The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  She is, of course, among Canada’s best-known and most feted writers, at the forefront of a list that invariably includes her friend Margaret Atwood and goes on from there to take in figures like Carol Shields and Timothy Findley before splintering apart, depending on how you rate Marian Engel, say, or whether you judge Robertson Davies to be more smoke than fire. (Munro herself dismisses him, in a word, as “dead.”) Munro, whose tenth collection of short stories, Runaway, will be published at the end of the month, has succeeded in putting this intractably rural, unhurried, and laconic region firmly on the literary map, rendering its human commotion—gothic passions, buried sorrows, and forlorn mysteries—in dazzlingly plainspoken tales that connect directly with her readers’ interior narratives and histories of the heart. By paying precise yet generous (although never sentimental) attention to those aspects of women’s lives that usually go under the undignified rubric “love troubles,” and to the sexual and domestic crises that come in their wake, Munro has made her presence felt well beyond Canada. Her books have been translated into nearly twenty languages, including Finnish and Slovak, and she shows no ebbing of her imaginative powers or her ability to seduce new readers. Each of the writer’s books has outsold the one before, and although none of them has become a bestseller in the United States, Munro has won a National Book Critics Circle Award (not to mention every literary prize Canada has to offer).

  Munro’s stories have appeared in America over the past three decades, first in The New Yorker and then in book-length collections that have emerged every few years since 1979, when The Beggar Maid (which was actually her fourth book) was published by Alfred A. Knopf. Her work garnered critical huzzahs right out of the gate for its clear, unfinicky delineation of complex adult emotions. Along the way, this spinner of humdrum kitchen-sink entanglements, whose signature is the illuminating ordinary detail that clarifies everything that leads up to it or the unremarkable yet pivotal moment that changes everything that comes after it, has earned a reputation as one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction. “Our Chekhov,” Cynthia Ozick called her, in a vaulting comparison that has since become something of an obligatory tip of the critical hat, bringing ever more stratospheric analogies to Tolstoy and Flaubert in its wake.

  Notwithstanding the fact that Munro’s writing is the sort to prompt a keen interest in the person behind the writer, she herself has remained tantalizingly out of reach of her readers. In this age of de rigueur promotional campaigns and personal publicity, she is famously private, someone who needs to be coaxed into giving interviews and finds book touring an ordeal. The other point that is constantly being made about Munro—always in a preemptive fashion suggesting that any further inquiry into the subject of her personality is an indication of your own insatiably vulgar TV-addled perspective—is how modest and unassuming she is. Both of these adjectives crop up repeatedly about her, as though the mystery of how this ostensibly contained and genteel creature came to be the excavator of our most randy desires and our most brazen impulses—our “open secrets,” as the title of one of her collections has it—is a negligible one. Never mind the ambition and drive, the all-consuming focus it must take to create those stunningly observed and crafted stories, year after year, decade after decade, on the part of a writer who, at age seventy-three, shows no signs of letting up on her production—or on her clear-eyed perceptions.

  * * *

  “I still haven’t claimed being a writer,” Alice Munro observes at our first meeting, less than ten minutes into what will turn out to be a very long and companionable lunch. “My husband claims it for me. I still write in a corner of the dining room, and I often answer the phone.” The tragicomic aspects of this are not lost on her, despite her reputation for good behavior. “I get very upset with the thought of the way a man’s work is accepted and honored. People don’t expect to phone up and talk to the man. He’s writing. He’s got a room where he writes.”

  We had arranged to meet at 12:30 at Bailey’s, located on the tiny patch of main square in Goderich, the next backwater town over from Clinton, where Munro has lived for the past thirty years with her second husband, Gerald Fremlin. (It is also the setting for many of Munro’s stories.) It’s easy to miss the restaurant—to miss the whole town—but when I finally find it, Carolyn, the restaurant’s proprietor, is waiting in the doorway to greet me, as though she were running a boardinghouse in a Carson McCullers story, scaling the world down to a cozy and welcoming presence. She takes me over to Munro, who is seated near the bar at her regular table, where she meets all of her friends and which also seems to be the designated point of contact for strangers who insist on tracking her down way out here in the sticks.

