Munro came to see this slowly, but by the time Lives had been published she knew this. After she submitted Real Life to Coffin in 1970, she watched what Kiil was doing with her work, asked specific questions, and was especially concerned about his plans for U.S. publication. At some point in 1973, she visited Kiil in Toronto to discuss the contractual terms for Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. In August 1973 Kiil sent her the contract for the then-untitled collection. His letter begins with an apology for taking so long to get it to her and, throughout, he is at pains to detail the various things he is doing for her: he had “two firm offers for ‘How I Met My Husband’ and ‘Forgiveness in Families’ ” (both appeared in McCall’s before Something was published in May 1974). Munro’s stories were then being considered by the New Yorker, Ms., Redbook, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s, and Penthouse, he reports, and he names all the editors he was dealing with save the person from the New Yorker. Kiil also notes that Allen Lane had just bought the U.K. rights to Dance, that the New American Library (Signet) edition of Lives would be out “no earlier than January 1974,” that the U.S. edition of Dance was due soon, and that he was working on “a complete resumé of the rights and royalties” of Munro’s books and he promised “to have it to you shortly. I suspect such an accounting would place things into better perspective for you and all concerned.” Kiil then mentioned the excellent reviews her books had been getting – the U.S. reviews of Lives – and the advertising planned in the United States for Dance. He ended, “I’m sure there is a lot more that needs discussing, but enough for now.”
Judging from his rhetoric in this letter, Kiil was trying very hard to secure a contract from an important, and probably hesitant, author. It is both a firm accounting and a rhetorical shaping of the news. The advance against Canadian royalties he mentions in the letter is $2,500 but the advance McGraw-Hill actually paid was twice that, $5,000. More than that, on Munro’s copy of the letter, written in another hand, is the following annotation:
Before signing
Get firm committment for U.S. Edition
Also, firm committment for Cnd. Edition
Check out rights on English Edition 4. How many copies Dance printed in U.S.?
Is Lives still being flogged?
How many p.b. Dance sold in Can. – have they lots on hand?
Check the 7½ % for 1st 5,000
Get advance from U.S. edition
Want to approve jacket
When, how many, for Allan Lane Lives? – could you send copy where is the advance?
Where is money for U.S. edition?
Whoever wrote this – and Munro has no recollection herself, nor have other possibilities been confirmed – had a sound knowledge of publishing and certainly took Munro’s point of view. All these questions were fair ones for Kiil. Once she satisfied herself on these points and doubled the advance, Munro signed another McGraw-Hill Ryerson contract. Yet, as this episode illustrates, her career was quickly moving to the point when she would need a skilled agent. Neither Kiil nor McGraw-Hill Ryerson would prove to be enough.20
“I Felt As If I Had Retrieved a Lost Part of Myself”: “And So I Went Away and Wrote This Story”
In January 1974 Robert Fulford published a column in the Toronto Star noting the return of the Tamarack Review after a break in publication. Commenting initially about “a remarkably high proportion of rascals” among writers, Fulford connects his observation to Hugo Johnson, a writer and a rascal. “Hugo is the latest creation,” he tells us, “of that remarkably talented writer, Alice Munro, and he appears in Material, a story in the new Tamarack Review.” Focusing on Munro’s story at some length, Fulford concludes his discussion by asserting that
Alice Munro’s story is in itself a marvelously duplicitous and contradictory act. First, it expresses the view of someone who despises and rejects the literary world – and yet it is written from within that same world, the world of books, stories, prizes, grants that Alice Munro inhabits. It is, among other things, an attack on literary journals published in a literary journal. Second, Munro attacks through her narrator the idea of organizing life in print. Yet her story is itself superbly organized.
“Material” appeared as the lead story in the November 1973 issue of Tamarack and it is, as Fulford and others saw at once, a striking and contradictory piece of work. It was also the first story from Something to reach print, so it signalled the very different Munro readers would find when McGraw-Hill Ryerson published that collection in May 1974.
“Material” offers the first-person point of view of an unnamed narrator, the first wife of Hugo Johnson, who runs across a story he has published in a collection. Focusing on that story, which uses Dotty, a person they both knew when they were married, the narrator caustically dissects Hugo’s pretensions, outrages, and, ultimately, his sustained power as a writer. Ironically, Munro’s dissection of the writer’s world came just at the moment when she was herself most clearly entering into it. Now involved with another proactive and aggressive writer, John Metcalf, Munro was well placed to both observe and live the writer’s life. “Material” was very much a product of her observations and its appearance in the Tamarack Review in November 1973 signalled her sharp, self-reflective analysis of the writer’s function.
