Author Alice Munro chronicles human spirit
By Hillel Italie
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Alice Munro, one of the world's most highly praised authors, once wrote a story called "An Ounce of Cure," in which a young woman endures a disastrous romance and finds herself fascinated rather than traumatized.
"I felt that I had had a glimpse of the shameless, marvelous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not of fiction, are improvised," the woman decides.
Over the past 35 years, few writers have proved as capable at making room for real life within the confines of traditional storytelling. Often compared to Anton Chekhov, Munro has attained near-canonical status as a thorough, but forgiving documenter of the human spirit.
The 71-year-old Munro is increasingly in favor with readers. Her most recent publication, a paperback edition of her story collection, "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," (Vintage, paperback, $14) has more than 160,000 copies in print, a big number for short stories and bigger still for an author who rarely talks to the media.
"She's become a virtuoso, really," says John Updike. "She manages to get into people's skin, without seeming to dive in, without being ostentatious."
On a recent sunny morning, Munro is interviewed in the lounge of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Those expecting the dreamy melancholy of a reclusive writer will be disappointed, or pleasantly surprised. Wearing a black turtleneck sweater and dark pants, her white hair in stylish layers, Munro has a bright smile, a healthy complexion and an open manner suggesting less an anguished artist than a friendly neighbor.
"I think people are often disappointed when they meet me; they expect an elevated atmosphere," she says.
"I remember once, long ago, I was introduced to a woman who had read my stuff, and there were two of three other women there and we were all talking about dyeing our hair. And later on this woman told me she was shocked because writers weren't supposed to have these trivial vanities and occupations."
Her published work, which includes nine story collections and one novel, often turns on the difference between Munro's growing up in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s.
Just as the story "Dance of the Happy Shades" looks back to a time when "everything was as expected," the story "Nettles" is narrated by a divorcee who leaves her husband "in the hope of making a life that could be lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame."
"It was wonderful," Munro says of the '60s. "Because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around."
Munro's writing has brought her numerous awards. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for "Hateship, Friendship" and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor.
She grew up idolizing such New Yorker authors as Updike and John Cheever, and the magazine now frequently publishes her work. One of Munro's former editors, Alice Quinn, remembers a pair of stories that appeared in 1977: "Royal Beatings," the title referring to punishment regularly inflicted in one working-class family, and "The Beggar Maid," the story of a scholarship student's unhappy marriage to a businessman's son.
"Those two stories were read by everyone," says Quinn, then an editor at Alfred A. Knopf and Munro's editor at The New Yorker from 1995-2001. "People were blown away by these stories. They were so intimate and dramatic and powerful, like miniature novels."
Out of modesty, and self-preservation, Munro doesn't accept the high opinion of others, likening her reputation to a beautiful costume with flaws in the stitching. She says she feels intimidated by the presence of other writers, and cites the late William Maxwell, an author and longtime New Yorker editor whom she met several years ago at a party.
"I literally couldn't speak, I was so awed, and this was made more so by the fact he was very modest and charming," she says. "He saw the trouble I was in and sort of gently held the conversation up until I could manage."
Pride, however deserved, would only waste energy better spent on the work at hand. Munro can chat away about dyeing her hair and other such matters, but she acknowledges that stories are ever "nagging at the back of my mind." She writes every day — in longhand, early in the morning, after coffee and before the phone starts ringing.
"If I'm going to get anything done that day, I sort of have to do it by 9 o'clock, when the world isn't coming in on me," she says.
"And we live in a small town (Clinton, Ont.). I go get the mail, and I have a 92-year-old cousin who lives up the street and I get her mail and I go in to visit her. I do things that aren't particularly burdensome, but if I try to write after that I won't be able to get into the story."
Munro, a fox farmer's daughter, was born Alice Anne Laidlaw. She was a literary person in a nonliterary town, concealing her ambition like a forbidden passion.
"It was glory I was after ... walking the streets like an exile or a spy," recalls the narrator of Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women," a novel published in 1971.
She received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a "coverup" for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story to CBC radio in Canada.
Although determined to be different, Munro for years lived liked millions of other women in the 1950s. She dropped out of college to marry a fellow student, James Munro, had three children and became a full-time housewife. By her early 30s, she was so frightened and depressed she could barely write a full sentence.
Her good fortune was to open a bookstore with her husband, in 1963. Stimulated by everything from the conversation of adults to simply filling out invoices, her narrative talents resurfaced but her marriage collapsed. Her first collection, "Dance of the Happy Shades," came out in 1968 and won the Governor's prize.
"When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn't look at them. I didn't tell my husband they had come, because I couldn't bear it. I was afraid it was terrible," says Munro, who is now married to Gerald Fremlin, a geographer.
"And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn't think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK."
The brief, sporadic free time of parenthood trained Munro to concentrate on short stories. But even with her children all grown, she chooses the same format, deciding she lacked what another great story writer, V.S. Pritchett, once called the "novelist's vegetative temperament."
"I knew that I lacked something, because even when my life changed so I had enough time, I couldn't seem to write a novel," she says. "I try to write novels, but they go so flabby and I don't have any good sense of what I'm doing."
Her stories are usually set in Ontario, but her plots are no more predictable than her characters. In the title piece of her most recent collection, an unmarried housekeeper journeys to meet an ailing man with whom she has had a warm correspondence. Only midway do readers learn of a cruel joke: The letters were written by two teenage girls.
"The Bear Came Over the Mountain" is the story of an old woman who begins losing her memory and agrees with her husband that she should be placed in a nursing home.
The narrative begins in a relatively tender, traditional mood. But we soon learn that the husband has been unfaithful in the past and didn't always regret it — "What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being." The wife, meanwhile, has fallen for a man at the nursing home.
Munro's ideas rarely come from history books or from current events, but instead from memories, anecdotes, gossip. The stories themselves are almost literally timeless, with few topical references or famous names.
"I don't do a lot of indicators where you can tell what time it is, because that would impinge on me too much. Somebody writing about now would have to have Iraq in it. They need to have the right music and right celebrities and right style of clothes," she says.
"In ordinary life I am a fairly active, political person. I have opinions and join clubs. But I always want to see what happens with people underneath; it interests me more."