  Munro is a trim, beautiful woman with relatively unlined skin and coiffed silvery-gray hair; long gone are the slightly unkempt curls of her early photographs. She is elegantly but unfussily put together, wearing a light enhancement of makeup, dressed in an ivory silk blouse, off-white pants, and arty yet sophisticated earrings. Munro gets up to give me a warm hello, and I am immediately struck by a lack of pretense that all the same seems too considered to be entirely guileless. Perhaps it is no more than the undercurrent of quiet amusement emanating from her gray-green eyes, which suggests a watchful inner self behind the easygoing, even intimate manner—a witty, sometimes brutally observant self, held in check by the need to pass herself off as conventionally and graciously female. When I compliment her on having remained thin, she corrects me, stressing the difference between “thin” and “thinnish” as though she were a weight counselor. “I’ve always been thinnish,” Munro insists, only half jokingly. “I was never a thin girl.” And then, warming to her theme, as our first glass of white wine is poured, she continues: “I was bulimic for a while before the word existed. I thought I was the only person who discovered it. Most women I knew got a heavy maternal figure. I was determined not to, as part of maintaining my identity.”

  We order Caesar salad, followed by arctic char, on Carolyn’s recommendation; she hovers throughout the meal, treating Munro like a prized local specimen who requires special care—not because she is so exacting but precisely because she isn’t aware of her own aura. Munro is an esteemed figure here, half town matriarch and half local Famous Person. “I have permission,” she gaily announces, “to close this place up.” (Indeed, when the last staff member departs several hours later and as the two of us are still going strong in the now-empty restaurant, Munro gets up to lock the front door for the afternoon.)

  The issue of her privacy, what she does and doesn’t want to disclose about herself, is very much on the table, so to speak, throughout our lunch. Munro’s fictional approach is rooted in a process of incremental disclosure, of a gradual peeling away of layers in order to get closer to an approximate emotional truth. In person, she strikes me as torn between the habit of self-effacing reticence, instilled in her by her Scottish-Irish Presbyterian background, and a conflicting, equally strong impulse to strip away the curtains, the better to expose the lives within, lives she has described, in a memorable and oft-quoted phrase from her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women, as “dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

  By way of apologetic explanation for having, at the last minute, scuttled the original plan for me to pick her up at home, she mentions a “long-ago rule that my husband and I have that no one come to the house.” I don’t press her on why this no-access clause, if it indeed exists, had initially slipped her mind. Beneath Munro’s charming surface, I suspect, lurks the steely resolve of the eleven-year-old girl who knew she wanted to be a writer even though she came, by her own account, from “a little town where nobody was interested in writing or the world of literature.” “My charm has a time limit,” she sweetly warns, in case I tread too far in with my questioning. I take the opportunity when a pause occurs in our conversation to inquire about her husband. Gerald Fremlin is a retired civil servant, a geographer who edited The National Atlas of Canada
, and grew up in the same house the couple live in now. In our conversations, Munro invokes him frequently and affectionately as “my husband” rather than by his name, like a proud Midwestern banker’s wife whose one great claim to glory is that she has married well.

  “He sounds,” I say, “like the love of your life.” Somewhat to my surprise, Munro gamely rises to the challenge, revealing that the two of them met for the first time when she was still eighteen-year-old Alice Laidlaw, a scholarship student at the University of Western Ontario—and freshly engaged to James Munro, with whom she would go on to have a twenty-year marriage and three daughters. Fremlin was a World War II vet seven years older than she, and Munro immediately “fell for him,” as she tells it with visible relish, her still-youthful eyes ablaze with the memory of romantic mischief.

