Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

veterans made up just under half of Western’s students. Throughout the late 1940s these men “dominated the student unions and newspapers” –Gerald Fremlin, who was approached by Munro, was a veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the war and sent her to another RCAF veteran, John Cairns. Such older and more experienced students “brought a degree of seriousness and maturity that served as a counterweight to the more jejune aspects of student culture.” At the same time, there was what intellectual historian A.B. McKillop calls a resurgence of “the cult of domesticity” after the war – he cites advertisements in
Maclean’s
magazine as an indication, since those “aimed at the woman as homemaker rose from about forty percent in 1939 to over seventy percent in 1950.” Although the war years had seen a surge in women’s attendance at Canadian universities, that increase was reversed with the war’s end – women made up considerably less than a third of students in arts and sciences at Canadian universities at the beginning of the 1950s. 3
    Recalling her university years, Munro says that she loved her time there, “being in that atmosphere, having all those books, not having to do any housework. Those are the only two years of my life without housework.” Not that she has greatly minded such work, either before university or after, but those two years at Western stand singular in her memory: “to have that concentration of your life, that something else was the thing you got up in the morning to do, and it was all reading and writing, studying.” Munro enrolled initially in the journalism program as something of a cover, so that she would not have to say that she wrote fiction – though, given the contributor note in the April 1950
Folio
that has her major as Honours English “with an emphasis on creative writing,” it was not much of a cover. The journalism program required English, and that first year Munro also took English history (which she says she already knew backwards), economics, French conversation, and psychology. Those enrolled in programs like journalism – that is, with some sort of applied focus – were put in the same sections of these courses and were seated alphabetically. Thus Alice Laidlaw met Diane Lane – a first-year pre-business student from Amherstburg – who became a friend and roommate.
    Both students had come from small towns, neither had much money (though Laidlaw was the more strapped), and each, initially, roomed with someone she knew from home. During that first year,each found that she was not enjoying the association with her original roommate. So the two took to spending time together at the public library, where Munro had a part-time job two or three afternoons a week sorting and reshelving books (as she also did at the Lawson library on campus on Saturday afternoons). Eventually, Munro moved into the same rooming house as Lane – the upstairs of a house belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Buck at 1081 Richmond Street – where she lived through her second year. Mr. Buck’s brother Tim was the leader of the Communist Party of Canada and had been in jail. The Bucks “rented the entire upstairs of their house, and it was a place where vaguely intellectual non-sorority-type girls lived.” Munro recalls that “we were all fairly poor, and we all cooked these messes we made on hotplates.” Socially, at the time, she remembers, “Western was fraternity, sorority. Not too serious.” That second year was “interesting, but fun, because I was then with people at University who were more or less like me.” Munro captures some of this in an unpublished draft story called “The Art of Fiction,” which draws on her time at Western. The narrator writes, “During my university years I lived in a house which was not really very big and which sheltered seven other girls, a landlady who wove her own skirts and belonged to a Bell Ringers Society, and a periodically confined lovesick Siamese cat.” 4
    During their first year, both young women took the same English 20 – a survey of British literature – class from Robert Lawrence and, through him, they came to the attention of the English department. Just as in high school, Munro made her mark by what she wrote: as a student she did not have much to say in class, but Lawrence read “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” a story she wrote that became her first publication. The English department was seeking