Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  These fights, Sheila recalls, were not over things immediate to the family, but rather were “philosophical and political, representing irreconcilable world views.” Munro herself says that they ultimately realized their incompatibility, “not just with our opinions of things on the news but more with what we wanted life to be like, which became finally apparent when we moved to the big house.”3

  There were other contexts for the breakup as well. During the 1950s, in Vancouver, there was a fair amount of what Munro calls “extramarital flirtation” between individuals, each married to another. Describing one of her own, she said, “It was quite passionate and it was always unplanned. It was absolutely foolish.” These attractions seldom led to breakups. During the 1960s in Victoria, owing to the temper of the times, among “people who had been married very young, there was an explosion of infidelity and of interest in affection, because none of us had had it in the normal period of life. So a lot of my friends got divorced then and had a lively time for maybe half a dozen years and then got married again. This was almost a pattern in our lives.” Munro’s “Jakarta” explores such a moment.

  Sheila Munro details the ways of the Munro family, remembering her mother hating “the image of the mother who disapproved of everything, who had a different set of values, the mother who was at the ironing board.” This sort of persona grew from Alice Munro’s determination “to be as different from her own mother as possible.” Sheila also makes it clear that her mother now has misgivings about this, thinking that she “didn’t establish enough of a mother’s authority, so that it left [Sheila] dangling without this natural reference point” in personally and culturally turbulent times. Sheila offers an extended quotation that speaks to Munro’s sense of herself as a mother at that time and suggests how her attitudes might have accentuated her growing differences with Jim. Alice recalled, speaking to Sheila,

  I was into my own role but this had to be seen through the tremendous change of values that came in the late sixties and that split women of my age. Some women decided to go against it, some women decided to be like their mothers. I wanted to be as if I were ten years younger. With the women of thirty-five, women born in the early nineteen-thirties, there was a big problem about how to be an adult in this period, not only because prejudice against adults was so firm (Abbie Hoffman saying anyone over thirty couldn’t be trusted) but also justified in my eyes. The times had a lot to do with the kind of mother I was to you and Jenny (then), but not earlier. There was more to let you be yourselves but it was also to let me be myself so I wasn’t engaged in the terribly serious business of making you into the kind of people I thought you should be. I didn’t have any notions about that. We were in this adventure.

  Meanwhile Jim was a parent who did think that his daughters should be shaped. As Sheila makes clear, he was the one who arranged for and took her to lessons, who worried over clothes and friends, who had expectations of her. Given such views, the temper of the times, and his own conservative outlook, having a wife less than two years younger than he was who wanted to act considerably younger, who wanted to argue about Vietnam, who acquiesced to the counterculture then everywhere evident, must have flummoxed Jim Munro. Alice, a rebellious wife, one often “ready for battle” – a phrasing Jim used about her “when he found her moody and volatile,” according to Sheila – continued to change, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her situation. By the time she was at work on Lives of Girls and Women during 1970, she had decided that her only means of personal survival was to escape the bonds of her marriage.

  That summer Alice, Jim, and Sheila toured Ireland for three weeks, leaving thirteen-year-old Jenny at home with a sitter and Andrea in a playschool. Sheila recounts returning to her parents’ room unannounced during the trip and finding her mother weeping, obviously in the midst of a fight. At another point, she recalls an argument in which “my mother picks up a plate and flings it at my father, except she tosses the plate slowly and without conviction and he ducks from the path of its wobbly flight. It hits the wall behind him.” Recalling these times years later, Munro stated that “when a marriage is breaking up … you use all kinds of things to mask what is the real problem. Lots of times you just try to deceive yourself to make a go of it. I still think it was a good thing it broke – it wasn’t that good for the children, but it was good for me and for Jim.”4

