Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

from its first-person narration, “At the Other Place” is interesting because it draws on Munro’s own experience of the land the family kept in Blyth – presumably the Laidlaws went on such excursions. Similarly, the other stories from the early 1950s may be seen touching on her experience – “The Idyllic Summer” is set in the Muskoka of Munro’s summer spent waitressing, and “The Edge of Town” begins with a detailed description of Lower Wingham and the Lower Town Store. There Munro emphasizes the place’s separateness: “The sidewalk does not go any further, there are no more street lamps, and the town policeman does not cross the bridge.” The story is concerned with an outcast character, Harry Brooke, who is not introduced until the story’s second page, once the setting is established: “Up here the soil is shallow and stony; the creeks dry up in summer, and a harsh wind from the west blows all year long.” Harry, an ineffective storekeeper, is a person set apart from the town by his manner: “His expectancy, his seeking,” made the townspeople “wary, uneasily mocking. In a poor town like this, in a poor country, facing the year-long winds and the hard winters, people expect and seek very little; a rooted pessimism is their final wisdom. Among the raw bony faces of the Scotch-Irish, with their unspeaking eyes, the face of Harry was a flickering light, an unsteady blade; his exaggerated, flowering talk ran riot among barren statements and silences.” Like Mr.Torrance in “A Basket of Strawberries,” nothing good will come of this difference. But Munro is clearly back home in Wingham – this is personal material; when Jill Gardiner, of the University of New Brunswick, read it to her during an interview in June 1973, she commented, “And yet, you know, that was not an imagined setting. I actually lived [it] … it’s all
real
. It’s all there. I did not
make
it for its meaning. I was trying to find meaning.”
    During 1953 Munro worked on a story, never published, called “Pastime of a Saturday Night.” Like “A Basket of Strawberries,” it takes up the time she was studying for her exams toward the end of high school. She tried the material in both third and first person. She may have submitted the latter version to Weaver, since her name is written on the first page in his hand. Indeed, throughout her career, Munro has frequently sent stories off unsigned, “just to get rid of them,” she has said. And while the story’s plot is of little concern, there is no doubt that she was drawing upon her own and her family’s circumstances. Thus, the grandmother here was influenced by Sadie Code Laidlaw:
    My grandmother was a big straight woman, with auburn-grey hair piled in a pyramid on top of her head. She had great strength, and she loved a job she could swing to with her whole body; she missed the farm work she had done as a girl and a young wife. In her dealings with town people, and her conduct of town life, she was timid, strict, and haughty. She was not at ease there and the care of my mother fretted her, as all womanly business did, that asked delicacy and patience more than strength. But she drove herself to do it, believing that all uncongenial duties were for the strengthening of the soul. She was a Presbyterian; her harsh and stirring voice rang out above all the others as they sang the Psalms.
    In this story too Munro offers descriptions of the country, the town clock in its tower, and the activities on the town’s main street (that is, on Josephine Street, Wingham) of a Saturday night that all turn up in later work. 36
    In January 1956 Weaver offered to buy “The Green April” for $125 for
Anthology
. Like “Pastime of a Saturday Night,” some of its characters are based on Munro’s aunt Maud and grandmother Laidlaw living in town, though Munro has invented a half-witted cousin. In the same letter, he returns “The Day of the Butterfly,” a story published in the July 1956 issue of
Chatelaine
and later included in
Dance of the Happy Shades
. Weaver also comments on “The Edge of Town” in
Queen’s Quarterly
, which he had seen, and reports that he had heard that
Chatelaine
had bought one of her stories – this one was probably “How Could I Do That?”, a story Weaver had rejected (as “The Chesterfield Suite”) but which appeared in the March 1956 issue of the magazine. He asks, “I wonder if you have tried to send any of your fiction to the United