Love Nor Money

A review of JoAnn McCaig’s Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives (from the National Post) raises some interesting points on the connection between writing and money. The review begins with a caution:

. . . 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.”

No wonder, then, that Alice Munro was not supportive of the book Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives, which apparently ignores Munro’s literary accomplishments in favour of examining her business savvy:

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.

Of course Munro doesn’t want to be portrayed as a “successful entrepreneur”. She must understand that the public needs to see her as a principled short-story writer, unwilling to bow to “the pressures the writer faced “to make money, crack the American market, write novels”.” Thus does she maintain her growing reputation as a Canadian Chekov.

It’s a miserable Catch-22. Writers need to make some money in order to write. But the establishment is critical of writers who look like they’re trying to make money. Not to mention the fact that one’s creative engine can be uncooperative when asked to shape the writing for a certain market. Munro says she did try to write a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and that:

. . . everything was working the way things work in the traditionally patterned novel except that it wasn’t working for me, and I got about a third of the way into it . . . And there again, I didn’t think about what I was doing. I just went back and started tearing it apart and putting it into these little sections, because that’s the way I wanted to tell the story to myself. So it had to be done like that in order to be told to me in a way that interested me most. I guess that’s why I can’t write a novel. I lose interest (from “The Real Material: An Interview with Alice Munro” by J.R. Struthers, in Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts edited by Louis K. MacKendrick).

So we walk a fine line, trying to steer our writing in directions that will pay off, so that we can keep doing what we love, and yet not betraying our own artistic vision and interests in the process.