Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  When she looked in the mirror she would sometimes see, with deep respectful feeling, almost of awe, almost of approval, how all that ordinary prettiness, roundness, readiness was melting and slipping away, and what looked out was the broad, deep eye-socketed, final face of her grandmother, her greatgran[d]mother, women who had been photographed on a farm porch, in front of a whitewashed cottage in Ireland, looking as if they had never asked anybody for anything in their lives.

  Such a passage is cousin to some of those found in “Winter Wind,” which also recreate Munro’s grandmother. It might also be seen as a usual contemplation of a forty-four-year-old person looking in the mirror. Yet placed in the trajectory of Munro’s life and, more pointedly, placed in relation to the writing she subsequently did after returning to Ontario, such a passage is resonant in that it reveals her meditating on the living family connections she found awaiting her there.

  So too is the moment on which “Married People” ends, one Norah recalls from their time together one summer when the families shared a rented cottage on an island off the coast. Andrew and pregnant Mary had rowed off on an errand to the mainland. They are considerably overdue. Norah and Bob, worried, watch the horizon. The story ends:

  Norah, objecting to the possibility that Andrew might never come face to face with her, or speak to her, or lie beside her again, was arguing in her mind that there had not been enough time. She did not seem to mean by this that there had not been enough time for ordinary living together or raising their children or any of those things, but not enough time for delivery of some large and particularly urgent message, which was straining in her now, which she would shout at him, throw at him, dazzle and utterly change and save him with, the moment she saw his face, if she was lucky enough to see his face, which was the one face she could not do without, not yet, not yet – again. The giving and accepting of any such message was to prove impossible. But it did not seem so to her when she was sitting on the beach, vowing and waiting, in her mortal anxiety, that day.33

  The whole of “Married People” builds to this moment, likely a moment remembered from the summer of 1957 (the detail places the Munros just after Jenny’s birth), a moment when Munro probably also found herself “in her mortal anxiety.” The story shows Munro looking back in ways different from her recollection of her childhood – now away from her marriage, she is beginning to use its remembered images too.

  Munro’s phrase “mortal anxiety” might well be seen as apt for just where she herself was as an artist when she walked into a CBC studio to talk to Harry Boyle during the summer of 1974. Thinking that she had “written out” the Wingham girlhood-to-young-adult material recalled from British Columbia, having mined her manuscripts of earlier attempts to produce about half the stories in Something, Munro was looking not so much for new materials as she was for new ways of seeing, of understanding her “old” material, her home place. Munro herself knew that the mined stories in Something were exercises, proficient enough to publish but ultimately dissatisfying, just as some of Something’s keener reviewers observed. But that book also contained the new style of autobiographical metafictional stories (and she had done “Home” too), and it also had “Tell Me Yes or No” and “The Spanish Lady,” precursors of what Munro has come to call her “passion” stories. When Munro talked to Joanna Beyersbergen late in spring 1974 and said of Huron County that there were “stories about people there just crying out to be used” she doubtless knew that she might well use them herself. But for a time, it seems, Munro was not yet in any position to do so.

  That “Married People” builds to an ending focused on a remembered moment, long ago and far away, during which Norah saw herself “vowing and waiting, in her mortal anxiety” is indicative of the imaginative change Munro was undergoing. This story was an early attempt to reverse her usual technique and literally marry her former married life in B.C. with her new life back in Ontario; dedicated to Jim and offered as a present, the story shows Munro beginning to scrutinize her marriage for meaning in the same way she had long examined her childhood and adolescence. More than this – and the technique would become increasingly evident as Who Do You Think You Are? gave way to The Moons of Jupiter – Munro accomplished her fictive effects by focusing on such moments as Norah experiences and remembers them years later. Home in Ontario a middle-aged woman (an adult, mother, much-praised writer, her position as daughter still intact at home with her father), Munro, like Norah, looked into the mirror and saw her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s faces staring back at her. Being Alice Munro, she also saw her mother’s face and, going home to Wingham from London with some regularity, she saw her father still there. By August 1974 when she talked to Boyle, Munro was emphatically home. In “her mortal anxiety” – and Munro really did believe she might never write another thing – the question was what to do with this home now that she was there.

