Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

heard of The Montrealer but I had no idea they paid as well as that. If you have time someday I would be glad of the address. Though I don’t seem to think along the short-story lines any more. Jim wishes I did. It was much nicer, financially.” In his next letter, Weaver provides the address and tells her that they would probably consider stories that have been broadcast but not published. Munro’s comments here – both with regard to Woodcock and concerning the
Montrealer
– reveal her in early 1959 as just the person, and just the writer, she remembered when she recreated herself overhearing her daughters watching
Funorama:
Munro “knew she wasn’t empty.” At the same time, as she explained to Weaver, she was also shy and unable to ask anyone to write on her behalf. When she also says she is not thinking “along short-story lines any more,” it suggests that Munro was trying to bolster her own feelings about her various attempts at a novel. 47

    Little more than a month after Munro wrote to Weaver, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw reached the end of her almost twenty-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease. She died on February 10, 1959, in the Wingham hospital. The
Advance-Times
ran the notice at the top of its first page:
    Friends in this community were saddened to learn of the passing of Mrs. Robert E. Laidlaw at the Wingham General Hospital on Tuesday of last week. Mrs. Laidlaw had suffered for over 20 years from a chronic illness, which, as it progressed, left her greatly handicapped. For the past two months she had beena patient at the hospital and her gallant fight against heavy odds will long be remembered by family and friends. She never lost interest in community affairs and until the last tried to lead a useful life.
    Munro did not attend her mother’s funeral. Jenny was just twenty months old, it was winter. The trip back east would have been expensive and this was a death long anticipated. Remembering, Munro says, “So I didn’t try very hard, but I always wished I had – I wish very much I had. I wish I had come to see her when she was dying. But at the time, I had a harder heart.… That was part of your intellectual pride. It was part of mine, to look at things very clearly, and it was part of my revolt against Mother, who was, in her talk to me, sentimental in a self-serving way.” Munro had not seen her mother since she visited Ontario with Sheila during the summer of 1956.
    After Alice married and moved to Vancouver, Bob Laidlaw had continued to work as the second-shift night watchman at the foundry, and during those years began raising turkeys. This combination brought improved finances for the family and some luxuries they had never had. Mr. Laidlaw and Bill – who was in high school, and then also went to Western on scholarship – worked outside most of the time, leaving Mrs. Laidlaw with Sheila, a year younger than Bill, in the house. Their friend and neighbour Julie Cruikshank recalls visiting Mrs. Laidlaw regularly as a child during the early 1950s; she “was alone much of the time, and she was very, very welcoming when I came.” Mrs. Laidlaw gave Julie chocolates – a real treat – and they would talk. Mrs. Laidlaw shook, and she was somewhat difficult to understand, but these visits were part of Julie Cruikshank’s childhood routine. “Mr. Laidlaw would come in, usually from the barn, and sit down and be very friendly.” Mrs. Laidlaw was very slow, she also recalls, “sitting much of the time.” 48
    During the late 1940s, when Alice was still at home and was looking after things, Mrs. Laidlaw acknowledged her daughter’s contribution and was grateful. But during the years after Alice had married, her sister, Sheila – then also in high school – had to deal with Mrs.Laidlaw, who had “gone right under with the disease,” according to Munro. Sheila was able to finish high school and leave for art college, but there is no question in Munro’s mind that her sister’s circumstances were more difficult than her own. To help, the Laidlaws had a succession of women come in, but none worked out well. By the time of Mrs. Laidlaw’s death in 1959, all the children were gone, and Bob Laidlaw was left to look after things himself, along with such assistance as his elderly mother and aunt in town and friends could provide.
    On July 10, 2002, Munro’s birthday, the Wingham Horticultural Society dedicated the Alice Munro Garden next to the North Huron Museum, the former