Although Munro’s final return to Ontario came in 1973, the imaginative return was a process she had begun, really, two years before on the train trip home with her daughters. During the intervening year, she spent July and August in Ontario. And beyond Ontario as a place, Munro also imaginatively confronted people there. She returned to an Ontario with her grandmother Sadie gone and Maud still there, though diminished and living in Huron View. We see her memories of these two women in “Winter Wind” and other elderly characters in “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” and “Walking on Water.” The title story draws indirectly on Sadie and Maud’s living arrangement and in that story Et, like Maud before she was married, is a dressmaker.
But the most pressing imaginative confrontation for Munro was, quite literally, “Home,” the Laidlaw farm in Lower Town along the Maitland, a place still embodying Anne Chamney Laidlaw though now lived in by Bob Laidlaw and his second wife. The story “Home,” written quickly between October 8 (Thanksgiving weekend, when its events happened) and October 30 (when Munro sent it to John Metcalf as a present), is a textual rendering of Munro’s imaginative reaction to her return home. Especially through what critics call its metafictional technique, in which Munro comments directly on what she has written, that story records its author’s state of mind as she confronts, no longer a visitor from away, her most essential material, her home place. “I don’t want any more effects, I tell you, lying. I don’t know what I want. I want to do this with honour, if I possibly can.” This desire, to accomplish her writing “with honour,” continued to be Munro’s ambition, but in her return to Ontario she was confronted with memories that presented themselves differently as subject to her imagination. It was no longer the place she left but still the home she remembered, and Munro may be seen reshaping her subject in 1973. Her three metafictional stories – each deeply autobiographical – and “Material” as well, confirm as much.24
Writer Jack Hodgins recalls visiting Munro for tea in 1974 when he was in London to receive an award and, during the conversation, she told him she did not think she would write any more. That was the first time he had heard her say this and, though he has heard Munro say as much since, Hodgins took her quite seriously that first time. Speaking of this feeling herself, Munro has said she was quite serious when she told Hodgins that, and added that though she has often felt this way, the feeling was especially strong during the time after her return to Ontario. “Maybe it’s because I write stories and between every story there’s a kind of break before the next one.”
As Fulford had commented on “Material,” it is possible to see Munro’s technique here as “a marvelously duplicitous and contradictory act.” Although it is offered as a story, the author nevertheless keeps stepping onto the page to comment on what she has just written, thus breaking the illusion that this is fiction. All these stories – “Material,” “Winter Wind,” “Home,” and “The Ottawa Valley” – show Munro analyzing both the morality and the efficacy of what she was doing as a writer of fiction. As she wrote in “Winter Wind,” “I feel compunction.” While “Material” offers a more detached analysis of the writer’s position, one written from behind the guise of the persona of Hugo Johnson’s first wife, the other three are about as close to the bone as a writer might get. Each of them is patently autobiographical, drawing on verifiable family relations, and poised on the dotted line between imaginative fiction and what Munro called “true incident.” Understood within Munro’s own life experience, these stories detail the artistic crisis her return to Ontario brought her: read along with these other stories, the endings of “Home” and “The Ottawa Valley” sound like farewells to fiction because that might well have been what they were intended to be.
While critics have analyzed Munro’s 1973 metafictional stories largely in technical terms, a more compelling rationale for her narrative experimentation lies in her biography: as the writing of “Home” in little more than three weeks demonstrates, Munro returned to Ontario to find it a place she could no longer imagine from far away in distance and time. It was real and immediate, both the place she remembered from her childhood and adolescence and alive in the present moment. Looking at Wingham as she travelled to the hospital with her sick father over the 1973 Thanksgiving weekend, Munro comments in “Home” that the town “has faded, for me. I have written about it and used it up. The same banks and barber shops and town hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages drained away.” The messages Munro had imagined from Wingham when she was writing in British Columbia were borne of memory and distance.
By the end of 1973, when she completed the stories that were to make up her third book, Munro had in a significant way written herself out. She had returned to material she had set aside or long thought about and salvaged what she could as stories. This process had the effect of a reminiscence, since Munro looked again at things she had written years previously, or had been mulling over for some time, and had taken from them what she could. This doubtless took her back to her years of frustration and depression over the numerous stories begun with hope and expectation but then abandoned. Other stories, inspired by more recent personal circumstances and incidents like “Tell Me Yes or No,” “The Spanish Lady,” “Memorial,” or “Forgiveness in Families,” were, like those salvaged from her attempts at novels, essentially exercises and not, in the language Munro later used to characterize her more valued stories, “the real material.” Speaking to Tim Struthers in 1981, Munro saw “The Ottawa Valley” and “Material” as the best stories in the book, “And ‘Winter Wind’ isn’t too bad either.” In the same interview, she mentioned “Home” as “sort of a final statement … about dissatisfaction with art” and said also that with Something she “was certainly trying hard with this book,” she “was trying something very new” but had since become dissatisfied with what she did there.
