Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

at him. Or in “Miles City, Montana,” the father of the narrator’s two daughters is suddenly dismissed: “I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed.” 24 Without doubt, each of these husbands – all three are long divorced in each story’s present – owes something to Jim Munro.
    The class differences between Alice Laidlaw and Jim Munro – as she makes utterly clear in her commentary on the wedding photograph – were immense. The two were from very different worlds. Their Oakville-based connections in Vancouver were but one indication of differences lying submerged, unacknowledged but present, which Munro drew upon after their divorce. But during the 1950s and into the 1960s, the Munros were busy establishing themselves and their young family; hence these differences remained mostly unstated between them, rooted far away in Ontario, though sometimes evident in their personal life in Vancouver.
    Those differences, while powerful enough and ultimately contributing to the end of the Munros’ marriage by the early 1970s, should not obscure a key fact: throughout their marriage, Jim Munro supported and encouraged Alice’s writing. Alice has said that Jim is one of the very few men she has known – apart from English teachers – who “really read fiction seriously.” And Robert Weaver remarked that Alice was “lucky to have a husband who supported her writing” at a time when many husbands, given the mores of the time, had difficulty with the time spent and the achievements of a wife who wrote. Weaver was in a position to know, certainly. Emblematic of Jim’s support was his gift of a typewriter to his wife on her twenty-first birthday on July 10, 1952. 25
    In tune with this, in “Cortes Island” Munro recreates a younger self, this time as a writer:
    But one complication had been added since childhood – it seemed that I had to be a writer as well as a reader. I bought a school notebook and tried to write – did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can. I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook cover left. Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle – excitement and despair, excitement and despair. It was like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week.
    Not entirely secret either. Chess knew that I read a lot and that I was trying to write. He didn’t discourage it at all. He thought that it was something reasonable that I might quite possibly learn to do. It would take hard practice but could be mastered, like bridge or tennis. This generous faith I did not thank him for. It just added to the farce of my disasters.
    Elsewhere in the story, once the narrator has fallen out with Mrs. Gorrie, it becomes clear that the older woman has been using a pass key to snoop around the young couple’s apartment. Mrs. Gorrie says that the narrator would “sit down there and say she’s writing letters andshe writes the same thing over and over again – it’s not letters, it’s the same thing over and over.” Hearing this, the narrator says, “Now I knew that she must have uncrumpled the pages in my wastebasket. I often tried to start the same story with the same words. As she said, over and over.”
    As with “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, Munro would follow the same practice herself – the Calgary archives are filled with hundreds of pages of fragments, many of them beginnings only, often with numerous repetitions of the same words in similar paragraphs. While Jim Munro learned quickly that the girl he “fell hard” for at Western was a writer, and once they were married knew she was always working on something, he seldom knew much more than that. He hardly ever saw anything in manuscript. “Her writing was very private,” he remembers. “She was always changing and revising it. I didn’t ever ask to see anything in manuscript. When they came out, I’d see them when they were published.”
“Due to Things in My Life, and Writing Blocks, and So On”
    When
Mayfair
published Munro’s “A Basket of Strawberries” in its November 1953 issue, the editors concluded the “About Ourselves” column, which appeared on the masthead page, with the following paragraph:
    When we read