Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

He celebrated the news of her first published story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” yet he recognized the inadvisability of her use of “Jesus Christ” there, given his wife’s and mother’s feelings. He dealt with the gun-toting man who saw his own family’s history in “The Time of Death” and so threatened him because he was Alice’s father. And on reading the copy of
Lives
she sent to him, pronounced it “a powerful book and very strong medicine indeed. I sometimes wished that you had not been quite so explicit in the matter of sex but then you haveset out to write of a young girl’s growing up, her reaction to that very important part of life, sex.” As Munro has said, her father never offered a word of criticism, for he understood the artist in her.
    Well he might. Always a reader, always a thoughtful man, during the last years of his life he had become a writer himself. After a lifetime of hard, physical labour in the bush, on his fur farm, at the foundry, and in the turkey barns, he took up writing, and succeeded well. Between 1974 and 1976 he published six pieces, five memoirs, and a short story, in the
Village Squire
, an Ontario magazine published in Blyth. At the same time he was working on his historical novel,
The McGregors
, set between the 1850s (when the Laidlaws first came to Huron) and 1925 (when the county could be seen as settled). In 1974, he told his daughter that he wanted “to bring out the tragedy of reticent people.”
    Among Munro’s papers is a brief unpublished manuscript intended as a separate commentary on “Working for a Living.” Munro wrote there that “this story, or memoir, is about [my father’s] working life, and to some extent about my mother’s. But I took him only up to his middle years, when his fox farm had failed and [he] was working in the Wingham Foundry.” She then describes his subsequent work as a turkey farmer and writes that “in the last years – really in the very last months – of his life, he became a writer. He had been working on the first draft of a novel about Ontario pioneer life when he went into the hospital for a check on his worsening heart condition.… When I visited him in the hospital all he wanted to talk about was his characters, and the ways he had thought of strengthening his book.” This was the last conversation the two had. “During the three weeks he had left he produced a second draft that I read with astonishment after his death. He had made a wonderful leap, in organization, in grasp, in love, of his material. His book
The McGregors
was published in 1979.”
    Munro then wonders whether Laidlaw should have been a writer. Such a decision, she realized, “would have been unthinkable, in his family, his community, his time. It would have seemed unmanly, impractical, indecently presumptuous. (It was possible for me because I was a girl and a girl’s choice was not so important, it would all beforgotten when she married and had children[.])” The real significance of these facts for Munro is her realization that “he had at any rate the moments of greatest pleasure in a writer’s life, which come long before publication, vindication, or even completion. I mean those moments when he … caught hold of his story, his creation, with such effort and determination and flashes of power and delight.” Her “memoir” – as she calls “Working for a Living” – was about her father’s working life. Yet, as her commentary confirms, when she wrote of her father’s working life she knew of his writing and, indeed, knew that
The McGregors
would be published. That is, the communion between writer-daughter and writer-father existed – its feeling is present on each page of “Working for a Living” though emerging first in “Royal Beatings” and “The Moons of Jupiter.” 14
    Laidlaw’s death became part of his daughter’s own perspective as “Places at Home” was passing into
Who Do You Think You Are?
Just as her loss of her mother had allowed her to soon take up the “personal material” surrounding her mother’s death in “The Peace of Utrecht,” so too her father’s passing allowed a similar, though much less literal, use of autobiographical materials in “Royal Beatings.” And like “Peace,” “Royal Beatings” proved to be “a
big
breakthrough story” for her, the “kind of story that I didn’t intend to write at all. That led on to most of the stories” in
Who Do You Think You