Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Allen, Donna Henry, Alice Laidlaw

    PROFESSOR ROBERT LAWRENCE’S ENGLISH 20 CLASS, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO, FEBRUARY 17, 1950
Woman in the front row: Joan Lawrence. Alice Laidlaw is the woman turned away from the camera while talking to another student, Diane Lane, on her right.

    James and Alice Munro with Robert and Anne Laidlaw, December 29, 1951

    Alice Munro in front of the B.C. legislature, Victoria, early 1952. Alice is wearing her “honeymoon suit.”

    Alice and Jim Munro, Grouse Mountain, B.C., summer 1953. Alice is pregnant with Sheila.

    1316 Arbutus Street, Vancouver

    The first house Alice and Jim Munro owned, 445 West King’s Road, North Vancouver. (The house has since been altered.)

    View from 2749 Lawson Avenue, West Vancouver

    Alice Munro, West Vancouver, 1957

    Alice Munro, ca. 1958–60, West Vancouver

    Alice and Jim Munro at home in West Vancouver

    Arthur Munro,
Robert Laidlaw,
Margaret Munro,
Jenny, Sheila, and Alice Munro,
West Vancouver,
May 1963

    Robert Laidlaw and Jenny Munro, Vancouver 1961

    Jenny, Andrea, and Margaret Munro, Victoria, April 1968

    Jenny, Alice, and Sheila Munro, Vancouver, July 1961, the summer of the “Miles City, Montana” trip

    1648 Rockland Avenue, Victoria

    Munro’s Books of Victoria today

    Alice Munro, Montreal, 1974

    Alice and Andrea Munro, ca. 1976–77

    Alice Munro and Morley Callaghan
(Geraldine Fulford, Bob Weaver in background), 1980s

    Alice Munro and Robertson Davies, Massey College, June 8, 1984

    Alice Munro and Patrick Lane, summer 1981, China

    Alice Munro and Robert Kroetsch, summer 1981, Great Wall of China

    “And this was the road where I went on my walks. I loved this road. This is my favourite road in the world.” – Alice Munro, Wingham, June 19, 2003

    Alice Munro and Gerry Fremlin, 1993

    The Alice Munro Literary Garden, Wingham

    Alice Munro and Audrey Boe Tiffin Marples, Wingham

    Taken in the early 1980s, this favourite photograph was chosen by Alice Munro to appear on the back of
Too Much Happiness
in 2009.

    Alice Munro, Dublin, 1996.

PART TWO
Becoming Alice Munro
“My Name Now Is Alice Munro, and I Am Living in Vancouver”
Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage, Family, 1949–1960
    Helen had won a scholarship and gone off to university, and at the end of two years, to her own bewilderment, she was married, and going to live in Vancouver.
– “Places at Home” (“The Peace of Utrecht”)

A lthough the notice of Munro’s scholarships in the
Advance-Times
makes her situation sound quite positive, and these awards certainly allowed her to move away from Wingham, her university scholarship support was in fact barely enough for subsistence. Once she got to London, Munro worked at two library jobs and, for extra money, sold her blood for fifteen dollars a pint. During these two years, getting enough to eat was a problem – one classmate said she thought Alice subsisted on “apples and iron pills” and her father wondered how she managed to live. But apart from what her scholarships allowed day to day, they confined Munro more significantly by their extent: they covered only those two years of a four-year program. So when she quit university and married James Munro in 1951 after completing just two years, as she told Thomas Tausky, “it wasn’t that I opted out of university. It was that I had a two-year scholarship and couldn’t go on. There was no money.”
    But in another way, Munro
had
opted out of university. By the time she left Western to marry, Munro had moved beyond the gratification brought by academic success. While she was at Western, her writing “was getting so much in the way” of her academic work, she recalls, “that’s all I wanted.” During her two years at university, Munro spent about half her time writing and the rest looking after her classes, working at both the public and the university libraries and, in a way she had not done before, having a social life. She also made two contacts – with James Munro and, much more distantly, with Gerald Fremlin – that would prove to shape the trajectory of her life. The April 1950 issue of
Folio
, Western’s undergraduate literary magazine, included Munro’s first published story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow.” It was followed there by Fremlin’s story, “An Ear to a Knot Hole.” A senior, Fremlin had contributed poems, both comic and serious, to every issue of
Folio
but one since spring 1947, and the issue in which his story