Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  were little, when I lived with their father – yes, blur is the word for it. I remember hanging out diapers, bringing in and folding diapers; I can recall the kitchen counters of two houses and where the clothesbaskets sat. I remember the television programs – Popeye the Sailor, The Three Stooges, Funorama. When Funorama came on it was time to turn out the lights and cook supper. But I couldn’t tell the years apart. We lived outside Vancouver in a dormitory suburb: Dormir, Dormer, Dormouse – something like that. I was sleepy all the time then; pregnancy made me sleepy, and the night feedings, and the West Coast rain falling. Dark dripping cedars, shiny dripping laurel; wives yawning, napping, visiting, drinking coffee, folding diapers; husbands coming home at night from the city across the water. Every night I kissed my homecoming husband in his wet Burberry and hoped he might wake me up; I served up meat and potatoes and one of the four vegetables he permitted. He ate with a violent appetite, then fell asleep on the living-room sofa. We had become a cartoon couple, more middle-aged in our twenties than we would be in middle age.

  After this vignette, Munro writes a summary two-sentence paragraph that, along with the ending of “Miles City, Montana,” stands out as a profound articulation of the child-parent relation: “Those bumbling years are the years our children will remember all their lives. Corners of the yards I never visited will stay in their heads.”28

  The two houses, with their separate kitchen counters and places for laundry baskets, correspond to the Munros’ moves. They were in the house on West King’s Road – a small, one-storey bungalow they moved into in 1953 – and lived there for just a few years before in 1956 they moved to 2749 Lawson Avenue, West Vancouver. It was a larger, grander house, ringed round by luxuriant hedges and bushes and with a view looking down over other residential streets and Marine Drive to Burrard Inlet with its ships at anchor west of the Lion’s Gate Bridge and, more distant, Vancouver itself. There they lived until the family moved to Victoria during the summer of 1963 in order to open Munro’s Bookstore. On Lawson Sheila and her younger sister, Jenny Alison, born June 4, 1957, grew, played, and went to school. The Munro family left that house on Lawson during the summer of 1961 to make a trip back home to Ontario, for a visit that became the basis of “Miles City, Montana,” one of Munro’s most autobiographical stories.

  Between Sheila and Jenny, Alice and Jim had a second daughter. Catherine Alice Munro was born early on the morning of July 28, 1955. But before that day was through she was dead, having been born without functioning kidneys. Initially, it looked as if the Munros would face a long-term infirmity. The Munros opted to have Catherine buried without a funeral in an available grave – the body placed in a small box, a common practice in such situations – without any formal marker or service. In subsequent years, Munro was deeply affected by the memories of Catherine; she told Ross that she had recurrent dreams about Catherine until Jenny was born in 1957, dreams that involved a lost baby left outside. Another story in The Love of a Good Woman, “My Mother’s Dream,” connects with these dreams.

  But more than that, Catherine Alice Munro – and a fictional figure named Elizabeth based on her – has been a presence in her mother’s writings. When Munro was pregnant for the last time, with her daughter Andrea in 1966, she took to writing poetry. Many of these poems are signed – in Munro’s hand – “Anne Chamney,” and one appeared in the Canadian Forum so attributed. Among them is one contrasting Catherine, her “dark child,” with her two daughters who lived: “Her face was long and dark / Pulled down by the harrowing effort / To live, to drive blood through her poisoned body. / In a few hours she died.” She says that “it would be presumptuous to bring any word to her,” since she does not even know where her “dark child” is buried. Addressing her directly, Munro sees her as a “child who went without comfort / Without a word to make you human / Helplessly poisoning yourself / Because my body made your body incomplete.”

  During the late 1970s, Munro worked on a story she called “Shoebox Babies.” In a notebook version of this story, the focus is on Prue, the adult daughter to Bonnie, a famous poet. While Prue was still a child, Bonnie bore Elizabeth, a daughter who lived less than a day. The draft includes Bonnie’s account of the shoebox burial, a meeting between Bonnie and an undertaker to make burial arrangements, and Prue’s discovery, years later when she was an adult, that her mother had published a book of poems called “Shoebox Babies.” Shocked by this discovery, Prue thinks, “I don’t understand the function of art. Art.”

