Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  In the two-part “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” Munro takes up family material from each side of her family – in “Connection,” three of the narrator’s mother’s cousins visit one summer; in “The Stone in the Field,” the narrator wonders over the lives of her six shy and reclusive spinster aunts, who still live together on the family farm. The visiting cousins are based partially on cousins of Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw, some of whom were also teachers; the spinster Fleming sisters on the farm replicate William Cole Laidlaw’s four sisters, two of whom married and one of whom died in infancy. Underneath “The Stone in the Field” of that story’s title lies the body of a hermit, a Mr. Black, “a one-legged fellow that built a shack down in a corner of the field across the road [from the family farm], and he died there.” The lot across the road from Thomas Laidlaw’s farm was owned by a William Black.

  In “The Stone in the Field,” Munro offers the following account, in the voice of the narrator’s father, of their family’s emigration to Canada:

  But it’s a wonder how those people had the courage once, to get them over here. They left everything. Turned their backs on everything they knew and came out here. Bad enough to face the North Atlantic, then this country that was all wilderness. The work they did, the things they went through. When your great-grandfather came to the Huron Tract he had his brother with him, and his wife and her mother, and his two little kids. Straightaway his brother was killed by a falling tree. Then the second summer his wife and her mother and the two little boys got the cholera, and the grandmother and both the children died. So he and his wife were left alone, and they went on clearing their farm and started up another family. I think the courage got burnt out of them. Their religion did them in, and their upbringing. How they had to toe the line. Also their pride. Pride was what they had when they had no more gumption.

  While Munro changes the actual relations and some of the chronology here, the details are accurate – brother killed by falling tree, both children dying of illness, the parents starting over. That is what Thomas’s brother, Robert Laidlaw, and his wife, Euphemia, had to do when their children died in the summer of 1868, as Munro details in “Changing Places.”20 Thomas’s brother Robert was always referred to as “Little Rob” to differentiate him from their larger cousin, Robert B. And Euphemia, Little Rob’s wife, had a name that might be shortened to “Fame” – the name of the narrator in “The Progress of Love.”

  Munro’s fictions will be taken up in the pages to come as she had occasion to publish them, yet the presence of her ancestors in the writing that has made her reputation needs to be both acknowledged and specified. What Munro offers by her namings – by using the facts of her families’ histories to pose the human mysteries she probes in her fiction – is persistent tribute to what her ancestors were, what they believed, what they did. For Munro, the facts of her families’ interconnected lives pose fundamental mysteries that she needed to confront, and then probe. In her hands – as in “Changing Places,” “The Stone in the Field,” or more recently, “Working for a Living” – those facts glisten, glow, and become articulate. In a more detailed and articulate way, they are equivalent to this passage from an obituary of her great-grandfather Thomas Laidlaw, published when he died in September 1915:

  The late Mr. Laidlaw was born in Scotland in the year 1836 and came with his parents in the same year to America where they settled in the state of Illinois. His father died three years later and the widow and children moved to Halton County, Ont. In the year 1851 he with his mother and elder brothers (all deceased) came to Morris and settled on lots 7 and 8, Concession 9. They were the seventh family to settle in the township. Here he endured all the privations and trials of the early settler, but through energy and with that indomitable spirit that ensures success, managed to hew out a home for himself on lot north half 8 Concession 9 where he lived until 15 years ago when he retired and has lived since in Blyth. In religion the late Mr. Laidlaw was a staunch Presbyterian and in politics Liberal.21

