Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Copyright © 2005, 2011 by Robert Thacker

  Cloth edition published 2005

  Emblem edition with new chapter published 2011

  Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Thacker, Robert

  Alice Munro : writing her lives : a biography / Robert Thacker.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-8468-3

  1. Munro, Alice, 1931-. 2. Munro, Alice, 1931 – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Authors, Canadian (English) – 20th century – Biography. I. Title.

  PS8576.U57Z885 2011 C813′.54 C2010-907896-9

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

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  v3.1

  For Debbie, Mike, and Sue:

  Friends of a Lifetime

  The walnuts drop, the muskrats swim in the creek.

  – “A Real Life” (1992) Open Secrets

  Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.

  – “Introduction” to The Moons of Jupiter (1986)

  The story must be imagined so deeply and devoutly that everything in it seems to bloom of its own accord and to be connected, then, to our own lives which suddenly, as we read, take on a hard beauty, a familiar strangeness, the importance of a dream that can’t be disputed or explained. Everything is telling you: Stop. Hold on. Here it is. Here too. Remember.

  – “Golden Apples” (1999) The Georgia Review

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE: Alice Munro, August 1974

  PART ONE: Everything Here Is Touchable

  1. Ancestors, Parents, Home

  2. “Particularly Clear and Important to Me”: Lower Town and Wingham, 1931–1949

  Photo Inserts

  PART TWO: Becoming Alice Munro

  3. “My Name Now Is Alice Munro, and I Am Living in Vancouver”: Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage, Family, 1949–1960

  4. “I Was Trying to Find a Meaning”: Victoria, Munro’s Bookstore, Dance of the Happy Shades, and Lives of Girls and Women, 1960–1972

  5. Waiting Her Chance, Going “Home”: Who Do You Think You Are?, 1972–1975

  6. “Other Stories Are Wonderful and Also Read Like the Truth”: Virginia Barber, the New Yorker, Macmillan, and Knopf, 1975–1980

  PART THREE: Being Alice Munro

  7. Feeling Like Rilke’s Editor: Making The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth, 1980–1990

  8. “She’s Our Chekhov”: Open Secrets, Selected Stories, The Love of a Good Woman, 1990–1998

  9. “But She’s Not in a Class with Most Other People”: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, the New Yorker’s Munro Triptych, Runaway

  10. “So This Is How It Should Be Done”: The View from Castle Rock, the Man Booker International Prize, and Too Much Happiness

  EPILOGUE: Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, Writing Home, Writing On …

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Sources

  References

  Archival and Unpublished Sources

  Select Bibliography

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Alice Munro, August 1974

  This ordinary place is sufficient, everything here is touchable and mysterious.

  – “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious” (1974)

  On August 18, 1974, CBC Radio aired a long interview with Alice Munro conducted by Harry J. Boyle on its Sunday Supplement program. Munro’s third book – Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories – had been published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson the previous spring, and she was just about to take up a year’s position as writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario. The year before, Munro had returned to Ontario from British Columbia after making for herself what she later described for one of her characters as “a long necessary voyage from the house of marriage,” leaving James Munro, her husband of twenty-two years, in the Victoria house where he still lives.1 Their daughters, Sheila, twenty, Jenny, seventeen, and Andrea, seven, were at varying stages of independence and dependence. Munro was worried about how the breakup would affect them, especially Andrea, but was pressing ahead. Her new life involved no real plan beyond leaving British Columbia for Ontario. Alice Munro had decided to come home.

  “Home,” despite more than twenty years on the west coast, was still Ontario. Specifically, it was Wingham, Huron County, Ontario – the place Alice Ann Laidlaw had left for marriage to James Armstrong Munro and a shared life in Vancouver at the very end of 1951. She was then twenty years old and had completed two years on scholarships at the University of Western Ontario; he was twenty-two, had a general arts B.A. from Western and a job at Eaton’s department store in Vancouver. Within two years of the marriage, Sheila was born, followed within another two by Catherine, who died the day of her birth; Jenny was born in 1957 and, after a longer interval, Andrea followed in 1966.

  Throughout her domestic life as a young wife and mother, Alice Munro wrote. Before she was married, Munro had published stories in Western’s undergraduate literary magazine, Folio, and she had made contact with Robert Weaver, an arts producer at the CBC, who bought and broadcast Munro’s “The Strangers” in October 1951. This was the first of a succession of stories broadcast there, and throughout the 1950s these were complemented by magazine publication in Mayfair, the Canadian Forum, Queen’s Quarterly, Chatelaine, and the Tamarack Review. The 1960s saw more commercial and little magazine publication, with the Montrealer emerging then as Munro’s most frequent venue, and the possibility of a book gradually became real. Dance of the Happy Shades was published by Ryerson Press in 1968, winning Munro’s first Governor General’s Award and, three years later, in 1971, Lives of Girls and Women appeared from McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

  To this point Munro’s writing was solitary, personal, private, something she did not talk about nor, really, much share with Jim Munro, although throughout their years together he remained supportive of her writing. When stories were finished, they went out to be considered for broadcast or publication. They often came back. Throughout most of Munro’s time living in British Columbia, as she later wrote, Robert Weaver was “almost the only person I knew who had anything to do with the world of writing.” This changed as time passed and Munro’s stories continued to appear, but for a long time Weaver – who besides his work at the CBC also held the leading editorial post at the Tamarack Review – was, she wrote, “one of the two – or possibly three – people who took my writing seriously.” Yet a writer was what she really was, engaged always in a “wooing of distant parts of” herself, as one of her narrators characterizes the process. That wa
s her “real work.” Yet to the world, she was a housewife and a mother. After Jim quit his job at Eaton’s and the family moved to Victoria to open Munro’s Books in 1963, Alice was known there as the wife of the man who ran the bookstore. Only gradually did the people she knew there learn that Munro wrote – for a long time very few people in Victoria were aware that she had published anything.2

  But all this changed in the early 1970s when Munro began her “long voyage from the house of marriage” and headed east to Ontario to stay, going home to the place she started out from. To make it easier on the children, Munro’s leave-taking from Victoria was prolonged. It involved departures and returns – for a time she lived elsewhere in Victoria, going home to prepare meals and be with her daughters. She spent much of the summer of 1972 in Toronto with Andrea, and in 1973, she and her daughters were in Nelson, in the British Columbia interior, while Munro taught a summer-school course in creative writing at Notre Dame University. That fall she was living in London with Jenny, commuting once a week into Toronto to teach at York University. She was also preparing Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You for the press.

  Something would prove to be Munro’s last book with McGraw-Hill Ryerson. She had remained with Ryerson with some misgivings after a large U.S. firm, McGraw-Hill, bought it in 1970; this decision to stay was made largely out of loyalty to Audrey Coffin, her Ryerson editor who had moved to McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Unlike its predecessor, Lives of Girls and Women, Something offers no pretense of a single point of view – it is an eclectic collection of stories, including “The Found Boat,” which dates from Munro’s 1950s attempts to write a conventional novel, along with some of the most singular, striking stories she has ever written, such as “Material” and “The Ottawa Valley.” The former offers a caustic critique of a writer’s pretensions while at the same time celebrating that person’s genuine gift (“an act of magic … an act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love. A fine and lucky benevolence”).3

  “The Ottawa Valley,” the last story written for Something, is the second of a succession of Munro stories confronting the looming fact of her mother, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw, who died in early 1959 after an almost twenty-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease. That affliction had asserted its symptoms by the summer of 1943 (“ ‘Is your arm going to stop shaking?’ ”) when Laidlaw took her two daughters, Alice and Sheila, to visit her relatives near Carleton Place in the Ottawa Valley. As in the story, it was here that Alice, then eleven or twelve, suffered the humiliation of a broken elastic in her underwear just before church at St. John’s Anglican, Innisville. Also as in the story, Mrs. Laidlaw sacrificed her own safety pin, to her daughter’s humiliation, so her own slip showed. Munro focuses on this episode, and as the story ends she steps back to assert that “the problem, the only problem is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken.”4

  During 1973 Munro also worked on “Home,” most often seen as a story but much more a memoir – significantly, its initial title was “Notes for a Work.” Like “The Ottawa Valley,” it also deals with Munro’s family and shows her willing to step outside her narrative guise to comment directly on the realities and truths she had rediscovered and was trying to convey. “Home” was finished in 1973 and published in an anthology of new Canadian stories in 1974 but was excluded from Something. In it, Munro deals directly with her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, and his declining health but she also describes her own feelings on her return home to Wingham – where her father still lived with his second wife, Mary Etta Charters Laidlaw, in the same house where Alice had grown up. Munro comments defensively on the life she was then living in London, “a life of a typewriter and three rooms and odd adventures,” a life “incomprehensible” to her stepsister, who lives nearby on a farm. On the way to the Wingham hospital, to which Robert Laidlaw has to drive himself since Alice does not drive, she writes that “we follow slowly that old usual route. Victoria Street. Minnie Street. John Street. Catherine Street. The town, unlike the house, stays very much the same, nobody is renovating or changing it. Nevertheless it has faded, for me. I have written about it and used it up. The same banks and barber shops and town hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages drained away.”5

  “I have written about it and used it up,” … “their secret, plentiful messages drained away.” Munro decided to leave “Home” out of her third book largely because of her sensitivity over its depiction of her stepmother and father, each still living. But another reason was her own dissatisfaction, she has remarked since, with her intrusions as author into what might be seen as the story’s fictional surfaces. The correct phrase is “might be seen” here because this is a central issue in the art of Alice Munro: her stories mostly begin in “real life,” as she said in her interview with Harry Boyle and has freely admitted throughout: “There is always a starting point in reality.” In “Material,” for instance, Munro wrote, “When I was pregnant with Clea we lived in a house on Argyle Street.” When Alice Munro was pregnant with Sheila, she and Jim lived in a house on Argyle Street in Vancouver; a more recent story, “Cortes Island,” has the young narrator, a new bride, living on Arbutus Street, where they lived before that.6 As Munro also told Boyle, the episode in “The Ottawa Valley” with the safety pin did happen. The details offered in “Home,” from the people and circumstances depicted, to the route taken to the Wingham hospital – the streets named would be either taken or passed when driving from the Laidlaw farm to the Wingham hospital – are factually exact. So too are the circumstances of that story’s narrator: she feels sensitive over the life she was then leading in London – one her stepsister must see as “incomprehensible” with “no work: nothing she could even call work, no animals to look after or vegetables to harrow and dig.”

