Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

evening was Gerry Fremlin, who by then had graduated and was working in London; he was there with his girlfriend. After Munro’s story was read, “he raised his hand and asked her why she hadn’t called the town Wingham.” Sheila Munro also writes that her mother “thought of Gerry as something of a Byronic figure on campus, dark and lean.” Another classmate recalls Fremlin at Western as “a raging, unconventional guy … the village atheist of the Arts Faculty.” Fremlin’s atheism was outspoken in classes (he remembers as much); the same classmate recalls him publicly taking on the well-known theologian Reinhold Niebuhr when he spoke at Western, although Fremlin does not recall doing so. Like Alice, Fremlin had begun in the journalism program but he later switched to English and philosophy. After working for a timein Toronto and London, he did graduate work at Western, receiving an M.A. in geomorphology. In 1955 he joined the geography branch of the Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources in Ottawa as a geographer, becoming its chief in 1971. After serving as editor of
The National Atlas of Canada
(1974), Fremlin left the civil service and returned home to Clinton, Ontario. During this time he never married. 7
    This brief encounter at the literary evening is notable, given Munro and Fremlin’s later relationship, but the question he addressed to her that evening about “The Man Who Goes Home” is one that has been asked repeatedly during Munro’s career about the settings of her stories. However, a letter he wrote to her the following summer suggests something of the growing appreciation of her writing around Western. It “was all about my writing,” she recalls, “a really, really appreciating, insightful letter … one of the best I ever got.” Fremlin saw Munro as a real writer, complimenting her work, comparing her to Chekhov – “but since I was seeing Jim already, it didn’t say anything about coming to Muskoka to see me.”
    The predominant feature of Munro’s writing while she was at Western is seen in the three stories she published in
Folio
. The first of these was “The Dimensions of a Shadow.” Owning a typewriter, Diane Lane volunteered to type it for her and, once it had been successfully submitted to John Cairns, his reaction caused a small scene. According to Sheila Munro, Fremlin remembers Cairns “running down the hall after reading the story, waving it in his hand and shouting ‘You’ve got to read this. You’ve got to read this.’ ” The story concerns Miss Abelhart, a small-town teacher who, pathetically, is revealed to have an infatuation with one of her male students; she was, Munro writes, “not ugly or absurd, in herself, only a little dried and hollowed, with straw hair tightly and tastelessly curled, and skin somewhat roughened, as if she had been for a long time facing a harsh wind. There was no blood in her cheeks, and something like dust lay over her face. People who looked at her knew she was old, and had been old always. She was thirty-three.” Miss Abelhart is distracted and disaffected as the story begins, so she avoids her usual temperance meeting at the church, walking off into the town by herself, thinking of the boy in her Latinclass – “In four days the school would be closed, and he would be gone.” She walks toward the school and meets the boy; they talk and he admits that he reciprocates her feelings for him. At one point she asks him, “Did you ever think that once in her life, a woman has the right to have someone look at her and not see anything about her, just her, herself? Every woman has a right, no matter how old or ugly she is.” The point of view shifts as the conversation concludes and it is revealed that Miss Abelhart is really alone, talking to a hallucination – Munro leaves her “alone in bottomless silence.”
    This revelation is effected by three high school girls who walk by Miss Abelhart and overhear her speaking aloud to the boy she imagines before her, whom the reader at the time thinks is real – “The three girls whom she had seen earlier in the evening walked past them. They were giggling together and glancing furtively from the corners of their eyes. The boy did not even look at them.” Later, realizing that Miss Abelhart is talking to an imaginary person, one of them exclaims, “Jesus Christ! That’s it! She thought there was somebody right there beside her!”
    After she had learned that the story was