Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Well he might insist, since Gibson had been working with Munro and her intuitive methods since the mid-1970s – he had seen her uncertainties before and had even, famously, and at a critical point in Munro’s career in 1978, pulled Who Do You Think You Are? from the press for restructuring according to her wishes. Two years after that episode, as she was envisioning the contents of what would be The Moons of Jupiter, Munro wrote to Gibson from Australia summarizing her available stories, concluding: “so these ten stories quite definitely have enough length for a book.” Complicating her situation just then, Munro continues, is another finished piece she has at hand, as she explains:

  There is also a long Memoir I wrote about my father, which I think is pretty good, but I think it should be kept out for a kind of family book I want to do someday – maybe about the Laidlaws in Huron County and in Ettrick & James Hogg whose mother was Laidlaw. There’s a whole lot of interesting stuff about the family, who seem to have been story-tellers since the Middle Ages. I know people going on about their families can be very tiresome but maybe I can do something unexpected with it.

  Faced with these musings from Munro, it makes sense to take her back again to the 1970s, to the productive decade that began in Victoria with the rapid composition of Lives of Girls and Women and ended with her back living in Huron County and writing – among other things – “Working for a Living,” the long memoir she refers to here. That decade saw her returning to, reshaping, and revising some of her writings from the 1950s and ’60s to help make Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. Then too she took up once more – but now that she was back in Ontario, differently – the remnants of her family inheritances she found there in such pieces as “Home,” “Winter Wind,” and most especially and significantly, “The Ottawa Valley,” for that 1974 collection as well. Just as that book was published, in an essay she effectively co-wrote with her father (who had given her most of the factual information it contains), Munro proclaimed that the stretch of the Maitland River flowing by their farm in Lower Wingham is for her a place where “everything is touchable and mysterious.” This rediscovery of Huron County as her home place led to Munro’s abandoned 1974–75 photo-text, “Places at Home,” and it led ultimately to what remains the single most important book in her oeuvre – at least as regards her development as a writer – Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid. After 1973 as well Munro was a daughter returned home who was able to talk over, read, and appreciate her father’s own emerging gifts as a writer during his last years after a lifetime of hard physical labour. All of this sets the stage for Munro’s shaping of The View from Castle Rock.

  Every August, on “Medal Day,” the famed MacDowell artists’ colony outside Peterborough, New Hampshire throws open its grounds to the public – the only day in the year it does so – in order to present the Edward MacDowell Medal for an outstanding contribution to the arts. On August 13, 2006, its forty-seventh recipient was Alice Munro. Receiving the award, Munro offered gracious and detailed thanks to Robert Weaver and to Virginia Barber, to her editors, and to both of her husbands, “men who believed that a woman doing really serious work, not just amusing herself, was possible. In my generation those men were not that easy to find, and the fact that I nabbed two of them is certainly lucky.” But while the centrepiece of the day’s program was Munro herself, the most extended presentation was by Virginia Barber, who offered a warm, detailed, and heartfelt reminiscence of her relations with Alice Munro alongside a clear-sighted and sharp analysis of the intimacies Munro’s stories offer readers, “the stuff of a magical alchemy.” Barber also said this:

  I’ve also learned that nearly every time Alice completes a book she opines that it will be her last. She used up all of her materials; she has nothing to say. After the publication of Runaway in 2004, she said the same sort of thing, and this time I suggested she write a non-fiction book about her Laidlaw ancestors – material she’s been interested in since we met. But in spite of the extraordinary number of letters, diaries, journals, printed material reaching back to the 1700s in Scotland, non-fiction wasn’t satisfying. How could she fill the historical gaps? But even more, what did they look like? What did they say to one another? What were they feeling? So, we quickly agree: Turn it into stories. And that material is the first hundred or so pages in her new book, The View from Castle Rock, which will be out in November.

  Here Barber confirms Munro’s “family book” as dating back to the critical 1974–76 period of her career (the two met in mid-1976 at a Writers’ Union of Canada meeting in Toronto); here too she also reconfirms Munro’s habit of predicting that her latest book will be her last.8

  While modest uncertainty over her work – irrespective of what her readers said and wrote – has characterized Munro’s own sense of her trajectory as a writer, this public airing of such misgivings should be seen as an appropriate preliminary to The View from Castle Rock. Even though inspired by Maxwell’s Ancestors and by the whole of his oeuvre, and having for well over twenty years contemplated what she called the “family book,” with The View from Castle Rock Munro showed herself well aware that she was producing a book that was both unlike any other she had previously published and – given age, the fullness of time, and very close proximity of its subject and characters (her own ancestors, her immediate family, herself) – it was a book that seemed to complete the life-circle Munro had begun through her stories since she began publishing them in the early 1950s.

  “Calamity Had Arrived with the End of Childhood”: Writing Her Life: The View from Castle Rock

  “Working for a Living,” which Munro mentions in her 1980 letter to Gibson, is a piece that began as a story. Through repeated revision (at the hands of the New Yorker editors) it became a memoir – only to be rejected by them in that form. It was finally published in 1981 as the first piece of the inaugural issue of Grand Street, alongside contributions by Northrop Frye, Ted Hughes, W.S. Merwin, and Glenway Wescott, among others. Reshaped and expanded, it is in Castle Rock as the conclusion to the first section, “No Advantages.” Given its history, its subject, and Munro’s placement of it – conversations with her editors, both Gibson and Close, confirm that the book’s structure was largely Munro’s own – “Working for a Living” plays a central role in The View from Castle Rock. Other “family” pieces – all of which Munro insists in her foreword to that book need to be called “stories” – appear there in revised form. Begun, as she announces in the first sentence of a notebook draft, on “the twenty-fourth of October, 1979,” the memoir version may be readily seen as growing from both Munro’s return to Ontario and her reaction to the death of her father in August 1976.

  The revised version in Castle Rock bears the marks of sustained rewriting (Munro has acknowledged working on it at least since 2001), although the most substantial revision is the addition of the last two pages or so of meditation on her father’s late writing career. “Working” is a distilled and poignant rendering of her parents as individuals and, more than that, it defines Munro’s own relation to each of them at two critical moments in her childhood: First, when she travelled in 1943 as a nine- or ten-year-old with her father to the Muskoka hotel where Anne Chamney Laidlaw, blooming in her new role, had been successfully selling fox furs directly to American tourists. And second, some years later when the family fox farm had failed, when her mother’s health had taken an irrefutable turn for the worse, and when Munro was sufficiently inured to the family’s situation that she looked to protect herself imaginatively while still living at home and was working toward a scholarship to university as a way out. Thus “Working” balances her mother’s real self – before she fell ill with Parkinson’s – with her struggles and eventual death. So too her father is shown as an unusually independent adolescent with his own trap line, then as a fox farmer who shared his fortunes with his wife and young family, and finally as a foundry night watchman and caretaker who worked to support that same family and look after his sick wife. Throughout, Munro
contrasts her family’s circumstances with those of her grandparents – Sadie Code Laidlaw and her husband William. She meditates on their relationship, on their marriage and their rearing of her father, and on her grandmother’s presence in Wingham as Anne Chamney Laidlaw struggled with Parkinson’s and died.

  Munro has repeatedly seen her mother’s circumstances, once she had fallen ill and was in decline, as her default material, her central subject – pivotal stories like “The Peace of Utrecht,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and “Soon” suggest as much. In another notebook draft version of “Working” Munro confirms this when she writes:

  I was just starting high school when this happened. At the same time that it became clear that we were poor, and could not hope as we had once, for a dazzling change of fortune[,] it became clear that my mother was sick for good, not plagued by passing ailments. Calamity had arrived with the end of childhood[.] I pretended not to notice, living in fantasy in books, in private expectation of some vaunting success.

