Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Mrs. Fremlin (who was in Huron View nursing home) and also a chance to see Andrea, then a teenager, on the weekends. Her time in Australia, that fall and into the new year, allowed her and Fremlin the opportunity to drive around the country, exploring its hidden places, and seeing its landscapes. To John Metcalf, she recounted that in Sydney they
    went to the King’s Domain on a Sunday afternoon. People bring a step ladder and get up and talk. Christians and Commies and plain loonies yelling but there were two special hecklers. One was a happy drunk who said to the Christians – looking at the sky – “I don’t see no heaven” and the other was a serious Syrian or Lebanese well-dressed gent who interrupted every speaker with “And what about Her Majesty the Queen?” It threw every one of them.
    In the same letter, Munro vowed that she would never be a writer-in-residence again, and for much the same reasons she had expressed to Knelman. She never has felt comfortable in the role, feeling that “the actual ‘work’ is useless and dishonest.” Even though such posts allowed her to see places she wanted to see – in the midst of this she mentioned being tempted by a similar job in Scotland – she vowed to resist the temptation. She has resisted ever since.
    During the summer of 1981, Munro joined a group of other Canadian writers on a tour of China. In fact, she celebrated her fiftieth birthday there. Along with her were Gary Geddes, Geoffrey Hancock, Robert Kroetsch, Patrick Lane, Suzanne Paradis, and Adele Wiseman. They were hosted by the Chinese Writers Association. Writing about the trip to Metcalf, Munro characterized the trip as “hot and intensive”; the Chinese were “friendly and polite” but, to them, “irony is unknown.” The Chinese writers they met gave them “a chilling discourse on art in the service of socialism.” Reminiscing about the trip in an interview with Hancock, she commented that though she liked travelling, she “was not enthusiastic about going to China at first. It’s the sort of thing you don’t turn down, but I felt overwhelmed by the idea, that nothing would be familiar enough to touch me at any point.” She also said “the people [were] the thing I came back with most of all. It kept occurring to me that there probably were lots of people there who’d never been alone in a room in their lives. There is no
alone
in China.” The group itself was comradely, and Munro’s birthday contributed to their conviviality: “A fiftieth birthday in China? I thought it was gorgeous.… Fifty, to me, always sounds a little grey – something kind of withered about it. And there I was having this wonderful banquet in Guangzhou. And then my birthday went on in Hong Kong and across the Pacific and finally it sort of petered out as we approached Vancouver. [It] went on for days.… It was the greatest birthday of my life.” 5
    While Munro’s reputation continued to grow internationally, there was a backlash in her hometown. The December 5, 1981, issue of
Today
, a weekly magazine supplement to many Canadian newspapers, carried an article by Wayne Grady entitled “Story Tellers to the World.”It focused on Munro and four other Canadian writers, arguing that the short story form is “uniquely suited to the Canadian experience” and detailing the attentions Canadian short story writers had been getting outside the country. Alongside the main story, the five writers were briefly profiled. Hers began with a quotation from Munro’s description of Lower Town in her interview with Alan Twigg; it was followed by this paragraph:
    Wingham, where Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in 1931, is a small but stately town in Huron County, an area of Ontario not known for its progressive views. Fictionalized as Jubilee in Munro’s second book,
Lives of Girls and Women
(1971), and as Hanratty in her most recent book,
Who Do You Think You Are?
(1980) [sic], the town is stultifyingly provincial and only occasionally reaches the comic heights of Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa.
    The next paragraph noted that Munro “escaped” Wingham by going to university.
    This article is notable less for what it said than for the reaction it received. The December 16 issue of the Wingham
Advance-Times
carried an editorial entitled “A Genius of Sour Grapes.” Written by Barry Wenger, president and publisher of the paper, it began with the
Today
article and then turned its attention to Munro herself: