Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

“Home,” the ongoing creation and publication of other stories which spring from Munro’s own experience andhistory and her return to Ontario in 1973, plus the standing idea of the “family book” that she wanted to do someday – these facts all combine to make
The View from Castle Rock
almost an inevitability. Just as Munro re-imagines her young self “living in fantasy in books,” ignoring the family’s calamity, in this volume (like William Maxwell before her in
Ancestors)
she takes an even longer view back in time to reach her ancestral Laidlaws, shepherds in the Ettrick Valley in Scotland. She reaches back into the seventeenth century to detail these people, who were related to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who himself had associations with such figures as Sir Walter Scott. Ultimately, of course, she follows them to Canada in 1818 as emigrants, to begin her family story here.
    In doing so, Munro sets herself at the forefront of her project. “No Advantages,” the book’s opening section, almost immediately offers her reader an image of Munro herself in the Ettrick Valley, a restless and solitary seeker: “Nevertheless,” she writes, “the valley disappointed me the first time I saw it. Places are apt to do that when you’ve set them up in your imagination. The time of year was very early spring, and the hills were brown, or a kind of lilac brown, reminding me of the hills around Calgary. Ettrick Water was running fast and clear, but it was hardly as wide as the Maitland River, which flows past the farm where I grew up, in Ontario.” Just after this, and with an explanation of her travel to the Ettrick Church and its graveyard, in the rain, Munro writes: “I felt conspicuous, out of place, and cold. I huddled by the wall till the rain let up for a bit, then I explored the churchyard, with the long wet grass soaking my legs.” There she finds the gravestone of William Laidlaw, her “direct ancestor, born at the end of the seventeenth century, and known as Will O’Phaup. This was a man who took on, at least locally, something of the radiance of myth, and he managed that at the very last time in history – that is, in the history of the British Isles – when a man could do so.” There too she also finds, “among various Laidlaws, a stone bearing the name of Robert Laidlaw, who died at Hopehouse on January 29th 1800 aged seventy-two years. Son of Will, brother of Margaret, uncle of James, who probably never knew he would be remembered by his link to these others, any more than hewould know the date of his own death. My great-great-great-great-grandfather.”
    Munro realizes that she needs to move on so as to catch the bus to return – still in the rain – to Selkirk where she is staying, and so concludes: “I was struck with a feeling familiar, I suppose, to many people whose long history goes back to a country far away from the place where they grew up. I was a naïve North American, in spite of my stored knowledge. Past and present lumped together here made a reality that was commonplace yet disturbing beyond anything I had imagined.” 9
    Quite apart from “Home” and “Working for a Living,” Munro has long tended toward the genealogical. In the late 1970s she took up the subject of Irish emigration to Canada – linked with her mother’s side of her family, though historically rather than personally – with “1847: The Irish” (1978), a CBC television script, and then its prose version, “A Better Place than Home” (1979). As for more recent generations, speaking of the Wingham cemetery where her parents are buried, Munro has said that she takes Fremlin there “and I tell him stories about every tombstone.” “It’s just like walking down Main Street in 1940. All the people you meet, they’re all together, people who died around Dad’s age.” During a 2003 visit there, she said, “I just saw somebody I went to school with, I saw their grave. I come here and people I didn’t know were dead are here.”
    Such interests and investigations continued beyond the personal to her writing, since they are at the root of “What Do You Want to Know For?,” eventually (although not initially) included in
Castle Rock
. So here at the outset of “No Advantages,” Munro offers her readers the image of herself in Ettrick Churchyard reading gravestones. This should be seen as a typical position for her, one she herself has described in her probing story, “Menesetung”: