Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

design, settling on Alex Colville’s
Elm Tree at Horton Landing
, a recognizable Canadian image (an example of “hyper-realism”) from the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. McClelland & Stewart had arranged an initial pressrun of 15,000 copies (consistent with the negotiations with Macmillan). In August Penguin bought the paperback rights (for mass market and trade editions) for $50,000. By the end of August Gibson sent finished copies of
The Progress of Love
to both Munro and Barber. To the author he wrote, “I hope that you are very proud of it. I know that I am.” To her agent, he expressed gratitude for what she did with Macmillan: “I hope that the arrival of the finished book will convince you that all of the hard and imaginative work you did to bring
The Progress of Love
to Douglas Gibson Books was worthwhile.” McClelland & Stewart launched the book – and so the Douglas Gibson Books imprint – on the evening of September 18 at its new offices on University Avenue in Toronto.
    Munro’s publicity tour began on September 16 in Toronto, continued to Montreal and Ottawa through the twenty-fifth, broke for three days, and then continued in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary through October 3. She then got ten days off, before starting again in Windsor and at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront. There she read “The Progress of Love” and, also, was the recipient of the first Marian Engel Award, a $10,000 award given to a female writer by the Writers’ Development Trust for “a distinguished and continuing body of work.” Engel, a friend of Munro’s and in her later years one of Barber’s writers, had died in 1985. Then came the U.S. tour – New York and Washington – before another stint in Ontario, followed by a trip to Halifax. After well over two months of meeting and greeting, the last publicity event on the tour was a reading in Toronto on December 8.
    Munro had not lost her aversion to such activity. As preparation for such an extended tour, she and Fremlin took a holiday of their own into the United States, where, among other things, they visited Barber’s hometown in the Blue Ridge region of Virginia. Even so, before the tour was finished, she wrote Metcalf acknowledging the copy of his
Adult Entertainment
(Macmillan) that she had received: “Awful tour,” she told him. “I won’t do this again even if I have to publish with some little outfit like Laprang-Oolong Press.” Metcalf replied asking for an inscribed copy of
Progress
. The day after she got home from her third swing through Ontario and the trip to Halifax, Munro sent him a copyand commented, “There is something really sickening about this selling yourself, so why am I doing it? Because it seems so precious and rarified
not
to?” In the same letter, she added, “I never give away my give-away copies – too scared people won’t like the book, won’t know what to say, etc.” This is a revelatory comment regarding Munro’s own view of her accomplishment. It is one reminiscent of the last glimpse of Frances in “Accident”: “But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.” 25 Well-established as Alice Munro, Writer, she was still wondering about all the fuss: Who Do You Think You Are? was a question she continued to ask even then.
    Because the Canadian and U.S. editions of
Progress
were published within a week of one another, the attention the book received was concurrent and mutually affirming. In keeping with the longstanding intimacy of Canada-U.S. cultural relations, the attention Munro got in the United States was watched closely back home. Beverly Slopen, a Toronto-based literary journalist and agent, prepared an advance profile of Munro for
Publishers Weekly
. While she was doing so, she also wrote in the
Toronto Star
over a month before the book’s publication, “There are signs that Alice Munro’s sixth collection of short stories … will be her most successful book to date in the U.S.” Similarly, when the
Vancouver Sun
wanted an advance review of
Progress
it ran the one that had just been published in the
New York Times
. Overall, reviews of
Progress
, especially those published in the United States and Britain, reveal a level of care and consideration befitting a major author of considerable gifts and power.
    In a prepublication feature review in
Quill &Quire
, Patricia Bradbury wrote that “more than ever