Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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 C BC’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, Munroworked 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 yearsMunro was completely on her