This interview is part of the June 13, 2024, Alice Munro Substack Virtual Memorial.
Introduction (Start Here)
Robert Thacker had an intuition that Alice Munro was a writer to watch when he read his first story by her (“Material”) in Tamarack Review, a Canadian magazine, fifty years ago. “If this is what Canadian writing is,” he thought between his undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, “sign me up” (1:55-5:20).
He wrote his master’s thesis on her uncollected stories and first book, then continued to follow her career into the 1980s, when he had a chance to meet her and ask a few questions. “I’m not dead yet,” she chided, expressing her skepticism of academics and her expectation that research should focus on writers no longer living.
Nonetheless, as a professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, Dr. Thacker continued publishing about Munro and eventually earned her trust (a story he tells in the interview around 46:15-53:00). In the early 2000’s, he interviewed Munro several times, as well as other important people in her life.
Thacker’s 600-page Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005) was released by her longtime publisher Douglas Gibson at McClelland & Stewart Ltd. in Toronto. Afterward, Thacker and Munro continued to meet every year or two. In 2011, he added new material to the paperback edition of the biography. In 2023, he published Alice Munro’s Late Style (Bloomsbury), focusing on themes of return and the maturation of Munro’s last three books.
Thacker’s first book was The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989). He is an archival scholar who has published and edited extensively on Willa Cather, Alice Munro, and related literary subjects. Before retiring from St. Lawrence University, he served as Chair of Canadian Studies and an associate dean. He has also held leadership positions for scholarly organizations in U.S. western and Canadian studies. In December 2023, the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States awarded Thacker the Donner Medal for distinguished achievement, scholarship, and program innovation in Canadian Studies in the United States. Thacker is well known through his professional associations for his delightful company and outstanding mentoring of younger scholars (including yours truly).
Dr. Thacker and I spoke in late May about Alice Munro’s life, her work, and the biographer-author relationship. View our conversation in the video above or the edited transcript below.
Interview Transcript
Edited, with subheads added to improve the reading experience. Click the headline of this post to view the full transcript if you are reading in email and the text is incomplete.
Welcome
Penry (00:00:02): Welcome. This is a special edition of Quiet Reading with Tara Penry. We're here to celebrate the life and work of Nobel laureate Alice Munro. My special guest is Dr. Robert Thacker, her biographer and a scholar of her work for 50 years.
Dr. Thacker is the Charles A. Dana of Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York -- And I left out the word emeritus. That is, Professor of Canadian Studies and English, Emeritus. Terribly important. His most recent book, Alice Munro's Late Style, was just published last year.
Earlier, in 2005, after many years of research that we'll hear a bit about today, he published Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, a biography that records the influence especially of Munro's home place in southwestern Ontario, but the influence of her life on her acclaimed fiction.
I will place the links to both of those books, the biography and the most recent one, Alice Munro's Late Style, in the transcript when we post online so folks will be able to find those easily.
Bob, thank you very much for making time in your busy schedule today to join us in this Substack Writers Memorial for Alice Munro that's scheduled exactly one month after her death on May 13th.
Thacker (00:01:33): Happy to do it.
“If this is Canadian writing, sign me up”
Penry (00:01:35): I want to start by letting you tell us a story. I know you as a great storyteller in all the years we've known each other through an academic organization, the Western Literature Association. I love your stories. So I wonder if you'd start off by telling us when and how you happened upon your first Alice Munro story.
Thacker (00:01:55): Sure. Actually, it was fortuitous, and I'm still kind of amazed by it.
I graduated from college in 1973 from Bowling Green in New York — not New York. Ohio, unless they moved it. And I took a year off after graduation to kind of figure out what I was going to do, whether I was going to go to graduate school and try to become an English professor or go to law school. (I'm happy I made the decision I did.)
Anyway, one of my professors at Bowling Green said to me, well, if you're going to go to Canada to study Canadian literature in English (and I already decided that was where I was going) — this professor said, well, you know, if you're going to do Canadian writing, one of the things you ought to do is take out a subscription to a prominent Canadian writing journal. And I thought about that and I knew about some stuff. And so I took out a subscription to a periodical. It was called the Tamarack Review and it was published in Toronto. I took out a subscription and the first issue came in November of 1973. I sat down and I read the first story in it.
Well, the first story in it happened to be Alice Munro's “Material.”
In some ways, it's a singular and different story than most people think of when they think of Munro. She did a stint when she got involved in the creation of the Writers’ Union of Canada. She was seeing a man named John Metcalf, who was deeply embroiled in this. And this was after her marriage had ended. This would be in [19]71, ’72, in there. And anyway, so he was taking her around to meetings of writers. And at the time, no surprise to anybody, most of the writers were men. And Alice, well, I should just refer people to the story. It was published in her third book, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You. And it's just a wonderful send-up of the academic writer, which is, I suppose, on Substack, a good place to talk about it.
(00:04:44): It begins, I mean, the woman, the narrator begins by saying, “I don't keep up with Hugo's writing.” He's her divorced former husband, and it kind of goes from there. And it's a wonderful story. Actually, it's one that critics have spent a lot of time trying to decide how seriously to take her. So there you go.
(00:05:13): But anyway, that was the first story that I read of Munro's, and I literally did put it down and think, well, you know, if this is what Canadian writing is, sign me up.
Penry (00:05:23): Yeah.
Thacker (00:05:25): So I went off to the University of Waterloo the next year and did a master's degree. It was among the first MA theses on Munro's work. I looked at her uncollected stories and the stories in her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, which was published in Canada in 1968. And it wasn't published in this country until ‘72, I think. How's that for an answer?
Penry (00:05:55): Impressive! [Laughter]
You mentioned her divorce in 1972, a pivotal life change. For those of our listeners and readers who aren't that familiar with the general outline of her life, I'll give a very brief, sketchy outline of her geographic background, moves, and changes as a setup to ask you about what these places meant to her.
(00:06:23): Before you discovered her as a [soon-to-be] graduate student in 1973, Munro had been writing about 20 years. Is that right? Since college?
Thacker (00:06:30): Yeah. I mean, she literally kind of followed the path that so many people do take. The first time she found publication was in the undergraduate literary magazine of the University of Western Ontario, which she attended for two years between 1949 and ‘51. She had a scholarship and basically it was a scholarship for two years. And when the money ran out, the money ran out because she wasn't going to get it from any place else. So she got married at that point.
Penry (00:07:01): Our students today would understand that very well [the money running out]. So she'd been writing more than 20 years then when you found her and she kept publishing after she married Jim Munro. They moved to British Columbia. They lived in Vancouver. They opened a bookstore in Victoria where they also lived. They had some daughters. One died in infancy and three survived. Is that right?
Thacker (00:07:26): Right.
Penry (00:07:28): And so she was a homemaker, raising daughters, also running a bookstore, also writing while they were in British Columbia. And she was married around 20 years before they divorced.
Correcting a common error about the Munro date of divorce
Thacker (00:07:43): Actually, actually -- This is the kind of thing that only somebody like me would care about or point out, but I will anyway.
Penry: Good!
Thacker: They didn't get divorced until 1976. Many of the obituaries said she divorced in ‘72, and it wasn't formally done until ‘76.
[Of her second marriage:] There's a very good reason that I always refer to her second husband as she always called him her second husband. But she also told me that they never married. I don't think it's a very big deal. She connected with this fellow, Gerald Fremlin, at the University of Western Ontario [during college]. They weren't close then, but they knew each other. And she reconnected when she got back to Ontario in 1974. And they moved in together in ‘75 because he was looking after an infirm mother in the house in which he was born, which brought her back -- I'm stealing your thunder -- which brought her back to Huron County, Ontario. She wasn't in the same town she grew up in, but she was about 20 miles away. So she lived there basically forever -- well, I think it's fair to say, certainly for the rest of her writing life and a good chunk of her life. Until her health became the major consideration it became, she was living in that same house. Fremlin died in 2013, and she stayed on there. But ultimately, she moved closer to one of her daughters in Port Hope, Ontario, which is east of Toronto. And that's where she was when she died.
The daughters and the divorce
Penry (00:09:35): I'm going to take you back to those early ‘70s, when she first made the move with her -- with whatever girls were still living with her. Were all three daughters still at home with her at that point, or the older ones had moved out?
Thacker (00:09:50): When the marriage ended, the three daughters (Catherine was born and died on the same day in 1955; the oldest one, Sheila, was born in 1953, and the second living one was Jenny and she was born in ’57. Andrea wasn't born until 1966) -- So when the marriage ended and Alice decided to come back to Ontario, basically the older two were closer to being on their own and the younger one did tend to stay in Victoria with her father. But Alice also saw each of them, I think, pretty regularly through those years.
What did home mean to Alice Munro’s writing?
Penry (00:10:53): Okay. So at that time, when she made the split and came back home to southwestern Ontario, I'd like to hear from you what was important about that for her writing. You've written in your biography that that was really an important move for her subject matter, her sense of confidence, and her sense of herself as a writer. So tell us about how important southwestern Ontario and small towns and her sense of home were for her writing.
Thacker (00:11:27): Well, I mean, I think it's hard to overestimate or put too much emphasis on.
Part I - Developing the national reputation
Basically, the way I see her writing career evolving is that she went to British Columbia and she got married in December of ‘51. She and Jim Munro, as you say, went to Vancouver first. He was working for the Eaton's department store. And so they lived in Vancouver until I think essentially he got tired of working for the Eaton's department store and they decided to go to Victoria and set up this bookstore.
He knew she was a writer and he supported her. Each of her husbands, she often said, you know, she was lucky, you know, because men of that generation would not necessarily support a wife who had serious work. Okay. And certainly that image comes up pretty continually in her life. As we said earlier, I mean, she first published in the university publication. A man by the name of Robert Weaver, who was also one involved in the Tamarack Review, which we mentioned earlier -- “discovered” is probably too strong a word -- but anyway, she got into contact with him. She had been writing him actually before she got married because he worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and he was a producer.
