Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

“A Basket of Strawberries,” this month’s
Mayfair
short story, for the first time we assumed that the author Alice Munro was a mature woman who had spent years learning about life and mastering the writer’s craft. We were astonished when we learned she’s only twenty-one. She was born in Wingham, Ontario, spent two years at the University of Western Ontario, left to get married and is a housewife in Vancouver. This is the first story to be published professionally – it arrives in the world simultaneously with her first child and we congratulate her on both achievements. 26
    Like many of the stories Munro was writing during the 1950s, “A Basket of Strawberries” focuses on an older character, one not altogether outside her experience, but certainly not close to it – its protagonist is Mr. Torrance, a small-town high school Latin teacher who is cut off from all around him by his intellectualism and his aesthetic values. Because of a long-ago affair with a student whom he was forced to marry by the press of the town’s proprieties, he remains disgraced and so can never become principal; his wife is a woman who now disgusts him and with whom he has little in common. The story focuses on a moment when Mr. Torrance loses his grip; he confesses his disgrace to one of his prize students, who reveals the lapse to her friends. Nothing good for Mr. Torrance will come of this; his situation is bleak – the basket of strawberries an emblem of things he will never have.
    Interviewed by J.R. (Tim) Struthers of the University of Western Ontario in 1981, Munro spoke about the stories she was writing during the 1950s, some of which were later included in
Dance of the Happy Shades
, saying, “I think every young writer starts off this way, where at first the stories are exercises. They’re necessary exercises, and I don’t mean they aren’t felt and imagined as well as you can do them.” She then differentiates these stories from “The Peace of Utrecht,” “the first story I absolutely had to write and wasn’t writing to see if I could write that kind of story.” Looking at the contents of
Dance
and thinking particularly of the stories from the 1950s, Munro recalls, “Well, you see, there were periods in here where I wrote hardly anything, due to things in my life, and writing blocks, and so on.” 27 “Cortes Island” recreates the frenzied pace of Munro’s writing, the repeated, rejected beginnings – “excitement and despair, excitement and despair” – and the
Mayfair
editorial note highlights one of the major “things” in Munro’s life that competed with her writing: the publication of her first commercial story was concurrent with the birth of the Munros’ first daughter. Combining marriage and family with “the black life of the artist” as she did from 1952 through the 1970s, this coincidence of births is a fitting one for Alice Munro. During that time, she was to outward appearances both wife and mother, but concurrently and somewhat secretly, she was also a deeply serious writer, writing on, draft after draft. This isthe “double life” Catherine Ross sees in her biography, an apt characterization that well defines Munro’s time in British Columbia.

    The Munros lived in the apartment on Arbutus Street until the fall of 1952. One of the other tenants there, a woman who looked after an ancient and infirm woman, had been friendly to Alice initially but then turned on her. The summer was hot, and this woman took exception to Munro’s walking to the beach in her bathing suit, carrying only a towel. Some of this is captured in Mrs. Gorrie in “Cortes Island.” Working at the library, Munro made friends there with co-workers such as Mari Stainsby, who later was a neighbour in West Vancouver and who, in 1971, did one of the first published interviews with Munro. Through the library, too, Munro also met people who were students at the University of British Columbia – images of student housing in Quonset huts, later referred to in stories, come from these years. There were other associations too, and the regular visits to the Careys and MacKendricks. During fall 1952 they moved to another apartment on Argyle Street, where they lived into 1953, though for just six months. Early that year Alice became pregnant so, with financial help from Jim’s father, they bought their first house at 445 West King’s Road, North Vancouver. They were living there when Sheila Margaret Munro was born on