Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

students for its honours program, and both Laidlaw and Lane were successfully recruited. Munro recalls that some time during that first year she was approached by Professor Murdo MacKinnon about switching to English. By that time, she remembers, she had “run afoul of economics” so she asked him if she would have to take more economics. No, he replied, she would need only to pick up the Latin she had missed that first year. So she shifted to English for her second year. That year she took aestheticsfrom Carl Klinck, eighteenth-century British literature from Brandon Conron, a course in drama from Eric Atkinson (“the best course I took”), French poetry, Greek literature and translation, and another course in English history “from a dreadful man” who “read from notes.” Although Munro says she spent about half of her time at Western writing, she did very well in her courses – apart from economics. At the end of her second year, she won a prize for the highest marks in English. 5
    During her first year at Western, Alice Laidlaw was sitting across from another student in the Lawson library. He was eating some candy, a piece of which he accidentally dropped on the floor. This young man had had his eye on Laidlaw and, looking at the candy on the floor as he was wondering what to do, he heard her say, “I’ll eat it.” Thus Alice Ann Laidlaw met James Armstrong Munro. Jim Munro was from Oakville, the eldest son of Arthur Melville Munro, a senior accountant at the Timothy Eaton company in Toronto, and his wife, Margaret Armstrong Munro. Just under two years older than Alice, Jim was in his second year studying Honours History when he met her. Growing up in Oakville and through high school, he was interested in the arts; he listened to opera and classical music, took art classes, and acted in plays. Jim had seen Alice around the university and had noticed her, but did not know anything about her; he did not know that she was a writer until, when he asked around about her, he was told that Alice Laidlaw “was
Folio’s
new find.” Recalling himself then, Jim Munro says he was “full of poetry and romantic notions” – he remembers then being under the influence of a book,
The Broad Highway
by Jeffrey Farnol, about a young man who falls for a high-spirited girl. He mirrored the story when he met Alice Laidlaw – “I really fell hard for her.” 6
    Describing Alice Laidlaw when she was a student at Western, Doug Spettigue, a classmate, recalls that “she was shy and small and had a very white face, freckle-sprinkled, and chestnut hair.… You thought you could stare right through those quiet eyes and the girl would disappear. But she didn’t. There was an unexpected strength there, and even then a confidence that some of the rest of us, noisier, may have envied.” For his part, Jim Munro is remembered from that time as also being shy, a bit awkward, and handsome. He had a great friend, DonaldDean, who wore a tam and played the bagpipes. He was more of a “true eccentric” than Jim Munro was, and the two were often together. Jim Munro was one of the theatre crowd among the students, a group Spettigue, another member, describes with verve: “We would have scorned to work at our courses but we worked passionately for the Players’ Guild and the Hesperian Club and for
Folio
.… We acted and directed and even wrote plays, we built and tore apart sets endlessly both in the old Guild Room and the Grand Theatre. We lived for the successive issues of
Folio
, to admire ourselves and envy our friends in print.”
    After their meeting in the library in Alice’s first year, she and Jim began seeing each other. They became a couple that year and were engaged at Christmas 1950. At Western they participated in the activities of the arts crowd; their eldest daughter, Sheila, writes that her mother wrote an adaptation of Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
“for a production put on by the Players’ Guild” and she and Jim once “attended a literary evening hosted by a young professor,” Jim Jackson, who “read one of her stories, ‘The Man Who Goes Home,’ about a man who takes the train home to the town he is from.” He does this repeatedly and, each time, he refuses to venture into the town once he reaches the station: he has a cup of coffee and takes the next train back to the city. He knows that the Maitland he might find will not be the Maitland he remembers.
    Among the members of the audience that literary