Munro’s dissatisfaction with the stories that were in Something was not altogether retrospective, however. Just before she wrote “Winter Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and “Home,” Munro commented to Metcalf that she was dissatisfied with what she had finished for the book, and through January 1974 she reiterated this feeling, complaining that she did not feel connected to that material. Yet despite her misgivings about her right to do what she was doing with the autobiographical material in the three stories she wrote toward the end of 1973, Munro had through them embarked on a new direction. Wingham remembered from British Columbia was, in fact, “used up” but, as “Winter Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and especially “Home” demonstrate, Munro’s return there to stay had brought about a new and sharper quality to her reminiscence: quite literally as 1974 began, Munro was home as she wrote “Home.” Having the experiences she described there over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, going back to London after spreading hay for the sheep at her home in Wingham, Munro wrote what she thought would be the last sentence in “Home”: “And so I went away and wrote this story.” In October 1973 as she wrote “Home” for John Metcalf as a birthday present, she did not have to go very far away from Wingham in order to write that sentence, only to London. As 1974 opened and passed into 1975, Alice Munro was moving much closer to her home place in Huron County.25
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, John Metcalf, and a Changed Career
After Munro came to terms with McGraw-Hill Ryerson during the fall of 1973, Kiil went to London to discuss his plans for the book and pick up the manuscript. The two had a genial lunch and discussion but, when Kiil rose to leave and asked to carry the manuscript away with him, she said no, it was not ready yet, there were more revisions she wanted to do. She brought it into Toronto herself a few weeks later. It was originally a group of ten stories before “Winter Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and a third story were added. The book went into production for spring publication, but all was not smooth sailing. When Munro got the manuscript back from McGraw-Hill Ryerson, she took exception to the editing. For both Dance and Lives, Audrey Co
ffin had been her manuscript editor. She had not been intrusive; during the making of each book she let Munro fashion it as she saw fit, supporting and understanding as the process evolved. With Something, either Kiil or another editor made syntactical changes that Munro found to be unacceptable; Coffin knew about the changes and fought them before the manuscript went back to Munro, but was overruled. Lives of Girls and Women had demonstrated to McGraw-Hill that Munro was a writer on the rise – she was seen as valuable property – so her work was now receiving additional attention. Unwelcome attention. Through retyping parts of the manuscript and by rejecting most of the proposed changes, Munro eventually came to terms with her publisher. Coffin was then nearing retirement age; she was also the only person at McGraw-Hill Ryerson in whom Munro had any real confidence. As a writer who needs and values her editor’s response when she knows and respects that person, Munro was not impressed by this incident. It did nothing for her confidence in McGraw-Hill Ryerson, all the more so since she was not herself confident in the strengths of this collection.26
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories was published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson in May 1974. McGraw-Hill New York brought out its edition in September (they used the Canadian printing with their own title and copyright pages, binding theirs in the United States). Significantly, there was no British hardcover edition. In Canada, reviews began appearing in late May. They were quite positive overall, although it is possible to see a thread of tentative reservation running through them, reservations over the settings, the age of the characters, or the variety of incident. Robert Fulford, writing in the Toronto Star (a review republished in the Montreal Star and the Ottawa Citizen as well), began, “You can’t ever really understand anyone, you can only nibble at the edges of comprehension. This is a truth Alice Munro has been telling us, in one way or another, for two decades.” Her new collection “justifies once again all the praise that has been showered on her in the last six years. Her beautifully solemn style now seems, if anything, even better; and her perceptions seem, if anything, more acute.” William French in the Globe and Mail refers to “a nagging feeling, … despite Mrs. Munro’s undeniable skill, … about her talent. How long could she continue to exploit the same themes? Was she trapped, creatively speaking, in rural Ontario, or could she break out and write about other aspects of Canadian life?” Answering his own questions he notes that while some of the stories derive from “typical Munro territory, … seven have contemporary urban settings, a new landscape for her. And the good news is that she has made the transition successfully; her talent is transportable.” For her part, Munro saw these two reviews and was not convinced by this praise; her misgivings over the book continued.
Closer to this apprehension, Chaviva Hosek wrote in Quill & Quire that the “collection is clearly a point of transition for Munro, and is somewhat uneven for that.” Munro does strike chords reminiscent of her earlier work, and “the strengths of her earlier style” are merged “with her newer concerns” in “The Found Boat” and “Material.” Even so, there are places “where the new direction has not yet reached the poise and subtlety of Munro at her best.” And given Munro’s own reaction on hearing that one of her stories had been sold to McCall’s, Kildare Dobbs in Saturday Night ironically observed that a “friend once complained to me that Alice Munro’s stories were dangerously close to the style of the fiction in women’s magazines.” Dobbs concedes that similarities are real, but sides ultimately with Munro’s own view, “There are far too many troubling undertones in her prose to make it suitable for slick women’s magazines.” Highlighting Munro’s new direction in his review’s title, Dobbs concludes, “It may well be that stories like ‘Tell Me Yes or No’ are pointers in this new direction. Alice Munro has it in her to become one of the best story tellers now writing.” Reviewing the book in the Canadian edition of Time under the title “Moving Miniaturist,” Geoffrey James asserts that Munro often “achieves a kind of subcutaneous empathy with her subjects. The revelations she provides may be small ones, but they are no less moving for that.” Referring to Munro’s earlier work, James celebrated this collection’s wider range with another ironic allusion to another publication: “As any constant reader of The New Yorker can attest, the childhood reminiscence has a certain limited fascination. Now, in her third book, Munro shows welcome signs of growth, though half a dozen stories still retain their rural, childhood roots. Some of these are not much more than intensely experienced, vividly recollected incidents, skilled acts of ventriloquism.” And the stories set in cities are “more pointed and more ambiguous than her rural pieces,” he asserted, and he illustrated this by citing “Material.”
Two things about the Canadian reviews of Something are worth noting. By the time Munro’s third book appeared, the consensus on the quality of her work in the short newspaper reviews, those by and large in regional papers, was well established. This sense was shared in magazines as well. There is a homogeneous quality to the reception the book received, quite positive overall with the occasional idiosyncratic comment or objection, such as Dorothy Powell’s order in the Canadian Author and Bookman, “Buy this book. Don’t borrow it. It is worth reading and re-reading.” The summaries and analyses echo the sense of Munro’s work already seen, and they are written with confidence that Munro has ascended to the level of established Canadian writer – that is, she has joined the pantheon of “real writers.” Thus Hilda Kirkwood, a longtime reviewer at the Canadian Forum, ends her review with a curious paragraph, one indicative of the times: “No doubt these stories will be grist for the Canadian Literature mills. But perhaps we could stop bleating about Canadian Women Writers and admit that these stories are literature and as such are of lasting interest anywhere, aside from the fact that the ladies they are ‘about’ live in Vancouver, Wiarton or Ottawa.”
Kirkwood’s comment leads directly to the second notable aspect of the reception of Something in Canada: with it, discussion of Munro’s work by academics seemed to begin in earnest. The first academic article, by Hallvard Dahlie of the University of Calgary, had appeared in 1972, and the reviews of Something followed suit in that they were more numerous and more emphatic than they had been for either of Munro’s first two books. Without question, this academic attention both recognized and advanced Munro’s reputation since it brings additional authority to the judgements being offered. Although reviewing the book in the London Free Press, Struthers, then a graduate student at Western, adopted a professorial air and asserts at the beginning of his review that Munro’s “achievement has been partially misunderstood and therefore underrated.” Her real interest, he tells his reader, is in “ordering”: “This awareness of how we all constantly order and re-create the lives of others and ourselves is what is most exciting about the fiction of Alice Munro.” David Stouck of Simon Fraser University, writing in the West Coast Review, focused on Munro’s style, “where the sentences are each carefully crafted, polished units and their effects carefully weighed and balanced. Like Flaubert, her prose has the authority of finished product, painstakingly executed and flawless in design.” Also focusing on Munro’s style, E.D. Blodgett (of the University of Alberta, a scholar who went on to write an important critical overview) wrote that “some poets – Rilke, Keats – fear to utter the most beautiful line. Munro, however, has created a style in which revelation would be a kind of cover-up.” He also wrote that “the story dwells and lives darkly and erratically within the narrator. It is her story, and not about her.”27
Such academic reviews were not so much validation of Munro’s writing as they were an important next step in her growing reputation. All three reviewers were at pains to assert the complexity of Munro’s work, and the latter two proposed lofty figures for comparison. Kirkwood’s final paragraph suggests, too, that this was happening just at the time when English-Canadian nationalism, which held sway among intellectuals and, most especially, in the universities, was fostering Canadian literature as a field of academic study. Ki
rkwood, not an academic herself, also reflects Munro’s status after Lives as a writer whose work was seen in an especial Canadian feminist context. Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Munro formed a trinity of Canadian women writers. (During the 1970s academics in Canadian literature began to joke about “the three Margarets”: Laurence, Atwood, and Alice Munro.)
But that was in Canada. When Something was published by McGraw-Hill in fall 1974, discussions of prior reputation and the development of Canadian literature were muted. Overall, the book got positive reviews in the United States. Three of the more considered ones, though, each a review appearing in major newspapers, were acerbic, even caustic. Bette Howland begins her review in the Chicago Tribune noting the praise and award Munro got for her first books, and continuing, “That’s gratifying; she’s talented and well worth the attention.” But Something “is not so good as her earlier work; the stories are less than the talent they display. ‘This is a message; I really believe it is,’ she writes at the end of one, ‘but I don’t see how I can deliver it.’ She might have been reviewing her own book.” Howland sees two types of stories here. First, what she calls “ ‘good ideas for a short story’ – well made, carefully plotted, essentially contrived, and lacking in feeling.” These are the stories Munro got from her earlier attempts. The other “kind of writing is flailing, experimental. The stories have less clearly defined plots, maybe none at all, and come to no conclusions.… Often their subject is the writer’s relation to her material,” and they are filled with disclaimers that emphasize the writer’s position. They “are uttered so often that they become in themselves a ‘trick.’ They mar the ending of ‘Ottawa Valley,’ which contains by far the best and truest writing in the book.” Howland’s review deserves to be noted, for the flaws she saw in Something are those Munro came to see there herself, flaws she saw as she was making the book. Although still publishable, she thought, these stories were fundamentally flawed.
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