  After both children of Robert and Euphemia Laidlaw died during the summer of 1868, they began their family again: they had a son, James, born in 1869, who grew up and eventually became engaged to Sadie Code, Thomas and Ann Code’s eldest daughter. That family moved to Morris Township in 1885, buying the farm next to Thomas Laidlaw’s on the Ninth Concession. They came, according to Munro, because Thomas Code “was a notable alcoholic,” and he “needed to get away from his cronies” in Scotch Corners. “He’d taken the pledge; it did seem to work except once in a while as an old man he’d get hold of a bottle.… The Codes,” she continued, “were Irish Protestants, Anglicans from a different, livelier tradition” than the Laidlaws. Sadie Code, the oldest of the four daughters who were reputed to be the best-looking women in Morris Township, once had a horse named after her – because she was such a high-stepper at a dance. James and Sadie never married – they had what Munro called a “disastrous engagement”; she remembers James as “a fantastically handsome old man.” James and Sadie “had been in love and engaged and they had a fight and very shortly after that” Sadie married William Cole Laidlaw (1864–1938), Munro’s grandfather, in January 1901. In November of that year their only child, Robert Eric “Bob” Laidlaw (1901–76), was born. Munro surmises that her grandparents “probably had nothing to do with one another after that. There was a great tension in that family.”22

  Writing about her grandmother in “Working for a Living,” Munro describes the Anglicanism in which Sadie Code was raised, and continues: “Her father had been a drinker, a storyteller, a convivial Irishman. When she married she wrapped herself up in her husband’s Presbyterianism, getting fiercer in it than most; she took on the propriety competition like the housework competition, with her whole heart. But not for love; not for love. For pride’s sake she did it, so that nobody could say that she regretted anything, or wanted what she couldn’t have.” Comparing these people, Munro turns to William Cole Laidlaw and continues: “As for the father he passed no opinions, did not say whether he approved or disapproved [of what his son Robert Eric Laidlaw decided to do with his life]. He lived a life of discipline, silence, privacy.” Compared to others in the Laidlaw family, his own ancestors and cousins, William “diverged a little, learned to play the violin, married the tall, temperamental Irish girl with eyes of two colors. That done, he reverted; for the rest of his life he was diligent, orderly, silent. They prospered.”

  More than any other relative from outside her immediate family, Sadie Code was a presence in Alice Ann Laidlaw’s childhood. When she was young, when her grandparents had retired from the farm and were living on Drummond Street in Blyth, Munro would visit them, sometimes for extended periods owing to illnesses or other circumstances at home. After her grandfather died in 1938, these visitings back and forth continued regularly; they were even sometimes noted in the weekly Wingham Advance-Times. After her sister Maud Code Porterfield’s husband, Alex, died in 1944 – when Alice was twelve – Sadie and her sister moved into a house on Leopold Street in Wingham where they lived until Sadie died in 1966, when she was almost ninety, and Maud went into the Huron View nursing home. She died there in 1976 when she was in her late nineties, after Munro had come back to Huron and had been one of her regular visitors.

  These two women appear as the keepers of family secrets in “The Peace of Utrecht,” Munro’s first painfully autobiographical story, one she did not even want to write. There, one of the women tells the narrator that before her death her mother escaped from the hospital into the January snow (“The flight that concerns everybody”). In “Winter Wind,” these women loom large to the teenaged narrator, reminding her of ancestral inheritances and connection, drawing her back from the future she imagines away from them, reminding her that “the haunts we have contracted for are not gone without,” as Munro writes in “Utrecht.”23

  Anne Clarke Chamney, Robert Eric Laidlaw: “Working for a Living”

  “Working for a Living,” Munro’s 1981 memoir,
began as a short story but became a memoir. It is a touchstone text in her biography. To write about Alice Ann Laidlaw’s parents, Anne Chamney and Robert Laidlaw, before they became her parents (and William George Laidlaw’s and Sheila Jane Laidlaw’s, too) seems to demand Munro’s own words as beginning:

  When I think of my parents in the time before they became my parents, after they had made their decision but before their marriage had made it (in those days) irrevocable, they seem not only touching and helpless, marvelously deceived, but more attractive than at any later time, as if nothing was nipped or thwarted then, and life still bloomed with possibilities, as if they enjoyed all sorts of power until they bent themselves to each other.

