Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  “Writing as a Way of Surviving as Herself”:

  The Beginnings of a Writer in Wingham

  In November 1939, when Munro was eight and had just begun Grade 4 in Wingham, Lucy Maud Montgomery paid a visit and spoke at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church there. According to the Advance-Times, Montgomery attracted a large audience to an evening program in which she both talked about her literary career and recited “one of her beautiful poems.”20 By the time of Montgomery’s visit, Munro had read Anne of Green Gables while, for her part, her mother had read all of Montgomery’s books. Munro was unaware of this visit until she was told about it quite recently, but hearing of it she spoke of her interest in Montgomery, saying, “I think she was boxed in by the very same things that a generation later could have boxed me in – being nice and being genteel.” Munro continued, “But she had a great eye, and I think Emily of New Moon is one of the best books in Canada. I just loved that book.” She recalls that she first read the book when she was nine or ten years old and was “pleased and troubled” by it. In her afterword to the New Canadian Library edition, Munro offers a statement about writing as a way of life, one that also gains power by applying so utterly to her own circumstances:

  But what’s central to the story, and may be harder to write about than sex or the confused feelings in families, is the development of a child – and a girl child at that – into a writer. Emily says, near the end of the book, that she has to write, she would write no matter what, and we have been shown not only how she learned to write, but how she discovered writing as a way of surviving as herself in the world.… We’re there as Emily gets on with this business, as she pounces on words in uncertainty and delight, takes charge and works them over and fits them dazzlingly in place, only to be bewildered and ashamed, in half a year’s time, when she reads over her splendid creation.…

  What mattered to me finally in this book, what was to matter to me in books from then on, was knowing more about life than I’d been told, and more than I can ever tell.21

  Munro’s move from the Lower Town school to the Wingham school at the beginning of Grade 4 doubled her distance from home – she now had a walk of just under three kilometres, travelling through Lower Town, across the Lower Town bridge into Wingham, and through the town to the school at the corner of East John and Frances streets across Josephine Street, Wingham’s main street. “I was eight, it was quite a walk, but I liked it,” she recalled. At the time, too, Munro saw herself as “different, and different in what I considered a favourable way.” She had seen herself in this way before she began school, and this sense of difference developed with the change in schools.

  Munro was not initially successful in the Wingham school. She was a year younger than her classmates and clumsy with her hands. “It was terribly difficult for me to learn to write with a straight pen, which we had to do then. Dip it in the ink. I would get about half a word done and it would end in a blot.” While she loved some of what they were learning then, Munro did not learn the material in the prescribed way – writing it down in notes. “I kept a notoriously untidy desk, with balls of paper crumpled up and shoved into it. The notes were all written on the board, and I couldn’t finish, and then when three boards were finished he would go back – this was the Grade 5 teacher – and rub off the first board and begin writing more. I wouldn’t have finished it yet, and so I would just give up, putting the paper in my desk.” One of her teachers called her “Uncle Wiggly” because her handwriting wiggled so. Remembering this period, Munro says she was “always in trouble, always in trouble.” When she was in Grade 5, Munro got a terrible report card that she hid and considered signing herself – “Mother had to go for a conference at the school and she was upset because she wanted me to do well and she thought it was pure wilfulness that I wasn’t doing well.” This trouble continued as Munro took home economics and had to learn to crochet – she was not adept at either. But Grade 7 was a bit better and, in Grade 8, when Munro was twelve, she “suddenly shone, because we had a man who didn’t care if you were untidy, and who recognized if you liked the stuff he was teaching,” a consideration “which had never come into it before.” Munro realized that her interest in her studies would be “the way in which I could actually shine.”22 So it proved to be.

  Her walks to and from school were not the only walks she took. The road leading north from her family’s farm – then without a name but now called West Street – was where, she says, “I always went on my walks. I loved this road.” That road led up past the Cruikshanks’ abandoned first house, vacant for years, a place Munro liked to visit with her girlfriends. When she was in Grade 7, “I found a book of Tennyson’s poems there. One of the Cruikshanks had been a high school English teacher and there was a book.” Having found it, Munro took it home. “That was so marvellous. They were all those long poems by Tennyson, like ‘Enoch Arden’ and ‘The Princess’ and Idylls of the King, and ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ You know how the rhythm of Tennyson goes, it was so enrapturing when you’re beginning to read poetry. Oh God, I just went crazy about it. It was a true treasure. I still know lines from those poems.” About the same time that Munro discovered Tennyson, she also became aware of her potential as a student. She maintains, though, that her subsequent excellence in school was not a matter of being gifted: “I absorbed history naturally because I loved it and, in English, I soared beyond all possible requirements. But at everything else, I had to work at it – I wasn’t a natural.”23

  The summer before she moved to the Wingham school, while she was still seven years old, Munro read Dickens’s A Child’s History of England. It was, she asserted in a 1962 essay, “the first book I ever read.… When I say that this was the first book I ever read, I don’t mean to give the impression that I was dipping into English history at four and a half, or anything like that. I mean it was the first real book, and also the first book I ever read, in the sense that I had a private vision of what I was reading about – unexpected, incommunicable, painfully exciting.” She had had whooping cough and so could not pursue her usual activities: “So I swung in my swing until I got dizzy and then for no reason in particular I took the Child’s History out of the bookcase in the front room, and sat down on the floor and started to read.” Most of her essay, “Remember Roger Mortimer,” traces and comments on Dickens’s handling of the kings and queens of England, the intrigue surrounding them, and her understanding of just what the author was doing; but it is especially significant in the way it offers an extended image of an Ontario child, reading, within her family:

  Not until I was grown up did I discover that it came there because it had been my father’s, and that it had been the first book he had ever read, too. I was ignorant of this because nobody asked me what I was reading, and I never told anybody; reading in our family was a private activity and there was nothing particularly commendable about it. It was a pesky sort of infirmity, like hay fever, to which we might be expected to succumb; anyone who managed to stay clear of it would have been the one to be congratulated. But once the addiction was established, nobody thought of interfering with it. A couple of years later, when I had turned into the sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes, my mother pointed me out to some visiting aunts with a fatalistic gesture – “Another Emma McClure!” Emma McClure was a relative of ours who lived somewhere deep in the country, where she had been reading day and night for thirty-five years, with no time to get married, learn the names of her nephews and nieces, or comb her hair when she came in to town. They all looked at me pessimistically, but nobody took my book away.

  Munro’s reading of Dickens’s book, placed within what she later calls “the isolation of my home” is revelatory: it defines her own sensibility as a reader, makes another story connection with her father, and defines the family’s tentative, even sceptical, view of its idiosyncratic pleasures.24 More particularly, “Remember Roger Mortimer” shows the intellectual direction she
would herself take toward history, toward imagined stories, and above all toward “a private vision” of what she “was reading about – unexpected, incommunicable, painfully exciting.”

  The year Munro was in Grade 7, 1942–43, eleven years old and the year she found Tennyson, was critical for her in several ways. Following this discovery, she began writing poetry and, as a parallel activity, “was always making up stories in her mind.” A memory of this story-making passion is found in “Boys and Girls,” where the narrator enjoys telling stories to herself after her brother Laird falls asleep in their shared upstairs bedroom:

  Now for the time that remained for me, the most perfectly private and perhaps the best time of the whole day, I arranged myself tightly under the covers and went on with one of the stories I was telling myself from night to night. These stories were about myself, when I had grown a little older; they took place in a world that was recognizably mine, yet one that presented opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice, as mine never did. I rescued people from a bombed building (it discouraged me that the real war had gone on so far away from Jubilee). I shot two rabid wolves who were menacing the schoolyard (the teachers cowered terrified at my back). I rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the townspeople’s gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-out piece of heroism (nobody ever rode a horse there, except King Billy in the Orangeman’s Day parade).25

  In an interview with Thomas Tausky, a University of Western Ontario professor, Munro confirmed that this passage was based on a memory, and that when she was creating such stories they were “half and half,” partly imitative of things she had read and partly imaginative. These activities gradually evolved, she remembers, into a Wuthering Heights imitation, a piece of writing she worked on throughout high school and was continually imagining, working out its details. Looking back, she told Tausky that “in the early stuff it would be the excitement of a plot, but with the Wuthering Heights imitation it was the soul of the fiction I was trying to capture on my own.… There was some apprehension there of what fiction is. The excitement – I think Jack Hodgins said, ‘I wanted to be part of the excitement.’ ”

  Such feelings were derived from, and confirmed by, Munro’s reading of Emily of New Moon. But more than any single, though crucial, book Munro’s development came from the ongoing acts of being read to as a preliterate child and then reading for herself. Although the Laidlaws’ middle-class prosperity may have been somewhat fragile, there is no question but that Munro grew up in a literate home. A childhood friend recalls attending birthday parties for Alice at the Laidlaws’ at which Mrs. Laidlaw read to all the children. Former high school teacher Audrey Boe remembers Mrs. Laidlaw’s deep interest in education – always wanting to know and learn more. And she recalls Bob Laidlaw as a reader, saying that she thought he “probably read every book in the library.” Given this, and not surprisingly, when Munro came to write an introduction for her Selected Stories in 1997, she invoked and analyzed an image seen from the window of the Wingham Public Library when she was about fifteen. Writing of this scene – a man with his horses in swirling snow “carelessly revealed” – Munro describes its effect as giving her “something like a blow to the chest.” Once its moment had passed, “it was more a torment than a comfort to think about” this scene, “because I couldn’t get hold of it at all.” By then, Munro was seeing that scene through the eyes of a developing writer – since early adolescence she knew that was what she wanted to do.

  A draft of “The Albanian Virgin” offers a narrator like Munro who lives outside the town of Logan, a town that like Wingham has its library in the town hall and also a major hotel named the Brunswick. Its narrator for a long time forgoes taking books home from the library since she had been told by another child that, living outside of town as she does, getting a library card would be too complex a process. Instead, she goes to the library and reads there, mesmerized: “The books themselves, the smell of the paper and the feel of the cover with these smooth indented pictures and letters, these objects, as well as the stories contained in them, seemed to me magical. They were magical. I didn’t even want to take them home.” Though the librarian encourages her to get a card, the narrator refuses. “This situation lasted ’til high school, when I got so greedy for the books that I had to swallow my pride.”26

  Thus for the young Alice Munro reading and writing involved “greed,” “torment,” “magic,” “excitement,” “a blow to the chest,” and above all, “the soul of the fiction.” Although she dates the writing of her first real story to the Easter holidays, when she was fifteen during an enforced holiday from school caused by an operation to remove her appendix, Munro’s development as a writer began much earlier.27 It began when she was read to by her mother (and committed stanzas of “Barbara Allen” to memory), when she discovered Dickens and read Montgomery’s books (and doubtless others), when she saw her parents read, when she made up stories in imitation of Zane Grey, Hans Christian Anderson, Emily Brontë, and others, and when she discovered that collection of Tennyson’s poems in the Cruikshanks’ house and so wrote her own poems in imitation of them. On those long walks to and from school, she was both making up stories and, as she said, “thinking my thoughts,” tracing her route from Lower Town to Wingham and back again, literally and imaginatively infusing that place with what was known and imagined, or yet to be imagined, yet to be articulated: a torment, a call, a sense of direction – everything there “touchable and mysterious.” Imagining lives and stories for this, her own known population.

  If Munro’s year in Grade 7, 1942–43, anticipated the academic success she would later achieve, it also happened within a context of great changes in the circumstances of the Laidlaw family. The fur business had remained a tenuous undertaking; the war had adversely affected the market and there was evidence that styles were changing. During the war, such decorative frills as furs seemed unimportant; money went into other things. Bob Laidlaw had been thinking of getting out of furs altogether. At one point, early in the war, he had thought of pelting his stock and going into the army as a tradesman. As Munro details in “Working for a Living,” Anne Laidlaw suggested instead that she should go to the Pine Tree Hotel in Muskoka during the summer of 1941 and sell their best furs directly to American tourists. She did so with some real success that year, but after that summer – once the Americans were in the war themselves – such tourists stopped coming.

  In June 1943 an issue of the Advance-Times ran a story headlined “Cows Electrocuted Entering Barn.” It begins: “The fact that they were wearing rubber boots probably saved Robert Laidlaw and Lloyd Cook of town from receiving a severe shock or worse.”28 In order to feed his foxes and minks, Bob Laidlaw salvaged dead animals from local farms or took old unneeded animals and kept them until they were butchered for feed (two such horses figure in “Boys and Girls”). An electrical short in a barn had killed a cow; Laidlaw and Cook, arriving to salvage the carcass, nearly met the same fate. Had that occurred, the effect on the Laidlaw family would have been catastrophic. That same summer, just as Munro’s academic circumstances were improving, Anne Chamney Laidlaw took her daughters east to Scotch Corners for a visit with her relatives there. Bill, who was seven, stayed home with his father.

  The Laidlaw women stayed about six weeks in the Ottawa Valley: “It was a big family visit,” Munro remembers. “We visited everybody, cousins at Carleton Place. Mother thought I should see the Parliament buildings and the Chateau Laurier, so I was taken to Ottawa one day and I got sick.” Munro is not sure whether this was the result of excitement or food, but she remembers spending “the whole day in the Chateau Laurier ladies’ room being sick.” This visit is the basis of “The Ottawa Valley,” the final story in, and also the last one she wrote for, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. It draws precisely from the details of that visit. Much of what is there, Munro has said, is autobiographical – the elastic on her underpants did break and she did insist on taking
a safety pin from her mother, whose slip showed as a consequence. However, its central scene, when the narrator confronts her mother about the symptoms of her illness, is imagined. Alice Munro did not do that. Nevertheless, she does offer precise detail of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s symptoms as she remembered them. At the time, “just her left forearm trembled. The hand trembled more than the arm. The thumb knocked ceaselessly against the palm. She could, however, hide it in her fingers, and she could hold the arm by stiffening it against her body.” When asked “So, are you not going to get sick at all?” the mother does not answer:

  “Is your arm going to stop shaking?” I pursued recklessly, stubbornly. I demanded of her now, that she turn and promise me what I needed. But she did not do it. For the first time she held out altogether against me. She went on as if she had not heard, her familiar bulk ahead of me turning strange, indifferent. She withdrew, she darkened in front of me, though all she did in fact was keep on walking along the path that she and Aunt Dodie had made when they were girls running back and forth to see each other; it was still there.29

  Another feature of “The Ottawa Valley” is Munro’s quotation from the definition of Parkinson’s disease in a commonly found medical encyclopedia – she cites her source. When Anne Laidlaw started showing symptoms of “Parkinson’s disease or shaking palsy,” as it is described by Fishbein, the family did not know what it was; in fact, it took about three years from the onset of symptoms to get a clear diagnosis. Even then there was nothing to be done – it was incurable. This fact exacerbated an already difficult situation: at the time, the family’s economic circumstances were already faltering, and they would continue to deteriorate during Munro’s high school years. Bob Laidlaw’s near accident in June 1943 also reveals the family’s vulnerability – as Munro said to Catherine Ross when first told about the incident, one she had never known of, her father “may not have wanted us to know. If he had died, we would have been destitute.” More pointedly, the onset of Anne’s Parkinson’s disease came just as Munro had reached puberty and was realizing her vocation as a writer. Recalling those times, Munro commented that “the lack of money and Mother’s illness coming at the same time was pretty bad. But in adolescence I was very self-protected, I was ambitious and a lot of the time I was quite happy. But I ignored this. I knew it, but I didn’t want to be tainted by tragedy. I didn’t want to live in a tragedy.”30