Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Canada-wide company his father worked for in Toronto.
    In December Jim Munro came back east to marry Alice Laidlaw. The wedding was “a quiet ceremony at the home of the bride’s parents,” according to the
Advance-Times
, held on December 29, 1951, and conducted by Dr. W.A. Beecroft, the United Church minister. The announcement continues:
    Given in marriage by her father, the bride wore an afternoon dress of wine velvet, with matching accessories and corsage of Lester Hibbard roses. She was attended by her sister, Miss Sheila Laidlaw, wearing a dress of sapphire blue velvet similar in style to the bride’s dress, with matching accessories and corsage of Pink Delight roses. Mr. Donald Dean of Tillsonburg was best man and Miss Diane Lane of St. Thomas played the wedding music.
    After the ceremony, a wedding dinner was served to the bridal party and the immediate families in the Brunswick Hotel. Following the dinner the bride and groom left for Toronto to travel by train to Vancouver. Mr. and Mrs. Munro will live in Vancouver.
    Diane Lane, who came up to Wingham before the wedding to help Alice with its preparations, recalls the ceremony as “about as modest a wedding as you could have.” Along with the Laidlaws, Lane, and Dean, only Mr. and Mrs. Munro attended. Lane played Handel’s
Largo
– a piece Alice requested as one of Jim’s favourites – and Bill Laidlaw, who was then fifteen, arranged for tin cans trailing from the weddingcouple’s car as they drove away, something Jim did not much appreciate. Alice and Jim were very happy, she recalls, and Jim in particular was most evidently “deeply infatuated.” 13
    Yet given the disparity of social backgrounds involved in the union and especially given Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s condition, all was not entirely well. Mrs. Laidlaw was at the time “so noticeably ill” – as Lane remembers her – and her speech was so badly affected that only family members could consistently understand her. Looking at a wedding photograph including her mother, Munro told Catherine Ross that “she looked quite nice in the picture. She had a fixed look, which is a characteristic of Parkinsonians, very masklike.” Munro looked at her wedding photographs at other times and tried to use them in what appears a draft version of “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field” in one of her longhand notebooks; it is entitled “Old Mr. Black” and it begins:
    People don’t spend much time looking at wedding pictures, particularly when the marriage itself no longer exists. I have a picture of myself and my first husband that deserves some attention. I am twenty, my husband is twenty-two. I am wearing a home-made velvet dress and hat. My husband is wearing a new suit, too large even when you take into account the baggy styles of the early fifties. Our attitudes to the undertaking are reflected in our faces – his stricken but shining with conviction, mine pale, resolute, sullen. Our parents on either side look uncomfortable. My wedding had come at a time when our family had had a patch of ill-luck so shocking that it makes other people turn away in embarrassment, my mother sick with an incurable disease (there she is with her slightly crazy eyes and her stiff pose and her beautiful Irish skull), my father with his business in ruins trying to support us by working as a night-watchman in the local foundry, our skid into poverty coinciding naturally with a skid from the middle class through the bottom of the middle class into the working class. And it was not as if therehadn’t been hopes and possibilities. My father owned a set of golf clubs. A few years before my mother had furnished the living-room where this picture was taken with an idea of creating a Victorian parlour, with uncomfortable needle-pointed chairs and settee, a painted hanging-lamp and fine gilt-framed mirror (our sheets and towels were worn almost to pieces, we had no refrigerator, fly-stickers hung over our kitchen table; that is the picture)[.]
    What Munro has written here – as only she can – is a precise description of the moment captured in this photograph. Likely written during the late 1970s (the adjacent material is connected to
Who Do You Think You Are?)
, perhaps just after her father’s death and perhaps as “Working for a Living” was coming to the fore in her imagination, what Munro writes here is a precise, unadorned reminiscence. She continues, shifting to Jim’s parents:
    Into such