Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  People don’t spend much time looking at wedding pictures, particularly when the marriage itself no longer exists. I have a picture of myself and my first husband that deserves some attention. I am twenty, my husband is twenty-two. I am wearing a home-made velvet dress and hat. My husband is wearing a new suit, too large even when you take into account the baggy styles of the early fifties. Our attitudes to the undertaking are reflected in our faces – his stricken but shining with conviction, mine pale, resolute, sullen. Our parents on either side look uncomfortable. My wedding had come at a time when our family had had a patch of ill-luck so shocking that it makes other people turn away in embarrassment, my mother sick with an incurable disease (there she is with her slightly crazy eyes and her stiff pose and her beautiful Irish skull), my father with his business in ruins trying to support us by working as a night-watchman in the local foundry, our skid into poverty coinciding naturally with a skid from the middle class through the bottom of the middle class into the working class. And it was not as if there hadn’t been hopes and possibilities. My father owned a set of golf clubs. A few years before my mother had furnished the living-room where this picture was taken with an idea of creating a Victorian parlour, with uncomfortable needle-pointed chairs and settee, a painted hanging-lamp and fine gilt-framed mirror (our sheets and towels were worn almost to pieces, we had no refrigerator, fly-stickers hung over our kitchen table; that is the picture)[.]

  What Munro has written here – as only she can – is a precise description of the moment captured in this photograph. Likely written during the late 1970s (the adjacent material is connected to Who Do You Think You Are?), perhaps just after her father’s death and perhaps as “Working for a Living” was coming to the fore in her imagination, what Munro writes here is a precise, unadorned reminiscence. She continues, shifting to Jim’s parents:

  Into such squalor and elegance & illness & ill-luck & pretension come my husband’s parents, perfectly normal well-behaved people of the upper middle class to whom exaggerations of all kinds were distressing. Plenty here for them to behave well about. They had never reason to think their son would marry anyone but the daughter of a family like themselves, or if he did take up with a girl from a little backwoods town, her father would at least be the leading citizen of the town, a judge or a doctor or at worst a merchant. How had this happened, they must have asked themselves a dozen times that day, how did their son even come to meet the daughter of a night-watchman who lived in a house with no garbage pickup and flies blackening the back door. At the University, that was how, where the new Provincial Govt’s munificences opens the Gothic doors a crack, lets in a dribble of the children of the poor who are brash & brainy & scornful & lucky too sometimes under their meekness in ways their betters can’t suspect.

  No doubt owing to her own perspective on this scene – written, as she says, when the marriage it commemorates was over, her mother and likely her father dead – Munro starkly analyzes the commemorated moment’s meaning, the differences between the two principals and their two families, not really known then, but intimately familiar by the time Munro writes. She focuses on an item in the photo, an antique gun that does appear by the Laidlaws’ mantel in Wingham in the actual wedding photo, and continues:

  Well, in a corner of the picture, propped up in the old-fashioned parlour, there is a gun, an elegant old muzzle-loader with a bayonet on the end. That’s part of my mother’s decorating and in itself has some complicated meaning, guns were no longer a natural article in parlours, of course; the gun was displayed for its antique elegance, and its history. When asked, we said it had been used in the War of 1812. My future mother-in-law and her friends would never have had a gun in their living-rooms (their living-rooms were all very much alike – comfortable, creamy, chintzy, pleasant) – and neither would any of the members of our family, who tended toward ferny curtains & plastic-covers on brocade-like furniture. I did not know anyone else who would have a gun in the living-room and for once I was not in opposition to my mother. I liked the gun there and valued its history (though I had got it all wrong, one of the things I’m coming to).

  So there is a gun included in my wedding-pictures. If I had been marrying a boy of my own background there could have been jokes about this but in the circumstances nobody mentioned it. I don’t mean that there was a specifically awkward circumstance, such as pregnancy; just that everything was awkward, and sad, and ill-omened. It was not a wedding any sort of jokes could be made about. It was a wedding nobody wanted except the bride & groom, and they clung to it in spite of drastic misgivings. I clung to it too; make no mistake, if anybody had advised me not to go through with it I would have eloped, to show them.

