Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

squalor and elegance & illness & ill-luck & pretension come my husband’s parents, perfectly normal well-behaved people of the upper middle class to whom exaggerations of all kinds were distressing. Plenty here for them to behave well about. They had never reason to think their son would marry anyone but the daughter of a family like themselves, or if he did take up with a girl from a little backwoods town, her father would at least be the leading citizen of the town, a judge or a doctor or at worst a merchant. How had this happened, they must have asked themselves a dozen times that day, how did their son even come to meet the daughter of a night-watchman who lived in a house with no garbage pickup and flies blackening the back door. At the University, that was how, where the new Provincial Govt’s munificences opens the Gothic doors a crack, lets in a dribble of the children of the poor who are brash & brainy & scornful & lucky too sometimes under their meekness in ways their betters can’t suspect.
    No doubt owing to her own perspective on this scene – written, as she says, when the marriage it commemorates was over, her mother and likely her father dead – Munro starkly analyzes the commemorated moment’s meaning, the differences between the two principals and their two families, not really known then, but intimately familiar by the time Munro writes. She focuses on an item in the photo, an antique gun that does appear by the Laidlaws’ mantel in Wingham in the actual wedding photo, and continues:
    Well, in a corner of the picture, propped up in the old-fashioned parlour, there is a gun, an elegant old muzzle-loader with a bayonet on the end. That’s part of my mother’s decorating and in itself has some complicated meaning, guns were no longer a natural article in parlours, of course; the gun was displayed for its antique elegance, and its history. When asked, we said it had been used in the War of 1812. My future mother-in-law and her friends would never have had a gun in their living-rooms (their living-rooms were all very much alike – comfortable, creamy, chintzy, pleasant) – and neither would any of the members of our family, who tended toward ferny curtains & plastic-covers on brocade-like furniture. I did not know anyone else who would have a gun in the living-room and for once I was not in opposition to my mother. I liked the gun there and valued its history (though I had got it all wrong, one of the things I’m coming to).
    So there is a gun included in my wedding-pictures. If I had been marrying a boy of my own background there could have been jokes about this but in the circumstances nobody mentioned it. I don’t mean that there was a specifically awkward circumstance, such as pregnancy; just that everything was awkward, and sad, and ill-omened. It was not a wedding any sort of jokes could be made about. It was a wedding nobody wanted except the bride & groom, and they clung to it in spite of drastic misgivings. I clung to it too; make no mistake, if anybody had advised me not to go through with it I would have eloped, to show them.
    Munro’s commentary on her wedding photograph breaks off here, for she shifts her focus, saying, “When I was about ten or eleven years old I went with my father when he had to fix the fences on the fifty acres we owned.” 14 The draft then breaks off altogether. Yet what remains of “Old Mr. Black” is as direct and clear-sighted an articulation of the social and personal contexts animating the Laidlaw-Munro wedding as might be imagined – Munro’s description recreates the day she literally became Alice Munro starkly, abjectly, precisely. She had made her choice: her name became Alice Munro, and she and her new husband went off to start their new life together in Vancouver.
“I Certainly Hope That You Will Continue Writing”
    Sometime in 1951, while she was still at Western and engaged to Jim Munro, Alice Laidlaw wrote to Robert Weaver in the Talks and Public Affairs section of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. A native of Niagara Falls, a war veteran, and a graduate of the University of Toronto, Weaver had joined the CBC in late 1948 to organize and produce its literary programs. He replaced James Scott, who returned to his native Seaforth (fairly close to Wingham) primarily to write but also to teach creative writing at Western. Among the programs Weaver inherited was one called
Canadian Short Stories
, a weekly fifteen-minute