Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  We took our bathing suits, though the creek was hardly deep enough to wade in at this time of year; my mother took a library book, not her knitting – she did not knit on Sunday. She and my father and Elinor, the youngest, got into the front of the milk-truck, and the rest of us sat in the back, as we liked to do, and watched the road unwind behind us, the hills rise up as we went down – riding backwards gave you a funny feeling and made you seem to be going much faster.

  Characteristically, Munro follows this image – the children riding backwards – by then describing the country they saw, and with such detail that the reader sees it too: “It was a very hot day, but there had not been enough hot weather yet to burn the country up. The roadside bushes were still green and the money-musk was blooming unfaded in the long grass. Haying-time was almost over, but in some of the fields the coils were still standing.”35

  Apart from its first-person narration, “At the Other Place” is interesting because it draws on Munro’s own experience of the land the family kept in Blyth – presumably the Laidlaws went on such excursions. Similarly, the other stories from the early 1950s may be seen touching on her experience – “The Idyllic Summer” is set in the Muskoka of Munro’s summer spent waitressing, and “The Edge of Town” begins with a detailed description of Lower Wingham and the Lower Town Store. There Munro emphasizes the place’s separateness: “The sidewalk does not go any further, there are no more street lamps, and the town policeman does not cross the bridge.” The story is concerned with an outcast character, Harry Brooke, who is not introduced until the story’s second page, once the setting is established: “Up here the soil is shallow and stony; the creeks dry up in summer, and a harsh wind from the west blows all year long.” Harry, an ineffective storekeeper, is a person set apart from the town by his manner: “His expectancy, his seeking,” made the townspeople “wary, uneasily mocking. In a poor town like this, in a poor country, facing the year-long winds and the hard winters, people expect and seek very little; a rooted pessimism is their final wisdom. Among the raw bony faces of the Scotch-Irish, with their unspeaking eyes, the face of Harry was a flickering light, an unsteady blade; his exaggerated, flowering talk ran riot among barren statements and silences.” Like Mr. Torrance in “A Basket of Strawberries,” nothing good will come of this difference. But Munro is clearly back home in Wingham – this is personal material; when Jill Gardiner, of the University of New Brunswick, read it to her during an interview in June 1973, she commented, “And yet, you know, that was not an imagined setting. I actually lived [it] … it’s all real. It’s all there. I did not make it for its meaning. I was trying to find meaning.”

  During 1953 Munro worked on a story, never published, called “Pastime of a Saturday Night.” Like “A Basket of Strawberries,” it takes up the time she was studying for her exams toward the end of high school. She tried the material in both third and first person. She may have submitted the latter version to Weaver, since her name is written on the first page in his hand. Indeed, throughout her career, Munro has frequently sent stories off unsigned, “just to get rid of them,” she has said. And while the story’s plot is of little concern, there is no doubt that she was drawing upon her own and her family’s circumstances. Thus, the grandmother here was influenced by Sadie Code Laidlaw:

  My grandmother was a big straight woman, with auburn-grey hair piled in a pyramid on top of her head. She had great strength, and she loved a job she could swing to with her whole body; she missed the farm work she had done as a girl and a young wife. In her dealings with town people, and her conduct of town life, she was timid, strict, and haughty. She was not at ease there and the care of my mother fretted her, as all womanly business did, that asked delicacy and patience more than strength. But she drove herself to do it, believing that all uncongenial duties were for the strengthening of the soul. She was a Presbyterian; her harsh and stirring voice rang out above all the others as they sang the Psalms.