  More crucially, there is the fact of Wingham itself. The town is the place that Munro, writing in October 1973 about a visit made earlier that month (though during the previous summer she also had visited Wingham regularly), asserts that she “has written about … and used … up,” the “secret, plentiful messages” Wingham’s outward signs had held for her had now “drained away.” In one sense this was true: the Wingham of mind and memory, the place recalled from the west coast since 1952, separated by time and distance, in Munro’s previous work – in stories like “Walker Brothers Cowboy” or “Images” or “Boys and Girls” from Dance of the Happy Shades, in the whole of Lives of Girls and Women, and even in some of the stories in Something, like “Winter Wind” – that remembered Wingham may well have been “used up.” Yet in “Home,” back there in Wingham in October 1973, Munro was looking at the place anew, so it was not at all used up, only different.

  In “Home” the narrator explains her previous relation to Wingham, and to her remembered home there: “Now that I am living a hundred miles away I come home every two months or so. Before that, for a long time, throughout my marriage, I lived thousands of miles away and would go without seeing this house for years at a time. I thought of it then as a place I might never see again. I was greatly moved by the memory of it. I would walk through its rooms in my mind.” Looking at it now, her mother long dead, “reminders of my mother in this house are not easy to find. Though she dominated it for so long, filled it with astonishing, embarrassing hopes, and her dark and helpless, justified complaint.”7

  The presence of “Home” in Munro’s work is crucial as this book begins: it confirms its author’s imaginative grappling with her “home place.” That phrase is Wright Morris’s; he used it as the title for a book Munro very much admires. Returning to Ontario, she found her home place lying before her in 1972–73 as a mature woman in her early forties, having left it a very young woman of twenty. Munro returned home as an author of some accomplishment and renown (especially since Lives of Girls and Women was just then showing every sign of marked success), having left it as a gifted student writer. Most of all, “Home” show
s Alice Munro wondering over, and trying to find new ways into, her home place as material: though worried that she may have “used up” Wingham, that all the town’s “secret, plentiful messages” had been “drained away” by her long-distance rememberings, she rediscovered anew her home place, a place where “everything was touchable and mysterious.”

  This was the Alice Munro who walked into the studio for her interview with Harry Boyle for Sunday Supplement to discuss Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. It is more casual conversation than interview, really. And at over forty minutes in length, Boyle had time to meander. A journalist, broadcaster, columnist, and novelist, Harry Boyle was a wholly appropriate choice for the assignment the CBC gave him – or, more accurately, that he assigned to himself – that day. Like Munro, he was a native of Huron County from St. Augustine, in West Wawanash Township – and like her also he attended high school in Wingham. As he noted at the outset, he saw the young Alice Munro in Wingham during the 1940s where he was working at his first job in radio at CKNX, the local station. Along with other Wingham children, Munro performed recitations and scripted pieces on the radio, so she certainly knew Boyle, whether he specifically knew her then or not.

  While Boyle is at pains to focus on several of the stories in Something – the title story, “Material,” “The Spanish Lady,” and “The Ottawa Valley” come in for the most discussion – the interview speaks eloquently to the culture of the people among whom Boyle and Munro grew up, and still owe allegiance to, more than anything else. Boyle compliments Munro for her ability to retain, and “celebrate,” “the essential mystery of individuals.” Talking about the culture of Huron’s Scots and Irish people, farmers and others who worked on the land, they agree that small towns in Huron “make a drama out of life. You’re a character in the whole drama.” To this, Munro remarks that “even the town loonie” has his role to play. More tellingly, she recalls that people were encouraged “not to aim too high”: “ ‘Who do you think you are?’ they used to ask,” she says. And while they do not quite exactly agree, both feel that there are elements of the macabre, what Munro calls “a Canadian Gothic,” in the life of rural southwestern Ontario. People were always being maimed in horrible accidents, living with untreated disease, singling themselves out by some excessive behaviour. Borne of “dispossessed peoples” fleeing eviction or poverty or famine or religious persecution in Europe during the nineteenth century, the people who live in Huron County evince both “enormous energy” and, Boyle and Munro agree, considerable sexual repression. They are the people Munro knows, they have provided her characters she has created, characters whose culture is rooted, and defined by, Huron County – this place where everything is both “touchable and mysterious.”