Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

appear to him in any form – rice instead of potatoes, a Chagall print, friends who voted N DP . And he was right. I was biding my time. He was not wrong to spot the danger signals, he was right. Many husbands were the same. These houses, lawns, children, cars, automatic washing-machines, which were supposed to [be] demanded by, created for, wives, seem to me, looking back, to have been more furiously created by husbands, by young men. Fortresses. Wives were pious or rebellious, in these situations. Pious women outdid each other.I must get home and make the cabbage rolls they said. I must wash the cupboards. I was not allowed to make cabbage rolls. Andrew feared foreign food. He feared vulgarity.
    Munro continued until the fragment breaks off: “Once at a party I heard a husband say he could never read any book written by a woman. He was a husband more belligerent than most, in his manliness, but nobody, no one of the women present, spoke seriously against him. We didn’t hope to argue with men. At a gathering of men and women all under thirty-five in this time before first flirtations, invitations, adulteries, all began to erode and confuse things, I saw the men.”
    Written during the late 1970s when abandoned husbands – Patrick, Richard, Andrew – are characters frequently seen in Munro’s stories, this autobiographical fragment offers a summary version of Alice and Jim Munro’s marriage from her point of view in the late 1950s. In the final incomplete sentence it suggests something of what followed in the 1960s in their social group. As such, the fragment sets the stage for the breakup of their marriage. Alice’s Chagall print was on the wall of their daughters’ bedroom, her writing was a source of frustration and depression for her, and Jim took himself and his role as husband, father, and breadwinner seriously. After fifteen years of marriage, the fundamental class differences remained between them.
    These differences became more pressing after the Munros had moved, just before Andrea was born, into the house on Rockland that Munro accepted but did not want. The size of the house, the image it projected, the requirements it seemed to demand – all underscored the class differences between them. While such differences existed throughout the marriage, they were often submerged below other needs – establishing themselves, raising a young family, opening Munro’s Bookstore – but that house on Rockland was the undoing of the Munros’ marriage. 1
    Alice Munro’s personal situation was inextricably entwined with her developing career. As the breakup approached, it had given urgency to her writing throughout 1970 as she worked on
Lives of Girls and
Women
. After separating from Jim in fits and starts, Munro was finally able to leave Victoria for good in September 1973. Then, for the first time in her life, she needed to support herself – like Del, she expected to get a job wherever she decided to live. Even though
Lives
had been published in the United States in 1972 and
Dance
was scheduled for fall 1973, and she was well along on a third book, Munro doubted that she would be able to support herself as a writer.
    Such doubts notwithstanding, she settled in London and began commuting weekly to Toronto to teach creative writing at York University. Through John Metcalf she became involved in the formation of the Writers’ Union of Canada. She was writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario for 1974–75. In August 1974, promoting
Something l’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
, both Douglas Gibson of Macmillan of Canada and Gerald Fremlin heard her on the CBC talking to Harry Boyle. Each had his own designs on her, and each proved successful in time. A year later, by August 1975, Munro had fled the academy for Fremlin and was back where she never thought she would be again: in Huron County. Living in Clinton with Fremlin (and his mother, who was quite frail), trying to write in a new place that was also her old place, Munro confronted her material in a way she had not done before.
“So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life”: “Work Is a Great Help, I Find”
    When the Munros made the move into what Alice has called “the big house” on Rockland, she was thirty-five. She had been married for almost fifteen years and was going to have a baby in a few weeks’ time. Sheila was about to turn thirteen, and Jenny was nine. Sheila has written, “I knew she did not want to live in such a house, but