Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  A similar review by Frederick Busch appeared in the New York Times. More negative though less considered and not as precisely argued as Howland’s, Busch’s review takes up the narrative reversal in “Tell Me Yes or No” and asserts that these stories “are journeyman’s work. But they are no more than that, and by now – ‘In Our Time’ was published in 1925 – we ought to demand that a volume of stories delivers thrilling economy, the poetry which makes the form so valuable.” Busch sees lots of information here, “but there is little emotional tension arising from the events.” As with Howland, Munro’s revelations about authorship seem to have irritated him. After discussing the ending of “How I Met My Husband,” where the narrator is disingenuous about her reasons for letting her husband tell their courtship story the way he does, the reviewer writes, “That the author can provoke anger by betraying her character is evidence that she can make characters. The reason given (and there are too many reasons given in this book, too few admissions that a character may be reined in close to the page, yet dance beyond the author’s logic) is an effort on the part of the narrative voice to be well-liked; the tone is sycophantic.” In “most of these stories, there is the kind of innocence of tone that can make you grin, but the way you grin at someone else’s charming child: already forgetting.” Striking many of the same notes in the Minneapolis Star, Susan Cushman wonders about comparing Munro to Laurence and Atwood, though she thinks Munro “probably will prove that she deserves this status” eventually and continues, “This collection unfortunately lacks the generous sparkle that graced Ms. Munro’s earlier work. Part of the problem seems to be a new ambivalence toward her craft,” which Cushman calls “writerly guilt.” Thus although Munro’s “strong talent still shows through,” Something “must be considered the weakest of her books so far.”28

  However mixed the message Munro received from American reviewers of Something, there was no question that it marked her ascent among Canadian writers. A June 1974 profile written for the London Free Press to accompany Struthers’s review of Something captures Munro at that time, and it warrants attention for the detailed snapshot it provides. Her third book just published, her separation from Jim a fact, her position as Western’s 1974–75 writer-in-residence confirmed, Munro had returned home. Speaking to the paper’s reporter, Joanna Beyersbergen, Munro looks back as well as forward. The profile opens “She doesn’t speak of leaving a husband of 20 years and 12-room house in Victoria, B.C., as though it was a cataclysmic experience.” Nor, Beyersbergen writes, does Munro present herself as a “newly-liberated woman. She talks about it as though she has done nothing very remarkable at all.… Her separation is ‘friendly,’ Mrs. Munro says. ‘We’re not even legally separated.’ ” However Munro then wanted to present the breakup of her marriage, most of this profile is concerned with other parts of her life. Growing up in Wingham (“I had to learn to piece a quilt when I was eight, that was to make my first quilt for my hope chest”; her mother had her “wear blue tunics, which middle-class girls wore, but not girls of Wingham”); conforming to accepted views of marriage (“I felt it was my responsibility to pick up my husband’s socks. I felt like that for 20 years”); motherhood (“I’m just so terribly glad I had my children when I did”); and career (she always wanted to “have the children and write”). Looking back is one thing, looking forward another. Beyersbergen writes that “it was the freedom which accompanies being unattached which was so inviting.” Munro said she likes to cook, but she does not “like having to do things like that all the time. That’s why I think I’ll never live with anyone again.”

  Turning to the way she had been seen in Wingham since she began publishing, and especially since Lives, Munro commented that “I tried so hard to be like everyone else. I desperately wanted to be asked to a dance.” But “I wasn’t really so unconventional, just by Wingham’s standards.” She “expected people” in Wingham “to be more put off by the book than they were. Maybe they’re not telling me. I think they react positively to success. Didn’t Elizabeth Taylor say, ‘Success is a great deodorant?’ ” Beyersbergen continues, “When Lives came out in England, Mrs. Munro says, she told her father who is still on the farm that she received good reviews in the London Times and the Manchester Guardian. Her father replied, she says with rumbles of belly laughter, ‘Well, you’ll never get one in the Wingham Advance-Times.’ ”

  Again, this is Munro once she had completed the shift from Victoria to London, once Andrea’s situation was stabilized, once Something was out, once Munro had the next year or so planned by way of her appointment at Western. Bob Laidlaw remained ill, so she was travelling to Wingham regularly. The month before this profile appeared, Munro had published in the syndicated Weekend Magazine “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious,” her brief affecting essay about her home place that she wrote with her father’s help. Beyersbergen goes on,

  Her laughter is not mockery; there is unconcealed gratitude that she can go back, and she does. “I love that countryside more than any other. I love Wingham. I love the look of small towns, even the shabbiness. After all, most people who write about small towns are practically tarred and feathered. Apparently Thomas Wolfe could never go home again at all.”

  It is the truthfulness of her perceptions which must make her writings disturbing to small town citizens.

