Alice Munros Best

was to be had from England and the United States. There might be some amateur theatre—high-school performances, Little Theatre groups. There was, however, the radio, and in the ′60s Alice Munro got her start through a CBC programme called
Anthology
, produced by Robert Weaver.
    But very few Canadian writers of any sort were known to an international readership, and it was taken for granted that if you had hankerings of that kind—hankerings about which you would of course feel defensive and ashamed, because art was not something a grown-up morally credible person would fool around with—it would be best for you if you left the country. Everyone knew that writing was not a thing you could ever expect to make your living at.
    It might be marginally acceptable to dabble around the edges of water-colour painting or poetry if you were a certain kind of man, described by Munro in “The Turkey Season”: “There were homosexuals in town, and we knew who they were: an elegant, light-voiced, wavy-haired paperhanger who called himself an interior decorator; the minister’s widow’s fat, spoiled only son, who went so far as to enter baking contests and had crocheted a tablecloth; a hypochondriacal church organist and music teacher who kept the choir and his pupils in line with screaming tantrums.” Or you could do art as a hobby, if you were a woman with time on your hands, or you could scrape out a living at some poorly paid quasi-artistic job. Munro’s stories are sprinkled with women like this. They go in for piano-playing, or write chatty newspaper columns. Or—more tragically—they have a real though small talent, like Almeda Roth in “Meneseteung,” but there is no context for them. Almeda produces one volume of minor verse, published in 1873, called
Offerings:
    The local paper, the
Vidette
, referred to her as “our poetess.” There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt, both for her calling and for her sex—or for their predictable conjuncture.
    At the beginning of the story Almeda is a maiden lady whose family has died. She lives alone, preserves her good name, and does charitable works. But by the end, the dammed-up river of art has overflowed—helped on by hefty doses of laudanum-laced painkiller—and it sweeps her rational self away:
    Poems, even. Yes, again, poems. Or one poem. Isn’t that the idea—one very great poem that will contain everything and, oh, that will make all the other poems, the poems she has written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags? … The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact it is the river, the Meneseteung … Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she sees the crocheted roses floating.
    This seemed to be the fate of an artist—of necessity, a minor artist—in the small Sowesto towns of yore: silence enforced by the need for respectability, or else an eccentricity verging on madness.
    If you moved to a larger Canadian city, you might at least find a few others of your ilk, but in the small towns of Sowesto you’d be on your own. Nevertheless, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robertson Davies, Marian Engel, Graeme Gibson, and James Reaney all came out of Sowesto; and Alice Munro herself—after a spell on the west coast—moved back there, and lives at present not far from Wingham, the prototype of the various Jubilees and Walleys and Dalgleishes and Hanrattys in her stories.
    Through Munro’s fiction, Sowesto’s Huron County has joined Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County as a slice of land made legendary by the excellence of the writer who has celebrated it, though in both cases “celebrated” is not quite the right word. “Anatomized” might be closer to what goes on in the work of Munro, though even that term is too clinical. What should we call the combination of obsessive scrutiny, arche-ological unearthing, precise and detailed recollection, the wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together?
    At the end of Munro’s
Lives of Girls and Women
(1971), her only noveland a
bildungsroman
—a novel of development, in this case a portrait of the artist as a young girl—there’s a telling passage. Del Jordan of Jubilee, who has by now—true to her last name—crossed over into the promised land of womanhood and also of