Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Among the stories in The Love of a Good Woman is “Cortes Island,” which begins: “Little bride. I was twenty years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty pounds.” While this story’s central incident is imaginary and some of the details of the protagonist and her husband differ from the Munros, she draws here upon the circumstances of her early months in Vancouver, recreating the atmosphere, tone, and circumstances of their experience. The narrator is of the same age and size, and has many of the attributes of Munro herself (she is a writer, is mechanically inept, and is drawn to libraries). More than this, though, the story concludes with finality – the narrator rejects Mrs. Gorrie, the mother of the landlord who lived upstairs and who had at first befriended her (and was among those calling her “little bride”), but who ultimately turned on her. “I didn’t take a final look at the house, and I didn’t walk down that street, that block of Arbutus Street that faces the park and the sea, ever again.” Naming the actual street where she lived, Munro again harkens back to her arrival in Vancouver, revisiting the person she was then. As in “Home,” where she wonders about her feelings for the family home in Wingham and writes, “It seems to me it was myself I loved here, some self I have finished with,” in “Cortes Island” she revisits herself as a young bride.

  “Running away to the West was an adventure,” Munro once told a journalist. “We were very young; we had no idea what to expect.” Settling in to her new role of wife and her new life was both exhilarating and daunting, as she and her husband both tried to conform to what was expected, both by the mores of the time and by one another. While Jim went off to work downtown every day, Alice read, and she wrote – in “Cortes Island,” she refers to “filling page after page with failure” – and looked after their apartment, doing the domestic chores, adapting to her new role as housewife. As in her Wingham and university years, Munro was drawn to the library. The month after she arrived in Vancouver, she got a part-time job at the Kitsilano branch of the Vancouver Public Library. She worked part-time until the fall of 1952, full-time until June 1953 and, after Sheila was born in October of that year, part-time again until her next pregnancy in 1955. Looking back on her reasons for marrying, the years that followed, and what she did during those years, Munro has said,

  I got married because that was what you did. Actually, that was what you did to have a sex life, because there was absolutely no reliable birth control. So it was your next step into adulthood. So I was quite happy to leave and get married and go on. But then I didn’t foresee at all that it would be such a long haul to get anything written that would be any good at all. Mostly, all through my twenties all I did was read. I read an awful lot. I read most of the writers of the twentieth century that you’re supposed to have read.

  In “Cortes Island,” Munro’s narrator mentions that “I read books I got from the Kitsilano Library a few blocks away.… I bolted them down one after the other without establishing any preferences, surrendering to each in turn just as I’d done to the books of my childhood. I was still in that stage of leaping appetite, of voracity close to anguish.”21

  Meanwhile, Jim continued to go downtown daily. Eaton’s, the leading Canadian department store at the time, did not have a management training program – young men like Jim Munro were hired and assigned to a department to work and learn on the job. Although initially he indicated an interest in books, and Eaton’s certainly had a book department, the personnel manager told him flatly that there was no money in books and assigned him to men’s underwear. (Alice, for her part, says that Eaton’s “would never let you do anything you were really good at.”) After a stint in underwear, which left him itching to do something else, he wrote advertising copy for the bargain basement; this was an assignment he enjoyed, and a creative one, since he got to write all the advertising. Eaton’s advertised in the Vancouver papers almost every day, so Jim got to use, he has said, “every cliché in the book.” He then moved into drapery before becoming the assistant manager of household linens. After that, he moved on to the fabric department. Jim spent twelve years at Eaton’s and, though he thought it a good place to work, he also never thought he was a good fit with the organization. His aesthetic and literary interests were at odds with the expected corporate norms; though he made money for Eaton’s, his colleagues and superiors did not much care. It was his view that they preferred someone who played golf.22

  The draft beginning “We were married during the Christmas vacation” describes the narrator and her new husband, the two just arrived in Vancouver, going to dinner at “the Kellands, who were friends of Richard’s parents.… They were generous people and they wanted to be kind to us for Richard’s parents’ sake and also because the way in which we lived, in three dark rooms in Kitsilano, without a car, seemed amazing, foolhardy.” Another draft story offers a similar situation, this one connected to “The Turkey Season”; it pauses after the turkey-gutters in that story sing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”:

  In Vancouver our Sundays stretched from Kitsilano to Kerrisdale. We lived in Kitsilano in three rooms in an old wooden house. On Sundays we got up late and [ate] pancakes with honey and [drank] a large pot of coffee and listened to the radio which played baroque music and gave reviews of books and plays and serious analysis of what was going on in the world. I used to think of the poem “Sunday Morning” particularly if the sun was shining and there was a patch of sunlight on the faded rug in our living-room. Up until about noon I was always hopeful that some marvelous expedition would take place. I wanted to go on a boat or take the chair-lift up Grouse Mountain.