  In this story too Munro offers descriptions of the country, the town clock in its tower, and the activities on the town’s main street (that is, on Josephine Street, Wingham) of a Saturday night that all turn up in later work.36

  In January 1956 Weaver offered to buy “The Green April” for $125 for Anthology. Like “Pastime of a Saturday Night,” some of its characters are based on Munro’s aunt Maud and grandmother Laidlaw living in town, though Munro has invented a half-witted cousin. In the same letter, he returns “The Day of the Butterfly,” a story published in the July 1956 issue of Chatelaine and later included in Dance of the Happy Shades. Weaver also comments on “The Edge of Town” in Queen’s Quarterly, which he had seen, and reports that he had heard that Chatelaine had bought one of her stories – this one was probably “How Could I Do That?”, a story Weaver had rejected (as “The Chesterfield Suite”) but which appeared in the March 1956 issue of the magazine. He asks, “I wonder if you have tried to send any of your fiction to the United States? I have often thought that you might find it useful and interesting to have some comments from editors in the United States, and I am sure that some of the more serious magazines there would at least be interested in reading some of your stories.”

  This letter, written about five years after Munro first made contact with Weaver and more than two after they had met – Weaver had walked up to the North Vancouver house on a very hot day in 1953 – might well be seen as typifying his interest in and support of Munro’s work: an acceptance, compliments, a useful suggestion, and a rejection – in that order. The year before he wrote this letter, Weaver had written a CBC memorandum to Robert Patchell, who worked on literary programs in Vancouver, regarding Munro. Weaver reports and details his Toronto group’s negative readings of Munro’s “Thanks for the Ride” and “The Chesterfield Suite,” but in the final paragraph he addresses a disagreement between those in the CBC in Vancouver and those in Toronto:

  One reason I have been very slow to write you about the stories is that I admire Alice just about as much as you do – after all I did manage to buy what I suspect was the first short story she ever sold – but she also strikes me as the kind of writer who won’t fold up under firm criticism, and I don’t think we need to take stories from her because we are afraid she might otherwise stop writing all together.

  Weaver recalls that there was a feeling among Patchell and others in Vancouver, who had come to know Munro there as something of a local talent, that if the CBC asked too much of her she might “be damaged,” and “might stop writing.” Weaver saw this, then and now, as having something to do with the relation between a regional office and the centre, Toronto – that is, as an instance of Canadian regionalism – but he also thinks it was a real fear about Munro in British Columbia. Obviously, Weaver did not think the caution was justified and, just as obviously, he was right.37

  Throughout the 1950s, Munro kept writing stories, submitting them to Weaver for broadcast consideration and also sending them to magazines. In 1953 and 1954 a story was published each year and there were two in 1955. Weaver also broadcast two stories during 1954–55. Three Munro stories were published in both 1956 and 1957, and she had another, “The Green April,” broadcast on Anthology. Of these latter seven stories, Munro excluded four from Dance of the Happy Shades, but the other three – “The Time of Death,” “The Day of the Butterfly,” and “Thanks for the Ride” – were included in that first book when it was published in 1968. During the mid-1950s Munro was producing her first mature work.

  During 1956–57 Munro published three stories in Chatelaine. The first of these, “The Chesterfield Suite,” was the one that Weaver rejected, writing to Patchell that though “it could be done quite successfully on radio,” it is “not terribly exciting.” The four people who read her work in Toronto agreed “Alice is a writer who should be encouraged in every possible way” but, for Weaver, “The Chesterfield Suite” and “Thanks for the Ride” were “not really successful.” When he returned the second Chatelaine story, “The Day of the Butterfly,�
�� to Munro, Weaver said it was “a pleasant story, but not really as interesting as much of your other work.” But he adds that “it is quite possible you might be able to interest a magazine in this story.” The third story, “The Dangerous One,” appeared in the July 1957 Chatelaine. In the March 1956 issue, which carried “The Chesterfield Suite” as “How Could I Do That?”, Munro is described, accompanied by a small photograph, on the masthead page as “a prolific and successful writer. Since she began writing during her student days at the University of Western Ontario, twenty-four-year-old Mrs. Munro has had stories read over the CBC and published in magazines and university journals. Most of them have had a small-town background similar to her own that, until six years ago, was Wingham, Ont. Now she lives in North Vancouver, does part-time work in a library, and cares for a daughter, Sheila, who is, her mother says, ‘wild and merry, contrary and delightful, as only a two-year-old can be.’ ”38