  The presence of long-published but never collected fugitive pieces like “Working” and the even older “Home,” the ongoing creation and publication of other stories which spring from Munro’s own experience and history and her return to Ontario in 1973, plus the standing idea of the “family book” that she wanted to do someday – these facts all combine to make The View from Castle Rock almost an inevitability. Just as Munro re-imagines her young self “living in fantasy in books,” ignoring the family’s calamity, in this volume (like William Maxwell before her in Ancestors) she takes an even longer view back in time to reach her ancestral Laidlaws, shepherds in the Ettrick Valley in Scotland. She reaches back into the seventeenth century to detail these people, who were related to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who himself had associations with such figures as Sir Walter Scott. Ultimately, of course, she follows them to Canada in 1818 as emigrants, to begin her family story here.

  In doing so, Munro sets herself at the forefront of her project. “No Advantages,” the book’s opening section, almost immediately offers her reader an image of Munro herself in the Ettrick Valley, a restless and solitary seeker: “Nevertheless,” she writes, “the valley disappointed me the first time I saw it. Places are apt to do that when you’ve set them up in your imagination. The time of year was very early spring, and the hills were brown, or a kind of lilac brown, reminding me of the hills around Calgary. Ettrick Water was running fast and clear, but it was hardly as wide as the Maitland River, which flows past the farm where I grew up, in Ontario.” Just after this, and with an explanation of her travel to the Ettrick Church and its graveyard, in the rain, Munro writes: “I felt conspicuous, out of place, and cold. I huddled by the wall till the rain let up for a bit, then I explored the churchyard, with the long wet grass soaking my legs.” There she finds the gravestone of William Laidlaw, her “direct ancestor, born at the end of the seventeenth century, and known as Will O’Phaup. This was a man who took on, at least locally, something of the radiance of myth, and he managed that at the very last time in history – that is, in the history of the British Isles – when a man could do so.” There too she also finds, “among various Laidlaws, a stone bearing the name of Robert Laidlaw, who died at Hopehouse on January 29th 1800 aged seventy-two years. Son of Will, brother of Margaret, uncle of James, who probably never knew he would be remembered by his link to these others, any more than he would know the date of his own death. My great-great-great-great-grandfather.”

  Munro realizes that she needs to move on so as to catch the bus to return – still in the rain – to Selkirk where she is staying, and so concludes: “I was struck with a feeling familiar, I suppose, to many people whose long history goes back to a country far away from the place where they grew up. I was a naïve North American, in spite of my stored knowledge. Past and present lumped together here made a reality that was commonplace yet disturbing beyond anything I had imagined.”9

  Quite apart from “Home” and “Working for a Living,” Munro has long tended toward the genealogical. In the late 1970s she took up the subject of Irish emigration to Canada – linked with her mother’s side of her family, though historically rather than personally – with “1847: The Irish” (1978), a CBC television script, and then its prose version, “A Better Place than Home” (1979). As for more recent generations, speaking of the Wingham cemetery where her parents are buried, Munro has said that she takes Fremlin there “and I tell him stories about every tombstone.” “It’s just like walking down Main Street in 1940. All the people you meet, they’re all together, people who died around Dad’s age.” During a 2003 visit there, she said, “I just saw somebody I went to school with, I saw their grave. I come here and people I didn’t know were dead are here.”

