Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

deserved a whole heart.”
    Although it is possible to say that Munro has described these relations before – in “The Peace of Utrecht,” in “Winter Wind,” in
Who Do You Think You Are?
, in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: Connection” and elsewhere – “The Ticket” is both precise as to actual biographical detail and, in this quotation and its title image, is explicitly confessional. The ticket referred to in the title is her Aunt Charley’s secret gift of two hundred dollars in cash in case the young bride decided, at the last moment, to flee the marriage. Should she not, though, her aunt tells her, then “ ‘you must be – you must promise –
you must be a good wife.’
‘Naturally,’ I said, as if there was no need to whisper.” Writing here with long retrospection – over fifty years and in full knowledge of what became of the marriage about to be enacted – Munro is especially harsh on herself. This harshness stems from Munro’s by now deeply felt sense that, when marrying Jim Munro in 1951, she withheld the needed full commitment to their marriage. An artist first and foremost, she felt ever directed away from their relationship into herwriting. Given her history this is not surprising, but she returns to the writer she was even back in 1951 in a striking way. At one point in “The Ticket,” as she is writing her life, she recalls herself wanting to avoid her grandmother and great-aunt’s house because “the town was enticing to me, it was dreamy in these autumn days. It was spellbound, with melancholy light on the gray or yellow brick walls, and a peculiar stillness, now that the birds had flown south and the reaping machines in the country round about were silent.” She continues: “One day,” as she approached her grandmother’s house, “I heard some lines in my head, the beginning of a story.
All over the town the leaves fell. Softly, silently the yellow leaves fell – it was autumn
. And I actually did write a story, then or sometime later, beginning with these sentences – I can’t remember what it was about.”
    In fact, the fragment of that story in her papers begins differently: “All over the town the leaves fell; it was autumn. Carelessly, softly, the leaves fell, for there was no wind.” But close enough. Written in the summer of 1951 – the very time Alice Laidlaw was home from university and beginning preparations for her December wedding and so a new life – “The Yellow Afternoon” is about the efforts of a high school teacher, a single woman who wishes to encourage in one of her students a devotion to the life of mind, to poetry and aesthetics, and to a commitment to university studies. The teacher, Miss Levinston, wants also to warn young Frances, who shows sparks of such potential, away from her likely alternative: getting married to a local boy. Frances, for her part, decides to do just that, and the story details her efforts to tell Miss Levinston of her intentions in a rather cruel way. “The Yellow Afternoon” was broadcast on the CBC program
Anthology
in February 1955 but never published.
    It is interesting to see that Munro returned here in “The Ticket” to one of her very early stories, one written during and derived from the very time in her life she was thinking about as she was trying to bridge the biographical gap between “Hired Girl” and “Home” for
The View from Castle Rock
. Interesting both for this book and as an example of Munro’s characteristic artistic practice: she is, as ever, writing her lives. Turning back to her younger self at a critical juncture in her ownlife – to the moment when marriage to Jim Munro “rescued” her (a word used in “The Ticket”) – Munro assesses her own heartlessness. Marriage got her out of Lower Town, Wingham, got her away from her mother’s illness and the family’s struggles for survival, and so got her away from the “calamity” that had “arrived with the end of childhood.” So Alice Munro is seen in
Castle Rock
completing the whole of her own life story as she, once again, writes her own life as it is inextricably connected to the lives of her Laidlaw ancestors, to their emigration to Canada and to Illinois (and thence to Canada), and to Huron County, her own ancestral home place. The place she has used continually from the beginning of her career to write her lives. Long envisioned and pondered,
The View from Castle Rock
is a critical book in Munro’s
oeuvre;
in fact, it