  In the same way and at about the same time, Munro wrote a notebook draft of “Miles City, Montana.” It includes another baby Elizabeth, stillborn, buried in the same way. Her presence between the two living children – born fifteen months after the eldest, Cynthia – animates that story’s meditation on the child-parent relation. Munro contrasts the personality of each parent as she dissects each person’s reaction to the near drowning of their younger daughter, Meg, in the story’s central episode. After four-year-old Meg is pulled from the pool, safe and alive, the narrator meditates on what would have occurred had she drowned; those thoughts are in the finished story. What is not there, however, is any mention of the dead baby Elizabeth. “Andrew believed in luck,” Munro writes, “his luck, would celebrate it like a virtue. If something not lucky happened, he would shove that out of mind, ashamed. That was why he never mentioned the dead baby. And my mentioning it would seem a kind of sickening parade of misfortune, a dishonesty.”29 Having Catherine Alice buried so long without formal recognition wore on Munro; in 1990, she arranged to have a marker placed in the North Vancouver cemetery – it does not mark her grave, but it at least recognizes her being.

  The 1961 Munro family car trip from which “Miles City, Montana” derives was not her first trip home to Ontario. When Sheila was still an infant, just nine months old, Munro flew with her baby back to visit the families. Her father-in-law, Arthur Munro, had made a business trip to Vancouver just before Sheila’s birth and, afterwards, Margaret Munro had flown out to help after the baby arrived. So when she was back east during the summer of 1954 Munro visited her family in Wingham. Given Mrs. Laidlaw’s illness and the expense involved, her parents could not travel.

  During the summer of 1956, Munro took Sheila back to Ontario by train for a visit. That was the last time she saw her mother. Jenny was born the next year, so Munro was not able to make the trip again until 1959 after Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s death. During these years, the years of her mother’s last illness, Munro wrote to her parents (“Dad wrote wonderful letters” – he was the correspondent) and to her grandmother, Sadie Laidlaw – “I wrote to Grandma less often, because I had to be more circumspect.” During her trips home, those of the 1960s as well as the 1950s, Alice and her daughters would also visit the Munros in Oakville. After her years at university and in Vancouver, she found she was more used to the middle-class life the Munros lived than she was to the circumscribed life at home. While it was clear that Arthur and Margaret Munro were initially bewildered by their son’s choice of a girl to marry, there is no doubt that they came genuinely to like and value her as the years passed. However, when they visited his parents, things were more difficult for Jim than for Alice – in some ways his choice of a wife was indicative of his difference in his parents’ eyes. As a child, Jim had felt closer to his paternal grandfather, a minister who had moved from a church in a very small town in Manitoba to Oakville, and spent considerable time with him. His aesthetic interests, too, were at variance with his accountant father’s views. But throughout their relations, Alice says, Jim’s family was very good to her: “Everything was amicable.” Once she left British Columbia and moved back to Ontario, she continued to visit Margaret Munro and also saw a good deal of Jim’s sister, also named Margaret.30

  In “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro uses the phrase “bumbling years” to refer to the time when Sheila and Jenny were children, and that may well be an apt characterization of Munro’s life as a housewife in North and West Vancouver from 195
3 until the family moved to Victoria in 1963. Given Andrea’s later arrival in 1966, Munro thinks of her role as a mother as falling into two periods, one in Vancouver, the other later in Victoria, after they established the bookstore and settled into a new place, one Munro found more comfortable than she had Vancouver. The neighbours that Munro had dodged in Vancouver were women, also housewives and mothers who, in seeking for connection, interfered with Munro’s ongoing writing by inviting her to coffee or to engage in other neighbourhood activities when she might be writing. Not at all forthcoming about what she was actually doing, and too polite to rebuff people, Munro was drawn into more of these activities during the years on Lawson Avenue than she would have liked. Jim Munro remembers that when people would call while Alice was writing, she was loath to tell them that she was busy, that she was working, and certainly not that she was writing. As she would later write in “Material,” “I never said the word write, Hugo had trained me not to, that word was like a bare wire to us.” Although she was annoyed that she had been interrupted, she never let her friends know they had done so.31