  Unlike most marriage breakups, the Munros’ was rendered subsequently in a succession of Alice’s stories. In “Material,” the narrator at one point says she “was not able fully to protect or expose” her husband Hugo, “only to flog him with blame, desperate sometimes, feeling I would claw his head open to pour my vision into it, my notion of what had to be understood.” Earlier she admits that when she was married to Hugo she never had confidence in him as a writer since she “believed that writers were calm, sad people, knowing too much. I believed that there was a difference about them, some hard and shining, rare intimidating quality they had from the beginning, and Hugo didn’t have it.” Munro wrote these lines just before she left Jim and Victoria behind, and well-positioned behind one of her characters’ personae, “knowing too much” herself. Once she returned to Ontario, though, the versions of husband found in stories like “The Beggar Maid,” “Chaddeleys and Flemings 1. Connection,” “The Moons of Jupiter,” and especially “Miles City, Montana” come closer and closer to Jim Munro, his likes and dislikes, his ways of behaving. Richard, the husband in the first “Chaddeleys and Flemings” story, the husband who condescends to his wife’s visiting Cousin Iris, is, like Jim, the target of a flung plate. Munro the artist has imagined a piece of lemon meringue pie on it, making the scene both humorous and sad, leaving the narrator amazed “that something people invariably thought funny in … old movies or an I Love Lucy show … should be so shocking a verdict in real life.”

  In “Miles City, Montana,” the narrator abruptly dismisses her former husband Andrew, informing the reader that this man who is so very present in the story just then is actually long gone, his present circumstances unknown to her. It is a jarring revelation there at that point. Just before this, Munro writes that at “the bottom of their fights, we served up what we thought were the ugliest truths.… And finally – finally – racked and purged, we clasped hands and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges, their grievances, their self-justification. We leap-frogged over them. We declared them liars. We would have wine with dinner, or decide to have a party.” As she wrote in “Material,” Munro’s stories after she left her marriage were for her, ironically, just as she wrote about Hugo there, “ripe and useable, a paying investment.”5

  Jim Munro was not receptive to a separation. When it became clear that Alice was in earnest about leaving the marriage, things became very difficult. Each of the older girls was caught between her parents – Sheila has written of this time and Jenny also confirms its unpleasantness. Each parent represented a side. While the older girls were more able to understand, Andrea’s situation was the more fraught; she was just five in 1971 and turning seven when Munro left finally in 1973. Given her age, throughout the breakup there was the question of where and with whom Andrea would live, what her contact with each parent would be, and how the break could best be effected. Because the decision to separate was taken between Alice and Jim before any physical break occurred, there was a protracted period of uncertainty for all the Munros.

  During this time Alice’s correspondence with John Metcalf, then living in Montreal, increased owing to her contributions to the anthologies he was editing and also to their shared interests. In one of her earliest letters to him, she says that it “is rather beastly of me never to answer letters especially since support such as yours means a great deal to me.” That support continued and Metcalf’s importance grew; over considerable distance and only by correspondence initially, their relationship developed. Once Alice had decided to leave her marriage but had not yet left, by 1971–72, Metcalf’s own marriage had u
nexpectedly collapsed, his wife leaving him and taking their two-year-old daughter with her. As the breakups came, Munro and Metcalf were able to commiserate. In June 1971, while Lives of Girls and Women was going into production, she sent him a photograph for The Narrative Voice (she “came out looking untrustworthy and pregnant” though, she says, she is neither). “I have been in a black mood, too,” she continues, “really bad, really the worst I’ve ever had, but for fairly specific reasons (is that a comfort?) and now things have brightened up. When I’m not writing (the last five months or so), I really mess up my life.”

  The undoubted cause of Munro’s mood was her relationship with Jim. She comments later in the letter, after she expresses hope that his wife will stay with him, that “It is NOT EASY being married to a WRITER,” that it is “worse being married to me when I’m not [writing]. I always have this idea about how I should live in a shack in the bush, but I’m dependent as hell too.” This letter also shows her at this point still writing to Metcalf about their work, mainly, and it reveals her continued uncertainties about what she is doing. Thus she continues, “I have another idea working out. I wish now I had never written Real Life, because the next one might be good, and R. L. just seems in my way. But I won’t do much till fall, because I’m taking my kids on the train to Ontario this summer.” She ended by responding supportively to Metcalf’s comments on the novel he was writing.

