby at
twenty-one.
INTERVIEWER
And you were writing all through that?
MUNRO
I was writing desperately all the time I
was pregnant because I thought I would never be able to write afterwards. Each
pregnancy spurred me to get something big done before the baby was born.
Actually I didn’t get anything big done.
INTERVIEWER
In “Thanks for the Ride,” you write from
the point of view of a rather callous city boy who picks up a poor town girl
for the night and sleeps with her and is alternately attracted to and revolted
by the poverty of her life. It seems striking that this story came from a time
when your life was so settled and proper.
MUNRO
A friend of my husband’s came to visit us
the summer when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter. He stayed for a month
or so. He worked for the National Film Board, and he was doing a film up there.
He told us a lot of stuff—we just talked the way you do, anecdotally about our
lives. He told the story about being in a small town on Georgian Bay and going
out with a local girl. It was the encounter of a middle-class boy with
something that was quite familiar to me but not familiar to him. So I
immediately identified strongly with the girl and her family and her situation,
and I guess I wrote the story fairly soon afterwards because my baby was
looking at me from the crib.
INTERVIEWER
How old were you when that first book came
out?
MUNRO
I was about thirty-six. I’d been writing
these stories over the years and finally an editor at Ryerson Press, a Canadian
publisher that has since been taken over by McGraw-Hill, wrote and asked me if
I had enough stories for a book. Originally he was going to put me in a book
with two or three other writers. That fell through, but he still had a bunch of
my stories. Then he quit but passed me onto another editor, who said, If you
could write three more stories, we’d have a book. And so I wrote “Images,”
“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” and “Postcard” during the last year before the book
was published.
INTERVIEWER
Did you publish those stories in
magazines?
MUNRO
Most of them got into Tamarack
Review. It was a nice little magazine, a very brave magazine. The
editor said he was the only editor in Canada who knew all his readers by their
first names.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever had a specific time to
write?
MUNRO
When the kids were little, my time was as
soon as they left for school. So I worked very hard in those years. My husband
and I owned a bookstore, and even when I was working there, I stayed at home
until noon. I was supposed to be doing housework, and I would also do my
writing then. Later on, when I wasn’t working everyday in the store, I would write
until everybody came home for lunch and then after they went back, probably
till about two-thirty, and then I would have a quick cup of coffee and start
doing the housework, trying to get it all done before late afternoon.
INTERVIEWER
What about before the girls were old
enough to go to school?
MUNRO
Their naps.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote when they had naps?
MUNRO
Yes. From one to three in the afternoon. I
wrote a lot of stuff that wasn’t any good, but I was fairly productive. The
year I wrote my second book, Lives of Girls and Women,
I was enormously productive. I had four kids because one of the girls’ friends
was living with us, and I worked in the store two days a week. I used to work
until maybe one o’clock in the morning and then get up at six. And I remember
thinking, You know, maybe I’ll die, this is terrible,
I’ll have a heart attack. I was only about thirty-nine or so, but I was
thinking this; then I thought, Well even if I do, I’ve got that many pages
written now. They can see how it’s going to come out. It was a kind of
desperate, desperate race. I don’t have that kind of energy now.
INTERVIEWER
What was the process involved in writing Lives?
MUNRO
I remember the day I started to write
that. It was in January, a Sunday. I went down to the bookstore, which wasn’t
open Sundays, and locked myself in. My husband had said he would get dinner, so
I had the afternoon. I remember looking around at all the great literature that
was around me and thinking, You fool! What are you doing here? But then I went
up to the office and started to write the section called “Princess Ida,” which
is about my mother. 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. So, once I started to write that, I was off. Then I made a big
mistake. I tried to make it a regular novel, an ordinary sort of childhood
adolescence novel. About March I saw it wasn’t working. It didn’t feel right to
me, and I thought I would have to abandon it. I was very depressed. Then it
came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story
form. Then I could handle it. That’s when I learned that I was never going to
write a real novel because I could not think that way.
INTERVIEWER
The Beggar Maid, too, is a sort of a novel because it’s interconnected stories.
MUNRO
I don’t want to second-guess things too
much, but I’ve often wanted to do another series of stories. In my new book, Open
Secrets, there are characters who reappear. Bea Doud in “Vandals”
is mentioned as the little girl in “Carried Away,” which is the first story I
wrote for the collection. Billy Doud is the son of the librarian. They’re all
mentioned in “Spaceships Have Landed.” But I mustn’t let this sort of plan
overtake the stories themselves. If I start shaping one story so it will fit
with another, I am probably doing something wrong, using force on it that I
oughtn’t. So I don’t know that I’ll ever do that kind of series again, though I
love the idea of it. Katherine Mansfield said something in one of her letters
like, Oh, I hope I write a novel, I hope I don’t die just leaving these bits
and pieces. It’s very hard to wean yourself away from this bits-and-pieces
feeling if all you’re leaving behind is scattered stories. I’m sure you could
think of Chekhov and everything, but still.