  In “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro offers a passage that, though ostensibly about Janet, her narrator, seems actually to derive from her own experiences as a young mother in Vancouver:

  When I was the age Nichola is now I had Nichola herself in a carry-cot or squirming in my lap, and I was drinking coffee all the rainy Vancouver afternoons with my neighbourhood friend, Ruth Boudreau, who read a lot and was bewildered by her situation, as I was. We talked about our parents, our childhoods, though for some time we kept clear of our marriages. How thoroughly we dealt with our fathers and mothers, deplored their marriages, their mistaken ambitions or fear of ambition, how competently we filed them away, defined them beyond any possibility of change. What presumption.

  Ruth Boudreau is based on Daphne Cue, who moved into a house across the laneway from the Munros in June 1959. She and her husband, Vic, then a commercial fisherman, were born and raised in West Vancouver. When they moved in across from the Munros, they had just had their first daughter, so the woman who was vacating the house thought to introduce her to Munro, who she knew had young daughters and also liked to read. The two became fast friends, and remain so today. They quickly saw that they were in danger of taking up too much of one another’s time, so they decided to meet just one afternoon a week, and that afternoon became sacred, according to both. They met, laughed, told stories, drank coffee, and smoked – but above all they talked about what they were reading. Like Munro, Cue had attended university (taking commerce, which she loathed). They each remember reading and discussing a three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence together – probably Edward Nehls’s D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, which was published between 1957 and 1959 – reading all of Katherine Mansfield, also Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and discussing Dickens, a particular favourite of Cue’s. Daphne recalls Munro seeming to have already read everything. Indeed, by the late fifties, Munro’s personal post-university reading of “most of the writers of the twentieth century you’re supposed to have read” had been going on for some time. “She was just a walking library as far as I was concerned.”

  Munro describes these times as not “like literary conversation. It would be just like high-powered gossip. All we knew about these people,” the authors and the characters they created, “and their books and their writing and everything. It was the most exciting talk I ever had; of course, it was the only time in our lives that we got to do this. We both read but we didn’t know anybody who read like this.” Beyond their shared reading, the women were personally compatible – they shared an irreverent sense of humour that allowed them to delight, when they were together, in making fun of the pretensions of their neighbours and acquaintances, giving them nicknames, making up funny stories about their lives. One such episode involved an affected and very British couple who lived in the neighbourhood. It had them naming the woman “Difficult Passage” because of a comment her husband made about his wife’s difficulties in childbirth; Cue and Munro imagined the couple’s sex life, told each other their versions of it, laughing so much that “we sat down on street benches and just broke up,” Cue remembers. Although the two did sometimes see each other as couples – Cue recalls attending the Munros’ parties with her husband – the relationship was mainly between the two women. Recalling this time, Cue says that she “thinks Alice probably got a lot from women friends”; besides Cue, there were other friends, Mari Stainsby among them.

  Although the two spoke most frequently about their daily lives, local matters, and reading, Cue was well aware Munro was writing – the bedroom at the back of the house Munro worked in was next to their shared lane. “She’d be typing away every day, in the afternoons, when Sheila was at school and Jenny was having a nap.” Munro has frequently said that, during the time Sheila and Jenny were growing up, she was “very big on naps.” Generally, she did not talk much about what she was writing, but in two instances Cue was her source for stories. Apart from the grafting on of a play from her own high school experience, and having the boyfriend become an undertaker, Munro took the whole of “An Ounce of Cure” from Cue’s experience. When Munro sold the story to the Montrealer, she took Cue to dinner – there two sailors tried to pick them up. They were delighted by the impulse, but rebuffed the men. And while the circumstantial details are different, the hapless brother in “Forgiveness in Families” owes much to Cue’s own brother.32

  Munro’s “double life” during the 1950s and early 1960s in West Vancouver involved, on the one hand, the day-to-day details of suburban living with a husband and a young family, and a disciplined writing schedule on the other. As she would write in “Miles City, Montana,” her narrator’s “real work” was “a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.” The children needed care, the house needed cleaning, there were meals to prepare. There were also regular local excursions – Jim Munro remembers trips with the children to the beach (one is detailed in “Shoebox Babies”) and around Vancouver, as well as trips back home to Ontario.

