Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  The draft goes on to explain why this Chagall print hung where it did, and this in turn takes her into an analysis of her marriage, and her husband and men generally. This vignette captures Munro the writer in Vancouver in 1959 feeling “a lump of complicated painful truth pushing at” her heart, but knowing “she wasn’t empty.” It was about this time that in her reading Munro discovered Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, a book that proved to be talismanic. Comparing her first reading of Emily of New Moon to Welty’s 1949 collection of stories, Munro has said that she read Emily “when I was just touching on becoming a writer.” Welty’s book, by contrast, came to Munro when she was a writer: “It is so good, it is so good, and I read it over and over again. And not really to find out how she did it, just to let it sink in. It was the kind of writing I most hoped to do.… I read it for just transcendence, almost to get into that world.” “That world” is the creation of Morgana, Mississippi – its people, its place, its ethos – so richly and fully drawn that a reader participates in its very being, its essences. So deep was the effect of The Golden Apples on Munro that as the years passed she felt “that I shouldn’t read it too often, because there are writers who can absolutely mesmerize you so you’re echoing things they do without even knowing it, so you stay away from them when you’re writing.” And at the time she discovered Welty’s book, as her recollection of that time in the Funorama fragment shows, Munro was tentative, open to influence. Just after she spoke about Welty, Munro added that during her early years as a writer she “felt so unsure of my voice. I can still feel unsure of it.” Being a writer is not like being a surgeon – you learn an operation and then just go in there and do it, confident you will do it right – “Writing isn’t like this at all. It isn’t like this at all. It’s just constant despair.” Constant despair over the insufficiency of what has actually been created. Or, as she wrote in her tribute essay “Golden Apples,” she was struck, reading Welty, “by the beauty of our lives streaming by, in Morgana and elsewhere.”45

  Doubtless part of the appeal of The Golden Apples, for Munro, had to do with its form: it is a collection of interconnected short stories, with all its characters derived from the same Mississippi town. When he had written to her about “The Cousins” in May 1957, Weaver had also asked what was to be, for Munro during the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the vexed question: “Have you begun work on a novel yet?” At this time in North American publishing in general, but in Canada especially, there was a widely held prejudice against collections of short stories. It was a truism among publishers that such collections did not sell, and that they should be attempted only once an author’s reputation was already established through the prior publication of a novel. Munro came up against this view early, and it hounded her well into the 1970s – indeed, it is fair to see the almost twenty-year genesis of her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, as a direct result of this attitude.

  So much of the “constant despair” Munro felt during the later 1950s and into the 1960s was brought on by her ongoing response to Weaver’s question. Her depression was not clinical, it was derived from her continuing failure during these year to write a novel, despite numerous attempts. The process proved counterproductive for her, but during this time she worked away at a projected novel, one variously entitled “The Death of the White Fox” or “The White Norwegian,” or just “The Norwegian,” which exists in manuscript in the Calgary archives. There is another, “The Boy Murderer,” which features a character named Franklin coming home from the war and jumping off the train before it gets to his hometown, Goldenrod. Munro wrote this scene numerous times; some of Franklin’s situation and some members of his family were the basis of Garnett French’s in Lives of Girls and Women. And Munro has said that “The Found Boat,” a story included in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, was salvaged from another attempt at a novel.

  “The Death of a White Fox” is the most complete of these ventures. It is the story of two sisters – Angie, fifteen, and May, seven – who are sent to live with relatives in Jubilee during the summer of 1947 because their mother, a widow living in London, is either dead or going into a sanatorium for six months. (This is something of the same circumstance faced by her grandmother Bertha and aunt Blanche Stanley, who were each taken in as teenagers when their mother died.) One draft begins:

  On the bus all afternoon and all evening, from noon till dark. How far was it, then, from the city to Jubilee? Not that far. It was only that the bus did not travel very fast, that we stopped and had waits in all the little towns along the way. Towards evening we stopped in Dungannon, in St. Augustine, in Kincaid, Crosshill, and Black Horse. Names familiar to me from my mother’s stories of her old life at home, little legendary towns of brick and wood and modern service stations; I had always wanted to see them. Why; what did I expect to find? Nothing, really; I knew they would not be very different from other places, I knew there would be nothing in particular to recognize. But my mother had been here, my mother had gone to dances and taught school here before I was born, and so I saw these towns in a fabled light, an emanation, probably, of my own marvelous, mystical egoism.