  Munro is quite emphatic that she was the one who left the marriage and that Jim was much steadier than she was as they decided what to do. As this was happening, there were infidelities as each turned to others while they were nominally still together. Alice was first, and Jim reacted. Her attitude toward these new relationships is seen in a revelatory comment some years later when writing to Marian Engel; she offers a report on the circumstances of each of her daughters, contrasting their approaches to living, and says of Sheila, “Like me, she must figure getting burned is what it’s all about.”6 Having decided as much for herself, Munro lived through a two-year period of turmoil when she was still in Victoria, initially in the house on Rockland. But, over time, through living elsewhere and through trips, she was able gradually to pull away.

  In the summers of 1971 and 1972, before she finally left Victoria for good in 1973, Munro was able to leave with her children for long periods. During the summer of 1971 she took her daughters by train back to Ontario for a visit to Wingham and other places there; she recalls this trip especially because she and Andrea shared a room on the train while the older two daughters, then seventeen and fourteen, rode coach, ignoring their mother and sister and hanging out with the other teenagers on the train. While she was in Wingham, Munro read the proof of Lives. She returned to Victoria for the school year and did the publicity associated with her book from there. In June of 1972 she went with Andrea to Toronto, staying in Earle and Iris Toppings’s house during July and August while they were in India. Besides visiting her father in Wingham, Munro wanted to be in Ontario because of a relationship with a man she had been seeing.

  By then she had told Metcalf that she and Jim were separating and asked his advice as to how she might earn her living as a writer. Metcalf, who was about to head off to the University of New Brunswick as a writer-in-residence for a year, set about seeing if he might secure the same position for Munro for the subsequent year. He also visited Munro in Toronto in early August and, she later wrote to Toppings, “he looked bad enough” owing to his own marital problems. Metcalf was an important connection for Munro as she was making her break. Another writer and fellow sufferer, he shared her situation.7

  When she returned to Victoria after her summer in Toronto, Munro took an apartment on Oak Bay Avenue not too far from the Rockland house and, after spending the morning writing, went over to be there when Andrea came home from school. She still did the cooking and the cleaning. Audrey Thomas recreates these circumstances in her story “Initram,” first published in 1975. It is based in part on a visit she made to Munro when she was living between Rockland and her apartment. “When she came to see me that time, I nearly had a fit because I wasn’t living at home,” Munro told Ross, also noting that many details in the story were true to the visit, though others were not. In its background, the story recounts how the two women met and it offers a transparent version of details from Munro’s biography – of Jim’s family and her history as a writer. Once the narrator arrives to visit her friend and fellow writer, Lydia, the details of her living arrangements recreate Munro’s just then. Since the story is a fiction, other details have been imagined or brought in from elsewhere, most especially the character of Lydia, whose personality and mannerisms are quite different from Munro’s. Yet Thomas’s editor at Oberon was sufficiently concerned about the likeness that, before the story was included in Ladies and Escorts, she checked with Munro to make sure she had no objection. “Initram” warrants mention here because it offers a glimpse into Munro’s circumstances over the winter of 1972 – whatever else the story ultimately does, it had its beginnings in Thomas’s visit to Munro at the time. The added material, however, means that it cannot really be said that Thomas’s story is about the breakup of Munro’s marriage; the circumstances are quite different from Munro’s.8

  By the time Munro returned to Victoria from Toronto during the fall of 1972, she knew that a final break was coming soon. Consequently, she worked hard over that winter on the material that became Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. In addition to the writing itself, Munro had begun a three-year period when she actively sought to promote herself as a writer, seeking grants and university appointments. The attention and awards Lives was bringing her in 1972 aided this plan, for it was adding significantly to her reputation as a Canadian writer to watch. This was the only time in her life when Munro actively did this. As her marriage ended and she prepared to strike out on her own, Munro did not have much expectation that she would be able to support herself by her writing. Thus while she tried to live this life for a time, she did so as a means to her particular ends – leaving Jim, their marriage, and Victoria – without any enthusiasm over what was to be required of her as she did so. Although she had never supported herself, her determination to leave her marriage saw her trying a variety of ways to be financially independent.

  Sometime during the period of the breakup, Munro let Bob Weaver know what was happening, for on November 27 – either 1971 or 1972 is possible – he wrote a caring and very understanding letter to her in which he apologizes, saying, “I’m sorry I bothered you about the Canada Council when you were in a state,” and continues, “I wasn’t entirely surprised by your letter because I’ve sensed for a long time some kind of strain.” He goes on to offer some of his own personal history; his father died when he was very young and he was raised wholly by and around women, making him “sensitive to the way women feel.” Weaver commiserates and mentions some of his own family problems, adding, “It’s sometimes grimly cheering to know that other people are in a mess.” He ends, “I guess you know that I’m fond of you for yourself as well as because of your writing. Let me know if there’s anything I can ever do (we’ll try the Council again), and I hope things improve. Work is a great help, I find. Do I sound fatherly now?”

  Munro had tried a second time for a Canada Council grant just before Dance of the Happy Shades came together at Ryerson, again unsuccessfully. Apparently Weaver was prodding her here to try again. Probably in response to this letter, she applied once more over the winter of 1972–73. In February 1973 she was writing to Metcalf, thanking him for what he did for her toward the writer-in-residence appointment at New Brunswick, saying that it was all right that she had not got it, but that “I’ll probably get the grant.” Munro did receive a $7,500 Canada Council Senior Arts Grant in 1973 – the only time she has received such support – but when it came it was mostly needed for the income tax she owed that year, for she had earned over $10,000 in royalties from McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

  Munro’s writing career was becoming more
demanding as the marriage was ending and, through its various connections, she was looking to move from Victoria. In April of 1973 she called Weaver and asked him about a furnished apartment in Toronto as well as questions about income tax. Writing with suggestions a few days later, Weaver also put Munro in touch with George Jonas, a CBC television producer who was then arranging a series of original plays by Canadian writers. Munro’s “How I Met My Husband,” one of the stories about to appear in Something and probably her most successful dramatized piece, was included.9 Through Weaver as well, she had two of the stories forthcoming in Something broadcast on Anthology. In the fall of 1972 McGraw-Hill, New York, published Lives of Girls and Women in the United States and, based on its success, decided to bring out Dance of the Happy Shades there the next year. At the same time, Toivo Kiil at McGraw-Hill Ryerson was managing sales of Munro’s subsidiary rights, bringing out a Canadian paperback of Dance, and beginning to anticipate Munro’s next book. Her career was gaining a new level of momentum.

  Early in 1973 Munro and Metcalf began correspondence as members of the selection committee of the incipient Writers’ Union of Canada. As Metcalf wrote in a form letter intended to solicit members, an ad hoc group of writers met in Toronto in December 1972 to “lay the foundations” for a union. It would be “a truly professional organization which would help and protect us in relation to contracts, royalties, permissions, foreign rights, TV and film rights, and publicity.” Munro attended this first meeting. She also went to another held in June 1973 in Toronto, as well as to the union’s founding meeting in Ottawa in November. The Writers’ Union was a necessary step in the professionalization of writing in Canada, one that grew directly out of the controversy over McGraw-Hill’s purchase of Ryerson, the Ontario Royal Commission on Publishing in Canada, and the nationalist concerns of the early 1970s. The union was created, by coincidence, just as Munro was getting out of her marriage and was setting her energies more directly toward writing as a profession. It became very much a part of her identity as a writer then, and so it has remained. At the first meeting, she became a member of an eight-person membership committee. In her letters to Metcalf about it, she suggested possible writers from British Columbia, offering a list of about twenty. She advocated opening membership to anyone who had published a book. Metcalf was tentative on this point, as were others, trying apparently to differentiate between writers of quality and those whose work did not meet that stipulation. Throughout this debate, Munro thought the very notion of any such differentiation was impossible, if not ludicrous, although she continued to be interested in knowing what the arguments in favour of such elitism were.10