Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  In an earlier typescript, Munro includes details later left out of the published memoir, writing that when her father attended the Continuation school, “He always walked into Blyth, to school, with two boys who were his close friends. One was from the Eighth, or Protestant, line of Morris Township; he went on to become a bank clerk and bank manager. The other was from the Seventh, or Catholic, Line; he became a priest. They both found school more difficult than he did but they stuck with it. On Saturdays, before the other two became too preoccupied with school-work, they would all spend whatever time they had left over from chores, in the bush, along Blyth Creek.”30

  As this passage implies, Laidlaw did not keep at his education beyond the Blyth Continuation school: “He did what many boys wanted to do. He began to spend more and more days in the bush.” Munro’s accounting for this focuses on her father’s misunderstanding of a poem he learned at the Blyth school; he heard the teacher say, “Liza Graymen Ollie Minus” instead of “Lives of Great Men all remind us,” a misunderstood phrase he years later repeated to his children as a joke. Munro sees this as characteristic, because her father “had been willing to give the people of the school, and in the little town, the right to have strange language, or logic; he did not ask that they made sense on his terms. He had a streak of pride posing as humility, making him scared and touchy, ready to bow out, never ask questions.… He made a mystery there, a hostile structure of rules and secrets, far beyond anything that really existed. He felt a danger too, of competition, of ridicule. The family wisdom came to him then. Stay out of it.” Munro’s memoir is itself an exercise in biography, a tribute to her parents likely occasioned by Bob Laidlaw’s death in 1976 (it was written sometime during 1979 or early 1980). It traces the trajectory of his life through its various phases, beginning with his parents and ending with his time working in the Wingham foundry. An unpublished fragment, intended as an introduction, takes Laidlaw to the end of his life, when he became a writer. Throughout, Munro describes what she here calls “the family wisdom,” Laidlaw’s tendency to “stay out of it.” Thus she writes, speaking initially of the time the young Bob Laidlaw spent along Blyth Creek:

  My father being a Huron County farm boy with the extra, Fenimore-Cooper perception, a cultivated hunger, did not turn aside from these boyish interests at the age of eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Instead of giving up the bush he took to it more steadily and seriously. He began to be talked about more as a trapper than as a young farmer, and as an odd and lonely character, though not somebody that anyone feared or disliked. He was edging away from the life of a farmer, just as he had edged away earlier from the idea of getting an education and becoming a professional man. He was edging towards a life he probably could not clearly visualize, since he would know what he didn’t want so much better than what he wanted. The life in the bush, on the edge of the farms, away from the towns; how could it be managed? Even here, some men managed it.31

  As Laidlaw was pursuing his trapline and earning money from it, Munro notes that he “never went after girls; he grew less and less sociable.” This, she says, would have pleased his mother who, though disappointed that her only child had not pursued a professional career, would have thought that “at least he was not just turning into a farmer, a copy of his father.” In the manuscript version of her memoir, Munro offers another omitted passage that details her father’s work and his transformation:

  Muskrats he trapped in the spring, because their fur stays prime until about the end of April. All the others were at their best from the end of October on into winter. He went out on snow-shoes. The white weasel didn’t attain its purity until around the tenth of December, and was going off by the end of January. He built up deadfalls, with a figure 4 trigger, set so the boards or branches fell on the muskrat or mink; he nailed weasel traps to trees. He nailed boards together to make a square box-trap working on the same principle as a deadfall (less conspicuous to other trappers). The steel traps for muskrats were staked so the animal would drown, often at the end of a sloping cedar rail. Patience and foresight and guile were necessary. For the vegetarians he set out tasty bites of apple and parsnip; for the meat-eaters, such as mink, there was delectable fish-bait mixed by himself and ripened in a jar in the ground. A similar meat-mix for foxes was buried in June or July and dug up in the fall; they sought it out not to eat but to roll upon, reveling in that pungency of decay.

  Foxes interested him more and more, though they were not so easy to get. He followed them away from the creek into the bush and out into the little rough sandy hills that are sometimes to be found at the edge of the bush, between bush and pasture, useless bits of land which grew nothing but pine trees and juniper bushes. Foxes love the sandy hills at night. He learned to boil his traps in water and soft maple bark, to kill the smell of metal, to set them out in the open with a sifting of sand over them. How do you kill a trapped fox that you don’t want to shoot, because of the wound to the pelt and the blood-smell left around the trap? You stun it with the blow of a long, strong, stick, then put your foot on its heart.32

  About 1925, such experience and his growing interest in foxes led Laidlaw to begin fur farming. During this time he met a cousin, Annie Chamney, visiting with her father from eastern Ontario. Thinking about her parents’ first meeting and courtship, Munro has said that when they met, her father “would have been very idealistic about women.… He was an only child, he had been very shy. People liked him a lot, but he still had led a very kind of solitary life. I think Mother would have seen him as someone with whom she could have had a different life than she could have had” with the two men she had been engaged to. “And she was probably right.” Munro thinks her mother “saw in him a much more interesting man, because he was, and a kinder man. He was very – he was soft-hearted in some ways.”

  When Annie Chamney met Bob Laidlaw, their eldest daughter asserts, she really was interested in the foxes and not just Bob, despite what Mrs. Laidlaw thought. An omitted passage in the manuscript version of “Working for a Living” has Chamney thinking, “The other trapping should be forgotten, the foxes were the thing to concentrate on.” During her years of teaching, Chamney had saved “a little money … to help buy a place where this new enterprise could get started.” The two courted and became engaged; after Chamney completed her second year teaching at the Bathurst school, they were married on July 28, 1927, at St. John’s Anglican church, Innisville – the Chamneys’ family church in Scotch Corners. Before that, their daughter recalls, Anne made Bob promise that he would never take a drink and, as long as Anne lived, he never did.33

  The wedding announcement, probably written by Annie Chamney, offers considerable detail. Beginning “A very pretty wedding was solemnized,” it notes that “the bride entered the church, which was prettily decorated for the occasion with white hydrangeas, leaning on the arm on her father, while [the accompanist] played and the choir sang sweetly, ‘The Voice That Breath’d O’er Eden.’ She was charmingly gowned in white georgette painted in pastel shades over a slip of white satin with trimming of English lace with shoes and stockings to match. Her veil of white was arranged becomingly with a wreath of orange blossoms and she carried a shower bouquet of Ophelia roses, lily-of-the-valley, and maiden-hair fern, and wore the gift of the groom, a handsome green gold watch.” After the wedding dinner, which was served by “four of the bride’s girl friends, … Mr. and Mrs. Laidlaw left for a short trip by motor, amidst showers of confetti.” On this honeymoon they camped at Christie Lake, southwest of Perth, and returned to a “farewell party where about eighty guests enjoyed a most delightful evening in music and dancing. The bride was the recipient of many handsome gifts which testified to the high popularity of the bride among her many friends.… Mr. and Mrs. Laidlaw left on Monday by motor for their home at Wingham, Ontario where the groom is a prosperous fox rancher and fruit farmer.”34

  The home the new Mr. and Mrs. Laidlaw motored toward was one, Munro wrote in “Working for a Living,” that

>   had an unusual location. To the east was the town, the church towers and the Town Hall visible when the leaves were off the trees, and on the mile or so between us and the main street there was a gradual thickening of houses, a turning of dirt paths into sidewalks, an appearance of street lights that got closer together, so that we could say that we were at the town’s furthest edge, though half a mile beyond its municipal boundaries. But to the west there was only one farm-house to be seen, and that one far away, at the top of a hill almost at the mid-point of the western horizon.…

  The rest of the view was a wide field and river-flats sloping down to the great hidden curve of the river, a pattern of overlapping bare and wooded hills beyond. It was very seldom that you got a stretch of country as empty as this, in our thickly populated county.

