Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Ottawa Valley: “It was a big family visit,” Munro remembers. “We visited everybody, cousins at Carleton Place. Mother thought I should see the Parliament buildings and the Chateau Laurier, so I was taken to Ottawa one day and I got sick.” Munro is not sure whether this was the result of excitement or food, but she remembers spending “the whole day in the Chateau Laurier ladies’ room being sick.” This visit is the basis of “The Ottawa Valley,” the final story in, and also the last one she wrote for,
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
. It draws precisely from the details of that visit. Much of what is there, Munro has said, is autobiographical – the elastic on her underpants did break and she did insist on taking a safety pin from her mother, whose slip showed as a consequence. However, its central scene, when the narrator confronts her mother about the symptoms of her illness, is imagined. Alice Munro did not do that. Nevertheless, she does offer precise detail of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s symptoms as she remembered them. At the time, “just her left forearm trembled. The hand trembled more than the arm. The thumb knocked ceaselessly against the palm. She could, however, hide it in her fingers, and she could hold the arm by stiffening it against her body.” When asked “So, are you not going to get sick at all?” the mother does not answer:
    “Is your arm going to stop shaking?” I pursued recklessly, stubbornly. I demanded of her now, that she turn and promise me what I needed. But she did not do it. For the first time she held out altogether against me. She went on as if she had not heard, her familiar bulk ahead of me turning strange, indifferent. She withdrew, she darkened in front of me, though all she did in fact was keep on walking along the path that she and Aunt Dodie had made when they were girls running back and forth to see each other; it was still there. 29
    Another feature of “The Ottawa Valley” is Munro’s quotation from the definition of Parkinson’s disease in a commonly found medical encyclopedia – she cites her source. When Anne Laidlaw started showing symptoms of “Parkinson’s disease or shaking palsy,” as it is described by Fishbein, the family did not know what it was; in fact, it took about three years from the onset of symptoms to get a clear diagnosis. Even then there was nothing to be done – it was incurable. This fact exacerbated an already difficult situation: at the time, the family’s economic circumstances were already faltering, and they would continue to deteriorate during Munro’s high school years. Bob Laidlaw’s near accident in June 1943 also reveals the family’s vulnerability – as Munro said to Catherine Ross when first told about the incident, one she had never known of, her father “may not have wanted us to know. If he had died, we would have been destitute.” More pointedly, the onset of Anne’s Parkinson’s disease came just as Munro had reached puberty and was realizing her vocation as a writer. Recalling those times, Munro commented that “the lack of money and Mother’s illness coming at the same time was pretty bad. But in adolescence I was very self-protected, I was ambitious and a lot of the time I was quite happy. But I ignored this. I knew it, but I didn’t want to be tainted by tragedy. I didn’t want to live in a tragedy.” 30
    Munro describes her high school years, 1944 to 1949: “We were just very, very poor as far as cash flow went. But we had some nice furniture and we had a lot of books and we had magazines Dad brought homefrom the foundry. So it was always a culturally rich life.” By this time they had an indoor toilet and running water too. The Laidlaws ate from their garden and they had milk; they kept a cow that Munro milked from the time she was twelve – to get out of the house – until it wandered off and drowned in the river when she was fifteen. Munro continues,
    We had eggs. But we’d heat the house with sawdust, which was the cheapest fuel you could buy. A horrible smell, but it was cheaper than wood, so we did that. I never had a boughten dress, or clothes. But then a lot of kids I went to high school with didn’t have either. Many of us were in the same boat except for that thin upper crust of people, whose fathers were doctors and dentists and merchants, and they were in a different class altogether. So that was a terrible sort of time in our family, though I didn’t take it