Alice Munro Read online

  Among the listeners to Boyle’s interview that August day in 1974 were three people who were to have a huge impact on Munro’s life and career. One had already figured in Alice Munro’s career; another was about to do so in the years just to come; and a third brought about Munro’s move back to Huron County to live – a move she has said she had “never anticipated,” and one that proved “a big shock to the system.” The first, Audrey Coffin, Munro’s editor at Ryerson and then McGraw-Hill Ryerson, heard the interview and later wrote that she “heard that Boyle interview on CBC – it was much better than I’d thought – really satisfying.” The second, Douglas M. Gibson, editorial director of the trade division at Macmillan of Canada, later wrote to Munro, “Last week I had the eerily pleasant experience of having my reading of Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You interrupted by your radio conversation about the book with Harry Boyle.” Gibson then mentions that, as “Harry’s editor for the past three books,” he has discussed many of the same topics with Boyle himself, and in his letter compliments the interview and Something. Finally getting to the real reason for his letter, Gibson also writes, “I’d very much like to meet you, if that could be arranged.” He says that he’s available in Toronto, but in any case “I’m sure that I could be easily persuaded to visit London.”8

  The third, and most important, person to hear Munro’s conversation with Boyle that August day was Gerald Fremlin, a physical geographer and the editor of The National Atlas of Canada. After a career in the civil service in Ottawa, Fremlin had retired to his native Clinton, Ontario, to look after his elderly mother. Years before, when he was a student at Western, he had been among the contributors whose writing had been published along with Alice Laidlaw’s in Folio. Fremlin was also someone Alice had her eye on before she connected with Jim Munro – she tried to submit her first story for Folio directly to Fremlin, whom she thought was an editor, in the hope of attracting his attention. That did not happen, but Fremlin was mightily impressed by Munro’s writing when it appeared in Folio and the next summer sent her a fan letter praising her work. By then Jim Munro was very much in evidence and everyone at Western knew it. Several years older and a veteran, Fremlin graduated and went to work. But for the fan letter, the two lost touch. Yet listening to Munro’s conversation with Boyle in August 1974 as he drove between Ottawa and Clinton, he could not miss Munro saying at one point, “Even since I’ve come back the past year to live here.”

  Picking up on this comment, Fremlin contacted Munro, and their connection was re-established. Given the elderly Mrs. Fremlin’s situation, the only way the two could have had a relationship was for Alice to go to Clinton, just thirty-five kilometres southwest of Wingham – back to Huron County, back to the people she grew up among and had long written about from British Columbia, back to the place where her father still lived in Wingham.

  Returning home to Ontario in 1973, really returning home to Huron County in 1975, Alice Munro was about to effect a transformation in her writing – one brought on, most certainly, by that homecoming. That transformation, in turn, brought about a coequal change in her writing career: just over a year after the Boyle interview, Munro was writing to Gibson from Clinton, Ontario – he had been persuaded to come to London for their meeting and she was working on a Macmillan book project he was editing. Munro worked with Gibson and Macmillan throughout 1975 on the projected book and, though it was never published, that connection brought her next book, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1978 to Macmillan, with Gibson as her editor. He remains her editor in Canada, since Munro followed him in 1986 to McClelland & Stewart to inaugurate Douglas Gibson Books with her sixth collection, The Progress of Love.

  Though she did not hear the Boyle interview that August day in 1974, Virginia Barber, a New York literary agent seeking new clients in Canada, was by late 1975 planning to approach Alice Munro in the hope of becoming her agent. Munro hired her in 1976.9 In one of her first acts in that capacity, Barber was able to get Charles McGrath, a young man who had become a fiction editor at the New Yorker in January of 1976, to have a look at some of the stories Munro had written since her return home. McGrath and his colleagues in the New Yorker fiction department were immediately enraptured: they quickly bought “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar Maid,” publishing each during 1977. By year’s end, Munro had a right-of-first-refusal contract with the New Yorker for 1978, a contract she has renewed each year since. There have been almost fifty Munro stories in the New Yorker since those first two. Given such interest, by the end of 1978 Munro also had a book contract in New York from Alfred A. Knopf, the revered publisher of fine literary work.

  When Alice Munro walked into a CBC studio in 1974 to talk to Harry Boyle, she was already, in Mordecai Richler’s sardonic phrase, “World Famous in Canada.” Her long apprenticeship as a writer concluded – her first book awarded a Governor General’s prize, her second becoming a 1970s feminist cri de coeur – her return home to Ontario begun, though not fully accomplished, Munro had reached a critical moment as a person, as a family member, and as a writer. Having left her life in British Columbia, having returned to an Ontario recognizably the same, though much changed during her absence, Alice Munro was forty-three years old and, really, on her own for the first time. What she had been before in each guise would change, yet what she would yet become was not clear. As a result of the Boyle interview broadcast, Munro made contacts that transformed her life and her career. Moving back to Huron County to join Gerald Fremlin, Alice Munro found her material – the people, landscape, culture, and history of her home place – the same, yet, given age, perspective, experience, and understanding, very different. And connecting with Douglas Gibson and Virginia Barber – each of whom saw the real potential of her fiction – Munro found a way to reach a larger audience. She was still what she had always been as a writer: driven, intuitive, always uncertain about her writing, continually trying to improve it, to make it perfect. That is how she wrote. But walking into that CBC studio to talk to Huron County-born and -raised Harry Boyle in August 1974, Alice Munro took a critical step toward becoming the writer she became over the next thirty years. Writing “Home,” moving back to the mysterious, touchable place she had left behind in 1951, the place that she had recalled, imagined, and detailed in the intervening years from British Columbia, now confronting it anew with its surfaces and depths still there, resonant, Alice Munro had come home.

  PART ONE

  Everything Here Is Touchable

  Ancestors, Parents, Home

  It’s the fact you cherish.

  – “What Do You Want to Know For?” (1994)

  Ancestors: “A Better Place Than Home”

  The part of Ontario Alice Munro returned to in 1973 was one that her own ancestors had pioneered. Each side of her family – one Scots Presbyterian, the Laidlaws, the other Irish Anglican, the Chamneys – arrived in Upper Canada at the beginning of the great emigration from Britain that followed the end of the Napoleonic wars. As Munro herself has detailed in a 1997 essay entitled “Changing Places,” her first ancestor, James Laidlaw (1763–1829), left Scotland for Canada in June 1818 with two of his sons, Walter and Andrew, his daughter, a grandson, and a pregnant daughter-in-law, Agnes, who gave birth to a daughter not long after their ship had left Leith. The Laidlaws landed at Quebec in August and travelled upriver to York, now Toronto. Munro writes, “This family had lived in the Scottish Borders and particularly the Ettrick Valley – called in the old days the Ettrick Forest – for centuries.”1 The family remained in York for a time before taking up land grants in Halton County, about thirty miles to the west of York, in Esquesing Township near Georgetown.

  Among the Laidlaw relatives left behind in Scotland was a cousin, James Hogg (1770–1835), the poet, whose mother, Margaret Laidlaw, was well known for having passed the oral traditions of the Scottish Borders on to Walter Scott. Seeing a letter from James Laidlaw written to his eldest son, Robert, from York, Hogg had it published in the March 1820 number of Blackw
ood’s Magazine, along with one of his own. Hogg describes James Laidlaw as “a highly respected shepherd of this country, and as successful as most men in the same degree of life; but for a number of years bygone he talked and read about America till he grew perfectly unhappy; and, at last, when approaching his sixtieth year, actually set off to seek a temperary home and grave in the new world; but some of his sons had formed attachments at home, and refused to accompany him.” Laidlaw’s letter, dated York, September 9, 1819, was intended in part to entice these remaining sons, Robert and William, to North America. The father details the differences he has found between Upper Canada and Scotland, much to Canada’s credit, writing of a “Mr. Macgill” who is “a very ricth man, and has befriended me more than all the farmers in Esther Ettrick or yearrow [w]ould have Dun.”2 In “Changing Places,” Munro draws on her great-great-great-grandfather’s letter – as published, and on Hogg’s too – and on other unpublished letters in her possession from some of these relatives that have been passed down to her by her paternal grandmother, Sarah Jane “Sadie” Code Laidlaw.

  In her essay Munro details the circumstances of one of the lingering Laidlaw sons, William, his wife, Mary, and their family. They did eventually emigrate to North America, but not until 1836, when they left the Scottish Highlands of Invernesshire and travelled by way of New York to Will County, Illinois. That is, William came after everyone in the family who had gone to Upper Canada years before had given up expecting him, and after his father, James, was dead. William and Mary had four sons, the youngest of whom was a newborn when the family emigrated. Thomas Laidlaw (1836–1915) proved to be Alice Munro’s great-grandfather and her first direct ancestor to settle in Huron County. As Munro details in “Changing Places,” the family was not long in Illinois because William, who had found work on “a canal being built” linking “Lake Michigan with the Illinois River,” died of cholera on January 5, 1839. “He was forty years old. On the same day, no doubt in the same sod house, his daughter Jane was born.” Mary Laidlaw appealed for help to her relatives in Upper Canada and, the next spring, she and her children were brought there by one of her husband’s brothers. So they find themselves “bound to the family after all,” and destined “not to become Yankees as their father must have wished.”3

  Munro’s essay “Changing Places” is important as an example of the parallel tracks of Alice Munro’s life, Alice Munro’s texts. Probably no more than most professional writers of fiction, yet nonetheless very precisely and so verifiably, Alice Munro has drawn on the factual details of her life – where she has been, whom she has known, her roots, what has happened, how things have turned out – in the fiction she has published. As she told Harry Boyle in 1974 and has freely admitted throughout her career, “There is always a starting point in reality.” For Munro, those starting points are first noticed, then probed, and then sharply detailed as she intuitively articulates them. As “Changing Places,” a historical essay that offers no hint of fiction, makes clear, Alice Munro is always able, often stunningly so, to take a web of human connections and, by the way her story is told, by finding her way into her material, to discover and articulate its mysteries. Concluding her text, Munro stands back and looks at what she has done with her own sense of awe at the way things are, and with her own understanding of them. This process is described well at the end of “Powers,” in Runaway, when Nancy wishes “not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.” Munro’s method is one of taking some image or idea that interests her, asking, “How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating?”, because she wants to know “What does this mean, what can be discovered about it, what is the rest of the story?”4 So taking up “Changing Places” at the beginning of a biography of a writer of fiction who, throughout her career, has always placed herself on that very-dotted line between “fact” and “fiction” requires some initial explanation.

  In 1982 Munro asked through the title of an essay, “What Is Real?” The same question might be asked of a 2002 New Yorker piece she published in one of its fiction issues called “Lying Under the Apple Tree.” It was identified there as a memoir, but in its first paragraph there is a disclaimer (one that, though written in Munro’s voice, was added by her editor at the magazine) that says “(To disguise some people and events, I have allowed myself a certain amount of invention with names and details).”5 Such distinctions indicate this writer’s methods and direction because, though here writing about something that really happened, Munro imagined “names and details.” They are, in other words, fiction. By tracing in the pages that follow the facts of Alice Munro’s cultural inheritance and life, and by recognizing the symbiotic relationship between those facts and the texts that Munro has produced, this book looks both forward and backward, and both outside of the texts as well as inside them. When Alice Munro wrote “Changing Places,” she probed the historical facts of her father’s family through what was public (the Hogg-Laidlaw exchange in Blackwood’s), through what was private (the letters she received from her grandmother), and through what she was able to deduce and shape herself (the text she produced).

  In another instance, “Working for a Living,” Munro published a memoir about her parents that had its beginnings as a fictional story about a protagonist very like herself, a person who left university without completing her degree. That story was finished and submitted to the New Yorker, where it was declined. Upon revision, it became a memoir, and was again declined by the magazine in that form. The first submission was rejected because the editors did not think it worked as a story; they passed on the memoir because the New Yorker had already run too many like it.6 It was, however, published as the first piece in the inaugural issue of Grand Street in 1981. By reversing Munro’s usual method – fiction becoming memoir rather than facts becoming fiction – “Working for a Living” shows how close the two modes in Alice Munro’s writing really are – the cherished fact is never far distant. In “Changing Places,” Munro takes the history of her Laidlaw ancestors as her subject. That essay, like “Working for a Living,” is the exception that proves the rule.

  What this close relationship suggests is that when the lives of Munro’s maternal ancestors are recounted – the Chamneys, the Codes, the Stanleys – their factual stories cannot be told without reference to what Munro does with them in fictions like “The Ottawa Valley,” “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,” and “The Progress of Love.” Alice Munro’s own “progress” has been one of using the factual details of her own life – at each stage of being: child, adolescent, young adult, mother and wife, single person, remarried, older person – as the litmus paper of her characters’ beings. She imagines their connections and wonderings, she articulates their feelings, she creates the very sense of being that all humans feel moving from birth to death. It is indeed the fact that Alice Munro cherishes, as well as the fiction. Following Munro’s own pattern, this biography traces her life and career going from the fact to the fiction and back again. Autobiography is imbedded in Alice Munro’s work, autobiography always resonant with fictional imaginings (“grafted on from some other reality”), and she can be seen as always “writing her lives,” the lives she has both lived and imagined.7

  Munro’s first maternal ancestors to leave County Wicklow, Ireland for Upper Canada – John Chamney, a distant uncle of hers, and George Code (1796–1890), her dual great-great-grandfather – arrived immediately after James Laidlaw and his family, about 1820. Just how these people travelled to Canada is not as well documented as the Laidlaws’ emigration, but there are possible clues in the historical detail. That same year a George Codd was listed among the Lanark Society settlers travelling aboard the Brock, one of the ships furnished by the British government to carry some 1,200 emigrants from Scotland via Quebec to Upper Canada. Underwritten by the Crown, these emigration movements were a response to the depression in Britain that followed the Napoleonic Wars; in North America, they were a means of settling Upper Canada wit
h loyal citizens after the War of 1812 with the Americans. The Lanark Society focused on settling the area around the town of Perth, north of the Rideau River in what became Lanark County, Ontario.8 An area north of Perth is still called the Scotch Line and, although Munro’s ancestors from Lanark were predominantly Irish, they farmed in an area known as Scotch Corners. It is loosely defined by portions of three Lanark townships – Beckwith, Drummond, and Ramsay – abutting and partially encircled by Mississippi Lake, a broad section of the Mississippi River that flows north into the Ottawa. The name Codd – one of the variant spellings, along with Coad, or Code – was common in the Scotch Corners area. The George Codd among the Lanark Society settlers may or may not have been Munro’s great-great-grandfather, but there is no doubt about his early arrival in Upper Canada.