Alice Munro as a Literary Entrepreneur By Jeet Heer National Post (May 11, 2002). Writers, like almost everyone else, have to make money to survive. But serious literary writers, unlike most people, have to be very careful about how they earn that money. An accountant may, without guilt, take on any client she wants, short of a mobster or the Enron Corporation. An author, in contrast, has to avoid not just the taint of criminality but also the more subtle dangers of commercialism. A high-brow prosesmith who simply writes on demand for the highest bidder will soon earn the reputation of being a "hack." For a woman of Alice Munro's generation, the economic dilemmas of writing fiction posed even greater problems. Munro, the subject of a new book titled Reading In: Alice Munro's Archives, started writing in the early '50s, but she did not make a decent living from writing short stories until the late '70s, when she cracked the U.S. market by becoming a fixture in The New Yorker. During her quarter-century apprenticeship, Munro had to juggle her roles as wife and mother with her furtive literary aspirations, writing during stolen moments away from her family. Earning only a sporadic income from her writing, for many years Munro doubted whether she would ever become a real, professional writer. In a story entitled "The Office", the narrator expresses, with Munro's characteristic sensitivity to social embarrassment, the insecurities of a housewife/writer. "But here comes the disclosure which is not easy for me: I am a writer. That does not sound right. Too presumptuous; phony, or at least unconvincing. Try again. I write. Is that better?... It doesn't matter. However I put it, the words create their space of silence, the delicate moment of exposure." (We know that this would-be writer has great potential because this unexpected burst of eloquence — "the delicate moment of exposure" — takes flight after the halting attempts at self-definition.) With the help of unpublished biographical material, JoAnn McCaig's Reading In: Alice Munro's Archives is an attempt to map out some of the issues raised by stories such as this one. Using Munro's career as a case study, McCaig sets out to illustrate the difficulty of being, specifically, a female Canadian short-story writer in a literary marketplace where each of those adjectives represents a barrier to success. McCaig's somewhat single-minded focus is on the business end of Munro's career, rather than on her writing. None of Munro's many excellent stories gets discussed in any detail. Instead, we hear about the pressures the writer faced "to make money, crack the American market, write novels." Through McCaig's economic lens, Munro emerges, surprisingly, as a successful entrepreneur whose rags-to-riches story one might have expected to read in the pages of Fortune or Forbes. Despite starting with meager cultural capital, Munro adroitly negotiated with editors and agents to develop one of the most lucrative brand-names in CanLit. McCaig's book has an interesting backstory that sheds light on taboos in the literary world surrounding money. After an earlier excerpt from the book was published in Essays in Canadian Writing in 1999 and publicized in the National Post, Alice Munro wrote to this paper saying that McCaig's article was "riddled with bizarre assumptions and written with blatant disregard for fact." In the aftermath, Munro and some of her literary friends and associates denied McCaig the right to quote from their unpublished writings. Since almost all of McCaig's arguments rely on private letters found only in archives, Munro's restriction seriousl impedes the ability of readers to judge either side's arguments. Munro's hostility to McCaig is interesting since McCaig, an academic, is not at all an intrusive biographer looking for salacious details. Fixated on economics, McCaig mentions Munro's two marriages and her family life only in passing. Yet, for Munro, as for many other people, it seems money may be the more touchy personal issue. As Norman Podhoretz once argued, in our society, it is money, not sex, that is the dirty secret everyone is reluctant to talk about in public. That said, even if one wishes Munro had taken a more tolerant attitude toward the use of quotations from her letters, there are aspects of the book that do suggest McCaig's analysis may not be that reliable. As is characteristic of an academic novice, McCaig seems eager to twist every shred of evidence toward supporting her thesis, not realizing that the most convincing arguments allow for the untidiness of life. When McCaig quotes from published sources, her exegesis often bears only a passing resemblance to the original source. Thus, a statement by Munro that male writers are more often allowed to misbehave in public (the Norman Mailer principle) is transformed by McCaig into anxiety about appearing in The New Yorker. Elsewhere, small, ambiguous doodles that Munro penned in the margins of her papers are interpreted as evidence of an identity crisis. Perhaps it is just as well that McCaig avoids old-fashioned close analysis of texts, since she is untrustworthy in reading even simple declarative sentences. The trouble is, outside the circle of family and friends who care for Alice Munro personally, the only reason Munro holds any interest is because she is an amazing writer whose prose has the uncanny ability to come to life. And, for a serious writer such as Munro, McCaig's avoidance of literary criticism is perhaps even more insulting than sniffing through old business letters. It's not as if there is nothing to be said about Munro's writerly talents. As we've seen in "The Office", Munro can render a character's transition from stammering hesitancy to subtly nuanced expressiveness within a few fluid sentences. Her entire body of work, 10 volumes so far, is filled with such verbal miracles. Aside from her mastery of prose, Munro has a landscape painter's sense of place: her small-town Ontario lingers in a reader's mind as a place we almost believe we grew up in. Equally admirable are Munro's narrative skills, which have become increasingly powerful in recent years. Like a good magician, she knows how to hold the audience's attention by leaving the biggest trick to the moment of maximum anticipation. But McCaig, oddly, seems to think literary value judgments (even the statement that Alice Munro's recent work is better than her early stories, for example, which McCaig makes a point of criticizing in her book) are always ideological impostures that need to be debunked. Aside from being silly, this line of thought is unnecessary for McCaig's thesis. In the end, there is no reason why you can't argue that Alice Munro has adroitly manoeuvred in the literary marketplace and also that she is a very good writer who deserves her success. Certainly Pierre Bourdieu, the brilliant Marxist theorist whom McCaig relies on heavily for her analytical structure, was not averse to value judgements. In his book about television, Bourdieu heaps scorn on the junk that dominates the boob tube. Too often, McCaig seems to resent Munro's high status and wants to replace the writer's fictional narratives with an academic interpretation. At one point, McCaig praises Munro's "enviable artistry and authority." Enviable seems to be the key word. "I am, after all, not an eminent man of letters, but a mere slip of a girl barely out of college," McCaig complains at another point. "Like my subject, Alice Munro, I have had to wrestle with the lies, secrets, and silence that are my cultural inheritance, and have had to grant myself the authority to speak.... The real 'beggar maid' in this story is not Alice Munro, but me." ("Beggar maid" was, of course, Alice Munro's memorable description of her character Rose, from Who Do You Think You Are?, taken from a Tennyson poem.). It's hard not to admire McCaig's audacity: Using tatters of evidence from business letters, she wants to create a narrative so compelling it will supplant the work of Alice Munro. Not surprisingly, McCaig has failed, and merely created a literary curiosity.