INTERVIEWER
And Chekhov always wanted to write a
novel. He was going to call it “Stories from the Lives of My Friends.”
MUNRO
I know. And I know that feeling that you
could have this achievement of having put everything into one package.
INTERVIEWER
When you start writing a story do you
already know what the story will be? Is it already plotted out?
MUNRO
Not altogether. Any story that’s going to
be any good is usually going to change. Right now I’m starting a story cold.
I’ve been working on it every morning, and it’s pretty slick. I don’t really
like it, but I think maybe, at some point, I’ll be into it. Usually, I have a
lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn’t
have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head
for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that
work by filling notebooks.
INTERVIEWER
You use notebooks?
MUNRO
I have stacks of notebooks that contain this
terribly clumsy writing, which is just getting anything down. I often wonder,
when I look at these first drafts, if there was any point in doing this at all.
I’m the opposite of a writer with a quick gift, you know, someone who gets it
piped in. I don’t grasp it very readily at all, the “it” being whatever I’m
trying to do. I often get on the wrong track and have to haul myself back.
INTERVIEWER
How do you realize you’re on the wrong
track?
MUNRO
I could be writing away one day and think
I’ve done very well; I’ve done more pages than I usually do. Then I get up the
next morning and realize I don’t want to work on it anymore. When I have a
terrible reluctance to go near it, when I would have to push myself to
continue, I generally know that something is badly wrong. Often, in about three
quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think
I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad
depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It’s
sort of like a love affair: you’re getting out of all the disappointment and
misery by going out with some new man you don’t really like at all, but you
haven’t noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about
the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it. But that only seems to
happen after I’ve said, No, this isn’t going to work, forget it.
INTERVIEWER
Can you always do that?
MUNRO
Sometimes I can’t, and I spend the whole
day in a very bad mood. That’s the only time I’m really irritable. If Gerry
talks to me or keeps going in and out of the room or bangs around a lot, I am
on edge and enraged. And if he sings or something like that, it’s terrible. I’m
trying to think something through, and I’m just running into brick walls; I’m
not getting through it. Generally I’ll do that for a while before I’ll give it
up. This whole process might take up to a week, the time of trying to think it
through, trying to retrieve it, then giving it up and thinking about something
else, and then getting it back, usually quite unexpectedly, when I’m in the
grocery store or out for a drive. I’ll think, Oh well, I have to do it from the
point of view of so-and-so, and I have to cut this character out, and of course
these people are not married, or whatever. The big change, which is usually the
radical change.
INTERVIEWER
That makes the story work?
MUNRO
I don’t even know if it makes the story
better. What it does is make it possible for me to continue to write. That’s
what I mean by saying I don’t think I have this overwhelming thing that comes
in and dictates to me. I only seem to get a grasp on what I want to write about
with the greatest difficulty. And barely.
INTERVIEWER
Do you often change perspective or tone?
MUNRO
Oh yes, sometimes I’m uncertain, and I
will do first person to third over and over again. This is one of my major
problems. I often do first person to get myself into a story and then feel that
for some reason it isn’t working. I’m quite vulnerable to what people tell me
to do at that point. My agent didn’t like the first person in “The Albanian
Virgin,” which I think, since I wasn’t perfectly sure anyway, made me change
it. But then I changed it back to first again.
INTERVIEWER
How consciously, on a thematic level, do
you understand what you’re doing?
MUNRO
Well, it’s not very conscious. I can see
the ways a story could go wrong. I see the negative things more easily than the
positive things. Some stories don’t work as well as others, and some stories
are lighter in conception than others.
INTERVIEWER
Lighter?
MUNRO
They feel lighter to me. I don’t feel a big
commitment to them. I’ve been reading Muriel Sparks’s autobiography. She
thinks, because she is a Christian, a Catholic, that God is the real author.
And it behooves us not to try to take over that authority, not to try to write
fiction that is about the meaning of life, that tries to grasp what only God
can grasp. So one writes entertainments. I think this is what she says. I think
I write stories sometimes that I intend as entertainments.
INTERVIEWER
Can you give an example?
MUNRO
Well I think that “Jack Randa Hotel,”
which I quite like, works as an entertainment. I want it to, anyway. Although a
story like “Friend of my Youth” does not work as an entertainment. It works in
some other way. It works at my deepest level.
INTERVIEWER
Do you agonize just as much over those
pieces you consider “entertainments” as over your central material?
MUNRO
Yes, that’s true.
INTERVIEWER
Are there stories that haven’t been any
trouble at all to write?
MUNRO
I actually wrote “Friend of my Youth” very
quickly. From an anecdote. There is a young man I know who works in the library
in Goderich and researches things for me. He was at our house one night and he
began to talk about neighbors of his family, neighbors who lived on the next
farm. They belonged to a religion that forbade them to play card games, and so
they played Crokinole, which is a board game. He just told me about that, and
then I asked him about the family, their religion, what they were like. He
described these people and then told me about the marriage scandal: the young
man who comes along who is a member of their church and gets engaged to the
older daughter. Then, low and behold, the youngersister was pregnant
so the marriage has to be switched. And they go on all living together in the
same house. The stuff about fixing the house, painting it over is all true too.
