Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

my father and I were so keen on having it that she did not protest very much. As a token of resistance, she said she would move to the house on one condition: I would have to do all the vacuuming.” The Rockland house had five bedrooms, five fireplaces, twelve-foot ceilings with exposed beams, a maid’s quarters, and two sets of stairs. Jim had his grandparents’ “massive dining-room suite sent out from Ontario,” lighting itwith a large brass chandelier. Eventually Jim got a church organ and installed it in a hallway they called “the chapel,” where the windows were painted to look like stained glass. James Polk, who visited the Munros with his wife Margaret Atwood in the summer of 1969, recalls Jim Munro’s pride in the newly acquired instrument. A trained musician himself, Polk spent some time during their visit playing Handel on it. While Atwood and Munro talked writing and literary gossip, Jim showed Polk the organ as well as the house itself. Polk described Jim as “very present” during their visit. 2
    Andrea’s birth, work in the bookstore, and the demands of a large house left Munro exhausted most of the time. She would often come home from the store and set about supper and other chores without taking off her coat. For his part, Jim “was already working incredibly hard six days a week at the store,” Munro told Ross. “There was no way he could turn around and scrub the floors.” While certainly Munro had thought of separation at other times in her marriage, she was all too aware of her financial dependence on him and her obligation to the children. Through the Vancouver years she had stayed and, in the years between the move to Victoria and Andrea’s birth, she was fired up with helping to make the bookstore a success. But in the time after Andrea was born, she was transformed. As she told Ross, she then became “so tired and discouraged that when I came out of it I was on my own. Jim hadn’t changed, but I had changed.”
    “Wives were pious or rebellious in these situations,” Munro wrote in that
Funorama
fragment. She was a rebellious wife herself, and her rebellion was fuelled both by the times and by the class differences that had always separated her from Jim. People who knew the Munros socially saw them as very different people, with Jim tending to show a critical view of his wife to others in ways that might not have been unusual then but certainly were not kind. Sheila has written that while her mother “may have been above reproach as a writer in his eyes, there was an underlying rejection of her class and her background as something shameful. He corrected her Huron County accent and he treated the Wingham relatives who came to visit with scorn and even refused to speak to them on occasion.” Writing this, Sheila cites a letter from Anne Laidlawcomplaining of Jim’s behaviour during a visit Alice’s sister, Sheila, made to Vancouver. About her parents’ arguments, Sheila continues,
    My father was on the side of conformity, conventional values, and conservative politics, and my mother was on the side of individualism, left-wing politics, and rebellion against conventional values. My mother thinks he did a very brave thing in marrying her and going against his parents, but that at some level what he wanted was for my mother to be the kind of conventional woman that his parents would have preferred him to marry – and he wanted the artist he did get.
    These fights, Sheila recalls, were not over things immediate to the family, but rather were “philosophical and political, representing irreconcilable world views.” Munro herself says that they ultimately realized their incompatibility, “not just with our opinions of things on the news but more with what we wanted life to be like, which became finally apparent when we moved to the big house.” 3
    There were other contexts for the breakup as well. During the 1950s, in Vancouver, there was a fair amount of what Munro calls “extramarital flirtation” between individuals, each married to another. Describing one of her own, she said, “It was quite passionate and it was always unplanned. It was absolutely foolish.” These attractions seldom led to breakups. During the 1960s in Victoria, owing to the temper of the times, among “people who had been married very young, there was an explosion of infidelity and of interest in affection, because none of us had had it in the normal period of life. So a lot of my friends