“Material” is a story replete with aphoristic turns of phrase and, for that, as well as for its subject, it is one of Munro’s most-quoted and -discussed stories. Though not as prominent as others found there, one quotation captures just what was happening as Munro was composing Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. Having read Hugo’s story, the narrator says, “The story is about Dotty. Of course, she has been changed in some unimportant ways and the main incident concerning her has been invented, or grafted on from some other reality.” This is true of “Material,” and also of most of the other stories in Something: they have been “grafted on from some other reality.” Dotty, the woman who lived downstairs from Hugo and the narrator when they lived on Argyle Street in Vancouver, was “grafted on” to “Material” from a largely finished but unpublished story called “Real People.” There the Dotty character, Ruth, is the central focus but the details of her life are close to those found in “Material.” The narrator and her husband, who look very much like Alice and Jim starting out in Vancouver, merely live upstairs; she is not a writer, only a pregnant young wife struggling with her circumstances.21
The relation of “Real People” to “Material” illustrates Munro’s method as she shaped the stories in Something. That book’s stories are unique within Munro’s oeuvre in that they were mostly refashioned from earlier work, taken from the novels and stories she had struggled with in Vancouver and Victoria but never published. As such, its stories represent a moment in Munro’s writing life when she looked back more than she looked forward. Given the changes in her life and in her ways of writing, this is hardly surprising. Munro needed to publish so as to kick-start her new life; heading back and returned to Ontario, she was in a new relation to her material. “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” the story, began in an attempted novel, as did “How I Met My Husband” and “The Found Boat.” The fiancé in “How I Met,” Alice Kelling, was in “Death of a White Fox.” “Walking on Water,” “Executioners,” and, again, “The Found Boat” use material and characters Munro had originally used in Lives – that book had had a much broader scope, with more characters and incidents, when Munro began it. The origins of other stories were found in Munro’s own experiences or in the anecdotes of others – “Forgiveness in Families” had its beginnings with Daphne Cue’s brother, “Tell Me Yes or No” derives from Munro’s work in the bookstore and the circumstances surrounding the breakup of her marriage, and “The Spanish Lady” uses material from Munro’s experience as well – and not only the breakup; she did see a man collapse and die in the Vancouver train station when she was returning to Victoria with her daughters in 1971. On that trip back too, she met a man who claimed to have known her in another life, though
he said he was an Arab. “Marrakesh” was called “A Blue-Eyed Arab” when the manuscript was first submitted. “Grafted on from some other reality,” in fact.22
Two other stories in Something, “Winter Wind” and “The Ottawa Valley,” warrant especial attention. The latter, Munro’s second focusing sharply on her mother, has received considerable attention for that and, as well, for the way in which it meditates on just what a writer does – what critics call its metafictional qualities. It was the last story written for the book, probably during November 1973; along with “Home” and “Winter Wind” (also written about that time) it is one of a trio of stories that reveal the initial imaginative impact of Munro’s return to Ontario.
For several reasons, “Winter Wind” seems to bring these considerations into focus. As a story, it is in an anomalous position among the Something stories in that it is the only one of them that left absolutely no trace in the Munro collection in Calgary. When asked about this absence, Munro was uncertain as to what might have happened to its first draft, but then commented that it “is from a true incident. So maybe it was very easy to write.” When she is working with something that actually happened, Munro says, she does not “have to go through as much” in the writing. More than that, too, she said that “Winter Wind” offers a very precise characterization of her grandmother and aunt, sisters Sadie Code Laidlaw and Maud Code Porterfield, living together on Leopold Street in Wingham when she was in high school. A final point about the story is that, when the book manuscript was initially assembled, “Winter Wind” was to be the last story, placed immediately after “The Ottawa Valley.” Had it been so, the effect created by the stories in succession would have been one of a narrator first discovering her mother’s Parkinson’s disease and then, years later and with the disease’s effects well established, living with it as an adolescent. Something was eventually structured so that no such effect is created; with “Memorial,” a very different story set on the west coast well away from Munro’s childhood home, placed between the two, the effect is to mute “Winter Wind” and enhance “The Ottawa Valley.”
Yet “Winter Wind” and its contexts bear examination as a story reflecting Munro’s concerns in 1973 and in Something generally. It is one of several stories that take up the point of view of elderly people and, as Munro said, it explicitly derives from her grandmother and aunt, from a time when she went to stay with them in Wingham because of a blizzard. Sadie Code Laidlaw had died in January 1966 as she was approaching her ninetieth birthday, and Maud had gone into the Huron View nursing home where she would live until her death at ninety-seven in 1976. Then living in Clinton, her niece Alice was one of the last family members to visit her there.
“Winter Wind” tells the personal and marital histories of the Code sisters, details their attitude toward and relations with the narrator’s sickly mother, and accounts for the narrator’s enforced visit to them because of the storm. It also offers the grandmother’s pained reaction when, after two nights, the narrator announces that she plans to go home that evening. “I had never heard my grandmother lose control before. I had never imagined that she could. It seems strange to me now, but the fact is that I had never heard anything like plain hurt or anger in her voice, or seen it on her face.… The abdication here was what amazed me.” A friend of the sisters, Susie Heferman, had just been found frozen to death in the storm, and the narrator’s grandmother fears as much for her granddaughter should she try to make it home in such conditions. After her grandmother’s singular outburst, the narrator does not attempt it. The story ends:
I understand that my grandmother wept angrily for Susie Heferman and also for herself, that she knew how I longed for home, and why. She knew and did not understand how this had happened or how it could have been different or how she herself, once so baffled and struggling, had become another old woman whom people deceived and placated and were anxious to get away from.
