Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Munro just at the moment when she was becoming a celebrity of a different kind. When Munro met with Knelman,
The Beggar Maid
was just about to appear in the States. Its publication in Britain and the Booker nomination there were still a way off. Yet in tone and substance, the piece makes it clear that much was afoot. Knelman mentions the first-reading contract at the
New Yorker
(then in its second year), the sale of her papers to the University of Calgary (she confided, “They’ll take
anything”)
, and the offers she had received to be a writer-in-residence. Though she was about to take up that kind of work again, both at the University of British Columbia and, later the same year, at Queensland, she made her hesitations clear: “You have an Alice Munro character that you play, and you’ve found out that people accept it. I wind up feeling like a total fraud. I like thestudents, but I think that if I had to work regularly I would rather get a job in a store.”
    If the critical success and Booker nomination of
The Beggar Maid
ended the 1970s, the 1980s opened with the “Munro bonanza” of more deeply affecting stories in the
New Yorker
. The five they bought in just five months in 1980 eclipsed the total of three bought since 1976 and confirmed the promise of the first-reading contract. Joyce Carol Oates had selected “Spelling” for
Best American Stories 1979
and that inaugurated Munro’s frequent inclusion (and more frequent mention) in that annual ever since. Both in Canada and abroad – through the dutiful, precise, and constant attentions of Virginia Barber – her work was appearing in mass-market paperbacks that, as the 1980s passed into the 1990s, gave way to quality trade paperbacks of all of her works from Penguin in Canada and from Vintage in the United States and eventually in Great Britain as well. Translations of Munro’s works into other languages also began during the 1980s.
    Personally, in the 1980s, the opportunities she received increased. She had long since been receiving the offers attendant to well-known writers – requests for contributions of writing, invitations to speak, read, or apply for some visiting-writer position or teaching post at a university. Libraries were after her as well. Editors wanted her to read and blurb books, provide reviews, contribute to anthologies, write screenplays, or to adapt a story for the stage. Writer friends asked for letters of support for grant applications. Aspiring writers sought guidance and, seeing some quality of note in one or the other of these, she would sometimes respond. During the 1980s all these supplications increased in frequency and urgency owing to Munro’s growing reputation, and increasingly they came from outside Canada as her reputation grew through the
New Yorker
and Knopf. Just as the 1970s saw Munro emerge as one of Canada’s leading authors, the 1980s saw the same thing happen abroad. By December 1984, McGrath wrote to Barber that “she is simply one of the finest short story writers alive, and it’s a great honor and privilege for us to be able to publish her.”
    Munro dealt with all this as best she could. Other writers whom she knew often found her willing to do what was needed. The same was truewith editors though, at times, Munro would be signally unresponsive – she says she has no ability to review books and has carefully avoided such requests. One in particular, a review of
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
sent to her by the
Canadian Forum
in 1981, would have been well worth reading, but it was never done. Munro did correspond with Elizabeth Spenser about it, apparently having suggested that Spenser might review it in her place. From the American South herself, Spenser encouraged Munro to undertake the review since she had been impressed with Munro’s knowledge of Southern writing when they met in Montreal in 1974. What is more, Spenser knew that readers would be interested in what Munro had to say about Welty. Still, no review was written. 4
    During the early 1980s Munro was responsive to some of the invitations that involved travel to places she wanted to visit. She spent from January to April 1980 as Distinguished Visiting Artist in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia; she was the program’s first writer-in-residence and had no teaching duties; the only requirement was that she should be there. That was an opportunity for her to take a break from looking after