Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

and unexpected, the gaudy, peeling cupola of the town hall, which is no relation to any of the rest of the town’s squarely-built, dingy grey-and-red-brick architecture. (Underneath it hangs a great bell, to be rung in the event of some mythical disaster.)
    This is just how Wingham looks across the “prairie” river flats south of town as one drives north on Highway 4. The story is about the shared relation between sisters, one based on their mother’s circumstances. Returning, discovering her own handwriting on some pages in a wash-stand, Helen “felt as if my old life was lying around me, waiting to be picked up again.” When Munro first drafted the story it was called “Places at Home” – but the title, like Helen’s life, is to be found in that washstand since her handwritten notes from years before read “The Peace of Utrecht, 1713, brought an end to the War of Spanish Succession.”
    “The problem, the only problem, is my mother,” Munro would later write in the same manner in “The Ottawa Valley,” produced after she had dealt more and more with personal material through the 1960s. “The Ottawa Valley” mother is more recognizably Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw. This one in “The Peace of Utrecht” is a more imaginative construction, more of a created character:
    “Everything has been taken away from me,” she would say. To strangers, to friends of ours whom we tried always unsuccessfully to keep separate from her, to old friends of hers whocame guiltily infrequently to see her, she would speak like this, in the very slow and mournful voice that was not intelligible or quite human; we would have to interpret. Such theatricality humiliated us almost to death; yet now I think that without that egotism feeding stubbornly even on disaster she might have sunk rapidly into some dim vegetable life. She kept herself as much in the world as she could, not troubling about her welcome; restlessly she wandered through the house and into the streets of Jubilee. Oh, she was not resigned; she must have wept and struggled in that house of stone (as I can, but will not, imagine) until the very end.
    At one point in the story Munro describes how the mother was seen by others in the town, and she has Helen conclude, “We should have let the town have her; it would have treated her better.” 51 We cannot help thinking of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s obituary in the
Advance-Times
– its bereaved tone and genuine feeling, both born of the extended suffering involved, coming through strongly. While Munro was writing “The Peace of Utrecht” she tried to tell the story of the two sisters through a first-person narrator, Ruth, a neighbour and girlhood friend of Helen’s, a person who stayed in Jubilee and so knew the family’s history and each sister’s relation to it. Though abandoned for Helen’s narrative, this attempt is another indication of Munro’s psychological return to Jubilee – that is, to Wingham – in order to write more personally this story that she had to write, one she did not much want to write. Ruth’s narrative offers the town’s point of view and she evidently was intended as the person who revealed to Helen the secret of her mother’s flight from the hospital.
    Some time in 1959 Munro sent “The Peace of Utrecht” to Weaver – her cover letter is undated but he has noted the story’s title on it. Its text is indicative:
    I thought I’d send you these to hear what you thought of them – one is the old story I sent Mayfair & the other is the long one I mentioned[.] I have a couple of better ones – I hope – nowbut I’m afraid the experience of feeling so fertile after the long drought has made me very uncertain of criticism – I mean I can’t criticize myself very well. I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time.
    “The Peace of Utrecht” is probably the long story Munro refers to here. As she first wrote it, the story was formally divided into three parts; published, it is in two. As she shaped the story, Munro appears to have purposely slowed its pace: the opening material about Maddy’s relationship with Fred Powell that begins the story in the published version was moved there from a second section. Thus Munro consciously held off the revelation of the circumstances of the mother’s death, and especially of her escape from the hospital. Following the undated letter dealing with “The Peace of Utrecht,” there are two more letters to Weaver, dated but not