Set squarely in the centre of “The Peace of Utrecht” is the history of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s lingering imprisoning illness and death. There too are Maud Code Porterfield and Sadie Code Laidlaw, living together in Jubilee, though just as Helen and Maddy’s aunts. It is the summer after their mother’s death, their father is long dead, and Helen – who did not return home for the funeral – has driven across the country with her children for a long visit with her unmarried older sister, Maddy. Helen “had won a scholarship and gone off to university,” as Munro writes in one draft, “and at the end of two years, to her own bewilderment, she was married, and going to live in Vancouver.” She still lives there. She is the story’s first-person narrator.
The core subject of the story and much of its detail are autobiographical. Having been home the summer after her mother’s death, Munro had learned about her mother’s “harrowing” escape from the hospital, and that is in the story. Much else is imagined: Maddy has elected for the past ten years, the years Helen has been away, to look after their mother, and many of Helen’s circumstances do not correspond to Munro’s. She draws on her own visit home, creating the homecoming she had experienced, but does so amid imagined family details – Helen drives herself across the continent, the home is more middle class, it is in the town, Maddy and Helen’s father is dead.
People ask me what it is like to be back in Jubilee. But I don’t know, I’m still waiting for someone to tell me, to make me understand that I am back. The day I drove up from Toronto with my children in the back seat of the car I was very tired, on the last lap of a twenty-five-hundred-mile trip. I had to follow a complicated system of highways and sideroads, for there is no easy way to get to Jubilee from anywhere on earth. Then about two o’clock in the afternoon I saw ahead of me, so familiar and unexpected, the gaudy, peeling cupola of the town hall, which is no relation to any of the rest of the town’s squarely-built, dingy grey-and-red-brick architecture. (Underneath it hangs a great bell, to be rung in the event of some mythical disaster.)
This is just how Wingham looks across the “prairie” river flats south of town as one drives north on Highway 4. The story is about the shared relation between sisters, one based on their mother’s circumstances. Returning, discovering her own handwriting on some pages in a wash-stand, Helen “felt as if my old life was lying around me, waiting to be picked up again.” When Munro first drafted the story it was called “Places at Home” – but the title, like Helen’s life, is to be found in that washstand since her handwritten notes from years before read “The Peace of Utrecht, 1713, brought an end to the War of Spanish Succession.”
“The problem, the only problem, is my mother,” Munro would later write in the same manner in “The Ottawa Valley,” produced after she had dealt more and more with personal material through the 1960s. “The Ottawa Valley” mother is more recognizably Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw. This one in “The Peace of Utrecht” is a more imaginative construction, more of a created character:
“Everything has been taken away from me,” she would say. To strangers, to friends of ours whom we tried always unsuccessfully to keep separate from her, to old friends of hers who came guiltily infrequently to see her, she would speak like this, in the very slow and mournful voice that was not intelligible or quite human; we would have to interpret. Such theatricality humiliated us almost to death; yet now I think that without that egotism feeding stubbornly even on disaster she might have sunk rapidly into some dim vegetable life. She kept herself as much in the world as she could, not troubling about her welcome; restlessly she wandered through the house and into the streets of Jubilee. Oh, she was not resigned; she must have wept and struggled in that house of stone (as I can, but will not, imagine) until the very end.
At one point in the story Munro describes how the mother was seen by others in the town, and she has Helen conclude, “We should have let the town have her; it would have treated her better.”51 We cannot help thinking of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s obituary in the Advance-Times – its bereaved tone and genuine feeling, both born of the extended suffering involved, coming through strongly. While Munro was writing “The Peace of Utrecht” she tried to tell the story of the two sisters through a first-person narrator, Ruth, a neighbour and girlhood friend of Helen’s, a person who stayed in Jubilee and so knew the family’s history and each sister’s relation to it. Though abandoned for Helen’s narrative, this attempt is another indication of Munro’s psychological return to Jubilee – that is, to Wingham – in order to write more personally this story that she had to write, one she did not much want to write. Ruth’s narrative offers the town’s point of view and she evidently was intended as the person who revealed to Helen the secret of her mother’s flight from the hospital.
Some time in 1959 Munro sent “The Peace of Utrecht” to Weaver – her cover letter is undated but he has noted the story’s title on it. Its text is indicative:
I thought I’d send you these to hear what you thought of them – one is the old story I sent Mayfair & the other is the long one I mentioned[.] I have a couple of better ones – I hope – now but I’m afraid the experience of feeling so fertile after the long drought has made me very uncertain of criticism – I mean I can’t criticize myself very well. I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time.