  In June 1927, the Laidlaws had bought the farm for $2,300, including a mortgage of $1,000; it was a property of just under five acres with a barn and a brick house built on higher ground above the surrounding flood-prone area known as Lower Town. Munro imagined her parents as they were about to set out on their marriage, “when they came and picked out the place where they would live for the rest of their lives, on the banks of the Maitland River just west of Wingham, still in Huron County but in Turnberry Township, they were driving in a car that ran well, on a bright spring day with the roads dry, and they themselves were kind and handsome and healthy and trusting their luck.”35

  Describing her parents, Munro adopts a rueful tone that reveals her deeply felt and long-examined understanding of her parents’ lives and struggles, both as a couple and as individuals, in the years that followed their marriage and move to Wingham. In 1982 Munro wrote to the Globe and Mail correcting a characterization of her father put forward in a profile of her they had just published, asserting that “my father worked so hard, through some very hard times, and he had some quite unpredictable bad luck. At the end of his life, he became a writer. He was a brave, uncomplaining, tremendously hard-working man.” In similar fashion, Munro tempers her discussion of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s sales triumph at the Pine Tree Hotel in Muskoka in “Working for a Living” with a chilling sentence, one omitted from the published version: “She did not know what treachery was already underway in her own body.”36 Her mother began showing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease not too long after this triumph.

  Settling into their new home along the Maitland River just west of town in August 1927, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Laidlaw certainly did not know what awaited them there – no more than anyone does. Yet looking back from her vantage of fifty years, their eldest daughter, Alice Ann, continued to do what had become her hallmark – she “lifted [them] out of life and held [them] in light, suspended in that marvelous clear jelly” she has spent her “life learning how to make.” It was “an act of magic, there is no getting around it; it is an act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love. A fine and lucky benevolence.”37 These words are especially apt, especially poignant, as they apply to Munro’s parents.

  Lower Town, Wingham: “Home”

  Wingham is located just over twenty kilometres northeast of Blyth, where Bob Laidlaw grew up and his parents still lived. The town developed at the point of confluence of the Middle branch of the Maitland River, which flows from the south, and the North branch, which flows from the northeast. Joined at Wingham, the river continues south and west to Lake Huron. Called the Meneseteung by the Natives, the river was renamed for an early governor general, Sir Peregrine Maitland, as the Huron Tract was opened. One of two major watersheds in Huron County, the Maitland reaches Lake Huron at Goderich, adjacent to its harbour. At Wingham it encircles the town on three sides so that, as Munro describes Jubilee in “The Peace of Utrecht,” the town’s buildings, and especially its distinctive town hall, can be seen from a considerable distance as Wingham is approached from the south, the river flats opening the view. Lower Wingham – located in a flood plain across the river to the west and south of the town, in Turnberry Township and not a part of the town – was settled first, in 1858. Other settlers followed over the next several years, both in Lower Wingham and on the higher ground to the east, which became Wingham proper.

  Initially, Lower Wingham prospered. According to one local history, by 1879 it had “the flour mill, carding factory, a saw mill, three general stores, two hotels and one school.” But in the early 1870s Wingham was chosen as the junction of the Toronto, Grey, and Bruce railway with the London, Huron, and Bruce railway; this caused rapid development there, to the detriment of Lower Wingham. When Wingham was incorporated as a village in 1874, its population stood at seven hundred, and three years later it had almost tripled to two thousand. It was incorporated as a town in 1879. Initially a service and transportation centre for surrounding farms, Wingham developed several industries over its history; the Western Foundry company, where Robert Laidlaw worked after the late 1940s, was founded in 1902 to manufacture stoves; the company offered a wide array of Huron stoves, sold through the Timothy Eaton Company catalogue and other outlets, which by 1914 included some fifteen models of ranges, stoves, and furnaces. Today, the company operates as Wescast Industries. In addition, there was Gurney’s glove factory, a furniture manufacturer – making hardwood chairs – called Brown’s factory when Munro was growing up, and a door manufacturer called Lloyd’s. CKNX radio was granted a commercial licence in 1935, “making Wingham the only town of its size in Canada at that time to have a commercial broadcasting station.”38