  Munro then details the possibilities that attract the narrator, who recognizes that all the things she wants to do cost money and, besides, they may not really be all that enticing. In any case, after they discuss various possibilities, “what Andrew often said was, ‘Well, could we get back in time.’ He did not go on to say ‘in time to get to Kerrisdale’ or ‘in time to get to the Adams.’ ” That assumption is implied, however, because

  every Sunday we went to the Adams for dinner. Andrew liked to go early to play ping-pong or checkers with Graham Adams, his best friend. Going to the Adams’ was a subject we were careful about. I never complained about going there but sometimes I would say, “Do you think they really want us there every Sunday?” I never made any criticism of Graham or of Mr. and Mrs. Adams who besides being Graham’s parents were friends of Andrew’s mother; but often I said sharp things about Susan Adams, Graham’s sister, and Andrew hastened to agree with me that she was a very boring, annoying girl, a “sorority girl.” Often Andrew would comment on something about the Adams that he thought I would approve of – “I see they take the Atlantic Monthly” – or he would say that he hoped I wasn’t too tired (we had been married only a few months and I was already pregnant). And when I said that I wasn’t tired or made some favorable remark about the Adams he would be relieved and grateful and I would feel generous.

  Again, Munro was drawing from her memories of those early years in Vancouver. One of Jim’s good friends from Oakville, Bill MacKendrick, had moved to Vancouver and lived, as Munro writes here, in the Kerrisdale section of the city, a better part of town. Another family, the Careys, were friends of Jim’s aunt and uncle from Winnipeg. Jim recalls that “we went there for dinner on Sunday afternoons. The Careys sort of adopted us; we went there more often than we didn’t.” For her part, Munro remembers these visits as “simply wonderful. We played word games after dinner and it was fun.” Mary Carey became one of Alice’s great friends, a person she visited regularly in Vancouver until the older woman’s death. She is one of three departed friends to whom Munro dedicated Runaway.23

  After she returned to Ontario in 1973, she frequently created characters with husbands who condescend to their wives’ rural backgrounds: there is Patrick in “The Beggar Maid” saying “You were right,” as he and Rose leave Hanratty on the bus after his first visit there. “It is a dump.
You must be glad to get away.” Or Richard the lawyer in “Chaddeleys and Flemings 1. Connection” pronouncing the narrator’s visiting cousin Iris “a pathetic old tart” and “pointing out the grammatical mistakes she had made, of the would-be genteel variety”; for this outburst, he gets whacked by a piece of lemon meringue his wife throws at him. Or in “Miles City, Montana,” the father of the narrator’s two daughters is suddenly dismissed: “I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed.”24 Without doubt, each of these husbands – all three are long divorced in each story’s present – owes something to Jim Munro.

  The class differences between Alice Laidlaw and Jim Munro – as she makes utterly clear in her commentary on the wedding photograph – were immense. The two were from very different worlds. Their Oakville-based connections in Vancouver were but one indication of differences lying submerged, unacknowledged but present, which Munro drew upon after their divorce. But during the 1950s and into the 1960s, the Munros were busy establishing themselves and their young family; hence these differences remained mostly unstated between them, rooted far away in Ontario, though sometimes evident in their personal life in Vancouver.

  Those differences, while powerful enough and ultimately contributing to the end of the Munros’ marriage by the early 1970s, should not obscure a key fact: throughout their marriage, Jim Munro supported and encouraged Alice’s writing. Alice has said that Jim is one of the very few men she has known – apart from English teachers – who “really read fiction seriously.” And Robert Weaver remarked that Alice was “lucky to have a husband who supported her writing” at a time when many husbands, given the mores of the time, had difficulty with the time spent and the achievements of a wife who wrote. Weaver was in a position to know, certainly. Emblematic of Jim’s support was his gift of a typewriter to his wife on her twenty-first birthday on July 10, 1952.25

  In tune with this, in “Cortes Island” Munro recreates a younger self, this time as a writer:

  But one complication had been added since childhood – it seemed that I had to be a writer as well as a reader. I bought a school notebook and tried to write – did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can. I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook cover left. Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle – excitement and despair, excitement and despair. It was like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week.

  Not entirely secret either. Chess knew that I read a lot and that I was trying to write. He didn’t discourage it at all. He thought that it was something reasonable that I might quite possibly learn to do. It would take hard practice but could be mastered, like bridge or tennis. This generous faith I did not thank him for. It just added to the farce of my disasters.

  Elsewhere in the story, once the narrator has fallen out with Mrs. Gorrie, it becomes clear that the older woman has been using a pass key to snoop around the young couple’s apartment. Mrs. Gorrie says that the narrator would “sit down there and say she’s writing letters and she writes the same thing over and over again – it’s not letters, it’s the same thing over and over.” Hearing this, the narrator says, “Now I knew that she must have uncrumpled the pages in my wastebasket. I often tried to start the same story with the same words. As she said, over and over.”

  As with “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, Munro would follow the same practice herself – the Calgary archives are filled with hundreds of pages of fragments, many of them beginnings only, often with numerous repetitions of the same words in similar paragraphs. While Jim Munro learned quickly that the girl he “fell hard” for at Western was a writer, and once they were married knew she was always working on something, he seldom knew much more than that. He hardly ever saw anything in manuscript. “Her writing was very private,” he remembers. “She was always changing and revising it. I didn’t ever ask to see anything in manuscript. When they came out, I’d see them when they were published.”