  Beyersbergen then turns to Something, citing a passage about these people’s “simple, natural, poverty-bred materialism,” and continues to assert that “as a writer, [Munro] is no longer primarily a girl or a young woman in Wingham, but a wife and mother in British Columbia.” This is an arguable assertion about Something, but Munro’s response to it is the more interesting, for it is the same one she wrote looking at Wingham in “Home”: “ ‘You use it up,’ Mrs. Munro says of her Wingham writings. But later, she thinks she will write about this area again. ‘There are stories about people there just crying out to be used.’ ”29

  Here Beyersbergen has detailed Munro as she was during the spring of 1974: free, looking back, looking forward. There is prescience here, since Munro did indeed return to Wingham as subject, but there is also the unforeseen: Munro did go back to Huron County to live with another person. Less happily, the “deodorant” of her success was not sufficiently strong to keep the enmity of some of the people who lived there from being focused on her work, and on Munro herself, during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

  In the way of such constructions, written for the moment and the particular occasion of Something’s publication, this profile simplifies what was really happening in Munro’s life. When she had moved into the house on London’s St. George Street in January 1974, Munro was delighted to have Andrea with her after their being separated during the fall. She was relieved to have got out of her teaching job at York for the balance of the year, but the writer-in-residence position she had been offered at Western would require some of the same duties that had made her uncomfortable at York. Her relationship with Metcalf was ongoing, but they saw each other infrequently, there was a tentativeness on both sides for fear of losing their friendship, and much of the relationship was maintained through letters and telephone calls. Munro was seeing other men, Metcalf other women. She was also continuing contacts with the literary people at Western, increasingly so after she accepted the writer-in-residence position for the fall. Her writing – how it was going, what she was doing, and what to do in relation to it – was another prime concern.

  As the negotiations surrounding the contract for Something suggest, Munro had become increasingly aware of the intricacies involved in publishing throughout her relations with McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Needing income, Munro had agreed to have Kiil try to sell serial rights for her stories to American magazines, and he had some success in that regard. Any income from the stories in Something prior to the book’s publication in May went completely to Munro; once the book had appeared, though, she had to share it with McGraw-Hill Ryerson. This never happened since the two stories from the book he sold to
McCall’s were published before Something, but this arrangement was but one indication of Munro’s position. She wrote to Metcalf asking advice about this arrangement and, after he responded, indicated that she had been approached by an agent during the spring of 1973. During the summer of 1972 Munro had discussed the possibility of an agent with the man she was seeing there then; he had had some experience along this line himself and volunteered to represent her.

  Munro continued to talk to Metcalf about her relations with McGraw-Hill Ryerson into 1974 and throughout that year kept looking into the matter of an agent. In October she received a letter from the Toronto-based writer Fred Bodsworth in response to her inquiry about agents. He gave her his New York agent’s name, told her how things worked, and volunteered to write the agent on Munro’s behalf if she wanted. Munro continued in this vein, quite slowly, until she received an inquiry in March 1976 from American agent Virginia Barber; after some correspondence and a meeting, Munro hired her later that year. Recalling her hesitancy to take the next step and hire an agent, particularly when Barber first approached her, Munro has said that she thought “I may never write another thing and what I do write will never sell. I just was almost fending off her enthusiasm. I felt so low in hope, and it wasn’t that I was low-spirited, I was fine, I wasn’t depressed, but I just had these ideas.” Such feelings, though seemingly hard to understand in light of what has happened to her since, are utterly consistent with her misgivings about her work over the years, misgivings that were aggravated by her changed living circumstance and reflected in the stories she had written since returning to Ontario.30

  No longer commuting to Toronto, Munro spent the first months of 1974 attending to the various requirements of her craft. Thanks to Lives (which had gone through four printings of the American edition by then) and the forthcoming new book, Munro was receiving progressively more attention. Despite her own misgivings about the stories it contained, Something went into production and Munro dealt with the proposed changes to her manuscript. She was still writing things for the book, she told a reporter, through February. In January, the dramatic adaptation of Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” had inaugurated CBC television’s The Play’s the Thing series, composed of four commissioned plays by Canadian writers. When he came to review Something in May in the Globe and Mail, William French commented that it “was one of the most successful of the CBC’S television plays last winter.” Munro had worked on another adaptation of “A Trip to the Coast” for the CBC the year before, and she wrote another, “1847: The Irish” specifically for the CBC a few years later. Munro accepted these projects as further income, but they had the effect of extending her reputation beyond her readership. There was also a television adaptation of “Baptizing” from Lives. Beyond visual adaptations of her work, which continued throughout the 1970s, the CBC continued to broadcast her stories on radio. “The Found Boat” was read on Anthology in April just before Something was published and, during fall 1974, Munro worked with people from the CBC on a thirty-part radio adaptation of Lives that was used to inaugurate its new national morning program, “Judy,” with Judy LaMarsh in fall 1975.

  In May 1974 Munro learned that the U.S. edition of Dance had won the Great Lakes College Association’s New Writer Award, an honour that involved a tour of the participating colleges. She also accepted invitations for what she certainly saw as literary chores – for example, she participated in a discussion at a local high school English teachers’ banquet in February and, in May, attended a similar dinner in Toronto for the heads of English departments at Canadian universities. At Western, she spoke to a faculty wives luncheon. Because of Something, too, there were interviews and profiles.

  Once school was over in June, Jenny and Andrea returned to Victoria to spend the summer with Jim, leaving Munro free of parental responsibilities. She thought for a time of going to England – McGraw-Hill Ryerson was telling inquiring journalists as much – but Munro ended up spending the summer in Montreal, she recalls, breaking up with John Metcalf. She stayed in Hugh and Nora Hood’s house there, wrote, and saw John and his friends. Having lived in Montreal since he came to Canada in the early 1960s, apart from brief stints elsewhere, and having founded along with Hugh Hood a group calling itself the Montreal Storytellers, Metcalf was well connected in the literary community there. In October, after Munro returned to London to get Andrea back in school and begin her duties as writer-in-residence at Western, Audrey Coffin wrote returning the manuscript of Something. She hoped Munro had a good summer in Montreal and mentioned that she had heard that “you’re now working (writing) and carousing (the job)” at Western.31

  Munro’s relationship with John Metcalf had begun with his fan letter to her after he heard “Images” broadcast on the CBC in September 1968 and continued, a regular connection, throughout the 1980s. There has been less contact in recent years and, in 2000, Munro took public exception to things Metcalf published – especially about Robert Weaver – in a critical piece on her work and reputation in the National Post. Yet during the early 1970s, and especially during the two years Munro was completely on her own, mid-1973 through August 1975, Metcalf was a key connection for her. That they engaged in a brief romance is of less interest here than their continuing connection as two writers who shared many of the same concerns as artists. Each read the other’s work as it was published and passed on their comments. Metcalf kept Munro up on literary gossip (especially after she moved to Clinton in August 1975) and each, throughout the correspondence, was quite candid with the other. Theirs was then a special relation, one based on long connection and, as the years passed, a certain outsider status each had. Metcalf was seen standing apart from the Canadian literary establishment as an “immigrant” (a reviewer on CBC once complained that it was too bad Metcalf had no Canadian childhood memories) and, as the years passed, he became better known for his contentious comments on Canadian literary matters. Munro, as the years passed and her career took off, was outside the Canadian literary scene in a very different way by virtue of her talent and success – by the end of the 1970s her standing at the New Yorker and Alfred A. Knopf said it all. Besides, she lived in Clinton and hardly ever came to Toronto.

  In 1974, though, during her summer in Montreal, most of that lay ahead. Metcalf knew people, Munro met them, and they spent time together as they were breaking up. Before she went to Montreal, Munro was the person more invested in the relationship, Metcalf the person backing off, withdrawing. He wanted to marry again and he was looking elsewhere. Over her summer there, they reached a rapprochement and she returned to London still connected to Metcalf, still writing and speaking, but each person was getting on with a separate personal life, even while they were still gossiping and working together on various projects. Before Munro went back to London, she agreed to a joint reading with Metcalf in February 1975 at Loyola College in Montreal. That reading was taped and deposited in the John Metcalf Fonds at the University of Calgary along with a tape, made prior to the reading, of Metcalf coaching Munro as she prepared to read from the story she had sent him as a birthday present, “Home.” She did need coaching, and Metcalf was helpful – just as he was throughout this key juncture of Munro’s life and career.32

  “In Her Mortal Anxiety”: Western, Suitors, and “Places at Home”

  Once Something was done in early 1974 and as it was going through the press and attracting review attention, Munro did what she had always done: she wrote. What she produced dissatisfied her mostly, so the manuscript stories that date to the year after her return to Ontario – beyond those already discussed – are hard to specify. One from this period is called “Married People.” Munro dated it “Oct. 10/ 74” and offered it as a birthday present to another man in her life, Jim, since its dedication reads “For My Husband Jim” and that date was his fifty-fifth birthday. An apparently finished typescript copy exists in the John Metcalf Fonds – Metcalf thinks she probably sent it to him as a submission for one of his anthologies – and there is draft
material in Munro’s papers. Like the stories that ended Something and “Home,” “Married People” anticipates the succession of the former-husband stories Munro wrote beginning with “The Beggar Maid” and continuing into the 1980s. The story is also ironically reminiscent of her dedication of Lives to Jim Munro: though the marriage was ending or had ended, it is a visible acknowledgement of both his unflagging support of her writing and of their time together.

  “Married People” takes its point of departure from a coincidence that occurred to Munro when she was living in London. There she and a man she had known in Victoria recognized one another on the street, stopped, and talked. His marriage had broken up and he had moved east also. In the story, Munro focuses on Norah, a person recognizably in the same situation as her own since leaving the west coast (“She mentioned the university where she had been employed last summer. Her jobs were short-term, peripheral, she drifted from one campus to another.”). Norah, who had been married to Andrew, recognizes and then goes and sits down to talk with Bob Johnson, who had been married to Mary – the four had been friends in Vancouver. Bob worked for an insurance company then, Andrew was in “retailing.” As a story that Munro never published, “Married People” cannot be advanced as any type of key text, but it is indicative of her focus during 1974. Two passages, especially, seem worth looking at. The first, derived from Norah’s contemplation of the physical changes she notes in Johnson from her memories of him in the late 1950s, turns back on Norah herself: