Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

class differences that existed in her marriage, differences that, she has said, were always there during her time with Jim.
    These contexts define “Thanks for the Ride” as an important transitional story. The first-person narrative, one that manages to reveal Lois’s anguish by way of external description, shows a marked improvement in Munro’s handling of character relative to setting, and the development in the story as revealed by the versions in the Calgary archive demonstrates that Munro did respond to Weaver’s critique. Munro has said, speaking of the whole of her career, that “at a certain point I need somebody”; that is, she needs another set of eyes, another sensibility, another assessment. For her, the first such person was Robert Weaver, backed up by his primary reader, Joyce Marshall, and the other readers at the CBC : he supported and encouraged her, he criticized her work in a professional, positive way, he suggested other publishers, he kept up their literary and professional connection. As she was later to write: “Connection. That was what it was all about.” 41 During the 1950s, Robert Weaver was Alice Munro’s most important connection to the growing world of serious Canadian writing.

    Yet but for the lifeline Weaver offered to Munro through his letters and his very occasional literary parties when he visited, Alice Munro had to persist alone as a writer. Jim was very supportive although, as his comments about “Thanks for the Ride” showed, like many spouses he was not always able to hit the right note; in any case, he saw little of his wife’s work in progress. Through Weaver Munro had made some local literary contacts in Vancouver, but her personality and family situation did not incline her to encourage them. In 1955, just after Catherine’s birth and death, Munro went out to the University of British Columbiato hear Ethel Wilson speak – Wilson was a writer whose work she admired and who, she knew, also lived in Vancouver. Munro later wrote to Mary McAlpine, a writer and early Wilson biographer, that her discovery of Wilson’s work in the early 1950s made her go “out of my mind with delight. Real writing was being done right where I lived!” 42 But Munro did not speak to her. Through Weaver she had met some of the people at the university involved in creative writing – people like novelist Robert Harlow – but this, too, was not a connection Munro was prepared to follow up, aware as she was of her own lack of university credentials. During her years in Vancouver, Munro came to know Margaret Laurence, who had returned from Africa and settled there with her family in 1957. Munro met her in 1960 at a book launch for Laurence’s first novel,
This Side Jordan
, and both Munros remember seeing the Laurences socially during the early 1960s. Particularly, Munro recalls being aware that Laurence was writing
The Stone Angel
.
    But mainly it was a solitary business for Munro as she pressed on, writing and submitting her stories, having some broadcast and publishing an increasing number of them in a variety of venues as the decade passed. When she was profiled for the first time in the North Vancouver
Citizen
in August 1961 under the headline “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories,” the writer quoted Robert Fulford who described her as “the least praised good writer in Canada.” 43
“A Lump of Complicated Painful Truth Pushing at My Heart”
    After Jenny Munro’s birth in June 1957 and ongoing, ultimately fruitless attempts at novels – work that brought on depression and a period of writer’s block – Munro had no publications or any stories broadcast until the early 1960s. Almost twenty years later she wrote about this period in what appears a draft connected to “The Moons of Jupiter.” In a scene showing the narrator at home with her children in rainy Vancouver, Munro writes: “Yesterday I was sick and stayed in bed. I was not very sick, just wanted to shut things down and pull up the covers and have hot drinks and watch television.” She continues, offeringremembered details of
Funorama
, of her daughters’ reactions to that program (it is 1959, they are six and two, just as Sheila and Jenny were that year), and of the time the program kept the girls occupied and so gave her time to think:
    I never thought a television program would make me nostalgic, if nostalgic is what I am. I spent a lot of time then being nostalgic for, or at least harking back