  Listening to the leisurely talk Boyle had with Munro on Sunday Supplement were Munro’s current and future editors – Audrey Coffin and Douglas M. Gibson. Coffin mentioned it in her letter returning the manuscript of Something, asking, “Have you noticed how your name keeps cropping up in Canadian book reviews and the like? And always now acknowledged as tops. Tomorrow the world! (Gratifying!!?).” When Gibson wrote, he acknowledged Munro’s rising reputation as well. Citing a detail from the Boyle interview, Gibson agreed with a remark Munro had made about small towns; in his own in Scotland, too, “ ‘even the town loonie’ had his role and was recognized as a character,” as she had said to Boyle.

  After taking a bachelor’s degree at St. Andrew’s University in his native Scotland, Gibson came to North America in 1966 and took a master’s degree at Yale. Then he embarked on a trip throughout the United States and Canada that saw him ending up in Toronto and, after a few months in the administration at McMaster University, answering an ad for editorial trainees at Doubleday Canada and being hired. Gibson worked there for six years before moving on to Macmillan to be editorial director of its trade division. Writing to Munro, Gibson probably knew that she was not happy at McGraw-Hill Ryerson and in his letter encouraged her to stop by his office if she was in Toronto. Such wooing was very much a part of the trade, both on the part of publishers and authors. Sometime in the fall Gibson travelled to London and met Munro for dinner. By January 1975 Gibson was writing her, “We at Macmillan would like to offer you a contract for your next book of fiction” and, as well, reported in the same letter that “on the other book, I have called Peter D’Angelo and he is sending along a lot of sample material for our perusal.”34

  Macmillan did not actually succeed in contracting for Munro’s next book until spring 1978 when Who Do You Think You Are? was going into production. But as this second letter suggests, Gibson and Munro set to work immediately after their first meeting on a book of photographs, with a text by Munro, focused on Ontario and to be called “Places at Home.” Peter D’Angelo, a medical student at Western and a photographer, had brought the idea to Munro when she was writer-in-residence there and she, in turn, took it to Gibson when they met. He was quite encouraging, so Munro and D’Angelo worked on the project throughout 1975, Munro producing a manuscript of about ten thousand words and D’Angelo spending that summer, supported by the advance he got from Macmillan, driving about southern Ontario taking photographs. The book was never published, but the work Munro did on it was important to her imaginative return to Huron County and much was later incorporated into Who Do You Think You Are?

  After this book was abandoned in late 1975, Munro’s relationship with Gibson, and so with Macmillan, continued through other connections. Munro wrote a blurb for Jack Hodgins’s first book, Spit Delaney’s Island, and she took the manuscript of her father’s novel, completed just before his death in August 1976, to Macmillan. It published Laidlaw’s The McGregors in 1979. She was nominally still connected to McGraw-Hill Ryerson after Something – there was a next-manuscript clause in her contract that McGraw-Hill wanted to hold her to.
In March 1975, just before he left the company, Kiil had written Munro about her next book, offering a $10,000 advance, better royalty terms, and promises of publicity in New York.35 But with Audrey Coffin retired and the experience of Something behind her, there was little chance of Munro accepting the offer. By the end of 1975 she was a writer heading toward another publisher, most probably to Macmillan to work with Gibson.

  By that time too Munro was focused on being a full-time writer. She had returned to London to take up the writer-in-residence position at Western for 1974–75. Andrea and Jenny were with her, and they moved again, into an apartment at 300 Oxford East. Munro was the university’s third writer-in-residence, having been preceded by the poet Margaret Avison and by Margaret Laurence. She was expected to visit classes, keep office hours to meet with student and faculty writers, and give a public reading each term. Munro returned to Western at a time when Canadian literature was overwhelming the resistance it had traditionally faced within the English department from those on the faculty who taught British or American writing. Stan Dragland, whose field was Canadian literature and who had joined the English faculty in 1970, remembers Munro’s year at Western. He recalls that resistance “was still in the air, though seldom spoken aloud to Canadianists, because it was there in the culture.” It was spoken of to Munro, though, since she reported to Metcalf that at an academic dinner party in September it was made clear to her that Canadian literature was being forced on them, and that one member of the department had commented that she had met Munro but did not intend to read her. Meeting her, apparently, was enough.

  Along with Dragland, D.M.R. Bentley and Catherine Ross also taught Canadian literature. Senior among them too was the poet and dramatist James Reaney, who had met Munro when she was still in Victoria and they had enjoyed social contacts there. Her time at Western allowed them to see a good deal of each other. Reaney, a native of Stratford and a person who had long taught a course on Ontario culture, recalls having fun with her sharing both remembered stories from childhood (“I had a stepfather who left dead animals lying about the barnyard”) and an enthusiasm for The Physiography of Southern Ontario, a geographical text both knew. Reaney recalls that when Munro read in his Canadian literature class, “huge crowds came.” Remembering one of these class visits also, Dragland said that in these Munro “could do no wrong” and he especially recalls her reading of “Postcard” to a class. When she read it to his class, though, she left off the last paragraph of the published version, the summary in which the narrator overtly addresses her pain at rejection. Dragland saw that act as an indication of Munro’s direction then: “Less explicit means more involving,” he recalls.

  Typically Munro would read a story and then take questions. As Dragland and Reaney both recall, she was quite successful with audiences when she did this. She was not so sure herself, however. Although it was much less taxing than the regular classroom teaching she had done before, the requirements of the writer-in-residence position at Western still made Munro uncomfortable, just as most of the activities required of a public writer long have. Probably owing still to her experience in George Cuomo’s writing workshop in Victoria ten years before, along with her shyness, Munro found such occasions difficult. As she made patently clear in “Material,” much of what she saw as the academic adulation of the writer as truth-teller was essentially phony. While for her own purposes she saw it as necessary to accept such work and to display herself in this way, she never reconciled herself to it. No matter how well others thought she did, no matter what they took away from it, Munro herself found such occasions to be wearing, draining.

  The social aspects of being in the university, however, were another matter. During her year at Western Munro attended and gave parties. These she enjoyed and, though such was not her intention, she was also able to use these parties as a means of gathering material for future writing. One party Rose attends in Who Do You Think You Are?, for instance, was derived from some Munro attended and one she herself gave during her time in London. Much of Simon’s personal history in “Simon’s Luck,” for instance, came to Munro from a faculty member recounting his own history at one of these parties. Even so, by the time her year was ending Munro had had enough of the academy since she wrote to Metcalf that she was not able to go to a party without being accosted by people who wanted something from her. In March 1975 she wrote to Audrey Thomas that she had not got any work done because the “job is exhausting and unreal. I’ve read so much stuff now I couldn’t tell Rod McKuen from Rilke. A terrible way to make a dollar. But it’s soon over.” She concluded from her year’s return to Western that being a writer-in-residence was not for her.

  Quite apart from the public occasions such a position demanded, Munro was ill suited as a writer-in-residence for a far more fundamental reason: she has never believed in the process of formally teaching so-called creative writing within the academy. More than belief, though, Munro seems unprepared to exercise what critical facility she has on other people’s writing. There is no question but that her eye for what she is herself trying to do in her own work is sharp, acute; but there is also no evidence that she has been willing to apply that sensibility elsewhere. Leo Simpson, another writer who got to know Munro when she was in London and who was writer-in-residence after her, recalls Munro as one who had a clear sense of “what a writer’s duties are,” and that sense was to focus on her own work and make it as good as she possibly could. She would never be enthusiastic about reading student work, he recalls. Both Mary Swan – who continued to meet with Munro when she was at Western – and Stan Dragland – who took sections of his then-unpublished novel Peckertracks to her – agree as to Munro’s methods. Swan wrote that “she didn’t dissect things or offer specific advice or suggestions, [but] was always encouraging and supportive as she has continued to be all these years.” Dragland is more analytical, writing that she offered “plenty of encouragement, but no direction.” He notes, “On the wide gamut of possible responses to the writing of others, from dismissal to rave, undiscriminating praise has the advantage of leaving no scars.”

  Dragland, who confesses to being a bit disappointed by Munro’s approach to his work and to that of students, has made some further comments that bear repeating. He remembers once hearing Munro say that “she never showed her writing to anyone before it went to her editor. She was the only writer I knew at the time who was so thoroughly professional in that regard.” As he concludes his reminiscence of Munro at Western during 1974–75, Dragland maintains that “what was far more important about Alice than this cavilling” about her approach to others’ writing “is that she was accessible as writer-in-residence. She was very friendly, highly sociable, anything but distant. She lived in London during her tenure; she was in residence and she hosted a variety of people and could talk about anything, even writing if it came to that. Many of Western’s writers-in-residence preferred to commute from Toronto and thus established nothing like Alice’s presence in the community.”36

  The third notable person who heard Munro’s conversation with Harry Boyle was Gerald Fremlin. Driving between Ottawa and Clinton that afternoon, he did not miss Munro saying “Even since I’ve come back the past year to live here.…” Fremlin was returning to his hometown, Clinton, to help his mother. He did not intend to stay. Having learned that Alice was back in London, where he had first met and liked her, he called her up that fall. They met in London, and Munro took him to the Faculty Club, where they each had three martinis – Munro said they both must have been interested to have had so many drinks. By the middle of November, Munro told Metcalf about Fremlin and was clearly deeply attracted to him, though still a bit wary. She was happy he was not a writer, a bit amazed that he was an academic, and noted that he was Irish. As the winter passed, Munro began to cross-country ski with Fremlin, to be companionable, and she remarked to Metcalf that she was learning all about drumlins and eskers and moraines in what she thought were just innocent landscapes.

  Mu
nro went to Victoria for Christmas 1974 with the family. Although there were no scenes, she returned to London determined not to go again. By early January 1975 she mentioned “Places at Home” to Metcalf as something she was working on, and that she was intent on making it a sharp text rather than something bland. She knew and admired James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Wright Morris’s The Home Place, and her idea was to write a text made up of a series of vignettes to complement D’Angelo’s photographs. These were descriptive of “Places at Home,” but they also included characters. Munro worked on the text throughout 1975, first doing random vignettes and then trying to organize the material around a seasonal theme, what she called “a sort of Ontario Book of Days” in a letter she wrote to Gibson from Clinton on September 16. The Calgary archive contains over 150 pages of manuscript from “Places at Home,” and in it Munro can be seen shaping this material, but she ultimately decided that she was unable to write the text that she imagined. Gibson agreed. Even so, the process of working on the photoalbum text, begun in London, worked on while her relationship with Fremlin was growing, and carried back to Huron County when Munro moved to Clinton that fall was significant to her return home and, as will be seen, to Who Do You Think You Are? That book began with a working title of “Places at Home.”

  Once Munro completed her work at Western, she intended to find a place to rent for the summer near Lake Huron in Bayfield or Goderich. But as her letter to Gibson indicates, by mid-September she had moved to Clinton to live with Fremlin and his mother in the family home. When she wrote to Audrey Thomas in March, Munro told her that “my life has gone rosy, again. This time its real. I’m almost ashamed to tell you, after my crazy behavior in lost causes. He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing – grown-up. Which is not the same as being middle-aged.… Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it.” Given this, and given Mrs. Fremlin’s frailty – and that was the issue, since she was not then ill – if Munro and Fremlin were to have a relationship she had to go there, or at least move nearby.