Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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, Munrowas 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 shewanted. 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