  Munro’s commentary on her wedding photograph breaks off here, for she shifts her focus, saying, “When I was about ten or eleven years old I went with my father when he had to fix the fences on the fifty acres we owned.”14 The draft then breaks off altogether. Yet what remains of “Old Mr. Black” is as direct and clear-sighted an articulation of the social and personal contexts animating the Laidlaw-Munro wedding as might be imagined – Munro’s description recreates the day she literally became Alice Munro starkly, abjectly, precisely. She had made her choice: her name became Alice Munro, and she and her new husband went off to start their new life together in Vancouver.

  “I Certainly Hope That You Will Continue Writing”

  Sometime in 1951, while she was still at Western and engaged to Jim Munro, Alice Laidlaw wrote to Robert Weaver in the Talks and Public Affairs section of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. A native of Niagara Falls, a war veteran, and a graduate of the University of Toronto, Weaver had joined the CBC in late 1948 to organize and produce its literary programs. He replaced James Scott, who returned to his native Seaforth (fairly close to Wingham) primarily to write but also to teach creative writing at Western. Among the programs Weaver inherited was one called Canadian Short Stories, a weekly fifteen-minute program of readings of original stories. When he arrived it had been on the air since 1946 and was undistinguished, so Weaver set about soliciting stories from across the country. He also drew on his own contacts at the University of Toronto (Henry Kreisel and James Reaney were classmates, so their work came in) and elsewhere. Having produced Canadian Short Stories himself, James Scott was a source, too, since he was involved with young writers at Western – he put Doug Spettigue in touch with Weaver and may well have done the same with Munro. She recalls hearing that a classmate, Bill Davidson, had sent a story to Weaver. Doug Spettigue did so as well, since one of his was broadcast in July 1951. By May of that year Alice had begun a correspondence with Weaver over her own submissions.

  Connecting with Robert Weaver was a key moment for Alice Munro, even a very lucky one. Luck and timing did have roles to play in her career’s unfolding, and hearing about Canadian Short Stories was one such moment. Weaver’s “main concern” was “to promote literature through the medium of radio” and, as he wrote in the June 1949 CBC program guide, “one of the chief aims” of Canadian Short Stories was to “discover and develop new talent.” At the same time, Weaver was acting on his own initiative: his was a classic case of a person defining and extending his own position. He went well beyond what was expected of him by his superiors and so made a contribution to Canadian letters that extended the scope of what the corporation did in fostering Canadian writing. After almost a decade of this, he extended his radio work with his editorial direction of the Tamarack Review. Setting about all this in 1948, Bob Weaver – as everyone still calls him – became what Robert Fulford has called “a one-man national literary network.” Somehow, Fulford has said, Weaver “caught on at the CBC and stayed there for the rest of his career”; he “seized upon this position at the CBC to become the friend, advocate, the explorer, the discoverer of Canadian writers.” Weaver made a point of travelling across the country, making regular trips to the west coast and to Montreal and points east. When he stopped, he would have parties in his hote
l rooms, inviting all the local writers and others with literary connections. Through such gatherings, writers, editors, and critics met and came to know one another so Weaver was able to function as “a one-man national literary network” indeed.

