Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

had also reached other writers, and three of these connections had real effects on Munro’s subsequent career.
    In September 1968, just as
Dance of the Happy Shades
was being printed,
CBC Tuesday Night
broadcast the last story Munro wrote for the book, “Images.” Among its listeners was a young writer in Montreal named John Metcalf. He was born in England in 1938 and after university studies there had emigrated to Canada in 1962, teaching first high school and then at Loyola College, now part of Concordia University. Impressed by the story, Metcalf decided to write Munro and tell her so. He knew Earle Toppings and obtained her address from him; in passing it on, Toppings warned Metcalf that he might not get a reply, such were Munro’s habits as a correspondent. When he wrote, Metcalf promptly told Munro what Toppings had said.
    In “Images,” Metcalf recalls, he saw that Munro “had done exactly what I was groping towards and she was there ahead of me.… But what I was trying to do, what she did, you could sum up in the title she gave to the story, ‘Images.’ Because this was what we were both trying to do at the time, which was to lessen the intricacies of plot and move a storyforward by a succession of powerful images that had flowing in them, in common, a kind of common energy, but they would be extraordinary vivid.” The story “moves forward in sort of nodules of picture or dialogue.” “Images” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” struck Metcalf as being technically radical, “extraordinary and demanding, very difficult.… It was such a technical feast for me, so when I read her I was thinking, ah, that’s how you do that.” Metcalf points as well to the narrator’s account of the family’s financial decline toward the beginning of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” calling it “the most incredible manipulation of voice I’d seen on a page in a very long time.” Besides finding her address and writing to Munro, Metcalf says he bought an armload – seventeen, he remembers – of copies of
Dance of the Happy Shades
and gave them to friends saying, “Read this book.”
    Munro later called the letter she received from Metcalf in 1969 “a bouquet, a burst of handsome praise. He had taken the trouble to do this – to write so generously and thoughtfully, to a writer he didn’t know, a writer of no importance, no connections. He didn’t do it out of kindness alone, though it seemed to me so wonderfully kind. He did it because he believes writing is important.” 32 Earle Toppings’s comment notwithstanding, Munro replied to Metcalf and they began a correspondence that led to what Munro called a “literary friendship.” Such a phrasing, which Munro comments “sounds to me too pretentious and genteel for the letters we wrote,” does not really capture the importance of this connection for her. Over the next several years, owing to the extended dissolution and breakup of her marriage in 1973 and her return to Ontario, her friendship with Metcalf was something of a second literary lifeline for her. Coached by Metcalf, Munro spent a brief period – from 1972 through the fall of 1975 – supporting herself by way of her writing and by playing the public writer to a degree she had not before nor has since. During this time, Metcalf was an important literary friend.
    At the time he first wrote to Munro, John Metcalf was himself freshly embarked on a career as a writer of short stories, novelist, editor, and anthologist. Later, especially as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, he gained notoriety as a critical gadfly, waging a campaign aimed atacademic critics of Canadian writing. He began publishing stories in the 1960s and had two stories in
Modern Canadian Stories
from Ryerson in 1966 – with Munro’s “The Time of Death” – and five in
New Canadian Writing, 1969
. His own first collection,
The Lady Who Sold Furniture
, was published by Clarke, Irwin in 1970. Concurrently, he was assembling two anthologies of Canadian stories for Ryerson aimed at course adoption,
Sixteen by Twelve
(1970), for high school students, and
The Narrative Voice
(1972), for students in university. Given Metcalf’s enthusiasm for her work, it is not surprising that he included two Munro stories in each anthology. And given his approach, she also had her first commissioned critical statements in those books, an “Author’s Commentary” in the first and, in the second, one titled (by Metcalf as an acknowledged echo