  While Munro has maintained for some time that her various fictional towns – Jubilee, Dalgleish, Hanratty, Logan, Carstairs, Walley – are not models of Wingham, there is no doubt that Wingham’s geography, economic bases, demographics, and cultural ethos have been shaping presences in her fictional imaginings. As the Wingham Advance-Times advertised, its Lyceum Theatre was offering weekly features when the Laidlaws arrived in August 1927. Hanna’s Ladies Shop later asserted, in an ad keyed to Easter, that “Only Quality Coats Retain Their Appearance” since “Quality, like character, is pretty hard to see at first glance.” A few weeks before, the King Department Store asked, “Have you planned your Spring wardrobe?” and went on to note that “there’s nothing like spring to make a success of your appearance.” Originally a men’s clothing store, King’s had become a department store by the time the Laidlaws moved to Wingham; one of its competitors then was the Walker Store, an Ontario company with several stores across the province.39 Munro would refer to it in “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” and stores similar to Wingham’s occur frequently in her other stories.

  Wingham evolved into a centre that in many ways encapsulates Huron County; most people were descendants of emigrants from the British Isles and, in religion, Protestants of many sects considerably outnumbered Roman Catholics. The Baptists and Methodists built churches within a few years of the arrival of the first settlers, and other Protestant groups followed suit before the Catholics built a church and installed a priest. Given this, it is not surprising that the first fraternal lodge in Wingham – with an 1856 charter that predates the town itself – was the Orange Lodge, an openly anti-Catholic organization. There is little doubt that Wingham was a place where religion was taken seriously. Not too many years ago its Baptist church identified itself on its sign out front as a “Bible Believing, Soul Saving” church. For most of its history, Wingham was dry, and it was populated mostly by people for whom virtue came from hard work, who often felt guilt, who were quick to remember a slight but would seldom recall a compliment. Such was the world Alice Munro came to know.

  Lower Town (always pronounced, Munro says, “Loretown”), was another place altogether, separate as it was from Wingham proper. Although there had once been real commerce in Lower Town, by the Laidlaws’ time there was only a grocery store there. On the west bank of the Maitland, in the flats area just by the confluence, Lower Town was populated by a disparate population. Munro has characterized the area there as a “kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes an
d hangers-on lived. Those were the people I knew. It was a community of outcasts. I had that feeling about myself.” This characterization of Lower Town, when quoted in a newspaper article, brought Munro considerable criticism around Wingham in 1981, yet there is no doubt that her memories, and her characterizations, are accurate. Most of the houses in Lower Town – and especially those closer to the river – were rented (owned largely by better-off people who lived in Wingham). Every year the Maitland flooded, and stories in the Wingham Advance-Times dealt with these annual floods in a resigned way: “The flats, of course, were completely inundated.… In Lower Town the agricultural grounds were completely covered, the water being about three feet deep around the building nearest the river.”40 Farther west from the area most often affected by this flooding and living in a house set on relatively higher ground, the Laidlaws were only mildly inconvenienced by these floods, since they were cut off from their most direct route to Wingham. But there can be little doubt that those who lived in Lower Town nearer the confluence, those the Laidlaws had to pass on their way to town, were just the sort of people Munro said they were, since people of greater means would not have chosen to live there.

  When she spoke to Harry Boyle in 1974, Munro commented on what she called “a Canadian Gothic” aspect to life of rural southwestern Ontario throughout her own time there and still present in 1974. If one examines the Advance-Times literally at random during the years Munro lived in the family home, stories confirming the sorts of occurrences she has used in her stories are frequent. Some examples: “Howick Baby Scalded to Death.… The 18-months-old baby pulled a pail of boiling water off the table, the water spilling over his entire body, scalding him badly” (March 23, 1939). Or “Hand Nearly Severed.… His hand came into contact with the saw, which bit into his wrist, slicing three-quarters of the way through and severing bones, tendons and nerves” (March 23, 1939). Or “Recluse Dies” and “Lamb Born With 7 Legs and 2 Tails”; these are offered above and below “Will Be Presented to the Queen” (April 27, 1939). “George Magee Found Dead in His Barn” (December 21, 1939). And, finally, on the same page that announces the Wingham school promotions, including Alice Laidlaw’s promotion to Grade 8, there is “Six-Year-Old Child Was Badly Burned” (July 1, 1943).