  The mystery Munro seeks to understand is brought to a particular moment: when Annie Clarke Chamney visited her cousins the Laidlaws, cousins because of the Code connection in Morris Township, her grandmother sister to Mrs. Sadie Laidlaw’s father, Thomas Code, who lived on the next farm. There she met Sadie and William’s son Bob, and also saw the foxes he had begun to raise for their pelts. Munro continues:

  A young woman came to visit them, a cousin on the Irish side, from Eastern Ontario. She was a school-teacher, lively, importunate, good-looking, and a couple of years older than he. She was interested in the foxes and not, as his mother thought, pretending to be interested in order to entice him. (Between his mother and the visitor there was an almost instant antipathy, though they were cousins.) The visitor came from a much poorer home, a poorer farm, than this. She had become a school-teacher by her own desperate efforts, and the only reason she had stopped there was that school-teaching was the best thing for women that she had run across so far. She was a popular hard-working teacher, but some gifts she knew she had were not being used. These gifts had something to do with taking chances, making money. They were as out-of-place in my father’s house as they had been in her own though they were the very gifts (less often mentioned than the hard work, the perseverance) that had built the country. She looked at the foxes and did not see their connection with the wilderness; she saw a new industry, the possibility of riches. She had a little money saved, to help buy a place where all this could get started. She became my mother.24

  Annie Clarke Chamney – she became “Anne” in 1927 when she married and moved to Wingham – had been born on September 12, 1898, on George and Bertha Chamney’s farm in Scotch Corners. She was the third child of four, the only daughter. She first went to school across the road from her home, in the same one-room school where her mother had taught and then, on her own initiative, she completed high school in Carleton Place. In 1916, through what Munro calls “her own desperate efforts,” she borrowed the necessary money from a cousin and entered the Ottawa Normal School to train as a teacher. Even though her mother, Bertha Stanley, had also been a teacher, Annie’s parents were not willing to support these studies, preferring that she remain at home rather than work away from the farm. Such attitudes were, Munro says, a combination of pride, Bertha’s religiosity, and her grandmother’s deference to her husband. Annie, however, had cousins who trained as teachers – Anna Myrtle, Sarah Margaret, and Rebecca Pearl, three of her uncle Edward and aunt Mary James Chamney’s five daughters. Myrtle was six years older than Annie; Sarah “Sadie,” four; and Pearl just a month younger. Myrtle lent Annie the money so that she and Pearl could attend the Ottawa Normal School together. They began their studies in the fall of 1916.

  Established in 1875, the Ottawa Normal School had just celebrated its fortieth anniversary, and in the fall of 1916, in the middle of World War 1, it enrolled 239 students, its largest class. Like most students, Annie and Pearl Chamney studied toward their provisional certification, a year-long course that ran from mid-August to late December and from early January to late June. On graduation, they were allowed to teach for four years before returning to obtain permanent certification. The Chamneys typified their times, since during the next decade almost half of the normal-school students in Ontario were “farmers’ daughters, products of country elementary and high schools. No fees were charged, and the $250 to $300 expense for room and board was within reach of most farm families with ambitions for their daughters.”25 Most female students did not return for their permanent certificate, though, since they married before that had to be done. Women predominated in the teaching ranks and held special sway in rural schools; in 1918–19 – the first year Annie Chamney taught full-time – of 111 teachers in the Carleton West-Lanark East district, only three were men who, given the war, were in short supply. Just one person, a woman, had a permanent teaching certificate, which required at least two years spent teaching and another year at normal school. The year-long provisional course required coursework on the science and history of education, and school management and organization, while students took classes in literature, grammar, composition, arithmetic, science, geography, and history. They also had instruction in reading, spelling, art, singing, hygiene, “physical culture,” “nature study,” agriculture, “manual training,” “household science,” and “manners.” Students were also evaluated on their practice teaching.

