Alice Munro
Page 6
Such facts confirm the world the Laidlaws were moving into when they set up housekeeping along the Maitland River west of Wingham in 1927. It is the place Munro has most remembered from her years living there, from 1931 to 1949. This stretch along the Maitland by the Laidlaws’ farm is a real place certainly, but more significantly it is the place that has fed Alice Munro’s imagination since she began writing there during her teenage years, and she has drawn on it ever since – an “ordinary place,” her own site for her imaginings, it “is sufficient, everything here touchable and mysterious.” This place – Munro’s own “home place” – is multifaceted, made up of a specific physical and cultural geography, the surrounding society populated by the people Munro knew, or knew of, and infused with the culture she herself came to own, embody, and understand. And the acculturation Munro experienced was one in which her ancestors – Irish Anglicans and Scots Presbyterians alike – maintained a presence through their particular histories. Her writing derives almost wholly from that “little stretch” along the Meneseteung / Maitland River, from the surrounding Lower Town, from Wingham and Huron County more generally.
“A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out,” wrote Eudora Welty, one of Munro’s avowed influences. Munro’s home place is just such a place – one still populated by the felt presences of people named Chamney, Code, Laidlaw, and Stanley, as well as others. The place Munro has lived in for most of her life – Huron County – is emphatically “like a fire that never goes out.” It is the place Alice Munro cherishes, the one from which she has fashioned her fictions, one that still burns.41
“Particularly Clear and Important to Me”
Lower Town and Wingham, 1931–1949
There are few pleasures in writing to equal that of creating your town.… Solitary and meshed, these lives are, buried and celebrated.
– “An Open Letter from Alice Munro” (1974)
In 1974, Alice Munro wrote “An Open Letter” for the inaugural issue of Jubilee, a short-lived publication from Gorrie, Ontario, a village east of Wingham. Named after Munro’s own fictional town, and carrying on its cover an image of Wingham’s leading civic structures – its post office and town hall – Jubilee was a celebration of Munro’s work and the small-town ethos. She initially began using Jubilee as a town name during the 1950s and some references were included in her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, but the town of that name was used most extensively as Del Jordan’s home place in Lives of Girls and Women. When in December 1970 Munro sent the manuscript of that book to her Ryerson Press editor, Audrey Coffin, the title she gave it was Real Life. In her open letter, she writes: “When I was quite young I got a feeling about Wingham – the town, of course, from which Jubilee has come – which is only possible for a child and an outsider. I was an outsider; I came into town every day to go to school, but I didn’t belong there. So everything seemed a bit foreign, and particularly clear and important to me. Some houses were mean and threatening, some splendid, showing many urban refinements of life. Certain store-fronts, corners, even sections of sidewalk, took on a powerful, not easily defined, significance. It is not too much to say that every block in that town has some sort of emotional atmosphere for me, and from the pressure of this atmosphere came at last the fictional place: Jubilee.”
Of Munro’s various unused titles, Real Life is her most evocative. These two words conclude the “Baptizing” section of Lives, where Del achieves her most powerful epiphany – her rejection of Garnet French’s attempt to dominate her – encapsulating that new understanding within herself. But more broadly, Real Life defines the essential feeling that Munro creates within and through her fiction: that what a reader reads here is not fiction, that this is real life – these events really happened. Or, at the very least, Munro makes her reader feel as if they did. Alluding in her open letter to other mythic towns found in fiction – among them Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Eudora Welty’s Morgana, Mississippi, and Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka, Manitoba – Munro asserts just what she is about in her creation of Jubilee: “There are few pleasures in writing to equal that of creating your town, exploring the pattern of it, feeling all those lives, and streets, and hidden rooms and histories, coming to light, seeing all the ceremonies and attitudes and memories in your power. Solitary and meshed, these lives are, buried and celebrated.”1
Real Life and Munro’s creation of her own town; her remembered feelings as a child in Wingham, feelings of mystery and feelings of threat; her sense of herself as an outsider, a person from Lower Town – each of these characterizations suggests the complexity of her relation with Wingham, and the inextricable connection between her own life and her fiction. From memories of being in Lower Wingham, growing up there amid its curious circumstances, smells, sights, and people, Munro fashioned fictions derived from that “real life.” Alice Munro’s relationship with Lower Wingham and with Wingham, set within the cultural contexts of Huron County, has been deep and continuing throughout her career.
