Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  This brief encounter at the literary evening is notable, given Munro and Fremlin’s later relationship, but the question he addressed to her that evening about “The Man Who Goes Home” is one that has been asked repeatedly during Munro’s career about the settings of her stories. However, a letter he wrote to her the following summer suggests something of the growing appreciation of her writing around Western. It “was all about my writing,” she recalls, “a really, really appreciating, insightful letter … one of the best I ever got.” Fremlin saw Munro as a real writer, complimenting her work, comparing her to Chekhov – “but since I was seeing Jim already, it didn’t say anything about coming to Muskoka to see me.”

  The predominant feature of Munro’s writing while she was at Western is seen in the three stories she published in Folio. The first of these was “The Dimensions of a Shadow.” Owning a typewriter, Diane Lane volunteered to type it for her and, once it had been successfully submitted to John Cairns, his reaction caused a small scene. According to Sheila Munro, Fremlin remembers Cairns “running down the hall after reading the story, waving it in his hand and shouting ‘You’ve got to read this. You’ve got to read this.’ ” The story concerns Miss Abelhart, a small-town teacher who, pathetically, is revealed to have an infatuation with one of her male students; she was, Munro writes, “not ugly or absurd, in herself, only a little dried and hollowed, with straw hair tightly and tastelessly curled, and skin somewhat roughened, as if she had been for a long time facing a harsh wind. There was no blood in her cheeks, and something like dust lay over her face. People who looked at her knew she was old, and had been old always. She was thirty-three.” Miss Abelhart is distracted and disaffected as the story begins, so she avoids her usual temperance meeting at the church, walking off into the town by herself, thinking of the boy in her Latin class – “In four days the school would be closed, and he would be gone.” She walks toward the school and meets the boy; they talk and he admits that he reciprocates her feelings for him. At one point she asks him, “Did you ever think that once in her life, a woman has the right to have someone look at her and not see anything about her, just her, herself? Every woman has a right, no matter how old or ugly she is.” The point of view shifts as the conversation concludes and it is revealed that Miss Abelhart is really alone, talking to a hallucination – Munro leaves her “alone in bottomless silence.”

  This revelation is effected by three high school girls who walk by Miss Abelhart and overhear her speaking aloud to the boy she imagines before her, whom the reader at the time thinks is real – “The three girls whom she had seen earlier in the evening walked past them. They were giggling together and glancing furtively from the corners of their eyes. The boy did not even look at them.” Later, realizing that Miss Abelhart is talking to an imaginary person, one of them exclaims, “Jesus Christ! That’s it! She thought there was somebody right there beside her!”

  After she had learned that the story was accepted, Munro remembers that her father was “almost as excited as I was.” But then the story came out and had “swear words” – “Jesus Christ!” – in it. This was “very hurtful” to her mother, grandmother, and aunt, Munro recalls, and it offended Jim’s mother too, for he had shown his mother the story. Bob Laidlaw, for his part, understood why she had used the expression, but did not think it was a good idea. He would subsequently refer to it as “that expression which you used.” Thus Munro began offending certain Huron County proprieties with her very first published story.8

  As the summary of “The Dimensions of a Shadow” suggests, Munro’s techniques are more than a bit forced. The same might be said of her third Folio story, “The Widower,” which was subsequently seen and rejected by Weaver at the CBC. It concerns a man who, after his wife dies, discovers that he is not very bereft after all. Between these two, Munro published “Story for Sunday” in the December 1950 Folio. Unlike the others, it offers a young girl’s point of view, one closer to Munro’s own. Evelyn is a fifteen-year-old who “had never walked home from a dance with a boy,” but the week before, after Sunday school, the superintendent had taken her in his arms and kissed her. This man, named Mr. Willens, works “in the office, down at the factory.” His touch has transformed Evelyn. She returns to Sunday school the next week, and as she enters the church “her whole body came alive in a new way and tingled with faint excitement.” Positioning herself to reenact their kiss of the previous week, Evelyn is stymied – she finds Willens’s attentions are now focused on another, Myrtle Fotheringay, the church pianist. So what Willens had done the previous week, she sees, “was all quite meaningless.” Rebuffed, Evelyn turns “to the face of the immaculate Christ …”, and the story ends with this evasive ellipsis.9

  Of the three stories Munro published as an undergraduate in Folio, “Story for Sunday” is the strongest in that it derives from her own point of view and range of experience; by contrast, the other two stories are wooden, more conventional and forced despite their strength in physical description. The ending of “Story for Sunday” is forced – the shift from adolescent rapture to religious fervour neat but unlikely – but there is a genuine quality to Evelyn’s feelings that is lacking in the other two narratives.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about “Story for Sunday,” especially at this juncture in Munro’s career, is that when she came to write one of her most ambitious stories of the 1990s, “The Love of a Good Woman,” she decided to name the roué character “Mr. Willens.” As that story begins, Munro writes that “for the last couple of decades, there has been a museum in Walley, dedicated to preserving photos and butter churns and horse harnesses and an old dentist’s chair and a cumbersome apple peeler and such curiosities as the pretty little porcelain-and-glass insulators that were used on telegraph poles.… Also there is a red box, which has the letters D.M. WILLENS, OPTOMETRIST printed on it, and a note beside it, saying, ‘This box of optometrist’s instruments though not very old has considerable local significance, since it belonged to Mr. D.M. Willens, who drowned in the Peregrine River, 1951. It escaped the catastrophe and was found, presumably by the anonymous donor, who dispatched it to be a feature of our collection.’ ”

