CLINTON, Ontario — Accepting a literary prize
in Toronto last month, Alice Munro, the acclaimed short-story writer —
“our Chekhov,” as Cynthia Ozick has called her — winner of the Man Booker International Prize
and just about every important North American literary award for which
she is eligible, told a newspaper interviewer, “I’m probably not going
to write anymore.”
Ian Willms for The New York Times
Alice Munro near her bungalow in Clinton, Ontario, a
small town like those in her renowned works of short fiction.
Ms. Munro, who will turn 82 next week, has talked this way before. In 2006 she told a writer
from The Toronto Globe and Mail, “I don’t know if I have the energy to
do this anymore.” She then went on to publish yet another story
collection, her 14th, called “Dear Life.”
It came out last fall, and reviewers, as usual, remarked on her
insightful handling of themes like the bleakness of small-town life; the
eruptive, transforming power of sex; and the trouble women have making
their way in a world run by men.
But recently, sitting on the back porch of her home on the edge of town
here, Ms. Munro insisted that this time she really means to retire. She
was wearing pants, a loose cotton top and sensible sandals that revealed
toenails painted electric blue, and she seemed cheerful and relaxed.
There will be no more books after “Dear Life,”
she said, and the four autobiographical stories that conclude the book —
retellings, in a way, of ones with which she began her career — will be
her last. “Put your money on it,” she said.
For great writers, retirement is a fairly recent career option. There
have always been writers, like Thomas Hardy and Saul Bellow, who kept at
it until the very end, but there are many more, like Proust, Dickens
and Balzac, who died prematurely, worn out by writing itself. Margaret
Drabble may have started a trend when, in 2009, at the age of 69, she
announced that she was calling it quits. Ms. Munro said she was
encouraged by the example of Philip Roth,
who declared that he was done last fall, as he was getting ready to
turn 80. “I put great faith in Philip Roth,” she said, adding, “He seems
so happy now.”
In 2009, Ms. Munro revealed that she had undergone coronary bypass
surgery and been treated for cancer, but she said that her health now
was good — or rather, not too bad. “That’s how we talk in Canada,” she
explained. “You don’t say to someone, ‘You’re looking well.’ You say,
‘You don’t seem so bad.’ ” The great recent upheaval in her life, she
added, was the death in April of her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, to whom she was “tremendously close.”
Ever since, she went on, she has been making an effort to be more
social, to see people and to accept invitations. “I do things quite
purposefully now to get out on the surface of life,” she said. “It just
seems natural now for me to do what other 81-year-olds do.” She laughed
and added, “If you’ll only tell me what that is.”
Ms. Munro is famously self-effacing and publicity-shy — traits that
probably stem in part from old-fashioned Canadian modesty and in part
from wariness, a wish not to be pinned down. In interviews she is funny,
direct and unpretentious but also a little elusive, apt to ask almost
as many questions as she answers. Nobody in Clinton knows who she is,
she said, “or if they do, they’re a little embarrassed.”
“It’s not the sort of life you should want,” she went on. “But I like
that nobody here cares much about writing. It allows me to feel quite
free.”
From the time she was 14, Ms. Munro said, she knew absolutely that she
wanted to be a writer. “But back then you didn’t go around announcing
something like that,” she said. “You didn’t call attention. Maybe it was
being Canadian, maybe it was being a woman. Maybe both.” She pursued
her career with unusual discipline, faithfully completing her quota of
pages every day while also raising three daughters and helping her first
husband, James Munro, run a bookshop, and persisted, despite not
winning much early recognition. Her first collection
came out only in 1968, when she was 37, and her work didn’t attract
attention outside Canada until it began appearing in The New Yorker in
the late ’70s. (I was her first editor at the magazine.)
She began to make her reputation with her fifth and sixth books, “The Moons of Jupiter” (1982) and “The Progress of Love”
(1986), in which she frequently spurned the traditional architecture of
the short story, beginning at the end and ending sometimes in the
middle. Slowly she then ascended to what Margaret Atwood called
“international literary sainthood.”
“What I feel now is that I don’t have the energy anymore,” she said,
echoing what she told The Globe and Mail in 2006. “Starting off as I did
at a time when women didn’t do much else besides bring up children —
it’s very hard, and you get very tired. I feel a bit tired now —
pleasantly tired.” She paused and added: “There is a nice feeling about
being just like everyone else now. But it also means that the most
important thing in my life is gone. No, not the most important thing.
The most important was my husband, and now they’re both gone.”
Ms. Munro’s house, a late-19th-century bungalow on a dead-end street
that backs down to some railroad tracks, is the house Mr. Fremlin was
born and grew up in. Out back is a walnut grove he planted, and the yard
is populated by some of his whimsical sculptures, among them a bathtub
painted to look like a Holstein. The inside is comfortable but unfancy
and almost defiantly unmodern. In the dining room there is even a
portrait of Queen Victoria, along with a dictionary stand and various
bric-a-brac collected by Ms. Munro’s mother. Mr. Fremlin, a retired
geographer and editor of The National Atlas of Canada, had his own
office, but Ms. Munro writes — or wrote — in a corner of the dining
room, at a tiny desk facing a window that overlooks the driveway.
They moved here in the late ’70s to care for her husband’s aging mother,
she explained, and never saw any point in leaving. Ms. Munro grew up in
Wingham, a little town about 20 miles to the north, where her father
raised turkeys. These towns and the surrounding Huron County
countryside, great expanses of Ontario farmland bisected by roads that
cross at exact right angles, and dotted by the occasional silo or
red-brick farmhouse with the maple leaf flag flying out front, are the
world of Ms. Munro’s fiction: a world of small, isolated communities
where ambition is frowned on, especially in women; where longings are
kept secret; and everyone knows, or thinks he knows, everyone else’s
business.
“To me, it’s the most interesting place in the world,” Ms. Munro said.
“I suppose that’s because I know more about it. I find it endlessly
fascinating.” She added, though, that Huron County had changed since she
began writing. “People are more aware now of cities and of different
ways of life,” she explained. “I suppose the writing I do is a bit in
the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were
starting now.”
Critics have often called Ms. Munro’s stories novels in miniature, a
compliment she resists a little. “We can do without that word
‘miniature,’ ” she said sharply, but then added that for years she was
not content writing short stories. “While working on my first five
books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel,” she said. “I thought until
you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to
trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has
been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than
they were.”
Another thing that bothers Ms. Munro less than it used to is the process
of growing old, a subject that preoccupies some of her best stories. “I
worry less than I did,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do about it,
and it’s better than being dead. I feel that I’ve done what I wanted to
do, and that makes me feel fairly content.”
She smiled and added: “I can have people around a lot more, because I’m
not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I
mean.”
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