Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

there is no doubt that they came genuinely to like and value her as the years passed. However, when they visited his parents, things were more difficult for Jim than for Alice – in some ways his choice of a wife was indicative of his difference in his parents’ eyes. As a child, Jim had felt closer to his paternal grandfather, a minister who had moved from a church in a very small town in Manitoba to Oakville, and spent considerable time with him. His aesthetic interests, too, were at variance with his accountant father’s views. But throughout their relations, Alice says, Jim’s family was very good to her: “Everything was amicable.” Once she left British Columbia and moved back to Ontario, she continued to visit Margaret Munro and also saw a good deal of Jim’s sister, also named Margaret. 30
    In “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro uses the phrase “bumbling years” to refer to the time when Sheila and Jenny were children, and that may well be an apt characterization of Munro’s life as a housewife in North and West Vancouver from 1953 until the family moved to Victoria in 1963. Given Andrea’s later arrival in 1966, Munro thinks of her role as a mother as falling into two periods, one in Vancouver, theother later in Victoria, after they established the bookstore and settled into a new place, one Munro found more comfortable than she had Vancouver. The neighbours that Munro had dodged in Vancouver were women, also housewives and mothers who, in seeking for connection, interfered with Munro’s ongoing writing by inviting her to coffee or to engage in other neighbourhood activities when she might be writing. Not at all forthcoming about what she was actually doing, and too polite to rebuff people, Munro was drawn into more of these activities during the years on Lawson Avenue than she would have liked. Jim Munro remembers that when people would call while Alice was writing, she was loath to tell them that she was busy, that she was working, and certainly not that she was writing. As she would later write in “Material,” “I never said the word
write
, Hugo had trained me not to, that word was like a bare wire to us.” Although she was annoyed that she had been interrupted, she never let her friends know they had done so. 31
    In “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro offers a passage that, though ostensibly about Janet, her narrator, seems actually to derive from her own experiences as a young mother in Vancouver:
    When I was the age Nichola is now I had Nichola herself in a carry-cot or squirming in my lap, and I was drinking coffee all the rainy Vancouver afternoons with my neighbourhood friend, Ruth Boudreau, who read a lot and was bewildered by her situation, as I was. We talked about our parents, our childhoods, though for some time we kept clear of our marriages. How thoroughly we dealt with our fathers and mothers, deplored their marriages, their mistaken ambitions or fear of ambition, how competently we filed them away, defined them beyond any possibility of change. What presumption.
    Ruth Boudreau is based on Daphne Cue, who moved into a house across the laneway from the Munros in June 1959. She and her husband, Vic, then a commercial fisherman, were born and raised in West Vancouver. When they moved in across from the Munros, they had just had their first daughter, so the woman who was vacating the housethought to introduce her to Munro, who she knew had young daughters and also liked to read. The two became fast friends, and remain so today. They quickly saw that they were in danger of taking up too much of one another’s time, so they decided to meet just one afternoon a week, and that afternoon became sacred, according to both. They met, laughed, told stories, drank coffee, and smoked – but above all they talked about what they were reading. Like Munro, Cue had attended university (taking commerce, which she loathed). They each remember reading and discussing a three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence together – probably Edward Nehls’s
D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography
, which was published between 1957 and 1959 – reading all of Katherine Mansfield, also Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black
, and discussing Dickens, a particular favourite of Cue’s. Daphne recalls Munro seeming to have already read everything. Indeed, by the late fifties, Munro’s personal post-university reading of “most of the writers of the twentieth century you’re supposed to have read” had been going on