  Like the first Mr. Willens, this one also preys on vulnerable females for physical gratification, but unlike that one, the second Mr. Willens is also derived from another, intermediary figure in Munro’s work. During the mid-1970s she was working on a text for a book of photographs, mostly vignettes of a paragraph to two pages in length; one of these is called “Hearse” and begins, “The most successful seducer of women that there ever was in that country was Del Fairbridge’s uncle, the older undertaker brother, retired.” Since the book was never completed and published, Munro used much of it in Who Do You Think You Are? There this fellow is transformed slightly and turns up in “Wild Swans,” another story of a young woman vulnerable to an older man’s advances: the “little man” who comes into Flo’s store “had been an undertaker, but he was retired now. The hearse was retired too. His sons had taken over the undertaking and bought a new one. He drove the old hearse all over the country, looking for women.” He had been heard, “singing, to himself or somebody out of sight in the back. Her brow is like the snowdrift / Her throat is like the swan.”10 His reappearance as Willens, an optometrist who makes house calls on women home alone in “The Love of a Good Woman,” is made the more interesting by his date of death – murdered in the midst of adultery when caught by the woman’s husband “in the spring of 1951.” That is, at about the same time as the first Mr. Willens was created. It is almost as if Munro returned to Willens to give him what he deserved – and coincidental dates continue in the story: Mrs. Quinn, his putative partner in adultery, dies of a kidney problem on Alice Munro’s twentieth birthday, July 10, 1951.

  During the summer of 1950 Munro had a job as a waitress at the Milford Manor hotel on Lake Muskoka in the tourist region of Ontario that bears that lake’s name. In a draft unpublished story titled “Is She as Kind as She Is Fai
r?”, probably written some time later in the 1950s, Munro attempts to make fiction of this experience. It shows her developing a narrative posture toward her personal material – what might be called a wry, distant wonder at the mysteries of being – that later became characteristic. That posture is wholly absent from the Folio stories – they all too clearly strive to create particular effects – but it emerged as Munro wrote and published during the 1950s and into the 1960s. One draft of “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?” begins

  Between my first and second years at college I worked as a waitress in a summer hotel in Muskoka. It was called the Old Pine Tree, and it was a chalet-type firetrap three storeys high, painted dark green and hung with balconies and baskets of petunias. It was not what people call “the better sort of place”, although I don’t suppose it was among the worst; you got your orange juice, which was canned, in a plain saucer without any cracked ice around it, and you got to share the beach, the tennis court and the dance-hall with the hired help. We got a lot of moderate-income honeymooners, often a depressing sight as they munched their way resolutely through breakfast, their eyes lifting occasionally, not to meet, but to blink at the prospect of another staring day, in the anxious country between courtship and domesticity. We got office-girls too, and girls who worked in stores, arriving in pairs to spend their holidays, and entering the dining-room, the first night, in full makeup, earrings, and flowered sheer; not again.

  The story focuses on the waitresses, their difficult relations with the cooks, with a person named Bill, “the mental defective,” and generally deals with the romances and other human relations going on around the hotel during the summer. At one point two of the waitresses are locked out of their room because their roommate, Dodie, is “doing it” with one of the other workers, Joey. Munro works through one girl’s hesitancy over phrasing – she tries out “having intercourse,” to which her roommate replies, “Screwing?” Evie, the hesitant girl, wonders:

  That was what Evie was thinking of. Her wish to see somebody doing it had always run parallel to her wish to see somebody dead – that is, she had wished and not wished at the same time, with alternating violent curiosity and superstitious fear. Though given a chance to battle it out, curiosity would almost certainly have won. And now without anybody seeing or preparing her she had seen it. She was glad she had come to the door first, and not Mareta, for if Mareta had pushed her back and told her what was happening she could not have said let me look, I want to see too.

  She thought of Joey’s small body with the t-shirt pulled up and the pants around his ankles, his flat white buttocks and narrow back, he was like a child held between Dodie’s thick freckled legs. She couldn’t remember Dodie’s face, or the back of Joey’s head, nothing but the amazing bodies, locked and jerking. The impression remained that Joey was an instrument, Dodie had stuck him in there, she hung on to him and made him do it but she was really doing it to herself. Who would have guessed the fragility, the defencelessness of Joey in such a situation, or the strength of Dodie?

  By way of an answer to this question, Munro later writes, “This was a nymphomaniac, Evie thought. Such a phenomenon deserved her closest attention, but did not readily reward it.”11

  The wondering, the seeing, the questioning, the realization. These qualities are evident in these passages, which focus on occurrences that are utterly commonplace – yet seen and written of by Munro, such commonplaces are transformed into occasions for mystery, for understanding. They find their point of departure in her experience (“There is always a starting point in reality,” she told Boyle in 1974), and Dodie is based on a person Munro knew that summer, but it is how she transforms such remembered people that is her hallmark.