  Fremlin was her earliest official appreciator, the first to see a whiff of Chekhov in the novice writer. He wrote her a fan letter about a story of hers that appeared in the college literary magazine—she recalls the youthfully portentous title, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” with a forgiving laugh (“Okay, okay,” she says, “we were all young once”)—but what she really hoped he would do, apparently, was ask her out. “I wanted him to say something like, ‘When I laid eyes on you…,’” she explains, her voice trailing off, sounding like one of her own multilayered characters, about to revise the course of her destiny on a dime, without so much as a goodbye to her former life. When I ask whether she would have gone off with Fremlin then and there, she says, simply and unhesitatingly, “Yes,” and for a moment I see the character of Pauline in her, the adulterous wife and mother in her 1997 story “The Children Stay,” who decides to bag an existence of “married complicity” to run off with her lover.

  In the event, Alice Laidlaw became Alice Munro at the age of twenty, a decision that doesn’t appear to have been propelled by the starry-eyed dictates of romance so much as by the brute exigencies of carnal need. “You got married,” she points out, “to have sex. Methods of birth control were too chancy.” She was pregnant a year later—which lapse of time, although abbreviated by today’s standards, she calls “an accomplishment in and of itself.” Although Munro is close today to her three daughters—who, she says, with a wry smile, get together “mostly to discuss me”—and is an enraptured grandmother (“I’m crazy about little kids,” she says. “I used to be cooler about them”), she candidly admits to an ever-present ambivalence about the maternal role, which she saw as foisted upon her by the expectations of her time, rather than actively chosen. “I never had the longing to have children,” she muses. Munro’s oldest daughter, Sheila, herself a writer, has published a bittersweet memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters, in which her mother appears somewhat distant and not beyond applying a wooden spoon for disciplinary purposes. I ask Munro about her feelings regarding the book. Astonishing me once again with her readiness to implicate herself—I have no doubt that in a court of law, Munro, who happily owns up to having “no moral scruples,” would be her own worst witness for the defense—she concedes that Sheila might not have received her best efforts. “She wasn’t the utter joy of my life she might have been. I was emotionally more open to the second.”

  Munro left her marriage when she was in her early forties and moved to London, Ontario, with her two younger daughters, Jenny and Andrea. In 1974, she took a yearlong academic appointment at the University of Western Ontario, where she encountered Gerald Fremlin for the first time since they had been students there together. She says that she considers herself “enormously lucky” in both of her spouses and is “eternally grateful” to her first husband, who has also remarried, for believing in her writing enough to let her attend to it in the hours she had “left over from my duties.” (“Such a stroke of luck,” she exclaims, although whether she is being entirely ingenuous or not, I can’t tell for sure. “In that time!”)

  Jim Munro, who came from a higher and more aspiring class than the writer’s family and owns Munro’s Books, one of Canada’s best bookstores, was also responsible for getting her away from her suffocating hometown. “None of the boys liked me,” she notes, without a trace of self-pity. “I was nice looking, but they left me alone. I would have been so unhappy if I had married one of the boys I went to high school with.” She then adds, quoting Fremlin with the slightly wicked half smile that accompanies all her best anecdotes: “My husband always says that if I hadn’t gotten out in time, I would have developed into a sad character out of a New England novel. I would have become the old maid who walked into town because she never learned to drive and had no sexual life and lived with her parents until they died.”

  * * *

  Alice Munro’s childhood, which she has drawn on heavily in her fiction, was a demanding, hardscrabble one. If not quite Dickensian in its lack of privilege, neither were her Scottish and Canadian bloodlines conducive to encouraging the overt “look at me” egotism that gifted writers-in-the-making are sometimes indulged in; indeed, her origins go far toward explaining her unease with directly claiming the spotlight. When I tell her that her much-praised modesty strikes me as a canny form of protective coloration to keep other people’s envy at bay, she nods her head in agreement. “I’m frightened of being overvalued,” she explains. “Someone will shoot you down. Being a writer is a shameful thing. It’s always pushing out your version. I try to correct for this.”

  Munro, the oldest of three siblings, grew up in the heavily Scottish-Irish farming community of Wingham, Ontario, a town twenty-odd miles from where she currently lives. She did well at school “as a way of distinguishing myself,” but as in the fictional town of Jubilee in her stories, limited expectations and a pervasive self-effacing reticence were the order of the day. “We were encouraged to be practical above everything,” Munro explains. “In the social background I came from, people never asked, ‘Am I happy?’ Self-fulfillment wasn’t a concept.”

  Her family were outsiders on all counts: temperamentally, socially, and geographically. Her father was an unsuccessful silver-fox breeder, and the family lived on the outskirts of town in what Munro has described as a “kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived. It was a community of outcasts. I had that feeling about myself.” (Although she wasn’t aware of his deep literary interest growing up, her father would turn out to harbor writerly ambitions of his own, which expressed themselves in the form of a novel he wrote that was published shortly after he died. “His book was the last thing we talked about,” she says, sounding quietly victorious.)

  Munro credits her mother, who haunts her fiction like the most persistent and poignant of ghosts, with having had “great pride in me when I was young.” The risk-taking gene that enabled Munro to spring for the precarious rewards of the writing life must also have originated with her. Having married at thirty after carving out an independent existence for herself as a schoolteacher, her mother seems always to have yearned for more psychologically and financially luxuriant vistas. Much like the mother of the narrator Del, in Lives of Girls and Women, Munro’s most autobiographical work, Munro’s mother entertained advanced ideas about the role of women outside the home that strayed beyond the closed-in, orderly universe of Wingham, where, as in Jubilee, “the clean, reproachful smell of wax and lemons” ruled over more free-floating ambitions. (These advanced ideas did not include ones on the subject of sex, which Munro’s mother apparently viewed with unmitigated distaste.)

  When Munro was still an adolescent, in what appears to have been the defining emotional circumstance of her young life, her mother began to suffer from a welter of enfeebling and mortifying symptoms that would eventually be diagnosed as Parkinson’s. It fell to Munro, as the oldest, to keep the household running from the age of twelve or thirteen on, an experience that both toughened her and damaged her relationship with her mother, bringing in its wake the deep sense of regret that appears and reappears in her stories. “My mother’s illness frightened me so much,” she admits, “tha
t I couldn’t identify with her. I learned to be capable simply because I had to be.” Munro admits to feeling guilt about having “emotionally abandoned” her mother during her long decline; she didn’t go home to see her for the last two years before she died. Whereas these daunting circumstances might have trampled the fighting spirit of a weaker girl, in Munro’s case they served to fuel a writerly sense of marginalization and a conviction that she was cut out for different things, even if not always by her own choice: “I was a person who didn’t fit anywhere. I always felt I’d kind of get out.”

  * * *

  And “kind of get out” Munro did, with a vengeance. But unlike her compatriot, the writer Mavis Gallant, who left her unhappy young self permanently behind in Montreal when she immigrated to Paris in 1950, Munro escaped the confinements of her origins via a less external distancing but, it could be argued, an even more radical route. It took, I would suggest, the form of an internal rebellion—one that went against the inhibiting strictures of both her upbringing and her chosen vocation. In her own slyly and unnoisily subversive fashion, Munro has broken new ground in terms of her subject matter, which is often close to raunchy in its sexual frankness, and in her allegiance to the short-story form as a vehicle for sustained narrative expression. Three interlinked stories in Runaway—“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”—are proof that she continues to do just that. The stories follow a character named Juliet from the time she is a gawky twenty-one-year-old girl in 1965 with a graduate degree in classics, which she fears may compromise her chances on the marriage market, through three decades to where they leave her off, short of money, still studying “the old Greeks,” permanently estranged from Penelope, the “bright but not bookish” daughter she had out of wedlock.