Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Seeing each other through their work together on the Writers’ Union, sharing both interests and similar personal situations, and finding one another mutually attractive, Munro and Metcalf had a romantic relationship that began in mid-1973 and continued into 1974. Munro spent that summer in Montreal and, after that, they broke up. Her connections to Metcalf were most significant in relation to Munro’s departure from married life but, even so, they continued and were maintained after they ended their romantic involvement. During the early 1970s Metcalf was a significant lifeline for Munro, connecting her to the world of writing in much the same way as Robert Weaver had during the 1950s and 1960s.

  For his part, Metcalf was still very much involved in the making of Canadian writing during the early 1970s – Margaret Atwood remembers him as a delight, “the life of the party.… He was absolutely funny and very verbal and very there and very connected.” A moving force behind “The Montreal Storytellers,” an initiative to bring writing into schools and other public spaces; teacher; author of five books; writer-in-residence at New Brunswick, Ottawa, and Loyola universities; and recipient of two Canada Council Senior Arts Grants during the 1970s, Metcalf seemed senior to Munro during the time they were together. He was a person to both confide in and learn from. But owing to his penchant for polemic attacks on other Canadian writers and on the writing culture in Canada that began during the 1970s, he was also a writer whom she quickly surpassed – she did so with Lives.

  While her relationship with Metcalf was developing, and while they worked with other writers in the union, Munro was still trying to leave Victoria for good. She needed something that would take her elsewhere. Over the winter of 1972–73, working on the stories that became Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, she pursued an opportunity to teach a summer course in creative writing at Notre Dame University in Nelson, British Columbia. A small university in the Kootenay region in the southeastern portion of the province, Notre Dame was well away from Victoria and indeed from just about anyplace else. She accepted the job in March. It involved teaching the second half of an English class, the creative writing portion (the first half was taught by a visiting instructor from the University of British Columbia). The class met for two hours daily from July 23 to August 17. Her stipend was $425, and she was also given a three-room apartment from July 1 to August 18, plus a travel allowance of $70.11

  In the Calgary archives there are numerous fragment versions of a story called “Creative Writing,” which drew specifically on this experience and was probably written about the same time. Most versions are written from the point of view of a character in Munro’s situation, though some feature the woman as wife to a husband who is teaching at a college in the mountains for the summer. This is an instance, one of several, in which Munro worked and reworked a situation, writing multiple versions, striving to find an effective way into the material. Here are two representative passages:

  Dorothy teaches creative writing. She is not qualified to teach anything else. This is the summer school session, at a little college in the Kootenay mountains. When Dorothy first arrived there, on the overnight bus from Vancouver, she was met by a boy, or a young man with a fuzzy beard, a fastidious voice, a cold serenity or contemptuous passivity of expression; whatever it was, she had seen it before and it made her nervous. Almost the first thing he said to her was, “We thought we were never going to get anybody for this job.”

  Nellie had not realized the pay was poor. She was rather pleased at the prospect of being paid anything at all. For some reason she hadn’t thought of being at the bottom of a list of people the college would have tried to get, she hadn’t thought of so many people being able to turn down offers, to choose and reject. She knew that she wasn’t well-known. She had published one book of stories. She always spoke reluctantly and modestly about her work. Secretly she believed all the flattering things that had ever been said about it and thought the people who had said unflattering things were stupid and affected.

  They [Nellie and Dahlia, the head of the English Department] were heading up a steep hill. The town was built around a mountain lake. “Why did you come?” said Dahlia. “Just out of curiosity?”

  “My husband and I are splitting up,” Nellie said. “I wanted to get away somewhere for a while and it seemed like – I remembered driving through here once and I thought it was a nice place, with the lake –”

  While Munro changed the details of the marriage breakup, the elements of the writer/teacher’s situation remain constant: the people at the college cannot believe anyone would come for the money they paid, she is working in “the smallest, dingiest, and – it is now July – the hottest university in the world,” and she “is delighted” because she “has never had an office or a job before.”

  Munro writes that for Nellie, the first version of writer/teacher, this “was the first job she had held since waitressing in her college days. She was forty-three years old.” While not quite true for Munro, who turned forty-two in Nelson and who had worked in the Vancouver library and in the bookstore since waitressing, it was pretty close. When she went to Nelson she had all three daughters with her, she had her own place, and she knew she was out of her marriage. No longer dependent, she was on her own. She found the teaching difficult because of her shyness but, more than that, as a person who has little belief in such programs Munro felt like a fraud as she was doing it. But there were things happening in Nelson, poetry readings and the like, Sheila worked construction and then on the roads, and Munro was meeting people through the college, which publicized her presence. She was happy that summer. Before going to Nelson, at the June meeting for the Writers’ Union, she had started to break off one relationship with a man and, at that meeting and over the summer, she was developing another with Metcalf. So the summer she spent in Nelson proved to Munro that, like her narrator in “Red Dress – 1946,” her new life was possible.