Childhood, Lower Town School, and Family Connections
That relationship began on July 10, 1931. The next Thursday, the Wingham Advance-Times announced the birth: “Laidlaw – In Wingham General Hospital on Friday, July 10th, to Mr. and Mrs. R.E. Laidlaw, a daughter – Alice Ann.” She was named after her mother’s dearest friend, Alice Mary Thompson, from the Ottawa Valley. In the fall, the Laidlaws had their daughter christened at the United Church in Wingham. As Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Munro’s first biographer, has observed, she initially “lived the life of a sheltered, cherished only child.” Munro’s brother, William George, was born a few months before her fifth birthday, on March 13, 1936, and their sister, Sheila Jane, arrived the year after that, on April 1. Munro recalls wondering if news of her sister’s birth was her father’s April Fool’s joke – it seemed to her that her brother had only just turned up.2
Munro’s first memories derive from this time as the only child, for she remembers a trip she made with her mother to Scotch Corners sometime in 1934, when she was about three. This was one of two trips the two made there when Munro was very young. When she was about a year old, George Chamney had visited the Laidlaws in Wingham, without his wife, probably because he was ill – it was the last time he saw his daughter. He died in March 1934. By then Bertha Stanley Chamney had for some time been suffering from cancer; she was gone in less than a year after her husband’s death. Visiting Scotch Corners in 1934, Munro had shared a bed with her grandmother there; more precisely, she recalls being with and watching her uncle Joe Chamney feed pigs: “I remember standing – I was too small to look over the wall of the pig-pen, but I had climbed up on the boards, and I was peering over, watching my uncle feed the pigs.”3
And in “Home” Munro uses another memory from about this time, one occurring in the barn in Lower Wingham, a memory that she fictionalizes as “the setting of the first scene I can establish as a true memory in my life. There is a flight of wooden steps going up to the loft.…” This passage is in italics as Munro’s authorial comment on what she had written in the story proper. She continues:
In the scene I remember I am sitting on one of the bottom steps watching my father milk the black and white cow. That is how I can always date the scene. The black and white cow died of pneumonia in the bad winter, which was nineteen thirty-five; such an expensive loss is not hard to remember. And since in my memory I am wearing warm clothes, something like a woolen coat and leggings, and there is a lantern hanging on a nail beside the stall, it is probably the fall, late fall or early winter of that year.
The lantern hangs on the nail. The black and white cow seems remarkably large and shiny, at least in comparison with the red cow, a very muddy red cow, her survivor, in the next stall. My father sits on a three-legged milking stool, in the cow’s shadow. I can get the rhythm of the milk going into the pail, but not quite the sound: something hard and light, like hailstones. Outside the small area of the stable lit by a lantern are the s
haggy walls of stored hay, cobwebs, brutal tools hanging out of reach. Outside that, the dark of these country nights which I am always now surprised to rediscover, and the cold which even then must have been building into the cold of that extraordinary winter, which killed all the chestnut trees, and many orchards.4
In “Home,” which among other things is another meditation on her father, Munro unites herself with him in a single image she imaginatively calls “the setting of the first scene I can establish as a true memory in my life.” Thus, she suggests the way her parents – father and mother each – moved through her memory and, eventually, through her fiction. With occasional exceptions such as “Boys and Girls” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Munro has largely left her siblings out of her fictionalized memories, yet Anne and Bob Laidlaw, and the family life they made in Wingham after their marriage in 1927, became presences to whom Munro returned again and again.
In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” one of the three stories Munro wrote over the winter of 1967–1968 in response to her Ryerson editor’s request for three more stories to round out Dance of the Happy Shades, she offers parents probably based to some considerable degree on the differing personalities of Bob and Anne Laidlaw. Although Ben Jordan’s circumstances in the story are largely invented, there is no doubt that his casual demeanour with his children owes a great deal to Bob Laidlaw. More pointedly, Munro creates in the mother a character who closely resembles Anne Laidlaw.
Once they had settled into their new home in Lower Town, with the fur farm established there and growing, Anne Laidlaw set about achieving the middle-class life to which she aspired. Having been born in self-respecting rural poverty in Scotch Corners, having through her own “desperate efforts” moved away and become a teacher, both in Lanark County and in Alberta, Anne Laidlaw naturally aspired toward Wingham and away from Lower Town. Thus Munro characterizes the narrator’s mother in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” in terms that owe much to her own experience as her mother’s child: “She walks serenely like a lady shopping, like a lady shopping, past the housewives in loose beltless dresses torn under the arms. With me her creation, wretched curls and flaunting hair bow, scrubbed knees and white socks – all I do not want to be.” Recalling her years as the only child, Munro has said she was “the object of my mother’s care in a role” that her brother and sister were not. “And her care was in shaping a person. Not the person that I wanted to be. I think that was always the conflict between us.… She wanted me to be smart, but a good person and the kind of person who was both socially and intellectually successful and was nice.”5
Heading from their house to Wingham, or even to the grocery in Lower Wingham, the two would have had a walk of about a kilometre, past most of Lower Town’s houses, which were more numerous closer to the river and the bridge to town. The grocery, then called the Lower Town Store, was located by the river and near the Turnberry agricultural grounds. “Uptown” Wingham – the area along Josephine Street where most of its stores were – was about twice as far from the Laidlaws’. Once Munro started school, this was the same route she walked to school and back, first to the Lower Town School by the store and the river and then, after two years there, across the bridge to Wingham to first its public and then its high school.
The Laidlaws’ house was built in the 1870s when Lower Wingham and Wingham were still competing as local centres. It is made of brick and is still occupied now, over 130 years later. When the Laidlaws lived there it had two bedrooms upstairs, the stairs running up between the walls from a landing two steps up from the dining room; the dining room was on the house’s north side, the living room on the south, to the right as you approached the front door. Behind the living and dining rooms was the kitchen. There was no indoor plumbing until the mid-1940s, when a bathroom was added upstairs.
The farm itself was something of an island, set off by itself between the end of the Lower Town road and the river. The road was north of the house; to the east was a large open field; to the south was the river, a river flat, and a high bank above; to the west, the direction in which the house faces, was “such a wonderful view of the landscape.” Munro has said, “You saw the hills. Some were treed, some were bare, and you couldn’t see another building except Roly Grain’s farmhouse,” off in the distance. To the south of the house was a barn, “toward the river, but the way the river is there’s a river flat – this was because there was a spillway and then there’s the bank of the river, which is quite pronounced.” Between the barn and river, the fox pens were built on the ridge running parallel to the river, behind them a sharp drop of about thirty metres down to the river flat, and “all that land down there was pasture for whatever horses we were keeping and the cow.” The fox pens were quite extensive, housing upwards of two hundred animals at various times, a world to itself with its own sounds and smells.6 The closest neighbours were the Cruikshanks, who lived across the Lower Town road, now called Turnberry Street.
Once Anne and Bob Laidlaw took possession in 1927, they set about making it their own, working toward the prosperity asserted in their wedding announcement. Bob built the fox pens. He planted walnut trees between the house and the barn (“the walnuts drop, the muskrats swim in the creek”), and pine trees to the west as a windbreak – “Dad planted it and it’s in the old pictures when they were just new and I’m a baby, so I think they were planted the same year I was born.” They cultivated a vegetable garden between the house and the road and, in the field to the east, they grew hay: “We had to have hay for the animals.” Inside, Bob Laidlaw built the fireplace in the living room and, for her part, Anne painted the floors and, Munro has said, even painted the linoleum to look like a rug, which they could not afford.7 Remembering this house, or one very much like it, in “Home,” Munro writes:
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 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. All the rooms are small, and as usual in farmhouses, they are not designed to take advantage of the out-of-doors, but if possible to ignore it. People who worked in the fields all day may have sensibly decided that at other times they did not want to look at them.
In my mind, then I could see the kitchen ceiling made of narrow, smoke-stained, tongue-and-groove boards, and the frame of one of the kitchen windows gnawed by a dog that had been shut in all night, before my time. The wallpaper in the front rooms was palely splotched by a leaky chimney. The floors were of wide boards which my mother painted green or brown or yellow every spring; the middle was a square of linoleum, tacks and a tin strip holding it down.
Summing up, Munro calls it “a poor man’s house, always, with the stairs going up between the walls” – that is, built in the simplest way. “A house where people have lived close to the bone for a hundred years.”8
Along with her first memories, Munro made one of her earliest friends when she was three: Mary Ross, who was just about the same age. Her father, Dr. George Ross, was one of Wingham’s three dentists. She lived in town and the two mothers got Alice and Mary together to play, both at Mary’s house and at Alice’s. Ross remembers going to the Laidlaws’ home and finding it a delight – with the land, the fox pens, and the river, there were lots of attractions to explore. For her part, Alice Ann, a name Ross still uses, delighted in the sidewalks in the town since she could ride a tricycle on them, something she could not do at home. Even when she was very young, Ross recalls, Munro could recite from memory successive verses of the traditional folk song “Barbara Allen,” and she sees this as evidence of Anne Laidlaw’s frequent reading to her daughter. Because Munro began her schooling at the Lower Town school, the two were not in classes together until Grade 4, after each had skipped a grade; once Munro had moved to the Wingham school, though, they went all through school together and when
they were in high school, they were the top two students. In 1948, Alice and Mary shared a scholarship for middle-school French. Throughout their years together, Mary Ross was the only other Wingham student to do as well as Munro, and sometimes scored slightly better. Remembering their early connection and Alice’s move from the Lower Town school to the Wingham school, Ross has said that “Mrs. Laidlaw wanted the best education possible for her children,” and so “decided to send them uptown where she felt, rightly or wrongly, there were more opportunities.”9
For the first two years of school, 1937 to 1939, Munro attended the Lower Town school – she completed Grades 1 and 3 there, skipping Grade 2 – “I still have trouble with subtraction,” she says today. Originally the first Baptist church dating from the 1860s, the Lower Town school was, in youthful microcosm, a reflection of Lower Wingham itself. About fifty children were pupils there. The geography of West Hanratty in Who Do You Think You Are? – the school “which was not very far” from Flo’s store – reflects that of Lower Wingham and, as Munro has frequently said, the details of the school in “Privilege” in that book come from her time at the Lower Town school: “The school … is the school I went to. It’s the most autobiographical thing in the book. One of the more autobiographical things I have written. But that’s exactly how it was.”