Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2016-02 Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013 Thacker, Robert University of Calgary Press Thacker, R. "Reading Alice Munro: 1973-2013." University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/51092 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca READING ALICE MUNRO, 1973–2013 by Robert Thacker ISBN 978-1-55238-840-2 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org Part Two What the Archives Reveal: Reading a Deepening Aesthetic During the latter half of the 1980s and into the 1990s, Alice Munro’s stories appeared in the New Yorker with increased frequency and regu- larity—only occasionally would one be published in another magazine, meaning that the editors at her primary venue had passed on it. With her still-growing reputation, placing stories elsewhere was not difficult. During the 1990s Munro published another three collections—Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994), and The Love of a Good Woman (1998)—and a first volume of herSelected Stories (1996). The new collections showed both continuity in her art and also some radical exper- imentation. In the first collection, for example, the title story connected to and extended other family-based concerns readers had seen before, while another, “Meneseteung” (1988), was unlike anything Munro had done previously. Much the same could be said of the stories found in the other two collections from the 1990s, notably with such stories as “The Albanian Virgin” and “Carried Away,” from Open Secrets, and the title story of the 1998 collection and others there equally so. As far as criticism, the first half of the 1990s saw another five sin- gle-authored books on Munro (one of which examined Mavis Gallant’s work in tandem) and a brief series biography. Three of these asserted a new critical sophistication while attempting to extend, in various ways, what 111 critics during the previous decade had established; the other two, from a series published by ECW Press, made the more significant contribution. The latter half of the decade saw only one critical monograph, by Coral Ann Howells, and published in Britain as part of a series there; it stands out as the best such critical book published during the 1990s. Critical essays appeared in greater numbers with uneven results, some showing both insight and imagination while others, often from abroad, merely “discovered” Munro and asserted the attractive qualities they found in her stories. In 1998 I edited a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing, republished the next year as The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro. It, along with my second review essay from 1998, republished here, is probably the best venue from which to ascertain the issues inform- ing Munro criticism during the 1990s. In January 1988 I visited the University of Calgary to look for the first time at the Alice Munro fonds there; since then I have returned many times. I spent the fall 2003 semester in Calgary reading the entire archive for my work on Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Because Munro is an organic writer—that is, she writes with images and ideas of what she is after but without outlines or planning notes—Munro’s work is especially amenable to archival investigation. Containing as they do notebook drafts and (often) multiple typescript versions of stories, in both fragmentary and complete forms (there is, for example, a full version of “Bardon Bus,” which Munro revised after the version published in The Moons of Jupiter), her archives reveal a great deal about her intentions and direction. Perhaps more than any other part of her work, they reveal Munro as a writer ever revising, working repeatedly toward particular phrasings, and most especially working intently on those phrasings that end stories. They also reveal her as a writer who sometimes worked extensively on stories that she later abandoned. As the last essay included in the section here asserts, Munro’s archives are filled with a myriad of clues regarding her direction and intentions. That essay, published in 1999, was consciously polemical: I was encouraging other scholars to go read and use the Calgary archives regularly and consistently. Given these investigations, the essays and review essay in this section are infused with what was then a new awareness of Munro’s directions, specific attempts, and textual outcomes, seen in relation to what her 112 Reading Alic e Munro | ROBERT THACKER archives revealed. This is most evident in “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather” (1992) and “Writing ‘Home’” (1998)—the latter the introduction to the special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing and to The Rest of the Story and still bearing the marks of that position here—in the readings they offer of, in the first, “Dulse” (1980) and, in the latter, “Home” (1974), “The Progress of Love” (1985), and “Friend of My Youth” (1990). Details from the archives inform the essay on American literary influence and also the second review essay on criticism—which reviews most of the critical work noted above—and especially the final essay focused on the Munro archive itself. “Alice Munro and the Anxiety of American Influence” is another essay with a polemic agenda. It proceeds from the twin facts that Munro has always been clear about her American literary influences but that, overall, most Canadian critics have avoided that fact. I delivered it as a paper in 1991 at the University of Ottawa’s symposium on Canadian–U. S. Literary Relations, and there were whoops and much consternation when I asked, “Whose anxiety is it, anyway—that of Canadian writers or Canadian critics?” With regard to Munro, it was quite clear that the critics were those who were anxious. During that time I was writing about anti-Amer- icanism as a widely held but largely unspoken prejudice among English- speaking Canadians, especially among those in universities, and this essay reflects these discussions (see Thacker “Gazing”). I was also doing my work on Cather as an influence on Munro and she, along with Eudora Welty, looms large. Later, when I revised Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives for the paperback edition, I added a tenth chapter covering 2004 to 2010 and, because of encouragements from Munro herself, explored the influence of William Maxwell. So my question still stands. The second omnibus review essay to be published in the Journal of Canadian Studies, “What’s ‘Material’?” (1998), also rails a bit about Munro’s relationship with the Canadian academy. Unlike its predeces- sor, “Go Ask Alice,” which considered books offering larger discussions of Canadian literature, this review essay looks exclusively at volumes of Munro criticism and at Catherine Sheldrick Ross’s short ECW biography. More than a bit polemical, too, it examines the relationship between the life, the fiction, and the criticism, asking uncomfortable questions about the appropriateness of the critical monograph for a writer like Munro PART TWO: What the Archives Reveal 113 and, more uncomfortably still, wondering over the unseemly rush of new PhDs to turn their theses into books so as to secure academic careers.

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