  There was adult society too. Daphne Cue recalls that the Munros would periodically have parties, often around holidays, as would other couples. This was a time of great drinking at parties – “We didn’t fool around,” Munro recalls. They did not keep liquor in the house normally, but when they had a party, she says, “everybody got plastered.… I can remember hanging out diapers with such a hangover, such a headache, every motion painful. We thought that’s just what you did.” There was then also, both at these parties and other social occasions, a fair amount of extramarital flirtation. Munro attributes this to the fact that most people were in their twenties or early thirties and had married young; hence, things happened. But the more dramatic incidents, of flirtation acted upon, lay ahead. What happened at a party during the 1950s didn’t count. Munro offers a recreation of one of these West Vancouver parties, and one of these extramarital situations in “Jakarta,” in The Love of a Good Woman. Cue recalls such parties then down on the beach at Oak Bay in West Vancouver, parties that included skinny-dipping, though she does not remember being at any with the Munros. Judging from “Jakarta,” though, Munro must have found her way to one, since she offers a scene of “bare bodies splashing and running and falling into the dark water” and her character, Kath, talks to naked people emerging from the sea.33

  “The Kind of Writer Who Won’t Fold up Under Firm Criticism”

  When Munro arrived in Vancouver in January 1952, she had written several stories in addition to those that had appeared in Folio or had been submitted to Robert Weaver at CBC. During the summer of 1951, she had produced two stories, “The Return of the Poet,” which drew on her time at Western, and “The Yellow Afternoon,” which looked back to her high school years. Much edited and Canadianized – references to Maria Chapdelaine were added at a later stage – it was broadcast on Anthology, Weaver’s new program, in 1955. In conversation with Struthers in 1981, Munro characterized the 1950s – the
time before she wrote “The Peace of Utrecht” – as the time when her attitude was “I will be a writer.” After that story, which takes up the searing “personal material” surrounding her mother’s death in 1959, her attitude became “some things have to be written by me.”34 Thus Munro sees the 1950s stories largely as exercises, or what she calls “holding-pattern stories.” As with her subsequent characterization of her decision to leave her university studies behind, Munro is mostly persuasive here, but not completely. The stories Munro wrote, submitted, and published during the 1950s are more than exercises; they show her grappling with personal material early on – perhaps not with the deep feelings like those about her mother, but with the personal material derived from Wingham.

  Talking about the way she has accommodated herself to her reputation, Munro said, “In a way, I pretend that I’m not that person,” the writer, “and I go about my life as if I wasn’t.” Such an approach was easy to manage in the 1950s and into the 1960s – to all appearances Munro was just another suburban housewife and mother. Yet the connection she had made with Robert Weaver in 1951 was alive and the advice he offered, suggesting that she submit to “better Canadian magazines,” the Northern Review and the Canadian Forum, was advice she followed. The two stories she published after “A Basket of Strawberries” appeared in the Forum, “The Idyllic Summer” (which Weaver broadcast on Anthology in March 1954) and “At the Other Place.” These were followed, in 1955, with “The Edge of Town” in Queen’s Quarterly. Each of these stories shares the same weaknesses and strengths of “A Basket of Strawberries”: the descriptions of place are vivid, but the characters and situations are incompletely rendered.

  Yet in “At the Other Place” Munro uses first-person narration for the first time in a published story and, although the story’s action is melodramatic, the perspective she offers there is one that became characteristic. Signed Alice Laidlaw, the story begins: “On Sunday afternoons in the summer my father and Uncle Bert took turns going down to the other place to have a look at the sheep which were pastured there. Sometimes my father let us come with him. In July we all went down after church, and took a hamper of food with us and had a picnic. We did not go away – even five miles away – very often, and we did not have many picnics. We were excited.” After describing the food, Munro offers more family detail before establishing the narrative perspective: