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Alice Laidlaw Munro

A Portrait of the Artist

By Doug Spettigue

(Originally published in the Summer 1969 issue of the Alumni Gazette)

My reminiscing has sent me scrambling in the mental attic for faded snaps   and scraps of Alice Laidlaw and the English Lang. & Lit. milieu of Western   in the late forties and early fifties. The album is not well stocked I’m   afraid, and I suppose there must be something disconcerting in being asked   to write about the classmate who made good. In Alice’s case, though,   there can only be respect, admiration and pleasure at well deserved recognition.   There were lots of us who had enthusiasm, aspirations, and a flair of one kind   or another. There were few who had the genuine creative gift. Alice had all   these but she also had - what shall I call it – staying power, the indomitable   will, the spark that refused to be smothered under marriage and family and   domesticity and – time. Lampman once confessed that the creative winds   blew only fitfully through him; for the real artist they were constant and   strong. Alice is such an artist.

I don’t remember Alice well from Western. She was a year younger and   I think we only took one class together; at that stage a year is a generation   gap. I can picture her clearly, though not as in the dust cover of Dance   of the Happy Shades. She was shy and small and had a very white face,   freckle sprinkled, and chestnut hair. She calls one of her heroines “commonplace   pretty.” Alice was not commonplace pretty but you expected her to be.   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.   We knew that she was writing, but then everybody was writing.

We would have scorned to work at our courses but we worked passionately for   Players’ Guild and the Hesperian Club and for Folio. Led by   Phil Stratford and Frank English and Betty Morley we acted and directed and   even wrote plays, we built and tore apart sets endlessly both in the old Guild   Room and at the Grand Theater. We lived for the successive issues of Folio,   to admire ourselves and envy our friends in print – Pat Moore and Ed   Pocunier and Bob Toye and Alice Laidlaw, though again Alice seems to me to   have been on the edge of that group. Perhaps she was less in circulation because   already Jim Munro was on the scene; I remember being told that Alice “had   her ring,” and she was married in 1951 when she was only twenty.

Much of the impetus for our creative activities came from the journalism   students at the core of both Folio and The Gazette. It was   also fanned by the professional advice of Jim Scott, who used to come down   from Seaforth fortnightly to instruct us individually in Creative Writing.   In those days most of us were writing verse. I recall showing some poems to   Jim Scott; he suggested I try prose. I don’t know now whether to marvel   more at his tact or at my obtuseness - I simply switched to short stories.

Alice, I’m sure, was working only with short stories; she began very   early the struggle to bend that stubborn form to her will. Jim Scott put me   in touch with John Sutherland of the old Northern Review and with   Bob Weaver of CBC; presumably he also made Bob aware of Alice. I began publishing   in 1951-52 with the London Writers’ Club prize and stories in Northern   Review, on CBC Anthology and in Bob Weaver’s first book   of Canadian Short Stories. Alice moved more slowly, preparing for   the long distance run. Her first stories, after she left Western, appeared   in the Canadian Forum from 1954 to 1957 and on CBC Anthology.   (For Alice as for many others Bob Weaver has been the unfailing good editor,   good Samaritan and very friendly tabby of Canadian culture.)

Those early stories - two of them are included in Dance of the Happy     Shades – established Mrs. Munro as another, and a better, recorder     in reminiscent realism of the rural and small-town life of Western Ontario.     This region, from London north to Owen Sound and along Lake Huron and Georgian     Bay, fascinated many writers of our time – James Reaney, David Helwig,     and I, and pre-eminently Alice. It is a cliché that Canadian fiction     is regionalist, and it’s partly true. But the cliché puts the     emphasis of region, whereas I would put it on the reminiscence. It is not     simply that the sense of the region fills such fiction; it does, and Hilda     Kirkwood can say that with impunity that “The flatness and dust of     the Western Ontario country roads does not seem like regional self-absorption     but the only possible soil out of which these characters could grow.”

I’m not sure about that “only possible,” though. Similar   characters grew from Knister’s Essex County soil south-west of London,   and for John Mitchell they grew north of Toronto. Hugh Garner, who wrote the   Foreword to Alice’s book, has nourished such creatures widely from Toronto   to the Gaspé. W.O Mitchell and Sinclair Ross have raised them in Saskatchewan,   and for that matter D.C. Scott managed to grow some of them a century ago in   the Hudson’s Bay posts of the Canadian Arctic. Each has his appropriate   region but there are many such regions. As Stephen Leacock said of his Mariposa, “if   you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns   just like it.”

What these regions have in common is their emptiness. The short story writer   looks back not so much in anger as in pity and terror at what he or she escaped   from. Knister’s Richard Milne returns to the childhood farm to try to   rescue from it a girl who represents the desperately, fatalistically ingrown   spirit of Western Ontario. The Narrator of Alice’s The Peace of Utrecht urges   her sister Maddy to “Go away, don’t stay here.” “Yes   I will”, Maddy says hurriedly, but she cannot, and the story ends with   her agonizing cry, “But why can’t I, Helen? Why can’t   I?”

It is of course the writers who cannot get away from the childhood region,   even when, like Alice, they move physically as far as Vancouver. The rest of   us may drive through one of these regions and see nothing to comment on; they’re   not scenic of forbidding, just desolate, empty, the houses looking lonely even   when a group of them huddle together. But Alice knows them inside and out,   the scraps on the oilcloth, the flies on the light bulb, the kitchen smells,   the grubby kids, dark-eyed and peculiarly alone. Her story, At the Other   Place begins: “The others liked to play in the old house sometimes.   I just liked to look around in it and think about the time gone by since people   lived here.” The other place, the place of childhood, is another reality;   for many Canadian writers it is the reality. In that terrible story   it is a place of senseless beatings and insane greed, of Aunt Thelma’s   cancer and Uncle Bert’s hate. The Canadian short-story writer is moved   by a terrible pity for the human condition that he comes at through a re-creation   of a childhood awareness that is profoundly dark.

Not all Alice’s stories are set in Western Ontario. One virtue of her   book and the quality which must have won her the Governor-General’s award,   is its range and experience. Alice carries the early sympathy and understanding,   as well as that terrible clarity, into stories of suburban Vancouver or Toronto   or Everywhere. Her style is flexible and strong; her vision is realistic, her   sensitivity humane. She belongs with such masters as Hugh Garner and Morley   Callaghan and Ethel Wilson, who keep short stories alive as a form despite   the ruinous effects of the formula-story, as Hugh Garner points out, and perhaps   also of the comfortable titillation of the ladies’ magazine articles   on sex and sickness and psychiatry. One of the things that I don’t recall   about Western in those days is what we were reading, but it must have been   close to the central tradition of the short story. We produced plays by Chekhov   and Tennessee Williams; we studied Hemingway and Faulkner; perhaps we found   our way to Anderson and Lewis and the American Mid-West where the modern North   American short story developed, and even back to James and Lawrence and Joyce   - Alice’s title story Dance of the Happy Shades must owe to   Joyce’s The Dead.

At any rate, we were reading and writing, and we must have found in Western   and its English Department an excitement that has stayed with us. Certainly   Alice found there the incentive to adapt the short story as an art form to   her experience of life as it is lived in Western Ontario, and to transplant   it and grow with it in a very different setting. The Governor-General’s   Award is a well deserved tribute to Alice Laidlaw Munro; it is equally a tribute   to The University of Western Ontario as it was in 1950.

Dr. Spettigue, an Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University,     received his Bachelor and Master’s degrees from Western (1952 and 1958)     and studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto.