Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

leave-taking from Victoria was prolonged. It involved departures and returns – for a time she lived elsewhere in Victoria, going home to prepare meals and be with her daughters. She spent much of the summer of 1972 in Toronto with Andrea, and in 1973, she and her daughters were in Nelson, in the British Columbia interior, while Munro taught a summer-school course in creative writing at Notre Dame University. That fall she was living in Londonwith Jenny, commuting once a week into Toronto to teach at York University. She was also preparing
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
for the press.
    Something
would prove to be Munro’s last book with McGraw-Hill Ryerson. She had remained with Ryerson with some misgivings after a large U.S. firm, McGraw-Hill, bought it in 1970; this decision to stay was made largely out of loyalty to Audrey Coffin, her Ryerson editor who had moved to McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Unlike its predecessor,
Lives of Girls and Women, Something
offers no pretense of a single point of view – it is an eclectic collection of stories, including “The Found Boat,” which dates from Munro’s 1950s attempts to write a conventional novel, along with some of the most singular, striking stories she has ever written, such as “Material” and “The Ottawa Valley.” The former offers a caustic critique of a writer’s pretensions while at the same time celebrating that person’s genuine gift (“an act of magic … an act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love. A fine and lucky benevolence”). 3
    “The Ottawa Valley,” the last story written for
Something
, is the second of a succession of Munro stories confronting the looming fact of her mother, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw, who died in early 1959 after an almost twenty-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease. That affliction had asserted its symptoms by the summer of 1943 (“ ‘Is your arm going to stop shaking?’ ”) when Laidlaw took her two daughters, Alice and Sheila, to visit her relatives near Carleton Place in the Ottawa Valley. As in the story, it was here that Alice, then eleven or twelve, suffered the humiliation of a broken elastic in her underwear just before church at St. John’s Anglican, Innisville. Also as in the story, Mrs. Laidlaw sacrificed her own safety pin, to her daughter’s humiliation, so her own slip showed. Munro focuses on this episode, and as the story ends she steps back to assert that “the problem, the only problem is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken.” 4
    During 1973 Munro also worked on “Home,” most often seen as a story but much more a memoir – significantly, its initial title was “Notes for a Work.” Like “The Ottawa Valley,” it also deals withMunro’s family and shows her willing to step outside her narrative guise to comment directly on the realities and truths she had rediscovered and was trying to convey. “Home” was finished in 1973 and published in an anthology of new Canadian stories in 1974 but was excluded from
Something
. In it, Munro deals directly with her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, and his declining health but she also describes her own feelings on her return home to Wingham – where her father still lived with his second wife, Mary Etta Charters Laidlaw, in the same house where Alice had grown up. Munro comments defensively on the life she was then living in London, “a life of a typewriter and three rooms and odd adventures,” a life “incomprehensible” to her stepsister, who lives nearby on a farm. On the way to the Wingham hospital, to which Robert Laidlaw has to drive himself since Alice does not drive, she writes that “we follow slowly that old usual route. Victoria Street. Minnie Street. John Street. Catherine Street. The town, unlike the house, stays very much the same, nobody is renovating or changing it. Nevertheless it has faded, for me. I have written about it and used it up. The same banks and barber shops and town hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages drained away.” 5
    “I have written about it and used it up,” … “their secret, plentiful messages drained away.” Munro decided to leave “Home” out of her third book largely because of her sensitivity over its depiction of her stepmother and father, each still living. But another reason was her own dissatisfaction, she has remarked since, with her intrusions as