And one of the things he did was he was responsible for the writing program. For example, the first one [radio show] I think was called Canadian Short Stories. Nah, the second one. He did a bunch of them. But the one that he's probably best known for is called Anthology, which was on the Canadian network for years.
(00:13:38): And one of the things - and I think that's worth kind of pausing over for a moment - because when you want to talk about Canadian culture, it's obviously bifurcated French and English. But the problem that English Canadians have is that a lot of people read English Canadian writing, and they think it's American writing. Okay? There's not that much difference between those people and us, however you want to define that, and anyway, so what the CBC was intent on doing was finding Canadian writers and buying their stories and broadcasting them on a network. And of course, this is at a time when radio is the thing. And when they're broadcast, they're broadcast from one end of a very big country to another. And she sold several stories to him [Weaver] and they really were her first, if you will, professional stories. All right.
(00:14:49): She also published a bit in this magazine that I talked about, the Tamarack Review. And so the thing is, what she was doing was developing a reputation.
And she was in other places, too. She was in Chatelaine. She was in Queen’s Quarterly. She was in a now defunct magazine called Mayfair, published in Canada.
Sidebar to the national reputation: The story in a slush pile
Ironically, at least I think, she sold the most number of stories after The New Yorker to a magazine called The Montrealer. And The Montrealer was trying to do... you know, the same sort of thing that the New Yorker did with New York City, right? Although Montreal then would be the nexus.
(00:15:52): And actually a very funny thing happened there. There was a shakeup at The Montrealer -- this was before she published anything there -- and a new fellow, a new editor came in. What was his name? Kiil. [Correction: Gerald Taaffe, from Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, p 162.] He came in and he started going through the slush pile, just the way you always think happened. And he found a story. It was the title story of the book, Dance of the Happy Shades. And he finds this, but she hadn't signed it, okay?
And so the editor went out trying to figure out who had submitted this thing. And this is a long way back, but the thing is, you know, their used to be (there may still be) this kind of magazines that aimed at people who wanted to be writers. Well, they had, you know, they had notices in the back of this magazine. So this guy [Taaffe] put a notice in the back of one of these magazines, and somebody who knew Alice – it probably would have been in Vancouver at that time because I think it was about ’61 -- had heard it broadcast on the CBC, the same story. And this person got in touch with Alice and told her to get in touch with this editor, and that's how she began to publish in the Montrealer.
Part II - What home meant
Thacker (00:17:35): But the point of all that, I think, well, there are two points.
One is that she really was being a writer from early on, almost alone. Okay? She was writing because she needed to write. And she sent stuff to the New Yorker -- this would have been in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And both she and Jim Munro, when I talked to each of them, said that they were convinced that there was some post office, you know, midway across the continent, who sent the rejection slips out because they came so fast.
Yeah. And she certainly brought it up on more than one occasion when she did start publishing in The New Yorker. But anyway, so the one point is, she really was working on her craft by herself largely for a very long time.
(00:18:41): And indeed, I think it's reasonable to say that when the marriage faltered and she decided to leave and go about a different way of life, she had to think about her writing as a marketable thing in a way that she really had not had to before because Jim, her husband, was supporting the family in the way that was done then, I guess.
Okay. So there's that.
(00:19:17): The second thing is that all the time she's writing about southern Ontario or Huron County and specifically where she had grown up, she's doing it from far away and in memory. Okay? And developing those attributes, I guess. And the thing is that it was when she came back and ended up back in Huron County in 1975 -- and she moved to Clinton in, I think it was August or September of 1975 -- that really was the sea change that I have long argued, because by that point, she was already acknowledged as a writer of some consequence, at least in Canada. So the thing is, when she came back, it wasn't a matter of apprentice work. It was a matter of seeing her material up close and personal in a way that she hadn't seen it before.
Thacker (00:20:22): That's a long answer, but that's my answer.
Penry (00:20:24): Yeah. And if people want to know more, they can read your biography, where it's very important. At that section of her life, that sense of returning home is a very strong theme that you develop in the book.
“I always did the housework.”
Penry (00:20:39): I also want to touch on something that you brought up about writing alone. That reminds me of a line -- I'm going to find it in my notes here -- that her oldest daughter Sheila wrote in a memoir called The Lives of Mothers and Daughters that came out just before your biography, a couple of years. Somewhere around mid-book, Sheila writes that her mother was so busy as a housewife and especially a hostess -- she hosted her in-laws at one point, and said she wasn't going to write while they were there -- she was so busy with her domestic responsibilities, but especially hosting, while they were in Vancouver, that at one point, this is a quotation from daughter Sheila,
(00:21:24): “She was almost frantic with frustration, afraid she would never write again.”
Was that the most precarious time for her as a writer? Or were there other challenges that shook her so deeply?
Thacker (00:21:41): Well, you know, the thing is that she did an interview once where she said to the interviewer, “Writing was something I just did, like the laundry.” Okay?