  Since this brief biography notes that with “How Could I Do That?”, Munro was making “her first appearance in Chatelaine,” it is fair to surmise that editors at the magazine thought they had found a new talent appropriate to their readers’ tastes. But as Weaver’s faint praise of “Day of the Butterfly” implies, magazines like Chatelaine were looking for a certain sort of story – those centred on women’s experiences – and the three stories of Munro’s they published conformed to type: “How Could I Do That?” focuses on a teenaged daughter’s cruel snub to her mother in front of her girlfriends; “The Day of the Butterfly” (published in the magazine as “Good-By, Myra”), on the narrator’s memory of Myra Sayla, an outsider from her group of schoolgirl friends, who falls ill and dies; “The Dangerous One,” about a cousin who comes to live with a protagonist’s grandmother and who proves to be dangerous because she is both a liar and a thief.

  That Weaver rejected such stories – and that Chatelaine bought them – is significant. Weaver and his colleagues at the CBC were pushing Munro away from conventional stories and toward her own material. In May of 1957, Weaver wrote Munro, rejecting a story called “The Cousins.” After taking detailed issue with Munro’s treatment of her material, Weaver summarized their reaction to the piece by describing it bluntly as “a fairly disastrous failure.” After such a categorical rejection, Weaver asks for a letter telling him what she is doing. “Have you begun work on a novel yet?” He says, “I may have given your name to Robert Fulford, Managing Editor of Mayfair Magazine” because that magazine “is once again buying short stories from time to time and might be worth trying.” As it happened, Gladys Shenner, the Chatelaine editor who had bought Munro’s stories, had left the magazine, so it is not altogether clear that Munro would have continued selling stories to them in any case. But here – and over the next three or four years especially, as Munro submitted and then sold stories to the Montrealer at Weaver’s suggestion, and as the idea of a collection of stories became more possible – Weaver was consistently both critical and encouraging.39

  A key instance of Weaver’s ability to both support Munro and push her involves “Thanks for the Ride,” a story she no longer admires but one that, when she wrote it in 1955, represented just the ambition Weaver was speaking about when he rejected “The Cousins.” The story focuses on an adolescent pickup affair. Responding to the readings it received at the CBC, Munro kept revising and working on it.40 Along with several other editors, Weaver was just then founding a new literary quarterly, the Tamarack Review (1956–1982), an important presence during this early and crucial time in Canadian literary history. Weaver was one of two editors of the quarterly; the other was William Toye, who worked at Oxford University Press in Toronto. Weaver ran Tamarack concurrent with his work at the CBC; at some point “Thanks for the Ride” left the CBC and went there. Munro recalls having to redo it once it was rejected by the Tamarack Review, since Jim, having read it, made some critical comments when it came back. She responded, in a rage, by taking the manuscript to the trash and throwing it out. Then Weaver wrote and asked to see it again, so she redid it yet again and “Thanks for the Ride” – the same version that was included in Dance of the Happy Shades – was the lead story in Tamarack’s second issue.

  Throughout, Weaver was doubtless well aware that, given its risqué subject matter, he could not broadcast the story, but publishing it in a literary review was another matter. For him, that was not the point: he was prodding Munro to make this ambitious story a more accomplished one. Whether he knew it or not, Weaver was also pushing Munro to go deeper into her personal material: although Lois in “Thanks for the Ride” is not an explicitly autobiographical character, Munro doubtless knew girls like her who lived in Lower Town, girls who dropped out of school early and found work in the Wingham glove works, girls who were often viewed by boys as sexual objects rather than as persons. Dick, the narrator, is a middle-class boy who has his father’s car for a weekend visit to his mother at a religious health camp; his background is thus somewhat analogous to Jim Munro’s. By encouraging Munro to go deeper into these characters, Weaver was pressing her to sharpen her sense of the class differences that existed in her marriage, differences that, she has said, were always there during her time with Jim.

