Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

was first submitted. “Grafted on from some other reality,” in fact. 22
    Two other stories in
Something
, “Winter Wind” and “The Ottawa Valley,” warrant especial attention. The latter, Munro’s second focusing sharply on her mother, has received considerable attention for that and, as well, for the way in which it meditates on just what a writer does – what critics call its metafictional qualities. It was the last story written for the book, probably during November 1973; along with “Home” and “Winter Wind” (also written about that time) it is one of a trio of stories that reveal the initial imaginative impact of Munro’s return to Ontario.
    For several reasons, “Winter Wind” seems to bring these considerations into focus. As a story, it is in an anomalous position among the
Something
stories in that it is the only one of them that left absolutely no trace in the Munro collection in Calgary. When asked about this absence, Munro was uncertain as to what might have happened to its first draft, but then commented that it “is from a true incident. So maybe it was very easy to write.” When she is working with something that actually happened, Munro says, she does not “have to go through as much” in the writing. More than that, too, she said that “Winter Wind” offers a very precise characterization of her grandmother and aunt, sisters Sadie Code Laidlaw and Maud Code Porterfield, living together on Leopold Street in Wingham when she was in high school. A final point about the story is that, when the book manuscript was initially assembled, “Winter Wind” was to be the last story, placed immediately after “The Ottawa Valley.” Had it been so, the effect created by the stories in succession would have been one of a narrator first discovering her mother’s Parkinson’s disease and then, years later and with the disease’s effects well established, living with it as an adolescent.
Something
was eventually structured so that no such effect is created; with “Memorial,” a very different story set on the west coast well away from Munro’s childhood home, placed between the two, the effect is to mute “Winter Wind” and enhance “The Ottawa Valley.”
    Yet “Winter Wind” and its contexts bear examination as a story reflecting Munro’s concerns in 1973 and in
Something
generally. It is one of several stories that take up the point of view of elderly people and, as Munro said, it explicitly derives from her grandmother and aunt, from a time when she went to stay with them in Wingham because of a blizzard.Sadie Code Laidlaw had died in January 1966 as she was approaching her ninetieth birthday, and Maud had gone into the Huron View nursing home where she would live until her death at ninety-seven in 1976. Then living in Clinton, her niece Alice was one of the last family members to visit her there.
    “Winter Wind” tells the personal and marital histories of the Code sisters, details their attitude toward and relations with the narrator’s sickly mother, and accounts for the narrator’s enforced visit to them because of the storm. It also offers the grandmother’s pained reaction when, after two nights, the narrator announces that she plans to go home that evening. “I had never heard my grandmother lose control before. I had never imagined that she could. It seems strange to me now, but the fact is that I had never heard anything like plain hurt or anger in her voice, or seen it on her face.… The abdication here was what amazed me.” A friend of the sisters, Susie Heferman, had just been found frozen to death in the storm, and the narrator’s grandmother fears as much for her granddaughter should she try to make it home in such conditions. After her grandmother’s singular outburst, the narrator does not attempt it. The story ends:
    I understand that my grandmother wept angrily for Susie Heferman and also for herself, that she knew how I longed for home, and why. She knew and did not understand how this had happened or how it could have been different or how she herself, once so baffled and struggling, had become another old woman whom people deceived and placated and were anxious to get away from.
    Munro’s first portrait of Sadie Code Laidlaw after Sadie’s death (there would be another in the late 1970s in “Working for a Living”) captures the woman’s person and what the narrator feels about her person. Yet, probing artist that she is, Munro offers two