Alice Munro on Her Childhood, Mother, Father and Aunts

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AKSCENTRE, Alice Munro, Childhood, Father, Mother, NEWS THAT MATTER, Nobel Prize for Literature

Today, we bring to you excerpts from an interview of Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. This interview was published in ‘The Paris Review’, No. 137, 1994 under the heading ‘ Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction’. Interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch and  Mona Simpson, it is a fairly comprehensive interview with the author beginning with her childhood and then covering her art of fiction, her views on life and times etc. In the following excerpts, we cover her views on her childhood, and her reflections on her father, mother and aunts in the form of a compilation as these questions were not posed to her in continuity-AKSCENTRE

INTERVIEWER

We went back to the house where you grew up this morning: did you live there your entire childhood?

ALICE MUNRO

Yes. When my father died, he was still living in that house on the farm, which was a fox and mink farm. It’s changed a lot though. Now it’s a beauty parlor called Total Indulgence. I think they have the beauty parlor in the back wing, and they’ve knocked down the kitchen entirely.

INTERVIEWER

Have you been inside it since then?

MUNRO

No I haven’t, but I though if I did I’d ask to see the living room. There’s the fireplace my father built and I’d like to see that. I’ve sometimes thought I should go in and ask for a manicure.

INTERVIEWER

We noticed a plane on the field across the road and thought of your stories “White Dump” and “How I Met My Husband.”

MUNRO

Yes, that was an airport for a while. The man who owned that farm had a hobby of flying planes, and he had a little plane of his own. He never liked farming so he got out of it and became a flight instructor. He’s still alive. In perfect health and one of the handsomest men I’ve ever known. He retired from flight instruction when he was seventy-five. Within maybe three months of retirement he went on a trip and got some odd disease you get from bats in caves.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.oprah.com

INTERVIEWER

The stories in your first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, are very resonant of that area, the world of your childhood. At what point in your life were those stories written?

MUNRO

The writing of those stories stretched over fifteen years. “The Day of the Butterfly” was the earliest one. That was probably written when I was about twenty-one. And I can remember very well writing “Thanks for the Ride” because my first baby was lying in the crib beside me. So I was twenty-two. The really late stories were written in my thirties. “Dance of the Happy Shades” is one; “The Peace of Utrecht” is another. “Images” is the very latest. “Walker Brothers Cowboy” was also written after I was thirty. So there’s a really great range.

INTERVIEWER

How do they seem to hold up now? Do you reread them?

MUNRO

There’s an early one in that collection called “The Shining Houses,” which I had to read at Harborfront in Toronto two or three years ago for a special event celebrating the history of Tamarack Review. Since it was originally published in one of the early issues of that magazine, I had to get up and read it, and it was very hard. I think I wrote that story when I was twenty-two. I kept editing as I read, catching all the tricks I used at that time, which now seemed very dated. I was trying to fix it up fast, with my eyes darting ahead to the next paragraph as I read, because I hadn’t read it ahead of time. I never do read things ahead of time. When I read an early story I can see things I wouldn’t do now, things people were doing in the fifties.

……………………..

INTERVIEWER

What about those aunts, the wonderful aunts who appear.

MUNRO

My great aunt and my grandmother were very important in our lives. After all, my family lived on this collapsing enterprise of a fox and mink farm, just beyond the most disreputable part of town, and they lived in real town, in a nice house, and they kept up civilization. So there was always tension between their house and ours, but it was very important that I had that. I loved it when I was a little girl. Then, when I was an adolescent, I felt rather burdened by it. My mother was not in the role of the lead female in my life by that time, though she was an enormously important person; she wasn’t there as the person who set the standards anymore. So these older women moved into that role, and though they didn’t set any standards that I was at all interested in, there was a constant tension there that was important to me.

Photo Courtesy: articles.latimes.com

INTERVIEWER

Then you didn’t actually move into town as the mother and daughter do in “Lives of Girls and Women”?

MUNRO

We did for one winter. My mother decided she wanted to rent a house in town for one winter, and she did. And she gave the ladies’ luncheon party, she tried to break into society, which was totally impenetrable to her. She couldn’t do it. There was just no understanding there. I do remember coming back to the farmhouse that had been occupied by men, my father and my brother, and you couldn’t see the pattern on the linoleum anymore. It seemed as if mud had flowed into the house.

……………..

INTERVIEWER

Was the community you grew up in pleased about your career?

MUNRO

It was known there had been stories published here and there, but my writing wasn’t fancy. It didn’t go over well in my hometown. The sex, the bad language, the incomprehensibility . . . The local newspaper printed an editorial about me: A soured introspective view of life . . . And, A warped personality projected on . . . My dad was already dead when they did that. They wouldn’t do it while Dad was alive, because everyone really liked him. He was so liked and respected that everybody muted it a bit. But after he died, it was different.

INTERVIEWER

But he liked your work?

MUNRO

But he liked my work, yes, and he was very proud of it. He read a lot, but he always felt a bit embarrassed about reading. And then he wrote a book just before he died that was published posthumously. It was a novel about pioneer families in the southwest interior, set in a period just before his life, ending when he was a child. He had real gifts as a writer.

INTERVIEWER

Can you quote us a passage?

MUNRO

In one chapter he describes what the school was like for a boy who lived a little earlier than he did: “On other walls were some faded brown maps. Interesting places like Mongolia were shown, where scattered residents rode in sheepskin coats on small ponies. The center of Africa was a blank space marked only by crocodiles with mouths agape and lions who held dark people down with huge paws. In the very center Mr. Stanley was greeting Mr. Livingston, both wearing old hats.”

INTERVIEWER

Did you recognize anything of your own life in his novel?

MUNRO

Not of my life, but I recognized a great deal of my style. The angle of vision, which didn’t surprise me because I knew we had that in common.

INTERVIEWER

Had your mother read any of your work before she died?

MUNRO

My mother would not have liked it. I don’t think so—the sex and the bad words. If she had been well, I would have had to have a big fight and break with the family in order to publish anything.

You can read the full interview at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1791/the-art-of-fiction-no-137-alice-munro

Nobel, Man Booker Wins Reveal Canada’s Confidence As a Literary Nation

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AKSCENTRE, Alice Munro, Eleanor Catton, JARED BLAND, Man Booker Prize, NEWS THAT MATTER, Nobel, The Globe and Mail, The Luminaries, The Rehearsal, Yann Martel

Following on the life-long habit of AKS to record events of literary and human importance, we are starting a new section for our readers NEWS THAT MATTER wherein we will import interesting news and views from around the world focusing on the literary world, as well as socio-cultural issues. The NEWS THAT MATTER will be a category in itself which the reader can check out under the categories of articles listed on the left hand margin.-AKSCENTRE

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JARED BLAND

The Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Oct. 16 2013, 3:42 AM EDT

Last updated Wednesday, Oct. 16 2013, 3:46 AM EDT

Eleanor Catton, who on Tuesday won the Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, is 28 years old. The novel for which she won, The Luminaries, is 848 pages, the longest book ever to win. And it is her second book, following The Rehearsal, which was published to wide acclaim in 2008.

Surely the most remarkable thing about her story is that that Ms. Catton, the youngest person ever to win the prize, has accomplished all of this at an age when many of us remain engaged in heated debates about the merits of pineapple as a pizza topping. (Delicious, for the record.)

Man Booker prize shortlist nominee Eleanor Catton poses with her book “The Luminaries” during a photocall at the Southbank Centre in London, October 13, 2013.
(OLIVIA HARRIS/REUTERS)

But not in Canada. Here, the most remarkable part of this story is that – you guessed it! – Ms. Catton is Canadian. Or, rather, she’s sort-of Canadian: She was born in London, Ont., moved to New Zealand when she was six, and now calls that island nation home. But she probably learned to write within our borders. That’s close enough, right?

But can you blame us? As of last Wednesday, no Canadian had ever won the Nobel Prize for literature. And no Canadian had won the Man Booker since Yann Martel’s tiger-maintenance manual Life of Pi took the prize in 2002. Only three Canadians had won in the Booker’s 45-year history, and again only sort-of: Michael Ondaatje had to share his 1992 honour with a co-winner, Barry Unsworth.

And then, last Thursday, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize. And on Tuesday, Ms. Catton won the Booker. And, for those so inclined to read the prizewinning tea leaves, it felt like, as a literary culture, we had made it. As a colleague jokingly wrote me by way of informing me of Ms. Catton’s win, “We’re a real literary nation.”

Of course, to believe that is to ignore the fact that Canada has, for a long time, produced a lot of remarkable literature, much of which has been celebrated around the world. Before winning the Nobel, after all, Ms. Munro was but one of several Canadian names tossed around in speculation. I heard some say Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje; someone predicted Rohinton Mistry as a longshot. It was suggested by the especially optimistic that Al Purdy had once been thought a contender.

This bounty, though, is a relatively recent thing, which is probably why this sudden confluence of international recognition feels, even to the skeptical, like a real moment. Canadian literature, late to gestate, late to blossom and late to grow into a sustainable maturity, has, of late, arrived in a significant way.

Courtesy: http://www.usatoday.com

Once, Nick Mount of the University of Toronto’s English department pointed out to me that that everything CanLit happens a few generations behind broader trends. Compared, for instance, to our English-speaking counterparts in the U.K. and United States, we got started rather late. (After all, Canada has not yet celebrated its 150th birthday.)

To give you a sense of how meteoric our growth as a literary culture was, in 1959, McClelland & Stewart, Ms. Catton’s publisher, issued 19 books. A decade later, that number was more than 70, and the house had become one of the country’s dominant cultural forces.

Writing in the periodical Books in Canada in 1975, critic Robert Fulford quantified the change similarly: “When I wrote a daily book column for The Toronto Star in the early 1960s I tried to review every serious novel by a Canadian published in English; and some seasons I nearly succeeded. Today it would take a platoon of critics to attempt the same task.”

That decade, the 1960s, was the crucible of CanLit’s growth. But that was 50 years after Woolf or Hemingway, 100 after Dickens and Dickinson, more than 200 after Defoe or Richardson or Fielding. Almost 400 after Shakespeare.

Obviously, we cannot know if Ms. Catton’s bizarre and ambitious account of the 19th century New Zealand gold rush will be remembered, even canonized, as some Booker winners have been. The prize’s 45 years have recognized a lot of famous books, but also too many that have slipped from our collective cultural imagination. Is The Luminaries a Midnight’s Children, or a The Remains of the Day? Or is it destined for the remainder bins of history, like P.H. Newby’s Something to Answer For, which won in the prize’s inaugural year, 1969?

But perhaps it does not matter. Some readers love The Luminaries. Some find it tiresome and mannered. But its victory, and Ms. Munro’s, speak to something larger: a culture finally fully grown, and the confidence for us, as a literary nation, to tread upon a bigger stage. Even if we have borrowed an actor from our Kiwi colleagues.

Jared Bland is the The Globe and Mail’s books editor.

Courtesy: http://www.theglobeandmail.com