Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

this time she worked away at a projected novel, one variously entitled “The Death of the White Fox” or “The White Norwegian,” or just “The Norwegian,” which exists in manuscript in the Calgary archives. There is another, “The Boy Murderer,” which features a character named Franklin coming home from the war and jumping off the train before it gets to his hometown, Goldenrod. Munro wrote this scene numerous times; some of Franklin’s situation and some members of his family were the basis of Garnett French’s in
Lives of Girls and Women
. And Munro has said that “The Found Boat,” a story included in
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
, was salvaged from another attempt at a novel.
    “The Death of a White Fox” is the most complete of these ventures. It is the story of two sisters – Angie, fifteen, and May, seven – who are sent to live with relatives in Jubilee during the summer of 1947 because their mother, a widow living in London, is either dead or going into a sanatorium for six months. (This is something of the same circumstance faced by her grandmother Bertha and aunt Blanche Stanley, who were each taken in as teenagers when their mother died.) One draft begins:
    On the bus all afternoon and all evening, from noon till dark. How far was it, then, from the city to Jubilee? Not that far. It was only that the bus did not travel very fast, that we stopped and had waits in all the little towns along the way. Towards evening we stopped in Dungannon, in St. Augustine, in Kincaid, Crosshill, and Black Horse. Names familiar to me from my mother’s stories of her old life at home, little legendary towns of brick and wood and modern service stations; I had always wanted to see them. Why; what did I expect to find? Nothing, really; I knew they would not be very different from other places, I knew there would be nothing in particular to recognize. But my mother had been here, my mother had gone todances and taught school here before I was born, and so I saw these towns in a fabled light, an emanation, probably, of my own marvelous, mystical egoism.
    In an interesting way, Munro is reversing geography here – she takes Angie and May to Huron County where they find their mother’s personal history; this is what Alice Laidlaw, from Huron County, found in Scotch Corners when she visited there, both with her mother and sister in 1943 and later alone when she was herself sixteen. Equally, the geography Angie finds in Jubilee is reminiscent of Scotch Corners – a small lake formed by the widening of a river, as the Mississippi does there. And more than the setting is borrowed from life. Munro draws obliquely on her parents’ history here; Chris, the stepson of Angie and May’s remarried grandmother, returned home from the war to begin fox farming:
    And Chris spent his time making a special and elaborate kind of feeding-dish for each pen, making watering-dishes that could be tipped and emptied from the outside of the pen, so the water would always be fresh, building new, ventilated kennels and wooden runs along the wire. He was a slow worker, and all the things he made were ingenious and carefully finished. In the colony of pens where the foxes lived everything was of his own design. The foxes inhabited a world he had made for them; it was separate and complete. In the fall he would kill those he wanted to pelt, using chloroform, and a box he had invented for that purpose.
    These details are taken from Bob Laidlaw’s fox farm. Chris, who is something of a ne’er-do-well, is engaged to a nurse in Toronto, Alice Kelling, who provides him with the money to buy an expensive white fox, a Norwegian, to introduce into his breeding stock. While not exact, this relation is reminiscent of Annie Chamney’s provision of money to begin the Laidlaw fox farm in Wingham. Though engaged, Chris is attracted to Angie, just as she is to him, and the two act on it –stealing away several times to kiss and explore one another, not more than that – until Chris withdraws; in response, Angie releases his prized white fox and, as a consequence, the two sisters are sent away again.
    Reasonably complete, “The Death of the White Fox” in its various guises and directions reads more like a long short story than it does a novel, although there are sections where a broader, novelistic, background is created. Remembering the progress of the writing, Munro said that she had it going for a while but then Jim’s parents