Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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