The Duke of Richmond had a most dramatic end — stranger than fiction, and evidence that our history is full of amazing stories. He was inspecting the defences of his command, near Ottawa, when he was bitten by his pet fox. It had rabies. He developed hydrophobia and went raving mad. His troops, terrified of both his bark and his bite, tied him to a tree, and watched him die. Nobody had the good sense to have his musket go off by accident.
When you approach Wingham from the south, you cross the many-branched Maitland, and head up Josephine Street. As you drive up the slope you’ll see a typical Ontario main street of two- or three-storey red- or yellow-brick buildings containing small stores or sales offices. After three blocks, on your right you’ll see the grand old post office building. Stop there, because the tall building is now the local museum, with a corner devoted to Alice Munro, containing old photographs, an ancient typewriter, some books, and so on. Even better, you’ll find a leaflet outlining an Alice Munro Tour of the town.
You don’t have to go very far to start the tour. The Alice Munro Literary Garden is right next door to the museum. Its narrow lot is well designed to accommodate a bench where you can sit and think (or possibly just sit), along with an elegant metal archway proclaiming the garden, and a winding circular walkway where the paving stones on the right give the titles of Alice’s books, while those on the left reflect some of the prizes she has won. Best of all, on the lawn at the front, fringed by flowers and shrubs, lies a metal statue of a young girl, chin in hand, lost in the book that she is reading, which is sweeping her off to another world.
Our Swedish cameraman spent a lot of time filming this evocative statue.
I was here in July 2001, when the Literary Garden was opened. In fact Jane and I interrupted our honeymoon to join in the celebration. In his excellent 2005 biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, Robert Thacker describes the event perfectly, including the part that took place in the old town hall theatre directly across the street:
Almost five hundred people were there on a beautiful summer day. Munro was resplendent in a hat given by her daughter Jenny and her goddaughter Rebecca, and the press was out in force. Munro’s picture was on the front page the next day of both the Globe and Mail and the National Post, and the Star ran its story on the dedication under the witty, and apt, headline “Jubilation in Jubilee.” Gibson and [agent Ginger] Barber spoke, as did David Staines, editor of the New Canadian Library [where Alice was on the editorial board], and Jane Urquhart, novelist and friend. At the local theatre [in the old town hall] each read from a favourite Munro story and talked about their associations with Alice, after which Munro read from one of her stories. A garden luncheon followed on the lawn. Among the contributors listed in the program was Munro’s Books.
After a quick trip along Josephine, the Swedish filmmakers and I turned and headed back south. Before the river we turned right, and went on to the west, before winding around a sports field. An uphill left turn took us to the edge of town. On our left lay the very last house, the old Laidlaw farmhouse, where Alice grew up.
Built in the 1870s, it is a simple farmhouse. But it had ambitions, as is demonstrated by the artistic decorations in the “polychromatic” style, with patterns of yellow brick at the corners set off against the regular red-brick exterior, in a handsome display. The front of the house still faces west across the empty fields that Alice has described. In truth, any keen reader of Alice’s work (especially Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are?) will feel, as they look at the house, that they know the inside very well, and may even sense her mother’s presence.
To the east, towards the town, however, the field that used to supply hay has disappeared, and the rear of the house has new out-buildings that contain a hairdressing salon. Because I didn’t want to disturb the owners — living in a literary house must be a pain, if tourists intrude — I asked our cameraman to be very discreet in his filming, and not to get too close to the house. A discreet cameraman? As Lena and I fidgeted by the car, Sven-Ake filmed the front of the house for ten endless minutes, then got even closer to the northwest corner for another ten, then got so close to the front window that he was only three steps away. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” was the roar that I expected to hear at any moment, but my urgent arm gestures (“Back! Back!”) just seemed to make him more stubborn. It may be a Swedish thing.
