Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes, my mother pointed me out to some visiting aunts with a fatalistic gesture – “Another Emma McClure!” Emma McClure was a relative of ours who lived somewhere deep in the country, where she had been reading day and night for thirty-five years, with no time to get married, learn the names of her nephews and nieces, or comb her hair when she came in to town. They all looked at me pessimistically, but nobody took my book away.
    Munro’s reading of Dickens’s book, placed within what she later calls “the isolation of my home” is revelatory: it defines her own sensibility as a reader, makes another story connection with her father, and defines the family’s tentative, even sceptical, view of its idiosyncratic pleasures. 24 More particularly, “Remember Roger Mortimer” shows the intellectual direction she would herself take toward history, toward imagined stories, and above all toward “a private vision” of what she “was reading about – unexpected, incommunicable, painfully exciting.”
    The year Munro was in Grade 7, 1942–43, eleven years old and the year she found Tennyson, was critical for her in several ways. Following this discovery, she began writing poetry and, as a parallel activity, “was always making up stories in her mind.” A memory of this story-making passion is found in “Boys and Girls,” where the narratorenjoys telling stories to herself after her brother Laird falls asleep in their shared upstairs bedroom:
    Now for the time that remained for me, the most perfectly private and perhaps the best time of the whole day, I arranged myself tightly under the covers and went on with one of the stories I was telling myself from night to night. These stories were about myself, when I had grown a little older; they took place in a world that was recognizably mine, yet one that presented opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice, as mine never did. I rescued people from a bombed building (it discouraged me that the real war had gone on so far away from Jubilee). I shot two rabid wolves who were menacing the schoolyard (the teachers cowered terrified at my back). I rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the townspeople’s gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-out piece of heroism (nobody ever rode a horse there, except King Billy in the Orangeman’s Day parade). 25
    In an interview with Thomas Tausky, a University of Western Ontario professor, Munro confirmed that this passage was based on a memory, and that when she was creating such stories they were “half and half,” partly imitative of things she had read and partly imaginative. These activities gradually evolved, she remembers, into a
Wuthering Heights
imitation, a piece of writing she worked on throughout high school and was continually imagining, working out its details. Looking back, she told Tausky that “in the early stuff it would be the excitement of a plot, but with the
Wuthering Heights
imitation it was the soul of the fiction I was trying to capture on my own.… There was some apprehension there of what fiction is. The excitement – I think Jack Hodgins said, ‘I wanted to be part of the excitement.’ ”
    Such feelings were derived from, and confirmed by, Munro’s reading of
Emily of New Moon
. But more than any single, though crucial, book Munro’s development came from the ongoing acts ofbeing read to as a preliterate child and then reading for herself. Although the Laidlaws’ middle-class prosperity may have been somewhat fragile, there is no question but that Munro grew up in a literate home. A childhood friend recalls attending birthday parties for Alice at the Laidlaws’ at which Mrs. Laidlaw read to all the children. Former high school teacher Audrey Boe remembers Mrs. Laidlaw’s deep interest in education – always wanting to know and learn more. And she recalls Bob Laidlaw as a reader, saying that she thought he “probably read every book in the library.” Given this, and not surprisingly, when Munro came to write an introduction for her
Selected Stories
in 1997, she invoked and analyzed an image seen from the window of the Wingham Public Library when she was about fifteen. Writing of this scene – a man with his horses in swirling snow “carelessly revealed” – Munro describes its effect as giving her “something like a blow to the chest.” Once its moment had