Beside it lay the grave of the man who wrote the epitaph, Will’s grandson, James Hogg, author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and a great literary figure in his day. I copied the wording down carefully for Alice’s book. Inside the spare Presbyterian church I noted that the first man from the parish to die in the First World War was a Robert Laidlaw, who shared a name — and, no doubt, bloodlines — with Alice’s Canadian father.
Jane and I returned to the car and headed west with mounting excitement. Now the Ettrick River was narrowing to the point that we could imagine Will o’ Phaup trying one of his legendary leaps (encompassing “frolic, agility and strength”) across it. Soon the farms were falling away, the road becoming a track. We parked the car and started to walk in to Potburn, the farm that lies before Far Hope. To our relief, Potburn proved to be deserted, occupied only by sparrows and finches, although the curtains in the windows hinted at recent occupancy. Now the buildings of Far Hope were in plain sight.
“Far Hope” indeed. It was supposedly the highest farm in Scotland, a designation that held no prospect of rich land. Our map told us that the hills that rose right behind the low stone house were the spine of Scotland. Just over their tops the rainwater drained west into the Solway, and the Atlantic, a fact that I was able to pass on to Alice.
The old farm buildings were a surprise and a delight. Usually a visit to a 300-year-old farm site will produce either a heap of rubble showing only bare outlines or, perhaps worse, a working farm, where literary intruders are not routinely welcomed, by man or dog. Miraculously, Far Hope is preserved in something close to its original state, and is unoccupied, yet at the same time open to all comers as a “bothy” (a rough sleeping hostel) on the walking trail known as the Southern Upland Way.
Inside, a literary tourist can pace the rough stone floor, seeing the original kitchen layout around the fireplace, and can easily imagine the old family’s straw bedding in place. A stroll around the silent outbuildings reveals where the horse was stabled, and the milk-providing cow. Sheep pens, the farm’s raison d’être, are prominent, and the Ettrick provides running water at the door.
Before we left, I wrote in the bothy visitor’s book an account of Alice Munro’s career, and its links to this small, humble place. I hope that many Canadians familiar with Alice’s work, especially The View from Castle Rock, will tear themselves away from the fleshpots of Edinburgh and make the pilgrimage to Far Hope.
Failing that, there is another Alice Munro pilgrimage, one much closer to home. Roughly an hour outside Toronto, just north and west of the town of Milton, lies the Boston Church. It is named after Thomas Boston, the minister of, yes, Ettrick Kirk, because so many of his former parishioners chose to come to this area, to settle in this heavily Scottish part of what was then called Canada West. A plaque outside the grey Gothic Revival building notes that the first service was held in 1820, while the handsome building itself was “designed and constructed in 1868 by Charles Blackwood, Thomas Henderson and congregation volunteers from Esquesing’s Scotch block.” The setting, on a road lined with old maple trees running northwest towards the Halton Hills, is idyllic, with the property itself adorned by maples, cedars, lilacs, and a great weeping willow, with few other buildings in sight. As you approach the church door, turn to the nearest corner on the left, and there you will find the graves devoted to the Laidlaws, Alice’s ancestors. Several of these graves have ancient tombstones giving details of the lives of those interred beneath them, including old James Laidlaw Senior, born in Ettrick Forest, Scotland, in 1763, who came to Esquesing in 1817, and died in 1826. And all of this history is to be found, as Alice writes, “almost within sight, and well within sound, of Highway 401 north of Milton, which at that spot may be the busiest road in Canada.”
Alice’s ancestors moved farther west from here, as pioneers, into the uncleared forest and bush of Southwestern Ontario’s Huron County. We get a very clear picture of what life was like for them in Alice’s story, “A Wilderness Station,” where after a tree-felling accident one character ends up in the Goderich jail. That ancient jail still stands, as a tourist attraction, in the town that anchors the county at the Lake Huron shore. The huge lake has allowed travel industry copywriters to go wild with descriptions of “Ontario’s West Coast,” complete with dramatic photos of a summer sun sinking into its wide waters. But it is the undramatic landscape stretching east of Goderich — a flat, partly wooded stretch of farming country with no striking natural features — that has become known to numberless readers as “Alice Munro Country.”
