Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

“Jakarta,” though, Munro must have found her way to one, since she offers a scene of “bare bodies splashing and running and falling into the dark water” and her character, Kath, talks to naked people emerging from the sea. 33
“The Kind of Writer Who Won’t Fold up Under Firm Criticism”
    When Munro arrived in Vancouver in January 1952, she had written several stories in addition to those that had appeared in
Folio
or had been submitted to Robert Weaver at CBC . During the summer of 1951, she had produced two stories, “The Return of the Poet,” which drew on her time at Western, and “The Yellow Afternoon,” which looked back to her high school years. Much edited and Canadianized – references to
Maria Chapdelaine
were added at a later stage – it was broadcast on
Anthology
, Weaver’s new program, in 1955. In conversation with Struthers in 1981, Munro characterized the 1950s – the time before she wrote “The Peace of Utrecht” – as the time when her attitude was “I will be a writer.” After that story, which takes up the searing “personal material” surrounding her mother’s death in 1959, her attitude became “some things have to be written by me.” 34 Thus Munro sees the 1950s stories largely as exercises, or what she calls “holding-pattern stories.” As with her subsequent characterization of her decision to leave her university studies behind, Munro is mostly persuasive here, but not completely. The stories Munrowrote, submitted, and published during the 1950s are more than exercises; they show her grappling with personal material early on – perhaps not with the deep feelings like those about her mother, but with the personal material derived from Wingham.
    Talking about the way she has accommodated herself to her reputation, Munro said, “In a way, I pretend that I’m not that person,” the writer, “and I go about my life as if I wasn’t.” Such an approach was easy to manage in the 1950s and into the 1960s – to all appearances Munro was just another suburban housewife and mother. Yet the connection she had made with Robert Weaver in 1951 was alive and the advice he offered, suggesting that she submit to “better Canadian magazines,” the
Northern Review
and the
Canadian Forum
, was advice she followed. The two stories she published after “A Basket of Strawberries” appeared in the
Forum
, “The Idyllic Summer” (which Weaver broadcast on
Anthology
in March 1954) and “At the Other Place.” These were followed, in 1955, with “The Edge of Town” in
Queen’s Quarterly
. Each of these stories shares the same weaknesses and strengths of “A Basket of Strawberries”: the descriptions of place are vivid, but the characters and situations are incompletely rendered.
    Yet in “At the Other Place” Munro uses first-person narration for the first time in a published story and, although the story’s action is melodramatic, the perspective she offers there is one that became characteristic. Signed Alice Laidlaw, the story begins: “On Sunday afternoons in the summer my father and Uncle Bert took turns going down to the other place to have a look at the sheep which were pastured there. Sometimes my father let us come with him. In July we all went down after church, and took a hamper of food with us and had a picnic. We did not go away – even five miles away – very often, and we did not have many picnics. We were excited.” After describing the food, Munro offers more family detail before establishing the narrative perspective:
    We took our bathing suits, though the creek was hardly deep enough to wade in at this time of year; my mother took a library book, not her knitting – she did not knit on Sunday. She andmy father and Elinor, the youngest, got into the front of the milk-truck, and the rest of us sat in the back, as we liked to do, and watched the road unwind behind us, the hills rise up as we went down – riding backwards gave you a funny feeling and made you seem to be going much faster.
    Characteristically, Munro follows this image – the children riding backwards – by then describing the country they saw, and with such detail that the reader sees it too: “It was a very hot day, but there had not been enough hot weather yet to burn the country up. The roadside bushes were still green and the money-musk was blooming unfaded in the long grass. Haying-time was almost over, but in some of the fields the coils were still standing.” 35
    Apart