  Once she finished teaching in Nelson on August 17, Munro set about organizing that new life quickly. She went to Toronto for a couple of weeks, staying in a friend’s house and exploring possibilities there. Munro then saw Toronto as a city where she had good friends and felt comfortable, more alive. Nothing materialized, so she returned to Victoria, intending to pack up, find an apartment in Vancouver, and move back there – despite her dislike of that city. Its proximity to Victoria would allow her access to her daughters, especially Andrea. But while she was still in Victoria, packing, Munro received a call from the chair of the English Department at York University asking if she would be willing to take on a course in creative writing, needed on short notice because of overflow enrolment. Thinking it over, finding that Jenny – then sixteen – was willing to come east with her, Munro accepted. The friend she had stayed with in Toronto taught at York and, knowing of Munro’s situation, had suggested her as a possible teacher. So just a month after leaving Nelson, Munro was back in Ontario, looking to set up a household for herself and Jenny. Andrea would remain in Victoria with Jim, her school, and her friends. Instead of Toronto, however, Munro decided to return to London – it was a smaller city, a place she knew, closer to Wingham, and cheaper than Toronto – and commute to York once a week by train.12

  Munro found a one-bedroom apartment at 383 Princess Avenue in London, settled into it with Jenny, and began her commute into York on Thursdays. While she enjoyed being in Toronto weekly and seeing friends there, Munro took an almost instant dislike to York and to her teaching assignment there. She found the university a frightful place and thought her work there ineffectual at best, fraudulent at worst. Within a month of beginning, and even having lost one class meeting to the Jewish holy days, she was thinking about quitting. Munro harboured that thought until she did quit early in 1974, citing her health as her primary reason; while she was treated for anemia in late 1973, her feelings over her own inability as a teacher and even the efficacy of the process itself were very important to her decision. During her time at York, though, Munro met and began mentoring Ma
ry Swan, a young writer then in her final year. Swan sought Munro out to see whether she should keep at her writing and, at one point, asked if she should join Munro’s class. Knowing that Swan had talent as a writer, Munro said “something like ‘Not in a million years,’ ” Swan recalls, and told her to stay away from the class. (Munro’s version: “I said, don’t come into my class, they’ll eat you alive, they’re no good anyway.”) Munro offered to continue to meet one-on-one. They did, and also kept meeting the next year in London when Munro was writer-in-residence at Western.13

  Living in London, Munro was close enough to Wingham to continue seeing her father on a regular basis. She had begun to visit him during the summer of 1972 when she was living in Toronto. He was suffering from heart problems, so in addition to her concerns over Andrea in Victoria, Munro also had to cope with her father’s declining health. Over Thanksgiving Bob Laidlaw became very sick and had to be hospitalized. There on the farm in Wingham, Munro found herself looking after things, coping with her stepmother, even spreading hay in the sheep yard, feeling that the life she had lived since leaving Wingham had all been something of a dream. This experience became the basis for “Home,” a story she wrote immediately after Thanksgiving (October 8) as a birthday present for John Metcalf. She sent him the second draft, called “Notes for a Work”; it is dated October 30, 1973, and dedicated to him “with love.”14

  As she settled into London, a place she liked well enough but not one where she expected to stay long-term, Munro began to develop local connections and friends. She saw something of Margaret Laurence, who was writer-in-residence at Western during the fall 1973 term, connected with people in the English Department at Western, and also reconnected with her sister-in-law, Margaret Munro, who lived in London, had also divorced, and was going back to school. Through Margaret Munro she later went to a party where she met people who were avowed Communists – they served as the basis of a story, “Gold,” which is one of the few Munro finished to her own satisfaction and submitted but never sold. Andrea was her most pressing concern, though, so Munro went to Victoria in November to see her, and then went back again for Christmas. Earlier that month she had gone to Ottawa for the founding meeting of the Writers’ Union and saw Metcalf there.

  Throughout the fall of 1973 too, Munro was writing, worrying about the stories and the shape of Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. She wrote “The Ottawa Valley,” the last one written for the collection and something of a coda, a farewell to fiction, late that year. Owing to its depiction of her father’s situation and precise, unflattering detail it contains about her stepmother, she kept “Home” out of the collection, placing it instead in New Canadian Stories, an annual anthology of new work published by Oberon. She thought there was little chance either would see it there. During the fall she had signed the contract for Something – after obtaining a higher advance than first offered and getting various assurances – with McGraw-Hill Ryerson and had accepted its $5,000 advance on royalties from Canadian sales.

  Returning to London from her Christmas visit to Victoria utterly convinced that she had been justified in leaving Jim, she brought Andrea to live with her. On January 12 she resigned from York and shortly after moved from the apartment she and Jenny had been in to a house at 330 St. George Street across the street from a park. She was elated to have Andrea with her, delighted to have quit her job at York, and was starting in earnest on the work involved in getting Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You ready for publication. Just before Christmas Western offered her the writer-in-residence position for 1974–75 and she was again being considered for the same position at New Brunswick. By January 1974 Munro was well settled in London: she was out of her marriage, had two of her daughters with her and, while not satisfied with the public writer role she would continue to have to undertake nor pleased with McGraw-Hill Ryerson as her publisher, she was on her own and beginning to find her way.

  “I Know We Can Sell Whatever You Produce”: U.S. Publication and Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

  In June 1973 William French, the Globe and Mail’s book editor, published a profile called “In Alice Land.” It focuses on a visit French had made to Munro’s Bookstore, transporting the reader to Victoria where Dance “is now in paperback, and it’s displayed on the front counter, by the cash register, beside ‘The Happy Hooker’.… Her second book, Lives of Girls and Women, is still available only in hardcover, but it sells steadily.” The piece includes quotations from Jim Munro and recounts Alice’s career and the bookstore’s history. At one point French writes that “for a writer with only two books to her credit, Mrs. Munro has received a remarkable amount of attention and acclaim.” He then ticks off some of the kudos Lives has received, anticipates its forthcoming paperback editions in Britain and the United States, and writes that “Dance of the Happy Shades will be published in the United States this fall, and American magazines like McCall’s and Ms. have been publishing her short stories – stories, Jim Munro points out, once rejected by Chatelaine.” Alice is nowhere to be seen. Clearly, she was not there the day French stopped by. Probably she had not been there lately, nor would she be there again any time soon.

  Yet French’s profile offers a snapshot of Munro’s reputation at this key moment in her career. Having watched the encouraging performance of Lives in Canada after it had refused concurrent publication, McGraw-Hill New York published its own edition in fall 1972. When it was about to appear, Publishers Weekly called Lives a “remarkable novel in which peripheral characters and the landscape are made real and wondrously interesting by this gifted writer whose book merits major reviews.” As French notes, Dance was recently published in paperback in Canada (in December 1972, so the original Ryerson hardback edition of 2,675 copies lasted over four years) and, after they were able to watch the performance of Lives in the United States, McGraw-Hill New York decided to bring the stories out there in 1973. Owing to Kiil’s efforts as her agent, McCall’s had already published “Red Dress – 1946” and was bringing out “An Ounce of Cure” that fall; it is doubtful that Chatelaine ever rejected those stories. Ms., while considering some of Munro’s stories then and later, did not publish anything of Munro’s until 1978. Small barbs aside, Jim’s point that Alice’s work was catching on in the States is clear, and French’s assertion that in Munro Canada had a writer whose work was causing excitement abroad is equally evident. Quite literally, a Canadian small-town girl was suddenly making good. Her own misgivings notwithstanding, Munro as writer was taking off.

  But her career was taking off at a time when, as Munro had realized herself in 1970, publishing in Canada was changing. Here again, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Writers’ Union of Canada are relevant. In an editorial comment written just after the union’s founding meeting and broadcast on CBC in November 1973, William French noted that “the union adopted a kind of charter which, in the current nationalist style, singled out as the enemy American books, American publishers, American distributors, and American-influenced bookstores. The charter committed the union to campaign against the dominance of American books in Canadian schools, libraries, and bookstores, without presenting specific proof of such dominance.” Further, it “committed itself to press for legislation requiring Canadian ownership of publishing firms, distributors, bookstores and book clubs, to end what it called an ‘essentially colonial system.’ In other words it wants the McGraw-Hills, Prentice Halls and so on to be repatriated. That puts some of the union members in an odd position – Alice Munro, for example, is published by McGraw-Hill, and Harry Boyle’s publisher is Doubleday. Now their union wants those publishers, in effect, to be dismantled.”

  Munro had begun with Ryerson, the most Canadian of publishers, and ended up through no fault of her own having her second and third books published by the “Canadian” house that in the minds of many writers most symbolized what was wrong with Canadian publishing. This anomalous position came about mostly because of Munro’s loyalty to Aud
rey Coffin. When Toivo Kiil became editor-in-chief of the newly constituted trade department at McGraw-Hill Ryerson, he saw that Munro’s writing had commercial potential both within Canada and without. Given the timing of Real Life, Munro seemed especially to demand his attention. Writing to Munro in November 1972, Kiil commented that the week before at a press reception McGraw-Hill Ryerson had held for two of their Canadian writers (Eric Nicol and Don Harron), he had spoken “to several of your colleagues. I must say, there is a lot of discontentment among Canadian writers – some of which I hope can be remedied by stronger pro-Cnd. Policy on our part. I think next year’s list will reflect the outcome of a lot of pressuring of M-H, Int’l from here.”