“The Peace of Utrecht” is probably the long story Munro refers to here. As she first wrote it, the story was formally divided into three parts; published, it is in two. As she shaped the story, Munro appears to have purposely slowed its pace: the opening material about Maddy’s relationship with Fred Powell that begins the story in the published version was moved there from a second section. Thus Munro consciously held off the revelation of the circumstances of the mother’s death, and especially of her escape from the hospital. Following the undated letter dealing with “The Peace of Utrecht,” there are two more letters to Weaver, dated but not explicitly mentioning the story, which probably chart her work on it. These were written in October, the first worrying about whether the story has arrived yet and the other enclosing a new version that Munro has done in the meantime because she “just wanted to get it out of the way. I was afraid that if I didn’t do it I would just go stale on the whole thing.” In December she writes that she “would like to do a little more work on the Tamarack story if it is not inconvenient though it is not really important.” Munro also says that “I hope you will still write to me sometimes even if it isn’t about stories. I am working again now after a period of considerable depression and uselessness this fall.” Weaver notes on this letter that he wrote her on December 23 and enclosed a proof of the story.52
Self-deprecating as always (“I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time”), sounding unsure of herself still, Alice Munro nevertheless wrote to Weaver to make sure she was able to work further on “The Peace of Utrecht” before it appeared in the Tamarack Review. One draft version of the story called “Places at Home,” a title she would later use again, contained the self-revelatory description of Helen as a person who “had won a scholarship and gone off to university, and at the end of two years, to her own bewilderment, she was married, and going to live in Vancouver.” So it was with Alice Laidlaw Munro. But as her history reveals, and especially as her relationship with Robert Weaver confirms, her unwavering commitment to writing – though often occasioning feelings of frustration, isolation, and even depression – ultimately brought her back imaginatively to these same “Places at Home” during the 1950s. As Munro implies, no story demonstrates this better than “The Peace of Utrecht.” And given Munro’s own history, given Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw’s long struggle and suffering, it was altogether fitting that when the editors of the Tamarack Review ran the story in their spring 1960 issue, they led with it and placed it right before five poems by Irving Layton. The first of these, “Keine Lazarovitch 1870–1959,” was the first publication of Layton’s later well-known elegy to his mother. It appears on the verso of the last page of “The Peace of U
trecht.”53 Well it should, for Munro’s story, the necessary return to her own “Places at Home,” is an elegy too. And in the years to come, in the several more stories following this first one and the second, “The Ottawa Valley,” this elegy continued as Munro probed ever more deeply and ever more consistently into her personal material, finding more stories she had to write. In 1960, a writer still named Alice Munro and still living in Vancouver had embarked on the material and trajectory that would make her Alice Munro.
“I Was Trying to Find a Meaning”
Victoria, Munro’s Bookstore, Dance of the Happy Shades,
and Lives of Girls and Women, 1960–1972
You don’t really think about why you write a story. You write it, you hope it works, it’s finished. Somebody else can see far better than you can, what it is you’re trying to say.
– Alice Munro to Audrey Coffin, April 3, 1968
In November 1960 Bob Laidlaw wrote a letter of condolence to his brother-in-law John Chamney in Scotch Corners – John and Ethel’s daughter Lila, just nineteen, had died early that month, the result of a car accident. Once he had expressed his sympathy, Laidlaw reported on himself, Sheila, and Bill, and then added that “Alice & her two girls are well. She is doing well writing. Had a story in a book of Canadian Short Stories recently published. She writes as Alice Munro. It is queer stuff she writes at times but she seems to know what she is doing.” Hearing for the first time of this unseen letter and especially its comment on her writing, Munro has said it typifies her father, and his use of the undercut compliment. Laidlaw knew the details of his daughter’s successes but implicitly apologized for them. Later in the letter, he wrote by way of shared grief, “It is now nearly two years since Anne died and I can think of her now as she was in early days. She was a good wife to me and she fought so hard to stay normal.”1
The book that Laidlaw mentioned was Robert Weaver’s Canadian Short Stories, published in London and New York by Oxford University Press in 1960 in its World’s Classics series. It includes Munro’s “The Time of Death,” a story she wrote in 1953 and first published in the Canadian Forum in 1956. It is the earliest of her stories included in Dance of the Happy Shades. As Laidlaw wrote, it was to him “queer stuff.” “The Time of Death” tells a stark story, one that begins “Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on.” This is Lower Town Wingham – or a place very like it – and the story takes place in very late, very grey, very stark autumn, as the first snow of winter impends. The whole of “The Time of Death” emerges from its first word: “Afterwards.” Leona Parry’s nine-year-old daughter, Patricia, whom her mother “had singing in public since she was three years old,” was left to look after her younger sister and two brothers while her mother went to a neighbour’s to sew her cowgirl outfit – Patricia was singing with the Maitland Valley entertainers. Once her mother is gone, Patricia looks around their slovenly house and says that “it never gets cleaned up like other places.” Pronouncing further that she is “going to clean this place up,” Patricia gets her brothers and sister to help her. She sets already hot water to boil on the stove to scrub the floor and in the central unseen accident, her youngest brother Benny, eighteen months old and “stupid,” is scalded to death.
Though there is a glimpse of Benny’s mortal injuries, Munro’s focus is on the effects of the accident on others: on the women who have gathered to help and to mourn – Munro makes their personal distaste toward the Parrys, especially Leona, and their way of living, quite evident; on the men, largely unseen, staying outside, sharing a bottle as solace; and most especially on Leona, who has scorned Patricia for what she did, refusing to have anything to do with her. For her part, Patricia seems to have no reaction as she immerses herself in the social activities surrounding the funeral proceedings and ignores her mother and her censure. Once these rituals are over, November arrives, the first snow has still not fallen. Leona eventually reconciles with Patricia (“What’s life? You gotta go on,” she tells a friend), but still “Patricia did not cry.” Benny had been “the only stupid thing [Patricia] did not hate.”
Patricia’s delayed reaction comes as the story ends with the reappearance of Old Brandon, the scissors-sharpener “who came along the road sometimes.” Benny had had a special name for him, “Bram.” “Benny remembered him, and ran out to meet him when he came.” Seeing him again coming along the road while she is out playing during that first week of November, the snow still not there, Patricia begins screaming and cannot be controlled: “They thought she must be having some kind of fit … you’d think she’d gone off her head.” The story ends: “The snow came, falling slowly, evenly, between the highway and the houses and the pine trees, falling in big flakes at first and in smaller and smaller flakes that did not melt on the hard furrows, the rock of earth.”2
However “queer,” “The Time of Death” is a powerful story, one rooted in Munro’s home place. She told Jill Gardiner in June 1973, “When I first started writing, setting meant more to me than people. This was really what I was writing about.… At first I think I was just overwhelmed by a place, and the story was almost … a contrived illustration of whatever this meant to me.” In “The Time of Death” the place, especially through the impending, delayed snow, confirms this comment. Yet Munro extends the characters in their setting to create what she told Boyle was the “positively Gothic” atmosphere of Lower Town Wingham, Huron County, Ontario. Munro also sees the story as “a kind of imitation Southern story … I was writing like the people I admired” – and though she does not name these admired writers here, leading candidates include Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and James Joyce in “The Dead.”
Seen within the contexts of Munro’s developing reputation, “The Time of Death” is a singular story. Although any casual scan of the Wingham Advance-Times during the 1930s and 1940s yields accounts of similar horrific accidents, one Lower Town family angrily identified its own history in Benny’s death. One male member drunkenly threatened Bob Laidlaw because of the story, walking around his house, firing a shotgun into the air. No one was hurt. Known and liked by everyone there, Munro’s father downplayed such acts; he knew the people in Lower Wingham, and so knew just who to worry about. But his daughter took them quite seriously and was wary of Wingham for some years after.
As such incidents illustrate, Munro’s work was beginning to be noticed as the 1950s ended and the 1960s began. In early 1958, Weaver wrote to Munro asking her which story she preferred for his anthology and so “The Time of Death” became an early representation of Munro’s work to a larger audience. In the mid-1960s the Ryerson Press put together another anthology, Modern Canadian Stories, and despite the press editor’s preference for new stories, the volume editor selected “The Time of Death” as the Munro inclusion. In his introduction he wrote about Munro that “although she has written only short stories, she is highly respected by a good many critics” and that “ ‘The Time of Death’ is one of her best short stories.”
There were others. “Sunday Afternoon,” one of the stories derived from Munro’s time as a maid during high school, was included in a revised edition of Desmond Pacey’s A Book of Canadian Stories published in 1962. The year before, Weaver included Munro’s “The Trip to the Coast” in Ten for Wednesday Night, a collection of stories first broadcast on the CBC program Wednesday Night. For this, “a small group of writers … were asked to submit new work for a series of radio readings” and first publication, Weaver wrote.3
As this suggests, by the early 1960s Weaver was no longer the lone literary person in Canada who saw Munro as a significant younger writer. Yet owing to her location, inclination, and situation, Munro was no more forthcoming in pressing her case than she had ever been. The word about her was out among people who paid attention to such things – Weaver had certainly succeeded that far – but her stories continued to appe
ar as they had throughout the 1950s, here and there, one at a time. Owing to Weaver’s efforts, in late 1961 there was a flurry of activity around the possibility of a collection of Munro’s stories. Three publishers considered it, and the Tamarack Review did too, but no book emerged. The Ryerson Press, which was among the three publishers considering the idea in 1961 and the one to which Weaver had taken six of Munro’s stories after the others had declined them, stuck with Munro. It encouraged her during the interim and eventually published Dance of the Happy Shades in the fall of 1968. Although sales were such that the first printing provided sufficient stock to hold the publisher well into the 1970s, Munro was launched. Dance of the Happy Shades won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in English. Robert Weaver, it should be noted, chaired the selection committee. In 1971 a putative novel, Lives of Girls and Women, followed that first book. It extended and confirmed Munro’s growing reputation as one of Canada’s leading writers, and it did so just as the nationalist fervour that characterized the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada took firm hold.
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