Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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. InMarch 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 aboutthe 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