Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  About 1820 John Chamney, following a daughter and son-in-law out from Ireland, took up land on the Twelfth Concession road of Lanark Township just north of what became Scotch Corners. Chamney – or “Chaddeley,” as Munro renders the name in her dual ancestral story, “Chaddeleys and Flemings” – derives from Cholmondeley and dates back to thirteenth-century Britain. There, and throughout references to Munro’s own immediate ancestors, the name is frequently rendered Chambly, as it is in her grandparents’ published wedding announcement and in her mother’s birth announcement. Like many of the Irish who came to Upper Canada, the Chamneys were Protestants and farmers.9

  George Code, Munro’s dual great-great-grandfather, was born in County Wicklow, Ireland, and, after emigrating, he farmed initially in Ramsay Township before moving south into Scotch Corners. In October 1826 he married Jane Morris in Perth and they went on to raise a family of twelve children, among them Ann Code (1828–1911), their second, and Thomas Code (1844–1927), their tenth. Ann Code was one of Munro’s maternal great-grandmothers, Thomas one of her paternal great-grandfathers. Born in Scotch Corners, Thomas Code as a young man went off to Huron County to farm with his oldest brother, Joseph, who ultimately settled in Wingham. Thomas returned to Scotch Corners to marry and farmed there for a time but in 1885 took his family of four daughters – among them his eldest, Sarah Jane “Sadie” Code, Munro’s paternal grandmother – back to Huron to settle on a farm near Blyth in Morris Township. His sister Ann had married Edward Chamney in 1847 and, after a time in Renfrew County at a place called the Scotch Bush, they farmed on the Second Concession of Ramsay just north of Scotch Corners, raising a family of four children – three sons and a daughter. George Chamney (1853–1934), the second son, was Munro’s maternal grandfather.

  Edward Chamney died in April 1869 and in August of 1870 his widow Ann bought the first lot on the Tenth Concession in Beckwith Township, the farm just across the road from the site of the Scotch Corners school, which was constructed there in 1871. During 1871 a national census was taken, showing the Chamneys – the forty-year-old widow Ann and her four children, Edward (21), George (17), John (15), and Rebecca (12) – on that farm. The eldest son, Edward, did not marry until his late thirties, in 1888, and his brother George followed the same pattern, marrying Bertha Ann Stanley on New Year’s Day, 1891, when he was thirty-seven. Once married, both sons brought their wives to live on the farm at Scotch Corners; Edward and family eventually moved to the next farm, leaving Ann Code Chamney (who lived on as a widow, a “relic,” as she’s called in one of her obituaries in 1911) and George and his family on the farm on the Tenth Concession. This farm is where Annie Clarke Chamney, Munro’s mother, was born in 1898, and where she grew up.

  Her mother, Bertha Ann Stanley, was born in 1867 and was the eldest daughter of John McLenaghan Stanley (1841–91) and Catherine Clarke (1838–83). Of English extraction, the Stanley family was well known in the Perth area – there is a prominent landform there still referred to Stanley’s Hill. Matthew Stanley (1845–1922), John’s cousin and probably his business associate for a time, ran a carriage and wagon business in Perth, establishing his business in 1866 and running it for over thirty years. Although family lore credits John Stanley, Matthew constructed a special wagon to transport “The Mammoth Cheese” that eastern Ontario cheese makers sent for display to the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. (Through the Stanleys, too, Munro is related to George F.G. Stanley, who was a noted historian of western Canada and former Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick.)

  Some of the circumstances of John and Catherine Stanley’s marriage, and of Munro’s grandmother Bertha Stanley’s religiosity, are the basis of “The Progress of Love” – a story in which a wife threatens to hang herself in response to her husband’s wanton behaviour. Certainly some detail regarding them, and Catherine’s circumstances in particular, is apt. Catherine Clarke was the daughter of James Clarke and Ann Dougherty, who moved to Wisconsin when she was a teenager, leaving her to live with her maternal grandparents, Thomas and Mary Dougherty. Her father and a brother, Thomas, subsequently drowned in Lake Michigan while fishing.