  In the conclusion to his 1984 thesis on Weaver’s contributions to Canadian literature, Mark Everard anticipates this book by writing that the “biographer of Alice Munro … would be both ungracious and historically inaccurate if he did not examine in some detail the editorial relationship that was largely responsible for keeping Munro interested in writing” in the years before her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published.15 That relationship began apparently when the Canadian Writers’ Service – an agency run by Cybil Hutchinson, who had been an editor at McClelland & Stewart – submitted “The Man Who Goes Home” to Weaver early in 1951. That was the same Munro story Jim Jackson had read at the literary evening in London, and Weaver rejected it, but on May 18 he wrote to her at 1081 Richmond Street about two other stories, “The Widower” and “The Strangers.” He rejected “The Widower” but, contingent on Munro’s willingness to shorten “The Strangers” – Canadian Short Stories required pieces not longer than 2,100 words – offered to buy it. He hoped to broadcast it on June 1, so the cuts had to be done quickly. Weaver suggests how to do this, but his most indicative comments are his criticisms of “The Widower”: “Here you have failed to rise above somewhat commonplace and tedious material.” The three stories he has seen suggest to him that Munro tends to understate her material. “This is something which a great many of our writers could learn to their benefit, but when this method is followed in a story like ‘The Widower,’ which is rather unexciting in the first place, it can sometimes have an unfortunate effect.” He continues, saying that “you are trying hard to use words with care and to present your material with real integrity and I certainly hope that you will continue writing, and that we will be given the opportunity to read some later stories of yours.” Munro replies in a week, apologizing for not getting the manuscript back sooner and thanking Weaver for his “encouragement and criticism.” She then details the changes she has made to reach the needed length: she “rewrote the first two pages entirely” and made more cuts later in the manuscript, but “in case the revision is not satisfactory I am sending also the original two pages” in case he would like to make alternative changes.16

  This exchange of letters is interesting in itself, certainly, but it is most significant in the way it begins the Weaver-Munro relation: for his part, Weaver is supportive and interested, but he is also critical – there is no mistaking what he has to say about “The Widower.” For hers, Munro shows herself understanding of his editorial needs, willing to make changes to “The Strangers” and, though she is just nineteen years old and this is her first such exchange, professional. Years later, in 1984 when Weaver was reaching retirement age and his program Anthology (successor to Canadian Short Stories) was celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, Munro wrote to Marian Engel seeking her support for a plan to have him made an honorary member of the Writers’ Union of Canada. She says that she has “been thinking how a long … relationship can still be there, still sustaining, after other relationships so much more intimate & important have burned right out.” Thus Weaver has been to Munro since she began her professional career in 1951. For her part, whenever Weaver has been singled out to be celebrated, Munro has been there. In a 1979 profile of Weaver in Books in Canada, Mark Abley wrote that “when Alice Munro is read and remembered, Weaver will be forgotten.” Clearly, Abley was wrong.17

  When he received the revision, Weaver wrote that Munro “had done an extremely good job on the re-write” of “The Strangers,” and he was sorry that its broadcast on June 1 had to be postponed by their reporting on the Massey Commission. He had wired her with this news, but in his letter of June 1 he offered more information. Since they had arranged to do a series of half-hour stories until the program’s summer break, “The Strangers” had to wait until October 5. He tells her that the cheque for the story will be arriving in three weeks, asks for clarification about her relationship with the Canadian Writers’ Service, and solicits other stories. Munro wastes no time responding, since on June 8 she replies and submits “The Liberation” for Weaver’s consideration. He replies about five weeks later, buying the story outright and saying that he sees no point in cutting it – they will pay her ninety dollars and save it until they have a half-hour slot available. Weaver continues, “I was very pleased to hear from you again, and I hope you will continue to send us fiction from time to time. ‘The Liberation’ is really a very nice story and it is fine to know that you are continuing to work in this field. Incidentally, it is a small point, but if you intend to do very much free lance writing I think you will soon discover that editors much prefer to receive manuscripts double-spaced. This makes it a good deal easier to tell at a glance [how] long a piece is.” In and of itself, such a suggestion is of little import. But this letter shows Weaver adopting the role of advisor that he played crucially to Munro for the next twenty years, until she made other contacts in the literary world. Weaver was her literary lifeline: he encouraged, made practical suggestions, responded, and generally cared for Alice Munro the writer. And he did so for scores of other writers besides.18

  By the time Alice and Jim Munro were married and heading for Vancouver, Weaver had considered and rejected two more stories, “The Unfortunate Lady” and “The Uncertain Spring.” The latter, Weaver wrote, showed that Munro was “steadily improving as a writer.” Weaver did not buy it only because he already had her long story, “The Liberation,” on hand. During 1952 Munro submitted at least two more stories, “The Shivaree” and “The Man from Melberry”; these were also rejected.

  For his part, Weaver compliments Munro on the descriptive sections and on character analysis, but “the three of us” who read the stories “were all agreed in feeling that [the stories] were not entirely successful.” Weaver goes on to say he is sorry about this, and he hopes Munro will send him “more fiction quite soon.” He adds, “I am sure that you realize that we are very much interested in the work you are doing and I hope that we are able to use one or two of your stories in the Canadian Short Stories series this winter.” Weaver’s concluding paragraph is as follows:

  Once or twice I have wondered whether you have ever sent any of your stories to one or two of the better Canadian magazines. While you wouldn’t receive any payment from either Northern Review or the Canadian Forum it might be helpful to you if either magazine published one of your stories and the editors might also send you some useful comments. I mentioned your work to John Sutherland of Northern Review and I know that he would be most interested in hearing from you.19

  Munro did not have another story broadcast on the CBC until “The Idyllic Summer” was used on Anthology in 1954. In August of the same year, that story appeared in the Canadian Forum. By then, Munro had already sold her first story for commercial publication – “A Basket of Strawberries” to Mayfair, which ran it in their November 1953 issue. She did sell a story, “Magdalene,” to John Sutherland at the Northern Review during the 1950s, but it was never published. Also at Weaver’s suggestion, during the mid-1950s Munro began sending stories to magazines in the United States – her first submissions to the New Yorker date from this time, and she recalls sending stories to little magazines listed in the back of a Discovery magazine.

  Thus Munro apparently wasted no time responding to Weaver’s suggestion that she submit to magazines. As “the only person” she knew “from the world of writing,” Robert Weaver was critical to her evolving career. His letters, she has written, “didn’t reprove me for not writing or exhort me to get busy. They reminded me that I was a writer. The most precious encouragement was not in what they said, but in what they took for granted.” For his part, Weaver saw from the first that Alice Laidlaw Munro was “a real writer”: “Alice knew early what she was trying to do – she had a strong will – and she wasn
’t to be deflected.”20

  “Three Dark Rooms in Kitsilano”

  A fragment that is probably connected to “Chaddeleys and Flemings” – and thus a product of the late 1970s – begins “We were married during the Christmas holidays and went at once to Vancouver where we were going to live. As we walked through the Vancouver railway station workmen were taking the lights off a huge Christmas tree. Richard had been living in Vancouver since early summer, articling with a law firm, and writing letters to me describing the mountains, the ocean, the great ships that came into port and making confident promises concerning our love and future life.” Obviously, Munro is drawing here, in her usual precise detail, on her own recollected experiences. Once she and Jim had married in December 1951, they took the train from Toronto directly to Vancouver. Another wedding announcement, cited by their daughter Sheila, mentions a wedding trip to Banff, but Munro recalls only that they may have merely stepped off the train and walked around there. The train trip, an adventure in itself, passed for a honeymoon, and they arrived in Vancouver on January 2, 1952. Having been working at Eaton’s since the previous summer, Jim had found an apartment for them. Munro recalls,

  The apartment he had found for us was on Arbutus Street, facing the park, the beach, the water[.] We had half the downstairs of a pink stucco house. Across the front of the house was a glassed in porch, which kept our living room quite dark. There was dark green linoleum on the floor, and a dark red chesterfield and chair, a fireplace with an electric heater and on either side of the fireplace a little window with a tulip of pink and green glass.

  Behind the living room was our bedroom, and beyond that was the kitchen. We shared the bathroom with the people in the other downstairs apartment.

  The house, at 1316 Arbutus, still looks across Kitsilano Beach Park to English Bay and Burrard Inlet beyond. The Munros lived there through the summer of 1952 but had to move in the fall owing to renovations, so they found a place on Argyle Street where they lived into 1953, until they bought their first house in North Vancouver.