Munro’s first portrait of Sadie Code Laidlaw after Sadie’s death (there would be another in the late 1970s in “Working for a Living”) captures the woman’s person and what the narrator feels about her person. Yet, probing artist that she is, Munro offers two paragraphs earlier in “Winter Wind” that vie in their importance with the evocative final paragraph in “The Ottawa Valley” (“The problem, the only problem, is my mother”). What she offers is a summary assessment of what she had herself written and published out of her own experience, what she has just been reviewing and reshaping for the stories to be offered in Something, and especially what she has just been doing with her aunt and grandmother and the “true incident” in “Winter Wind.” She asks, “How does a writer know?” and her meditation is worth considering:
And how is anybody to know, I think as I put this down, how am I to know what I claim to know? I have used these people, not all of them, but some of them, before. I have tricked them out and altered them and shaped them any way at all, to suit my purposes. I am not doing that now, I am being as careful as I can, but I stop and wonder, I feel compunction. Though I am only doing in a large and public way what has always been done, what my mother did, and other people did, who mentioned to me my grandmother’s story. Even in that closed-mouth place, stories were being made. People carried their stories around with them. My grandmother carried hers, and nobody ever spoke of it to her face.
But that only takes care of the facts. I have said other things. I have said that my grandmother would choose a certain kind of love. I have implied that she would be stubbornly, secretly, destructively romantic. Nothing she ever said to me, or in my hearing, would bear this out. Yet I have not invented it, I really believe it. Without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot be investigated, but have to be relied on.23
“But that only takes care of the facts.” What seems to have happened here, and in “Home” and in “The Ottawa Valley,” is that Munro returned to Huron County and confronted memories that, as she worked on the stories that became Something, led her to question her very practice as an artist during the years since she left in 1951. Given the autobiographical cast of much of her work, such questions doubtless occurred to her previously but here such questions come into the fiction in a way they had not previously. Munro had come home and found it much the same yet different, its facts lying about, teasing her mind, urgent.
In “The Ottawa Valley” Munro’s fascinations with her craft also emerge, and there the focus is once again on her mother. There too the question she raises is epistemological – she says she wants “to find out more, remember more” so as to “mark her [mother] off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her.” But Munro also speaks of the insufficiency of her technical practices (“applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know”) in trying to create the version of her mother, and the memory of this visit to the Ottawa Valley, that she seeks. Munro begins her final paragraph by asserting that what she has done does not meet an accepted criteria for a story: “If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done.”
But needing to know more, to remember more herself, Munro pressed on beyond the imagined mother-daughter confrontation scene, a scene that would have ended the story with suitable literary mystery but insufficient memory, insufficient “real life.” So briefly, between the confrontation scene and Munro’s comment on what she has done, there appears another scene, this one a remembered image of her mother, her brother James, and their cousin Dodie reciting poetry from their school readers. As it ends “they were all reciting together, and laughing at each other: Now by great marshes wrapped in mist, / Or past some river’s mouth, / Throughout the long still autumn day / Wild birds are flying south. ‘Though when you come to think of it, even that has kind of a sad ring,’ Aunt Dodie said.”
Such a scene is needed, sandwiched between the story’s crucial mo
ment and Munro’s own assessment of what she has done, because of what she was doing with “real people” in “real life.” The literary artifice of the daughter confronting her mother (“Is your arm going to stop shaking?”) is mitigated, and made more authentic, by the much less dramatic though utterly poignant image of the three older people sharing a recitation of a poem from their shared childhood. The family connection, just as “the path that [her mother] and Aunt Dodie had made when they were girls running back and forth to see each other … was still there.” Like the central episode in “Winter Wind,” the visit to the Ottawa Valley was based on a true incident, and the path existed. When Anne Chamney Laidlaw had taken her daughters to the Ottawa Valley in the summer of 1943, between the farms once owned by George and Edward Chamney, the paths made by their children going back and forth were still there. Munro remembered them thirty years later when she wrote “The Ottawa Valley.”
Moving back to Ontario from British Columbia in September 1973, Munro again confronted the real place that had held her imagination, and had informed her writing, during her twenty-plus years on the west coast. Remembering her feelings, she once wrote: “When I lived in British Columbia, I longed for the sight of Ontario landscape – the big solitary oaks and beeches and maples looming in summer haze in the open fields, the carpet of leeks and trilliums and bloodroot in the sunny woods before the leaves come out, the unexpected little rough hills with hawthorns and tough daisies, the creeks and bogs and the long smooth grassy slopes.” Once, on “a motor-trip home via the state of Washington, we came” upon a change of landscape “and I felt as if I had retrieved a lost part of myself, because it was something ‘like home.’ ”
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