Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

utterly poignant image of the three older people sharing arecitation of a poem from their shared childhood. The family connection, just as “the path that [her mother] and Aunt Dodie had made when they were girls running back and forth to see each other … was still there.” Like the central episode in “Winter Wind,” the visit to the Ottawa Valley was based on a true incident, and the path existed. When Anne Chamney Laidlaw had taken her daughters to the Ottawa Valley in the summer of 1943, between the farms once owned by George and Edward Chamney, the paths made by their children going back and forth were still there. Munro remembered them thirty years later when she wrote “The Ottawa Valley.”
    Moving back to Ontario from British Columbia in September 1973, Munro again confronted the real place that had held her imagination, and had informed her writing, during her twenty-plus years on the west coast. Remembering her feelings, she once wrote: “When I lived in British Columbia, I longed for the sight of Ontario landscape – the big solitary oaks and beeches and maples looming in summer haze in the open fields, the carpet of leeks and trilliums and bloodroot in the sunny woods before the leaves come out, the unexpected little rough hills with hawthorns and tough daisies, the creeks and bogs and the long smooth grassy slopes.” Once, on “a motor-trip home via the state of Washington, we came” upon a change of landscape “and I felt as if I had retrieved a lost part of myself, because it was something ‘like home.’ ”
    Although Munro’s final return to Ontario came in 1973, the imaginative return was a process she had begun, really, two years before on the train trip home with her daughters. During the intervening year, she spent July and August in Ontario. And beyond Ontario as a place, Munro also imaginatively confronted people there. She returned to an Ontario with her grandmother Sadie gone and Maud still there, though diminished and living in Huron View. We see her memories of these two women in “Winter Wind” and other elderly characters in “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” and “Walking on Water.” The title story draws indirectly on Sadie and Maud’s living arrangement and in that story Et, like Maud before she was married, is a dressmaker.
    But the most pressing imaginative confrontation for Munro was, quite literally, “Home,” the Laidlaw farm in Lower Town along the Maitland, a place still embodying Anne Chamney Laidlaw though now lived in by Bob Laidlaw and his second wife. The story “Home,” written quickly between October 8 (Thanksgiving weekend, when its events happened) and October 30 (when Munro sent it to John Metcalf as a present), is a textual rendering of Munro’s imaginative reaction to her return home. Especially through what critics call its metafictional technique, in which Munro comments directly on what she has written, that story records its author’s state of mind as she confronts, no longer a visitor from away, her most essential material, her home place. “I
don’t want any more effects, I tell you, lying. I don’t know what I want. I want to do this with honour, if I possibly can.”
This desire, to accomplish her writing
“with honour,”
continued to be Munro’s ambition, but in her return to Ontario she was confronted with memories that presented themselves differently as subject to her imagination. It was no longer the place she left but still the home she remembered, and Munro may be seen reshaping her subject in 1973. Her three metafictional stories – each deeply autobiographical – and “Material” as well, confirm as much. 24
    Writer Jack Hodgins recalls visiting Munro for tea in 1974 when he was in London to receive an award and, during the conversation, she told him she did not think she would write any more. That was the first time he had heard her say this and, though he has heard Munro say as much since, Hodgins took her quite seriously that first time. Speaking of this feeling herself, Munro has said she was quite serious when she told Hodgins that, and added that though she has often felt this way, the feeling was especially strong during the time after her return to Ontario. “Maybe it’s because I write stories and between every story there’s a kind of break before the next one.”
    As Fulford had commented on “Material,” it is possible to see Munro’s technique here as “a marvelously duplicitous