  In an interesting way, Munro is reversing geography here – she takes Angie and May to Huron County where they find their mother’s personal history; this is what Alice Laidlaw, from Huron County, found in Scotch Corners when she visited there, both with her mother and sister in 1943 and later alone when she was herself sixteen. Equally, the geography Angie finds in Jubilee is reminiscent of Scotch Corners – a small lake formed by the widening of a river, as the Mississippi does there. And more than the setting is borrowed from life. Munro draws obliquely on her parents’ history here; Chris, the stepson of Angie and May’s remarried grandmother, returned home from the war to begin fox farming:

  And Chris spent his time making a special and elaborate kind of feeding-dish for each pen, making watering-dishes that could be tipped and emptied from the outside of the pen, so the water would always be fresh, building new, ventilated kennels and wooden runs along the wire. He was a slow worker, and all the things he made were ingenious and carefully finished. In the colony of pens where the foxes lived everything was of his own design. The foxes inhabited a world he had made for them; it was separate and complete. In the fall he would kill those he wanted to pelt, using chloroform, and a box he had invented for that purpose.

  These details are taken from Bob Laidlaw’s fox farm. Chris, who is something of a ne’er-do-well, is engaged to a nurse in Toronto, Alice Kelling, who provides him with the money to buy an expensive white fox, a Norwegian, to introduce into his breeding stock. While not exact, this relation is reminiscent of Annie Chamney’s provision of money to begin the Laidlaw fox farm in Wingham. Though engaged, Chris is attracted to Angie, just as she is to him, and the two act on it – stealing away several times to kiss and explore one another, not more than that – until Chris withdraws; in response, Angie releases his prized white fox and, as a consequence, the two sisters are sent away again.

  Reasonably complete, “The Death of the White Fox” in its various guises and directions reads more like a long short story than it does a novel, although there are sections where a broader, novelistic, background is created. Remembering the progress of the writing, Munro said that she had it going for a while but then Jim’s parents came to visit, keeping her from the novel. When she returned to it, she discovered it was not working. More than that, she sees this time as a “bleak period” in her life as a writer, noting that “you don’t like to tell anybody about it.”46 Looking at “The Death of a White Fox” now, what is most interesting about this manuscript is the way Munro drew on its various details and motifs in her subsequent writing: elements of “Boys and Girls,” “Images,” Lives of Girls and Women, “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” as well as others are readily visible here. And though intended as a novel, and pursued in just that way for some time, “The Death of the White Fox” demonstrates that Munro’s imagination has long seemed most
fixed on the story form, that the broader canvas and single narrative of the traditional novel have consistently eluded her. Rather, Munro has created novelistic effects in her use of shorter forms, a method that has become ever more pronounced as her career has progressed.

  Though the late 1950s was a frustrating time for Munro, she continued to pursue possibilities through Robert Weaver. In early 1958, for example, he wrote her about including one of her stories in an anthology he was editing for Oxford University Press and wondered about the progress of her novel. He had heard about her work on it from Robert Harlow in Vancouver and suggested that he might “broadcast or publish a chapter.” He offers to suggest publishers for the novel and asks, “Did you have any luck with the English magazines I mentioned to you?” Late that year Weaver orchestrated Munro’s first application for a grant from the newly formed Canada Council in support of her writing. She wanted to use the money to pay for babysitting. He arranged for application forms, suggested people who would be willing to write letters of recommendation, and then contacted them himself. At one point he writes Munro that he’s “glad you don’t mind my interfering” with this matter. At this time too Weaver was encouraging Munro to apply to another new body, the Humanities Research Council of Canada – something she apparently did, though there is no record of an application.