The word “undramatic” also applies to the history of the area, settled in the nineteenth century by immigrants from Scotland, England, and Ireland, as shown by place names like Dunlop, Clinton, and the ominous Donnybrook. (My old friend Harry J. Boyle grew up near there, admired by young Alice as he walked to work at the Wingham radio station, on his way to a career at the CBC, and to another as the author of many books including The Luck of the Irish, and — because he was willing to go along with my mischievous title idea — as the author of record of The Great Canadian Novel.) There are other Irish traces in this heavily Scottish area. The nearby community of Dublin has a tiny river running through it. The local blend of sentiment and realism is reflected in the name given to that watercourse, “the Liffey Drain.” This is not a land of Great Expectations.
No wars were fought with the Native people who lived here, no great battles with American invaders. Instead it was the scene of countless small heroic family battles, to fell the trees and clear the land, to build a cabin, to get the crops in; in short, to survive. To survive enough winters, in fact, to replace the cabin with a house, and in time to build the little towns with mills, and churches, and schools that dot today’s settled landscape. These early struggles are neatly caught, I think, in the C.W. Jefferys drawing of brawny settlers straining to clear away giant tree trunks that I chose to put on the cover of an informative historical novel that I published about these pioneer days. It was called The MacGregors, and it was written by Alice’s father, Robert Laidlaw.
For today’s literary tourist the points of special interest in Huron County are Clinton, where Alice now lives, her privacy protected by kindly neighbours (although I, as a privileged visitor, can tell you that this woman who once wrote in A Laundry Room of Her Own, still has no writing room of her own where she can shut her door on a ringing phone, or on the general business of the household, including her husband, Gerry, rummaging around for a snack); Goderich, where she prefers to meet visiting journalists, and where the staff at her favourite restaurant on the hexagonal central square are only too happy to tell a visiting publisher, decisively, which potential book cover should be chosen for Alice’s next work, and where she is to be met, silver hair blowing in the wind, strolling down by the harbour with Gerry; or Blyth, where her father had strong links and she plans to be buried, and where, as Val Ross’s perfect story showed, she could be counted on to roll up her sleeves and pitch in as a waitress to help raise funds for the local theatre, where, amazingly, she once played a small part onstage; or the lakeside town of Bayfield, where she enjoys the little bookstore, where she once staged a “Long Pen” event to help her friend Margaret Atwood; or, above all, Wingham, her birthplace, where the main street is graced by the Alice Munro Literary Garden. In Wingham you will also find a leaflet that will help visitors to follow an Alice Munro walking tour that begins at the house where she grew up. In an ideal world that house will soon be bought by sensible authorities aware that for the next century it can be a well used tourist centre for the many people from around the world who will wish to see “Alice Munro Country” for themselves.
The day in 2002 that the attractive little literary garden was opened in Wingham, Jane and I cut short our honeymoon (are you feeling sorry for her yet?) in order to attend the happy festivities. Speeches were given by old friends like David Staines and Alice’s effervescent agent,
Ginger Barber, in the grand old Victorian Opera House across Josephine Street from the garden, while Alice, who knew her expected role, smiled serenely beneath a large, flowered hat. It was the only time in my life when I earned a warm round of applause simply by revealing that my middle name is — Maitland! The audience knew that the Maitland River, and its many branches, dominates the Huron County landscape. I knew that not every publisher is lucky enough to have a mother whose uncommon surname was sure to strike Alice as a link with home.
The fine Canadian literary critic Philip Marchand concisely explained the importance of these settings to Alice and her work — and vice versa — in a 2009 review of Too Much Happiness:
If Alice Munro had never existed, part of the soul of Canada would have remained inarticulate, forgotten, submerged. The locus of this Canadian scene rendered so powerfully in her fiction is rural Southwestern Ontario, settled by Scotch Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Methodists from the north of England . . . Everything in her world comes back to that small-town milieu of pokey little stores, dull Sunday-afternoon dinners with aunts and uncles, a mentality made up of respect for hard work, resentment of show-offs and dim memories of Calvinist terrors.
Hmm — resentment of show-offs.
The point of a stroll through these little towns, or a drive along the placid roads dotted with mixed farms (with patches of bush still preserved in the background as a source of firewood or maple syrup) is that what you see around you is so ordinary. It’s a dull, everyday landscape. And Alice Munro the magician has waved her wand over this undramatic scene, and made it the setting for some of the most astonishing and thrilling short stories ever seen. She has made the lives of people like a chambermaid at the Blue Spruce Inn in Huron County the stuff of world literature. For Alice Munro knows Huron County in her bones. She has been determined to catch it on paper, just as her character Del in Lives of Girls and Women hoped: “What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together — radiant, everlasting.”
Robert Thacker’s splendid biography makes it unnecessary for me to run through Alice’s life story in any detail, beyond the main points. She was born in the summer of 1931, in Wingham, which was then a town of about 3,000 people. Her father had a failing fox farm on the wrong side of town, and her mother, a former teacher, fell ill early with Parkinson’s Disease and died young. Alice was a bright girl who did well in school and went on to the University of Western Ontario, in the conservative, yellow-brick city of London, the regional centre. After two penny-pinching years that saw Alice selling her blood for cash, lack of funds forced her to drop out. But she had met James Armstrong Munro, a fellow student, and soon moved to Vancouver with him as his wife. Jim and she raised three daughters (Sheila, Jenny, and Andrea) there and in Victoria, where the two established a fine bookstore, still going strong.
Sheila Munro’s memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters, tells us a lot about Alice the mother. We know from Robert Thacker’s careful account that she started trying her hand as a short story writer in 1953, and after years of contributing stories to little magazines and to the CBC (where a producer named Bob Weaver was her mentor, and her first link with the writing world) she became “an overnight sensation” when her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, came out in 1968 and won the Governor General’s Award. The local paper, the Victoria Times Colonist (where I once was charmed to see an editor distribute home-laid eggs to colleagues/customers) greeted that book with a headline “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories.”
When her marriage broke down, Alice returned home to Southwestern Ontario, where she soon met a contemporary, Gerry Fremlin, who remembered her fondly. They still live together, thirty-five years later, in Clinton, only thirty kilometres away from Wingham. Robert Thacker sees huge significance in the fact that after brief spells in London and Toronto (where at York University she tried her hand at teaching writing, and had the courage to quit when she realized that she was not a good teacher) Alice moved all the way home, to Huron County. Certainly, although she has written a number of fine stories set on the West Coast (or in Miles City, Montana, come to think of it), it is Southwestern Ontario that has most reliably inspired her writing.
My own contact with Alice — so generously described by her in the letter I have quoted early in the chapter, a letter I only got to see when I published Robert Thacker’s brilliantly researched biography — began with a fan letter from me, followed by a meeting for lunch at the London downtown Holiday Inn. (I recently revisited it on a research trip, and must report that no plaque records our meeting, and even the name of the hotel has changed.) Alice has always been such a beautiful woman that I use the word “courtship” cautiously, but I was certainly courting her professionally, to assure her that she would be comfortable working with me (which took a few meetings), and to promise explicitly that I would never, ever, ask her for a novel.
You know the rest.