  In this story Munro has the waitresses reading romance stories as they sun themselves in the afternoons by the lake; some of them began with their next year’s university texts but those were soon put aside. The summer she was in Muskoka Munro tried her hand at writing such commercial stories.12 She found she did not believe in them enough – their hope, what they offered those who bought and read them. She was already too cynical to write them with success, with the necessary conviction. That balance, between belief and hope and romance on the one hand, and what is real on the other, is evident in “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, especially when she meditates on the relation between Dodie and Joey – her insight, even early on, is as caustic as it is humane.

  And as she describes the honeymooning couples “in the anxious country between courtship and domesticity” in her draft story, Munro offers a knowing perspective on their circumstances. Well she should, since by the time she wrote “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?” Munro was herself married. Speaking to Thomas Tausky in 1984, she explained that once she had earned her scholarships to Western she “had to come to university” since, at home, there was no money even “to come to London to look for a job.” And once her two years at university had passed, there “was no money then to do anything but get married.… I could either stay in Wingham or get married.” Even if she went home to Wingham, her most likely prospect was to marry a farmer there. There was also her mother’s situation. And by the time she was in university, Munro also knew that she was an artist, so her dilemma was compounded. Talking to Tausky about her early attraction to Wuthering Heights and the story she wrote in high school in imitation of Brontë, and connecting it with what she later did in creating Del Jordan’s circumstances in Lives of Girls and Women, Munro saw then “that these were the twin choices of my life … marriage and motherhood or the black life of the artist.” Although the first choice was to predominate during the 1950s, Alice Munro ultimately chose both.

  Once they met toward the end of Alice’s first year, she and Jim Munro began their own version of what she would later characterize as “friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage.” Jim Munro had enrolled in a training program of the Royal Canadian Navy for university students and spent the summer Alice was in Muskoka in British Columbia. This led to his resolve to move there after he finished university. And once he fell hard for Alice Laidlaw, Jim also decided to switch from history to the general arts program at Western – it would allow him to take courses in English and other subjects and, more significantly, he would be able to graduate a year earlier than he had previously planned, in 1951. Jim could then find a job so he and Alice could marry.

  When they got engaged at Christmas 1950, Jim went to Wingham and asked Robert Laidlaw for Alice’s hand in marriage – Mrs. Laidlaw’s suggestion, Jim recalls. When their final year at Western was over, Alice went home to Wingham and then took off for a time with Diane Lane working at a job intended to make them lots of money. Arranged by a neighbour in St. Thomas, Ontario – Lane’s father, an Anglican minister, had moved to a new church there – the two young women were hired to remove the suckers that fed on the tobacco plants in the neighbouring fields. They were singularly unsuccessful at that work, which was difficult, dirty, and tedious, and they abandoned it after a time. Jim, who had graduated with a general arts degree in English and History, did another period of Navy training and, once he got out, began working in Vancouver for the Timothy Eaton department store – the same Canada-wide company his father worked for in Toronto.

  In December Jim Munro came back east to marry Alice Laidlaw. The wedding was “a quiet ceremony at the home of the bride’s parents,” according to the Advance-Times, held on December 29, 1951, and conducted by Dr. W.A. Beecroft, the United Church minister. The announcement continues:

  Given in marriage by her father, the bride wore an afternoon dress of wine velvet, with matching accessories and corsage of Lester Hibbard roses. She was attended by her sister, Miss Sheila Laidlaw, wearing a dress of sapphire blue velvet similar in style to the bride’s dress, with matching accessories and corsage of Pink Delight roses. Mr. Donald Dean of Tillsonburg was best man and Miss Diane Lane of St. Thomas played the wedding music.

  After the ceremony, a wedding dinner was served to the bridal party and
the immediate families in the Brunswick Hotel. Following the dinner the bride and groom left for Toronto to travel by train to Vancouver. Mr. and Mrs. Munro will live in Vancouver.

  Diane Lane, who came up to Wingham before the wedding to help Alice with its preparations, recalls the ceremony as “about as modest a wedding as you could have.” Along with the Laidlaws, Lane, and Dean, only Mr. and Mrs. Munro attended. Lane played Handel’s Largo – a piece Alice requested as one of Jim’s favourites – and Bill Laidlaw, who was then fifteen, arranged for tin cans trailing from the wedding couple’s car as they drove away, something Jim did not much appreciate. Alice and Jim were very happy, she recalls, and Jim in particular was most evidently “deeply infatuated.”13

  Yet given the disparity of social backgrounds involved in the union and especially given Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s condition, all was not entirely well. Mrs. Laidlaw was at the time “so noticeably ill” – as Lane remembers her – and her speech was so badly affected that only family members could consistently understand her. Looking at a wedding photograph including her mother, Munro told Catherine Ross that “she looked quite nice in the picture. She had a fixed look, which is a characteristic of Parkinsonians, very masklike.” Munro looked at her wedding photographs at other times and tried to use them in what appears a draft version of “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field” in one of her longhand notebooks; it is entitled “Old Mr. Black” and it begins: