Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

passed, “it was more a torment than a comfort to think about” this scene, “because I couldn’t get hold of it at all.” By then, Munro was seeing that scene through the eyes of a developing writer – since early adolescence she knew that was what she wanted to do.
    A draft of “The Albanian Virgin” offers a narrator like Munro who lives outside the town of Logan, a town that like Wingham has its library in the town hall and also a major hotel named the Brunswick. Its narrator for a long time forgoes taking books home from the library since she had been told by another child that, living outside of town as she does, getting a library card would be too complex a process. Instead, she goes to the library and reads there, mesmerized: “The books themselves, the smell of the paper and the feel of the cover with these smooth indented pictures and letters, these objects, as well as the stories contained in them, seemed to me magical. They were magical. I didn’t even want to take them home.” Though the librarian encourages her to get a card, the narrator refuses. “This situation lasted ’til high school, when I got so greedy for the books that I had to swallow my pride.” 26
    Thus for the young Alice Munro reading and writing involved “greed,” “torment,” “magic,” “excitement,” “a blow to the chest,” andabove all, “the soul of the fiction.” Although she dates the writing of her first real story to the Easter holidays, when she was fifteen during an enforced holiday from school caused by an operation to remove her appendix, Munro’s development as a writer began much earlier. 27 It began when she was read to by her mother (and committed stanzas of “Barbara Allen” to memory), when she discovered Dickens and read Montgomery’s books (and doubtless others), when she saw her parents read, when she made up stories in imitation of Zane Grey, Hans Christian Anderson, Emily Brontë, and others, and when she discovered that collection of Tennyson’s poems in the Cruikshanks’ house and so wrote her own poems in imitation of them. On those long walks to and from school, she was both making up stories and, as she said, “thinking my thoughts,” tracing her route from Lower Town to Wingham and back again, literally and imaginatively infusing that place with what was known and imagined, or yet to be imagined, yet to be articulated: a torment, a call, a sense of direction – everything there “touchable and mysterious.” Imagining lives and stories for this, her own known population.

    If Munro’s year in Grade 7, 1942–43, anticipated the academic success she would later achieve, it also happened within a context of great changes in the circumstances of the Laidlaw family. The fur business had remained a tenuous undertaking; the war had adversely affected the market and there was evidence that styles were changing. During the war, such decorative frills as furs seemed unimportant; money went into other things. Bob Laidlaw had been thinking of getting out of furs altogether. At one point, early in the war, he had thought of pelting his stock and going into the army as a tradesman. As Munro details in “Working for a Living,” Anne Laidlaw suggested instead that she should go to the Pine Tree Hotel in Muskoka during the summer of 1941 and sell their best furs directly to American tourists. She did so with some real success that year, but after that summer – once the Americans were in the war themselves – such tourists stopped coming.
    In June 1943 an issue of the
Advance-Times
ran a story headlined “Cows Electrocuted Entering Barn.” It begins: “The fact that they were wearing rubber boots probably saved Robert Laidlaw and Lloyd Cook of town from receiving a severe shock or worse.” 28 In order to feed his foxes and minks, Bob Laidlaw salvaged dead animals from local farms or took old unneeded animals and kept them until they were butchered for feed (two such horses figure in “Boys and Girls”). An electrical short in a barn had killed a cow; Laidlaw and Cook, arriving to salvage the carcass, nearly met the same fate. Had that occurred, the effect on the Laidlaw family would have been catastrophic. That same summer, just as Munro’s academic circumstances were improving, Anne Chamney Laidlaw took her daughters east to Scotch Corners for a visit with her relatives there. Bill, who was seven, stayed home with his father.
    The Laidlaw women stayed about six weeks in the