Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

explicitly mentioning the story, which probably chart her work on it. These were written in October, the first worrying about whether the story has arrived yet and the other enclosing a new version that Munro has done in the meantime because she “just wanted to get it out of the way. I was afraid that if I didn’t do it I would just go stale on the whole thing.” In December she writes that she “would like to do a little more work on the Tamarack story if it is not inconvenient though it is not really important.” Munro also says that “I hope you will still write to me sometimes even if it isn’t about stories. I am working again now after a period of considerable depression and uselessness this fall.” Weaver notes on this letter that he wrote her on December 23 and enclosed a proof of the story. 52

    Self-deprecating as always (“I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time”), sounding unsure of herself still, Alice Munro nevertheless wrote to Weaver to make sure she was able to work further on “The Peace of Utrecht” before it appeared in the
Tamarack Review
. One draft version of the story called “Places at Home,” a title she would later use again, contained the self-revelatory description of Helen as a person who “had won a scholarship and gone off to university, and at the end of twoyears, to her own bewilderment, she was married, and going to live in Vancouver.” So it was with Alice Laidlaw Munro. But as her history reveals, and especially as her relationship with Robert Weaver confirms, her unwavering commitment to writing – though often occasioning feelings of frustration, isolation, and even depression – ultimately brought her back imaginatively to these same “Places at Home” during the 1950s. As Munro implies, no story demonstrates this better than “The Peace of Utrecht.” And given Munro’s own history, given Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw’s long struggle and suffering, it was altogether fitting that when the editors of the
Tamarack Review
ran the story in their spring 1960 issue, they led with it and placed it right before five poems by Irving Layton. The first of these, “Keine Lazarovitch 1870–1959,” was the first publication of Layton’s later well-known elegy to his mother. It appears on the verso of the last page of “The Peace of Utrecht.” 53 Well it should, for Munro’s story, the necessary return to her own “Places at Home,” is an elegy too. And in the years to come, in the several more stories following this first one and the second, “The Ottawa Valley,” this elegy continued as Munro probed ever more deeply and ever more consistently into her personal material, finding more stories she had to write. In 1960, a writer still named Alice Munro and still living in Vancouver had embarked on the material and trajectory that would make her Alice Munro.

“I Was Trying to Find a Meaning”
Victoria, Munro’s Bookstore
, Dance of the Happy Shades,
and
Lives of Girls and Women,
1960–1972
    You don’t really think about why you write a story. You write it, you hope it works, it’s finished. Somebody else can see far better than you can, what it is you’re trying to say.
– Alice Munro to Audrey Coffin, April 3, 1968
    I n November 1960 Bob Laidlaw wrote a letter of condolence to his brother-in-law John Chamney in Scotch Corners – John and Ethel’s daughter Lila, just nineteen, had died early that month, the result of a car accident. Once he had expressed his sympathy, Laidlaw reported on himself, Sheila, and Bill, and then added that “Alice & her two girls are well. She is doing well writing. Had a story in a book of Canadian Short Stories recently published. She writes as Alice Munro. It is queer stuff she writes at times but she seems to know what she is doing.” Hearing for the first time of this unseen letter and especially its comment on her writing, Munro has said it typifies her father, and his use of the undercut compliment. Laidlaw knew the details of his daughter’s successes but implicitly apologized for them. Later in the letter, he wrote by way of shared grief, “It is now nearly two years since Anne died and I can think of her now as she was in early days. She was a good wife to me and she fought so hard to stay normal.” 1
    The book that Laidlaw mentioned was Robert Weaver’s
Canadian Short Stories
, published in London and New York by Oxford University Press in 1960 in its World’s Classics series. It includes