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from THE BOOK
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Alice Munro
Writing Her Lives
by Robert Thacker
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Biography •
A Douglas Gibson Book published by McClelland & Stewart •
Hardcover, 616 pages •
November 2005 •
$39.99 •
0-7710-8514-1
In this excerpt, Alice Munro (then Alice Laidlaw) is fresh from high
school and in the first year of her studies at the University of
Western Ontario, where she meets her future husband, Jim Munro.
Recalling her university years, Munro says that she
loved her time there, "being in that atmosphere, having
all those books, not having to do any housework. Those
are the only two years of my life without housework."
Not that she has greatly minded such work, either before
university or after, but those two years at Western
stand singular in her memory: "to have that concentration
of your life, that something else was the thing you
got up in the morning to do, and it was all reading
and writing, studying." Munro enrolled initially in
the journalism program as something of a cover, so that
she would not have to say that she wrote fiction —
though, given the contributor note in the April 1950
Folio [the university's student literary magazine]
that has her major as Honours English "with an emphasis
on creative writing," it was not much of a cover. The
journalism program required English, and that first
year Munro also took English history (which she says
she already knew backwards), economics, French conversation,
and psychology. Those enrolled in programs like journalism
— that is, with some sort of applied focus —
were put in the same sections of these courses and were
seated alphabetically. Thus Alice Laidlaw met Diane
Lane — a first-year pre-business student from
Amherstburg — who became a friend and roommate.
Both students had come from small towns, neither had
much money (though Laidlaw was the more strapped), and
each, initially, roomed with someone she knew from home.
During that first year, each found that she was not
enjoying the association with her original roommate.
So the two took to spending time together at the public
library, where Munro had a part-time job two or three
afternoons a week sorting and reshelving books (as she
also did at the Lawson library on campus on Saturday
afternoons). Eventually, Munro moved into the same rooming
house as Lane — the upstairs of a house belonging
to Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Buck at 1081 Richmond Street
— where she lived through her second year. Mr.
Buck's brother Tim was the leader of the Communist Party
of Canada and had been in jail. The Bucks "rented the
entire upstairs of their house, and it was a place where
vaguely intellectual non-sorority-type girls lived."
Munro recalls that "we were all fairly poor, and we
all cooked these messes we made on hotplates." Socially,
at the time, she remembers, "Western was fraternity,
sorority. Not too serious." That second year was "interesting,
but fun, because I was then with people at University
who were more or less like me." Munro captures some
of this in an unpublished draft story called "The Art
of Fiction," which draws on her time at Western. The
narrator writes, "During my university years I lived
in a house which was not really very big and which sheltered
seven other girls, a landlady who wove her own skirts
and belonged to a Bell Ringers Society, and a periodically
confined lovesick Siamese cat."
During their first year, both young women took the same
English 20 — a survey of British literature —
class from Robert Lawrence and, through him, they came
to the attention of the English department. Just as
in high school, Munro made her mark by what she wrote:
as a student she did not have much to say in class,
but Lawrence read "The Dimensions of a Shadow," a story
she wrote that became her first publication. The English
department was seeking students for its honours program,
and both Laidlaw and Lane were successfully recruited.
Munro recalls that some time during that first year
she was approached by Professor Murdo MacKinnon about
switching to English. By that time, she remembers, she
had "run afoul of economics" so she asked him if she
would have to take more economics. No, he replied, she
would need only to pick up the Latin she had missed
that first year. So she shifted to English for her second
year. That year she took aesthetics from Carl Klinck,
eighteenth-century British literature from Brandon Conron,
a course in drama from Eric Atkinson ("the best course
I took"), French poetry, Greek literature and translation,
and another course in English history "from a dreadful
man" who "read from notes." Although Munro says she
spent about half of her time at Western writing, she
did very well in her courses — apart from economics.
At the end of her second year, she won a prize for the
highest marks in English.
During her first year at Western, Alice Laidlaw was
sitting across from another student in the Lawson library.
He was eating some candy, a piece of which he accidentally
dropped on the floor. This young man had had his eye
on Laidlaw and, looking at the candy on the floor as
he was wondering what to do, he heard her say, "I'll
eat it." Thus Alice Ann Laidlaw met James Armstrong
Munro. Jim Munro was from Oakville, the eldest son of
Arthur Melville Munro, a senior accountant at the Timothy
Eaton company in Toronto, and his wife, Margaret Armstrong
Munro. Just under two years older than Alice, Jim was
in his second year studying Honours History when he
met her. Growing up in Oakville and through high school,
he was interested in the arts; he listened to opera
and classical music, took art classes, and acted in
plays. Jim had seen Alice around the university and
had noticed her, but did not know anything about her;
he did not know that she was a writer until, when he
asked around about her, he was told that Alice Laidlaw
"was Folio's new find." Recalling himself then,
Jim Munro says he was "full of poetry and romantic notions"
— he remembers then being under the influence
of a book, The Broad Highway by Jeffrey
Farnol, about a young man who falls for a high-spirited
girl. He mirrored the story when he met Alice Laidlaw
— "I really fell hard for her."
Describing Alice Laidlaw when she was a student at Western, Doug
Spettigue, a classmate, recalls that "she was shy and small and had a
very white face, freckle-sprinkled, and chestnut hair. . . . You
thought you could stare right through those quiet eyes and the girl
would disappear. But she didn't. There was an unexpected strength
there, and even then a confidence that some of the rest of us,
noisier, may have envied."
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