Before I came on the scene Alice had brought out Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which was unwisely published as a novel. (It’s always better to under-claim and try for a Yes-And response, rather than the Yes-But response that the book received from people who liked it, yes, but felt that it wasn’t really a novel.) Then came a fine short story collection called — in a typical Munro phrase that foretells trouble — Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974). I recall an academic conference on Alice’s work where I was used by Alice as an observer who could report to her what was being said about her work. I remember her genuine shock and outrage at the waste of an intelligent teacher’s time when I reported that one speaker, a well-paid professor, had spent much ingenuity and effort proving that Something . . . was really, secretly, a novel!
The very first book we worked on together was Who Do You Think You Are? (1978). Usually in those days all Canadian fiction titles had a cover produced by a commercial artist who was instructed to break out a new set of crayons and do a nice picture of the book’s most exciting scene. I exaggerate, slightly. It was time, I thought, to change all that for Alice, by seeking out, and paying for, a fine, existing work by a recognized Canadian artist. Our cover, graced by the art of the magic realist Ken Danby, showed a reflective young woman, sitting on a patch of grass, hugging her knees. It went wonderfully well with Alice’s stories about a girl growing up, and the double-edged title, Who Do You Think You Are?
A note about that title. As I’ve mentioned, the book’s later publishers in the U.S. and the U.K. were alarmed that Malcolm Bradbury had recently used the same title (although book titles are not protected by copyright). So despite the perfect double meaning of the Canadian title, in the other editions the book came out under the feeble name The Beggar Maid. Under its proper title it won the Governor General’s Award and smashed all existing sales records for a Canadian short story collection. And we never looked back.
The proud roll call of titles continues through the eighties and nineties. The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love (the ransomed story collection), Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, The Love of a Good Woman. In the new century the nine- or ten-story collections continued with Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, then Runaway, then The View from Castle Rock, followed by her 2009 collection, Too Much Happiness. My own role in all this was very easy. Basically I was hanging on for the ride, whooping.
I did the odd useful thing, like finding wonderful paintings by people like Alex Colville, Christopher and Mary Pratt, and Paul Peel, to give the books the right, elegant look. I knew that we had succeeded when other Canadian publishers started using Canadian magic realist paintings on their covers, as if waving and shouting, “Hey, this author’s kind of like Alice Munro!” without the embarrassing business of having to state the claim openly, in words.
On occasion, I found a good title lurking inside a story. The final story in her most
recent book was originally entitled “To the Danish Islands.” I suggested to Alice that the main character’s dying words, “Too much happiness,” would make a fine title. Then with that installed as the title of the longest story, I suggested that it made an ideal title for the whole book. And so it proved.
And I did try to keep track of all the prizes Alice was winning, all over the world, and the acres of ecstatic reviews that she was receiving. Soon my hardest editorial task was choosing which prizes and which review quotes I should use in my flap copy describing the book. As for my editing, actually working on the stories, that role shrank over the years (from the days, when, as Bob Thacker reminds me, I helpfully cut a long story into two) as Alice became such a popular writer in the New Yorker that all of the stories reached me carefully pre-edited. They also were benefitting from the wise editorial attention given by Anne Close, Alice’s editor at Knopf in New York.
In fact, often my most useful role was twisting Alice’s arm at two stages. First, to get her to agree that, oh all right, we really do have enough stories now to bring out a new collection. (This is a great joke between us, since Alice is famously reluctant to start the publicity windmill yet again. This means that when the issue is whether we should plan to publish a new collection, she has been known to say, “Oh, I guess there’s no getting out of it,” knowing that the arrival of another new book will complicate her life, even if she does no publicity.)
Then, once we’ve got the manuscript going through the publishing process, my main arm-twisting role is to stop Alice from trying to rewrite the book, compulsively polishing the proofs as they go to her for what we hope will be purely formal approval. There is a history here, of course. When our first book together, Who Do You Think You Are?, was at the printers (carrying along with it our hopes for a successful fall season) I returned home from Saturday shopping to find the phone ringing in the kitchen. It was Alice. Following what she once described as “country manners,” she asked how I was, and the family. Then she asked how far advanced her new book was.
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