And, you know, even when I came to be talking to her about her writing and asking questions about periods like, you know, some time back, she would say things like, you know, “Well, I always did the housework.”
(00:22:14): Her first book was published in 1968, Dance of the Happy Shades. Her, if you will, hometown paper, I think it was the Victoria paper -- I'm not sure which one it was -- wrote the headline (talking about the book), “Housewife finds time to write stories.”
OK? This is a person who was born in 1931. And this is this is a person who, you know, always wrote along with family responsibilities.
(00:22:57): And as actually, I think I said to you when we were preparing for this, one of the things that, you know, she never made a big deal out of it, but I do think she was irritated by it. And that is that the, you know, as the story of Munro's books was told, it was usually given to her husband first as the primary person, whereas it wasn't. And indeed, from Alice's point of view, the years in which they were trying to get the store established were the best years of their marriage because they had a shared goal that they were each contributing to.
(00:23:48): Going back to the quotation from Sheila, yeah, I mean, I think that probably as the domestic responsibilities impinged, she would tend to not write.
(00:24:08): I've always thought this was kind of a funny thing that when the first book was coming together. And this was a book where the publisher was instigating it more than Alice was herself. Her editor, it was Ryerson of Canada was the name of the publisher. Her editor there, a woman by the name of Audrey Coffin, told Alice that I think they had And the book has 15 stories, and I think they had 11 or a dozen in hand. And this is about ‘66 or ‘67. Coffin told her that they needed three more stories, right? And Alice said, “You want me to write three more stories when I've got a five-month-old baby?” And Coffin said, yes. And she did.
(00:25:05): And indeed, the three stories she wrote in that book are, well, one gets mentioned a lot because it's the opening story in the book. It's one called “Walker Brothers Cowboy.” And the other two, well, the other two, one of them is a particular favorite of mine. It's called “Images.” It was broadcast, I remember. And then another called “Postcard.” But in any event, she delivered.
(00:25:37): And see, that's just it. Following that line for just a second, each of the older daughters said to me at one time when I was talking to them that they could always tell when their mother was deep in a story because, you know, she seemed to be someplace else. Right.
Penry (00:26:02): Yeah, which any writer can relate to. The headline now would read something like, “Writer neglects housework; children...
Thacker (00:26:14): Right.
Penry (00:26:14): “ … spend all their time at the neighbor's” or something like that. Just the opposite of her headline.
Thacker (00:26:18): Well, you know, the thing is -- we didn't plan this at all -- but you go back and read that story, “Material,” OK? I mean, her real subject there is men and women. Basically what happens is the narrator starts talking about her marriage to Hugo. What she's really focusing on is how he was able to do what he was able to do with his life. And, not that she didn't do something, but that he was able to do it in a way (And actually, she also pins it on her second husband) -- in a way that women didn't have [the chance] to do, right?
So it isn't just a send up of male writers; it's kind of a send-up of social mores at the time. But it's a great story.
Feminism & Other Labels
Penry (00:27:25): This is, after all, the generation of The Feminine Mystique.
Thacker (00:27:29): Well, and she was in some ways embroiled in that. I mean, I don't want to get into ideological tussles, but one of the things about Munro that I've always thought was interesting is that she certainly, while she was certainly sympathetic to things feminist all the way through, she was never ideological about it.
There's an interview on an early critical book where the woman who was doing it, a woman named Beverly Rasporich, you know, is trying to get Alice to agree to this, that, and the other thing by way of, you know, ideological intentionality. And, you know, she just plain wouldn't do it.
Penry (00:28:19): Well, and that gets right to my next question. I lined up the questions of her greatest challenges and feminism to be right next to each other. And by going back to “Material,” you read my mind. So the little nuance that I want to add here to the discussion of her resistance of ideology is I want to ask you what she thought or felt toward the word “feminism.” Did she feel that when people used that word they were being “ideological,” so she didn't want anything to do with the word, or was she fine with having that word applied to her as long as people didn't try to pin her down to a creed that she was going to stick with at all times? You say she wasn't ideological, but what did she think about the word “feminism”?
Thacker (00:29:03): It's a good question and it's a difficult question. Because I think there's no question but that she was deeply sympathetic based on her own experience in a variety of ways. But at the same time, this is not the kind of thought and analysis that she was drawn to as an intellectual. She was drawn to the telling of story and the telling of the story in a particularly affective, effective, and compelling way, which is, of course, what she continued to do.
(00:29:55): If somebody's interested in this type of thing [Munro on feminism, labels, and other people’s expectations], I would point them someplace. It's always been an interesting thing to me that when her first collection of Selected Stories was published in 1996 (it was published in hardback by Knopf and was published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart), it had no introduction or other explanation of who picked the stories, how they were picked, why they were picked. I explain a lot of this stuff in my biography, but the thing is, John Updike wrote a, well, a wonderful review in the New York Times Book Review of the Selected Stories. The Selected Stories came out in ‘96, and that was just only about two years after her last collection. And a couple of those stories were in the thing. So anyway, his review basically was kind of this great long celebration of Munro's abilities. And then in the last paragraph or so, he basically skewers the collection because nobody explained who did it and why they did it and so on and so forth.
So almost immediately, it was in ‘97, they produced a paperback version (there's a Penguin in Canada and elsewhere and Vintage in the U.S.) with an introduction by Alice, and one of the things I've argued about it is that she sounds a bit churlish in the introduction. And one of the things she says is you know the you know she's got to meet expectations. I mean she's not It's not overtly so, but I think what happened was that they kind of pushed her into writing an introduction that she wasn't much inclined to write. And in that, she talks about all the things, all the boxes she has to check, and feminism is one of them. Okay.
(00:32:23): And for my purposes, she also talks a good deal about being a Canadian writer and checking that particular box. I'm not gonna, you know, wax poetic about it, but I really think that ultimately she figured out a way to be exactly the writer she wanted to be rather than to meet other people's expectations.
(00:33:00): I think that's something which is both admirable and laudable in a world where that isn't the case usually.
Penry (00:33:10): Right. And writers struggle with that today. It's so important in this internet era to have a kind of writerly identity or brand or website and all these kinds of things that writers feel pressured to have aside from just categories you and I are familiar with, like regional or Canadian or Western or Prairie or small town, feminist, all those kinds of labels. Now it gets even narrower. Writers have always chafed at those labels. And now, not only are you going to have labels, but you're going to have some kind of image or brand that everybody will know you by. So I think that it's very relatable for writers to feel annoyed by checking those boxes.
Munro’s humor, public writer phase, & shyness
Penry (00:33:52): And the way you talk about her, it sounds like there were things that made her peevish. I want to flip that around. I know you partly as a person with a fantastic sense of humor. And I know that you and Alice Munro became friends over time working together. We're going to get to that in just a moment, your relationship with her. But I wonder another question about her temperament and her preferences: What was her sense of humor like? What did she make jokes about or what did she find funny? I don't feel humor when I read her stories, but I haven't read as many as you have.
Thacker (00:34:33): Oh, a lot of people do. And I certainly do in a variety of ways. I mean, I think she thought that everything was funny.
In fact, she, who was it? Oh, Kinsella. Yeah, W.P. Kinsella. He's the Shoeless Joe Jackson guy. I don't know if he interviewed her or was doing a review or something. But in any case, in print, he recounted talking to Alice once and saying to her, you know, I think you think everything is funny. And she said, I do. Right.
Thacker (00:35:22): And, you know, I think she had a wonderful sense of humor. Irony. It came through, well, it comes through in the writing certainly, but it certainly came through in the interpersonal.
The other thing about her was that she as a person was shy. And she even, you know, when she, had developed a career and was very well known, I don't think that entirely went away.
When she came back East and was trying to figure out exactly what form her life was going to take -- this would be ‘72, ’73 -- she really did for a little bit, say probably from ‘72, ‘73 through ‘75, maybe, you know, make an effort at trying to be a public writer, okay? But I don't think she was ever really convinced it was going to work.
The Canada Council in Canada had a program to pay for Canadian writers to go around the universities and colleges and sit on panels and read and whatnot. And she did do some of that.
And the thing is that she never liked it, and it kind of...
When you saw her do it, and I certainly saw her do it a few times, it looked like what writers did, okay? But when you heard her talk about how she felt when she was doing that, whether she was reading the story or sitting on a panel or whatever it was, she said that, you know, that she would be nervous for days ahead of time and, you know, kind of beside herself with worry.
And I think she went in the early ‘60s when she was still in Victoria, she went to a creative writing class. She got chewed up by some pompous, pretentious person who probably didn't think much of women writing at all, and certainly didn't have any interest in stories about domestic existence.
And anyway, one of the things that I thought was remarkable was that I started interviewing her for this biography in 2001, and she could talk about that session with that guy as if it happened 12 minutes ago. Okay. (And I dug up some stuff about him and I'm not going to mention his name because he doesn't deserve it.) But the thing is that, I mean, it never left her mind.
Munro and academics / Keen evaluator of professional relationships
And, she didn't like, I don't think she got used to academics. I don't think she liked us much.
And I think, you know, part of my deal with her was that — I have long said that she was, as a professional, she was one of the best evaluators that I'd ever run into. She certainly did it to me. She did it to Virginia Barber, who was her first agent in the ‘70s. And she did it to Doug Gibson, who was her Canadian publisher for many, many, many years.
And when I say “did it,” what I mean is that she wasn't in any hurry to develop a relationship with somebody until she was sure that they were somebody who was... not ‘going to do what she approved of’ … but that there was somebody that she could be confident in and work well with.
And I think that that really came in part, I think, probably from all those years being on her own and kind of rattling around in her mind about these stories and their worth and what directions they take and so on. And I could probably extend that to some degree to the people at the New Yorker too.