The couple painted their half, and the older sister didn’t—half the house got
painted.
INTERVIEWER
Was there really a nurse?
MUNRO
No, the nurse I invented, but I was given
the name. We had a fund-raising event at the Blyth Theater, about ten miles
away from here. Everybody contributed something to be auctioned off to raise
money, and somebody came up with the idea that I could auction off the right to
have the successful bidder’s name used for a character in my next story. A
woman from Toronto paid four hundred dollars to be a character. Her name was
Audrey Atkinson. I suddenly thought, That’s the nurse! I never heard from her.
I hope she didn’t mind.
INTERVIEWER
What was the inception of that story?
MUNRO
When I started to write the story we were
on one of our trips from Ontario to British Columbia; we drive out every year
in fall and drive back in spring. So I wasn’t writing, but I was thinking about
this family in the motels at night. Then the whole story of my mother closed
around it, and then me telling the story closed around my mother, and I saw
what it was about. I would say that story came easily. I didn’t have any difficulty.
I’ve done the character of my mother so often, and my feelings towards her, I
didn’t have to look for those.
INTERVIEWER
You have several mothers in your work.
That particular mother appears in other stories, and she seems very real. But
so does Flo, Rose’s stepmother in “The Beggar Maid.”
MUNRO
But Flo wasn’t a real person. She was
someone very like people I’ve known, but she was one of these composite
characters that writers talk about. I think Flo was a force because I wrote
that story when I had just come back to live here after being away for
twenty-three years. The whole culture here hit me with a tremendous bang. I
felt that the world I had been using, the world of my childhood, was a
glazed-over world of memory once I came back and confronted the real thing. Flo
was an embodiment of the real thing, so much harsher than I had remembered.
INTERVIEWER
You obviously travel a great deal, but
your work seems fundamentally informed by a rural sensibility. Do you find that
stories you hear around here are more resonant for you, or did you use just as
much material from your life when you lived in cities?
MUNRO
When you live in a small town you hear
more things, about all sorts of people. In a city you mainly hear stories about
your own sort of people. If you’re a woman there’s always a lot from your
friends. I got “Differently” from my life in Victoria, and a lot of “White
Dump.” I got the story “Fits” from a real and terrible incident that happened
here—the murder-suicide of a couple in their sixties. In a city, I would only
have read about it in the paper; I wouldn’t have picked up all the threads.
INTERVIEWER
Is it easier for you to invent things or
to do composites?
MUNRO
I’m doing less personal writing now than I
used to for a very simple obvious reason. You use up your childhood, unless
you’re able, like William Maxwell, to keep going back and finding wonderful new
levels in it. The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is
your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your
children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and
visit you in the nursing home. Maybe it’s advisable to move on to writing those
stories that are more observation.
INTERVIEWER
Unlike your family stories, a number of
your stories could be called historical. Do you ever go looking for this kind
of material, or do you just wait for it to turn up?
MUNRO
I never have a problem with finding
material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with
the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem. For the historical
pieces I have had to search out a lot of facts. I knew for years that I wanted
to write a story about one of the Victorian lady writers, one of the
authoresses of this area. Only I couldn’t find quite the verse I wanted; all of
it was so bad that it was ludicrous. I wanted to have it a little better than
that. So I wrote it. When I was writing that
story I looked in a lot of old newspapers, the kind of stuff my husband has
around—he does historical research about Huron County, our part of Ontario.
He’s a retired geographer. I got very strong images of the town, which I call
Walley. I got very strong images from newspaper clippings. Then, when I needed
specific stuff, I’d sometimes get the man at the library to do it for me. To
find out things about old cars or something like that, or the Presbyterian
church in the 1850s. He’s wonderful. He loves doing it.
INTERVIEWER
What about those aunts, the wonderful
aunts who appear.
MUNRO
My great aunt and my grandmother were very
important in our lives. After all, my family lived on this collapsing
enterprise of a fox and mink farm, just beyond the most disreputable part of
town, and they lived in real town, in a nice house,
and they kept up civilization. So there was always tension between their house
and ours, but it was very important that I had that. I loved it when I was a
little girl. Then, when I was an adolescent, I felt rather burdened by it. My
mother was not in the role of the lead female in my life by that time, though
she was an enormously important person; she wasn’t there as the person who set
the standards anymore. So these older women moved into that role, and though
they didn’t set any standards that I was at all interested in, there was a
constant tension there that was important to me.
INTERVIEWER
Then you didn’t actually move into town as
the mother and daughter do in “Lives of Girls and Women”?
