Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the
Globe and Mail
, “vice-president June Callwood, children’s writer Janet Lunn, and Alice Munro, who lives in the eye of the storm in Clinton.” Almost five hundred people attended. French, who reported on the meeting,also noted that “the five people on the platform made some low-key remarks in defence of freedom and the three books specifically, trying not to offend or inflame.” Munro asserted that “the tradition of propriety in literature is not an ancient one but a fairly recent one” and then went on to illustrate this “from a book” she valued very much. “In a fairly short space this tells about 1) an incestuous rape 2) a case of extreme drunken-ness and double incest, 3) a daughter-in-law who disguises herself as a prostitute to trick her father-in-law, and finally, about a king who falls in love with a beautiful married woman he sees bathing on the roof-top, seduces her, tries to trick her husband into thinking he – the husband – is the father of her expected child, then when this fails sends the husband back into the thick of the battle to be killed.” Reporting on this part of her speech, the reporter from the
Clinton News-Record
wrote that “Munro’s comparison of the alleged pornographic materials in the novels to material in The Bible sparked an audience reaction that began to resemble a faith healing session.” Once she was finished with King David and Bathsheba, Munro continued:
    Writers do have responsibilities – all serious writers make a continual, and painful, and developing effort, to get as close as they can to what they see as reality – the shifting complex reality of human experience. A serious writer is always doing that, not attempting to please people, or flatter them,
or
offend them. The three books under consideration are all by serious writers. They are also moral books in that they deal with the question of how to live – what makes life not only bearable but what makes it honourable, how can people care for each other, how can we deal with hypocrisy and self-deception, how can we grow and learn and survive?
    Ultimately, the board voted to remove
The Diviners
from the high school but compromised on the other two books.
    After the meeting Munro received an encouraging letter from Laurence, who had written in response to the press coverage. Some of Munro’s comments in her reply are revelatory: “In a personal way thisis all good for me – I have a problem wanting people to like me and it’s high time I got over it. I think it’s harder because I’m
not
an outsider living here, I have relatives[.] G.[erry] grew up here.
Good
people who were kind and friendly are now distant and disappointed.” And beyond her personal revelation about the pain she felt as an insider, a person from Huron County, she also writes that “a man came up to me after the meeting and said, ‘Your mother taught me in Sunday School. She would be ashamed of you.’ And it’s
true
. My mother burned
Grapes of Wrath
in the kitchen stove.” Recounting the same incident to another friend, Munro recognized that her writing reflected her own preference – that she rejected her mother’s piety and conventional notions, and she knew that she had become someone her mother would have been ashamed of.
    William French described Munro as one who “had the uncomfortable feeling of looking out at the somewhat hostile faces she usually encounters in more genial circumstances in the grocery store and on Clinton’s neighborly streets.” 26 While there is no question but that Munro’s return to Huron County to live had a positive effect on her writing, it is evident equally that proximity to the people of the area exacted a personal price. Along with the evident slights of the people she knew, Munro received anonymous letters full of righteous indignation over her stand in defence of
The Diviners
and the other books. She had no illusions about how she was seen and, especially, how her work was viewed by many there. Her outspoken actions during the book-banning controversy embody the uneasy relationship. Into the 1980s, that relationship was particularly fraught. Munro’s luminous question, one she mentioned in her 1974 interview with Boyle and was just then making famous – Who do you think you are? – became a fact of her own daily life in Clinton. The low point occurred, certainly, in December 1981 when Barry Wenger, president and publisher of the
Wingham Advance-Times
, published an