Munro and The New Yorker
Penry (00:40:28): She wrote a great deal for The New Yorker, for people who don't have a sense of her whole career. You mentioned to me that after her first couple of stories for The New Yorker, they had her on a right of first refusal contract so that her agent sent all of her stories to The New Yorker and they published many things that she sent, unless the story was too long.
Thacker (00:40:50): And then they... Well, they still read it and they may have rejected it. The New Yorker published a story called “The Love of a Good Woman,” which was the title story of that collection in 1998. And initially, it didn't look like they were going to take it and that she was going to take it back. Because all a right of first refusal contract does is that the writer guarantees that the magazine can see a story once she wants to shop it around.
This was when Tina Brown was the editor and Bill Buford was the fiction editor.
(00:41:33): And for a while there, and it's not absolutely clear exactly what happened, but for a while there, it looked like Virginia Barber was going to withdraw the story. And it was largely a matter of length. I mean, the magazine was trying to do it in two issues and that kind of thing. And she did, that did happen a couple of times.
But anyway, length really, as you say, it did become an issue.
(00:42:09): One of the things that's unique in her career is that The New Yorker in 2004 published three connected stories in the same issue, something like over 30,000 words, something like that, which is a singular thing. It's pretty amazing.
Penry (00:42:26): … Because everybody knows how hard it is to get into The New Yorker …
Thacker (00:42:31): Yeah, yeah. As far as The New Yorker goes, simply put, her first story was in March of 1977 - um - I think the last one was in 2011. And actually, that one's an interesting one because it was published in The New Yorker, and for largely personal reasons, she decided not to put it in her last collection, Dear Life. So it's kind of an orphan out there. And I treat it in the last book [Alice Munro’s Late Style].
But anyway, she published a total of 63 pieces in The New Yorker, one of them twice. And I say pieces because they accepted a piece called “Lying Under the Apple Tree.” I think this is about 2002. The New Yorker accepted the piece as personal history, but as they were doing their vaunted fact-checking, they discovered fictional bits here and there. So ultimately, they published it under that heading, but the editor there, Deborah Treisman wrote a disclaimer about it because it, you know, it's really more fiction than it is personal history, right.
(00:44:25): There's one of the last ones she did, “Dear Life,” the title story of the last book, was published as personal history, and it really is personal history.
Penry (00:44:42): You have to find out those things from the biographer because otherwise the rest of us never know whether a writer is just toying with us.
Thacker (00:44:50): He [the biographer] spends enormous amounts of time running down some of the smallest things. [Laughter]
Penry (00:44:55): I have three more questions and I know I've taken a lot of your time, but I want to ask a question about your relationship with Munro. And I want to ask also about a passage that's in your book that you write when Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage comes out in the ‘90s [correction: 2001]. And I want to ask just a final question about your recommendation for people who are new to Munro. So: one about your relationship, one about something you wrote, and then one for advice for new readers.
Let's see if we can get all that in.
Earning Munro’s trust
Penry (00:45:30): So, about your relationship with her, when you decided that you were going to write a biography, I love this story that you told me that you put a note in a critical anthology of essays that you edited, identifying that you intended to begin work on a biography of her.
Thacker (00:45:51): I sent her a letter and I told her that.
Penry (00:45:54): Oh, in a letter. Okay.
Thacker (00:45:57): And I told Virginia Barber that too.
Penry (00:46:00): Her agent.
Thacker (00:46:00): Yeah.
Penry (00:46:01): So you sent the book to her agent and to Munro and told them [in a letter] that you plan to start a biography. What do you think made a difference? Why do you think -- Well, tell us the story of when you first got a response from Munro, that she was going to work with you and not just ignore you. I think that's a wonderful story. What do you think made the difference for her?
Thacker (00:46:27): For a long time in my career, I took the view that what I was going to do as a Munro critic was to leave her alone so she kept writing.
The thing is, too, there were people about, I mean, I knew of one or two other academics who were making noises about writing a Munro biography. Certainly not that they couldn't, but it kind of prodded me into doing something. This would have been in the ‘90s.
(00:47:07): And almost at the same time, I was asked to do a special Alice Munro collection of critical essays.
So I had encouraged a person who had been doing some work at the Munro papers at the University of Calgary, who was doing a doctoral dissertation there, to write about Munro's relationship with Barber. Suffice to say that when I got it as a draft, it wasn't exactly what I was looking for.
I knew that if I was going to publish it, I was going to have to at least get Barber's okay. She wouldn't okay it without Alice okaying it.
(00:48:00): [After sending the contributor’s draft essay to Barber] And I got this letter that began, “Dear Professor Thacker, I don't think you'll be surprised when I tell you that I don't recognize the relationship that the author describes.”
And so anyway, this essay went on to be published. She gave me permission to publish it.
But in the same letter, there was a letter from Alice Munro telling me in no uncertain terms that if it was going to be published, that the author had to do this, this, and this. And you could also see that she wasn't happy about the whole business.
And so anyway, this thing went to publish. It was published as an issue of a journal. And then the publisher brought it out as a book. It's called The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro. It was published in 1999.
(00:49:08): Anyway, I then sent copies to both Barber and Munro saying that I'd thought about it and I had decided that I was going to go ahead with the biography. And it wasn't too long after that, I got this letter.
And I remember looking at it and thinking, you know, who do I know in Comox, British Columbia?
And it turned out that it was a letter from Alice Munro telling me that she had thought about it, and I think actually because of the circumstances that we had gone through with this essay …
When I was doing this, I knew that I was either helping my case or hurting my case, and it turned out I was helping my case because I think what she decided from all that was that she -- somebody was going to do it [write a biography] and she would be better off to cooperate with somebody and know what kinds of questions were being asked.
(00:50:16): So that's what we did. We started in August of 2001. And the number of times, four or five times, I guess, we met when I had piled up enough questions and enough things to ask her about. But it was really focused on that.
(00:50:44): And she was always very clear that this was not an authorized biography or one that she was encouraging herself, which I think is indicative, too, of the sort of a person she was.
I mean, as came out in a lot of the obituary materials, this was a person who came from a society where you didn't put yourself forward. You know, even though she always knew what she had accomplished, she still was that person who didn't put herself forward.
(00:51:22): So I published the book [Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives] in 2005. She saw the text before it was published. Her only reaction was that I had spent some time talking about a scene from when she went to her first elementary school, which was a pretty rough place. She's talked about it many times in interviews. And she says, the only thing I'd like you to do, could you take that out?
And I said, sure.
And I said, why?
And she says, I don't want to remind them that that story's there.
Because this is a story in which in this rough school, in an outhouse, a brother and sister have sex in an outhouse. It's in The Beggar Maid [U.S. title] / Who Do You Think You Are? [Canadian title]
Thacker (00:52:26): I published the book in 2005. And then in 2011, I updated it and brought it out as a paperback so if people are interested, look for the paperback because there's actually more in it. I was writing about a writer who was still writing, but the thing is that I was checking in every year or two. I'd see her. We'd do more updating and interviews and that sort of stuff.
Memory problems
And she told me, I think it was in 2010 that the, the memory problems were indeed a, a real infliction.
Penry (00:53:26): She had that for a long time.
Thacker (00:53:28): Right. She really did.
Thacker (00:53:30): And it, you know, and the other thing too, is that you find yourself then wondering about stories like uh
Penry: “The Bear —”
Thacker: “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” right, which was written and published, you know, before anything was clear [about Munro’s memory problems]. But then there's a story called “In Sight of the Lake” that's in Dear Life, and by then she certainly knew what’s in store.
Penry (00:54:07): I think about “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and how prescient that was that she herself was going to suffer Alzheimer's [dementia] like the woman in the story —
Thacker (00:54:18): Well, that may have been. I'm not sure that that's the case. The one thing is that when Alice came back to Ontario, she had a — Well, and actually this woman was a — it turns up in several stories because what happened was her mother was diagnosed, although it took them a while to get the diagnosis, but her mother started showing signs of Parkinson's disease about 1943. Alice would have been about 12.
And it was very clear that it was debilitating and affecting and all sorts of stuff. And so her mother-in-law, the mother of Alice's father, and her sister moved. Both of them were widows, and they moved to Wingham to be close to the family because it was clear that help was going to be needed. And so these two women are presences in various stories.
Well, when Alice moved back to Ontario in 1975, the grandmother had been dead for the better part of a decade, but the aunt, great-aunt as she was, was in the local home. And Alice spent a lot of time visiting her.
And indeed, there's a pretty well-known scene in The Beggar Maid where Flo, the character there, is in such a home and is pretty much gone, but every once in awhile shows that she's still there by biting a nurse.
(00:56:32): And so, I think, not to make too much of a point of it, I think that Alice had known places like that and gone to places like that and thought about people in those situations.
And certainly in conversations I had with her, you know, not anything until about 2010 where she did get specific, but until up until then, you know, and of course it's true of all of us. We know that if we live long enough, the chances of that occurring are quite, are quite real.
(00:57:04): So yeah, but it's — I think she was prescient in a lot of ways.
Penry (00:57:11): Yeah.
“Trying to define just how her work is so very good” (Part I)
Penry (00:57:15): So I wanted to ask about a quotation that comes from your biography. Well into it, when Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage -- and for those who haven't read the book, the title story is really a good one to read, to get a sense of what's so special about Munro -- but the quote: You noted in your biography that the reviewers, when that book came out, had the same problem that reviewers had always had with her books.
And that was, you said they were, and this is a quote from your book, “trying to define just how her work is so very good, so very affecting.” I love that line because it seems like if a writer's good enough nobody can quite explain why they're so good. I felt like that's what you were saying about Munro right there. Even for you as a literary critic working on her for decades -- and for any of us as a literary critic or a reviewer: don't get too worked up if we can't quite put our finger on why she's so good, because the reviewers have been trying and trying.
So what's your own answer? I'm going to put that challenge to you. If you try to define just how her work is so very good, so very affecting, what's the big deal? What's the big deal about Alice Munro? Why is she so special?