MUNRO
We did for one winter. My mother decided
she wanted to rent a house in town for one winter, and she did. And she gave
the ladies’ luncheon party, she tried to break into society, which was totally
impenetrable to her. She couldn’t do it. There was just no understanding there.
I do remember coming back to the farmhouse that had been occupied by men, my
father and my brother, and you couldn’t see the pattern on the linoleum
anymore. It seemed as if mud had flowed into the house.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a story you like that others
don’t? Are there any stories your husband doesn’t like for instance?
MUNRO
I liked “The Moon in the Orange Street
Skating Rink” a lot, but Gerry didn’t like that story. It was from anecdotes
he’d told me about his childhood, so I think he expected them to come out quite
differently. Because I thought he would like it; I didn’t have qualms. And then
he said, Well, not one of your best. That’s the only time we ever had trouble
about anything I wrote. Since then he’s been really careful about not reading
something until I’m away, and then if he likes it he will mention it, but maybe
he won’t mention it at all. I think that’s the way you have to manage in a
marriage.
INTERVIEWER
Gerry’s from here, less than twenty miles
from where you grew up. Are his anecdotes and his memories more useful to you
than those of Jim, your first husband?
MUNRO
No, Jim was from near Toronto. But he was
from a very different background. He lived in a sort of upper-middle-class
commuter town where most of the men worked in Toronto and were professional.
Cheever wrote about towns like that around New York. I’d never known people of
this class before, so the way they thought about things was interesting as
hell, but it wasn’t anecdotal. I guess I was too hostile for a long time to
appreciate it; I was more left-wing then. Whereas the things that Gerry tells
me are further extensions of all the stuff I remember from growing up—though
there’s an entire difference between a boy’s life in town and a girl’s life on
the farm. The greatest part of Gerry’s life was probably between the ages of
seven and fourteen, when the boys roamed the town in gangs. They weren’t
delinquents or anything, but they did more or less as they pleased, like a
subculture within the town. Girls were not part of that, I don’t think ever. We
were always in little knots of girlfriends, we just didn’t have the freedom. So
it was interesting to learn all this.
INTERVIEWER
How long did you live outside of this
region?
MUNRO
I got married the end of 1951, went to
live in Vancouver, and stayed there until 1963, and then we moved to Victoria
where we started our bookstore, Munro’s. And I came back, I think it would be,
in the summer of 1973. So I had only been ten years in Victoria. I was married
for twenty years.
INTERVIEWER
Did you move back east because you met
Gerry, or for work?
MUNRO
For work. And also because I had been
living with my first husband in Victoria for ten years. The marriage was
unraveling for a year or two. It’s a small city. You have a circle of friends
who all know each other, and it seems to me that if a marriage is breaking up,
it’s very hard to stay in the same environment. I thought it would be better
for us, and he couldn’t leave because he had the bookstore. I got an offer of a
job teaching creative writing at York University outside of Toronto. But I didn’t
last at that job at all. I hated it, and even though I had no money, I quit.
INTERVIEWER
Because you didn’t like teaching fiction?
MUNRO
No! It was terrible. This was 1973. York
was one of the more radical Canadian universities, yet my class was all male except
for one girl who hardly got to speak. They were doing what was fashionable at
the time, which had to do with being both incomprehensible and trite; they
seemed intolerant of anything else. It was good for me to learn to shout back
and express some ideas about writing that I hadn’t sharpened up before, but I
didn’t know how to reach them, how not to be an adversary. Maybe I’d know now.
But it didn’t seem to have anything to do with writing—more like good training
for going into television or something, getting really comfortable with
clichés. I should have been able to change that, but I couldn’t. I had one
student who wasn’t in the class, who brought me a story. I remember tears came
into my eyes because it was so good, because I hadn’t seen a good piece of
student writing in so long. She asked, How can I get into your class? And I
said, Don’t! Don’t come near my class, just keep bringing me your work. And she
has become a writer. The only one who did.
INTERVIEWER
Has there been a proliferation of creative-writing
schools in Canada as in the United States?
MUNRO
Maybe not quite as much. We don’t have
anything up here like Iowa. But careers are made by teaching in writing
departments. For a while I felt sorry for these people because they weren’t
getting published. The fact that they were making three times as much money as
I would ever see didn’t quite get through to me.
INTERVIEWER
It seems the vast majority of your stories
are based in Ontario. Would you choose to live here now, or was it
circumstance?
MUNRO
Now that I’ve been here I would choose to.
It was Gerry’s mother’s house, and he was living there to take care of her. And
my father and my stepmother lived in the region too; we felt that there was a
limited period of time when we would be at the service of these old people, and
then we would move on. Then, of course, for various reasons, that didn’t
happen; they’ve been gone a long time, and we’re still here. One of the reasons
to stay now is that the landscape is so important to both of us. It’s a great
thing that we have in common. And thanks to Gerry, I appreciate it in such a
different way. I couldn’t possess any other landscape or country or lake or
town in this way. And I realize that now, so I’ll never leave.
INTERVIEWER
How did you meet Gerry?
