Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

of the well-known essay by Mary McCarthy) “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled.”
    Without detailing them, these pieces reveal Munro talking about her writing in her characteristic ways. She is sceptical of writing about writing, preferring that the story itself, rather than any commentary on it, be the real focus. In the first piece, she briefly addresses “An Ounce of Cure,” a story in which a first-person narrator recalls an event when she was in high school. Spurned by a boy she liked, she decided to drown her sorrow by drinking one evening while babysitting. The story, an incident that happened to Daphne Cue as a girl, is mostly comical. Even so, in her essay Munro notes that its narrator “gets out of” what had happened to her “by changing from a participant to an observer” – this is what, as a writer, Munro does herself. Looking back at the story as she wrote her essay, Munro maintained that it accomplished what she sought for it. On the other hand, “Boys and Girls,” a story she wrote “too purposely perhaps,” uses her own history to analyze sex roles. She still wonders over it, and in doing so reveals herself an exacting artist: “When I read this story over I have a feeling of failure and despair; I feel that there’s so much more that should be there, a whole world really, and I have strained it out into this little story and cannot tell if I got what matters.” In “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled,” Munro first displays her fundamental scepticism over the ways of literary critics by undercutting someone’s assertion that the house in“Images” is symbolic, rather than just a description of a house Munro remembered from Lower Town; that is, nothing symbolic, a real house. Her doubts in this regard have never wavered, yet the best part of this essay is Munro’s statement that as a writer she “feels like a juggler trying to describe exactly how he catches the balls … he still feels it may be luck, a good deal of the time, and luck is an unhappy thing to talk about, it is not reliable.” 33
    However uncertain she may have been, Munro was writing stories that continued to attract attention and more unsought contacts with other writers. One day during the summer of 1969, Audrey Thomas, who in 1967 had published her own first collection of stories,
Ten Green Bottles
, went to Munro’s Bookstore specifically to meet the author of
Dance of the Happy Shades
. George Woodcock had asked her to review it for
Canadian Literature
and, having done so, Thomas wanted to tell Munro personally how much she liked the book. Munro was not there, but Jim had Thomas call her up at home from the store. Alice invited her to come right over, and the two began a friendship that continues. Today Munro calls Thomas her best friend.
    Also during the summer of 1969, Margaret Atwood, who was living in Edmonton at the time, came through Victoria with her husband James Polk. In response to Atwood’s reading of Munro’s stories in anthologies and
Dance of the Happy Shades
, they sought Munro out and ended up spending a weekend with Alice and Jim. That too was the beginning of a long and still ongoing friendship between the two women.
    Recalling this first visit, Atwood said that “the world of Canadian writers was extremely small at that time. Anybody who had published a book of any kind” was sought out, for books were “like your calling card.” An all-too common attitude toward Canadian writing at the time, suggesting something of the colonial assumptions still very much in play in Canadian culture, is offered in passing in Christopher Dafoe’s May 1969 profile of Munro (whose picture there is captioned “a quiet Canadian”). Amazed as he seems to be at finding “a writer of exceptional gifts” in a Victoria bookstore, he casually writes that “it is easy enough to overlook Canadian writers. I first discovered Mordecai Richler in the pages of The Spectator, Ethel Wilson in The Reporter.” Given such aninhospitable climate for their own writing and aware as they were of
Dance of the Happy Shades
, Atwood, Metcalf, and Thomas sought out Munro and long-standing personal connections were developed.
    Thomas maintains that her friendship with Munro is not a literary one, that she does not think she has had any effect on Munro’s career. While this is true, the same cannot be said for either Metcalf or Atwood. During the first half of the 1970s, Metcalf proved to be enormously important to Munro’s