Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

thing she wrote during the time she occupied that office. What she was after was a novel: “I spent hours staring at the walls and the Venetian blinds, drinking cups of instant coffee with canned milk, believing that if I concentrated enough I could pull out of myself a novel that would be a full-blown miracle.” But she had only this story: “I stayed in the office four months and never wrote another word, but I did get my first ulcer.” These are clearly Munro’s own comments on her creative anxiety.
    The story speaks also to the circumstances of her life after about ten years of married life in Vancouver. Rhetorically, the narrator asks, “What do I want an office for? I have a house; it is pleasant and roomy and has a view of the sea … there is no lack of space.” These details are true of the house on Lawson Avenue, encircled by hedges and vegetation, looking down on Burrard Inlet. Yet it was a house that Munro, after five years there, still did not care for very much. Like the even larger house they bought a few years later in Victoria, it was more to her husband’s taste than her own. Shifting from the house in “The Office” to her self-image as a writer, and to her difficulty then in even telling anyone else that she writes, Munro explains that saying she writes humiliates her: “The words create their own space of silence, the delicate moment of exposure.” The “delicate moment of exposure” Munro writes of here, the bedrock fact that lies at the core of her conflict with Mr. Malley in “The Office,” is that she is a writer and a woman who at some level lives counter to the expectations of her social position. That is, she has an interest that takes her away – mentally if not physically – from the marriage and children women were supposed then to find made a sufficient life, completely satisfying. In her tribute to Engel, speaking of her situation, and especially of her women friends when she was a young mother in Vancouver, Munro wrote, “Our marriages were the unquestioned framework of our lives, our children were the content, our ties to each other were our lifelines to ourselves.”
    Though Munro does not dwell on conventional relations between the sexes here, she makes it clear how being a writer who is also a wifeand mother is very different from the life of those men who write or work at home: “To write, as everyone knows, you need a typewriter, or at least a pencil, some paper, a table and chair; I have all these things in a corner of my bedroom. But now I want an office as well.” Munro did have all these things in the house on Lawson, and she did write in her bedroom. Munro continues:
    A house is all right for a man to work in. He brings his work into the house, a place is cleared for it; the house rearranges as best it can around him. Everybody recognizes that his work
exists
. He is not expected to answer the telephone, to find things that are lost, to see why the children are crying, or feed the cat. He can shut his door. Imagine (I said) a mother shutting her door, and the children knowing she is behind it; why, the very thought is outrageous to them. A woman who sits staring into space, into a country that is not her husband’s or her children’s is likewise known to be an offense against nature. So a house is not the same for a woman. She is not someone who walks into the house, to make use of it, and will walk out again. She
is
the house; there is no separation possible.
    As she often does, Munro offers this construction of things and then shifts direction; in a long parenthetical passage, she admits that on occasion she was able to get apart from her role of wife and mother, “feeling a fierce and lawless quiver of freedom, of loneliness too harsh and perfect for me now to bear.” When this happened, she knew “how the rest of the time I am sheltered and encumbered, how insistently I am warmed and bound.”
    Both of the Munros’ older daughters recall the times when their mother imaginatively went off “staring into space, into a country” not their father’s, and not theirs. Sheila’s recollections are recounted in
Lives of Mothers and Daughters
, and Jenny recalls knowing as a child when her mother was working intently on something, trying to finish it. At these times there would be a tension in the air, one created partly by the continuing sound of the typewriter’s pounding reverberating throughout thehouse. Members of the family were all aware of