  These contexts define “Thanks for the Ride” as an important transitional story. The first-person narrative, one that manages to reveal Lois’s anguish by way of external description, shows a marked improvement in Munro’s handling of character relative to setting, and the development in the story as revealed by the versions in the Calgary archive demonstrates that Munro did respond to Weaver’s critique. Munro has said, speaking of the whole of her career, that “at a certain point I need somebody”; that is, she needs another set of eyes, another sensibility, another assessment. For her, the first such person was Robert Weaver, backed up by his primary reader, Joyce Marshall, and the other readers at the CBC: he supported and encouraged her, he criticized her work in a professional, positive way, he suggested other publishers, he kept up their literary and professional connection. As she was later to write: “Connection. That was what it was all about.”41 During the 1950s, Robert Weaver was Alice Munro’s most important connection to the growing world of serious Canadian writing.

  Yet but for the lifeline Weaver offered to Munro through his letters and his very occasional literary parties when he visited, Alice Munro had to persist alone as a writer. Jim was very supportive although, as his comments about “Thanks for the Ride” showed, like many spouses he was not always able to hit the right note; in any case, he saw little of his wife’s work in progress. Through Weaver Munro had made some local literary contacts in Vancouver, but her personality and family situation did not incline her to encourage them. In 1955, just after Catherine’s birth and death, Munro went out to the University of British Columbia to hear Ethel Wilson speak – Wilson was a writer whose work she admired and who, she knew, also lived in Vancouver. Munro later wrote to Mary McAlpine, a writer and early Wilson biographer, that her discovery of Wilson’s work in the early 1950s made her go “out of my mind with delight. Real writing was being done right where I lived!”42 But Munro did not speak to her. Through Weaver she had met some of the people at the university involved in creative writing – people like novelist Robert Harlow – but this, too, was not a connection Munro was prepared to follow up, aware as she was of her own lack of university credentials. During her years in Vancouver, Munro came to know Margaret Laurence, who had returned from Africa and settled there with her family in 1957. Munro met her in 1960 at a book launch for Laurence’s first novel, This Side Jordan, and both Munros remember seeing the Laurences socially during the early 1960s. Particularly, Munro recalls being aware that Laurence was writing The Stone Angel.

  But mainly it was a solitary business for Munro as she pressed on, writing and submitting her stories, having some broadcast and publishing an increasing number of them in a variety of venues as the decade passed. When she was profiled for the first time in the North Vancouver Citizen in August 1961 under the h
eadline “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories,” the writer quoted Robert Fulford who described her as “the least praised good writer in Canada.”43

  “A Lump of Complicated Painful Truth Pushing at My Heart”

  After Jenny Munro’s birth in June 1957 and ongoing, ultimately fruitless attempts at novels – work that brought on depression and a period of writer’s block – Munro had no publications or any stories broadcast until the early 1960s. Almost twenty years later she wrote about this period in what appears a draft connected to “The Moons of Jupiter.” In a scene showing the narrator at home with her children in rainy Vancouver, Munro writes: “Yesterday I was sick and stayed in bed. I was not very sick, just wanted to shut things down and pull up the covers and have hot drinks and watch television.” She continues, offering remembered details of Funorama, of her daughters’ reactions to that program (it is 1959, they are six and two, just as Sheila and Jenny were that year), and of the time the program kept the girls occupied and so gave her time to think:

  I never thought a television program would make me nostalgic, if nostalgic is what I am. I spent a lot of time then being nostalgic for, or at least harking back to, something else. I wanted that fifteen minutes to myself for harking-back purposes. I was trying to be a writer but I seldom wrote anything. What I did was try to get clear my mind, and hold on to, something I meant to write about. It was the past, it wasn’t yet my past. In my bedroom I had a print of Chagall’s I and the Village which I looked to for help. I don’t like admitting that – the moony white cow’s head, the precious stones, the upside-down church, all seem rather stylish and cleaned-up, in relation to that real past I had to deal with, even as a dream that picture is a long way out – but it is true that when I lay on the bed and looked at it I could feel a lump of complicated painful truth pushing at my heart; I knew I wasn’t empty, I knew that I had streets and houses and conversations inside; not much idea how to get them out and no time or way to get at them.44