Alice Munro in front of the B.C. legislature, Victoria, early 1952. Alice is wearing her “honeymoon suit.”
Alice and Jim Munro, Grouse Mountain, B.C., summer 1953. Alice is pregnant with Sheila.
1316 Arbutus Street, Vancouver
The first house Alice and Jim Munro owned, 445 West King’s Road, North Vancouver. (The house has since been altered.)
View from 2749 Lawson Avenue, West Vancouver
Alice Munro, West Vancouver, 1957
Alice Munro, ca. 1958–60, West Vancouver
Alice and Jim Munro at home in West Vancouver
Arthur Munro,
Robert Laidlaw,
Margaret Munro,
Jenny, Sheila, and Alice Munro,
West Vancouver,
May 1963
Robert Laidlaw and Jenny Munro, Vancouver 1961
Jenny, Andrea, and Margaret Munro, Victoria, April 1968
Jenny, Alice, and Sheila Munro, Vancouver, July 1961, the summer of the “Miles City, Montana” trip
1648 Rockland Avenue, Victoria
Munro’s Books of Victoria today
Alice Munro, Montreal, 1974
Alice and Andrea Munro, ca. 1976–77
Alice Munro and Morley Callaghan
(Geraldine Fulford, Bob Weaver in background), 1980s
Alice Munro and Robertson Davies, Massey College, June 8, 1984
Alice Munro and Patrick Lane, summer 1981, China
Alice Munro and Robert Kroetsch, summer 1981, Great Wall of China
“And this was the road where I went on my walks. I loved this road. This is my favourite road in the world.” – Alice Munro, Wingham, June 19, 2003
Alice Munro and Gerry Fremlin, 1993
The Alice Munro Literary Garden, Wingham
Alice Munro and Audrey Boe Tiffin Marples, Wingham
Taken in the early 1980s, this favourite photograph was chosen by Alice Munro to appear on the back of Too Much Happiness in 2009.
Alice Munro, Dublin, 1996.
PART TWO
Becoming Alice Munro
“My Name Now Is Alice Munro, and I Am Living in Vancouver”
Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage, Family, 1949–1960
Helen had won a scholarship and gone off to university, and at the end of two years, to her own bewilderment, she was married, and going to live in Vancouver.
– “Places at Home” (“The Peace of Utrecht”)
Although the notice of Munro’s scholarships in the Advance-Times makes her situation sound quite positive, and these awards certainly allowed her to move away from Wingham, her university scholarship support was in fact barely enough for subsistence. Once she got to London, Munro worked at two library jobs and, for extra money, sold her blood for fifteen dollars a pint. During these two years, getting enough to eat was a problem – one classmate said she thought Alice subsisted on “apples and iron pills” and her father wondered how she managed to live. But apart from what her scholarships allowed day to day, they confined Munro more significantly by their extent: they covered only those two years of a four-year program. So when she quit university and married James Munro in 1951 after completing just two years, as she told Thomas Tausky, “it wasn’t that I opted out of university. It was that I had a two-year scholarship and couldn’t go on. There was no money.”
But in another way, Munro had opted out of university. By the time she left Western to marry, Munro had moved beyond the gratification brought by academic success. While she was at Western, her writing “was getting so much in the way” of her academic work, she recalls, “that’s all I wanted.” During her two years at university, Munro spent about half her time writing and the rest looking after her classes, working at both the public and the university libraries and, in a way she had not done before, having a social life. She also made two contacts – with James Munro and, much more distantly, with Gerald Fremlin – that would prove to shape the trajectory of her life. The April 1950 issue of Folio, Western’s undergraduate literary magazine, included Munro’s first published story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow.” It was followed there by Fremlin’s story, “An Ear to a Knot Hole.” A senior, Fremlin had contributed poems, both comic and serious, to every issue of Folio but one since spring 1947, and the issue in which his story followed Munro’s also featured two of his poems. Given this presence in Folio, Alice Laidlaw thought during her first year to bring her initial submission to the magazine to Fremlin directly. She hoped, as she has said, that he would immediately fall for her. He did not. Instead, he sent her down the hall to the actual editor, who eventually accepted her story for publication.
The contributor’s note in that issue of Folio refers to Munro as an “eighteen-year-old freshette, whose story in this issue is her first published material. Graduate of Wingham High School. Overly modest about her talents, but hopes to write the Great Canadian Novel some day.” As with Mary Ross’s “Prophet’s Address” in Wingham, this note confirms Munro’s very clear, and very serious, commitment to her writing. Even during Munro’s first year at Western, people who knew the magazine were talking about Alice Laidlaw as Folio’s “find.” Such was her evident potential.1
Folio published two more stories by Alice Laidlaw during her time at university, but by the spring of 1951 she was in correspondence with Robert Weaver at the CBC about her submissions to a radio program called Canadian Short Stories. In May he wrote to her requesting revisions to a story called “The Strangers” and, once she had made them, he bought the story for fifty dollars. Initially slated for broadcast on June 1, the story was preempted by the release that day of the Massey Commission report on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences – an ironic coincidence given Munro’s subsequent reputation. “The Strangers” was ultimately broadcast on October 5 during the first broadcast of the fall schedule. Weaver, who championed Canadian writing and Canadian writers through the CBC from the late 1940s on, and through the Tamarack Review from the 1950s through the 1980s, was to be among the critical people in Alice Munro’s career, the one person she knew from the larger world of writing who helped to sustain her through her first two decades of serious writing. During the 1950s, Munro submitted fourteen stories to Weaver, some accepted and broadcast, others rejected. Throughout, he encouraged, helped, supported, and made suggestions. With Weaver’s encouragement, Munro started sending her stories to magazines. The first story she sold for publication appeared in the Canadian magazine Mayfair in November 1953; it was followed during the decade by contributions to the Canadian Forum, Queen’s Quarterly, Chatelaine (which had rejected Munro’s submitted poems during her teenage years) and, in its second issue, the Tamarack Review.
