Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

lines just before she left Jim and Victoria behind, and well-positioned behind one of her characters’ personae, “knowing too much” herself. Once she returned to Ontario, though, the versions of husband found in stories like “The Beggar Maid,” “Chaddeleys and Flemings 1. Connection,” “The Moons of Jupiter,” and especially “Miles City, Montana” come closer and closer to Jim Munro, his likes and dislikes, his ways of behaving. Richard, the husband in the first“Chaddeleys and Flemings” story, the husband who condescends to his wife’s visiting Cousin Iris, is, like Jim, the target of a flung plate. Munro the artist has imagined a piece of lemon meringue pie on it, making the scene both humorous and sad, leaving the narrator amazed “that something people invariably thought funny in … old movies or an
I Love Lucy
show … should be so shocking a verdict in real life.”
    In “Miles City, Montana,” the narrator abruptly dismisses her former husband Andrew, informing the reader that this man who is so very present in the story just then is actually long gone, his present circumstances unknown to her. It is a jarring revelation there at that point. Just before this, Munro writes that at “the bottom of their fights, we served up what we thought were the ugliest truths.… And finally – finally – racked and purged, we clasped hands and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges, their grievances, their self-justification. We leap-frogged over them. We declared them liars. We would have wine with dinner, or decide to have a party.” As she wrote in “Material,” Munro’s stories after she left her marriage were for her, ironically, just as she wrote about Hugo there, “ripe and useable, a paying investment.” 5
    Jim Munro was not receptive to a separation. When it became clear that Alice was in earnest about leaving the marriage, things became very difficult. Each of the older girls was caught between her parents – Sheila has written of this time and Jenny also confirms its unpleasantness. Each parent represented a side. While the older girls were more able to understand, Andrea’s situation was the more fraught; she was just five in 1971 and turning seven when Munro left finally in 1973. Given her age, throughout the breakup there was the question of where and with whom Andrea would live, what her contact with each parent would be, and how the break could best be effected. Because the decision to separate was taken between Alice and Jim before any physical break occurred, there was a protracted period of uncertainty for all the Munros.
    During this time Alice’s correspondence with John Metcalf, then living in Montreal, increased owing to her contributions to the anthologies he was editing and also to their shared interests. In one ofher earliest letters to him, she says that it “is rather beastly of me never to answer letters especially since support such as yours means a great deal to me.” That support continued and Metcalf’s importance grew; over considerable distance and only by correspondence initially, their relationship developed. Once Alice had decided to leave her marriage but had not yet left, by 1971–72, Metcalf’s own marriage had unexpectedly collapsed, his wife leaving him and taking their two-year-old daughter with her. As the breakups came, Munro and Metcalf were able to commiserate. In June 1971, while
Lives of Girls and Women
was going into production, she sent him a photograph for
The Narrative Voice
(she “came out looking untrustworthy and pregnant” though, she says, she is neither). “I have been in a black mood, too,” she continues, “really bad, really the worst I’ve ever had, but for fairly specific reasons (is that a comfort?) and now things have brightened up. When I’m not writing (the last five months or so), I really mess up my life.”
    The undoubted cause of Munro’s mood was her relationship with Jim. She comments later in the letter, after she expresses hope that his wife will stay with him, that “It is NOT EASY being married to a WRITER,” that it is “worse being married to me when I’m not [writing]. I always have this idea about how I should live in a shack in the bush, but I’m dependent as hell too.” This letter also shows her at this point still writing to Metcalf about their work, mainly, and it reveals her continued uncertainties about what she is doing. Thus she continues, “I