MUNRO
I had known Gerry when we were in
university together. He was a senior, and I was a freshman. He was a returned
World War II veteran, which meant that there were seven years between us. I had
a terrific crush on him when I was eighteen, but he did not notice me at all.
He was noticing other people. It was a small university so you sort of knew
everybody and who they were. And he was one of that small group of people who
seemed—I think we called them bohemian, when they still said bohemian;
they wrote poetry for the literary magazine, and they were dangerous, got drunk
and so on. I thought he was connected with the magazine, and when I wrote my
first story, part of my plan was that I would take this manuscript to him. Then
we would fall into conversation, and he would fall in love with me, and
everything would go on from there. I took the story to him, and he said, John
Cairns is the editor, he’s down the hall. That was our only exchange.
INTERVIEWER
That was your only exchange all through
your years in college?
MUNRO
Yes. But then, after I had published the
story, he had left university. I was working as a waitress between my first and
second years, I got a letter from Gerry. It was really a wonderful letter all
about the story. It was my first fan letter. But it wasn’t about me at all, and
it didn’t mention my beauty, or that it would be nice for us to get together or
any of that. It was simply a literary appreciation. So that I appreciated it
less than I might have if it had been from anybody else because I was hoping
that it would be more. But it was a nice letter. Then, after I moved back to
London and had the job at Western, he somehow heard me on the radio. I did an
interview. I must have said where I was living and given the impression that I
was not married anymore, because he then came to see me.
INTERVIEWER
And this was twenty-some odd years later?
MUNRO
Easily. More than twenty years later, and
we hadn’t seen each other in the meantime. He didn’t look at all as I’d
expected. He just called me up and said, This is Gerry Fremlin. I’m in Clinton,
and I was wondering if we could have lunch together sometime. I knew his home
was in Clinton and I thought he had probably come home to see his parents. I
think by this time I knew that he was working in Ottawa, I’d heard that from
somebody. And I thought the wife and children were back in Ottawa, and he’s
home to visit his parents and he thought he’d like to have lunch with an old
acquaintance. So this is what I expected until he turned up and I learned that
he was living in Clinton and there was no wife and no children. We went to the
faculty club and had three martinis each, at lunch. I think we were nervous.
But we rapidly became very well acquainted. I think we were talking about
living together by the end of the afternoon. It was very quick. I guess I
finished out that term teaching at Western and then came up to Clinton, and we
started living together there in the home where he had moved back to look after
his mother.
INTERVIEWER
You hadn’t made the decision to come back
here for writing.
MUNRO
I never made a decision with any thought
of my writing. And yet I never thought that I would abandon it. I guess because
I didn’t understand that you could have conditions for writing that would be
any better than any other conditions. The only things that ever stopped me
writing were the jobs—when I was defined publicly as a writer and given an
office to work in.
INTERVIEWER
That seems reminiscent of your early story
“The Office”: the woman who rents an office in order to write and is so
distracted by her landlord she eventually has to move out.
MUNRO
That was written because of a real
experience. I did get an office, and I wasn’t able to write anything there at
all—except that story. The landlord did bug me all the time, but even when he
stopped I couldn’t work. This has happened anytime I’ve had a setup for
writing, an office. When I worked as writer-in-residence at the University of
Queensland in Australia, I had an office there, in the English Department, a really
posh, nice office. Nobody had heard of me, so nobody came to see me. Nobody was
trying to be a writer there anyway. It was like Florida; they went around in
bikinis all the time. So I had all this time, and I was in this office, and I
would just sit there thinking. I couldn’t reach anything; I meant to, but it
was paralyzing.
INTERVIEWER
Was Vancouver less useful for material?
MUNRO
I lived in the suburbs, first in North
Vancouver, then in West Vancouver. In North Vancouver, the men all went away in
the morning and came back at night, all day it was housewives and children.
There was a lot of informal togetherness, and it was hard to be alone. There
was a lot of competitive talk about vacuuming and washing the woolies, and I
got quite frantic. When I had only one child, I’d put her in the stroller and
walk for miles to avoid the coffee parties. This was much more narrow and
crushing than the culture I grew up in. So many things were forbidden—like
taking anything seriously. Life was very tightly managed as a series of
permitted recreations, permitted opinions, and permitted ways of being a woman.
The only outlet, I thought, was flirting with other people’s husbands at
parties; that was really the only time anything came up that you could feel was
real, because the only contact you could have with men, that had any reality to
it, seemed to me to be sexual. Otherwise, men usually didn’t talk to you, or if
they did they talked very much from high to low. I’d meet a university
professor or someone, and if I knew something about what he knew, that would
not be considered acceptable conversation. The men didn’t like you to talk, and
the women didn’t like it either. So the world you had was female talk about the
best kind of diet, or the best care of woolies. I was with the wives of the
climbing men. I hated it so much I’ve never been able to write about it. Then
in West Vancouver, it was more of a mixed suburb, not all young couples, and I
made great friends there. We talked about books and scandal and laughed at everything
like high-school girls. That’s something I’d like to write about and haven’t,
that subversive society of young women, all keeping each other alive. But going
to Victoria and opening a bookstore was the most wonderful thing that ever
happened. It was great because all the crazy people in town came into the
bookstore and talked to us.
INTERVIEWER
How did you get the idea to start the
bookstore?
MUNRO
Jim wanted to leave Eatons, the big
department store in town. We were talking about how he wanted to go into
business of some kind, and I said. “Look, if we had a bookstore I could help.”
Everybody thought that we would go broke, and, of course, we almost did. We
were very poor, but at that time my two older girls were both in school, so I
could work all the time in the store, and I did. That was the happiest period
in my first marriage.
INTERVIEWER
Did you always have the sense that the
marriage wouldn’t last?
MUNRO
I was like a Victorian daughter—the
pressure to marry was so great, one felt it was something to get out of the
way: Well, I’ll get that done, and they can’t bug me about it, and then I’ll be
a real person and my life will begin. I think I married to be able to write, to
settle down and give my attention back to the important thing. Sometimes now
when I look back at those early years I think, This was a hard-hearted young
woman. I’m a far more conventional woman now than I was then.
INTERVIEWER
Doesn’t any young artist, on some level,
have to be hard-hearted?
MUNRO
It’s worse if you’re a woman. I want to
keep ringing up my children and saying, Are you sure you’re all right? I didn’t
mean to be such a . . . Which of course would make them furious because it
implies that they’re some kind of damaged goods. Some part of me was absent for
those children, and children detect things like that. Not that I neglected
them, but I wasn’t wholly absorbed. When my oldest daughter was about two,
she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away
with one hand and type with the other. I’ve told her that. This was bad because
it made her the adversary to what was most important to me. I feel I’ve done
everything backwards: this totally driven writer at the time when the kids were
little and desperately needed me. And now, when they don’t need me at all, I
love them so much. I moon around the house and think, There used to be a lot
more family dinners.
INTERVIEWER
You won the Governor-General’s Award for
your first book, which is roughly equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize in our
country. It happens only very rarely in the States that a first book wins such
a big prize. When it does, the writer’s career often seems to suffer afterward.
MUNRO
Well, I wasn’t young, for one thing. But
it was difficult. I had about a year when I couldn’t write anything because I
was so busy thinking I had to get to work on a novel. I didn’t have the burden
of having produced a huge best-seller that everyone was talking about, as Amy
Tan did with her first book, for instance. The book sold very badly, and nobody—even
though it had won the Governor-General’s Award—nobody had heard of it. You
would go into bookstores and ask for it, and they didn’t have it.
INTERVIEWER
Do reviews matter much to you? Do you feel
you’ve ever learned from them? Have you ever been hurt by them?
MUNRO
Yes and no, because really you can’t learn
much from reviews, you can nevertheless be very hurt. There’s a feeling of
public humiliation about a bad review. Even though it doesn’t really matter to
you, you would rather be clapped than booed off stage.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a big reader growing up? What
work if any had an influence?
MUNRO
Reading was my life really until I was
thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first
writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about
small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the
thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really
aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women.
I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that
women could write about the freakish, the marginal.
INTERVIEWER
Which you’ve always done as well.
MUNRO
Yes. I came to feel that was our
territory, whereas the mainstream big novel about real life was men’s
territory. I don’t know how I got that feeling of being on the margins, it
wasn’t that I was pushed there. Maybe it was because I grew up
on a margin. I knew there was something about the great writers I felt shut out
from, but I didn’t know quite what it was. I was terribly disturbed when I
first read D. H. Lawrence. I was often disturbed by writers’ views of female
sexuality.
INTERVIEWER
Can you put your finger on what it was
that disturbed you?
MUNRO
It was: how I can be a writer when I’m the
object of other writers?
INTERVIEWER
What is your reaction to magic realism?
MUNRO
I did love One
Hundred Years of Solitude. I loved it, but it can’t be imitated. It
looks easy but it’s not. It’s wonderful when the ants carry off the baby, when
the virgin rises into the sky, when the patriarch dies, and it rains flowers.
But just as hard to pull off and just as wonderful is William Maxwell’s So
Long, See You Tomorrow, where the dog is the character. He’s
dealing with a subject that potentially is so banal and makes it brilliant.
INTERVIEWER
Some of your newer stories seem to mark a
change in direction.
MUNRO
About five years ago, when I was still
working on the stories that were in Friend of My Youth, I
wanted to do a story with alternate realities. I resisted this because I
worried it would end up a Twilight Zone kind of stuff. You know, really junky
stuff. I was scared of it. But I wrote “Carried Away,” and I just kept fooling
around with it and wrote that weird ending. Maybe it’s something to do with
age. Changing your perceptions of what is possible, of what has happened—not
just what can happen but what really has happened. I have all these
disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives.
That was one of the problems—why I couldn’t write novels, I never saw things
hanging together any too well.
INTERVIEWER
What about your confidence? Has that
changed over the years?
MUNRO
In writing, I’ve always had a lot of
confidence, mixed with a dread that this confidence is entirely misplaced. I
think in a way that my confidence came just from being dumb. Because I lived so
out of any mainstream, I didn’t realize that women didn’t become writers as
readily as men, and that neither did people from a lower class. If you know you
can write fairly well in a town where you’ve hardly met anyone else who reads,
you obviously think this is a rare gift indeed.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve been a master at steering clear of
the literary world. Has this been conscious or largely circumstantial?
MUNRO
It certainly was circumstantial for a long
time, but then became a matter of choice. I think I’m a friendly person who is
not very sociable. Mainly because of being a woman, a housewife, and a mother,
I want to keep a lot of time. It translates as being scared of it. I would have
lost my confidence. I would have heard too much talk I didn’t understand.
INTERVIEWER
So you were glad to be out of the
mainstream?
MUNRO
This is maybe what I’m trying to say. I
probably wouldn’t have survived very well otherwise. It may have been that I
would lose my confidence when I was with people who understood a lot more than
I did about what they were doing. And talked a lot about it. And were confident
in a way that would be acknowledged to have a more solid basis than mine. But
then, it’s very hard to tell about writers—who is confident?
INTERVIEWER
Was the community you grew up in pleased
about your career?
MUNRO
It was known there had been stories
published here and there, but my writing wasn’t fancy. It didn’t go over well
in my hometown. The sex, the bad language, the incomprehensibility . . . The
local newspaper printed an editorial about me: A soured introspective view of
life . . . And, A warped personality projected on . . . My dad was already dead
when they did that. They wouldn’t do it while Dad was alive, because everyone
really liked him. He was so liked and respected that everybody muted it a bit.
But after he died, it was different.
INTERVIEWER
But he liked your work?
MUNRO
But he liked my work, yes, and he was very
proud of it. He read a lot, but he always felt a bit embarrassed about reading.
And then he wrote a book just before he died that was published posthumously.
It was a novel about pioneer families in the southwest interior, set in a
period just before his life, ending when he was a child. He had real gifts as a
writer.
INTERVIEWER
Can you quote us a passage?
MUNRO
In one chapter he describes what the
school was like for a boy who lived a little earlier than he did: “On other
walls were some faded brown maps. Interesting places like Mongolia were shown,
where scattered residents rode in sheepskin coats on small ponies. The center
of Africa was a blank space marked only by crocodiles with mouths agape and
lions who held dark people down with huge paws. In the very center Mr. Stanley
was greeting Mr. Livingston, both wearing old hats.”
INTERVIEWER
Did you recognize anything of your own
life in his novel?
MUNRO
Not of my life, but I recognized a great
deal of my style. The angle of vision, which didn’t surprise me because I knew
we had that in common.
INTERVIEWER
Had your mother read any of your work
before she died?
MUNRO
My mother would not have liked it. I don’t
think so—the sex and the bad words. If she had been well, I would have had to
have a big fight and break with the family in order to publish anything.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you would have done it?
MUNRO
I think so, yes, because as I said I was
more hard-hearted then. The tenderness I feel now for my mother, I didn’t feel
for a long time. I don’t know how I would feel if one of my daughters wrote
about me. They’re about at the age now where they should be coming out with a
first novel that is all about childhood. It must be a dreadful experience to go
through, becoming a character in your kid’s novel. People write carelessly
wounding things in reviews like, oh, that my father was a seedy fox farmer, and
things like this, reflecting on the poverty. A feminist writer interpreted “My
Father,” in Lives of Girls and Women,
as straight autobiographical representation. She made me into someone who came
out of this miserable background, because I had a “feckless father.” This was
an academic at a Canadian university, and I was so mad, I tried to find out how
to sue her. I was furious. I didn’t know what to do because I thought, It
doesn’t matter for me, I’ve had all this success, but all my father had was
that he was my father. He’s dead now. Is he going to be known as a feckless
father because of what I did to him? Then I realized she represented a younger
generation of people who had grown up on a totally different economic planet.
They live in a welfare state to a certain extent—Medicare. They’re not aware of
the devastation something like illness could cause to a family. They’ve never
gone through any kind of real financial trouble. They look at a family that’s
poor and they think this is some kind of choice. Not wanting to better yourself
is fecklessness, it’s stupidity or something. I grew up in a house that had no
indoor toilet, and this to this generation is so appalling, truly squalid.
Actually it wasn’t squalid. It was fascinating.
INTERVIEWER
We didn’t ask you questions about your
writing day. How many days a week do you actually write?
MUNRO
I write every morning, seven days a week.
I write starting about eight o’clock and finish up around eleven. Then I
do other things the rest of the day, unless I do my final draft or something
that I want to keep working on then I’ll work all day with little breaks.
INTERVIEWER
Are you rigid about that schedule, even if
there’s a wedding or some other required event?
MUNRO
I am so compulsive that I have a quota of
pages. If I know that I am going somewhere on a certain day, I will try to get
those extra pages done ahead of time. That’s so compulsive, it’s awful. But I
don’t get too far behind, it’s as if I could lose it somehow. This is something
about aging. People get compulsive about things like this. I’m also compulsive
now about how much I walk every day.
INTERVIEWER
How much do you walk?
MUNRO
Three miles every day, so if I know I’m
going to miss a day, I have to make it up. I watched my father go through this
same thing. You protect yourself by thinking if you have all these rituals and
routines then nothing can get you.
INTERVIEWER
After you’ve spent five months or so
completing a story, do you take time off?
MUNRO
I go pretty much right into the next one.
I didn’t use to when I had the children and more responsibilities, but these
days I’m a little panicked at the idea of stopping—as if, if I stopped, I could
be stopped for good. I have a backlog of ideas. But it isn’t just ideas you
need, and it isn’t just technique or skill. There’s a kind of excitement and
faith that I can’t work without. There was a time when I never lost that, when
it was just inexhaustible. Now I have a little shift sometimes when I feel what
it would be like to lose it, and I can’t even describe what it is. I think it’s being totally alive
to what this story is. It doesn’t even have an awful lot to do with whether the
story will work or not. What happens in old age can be just a draining away of
interest in some way that you don’t foresee, because this happens with people
who may have had a lot of interest and commitment to life. It’s something about
the living for the next meal. When you travel you see a lot of this in the
faces of middle-aged people in restaurants, people my age—at the end of middle
age and the beginning of old age. You see this, or you feel it like a snail,
this sort of chuckling along looking at the sights. It’s a feeling that the
capacity for responding to things is being shut off in some way. I feel now
that this is a possibility. I feel it like the possibility that you might get arthritis,
so you exercise so you won’t. Now I am more conscious of the possibility that
everything could be lost, that you could lose what had filled your life before.
Maybe keeping on, going through the motions, is actually what you have to do to
keep this from happening. There are parts of a story where the story fails.
That’s not what I’m talking about. The story fails but your faith in the
importance of doing the story doesn’t fail. That it might is the danger. This
may be the beast that’s lurking in the closet in old age—the loss of the
feeling that things are worth doing.
INTERVIEWER
One wonders though, because artists do
seem to work to the very end.
MUNRO
I think it’s possible that you do.
You may have to be a little more vigilant. It’s something I never would have
been able to think of losing twenty years ago—the faith, the desire. I suppose
it’s like when you don’t fall in love anymore. But you can put up with that
because falling in love has not really been as necessary as something like
this. I guess that’s why I keep doing it. Yes, I don’t stop for a day. It’s
like my walk every day. My body loses tone now in a week if I don’t exercise.
The vigilance has to be there all the time. Of course it wouldn’t matter if you
did give up writing. It’s not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It’s
the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you
write. This is what I wonder: what do most people do once the necessity of
working all the time is removed? Even the retired people who take courses and
have hobbies are looking for something to fill this void, and I feel such
horror of being like that and having that kind of life. The only thing that
I’ve ever had to fill my life has been writing. So I haven’t learned how to
live a life with a lot of diversity. The only other life I can imagine is a
scholarly life, which I probably idealize.
INTERVIEWER
They are very different lives too, the
life of a single pursuit as opposed to the serial.
MUNRO
You go and play golf and you enjoy that,
and then you garden, and then you have people in to dinner. But I sometimes
think what if writing stops? What if it just peters out? Well, then I would
have to start learning about something. You can’t go from writing fiction to
writing nonfiction, I don’t think. Writing nonfiction is so hard on its own
that it would be learning a whole new thing to do, but maybe I would try to do
that. I’ve made a couple of attempts to plan a book, the sort of book
everybody’s writing about their family. But I haven’t got any framework for it,
any center.
INTERVIEWER
What about the essay, “Working for a
Living,” that appears in The Grand Street Reader?
That reads like a memoir.
MUNRO
Yes. I’d like to do a book of essays and
include it.
INTERVIEWER
Well, William Maxwell wrote about his
family in that way in Ancestors.
MUNRO
I love that book, yes. I asked him about
it. He had a lot of material to draw on. He did the thing you have to do, which
is to latch the family history onto something larger that was happening at the time—in
his case, the whole religious revival of the early 1800s, which I didn’t know
anything about. I didn’t know that America had been practically a Godless
country, and that suddenly all over the country people had started falling down
in fits. That was wonderful. If you get something like that, then you’ve got
the book. It would take a while. I keep thinking I’m going to do something like
this, and then I get the idea for one more story, and that one more story
always seems so infinitely more important, even though it’s only a story, than
the other work. I read that interview in The New Yorker with William Trevor, when he said
something like, and then another little story comes along and that solves how
life has got to be.
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