Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

in
The Love of a Good Woman
, “My Mother’s Dream,” connects with these dreams.
    But more than that, Catherine Alice Munro – and a fictional figure named Elizabeth based on her – has been a presence in her mother’s writings. When Munro was pregnant for the last time, with her daughter Andrea in 1966, she took to writing poetry. Many of these poems are signed – in Munro’s hand – “Anne Chamney,” and one appeared in the
Canadian Forum
so attributed. Among them is one contrasting Catherine, her “dark child,” with her two daughters who lived: “Her face was long and dark / Pulled down by the harrowing effort / To live, to drive blood through her poisoned body. / In a few hours she died.” She says that “it would be presumptuous to bring any word to her,” since she does not even know where her “dark child” is buried. Addressing her directly, Munro sees her as a “child who went withoutcomfort / Without a word to make you human / Helplessly poisoning yourself / Because my body made your body incomplete.”
    During the late 1970s, Munro worked on a story she called “Shoebox Babies.” In a notebook version of this story, the focus is on Prue, the adult daughter to Bonnie, a famous poet. While Prue was still a child, Bonnie bore Elizabeth, a daughter who lived less than a day. The draft includes Bonnie’s account of the shoebox burial, a meeting between Bonnie and an undertaker to make burial arrangements, and Prue’s discovery, years later when she was an adult, that her mother had published a book of poems called “Shoebox Babies.” Shocked by this discovery, Prue thinks, “I don’t understand the function of art. Art.”
    In the same way and at about the same time, Munro wrote a notebook draft of “Miles City, Montana.” It includes another baby Elizabeth, stillborn, buried in the same way. Her presence between the two living children – born fifteen months after the eldest, Cynthia – animates that story’s meditation on the child-parent relation. Munro contrasts the personality of each parent as she dissects each person’s reaction to the near drowning of their younger daughter, Meg, in the story’s central episode. After four-year-old Meg is pulled from the pool, safe and alive, the narrator meditates on what would have occurred had she drowned; those thoughts are in the finished story. What is not there, however, is any mention of the dead baby Elizabeth. “Andrew believed in luck,” Munro writes, “his luck, would celebrate it like a virtue. If something not lucky happened, he would shove that out of mind, ashamed. That was why he never mentioned the dead baby. And my mentioning it would seem a kind of sickening parade of misfortune, a dishonesty.” 29 Having Catherine Alice buried so long without formal recognition wore on Munro; in 1990, she arranged to have a marker placed in the North Vancouver cemetery – it does not mark her grave, but it at least recognizes her being.
    The 1961 Munro family car trip from which “Miles City, Montana” derives was not her first trip home to Ontario. When Sheila was still an infant, just nine months old, Munro flew with her baby back to visit the families. Her father-in-law, Arthur Munro, had made a business trip to Vancouver just before Sheila’s birth and, afterwards, Margaret Munrohad flown out to help after the baby arrived. So when she was back east during the summer of 1954 Munro visited her family in Wingham. Given Mrs. Laidlaw’s illness and the expense involved, her parents could not travel.
    During the summer of 1956, Munro took Sheila back to Ontario by train for a visit. That was the last time she saw her mother. Jenny was born the next year, so Munro was not able to make the trip again until 1959 after Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s death. During these years, the years of her mother’s last illness, Munro wrote to her parents (“Dad wrote
wonderful
letters” – he was the correspondent) and to her grandmother, Sadie Laidlaw – “I wrote to Grandma less often, because I had to be more circumspect.” During her trips home, those of the 1960s as well as the 1950s, Alice and her daughters would also visit the Munros in Oakville. After her years at university and in Vancouver, she found she was more used to the middle-class life the Munros lived than she was to the circumscribed life at home. While it was clear that Arthur and Margaret Munro were initially bewildered by their son’s choice of a girl to marry,