Where Alice Munro found her stories

Another woman recalled her mother-in-law saying, after reading Lives of Girls and Women, “Alice Munro should be ashamed of herself,” because the people in her stories seemed so vividly recognizable — and often didn’t fare well in Munro’s fictionalized version.

Such is the fate of writers like Munro, keen observers who write about what they know best — their own hometowns and the people in them. The local people are delighted that one of their own has put the town on the world’s literary map. But there can also be a darker undercurrent of resentment and outright hostility.

Munro has faced this duality for decades. Indeed, bitterness still burns bright for members of one family, who have since decamped but have not forgiven Munro for writing about a tragedy in the 1930s.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when her stories started appearing, people in Huron County, some of them living in Lower Town, a poorer, flood-prone part of Wingham, were appalled. They felt she was writing about them.

“The characters seemed to be drawn from where she lived — there was a bit of incest — and some of these people knew this and didn’t want to admit it,” says a woman getting set to play euchre at the Wingham Adult Day Centre, further up the main street. “A guilty conscience is a funny thing.”

Wingham, where Munro’s father, Robert Laidlaw, had a fox farm and later raised turkeys, was to her “the most interesting place in the world,” she told the New York Times. They lived at the end of a long road, the last house in town, with a cornfield on one side, the Maitland River on another. The old barns are still standing.

Her home in recent decades was in nearby Clinton, a scant half-hour drive down the highway, where she lived with her husband, Gerry Fremlin, in his family’s home, until his death this year. So deeply is she associated with Huron County, with its rich farmland, wind rows of trees, where dried corn rustles in the fall breeze, that it is called Munro County, the way Thomas Hardy is linked to Dorset (which he called Wessex) and William Faulkner Lafayette County (Yoknapatawpha County).

Sunlight and shadow fall on Huron County’s furrowed fields as winter draws near, but it is in the shadows that Munro’s characters live — furtive sex in the cornfields, backwater bootleggers with violent tempers, lives and hopes crushed within the space of a single conversation. Her writing is plain — as plain as Wingham, in fact — but throbs with precise, understated emotion. It has been too much for some.

A family with roots in Lower Town resents Munro three generations after the publication of a story about a baby scalded to death in a pail of boiling water on a wood stove.

Everything about the story is too close to home, says a 39-year-old Mississauga nanny, a grandniece of the dead child. She doesn’t want her name or her family’s name used because she fears hate mail from Alice Munro’s fans. “It will be seen as petty.”

“The Time of Death,” in the 1968 short-story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, mirrors her family’s story. Her great uncle, Buddy, died at 18 months from a scalding in the same way a baby, named Benny, dies in the Munro story. Her retelling of the event, says the woman, caused “a lot of pain and hurt.” Her great grandmother was “a broken woman.” There was so much anger that one of her great uncles showed up at the Laidlaw farm, waving a gun and “demanding that their daughter stop writing stories about them.”

It’s easy to see how hurtful this story would be. The family, as depicted by Munro, is slovenly. The baby is left in the care of a 9-year-old sister who decides to clean the house while their mother is out. “This place stinks,” the sister says. There’s hard porridge on the linoleum. The scrubbing water must be boiling hot. When the neighbouring women, who condescend to the mother, start to pull off Benny’s clothes, it looks like his skin is coming off too.

“They come across as white trash, the father is a drunk, the mother is always out, the house is a mess,” the Mississauga woman says. “The characters are horrible.”

Her aunts and uncles “were good people,” she says. “They were not wealthy, they were a hard-working farm family who had a lot of tragedy.”

Suggestions that the little boy, who died in 1939, will be remembered forever in literature does not temper her anger. “Imagine yourself as the mother.”

“The Time of Death” is the only work of Munro this woman has read. Even in high school, she refused to read a Munro short story assigned in English class. She explained to her teacher, “Alice Munro wrote about my family.”

Fact and fiction

Jodi Jerome is a local historian and former curator of the North Huron Museum. She has written a history of Wescast Industries, once Wingham’s main employer, now owned by a Chinese company. She has a deep interest and affection for Munro’s work. Story collections are stacked near her computer in her farmhouse at the end of a road lined with maples a few minutes out of Wingham.

“When I read Alice Munro, I can’t read her like everyone else. I see so much of Wingham’s part in it, though I know it’s fiction.”

She has read the actual scalded baby story in the archives of the local weekly, the Wingham Advance (now the Wingham Advance-Times). But she has also found two other examples of young children dying from scalding, one as early as 1877, as reported in the Huron Expositer. That story is uncannily similar: The older sister is left to wash the floor while the mother goes across the road to tend to an ailing neighbour. The girl finds the water too hot and goes to the pump to get cooler water. When she returns, she finds the child scalded.

Jerome recognizes the setting of another story, “Day of the Butterfly,” in which the children of a local fruit seller are outcasts at school. Munro writes: “to tell you the truth there was a smell about Myra, but it was a rotten-sweetish smell as of bad fruit.” Jerome recalls a store that was the likely inspiration: it was Bondi’s and it was on Wingham’s main street.

Then there is the incest incident, which occurred in Lower Town in 1896. A man who got his daughter pregnant is tarred and feathered.

“That’s what so weird around here. The past is so present. People drive through town and think it’s just another small town in Ontario, but when you know the stories, when you know the history, you see it everywhere.”

The Wingham that Munro knew — in her fiction the towns are called Jubilee, Walley and Hanratty — was a closed and repressive world, says Jerome. And to be clear, Munro herself has said Jubilee is not Wingham, Walley is not Wingham and she is not writing autobiography. She took bits from many small towns. As she has written: “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable — deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

Munro was excoriated in an editorial in the Wingham Advance-Times in 1981, under the heading “A Genius of Sour Grapes,” written by the publisher and president of the paper: “Sadly enough Wingham people have never had much chance to enjoy the excellence of her writing ability because we have repeatedly been made the butt of soured and cruel introspection.”

It continued, “But it seems that something less than greatness impels her to return again and again to a time and place in her life where bitterness warped her personality.”

She reflected on this editorial in a Paris Review interview in 1994: “ ... my writing wasn’t fancy. It didn’t go over well in my hometown,” she said. “The sex, the bad language, the incomprehensibility ... My dad was already dead when they did that. They wouldn’t do it while Dad was alive, because everyone really liked him. He was so liked and respected that everybody muted it a bit. But after he died, it was different.”

The tone at the paper has long since changed. “We feel very honoured that she wrote about things she knew. She wrote about this area,” North Huron Reeve Neil Vincent told the Advance-Times last week.

Moreover, the Alice Munro Writers and Readers Festival, which had been dormant for a few years, has been revived.

That détente was a long time coming. “Alice was a sore point for Wingham and possibly Wingham was a sore point for Alice,” Jerome continues. “A lot of people held grudges, probably people who otherwise wouldn’t have picked up one of her books. They kind of wanted to see their names in her books, but when they saw the characters they didn’t like it.”

“I bet more people in the city have read (Munro) than we have,” Leedham says.

In fact, says Audrey Fitch, another member of the United Church Women. “I started a couple, but couldn’t stay interested. “I like a good story.”

But any disaffection with Munro for mining their lives decades ago has abated, says Jerome. “She did something women didn’t do then — become a writer, a modern writer who wrote about things that were uncomfortable. She told secrets — one of her books is called Open Secrets — things people know about everybody’s family but didn’t want to talk about.”

Even as recently as 2002, Munro was wary of Wingham. When the Alice Munro Literary Garden was opened on her 71st birthday, Josephine St., the main drag, was shut down for the festivities. Several organizers recall that Munro went to the local police and asked for additional security.

That’s not surprising. Munro received threatening letters decades ago when her first stories were published, says Verna Steffler: “There were some people she was just a little leery of. They are dead now. But I saw them in the lineup that day (in 2002). I hung around a little closer in case someone decided to haul off and hit her.”

Nothing happened. It was a day of rejoicing — and possibly reconciliation. “Maybe by 2002 they had gotten over it.”

Among those who helped smooth relations were the Procters, a retired farming couple. Ross Procter helped raise funds for the public garden and, with his wife, Mary, held a series of parties called “AM in the PM” after placing an ad in the paper inviting Munro’s former classmates. Eighty people showed up for the first one.

Procter insists he has never recognized anyone in Munro’s stories. He and other Munro loyalists believe her characters are composites. “In her early writing, some people thought they knew who she was writing about, so there was some unease, but now it doesn’t amount to anything.”

These are people, some of whom had gone to school with Alice, who thought the hostility she’d experienced over the years was a “dirty deal,” says Robert Thacker, Munro’s biographer. “They were a counterforce in reasserting or valuing what Alice has done.”

Certainly, no one values Alice more than Verna Steffler, 74, a retired nurse. Both the Alice Munro corner of the museum and the Alice Munro Literary Garden are her projects.

The garden is set under a spreading catalpa tree in a former parking lot. Now inlaid stones with the names of Munro’s books are on one side of a path and her many awards are on the other, on either side of a snowy clematis draped bower.

Steffler had ordered and hung a banner in the garden by 4 p.m. on the day the Nobel was announced. The paint was barely dry.

What accounts for her enthusiasm? “She is so different from Margaret Atwood, who gets awards and is always out there,” says Steffler. “But Alice gets her awards and stays home.”

Now Wingham is known as the hometown of a Nobel Prize winner and Steffler will have a lot of company in celebrating the fact.

“How do we recognize her?” asks Jerome.

Canadian Gothic

It would have been impossible for Munro not to draw some inspiration from the life she observed around her.

Yet she herself has said she often turned to newspaper clippings for material for her stories, which she told the CBC in 1974 reflected a “Canadian Gothic” view of small-town Ontario.

In that same interview, Harry Boyle asked her if she felt she was “unkind.” She said she hoped to get a step closer “to what is very hard to bear — a sort of unbearable truth.” Munro continued that she never thought about being kind or unkind. “If one is honest, I think there is always a love involved in the effort to get at the truth.”

In researching the archives of the Advance-Times, biographer Thacker easily found references that turned up in Munro stories: “Hand nearly severed” or “Recluse dies” or “Lamb Born with 7 legs and 2 tails.”

For background material, Munro also turned to an old friend, Reg Thompson, who works in the Goderich library. The two met in the 1970s during a debate on banning books in Huron County schools, and discovered that Munro was named after one of Thompson’s aunts.

Over coffee in her kitchen, they’d swap old tales. Thompson told her a story from the Ottawa Valley, where they both have family roots, about a scandalous marriage in which a young man who belonged to a sect of Presbyterians comes to live in a household with two sisters. He is engaged to one but marries the younger, whom he has gotten pregnant. They all continue to live together.

It became “Friend of my Youth.” The story is dedicated to “R.J.T. with thanks.”

Thompson enjoyed researching for Munro, looking for specific details she needed, including, on one occasion, someone beheaded in an industrial accident. He wanted the facts to be correct. “I didn’t want Alice to get nailed on a detail” he says, when the famed fact checkers at The New Yorker got to work on a story.

She has thanked him in The Love of a Good Woman for his “inspired and ingenious research.”

Still, he says, by way of caution: “people seem to torture themselves — is that real? She really does make things up.”

Munro has addressed the ethics of writers drawing on other people’s experience in the short story “Material,” about a woman who recognizes someone she knew in a story by her ex-husband, a successful writer. While the narrator is consumed by the ordinariness of life, she sees that through the writer’s craft the woman she recognized has been “lifted out of life and held in light.”

Biographer Thacker says that this is the job of the writer: to transform and fix in permanence the ordinary place, the old road, the river, the forgotten person.

“It has passed into art,” he says.