Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

what was happening. These recollections, connected to Munro’s precise words in “The Office,” combine to create the physical facts of Munro’s “human position” – in Auden’s phrase – as her children grew and her writing career slowly expanded during the family’s last years in Vancouver.
    Outwardly, the Munros were a typical suburban West Vancouver family: father working across the water in Vancouver, mother staying at home with the children; family outings to the beach, vacations back home in Ontario, dancing lessons, shows, and parties. Those who knew Munro then saw her as an encouraging mother, one who had realistic but keen expectations for her daughters. But inwardly at times, Munro was off staring into that other country. Here she spent her “real life,” trying to fashion human constructions that always seemed to turn out to be so much less than she imagined when she first saw them in her mind’s eye. So as the 1960s began for her in West Vancouver, Alice Munro was leading a double life, just as she had set out to do from Wingham – there was both a normal life and, behind it, “the black life of the artist.”
    The man from whom Munro rented her office, as it happened, was someone Daphne Cue’s family had known about in West Vancouver, and Daphne herself had gone to school with his daughter. He had led, Cue recalls, “a very checkered life”; his first wife, the daughter’s mother, “had run off on him and went with a number of other women to live with a hermit up the mountain” above West Vancouver. By the time Munro rented the office from him “he had another wife, that very pathetic creature” she depicts in the story. He did bring plants and other things she did not want, told her stories she had no interest in, and irritated her by interrupting her writing. Their relations worsened and Munro left. She was drawn to him as a character in her story, she recalled, because of his “clamorous humanity, his dreadful insistence, which had to get the better of that woman seeking isolation.” He was in life as he is in her fiction, a man who, she concludes in the story, thought of her and arranged “in his mind the bizarre but somehow never quite satisfactory narrative of yet another betrayal of trust. While I arrange words, and think it is my right to be rid of him.” 14
    Munro wrote about this period in her life, one she sees as its low point, in “On Writing ‘The Office.’ ” The struggle for the novel she and everyone else seemed to be seeking continued, and it brought on physical side effects – she developed an ulcer and felt unable to write another word. As a writer, Munro was blocked; the numerous abandoned beginnings in her papers attest to this. Recalling this, Munro says, “I would start a story and then I would get totally discouraged with it and start another, so I would never finish anything. But in the last year I lived in Vancouver, I had a total blockage. I couldn’t write a sentence. I couldn’t. I could think of things but I couldn’t write them.” Confirming what she wrote about having difficulty breathing, Munro continues, “I would have fits where I couldn’t breathe. And I went to a doctor and I guess I saw a psychiatrist a couple of times.” Munro thinks now that these were panic attacks brought on by her anxieties over her writing.

    A change was in the offing. By the early 1960s Jim Munro had become restive at Eaton’s. He wanted to leave there in order to do something more to his interest and liking. And as he had told that personnel manager at Eaton’s when he arrived, he was interested in books. With this in mind, Jim began working with Stephen Franklin, who was also a writer, in a small paperback bookstore called Pick-a-Pocket. It too was located in the Dundarave shopping area along Marine Drive. Initially the Munros thought about going into the business with Franklin and his wife, Elsa, but that plan did not work out. During their time in Vancouver, Munro recalls, “something would come up and we would get fired up about an idea” that would get Jim out of Eaton’s, “but we didn’t really get fired up until ’63. Then we went on a holiday together without the kids; we had never done that before.” Munro remembers being nervous over the girls – just as she had been at lunch with Earle Toppings – but during this “three- or four-day holiday,” she says, “we solidified the idea of the bookstore.” She recalls suggesting