  Such interests and investigations continued beyond the personal to her writing, since they are at the root of “What Do You Want to Know For?,” eventually (although not initially) included in Castle Rock. So here at the outset of “No Advantages,” Munro offers her readers the image of herself in Ettrick Churchyard reading gravestones. This should be seen as a typical position for her, one she herself has described in her probing story, “Menesetung”: “People are curious. A few people are. They will put things together. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” The New Yorker version of this story ended with these words, but Munro restored her originally submitted ending when she published the story in Friend of My Youth and, doing so, revised it further, with these words about the limitations of fiction: “And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if [the protagonist, Almeda Joynt Roth] took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”

  In Castle Rock too, Munro ends the long title story, “The View from Castle Rock,” with another personal tour of the family gravestones found in the Boston Presbyterian Church (named after the Ettrick minister she writes about) graveyard in Halton, Esquesing Township, Ontario – built, largely with volunteer labour, on land sold to the church by Andrew Laidlaw, Munro’s great-great-uncle, in 1824. And still seeking another graveyard – one that might reveal the grave of her great-great-grandfather, William Laidlaw, who died of cholera in Joliet, Illinois in early 1839 or ’40 – Munro ends Castle Rock in an epilogue entitled “Messenger” with the image of herself in yet another cemetery.

  This one is in Blyth, Ontario – a place midway between Clinton and Wingham, the place where her father was a boy, and the place where she and Gerry Fremlin have bought plots for themselves. There she finds, among those of her relatives, the grave of William’s wife, Mary Scott, who after his death in a foreign country was brought with their children to Canada by William’s brother Andrew and a team of oxen. “Mary who wrote the letter from Ettrick to lure the man she wanted to come and marry her. On her stone is the name of that man, William Laidlaw. Died in Illinois. And buried God knows where.”

  Just after this, having made more connections in her mind and memory with others memorialized in the Blyth cemetery, Munro steps back and synthesizes what she’s been doing throughout the whole of The View from Castle Rock, writing: “Now all these names I have been recording are joined to the living people in my mind, and to the lost kitchens, the polished nickel trim on the commodious presiding black stoves, the sour wooden drainboards that never quite dried, the yellow light of the coal-oil lamps.” Continuing in this vein to her conclusion, Munro recalls “a magic doorstop, a big mother-of-pearl seashell that I recognized as a messenger from near and far” that she could hold to her ear “and discover the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea.”10

  If, as Munro wrote toward the beginning of one of the stories she mentions to Gibson from Australia in 1980, “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,” connection “was what it was all about,” then the whole of The View from Castle Rock shows Munro pursuing a complex web of conne
ctions – personal, cultural, and historical – with the single-minded determination of someone who has been meditating the prospect for some time. When she submitted “The View from Castle Rock” to the New Yorker in March 2005, it was in the form of a 140-page manuscript that, seen now against the finished book, was made up of the whole of the first part, “No Advantages,” including parts of “Messenger,” subsequently moved to end of the book. Tellingly, it bore the title “Laidlaws II: The View from Castle Rock.” The editors there were immediately drawn to the manuscript and – characteristically, though in this instance quite practically – set about finding ways to shorten it effectively for their needs. Deborah Treisman, who had written to Munro that her 2004 Juliet triptych was “the longest manuscript I’ve sat down to edit in my history at this magazine, or any other!”, had to tackle an even longer one in “The View from Castle Rock.” Recognizing that in it they had, as she wrote to editor David Remnick, a “combination of family history and fiction,” she proposed for his approval ways to both shorten it and sharpen it, for “it has some real Munrovian highlights” in it.

  As Barber described Munro’s method in Castle Rock on Medal Day at the MacDowell Colony, Munro draws explicitly on family letters and other archival materials surrounding her ancestors’ emigration, and on published materials regarding them that had appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, but much of the “No Advantages” section of the book is imagined, created within the text. As has long been the case, Munro’s work with the New Yorker played a role in this larger process. Agreeing to publish only a portion of the submitted manuscript, Treisman and her colleagues shaped the story of the Laidlaws’ passage from Scotland to Canada into the twelve magazine pages they published in August 2005. When the book version was published, the effects of this process were evident, since the story published in the magazine (itself an expansion of the earlier “Changing Places”) is retained, with the rest of the long submitted manuscript shaped into the full separate pieces that make up the book’s first section, “No Advantages.”