  Munro has often said that a basic cultural norm in her childhood was the enmity between Protestant and Catholic inherited from Ireland – the Orange and the Green. The Orange Lodge was a presence and she refers to “King Billy’s parade” in her fiction. An illustration of this legacy in her own family is found when Catherine’s grandfather, Thomas Dougherty, executed a will in 1853. He left Catherine a cow. But Dougherty also left his property to his daughter Ellen “provided she shall not at any time intermarry with any person who shall be a member or adherant or any way of or to the Roman Catholic church or persuasion.”10

  Alice Munro has been wearing Catherine Clarke’s wedding ring, one that her mother inherited, since she was fifteen; she also has a sampler her great-grandmother made on her wall at home in Clinton and, in her travels, has located Clarke’s grave in the Anglican cemetery in Pembroke. John and Catherine married in Lanark village in 1866; Bertha Ann was born the next year and, the year after that, a second daughter, Blanche, arrived. About 1870, Stanley and his family moved to Pembroke; the 1871 census has them living in East Pembroke village.11 While it is not clear just what Stanley initially did there, in early 1875 the local paper announces a “New carriage shop in Pembroke, Next Door to Mill’s Axe Shop.” The first ad is signed “M. Stanly & Co.,” so it is a reasonable surmise that Matthew Stanley, who had been in this business in Perth for almost a decade, was expanding with his cousin John involved, and throughout the summer of 1875 and into the fall the Pembroke Observer and Upper Canada Advertiser carries an ad reading “Stanley & Co’s Carriage Factory is Again in Full Blast.” Weekly from the tenth to the thirty-first of December 1875, there is an ad for “J.M. Stanley & Co Carriage Manufacturers” announcing that the company has moved “to one of the largest Factories in Central Canada,” where “they are now in a position to turn out work second to none in Canada, and at rates cheaper than heretofore.” In her own researches, Munro has read these ads (or others like them) and commented that the copy-writing showed imagination and creativity, “a lively sort of ad written with style.”12 John M. Stanley, who had apparently taken over the company from his cousin, most certainly had these qualities; Munro thinks he passed them on to his granddaughter, Annie Clarke Chamney, her mother.

  But he had other qualities, too. Just as Munro characterizes the grandfather in “The Progress of Love,” John Stanley drank and was a womanizer. Within the Chamney family, Catherine was reputed to have died of a broken heart. In any case, Catherine Clarke died in Pembroke on October 12, 1883 – on her forty-fifth birthday.13 Her daughters – Bertha, sixteen, and Blanche, fourteen – each went to live with a married aunt, each one a sister to John Stanley. Bertha went to her aunt Nancy, who was married to John Code; Blanche to her aunt Mary, who was married to George Legerwood. For his part, John Stanley left the area and remarried; he subsequently fathered two sons, the first born less than two years after Catherine Clarke’s death, by his second wife, Catherine Kennedy. By July 1888 he was apparently on his own in Seattle. In a letter dated July of that year Stanley tells his sister things are not going well for him, and in response to Blanche’s query that he might visit them, Stanley writes that “it is impossible under existing circumstances, there is not the least probability of my returning [or] of my ever going back.” He says that his life out west “is a little rough and at many times very lonely.” By May of 1891 Stanley writes to his brother-in-law, George Legerwood, of his “sickness. I did not get better [and] have been under the doctors care for very near five months – scarcely able to walk out. I am not able to attend any business.” Though the doctors say he will get better, it will take a long time. He does add that he “is so used to trouble for the last Eight years, that I do not mind it so much after all.” Even so, Stanley ends, “It would have been better for me if I had died when my wife died. I have had nothing but trouble from t
hat day to this – now I do not expect anything else but trouble – circumstances often force trouble – and they have been heaped on me.” Despite his hope for a recovery, none came. John Stanley died on July 2, 1891, in Providence Hospital, Seattle, and, in August, his daughter Blanche received a letter from a Seattle lawyer charged with administering his estate. At the time of his death, Stanley had a chest of tools, some clothing, a watch, and eight dollars. Additionally, he was part owner of some real estate in Jefferson County, Washington, where he had a homestead claim on which the improvements needed for clear title had not been made, and there may have been land in Oregon too.14

