Thursday, Oct 10, 2013
Dubai: Alice Munro, the Canadian author who has honed the craft of short-story writing since her first publication in 1950, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Alice Munro is widely regarded as one of the world’s best living short-story writers. Her fans include Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen, and a comparison with the Anton Chekhov has been so well reported. It risks becoming meaningless — until you recall that its originator was peppery fellow writer Cynthia Ozick. All of this should make her one of literature’s worst-kept secrets, yet when she was declared winner of the Man Booker International Prize five days ago, it seemed as if she was being rediscovered.
She was born Alice Laidlaw in 1931, the eldest of three children. Her most recently published volume, The View From Castle Rock, was spun explicitly from family history and revealed that she can trace her ancestry back to Scotland and James Hogg, friend of Robert Burns, and author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In recent generations, the clan has lived in the county of Huron, part of south-western Ontario, Canada’s sprawling answer to the American Midwest. There, Munro’s father and mother, a former schoolteacher, struggled to keep afloat a fox and mink farm on the outskirts of Wingham, a provincial town just like those that fill her fiction.
She married after two years of college and became a mother at 21. The family moved to Vancouver - almost as far away as she could get without leaving the country. Three more children came along.
All the while, Munro was writing, sneaking an hour here and there while the babies napped or while dinner cooked. As she once told an interviewer, there was housework to be done as well as reading. Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers were early influences, and she frequently cites William Maxwell as a defining literary love.
The determination to write had set in with adolescence and Munro got her start through a radio show called Anthology, produced by Robert Weaver, who nurtured such other talents as Mordecai Richler and Mavis Gallant. She was regularly submitting stories to the New Yorker, receiving in return polite, pencilled rejection slips.
In a Paris Review interview, she noted a preponderance of ageing spinsters in her early work. “I think I knew that at heart I was an ageing spinster,” she said, her distinctive wit audible through the interview’s studiously unadorned Q&A format.
The Depression hung over her earliest years and she was just a little too old to take advantage of a succession of 20th-century cultural moments. By the time Elvis had teenagers all shook up, she had become a wife and mother. She was well into her 30s when flower power bloomed and nearing 40 with a book to her name by the time the women’s movement got into its stride.
Observation on people
That first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968. Made up of stories written over a 15-year period, it won her the prestigious Governor General’s Award. She followed it with Lives of Girls and Women. Published in 1971 and billed as a novel — her only one — it offered a fictionalised portrait of her girlhood and contained the observation that people’s lives “were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable — deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum”. She had found her material.
Though she has written memorably about men who are brandy-tippling, salty heroes, in the latest collection, the lives she writes of are invariably female. She credits her mother as her major source, and over the course of 11 collections she has become one of the most acute chroniclers of female sexuality, sidling up to erotic secrets in a way that lends them extra charge.
As Margaret Atwood notes: “Pushing the sexual boundaries is distinctly thrilling for many a Munro woman; but in order to trespass you have to know exactly where the fence is and Munro’s universe is crisscrossed with meticulously defined borders. Hands, chairs, glances — all are part of an intricate inner map strewn with barbed wire and booby traps and secret paths through the shrubbery.”
After 20 years of marriage, Munro and her first husband parted. By the time she returned newly single to Huron, she had been gone 23 years, though on the page, she had rarely left.
“I think I married to be able to write, to settle down and give my attention back to the important thing,” she has said. “Sometimes now when I look back at those early years I think: this was a hard-hearted young woman.”
A similar steeliness lies at the core of her writing and it’s one of its most compelling qualities.
As Alison Samuel, her long-time UK editor at Chatto & Windus, says: “There’s a hard nugget inside her stories - something really muscular.”
Her second husband is a retired geographer and his understanding of the region complements her own. They had met at college, where he was older and hipper and didn’t notice her, even when she submitted a story to a magazine he was involved with. He did write her a letter about that story a few years afterwards — It was her first piece of fan mail, but she had been hoping for a different kind of note.
Decades later, they reconnected for a nervous, three-Martini lunch and by the end of the afternoon it was almost settled that they would move in together. They live just 16 kilometres from her childhood home.
She has perfected precisely the kind of regional writing that the Swedish Academy sneers at. Yet, as Ali Smith observed reviewing Runaway, her tenth collection: “Munro’s stories enact what can only be called a sort of magic. Reading them, you sense what’s about to happen before it does and this sense of expectancy happens not in an obvious way but because you have become complicit with both the story and its consequences — you have been made local to its characters. In Munro’s hands, this kind of localising is what storytelling means, and the telling of even the bleakest stories is a hopeful act.”
Style of writing
Plenty happens in Munro’s stories. Her prose is exact and unflinching, coolly anatomising vengeful grudges, dark crimes and curdled emotions. Just as buttoned-down fronts conceal the seamy undersides of her characters’ natures, so the surface plainness of her writing disguises her bold risk-taking when it comes to form and time. She has what Daniel Menaker, who for years edited her at the New Yorker, calls “a slyly postmodern sensibility”. She writes about the way people, especially women, narrate their own life stories, and how those stories evolve, shaped by omissions and fabrications, each version overlapping and conflicting with the next to shape reality.
As a reader, she takes a pleasingly cavalier approach to books, hopscotching her way through narratives, sometimes starting at the end or, as with her initial reading of The Brothers Karamazov, skipping entire sections.
“A story is not like a road to follow,” she has written. “It’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.”
Her new collection, due to be published this autumn, promises to be her darkest yet. Its contents tell of a humiliating seduction, dangerous intimacy, and deadly jealousy. Its title is Too Much Happiness
Munro has built a career almost exclusively on short fiction. Though her stories have gradually grown in length (the shortest in the forthcoming book is more than 7,000 words long), there remains only the one full-length novel. As Chatto’s Samuel points out, Munro’s writing is so wonderfully crafted, it rises far above well-rehearsed debates concerning the form and its future. To say that she has made the short story her own and reinvigorated it somehow falls short — she has reinvented it.
In interviews, she chalks up her pluck to naivety, and her success to hard graft (each story takes an average six to eight months to write, beginning life as a notebook scribble, then going through multiple drafts before being shown to anyone). Listening to her talk — her soft voice drawing out the Celtic lilt you’ll hear in certain Canadian accents, her pretty features framed by a haze of silvery curls — you might almost believe her.
It’s in keeping with the way she lives her creative life that she should scoop not the established Man Booker Prize (only novels are eligible, though judge Claire Tomalin insisted that she be included on the 1980 shortlist for The Beggar Maid), but the newer Man Booker International.
It is equally fitting that this is fast becoming the more significant award, appearing an ever more competent alternative to the Nobel. Her victory should mean that those readers discovering her for the first time meet not only a great short-story writer, but also a great writer.
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