  Although Munro’s application to the Canada Council proved unsuccessful, this episode reveals Weaver’s utter willingness to work on Munro’s behalf and, as well, it reveals Munro herself in early 1959. In December 1958 Weaver telegraphs Munro that he has arranged letters of support for her application from Murdo MacKinnon (the Western English professor who recruited her for Honours English), Milton Wilson (literary editor, Canadian Forum), and Weaver himself. He also said that no one was available to write from Chatelaine, owing to staff changes, and he suggested that she approach George Woodcock, who “knows your work and would probably write from Vancouver if you wish.” Just then, Woodcock was founding the magazine Canadian Literature – it began publication in 1959. A few days after the new year, Munro wrote back to Weaver:

  I got your telegram suggesting George Woodcock. Do you know I very carefully composed a letter, feeling that since I hadn’t met him I couldn’t really phone, and I put it in an envelope, sealed and addressed it, and then I simply couldn’t send it. This is rather peculiar and hard to explain. In fact I can’t explain it. I suppose I felt I had no right to ask him. Or I was afraid of being turned down, which would bother me a good deal because I respect his opinion. I felt I was weakening my chances by not asking him but I could not do it. The truth is I would probably have been unable to bring myself to ask anybody, when it came right down to it. This is pretty stupid, because basically I don’t feel so worthless and undeserving as all that. But thanks anyway.

  When he replies to this, Weaver says that he is “sorry you didn’t approach Woodcock” since “there was no reason for you to be shy. I’m sure that he would have been quite prepared to write a letter for you; if I had thought that shyness might keep you from getting in touch with him I would have sent him a wire myself and I’m sorry now that I didn’t do it.” Weaver continues to say that “three letters should be sufficient if the Council feels any sympathy for your application.” They apparently did not: she did not get the grant.

  In the same letter in which she describes not approaching Woodcock, Munro remarks that she “had heard of The Montrealer but I had no idea they paid as well as that. If you have time someday I would be glad of the address. Though I don’t seem to think along the short-story lines any more. Jim wishes I did. It was much nicer, financially.” In his next letter, Weaver provides the address and tells her that they would probably consider stories that have been broadcast but not published. Munro’s comments here – both with regard to Woodcock and concerning the Montrealer – reveal her in early 1959 as just the person, and just the writer, she remembered when she recreated herself overhearing her daughters watching Funorama: Munro “knew she wasn’t empty.” At the same time, as she explained to Weaver, she was also shy and unable to ask anyone to write on her behalf. When she also says she is not thinking “along short-story lines any more,” it suggests that Munro was trying to bolster her own feelings about her various attempts at a novel.47

  Little more than a month after Munro wrote to Weaver, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw reached the end of her almost twenty-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease. She died on February 10, 1959, in the Wingham hospital. The Advance-Times ran the notice at the top of its first page:

  Friends in this community were saddened to learn of the passing of Mrs. Robert E. Laidlaw at the Wingham General Hospital on Tuesday of last week. Mrs. Laidlaw had suffered for over 20 years from a chronic illness, which, as it progressed, left her greatly handicapped. For the past two months she had been a patient at the hospital and her gallant fight against heavy odds will long be remembered by family and friends. She never lost interest in community affairs and until the last tried to lead a useful life.

  Munro did not attend her mother’s funeral. Jenny was just twenty months old, it was winter. The trip back east would have been expensive and this was a death long anticipated. Remembering, Munro says, “So I didn’t try very hard, but I always wished I had – I wish very much I had. I wish I had come to see her when she was dying. But at the time, I had a harder heart.… That was part of your intellectual pride. It was part of mine, to look at things very clearly, and it was part of my revolt against Mother, who was, in her talk to me, sentimental in a self-serving way.” Munro had not seen her mother since she visited Ontario with Sheila during the summer of 1956.

  After Alice married and moved to Vancouver, Bob Laidlaw had continued to work as the second-shift night watchman at the foundry, and during those years began raising turkeys. This combination brought improved finances for the family and some luxuries they had never had. Mr. Laidlaw and Bill – who was in high school, and then also went to Western on scholarship – worked outside most of the time, leaving Mrs. Laidlaw with Sheila, a year younger than Bill, in the house. Their friend and neighbour Julie Cruikshank recalls visiting Mrs. Laidlaw regularly as a child during the early 1950s; she “was alone much of the time, and she was very, very welcoming when I came.” Mrs. Laidlaw gave Julie chocolates – a real treat – and they would talk. Mrs. Laidlaw shook, and she was somewhat difficult to understand, but these visits were part of Julie Cruikshank’s childhood routine. “Mr. Laidlaw would come in, usually from the barn, and sit down and be very friendly.” Mrs. Laidlaw was very slow, she also recalls, “sitting much of the time.”48

  During the late 1940s, when Alice was still at home and was looking after things, Mrs. Laidlaw acknowledged her daughter’s contribution and was grateful. But during the years after Alice had married, her sister, Sheila – then also in high school – had to deal with Mrs. Laidlaw, who had “gone right under with the disease,” according to Munro. Sheila was able to finish high school and leave for art college, but there is no question in Munro’s mind that her sister’s circumstances were more difficult than her own. To help, the Laidlaws had a succession of women come in, but none worked out well. By the time of Mrs. Laidlaw’s death in 1959, all the children were gone, and Bob Laidlaw was left to look after things himself, along with such assistance as his elderly mother and aunt in town and friends could provide.

  On July 10, 2002, Munro’s birthday, the Wingham Horticultural Society dedicated the Alice Munro Garden next to the North Huron Museum, the former post office, on Josephine Street in Wingham. It was a gala occasion and Munro was being celebrated by hundreds of people. As she said, “all was wonderful and happy.” Then there was a surprise, a surprise worthy of an Alice Munro story. “I was signing books and a woman, an old woman, came up to me and said, did you know your mother got out of the hospital?

  “She began to talk to me and then other people interrupted and she just stayed until she could get me, and she told me the whole story of how my mother got out in the snow
barefoot, got out some back door.” She had made her way to this woman’s house. The woman, a nurse, had nursed her in the hospital, and Mrs. Laidlaw knew where she lived. “And she went and knocked on the door in her hospital gown and told her she had to get out of there and she had to go home.”

  As Munro wrote in “The Peace of Utrecht,” the first of her stories to deal with the facts and memory of her mother, the one that uses Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s flight, people emerge in life to make “sure the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without.” When this woman approached her, Munro already knew about her mother’s escape, as her story makes clear; Aunt Maud and her grandmother made sure to tell her, but she did not know the details, that her mother was barefoot in the snow. Bob Laidlaw had not told Alice, off in Vancouver, how bad things were with her mother – and he certainly did not tell her about the escape; “he didn’t see why we had to know anything so harrowing.”49

  “I Felt As If My Old Life Was Lying Around Me, Waiting to Be Picked Up Again”

  Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s death led directly to “The Peace of Utrecht,” which appeared in the spring 1960 issue of the Tamarack Review, little more than a year after her mother’s death. Munro has called this story her “first really painful autobiographical story … the first time I wrote a story that tore me up”; it was one “I didn’t even want to write.” To another interviewer, she has commented that “Peace” “was the story where I first tackled personal material. It was the first story I absolutely had to write” and, because of this, there was nothing in it of the exercise Munro remembers in the stories she had written to this point.50 And more than this, “The Peace of Utrecht” represents Munro’s imaginative homecoming to Wingham after her years away in Vancouver, home to the personal material that would subsequently become her hallmark.