What should a newcomer read?
Thacker (00:58:45): Well, there are actually several ways to go about that. [But] I'm going to jump to your third question [Where a newcomer should start in Munro’s work].
Thacker (00:58:54): For a long time, when people ask me, well, which book should I start with, I would say The Progress of Love, which was published in 1986. I still like that book a lot. And I think it's got enormously wonderful stories in it.
But in some ways, looking back over the entire body of, you know, 14 books plus all kinds of other stuff, I'm not sure that that's the one I would immediately go to.
I think Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, though, certainly could be put forward, because it really is kind of Munro at her apogee. I mean, every one of those stories -- each one is different from the other -- I think is, is, you know, at the top of her game.
So I think, you know, if you're going to start someplace, that's a good book to start with.
[Also,] Both of the selected stories.
Thacker (01:00:07): One was published in ‘96, ‘97, as I've said. And seeing that kind of gives you a chronological approach because it goes back into the early Canadian publications, which many Americans have missed.
It also doesn't include Lives of Girls and Women. (I think that's right, yeah.) That is the one book that was called a novel by the publisher, but I don't think it is. It's interconnected short stories.
Thacker (01:00:45): Another way to do it [to start reading Munro] would be to just read the two volumes of selected stories chronologically. That certainly works. The second one came out in 2014. It's called “Family Furnishings,” which is the title of one of the stories in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.
All right, so there, I've answered that question.
Penry (01:01:18): You answered the last one, what should people read?
“Trying to define just how her work is so very good” (Part II):
“A fine and lucky benevolence”
Thacker (01:01:21): I'm not going to try to slip away [from the unanswered question] on you.
You know, one of the things is that you mentioned the title story in Hateship. It's an excellent story, but it's a bit unusual in that Charles May, who has done a lot of work on the short story as a form, talks about this. It's more plot-driven than most Munro stories are, because most of the time her stories are not especially plot driven.
I mean, things happen, but the connection between this happening and that happening is often hard to really put your finger on.
Thacker (01:02:20): But the answer to your question, I think, what I would say, and certainly what those critics said — And I think in a lot of ways, she continued becoming even more complicated — It has to do with the way the... I guess I'd call it the affect of the writing, okay?
(01:02:49): Because the thing is, is that she's able to create in her stories — and actually was able to do this from early on — you know, you're going along, reading something, and all of a sudden there's a phrasing — okay? — which, you know, you pause over and it leaps out and —
An early critic of Munro, a woman named Helen Hoy, talked about it in terms of Munro's oxymorons. And the thing is that she'll take words that you don't expect to be paired together and she pairs them together. So there's that quality.
(01:03:36): But the answer that I've stuck to for a very long time is that she has this facility for writing prose that gets at what it feels like to be alive.
Okay.
(01:03:57): And Doug Gibson, her Canadian publisher, has a line where he went to Stockholm, as did [agent Virginia] Barber and her editor at Knopf, Ann Close, and others. Alice sadly decided not to go because of her health.
Penry (01:04:23): You're referring to the Nobel Prize.
Thacker (01:04:24): Yeah, the Nobel Prize.
This was in December of 2013. Anyway, I can't remember if it was Doug or Doug's wife, Jane, but one or the other, was talking to some woman in Sweden, from there. And her comment about Munro is fascinating — same sort of thing that I'm talking about.
(01:04:51): “What I want to know,” this woman said, “is how she knows how I feel.”
(01:05:09): You step back at the end of the story and, and you just kind of let it, um, flow over you. You know, it's so intrinsically right — not in a sense of right as correct but, you know, that's how things are — and I think that that's a quality that she's been learning, you know, that she spent an enormous amount of time “learning how to make.”
That phrase, “learning how to make,” is a phrase that she used for Hugo back in “Material.” All right? So, I mean, I think where that narrator kind of stands back and looks at a story of Hugo's that she read that shared a character whom both of them knew during the marriage.
And this woman whose name was Dotty, the narrator says, “has passed into Art.” Right. “It doesn't happen to everybody.” And many people who knew wouldn't appreciate it if they knew that it had.
(01:06:39): But she also calls it “A fine and lucky benevolence.”
Penry (01:06:43): “A fine and lucky benevolence.” I think we can close with that phrase because it strikes me that I'm feeling the beneficiary, that I am the beneficiary of your fine and lucky benevolence, or lucky for me, benevolent from you.
Thank you, Bob, for the generosity of your time today.
We're going to sign off from our viewers and readers at Quiet Reading and look forward to June 13th, when we can read more people's personal essays and stories and tributes to Alice Munro.
Thank you, Bob.
Thacker (01:07:15): You’re welcome.
Resources
Robert Thacker, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005, updated 2011)
Robert Thacker, Alice Munro’s Late Style (2023)
June 13, 2024 Alice Munro Substack Virtual Memorial
Related posts from Tara:
“What’s So Great about Alice Munro?”
“She Wrote a Classic in the Laundry Room”
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Becoming the Writer She Wanted to Be