During the spring of 1952 when Weaver was about to broadcast the second story he had bought from Laidlaw – “The Liberation” – he received a letter from the author. Then living at 1316 Arbutus Street, Vancouver, she writes, “I don’t like to bother you about this, but I wonder if it would be too much trouble to give my new name and address when the author’s name is mentioned. I have been married since the story’s acceptance; my name now is Alice Munro, and I am living in Vancouver.” When the story was broadcast on June 13, however, Munro was still identified as “Alice Laidlaw” “of London Ontario.”2 She was, of course and a bit perversely, both persons – for, though she had left Wingham and London and Ontario and would only visit there during the next twenty years, she was still and would continue to be “from” Ontario. In ways she most probably did not intend when she wrote to Robert Weaver in May of 1952, her name really was “Alice Munro” – she was living in Vancouver, imagining Ontario.
“The Twin Choices of My Life”:
University of Western Ontario, 1949–1951
Founded in 1878, the University of Western Ontario served in 1949 as the regional university in southwestern Ontario just as, in the east, Queen’s University fulfilled a similar role for that part of the province. The University of Toronto, by contrast, liked to cast itself as the prov
incial institution and also, in many ways, the national university. When Munro arrived in London in the fall of 1949, Western enrolled over four thousand students in all of its programs and associated colleges; about half that number would have been undergraduates in the university itself. At the time, Western was reaching the end of a post-war influx of veterans that had taxed its capacities; during 1946–47, for example, veterans made up just under half of Western’s students. Throughout the late 1940s these men “dominated the student unions and newspapers” – Gerald Fremlin, who was approached by Munro, was a veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the war and sent her to another RCAF veteran, John Cairns. Such older and more experienced students “brought a degree of seriousness and maturity that served as a counterweight to the more jejune aspects of student culture.” At the same time, there was what intellectual historian A.B. McKillop calls a resurgence of “the cult of domesticity” after the war – he cites advertisements in Maclean’s magazine as an indication, since those “aimed at the woman as homemaker rose from about forty percent in 1939 to over seventy percent in 1950.” Although the war years had seen a surge in women’s attendance at Canadian universities, that increase was reversed with the war’s end – women made up considerably less than a third of students in arts and sciences at Canadian universities at the beginning of the 1950s.3
Recalling her university years, Munro says that she loved her time there, “being in that atmosphere, having all those books, not having to do any housework. Those are the only two years of my life without housework.” Not that she has greatly minded such work, either before university or after, but those two years at Western stand singular in her memory: “to have that concentration of your life, that something else was the thing you got up in the morning to do, and it was all reading and writing, studying.” Munro enrolled initially in the journalism program as something of a cover, so that she would not have to say that she wrote fiction – though, given the contributor note in the April 1950 Folio that has her major as Honours English “with an emphasis on creative writing,” it was not much of a cover. The journalism program required English, and that first year Munro also took English history (which she says she already knew backwards), economics, French conversation, and psychology. Those enrolled in programs like journalism – that is, with some sort of applied focus – were put in the same sections of these courses and were seated alphabetically. Thus Alice Laidlaw met Diane Lane – a first-year pre-business student from Amherstburg – who became a friend and roommate.
Both students had come from small towns, neither had much money (though Laidlaw was the more strapped), and each, initially, roomed with someone she knew from home. During that first year, each found that she was not enjoying the association with her original roommate. So the two took to spending time together at the public library, where Munro had a part-time job two or three afternoons a week sorting and reshelving books (as she also did at the Lawson library on campus on Saturday afternoons). Eventually, Munro moved into the same rooming house as Lane – the upstairs of a house belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Buck at 1081 Richmond Street – where she lived through her second year. Mr. Buck’s brother Tim was the leader of the Communist Party of Canada and had been in jail. The Bucks “rented the entire upstairs of their house, and it was a place where vaguely intellectual non-sorority-type girls lived.” Munro recalls that “we were all fairly poor, and we all cooked these messes we made on hotplates.” Socially, at the time, she remembers, “Western was fraternity, sorority. Not too serious.” That second year was “interesting, but fun, because I was then with people at University who were more or less like me.” Munro captures some of this in an unpublished draft story called “The Art of Fiction,” which draws on her time at Western. The narrator writes, “During my university years I lived in a house which was not really very big and which sheltered seven other girls, a landlady who wove her own skirts and belonged to a Bell Ringers Society, and a periodically confined lovesick Siamese cat.”4
During their first year, both young women took the same English 20 – a survey of British literature – class from Robert Lawrence and, through him, they came to the attention of the English department. Just as in high school, Munro made her mark by what she wrote: as a student she did not have much to say in class, but Lawrence read “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” a story she wrote that became her first publication. The English department was seeking students for its honours program, and both Laidlaw and Lane were successfully recruited. Munro recalls that some time during that first year she was approached by Professor Murdo MacKinnon about switching to English. By that time, she remembers, she had “run afoul of economics” so she asked him if she would have to take more economics. No, he replied, she would need only to pick up the Latin she had missed that first year. So she shifted to English for her second year. That year she took aesthetics from Carl Klinck, eighteenth-century British literature from Brandon Conron, a course in drama from Eric Atkinson (“the best course I took”), French poetry, Greek literature and translation, and another course in English history “from a dreadful man” who “read from notes.” Although Munro says she spent about half of her time at Western writing, she did very well in her courses – apart from economics. At the end of her second year, she won a prize for the highest marks in English.5
During her first year at Western, Alice Laidlaw was sitting across from another student in the Lawson library. He was eating some candy, a piece of which he accidentally dropped on the floor. This young man had had his eye on Laidlaw and, looking at the candy on the floor as he was wondering what to do, he heard her say, “I’ll eat it.” Thus Alice Ann Laidlaw met James Armstrong Munro. Jim Munro was from Oakville, the eldest son of Arthur Melville Munro, a senior accountant at the Timothy Eaton company in Toronto, and his wife, Margaret Armstrong Munro. Just under two years older than Alice, Jim was in his second year studying Honours History when he met her. Growing up in Oakville and through high school, he was interested in the arts; he listened to opera and classical music, took art classes, and acted in plays. Jim had seen Alice around the university and had noticed her, but did not know anything about her; he did not know that she was a writer until, when he asked around about her, he was told that Alice Laidlaw “was Folio’s new find.” Recalling himself then, Jim Munro says he was “full of poetry and romantic notions” – he remembers then being under the influence of a book, The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol, about a young man who falls for a high-spirited girl. He mirrored the story when he met Alice Laidlaw – “I really fell hard for her.”6
Describing Alice Laidlaw when she was a student at Western, Doug Spettigue, a classmate, recalls that “she was shy and small and had a very white face, freckle-sprinkled, and chestnut hair.… You thought you could stare right through those quiet eyes and the girl would disappear. But she didn’t. There was an unexpected strength there, and even then a confidence that some of the rest of us, noisier, may have envied.” For his part, Jim Munro is remembered from that time as also being shy, a bit awkward, and handsome. He had a great friend, Donald Dean, who wore a tam and played the bagpipes. He was more of a “true eccentric” than Jim Munro was, and the two were often together. Jim Munro was one of the theatre crowd among the students, a group Spettigue, another member, describes with verve: “We would have scorned to work at our courses but we worked passionately for the Players’ Guild and the Hesperian Club and for Folio.… We acted and directed and even wrote plays, we built and tore apart sets endlessly both in the old Guild Room and the Grand Theatre. We lived for the successive issues of Folio, to admire ourselves and envy our friends in print.”
After their meeting in the library in Alice’s first year, she and Jim began seeing each other. They became a couple that year and were engaged at Christmas 1950. At Western they participated in the activities of the arts crowd; their eldest daughter, Sheila, writes that her mother wrote an adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt “for a production put on by the Players’ Guild”
and she and Jim once “attended a literary evening hosted by a young professor,” Jim Jackson, who “read one of her stories, ‘The Man Who Goes Home,’ about a man who takes the train home to the town he is from.” He does this repeatedly and, each time, he refuses to venture into the town once he reaches the station: he has a cup of coffee and takes the next train back to the city. He knows that the Maitland he might find will not be the Maitland he remembers.
Among the members of the audience that literary evening was Gerry Fremlin, who by then had graduated and was working in London; he was there with his girlfriend. After Munro’s story was read, “he raised his hand and asked her why she hadn’t called the town Wingham.” Sheila Munro also writes that her mother “thought of Gerry as something of a Byronic figure on campus, dark and lean.” Another classmate recalls Fremlin at Western as “a raging, unconventional guy … the village atheist of the Arts Faculty.” Fremlin’s atheism was outspoken in classes (he remembers as much); the same classmate recalls him publicly taking on the well-known theologian Reinhold Niebuhr when he spoke at Western, although Fremlin does not recall doing so. Like Alice, Fremlin had begun in the journalism program but he later switched to English and philosophy. After working for a time in Toronto and London, he did graduate work at Western, receiving an M.A. in geomorphology. In 1955 he joined the geography branch of the Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources in Ottawa as a geographer, becoming its chief in 1971. After serving as editor of The National Atlas of Canada (1974), Fremlin left the civil service and returned home to Clinton, Ontario. During this time he never married.7
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