Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

accepted, Munro remembers that her father was “almost as excited as I was.” But then the story came out and had “swear words” – “Jesus Christ!” – in it. This was “very hurtful” to her mother, grandmother, and aunt, Munro recalls, and it offended Jim’s mother too, for he had shown his mother the story. Bob Laidlaw, for his part, understood why she had used the expression, but did not think it was a good idea. He would subsequently refer to it as “that expression which you used.” Thus Munro began offending certain Huron County proprieties with her very first published story. 8
    As the summary of “The Dimensions of a Shadow” suggests, Munro’s techniques are more than a bit forced. The same might be said of her third
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story, “The Widower,” which was subsequently seen and rejected by Weaver at the CBC . It concerns a man who, after his wife dies, discovers that he is not very bereft after all. Between these two, Munro published “Story for Sunday” in the December 1950
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. Unlike the others, it offers a young girl’s point of view, one closer to Munro’s own. Evelyn is a fifteen-year-old who “had never walked home from a dance with a boy,” but the week before, after Sunday school, thesuperintendent had taken her in his arms and kissed her. This man, named Mr. Willens, works “in the office, down at the factory.” His touch has transformed Evelyn. She returns to Sunday school the next week, and as she enters the church “her whole body came alive in a new way and tingled with faint excitement.” Positioning herself to reenact their kiss of the previous week, Evelyn is stymied – she finds Willens’s attentions are now focused on another, Myrtle Fotheringay, the church pianist. So what Willens had done the previous week, she sees, “was all quite meaningless.” Rebuffed, Evelyn turns “to the face of the immaculate Christ …”, and the story ends with this evasive ellipsis. 9
    Of the three stories Munro published as an undergraduate in
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, “Story for Sunday” is the strongest in that it derives from her own point of view and range of experience; by contrast, the other two stories are wooden, more conventional and forced despite their strength in physical description. The ending of “Story for Sunday” is forced – the shift from adolescent rapture to religious fervour neat but unlikely – but there is a genuine quality to Evelyn’s feelings that is lacking in the other two narratives.
    Perhaps the most interesting thing about “Story for Sunday,” especially at this juncture in Munro’s career, is that when she came to write one of her most ambitious stories of the 1990s, “The Love of a Good Woman,” she decided to name the roué character “Mr. Willens.” As that story begins, Munro writes that “for the last couple of decades, there has been a museum in Walley, dedicated to preserving photos and butter churns and horse harnesses and an old dentist’s chair and a cumbersome apple peeler and such curiosities as the pretty little porcelain-and-glass insulators that were used on telegraph poles.… Also there is a red box, which has the letters D.M. WILLENS, OPTOMETRIST printed on it, and a note beside it, saying, ‘This box of optometrist’s instruments though not very old has considerable local significance, since it belonged to Mr. D.M. Willens, who drowned in the Peregrine River, 1951. It escaped the catastrophe and was found, presumably by the anonymous donor, who dispatched it to be a feature of our collection.’ ”
    Like the first Mr. Willens, this one also preys on vulnerable females for physical gratification, but unlike that one, the second Mr.Willens is also derived from another, intermediary figure in Munro’s work. During the mid-1970s she was working on a text for a book of photographs, mostly vignettes of a paragraph to two pages in length; one of these is called “Hearse” and begins, “The most successful seducer of women that there ever was in that country was Del Fairbridge’s uncle, the older undertaker brother, retired.” Since the book was never completed and published, Munro used much of it in
Who Do You Think You Are?
There this fellow is transformed slightly and turns up in “Wild Swans,” another story of a young woman vulnerable to an older man’s advances: the “little man” who comes into Flo’s store “had been an undertaker, but he was retired now. The hearse was retired too. His sons had taken