Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

nymphomaniac, Evie thought. Such a phenomenon deserved her closest attention, but did not readily reward it.” 11
    The wondering, the seeing, the questioning, the realization. These qualities are evident in these passages, which focus on occurrences that are utterly commonplace – yet seen and written of by Munro, such commonplaces are transformed into occasions for mystery, for understanding. They find their point of departure in her experience (“There is always a starting point in reality,” she told Boyle in 1974), and Dodie is based on a person Munro knew that summer, but it is how she transforms such remembered people that is her hallmark.
    In this story Munro has the waitresses reading romance stories as they sun themselves in the afternoons by the lake; some of them began with their next year’s university texts but those were soon put aside. The summer she was in Muskoka Munro tried her hand at writing such commercial stories. 12 She found she did not believe in them enough – their hope, what they offered those who bought and read them. She was already too cynical to write them with success, with the necessary conviction. That balance, between belief and hope and romance on the one hand, and what is real on the other, is evident in “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, especially when she meditates on the relation between Dodie and Joey – her insight, even early on, is as caustic as it is humane.
    And as she describes the honeymooning couples “in the anxious country between courtship and domesticity” in her draft story, Munro offers a knowing perspective on their circumstances. Well she should, since by the time she wrote “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?” Munro was herself married. Speaking to Thomas Tausky in 1984, she explained that once she had earned her scholarships to Western she “had to come to university” since, at home, there was no money even “to come to London to look for a job.” And once her two years at university had passed, there “was no money then to do anything but get married.… I could either stay in Wingham or get married.” Even if she went home to Wingham, her most likely prospect was to marry a farmer there. There was also her mother’s situation. And by the time she was in university, Munro also knew that she was an artist, so her dilemma was compounded. Talking to Tausky about her early attraction to
Wuthering Heights
and the story she wrote in high school in imitation of Brontë, and connecting it with what she later did in creating Del Jordan’s circumstances in
Lives of Girls and Women
, Munro saw then “that these were the twin choices of my life … marriage and motherhood or the black life of the artist.” Although the first choice was to predominate during the 1950s, Alice Munro ultimately chose both.
    Once they met toward the end of Alice’s first year, she and Jim Munro began their own version of what she would later characterize as “friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage.” Jim Munro had enrolled in a training program of the Royal Canadian Navy for university students and spent the summer Alice was in Muskoka in British Columbia. This led to his resolve to move there after he finished university. And once he fell hard for Alice Laidlaw, Jim also decided to switch from history to the general arts program at Western – it would allow him to take courses in English and other subjects and, more significantly, he would be able to graduate a year earlier than he had previously planned, in 1951. Jim could then find a job so he and Alice could marry.
    When they got engaged at Christmas 1950, Jim went to Wingham and asked Robert Laidlaw for Alice’s hand in marriage – Mrs. Laidlaw’s suggestion, Jim recalls. When their final year at Western was over, Alice went home to Wingham and then took off for a time with Diane Laneworking at a job intended to make them lots of money. Arranged by a neighbour in St. Thomas, Ontario – Lane’s father, an Anglican minister, had moved to a new church there – the two young women were hired to remove the suckers that fed on the tobacco plants in the neighbouring fields. They were singularly unsuccessful at that work, which was difficult, dirty, and tedious, and they abandoned it after a time. Jim, who had graduated with a general arts degree in English and History, did another period of Navy training and, once he got out, began working in Vancouver for the Timothy Eaton department store – the same