  This information, based on documents previously unknown to Munro, offers specifics on her great-grandfather’s history and circumstance that, had she known it, may have caused her to change the character based on him in “The Progress of Love.” There, his wife dies and he remarries, goes to the States – and eventually to Seattle – but takes the younger daughter, Beryl, with him. He prospers well enough to leave each of his daughters three thousand dollars when he dies. And that money, and what it implies, is at the heart of the story, since the narrator’s mother so hated her father that upon receiving the money from her inheritance in cash she burned it in the stove. In everything but this central detail “The Progress of Love,” then, is derived directly from the materials of Munro’s Chamney family lore and history. Fame, its narrator, is an imagined character (Munro had a great-aunt named Euphemia, this character’s given name). She is a person more like Munro herself than her mother, who was in fact daughter to Bertha Ann Stanley, the person who trained as a teacher, taught, married a farmer, and was religious. Since her father, John M. Stanley, died near destitute, she had no inherited money to burn, but Bertha must have had feelings toward her father similar to those Munro creates in “The Progress of Love.”

  On the first day of 1891, Bertha Ann Stanley married George Chamney, a young man described in the wedding announcement as “a rising young farmer,” at her uncle John Code’s home in Ramsay, where she had lived after her mother’s death in 1883. After completing high school, Bertha had trained as a teacher at the Renfrew model school and then, also according to the announcement, “achieved a wide and permanent reputation as a teacher in various parts of Lanark and Renfrew Counties.” During 1890 Bertha taught at Davis Mills in Alice Township near Pembroke and, the year prior, had taught at the Scotch Corners school on the Ninth Concession – the school across the road from the Chamney farm. There, according to Munro, she met George Chamney. On the day of her marriage, Bertha reinscribed a scrapbook that had belonged to her mother – it read “Mrs. John M. Stanley, Pembroke, Ont 1878.” Beneath her mother’s inscription is written, “Mrs. George Chamney, Scotch Corners Ont Jan 1st 1891.” This book is filled with clippings from newspapers and other publications of a religious nature and other clippings giving instructions on how to be a better wife and mother. Beyond the shared inscriptions it cannot be said which woman accounted for the contents, but there is no doubt as to the continuity between them. Bertha’s religiosity was not extreme; “she was a woman,” Munro described her, “who had kind of taken hold of religion, of an Anglican religion, but very devout. Not fundamentalist, I think more devout in an Anglican way.”15

  Bertha and George Chamney raised a family of four children on their farm in Scotch Corners, Beckwith Township, three sons – Edward (1892–1951), John (1894–1972), and Joseph (1900–70) – and a daughter, Annie Clarke (1898–1959), Munro’s mother. On the edge of the Canadian Shield, the farms of Lanark were marginal operations – an Ontario agricultural assessment in 1881 reported that those in Beckwith Township “had heavy clay, sand, and gravel with some flat, rocky soil.” Describing the Chamneys’ situation, Munro commented that they lived on this “hardscrabble land for a long time, but they had not much to show for it. And that was fine, they respected themselves.” Though Bertha trained and went out and “achieved a wide and permanent reputation as a teacher,” she did not encourage her daughter on the same path. Her religiosity was in part about submission to her husband and, in turn, their daughter, Annie, was expected to submit in the same fashion as a point of pride: she was the only daughter of the family, and the only daughter lives at home until she is married. “My daughter does not have to go out and earn her living” was what was thought and sometimes said; but what this really meant, Munro has observed, is that “my daughter has to slave at unpaid labor at home.”16

  This was the situation Annie Clarke Chamney confronted as she grew up in Scotch Corners, but she had other ideas of her own. She trained as a teacher at the Ottawa Normal School on money borrowed from one of her cousins, Myrtle Chamney, also a teacher. Then she taught in Lanark before moving to Alberta to teach for several years. Returning to Ontario for two more years of teaching in Bathurst, near her home, Annie Chamney married a cousin from Morris Township, Huron County, and had children of her own. Once she had done all this, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw brought her own daughters home during the war to “The Ottawa Valley.” There, in the story of that title, Anne’s eldest daughter, Alice Ann, remembers that visit and recreates her first recollection of the symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that would eventually imprison her mother. More than that, Munro recreates the cultural contexts of the Ottawa Valley, her mother’s people, the Chamneys and the Codes: “Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents’ old camera used to take. In these snapshots [her mother’s cousin, her brother, and his wife], even her children, come out clear enough. (All these people dead now except the children who have turned into decent friendly wage earners, not a criminal or as far as I know even a neurotic among them.) The problem, the only problem, is my mother.”17

  This was the last story Munro wrote, late in 1973, that was included in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. Another late story there is “Winter Wind,” and she had also written “Home” in October 1973 but decided not to include it in the book. In direct and vivid ways, these three stories reveal Alice Munro rediscovering – as a mature woman and writer – the cultural legacies left her by her family in her home place. Munro’s mother’s presence is only the most pressing and urgent one – more distant ancestors, like the cousins in “The Ottawa Valley” or her aunt and grandmother in “Winter Wind,” reveal Munro’s awareness of the web of human interconnection defined by her home place. She began exploring that web in a new way in her stories when she returned and confronted them, still there, in Ontario.

  When William Laidlaw’s sons – living among Andrew and Walter Laidlaw’s families in Halton County – reached their young manhood years during the late 1840s, it was clear that there was no land for them there. To farm, they would need to go to a part of the province that was still opening up, where land to homestead was still available. Since the late 1820s, the Canada Company had been developing the Huron Tract – the lands stretching west from Guelph to Lake Huron at Goderich. During the 1830s, the Huron Road had been cut and made reasonably passable, although by the end of that decade most settlement in the tract was at the western end, in and around Goderich. During the 1840s settlement continued to grow. Land was available – usually in lots of fifty or one hundred acres – for a small down payment and ten years to pay the balance. In November 1851, John and Thomas Laidlaw – William and Mary’s sons, twenty-one and fifteen years old respectively – and their cousin Robert B. Laidlaw, Andrew and Agnes’ youngest son, who was twenty-three, set off to the Huron Tract.

  Recalling this in 1907, Robert B. Laidlaw wrote that the threesome “got a box of bed-clothes and a few cooking utensils into a wagon and started from the County of Halton to try our fortunes in the wilds of Morris Township.” They got as far as Stratford and thought to take the stage to Clinton (where young Thomas Laidlaw’s great-granddaughter Alice Munro now lives, more than 150 years later) but “the stage had quit running, until the road froze up,” so the three young men “got our axes
on our shoulders and walked to Morris.” They found a place to board near their land on the Ninth and Tenth Concessions and the three set about building a “shanty” on John’s property. In February, Andrew brought Mary Laidlaw, John and Thomas’s mother, and their sister Jane, thirteen, to live. That summer Robert went back to Halton, returning in the fall to work on his own place. James Laidlaw, William and Mary’s oldest son, also came to Morris in fall 1852. During the spring of 1853, James, John, and Robert were building a shanty for a neighbour, “and as we were falling a tree, one of its branches was broken in the falling, and thrown backwards,” hitting “James on the head, and killing him instantly. We had to carry his body a mile and a quarter to the nearest house,” Robert B. Laidlaw continues, “and I had to convey the sad news to his wife, mother, brother and sister. It was the saddest errand of my life. I had to get help to carry the body home, as there was only a footpath through the bush, and the snow was very deep and soft. This was on April 5, 1853.” A common sort of accident during the frontier period, and frequent enough in the logging business even today, James Laidlaw’s death became the basis of Munro’s “A Wilderness Station,” itself the basis of the feature film Edge of Madness.18

  As these recollections indicate, Munro is descended from some of the first pioneers of Morris Township. Thomas Laidlaw, who came to Morris as a fifteen-year-old, and initially did most of the cooking for the threesome because he was the best of them at such things, took up a hundred acres of land on the Ninth Concession just to the northeast of the village of Blyth. His land was next to his brother Robert’s, adjacent to their brother John’s and not too far from their cousin Robert B. Laidlaw’s, the farthest east on the Ninth Concession.19 In 1863, at the age of twenty-six, Thomas Laidlaw married Margaret Armour and they raised a family of five children. Their first, William Cole Laidlaw (1864–1938), was Munro’s paternal grandfather; he was followed by four sisters.