  “Due to Things in My Life, and Writing Blocks, and So On”

  When Mayfair published Munro’s “A Basket of Strawberries” in its November 1953 issue, the editors concluded the “About Ourselves” column, which appeared on the masthead page, with the following paragraph:

  When we read “A Basket of Strawberries,” this month’s Mayfair short story, for the first time we assumed that the author Alice Munro was a mature woman who had spent years learning about life and mastering the writer’s craft. We were astonished when we learned she’s only twenty-one. She was born in Wingham, Ontario, spent two years at the University of Western Ontario, left to get married and is a housewife in Vancouver. This is the first story to be published professionally – it arrives in the world simultaneously with her first child and we congratulate her on both achievements.26

  Like many of the stories Munro was writing during the 1950s, “A Basket of Strawberries” focuses on an older character, one not altogether outside her experience, but certainly not close to it – its protagonist is Mr. Torrance, a small-town high school Latin teacher who is cut off from all around him by his intellectualism and his aesthetic values. Because of a long-ago affair with a student whom he was forced to marry by the press of the town’s proprieties, he remains disgraced and so can never become principal; his wife is a woman who now disgusts him and with whom he has little in common. The story focuses on a moment when Mr. Torrance loses his grip; he confesses his disgrace to one of his prize students, who reveals the lapse to her friends. Nothing good for Mr. Torrance will come of this; his situation is bleak – the basket of strawberries an emblem of things he will never have.

  Interviewed by J.R. (Tim) Struthers of the University of Western Ontario in 1981, Munro spoke about the stories she was writing during the 1950s, some of which were later included in Dance of the Happy Shades, saying, “I think every young writer starts off this way, where at first the stories are exercises. They’re necessary exercises, and I don’t mean they aren’t felt and imagined as well as you can do them.” She then differentiates these stories from “The Peace of Utrecht,” “the first story I absolutely had to write and wasn’t writing to see if I could write that kind of story.” Looking at the contents of Dance and thinking particularly of the stories from the 1950s, Munro recalls, “Well, you see, there were periods in here where I wrote hardly anything, due to things in my life, and writing blocks, and so on.”27 “Cortes Island” recreates the frenzied pace of Munro’s writing, the repeated, rejected beginnings – “excitement and despair, excitement and despair” – and the Mayfair editorial note highlights one of the major “things” in Munro’s life that competed with her writing: the publication of her first commercial story was concurrent with the birth of the Munros’ first daughter. Combining marriage and family with “the black life of the artist” as she did from 1952 through the 1970s, this coincidence of births is a fitting one for Alice Munro. During that time, she was to outward appearances both wife and mother, but concurrently and somewhat secretly, she was also a deeply serious writer, writing on, draft after draft. This is the “double life” Catherine Ross sees in her biography, an apt characterization that well defines Munro’s time in British Columbia.

  The Munros lived in the apartment on Arbutus Street until the fall of 1952. One of the other tenants there, a woman who looked after an ancient and infirm woman, had been friendly to Alice initially but then turned on her. The summer was hot, and this woman took exception to Munro’s walking to the beach in her bathing suit, carrying only a towel. Some of this is captured in Mrs. Gorrie in “Cortes Island.” Working at the library, Munro made friends there with co-workers such as Mari Stainsby, who later was a neighbour in West Vancouver and who, in 1971, did one of the first published interviews with Munro. Through the library, too, Munro also met people w
ho were students at the University of British Columbia – images of student housing in Quonset huts, later referred to in stories, come from these years. There were other associations too, and the regular visits to the Careys and MacKendricks. During fall 1952 they moved to another apartment on Argyle Street, where they lived into 1953, though for just six months. Early that year Alice became pregnant so, with financial help from Jim’s father, they bought their first house at 445 West King’s Road, North Vancouver. They were living there when Sheila Margaret Munro was born on October 5, 1953. Alice was just twenty-two at the time.

  As anyone who has had children knows, a baby’s arrival changes the life parents have had – utterly. During the 1950s most of those changes fell almost wholly on the mother. In just over a year after Sheila’s birth Munro was pregnant again and, less than two years after that, she was pregnant a third time. Remembering this period, Munro has said, “I was reading all the time, things that I would never try to read now, and [I would] write, and of course keep house and have babies to look after and dodge the neighbours.” (This dodging, she now says, happened when they lived on West King’s Road, not on Lawson.) More than this, Vancouver was not a place Munro took to readily. The image of the narrator in “Material,” pregnant and sulky in the midst of unceasing rains, captures her feeling of discomfort, but the best image of Alice Munro, as young mother in Vancouver during the fifties, is found in “The Moons of Jupiter.” There, Janet, the narrator, says that she was offended when her father told her that the years she was growing up were a blur to him. She is offended because those same years are so vivid to her. Yet the years when her own children