  Annie Clark Chamney – so her name reads on her records – was a solid student at normal school. History was her best subject, but her performance was sound throughout. In January 1917, her regular evaluations ended when she fell seriously ill and had to be hospitalized, so she was forced to break off her year in order to recuperate. Once she had recovered, Chamney obtained a teaching position at the Goulburn school number eight in Ashton, Ontario, in Beckwith Township during fall 1917 at a salary of $480 a year. According to Munro, the students here “were all religious fundamentalists and quite mad at her because she wouldn’t get saved.” After the new year, she returned to normal school where she completed her course and was granted an Interim Second Class certificate “valid for two years.” The next year, 1918–19, Annie Chamney taught at the Beckwith school number four and lived at Prospect; her salary was $600.26

  From 1919 to 1921, Chamney taught at school number twelve on the Twelfth Concession of Lanark Township, referred to locally as James school. During that time she became engaged to Edward James but they later broke up. In the fall of 1921, she moved to Alberta to teach and was succeeded at the James school by her cousin Sadie. That fall she taught in Woodham, Alberta, and the next year in nearby Killam. There is no record of where Chamney was during 1923–24 but the next year, 1924–25, she appears to have split the year between Park Grove and Glenora, Alberta, the first a small community east of Edmonton, the second closer to the city. Of these Alberta schools, only Killam maintained a presence in the family’s history since Munro wrote a cousin that Annie “taught at Killam and one other place (rode a horse to school in one of these places, got engaged and disengaged in another).” Munro also thinks that Killam may have been the only place her mother taught in a school with more than one room – the Killam school was made of stone, with four classrooms. When Munro saw her mother’s picture in a local history, she recognized the last name of one of the other teachers, knowing her to be one of her mother’s friends – “they called each other by their last names, a kind of independent nickname sort of thing.”27

  Annie Clarke Chamney came back east to Lanark County in the fall of 1925 to teach at Bathurst school number nine on the Sixth Concession of that township at a salary of $1,000. She boarded with a relative, William Stanley, and his family. One of Annie’s students, W. Clyde Bell, as a ten- and eleven-year-old had her as his teacher during the next two years, and remembers her as “a good teacher and a pleasant person.” Additionally, she had a sense of humour. Bell recalls her telling them stories from her time in Alberta and he also remembers that she had William Stanley drive her to see a picture of the men who had made the mammoth cheese that eastern Ontario cheese makers sent to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.28

  At some point during her time at the Bathurst school, Annie Clarke Chamney made the trip with her father to Huron County to visit her Code relatives and, near
Blyth, met Robert Eric “Bob” Laidlaw. She saw the fox farm he was starting at his parents’ place and, more than its very real possibilities, she saw in Bob Laidlaw the possibility of a life different from that of a farmer’s wife – the life she had been born into and hoped to avoid. In Alberta Chamney had been engaged but had broken it off, and when she taught at the James school she was also engaged and also broke that engagement. Wondering over these facts, Munro thinks her mother was “unwilling perhaps to commit herself to a life she’d known women to have,” the life her own mother had had as a farmer’s wife. She did not commit herself until she met Bob Laidlaw.29

  Bob Laidlaw was the only child of Sadie Code and William Cole Laidlaw, born on November 2, 1901, on the farm on the Ninth Concession near Blyth that Thomas Laidlaw had cleared during the 1850s. He was born eleven months to the day after his parents’ marriage and more than three years after his future wife, Annie Clarke Chamney, was born. In “Working for a Living” Munro treats each of her parents as individuals, but she has more to say there about her father. A visit to him while he was working at the Wingham foundry is key to the fictional version. She begins with an observation about the “notable” cultural “difference between people who lived on farms and people who lived in country towns and villages,” so that “farmers maintained a certain proud and wary reserve that might be seen as diffidence.” She makes clear that Bob Laidlaw, as a person rather than her father, best exemplifies just what she is writing about. When he was a child, Bob Laidlaw attended the country school just down the road from his family’s farm and, Munro writes, when “he had gone as far as he could go” there “he wrote a set of exams called collectively, the Entrance. He was only twelve years old. The Entrance meant, literally, the Entrance to High School, and it also meant the Entrance to the world, if professions such as medicine or law or engineering, which country boys passed into at that time more easily than later.… He passed the Entrance and went to the Continuation School in Blyth. Continuation Schools were small high schools, without the final fifth Form, now Grade Thirteen; you would have to go to a larger town for that.”