Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

“Sadly enough Wingham people have never had much chance to enjoy the excellence of her writing ability because we have repeatedly been made the butt of soured and cruel introspection on the part of a gifted author.” Wenger took exception to Munro’s presentation of Lower Town as “this kind of ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived,” but he saved his real ire for the characterization of Wingham as “stultifyingly provincial.” While he left open the possibility that this characterization might be Grady’s, not Munro’s, he tended to connect the opinion to her: “But it seems that something less than greatness impels her to return again and again to a time and place in her life where bitterness warped her personality.” The nextweek’s
Advance-Times
ran a letter from Joyce McDougall, a former neighbour of the Laidlaws (“We were friends, then – I’m almost ashamed to admit”) who, agreeing with the editorial, claimed to “know the truth behind most of the stories she has written – in fact, I and my family were cruelly depicted in one of them.” According to her, Lower Town “was truly a town of hardworking, moral and respectable people.”
    Responding to the
Advance-Times
, Munro wrote that Grady was “a journalist who never interviewed me, to whom I have not said one word about Wingham, or writing, or anything else of importance.” She talked to him once about something else. Munro also disputes “the supposition made by you and this journalist that I have created my fictional towns out of Wingham, which is not true.… Far from being bitter,” she ended, “I have always had a certain affection for Wingham, though I can see from your editorial the feeling is not mutual.” Munro wrote also to
Today
, maintaining that her fictional towns were “created out of bits of Wingham and many other towns, and quite a bit out of my own head, and that Jubilee is not Wingham, Hanratty is not Wingham. I am not writing autobiography. If I ever do, it will be time to talk about Wingham.”
    While Grady’s article was certainly the catalyst for this spate of criticisms, the hostile reactions toward Munro and her writing probably sprang from a range of factors. First among these, and most especially among people in Huron County who shared Munro’s pioneer Scots-Irish Protestant background while having little appreciation for fiction, was that deep-seated distrust of noticeable individuality encapsulated in the question “Who Do You Think You Are?” There was a clear preference for people who stayed in line, always doing the so-called normal, so some combination of envy or jealousy, with little appreciation of Munro’s talent, marked the general local reaction. No doubt, too, there were residual feelings over Munro’s defence, as a representative of the Writers’ Union, of
The Diviners
and the other targeted books. Last, some people around Wingham took exception to Munro’s depiction of a character they saw as based on her father – probably the father in “Royal Beatings.”
    As it happened, about a year later Munro took exception herself to a description of her father in the
Globe and Mail’s
pro file of her, “Writing’s Something I Did, Like the Ironing.” There, Laidlaw was referred to as a “failed fox-farmer, a failed turkey farmer.” She sent a letter to the
Globe
defending him and evidently submitted it to the
Advance-Times
as well, although it was not published there. Writing to her about her letter, Wenger began, “There is no need to fear my sharp pencil. I knew your father personally and always respected him as a man of great courage who faced life’s difficulties with dignity.” Responding to what Munro had said about journalistic practice – the need to clearly differentiate their subject’s views from their own – Wenger wrote that in Grady’s article “it was the author’s remarks about Wingham, rather than your own which enraged so many here.” Wenger also wrote that he was “personally glad to know that in both cases the observations about Wingham and your father were not your own.”
    These responses reveal a deeper aspect to Munro’s return to Huron County. While journalists came, saw, and characterized the area (Grady finding it “stultifyingly provincial,” Wayne writing her “Huron County Blues,” and French giving the memorable image of Munro meeting people from the book-banning meeting in the grocery), Munro was