Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

just left:
    The waste, the frivolity, the shamefulness of that life seemed clear to her, particularly as she looked out at the ploughed fields, the golden stubble, the red and yellow woods, the dipping and sunny and nostalgic landscape that had replaced the city street. She was going to be a writer, very soon.
    In order not to lose more of this feeling, she did not go into her house but set her books and suitcase and coat inside the porch door. The kitchen beyond was dark, the lights had not been turned on anywhere, which meant that her mother was probably asleep. Her mother slept odd hours, and was often most wakeful in the middle of the night[.] Her sickness had removed her from the ordinary course of life.
    “She was going to be a writer, very soon.” Alice Ann Laidlaw had set off to London to begin university in the usual way, even though, she knew then, her real intention was to be a writer like her character. Janet comes home from university knowing that her real focus is on the place she came from, the place that she would write about to become the writer she sought to be. Just as Alice Munro was to do.
    After she describes in “An Open Letter” the feeling she had for Wingham when she was a child, Munro finds an illustration, a correlative, for that feeling in another piece of art, writing,
    There is a painting by Edward Hopper that says much better what I am trying to say here. A barber-shop, not yet open; the clock says seven and it must be seven in the morning, yes, a cool light, fresh morning light of a hot summer day. Beside the barber-shop a summer-heavy darkness of trees. The plain white slight shabby barber-shop, so commonplace and familiar; yeteverything about it, in the mild light, is full of a distant, murmuring, almost tender foreboding, full of mystery like the looming trees.
    So in the fall of 1949 Alice Laidlaw left Lower Town, left Wingham, left the only home place she had known, for London and the University of Western Ontario. Apart from visits over the years, she has never come back to stay, though she has lived nearby since 1975. Alice Munro was nevertheless destined ever and always to return in her imagination to Wingham, to her home place, a place “full of mystery like the looming trees.” 39 She has probed its mysteries, perpetually recreating her town and its people – “Solitary and meshed, these lives are buried and celebrated” – in the stories she has written and continues to produce.

Boston Presbyterian Church, Halton, Esquesing Township, Ontario. Built on land sold by her Great-Great-Uncle Andrew in 1824, it figures in
The View from Castle Rock
. Many of Munro’s Laidlaw ancestors are buried to the left of the church.

    The Code sisters as young girls: Sadie (Alice’s grandmother), Maud, Elsie, and May

    The Code sisters as young women: Sadie, Maud, Elsie, and May. Sarah Jane “Sadie” Code Laidlaw (1876–1966), Anna “Maud”
Code Porterfield (1878–1976), Laura “Elsie”
Code Powell (1880–1934), Melissa “May”
Code Kennedy (1882–?)

    Sadie (Sarah Jane Code Laidlaw) and Maud Code Porterfield (Leopold Street, Wingham)

    Insert:
Thomas (1844–1927) and Annie (1841–1913) Code, Alice’s great-grandparents from the Ottawa Valley A January 1879 map of Wingham, Ontario

    CHAMNEY FAMILY PORTRAIT :
Front:
Bertha Ann Stanley Chamney (1867–1935), Joseph Henry Chamney (1900–1970), George Chamney (1853–1934);
Back:
John Gillman Chamney (1894–1972), Annie Clarke Chamney (1898–1959), Alice’s mother
Edward Melbourne Chamney (1892–1951)

    Annie Clarke Chamney, ca. 1913–14

    Anne Chamney Laidlaw, summer 1927, honeymoon, Christie Lake

    Alice Laidlaw Munro’s girlhood home

    Baby Alice with her grandfather George Chamney (ca. 1933)

    Alice Laidlaw with her grandparents Sadie and William Code Laidlaw, ca. 1935–36

    Alice and Anne Laidlaw, fall 1931, Wingham

    Alice Laidlaw, 1933–34

    Fox farm building, Laidlaw’s

    Baby Alice (ca. summer 1932) with Reta Stapleton, a neighbour

    Alice Laidlaw, ca. 1944–45

    Alice and her sister, Sheila Laidlaw, on the Maitland River, ca. 1946–47

    Wingham Town Hall, Josephine Street

    Wingham Hospital, where Alice Laidlaw was born and her mother was treated

    Wingham High School

    Maitland River flooding, Lower Town Wingham

    WINGHAM PUBLIC SCHOOL, GRADE 6, 1941-42
Alice Ann Laidlaw is third from the right in the second row.

    WINGHAM HIGH SCHOOL, GRADE 12, 1947
Last three girls on right at the front: Mary