When he did finally saunter back to the car he told me that he’d once been arrested by the KGB in Moscow’s Red Square, so a Wingham hairdressing salon held no terrors for him. Nevertheless, I had turned the car around, in case a quick getaway was needed. As I prepared to drive off I made a bad mistake. I said, making friendly conversation, “You know, this was Alice’s favourite road to walk when she was young.”
Four Swedish ears pricked up. Suddenly I had a new profession; while Sven-Ake sat in the front seat, I turned into a stunt driver. But this time the stunt was not to drive at Bullitt speed, but as slowly and as smoothly as possible. At first, from the passenger seat, he filmed my right ear — or at least filmed me driving. Then he unbuckled his safety belt, jammed his camera hard against the windshield and instructed me to drive “sloooowly … sloooowly,” while I drove at walking pace, trying to avoid all the ruts in the dirt road without jerking the wheel. Try it some time. As we drove, and he filmed the road, we passed a field of dead, standing corn. This was a Munro-like lesson in finding the extraordinary in the everyday. My fascinated Swedish cameraman friend spent twenty minutes filming the empty October field of rustling cornstalks.
Finally, as we drove away from the house, I found myself looking at the neighbouring houses, trying to guess which one had been occupied by “Mrs. Netterfield,” the crazy lady who prowled around baby Alice’s house, while her mother clung to her for dear life.
On Highway 4 south to Blyth, then onto Clinton. Because of the damned cornstalks we were running late, so I wasn’t able to take the side road east to the Wingham Golf and Curling Club, where I have happily attended two celebrations for Alice organized by local friends like her old schoolmate Ross Procter. These “AM in the PM” events are great fun, attended by Alice and people like Mary Swan, her bookseller friend in Bayfield, who once produced a thoughtful talk about Alice’s writing that could have graced an academic conference. And the awards session showed that a crop of young writers was springing up, encouraged by Alice’s example.
The sound of the local people was important, too, and something for visitors to concentrate on. The southwestern Ontario accent (“Straatford”) is distinctive. Ken McGoogan quotes Carol Shields, an enormous fan of Alice’s work, saying, “Her use of language is very sophisticated, but I can always hear, underlying the sentence and its rhythms, that rural Ontario sound.” An obvious example I’d suggest is this: in the story “Home” we hear, “The cake’s even a mix, I’m shamed to tell you. Next thing you know it’ll be boughten.”
Lying halfway between Wingham (where she was raised) and Clinton (where she came to live), Blyth is physically at the heart of Alice Munro Country. But it’s central in another way. This was where Alice’s ancestors came when they left Halton Hills to settle in Huron County. There were three Laidlaw boys in the party: John (twenty-one), Alice’s great-grandfather Thomas (fifteen), and their cousin Robert (twenty-three). In 1907 Robert wrote his memories of their 1851 journey. His words are quoted in Robert Thacker’s biography: “‘We got a box of bedclothes and a few cooking utensils into a wagon and started from the County of Halton to try our fortunes in the wilds of Morris Township.’ They got as far as Stratford, and thought to take the stage to Clinton but ‘the stage had quit running, until the road froze up,’ so the three young men ‘got our axes on our shoulders and walked to Morris.’”
There, near Blyth, they found their land on the Ninth and Tenth concessions and started to build a shanty, and to fell the trees.
Now, just watch how Alice Munro uses this family material. In �
�A Wilderness Station,” the second section of the story told in letters and other documents is a recollection by “Mr. George Herron.” It begins:
On the first day of September, 1851, my brother Simon and I got a box of bedclothes and household utensils together and I put them in a wagon with a horse to pull it, and set out from Halton County to try our fortunes in the wilds of Huron and Bruce, as wilds they were then thought to be.
Later, her story continues:
The roads were always getting worse as we came west, so we thought it best to get our box sent on to Clinton by the stage. But the stage had quit running due to rains, and they were waiting till the roads froze up, so we told Archie Frame’s boy to turn about and return with horse and cart and goods back to Halton. Then we took our axes on our shoulders and walked to Carstairs.
Our wise historian friend, Desmond Morton, with his warnings about axe wounds (gangrene!) and the fatal accidents that befell so many people trying to clear their land of trees, could have predicted what happened next, both in real life, and in Alice’s story. That death in the woods leads to the dead man’s widow leaving her shanty near Carstairs (Blyth) to turn herself in at the local gaol in Walley (Goderich, where the historic gaol still stands). What makes “A Wilderness Station” such an important story is not only Alice Munro’s clever use of different documents and letters that tell us a lot about pioneer times (a local minister’s death prompts the landlord of the Carstairs Inn to complain about his effects: “There is some books here. Nobody wants them”). What amazes students of the short story form is that a final section in the story brings this tale of the 1850s right up to 1907, and the world of “steamer cars.” A short story that deals with several generations? Who ever heard of such a thing?
The old pioneer farm northeast of Blyth was where Alice’s father, Robert grew up. He walked into school each day, and was a good pupil. But Alice has written about his bashfulness as a farm boy in town, an outsider, and how he came to spend more and more time roaming around the countryside. Eventually, his hobby of trapping mink, muskrats, and foxes produced enough money that he began to think, like an angler turning to fish farming, that raising foxes for their pelts might be a fine way to make a living. And that is what he did, when he married and moved to Wingham. But Blyth remained the family centre, where young Alice would spend time with relatives when there was an emergency at home.
Alice’s father, Robert Laidlaw, was just as fascinated by these pioneer times as his daughter. Late in his life he wrote about them in a novel, The MacGregors, which I published in 1979, at Alice’s urging, after his death. I ran into some trouble with my bosses at Macmillan over this decision, but a) the book is a good, solid account of pioneer life in Ontario — as Jane Urquhart indicated when she read from it at the Alice Munro Tribute at Harbourfront in November 2012 — and b) publishing it strengthened our bonds with Alice. Case closed.
I know Blyth — another Huron County town with its main street running north-south — fairly well, because right in the heart of town is the Memorial Hall, which houses the Blyth Festival theatre. The festival has been running since 1975, and has an admirable policy of encouraging original plays, some of them based on work by local authors like Harry J. Boyle and, yes, Alice Munro. Indeed, on one occasion, when Alice was reluctant to cause a fuss by showing up in the audience, she used me as her undercover reviewer of a play based on one of her stories. I was able to report that it worked well.
Surprisingly, Alice has even acted in a couple of festival productions, which tend to enjoy strong local support. Once, she told me with a laugh, she played the part of a difficult, loud author. But how did this onstage stuff fit with the shy public person I knew? “Ah, it’s easy when I’m just playing a role,” said Alice.
Thanks to Val Ross in the Globe and Mail, the world now knows the story of how an American tourist once went to a chicken supper held in Blyth to raise funds for the local festival. As the grey-haired waitress cleared away the dirty dishes, the tourist indicated an elegant auburn-haired woman sitting off to the side. “I hear,” he said to the waitress, “there’s a famous lady writer who lives near here. Would that by any chance be her?”
The waitress paused in picking up the dishes. “I’m not sure,” she said, peering closely. “Yes, I think that might be her.” Then Alice Munro, the waitress, swept the pile of dirty dishes off the table and away to the noisy, steamy kitchen that was full of other volunteers.
It’s a great story, and one that I’m always pleased to tell in my Stories About Storytellers show. In September 2012 I got to tell it in Blyth, at the theatre itself, to an audience containing many good people who had done their share of serving at chicken suppers. They liked the story. As for me, I loved all the behind-the-scenes stuff in the Green Room, knowing that Alice, too, had fretted there, and in the wings beside the backstage curtains, before striding onto the stage as a loud, bossy author.
A sad note. When Alice’s husband, Gerry, died in April 2013, Alice decided that the family should return to its Blyth roots. He was buried in the graveyard there, where Alice will join him in due course.
In the spring of 2013 I gave my show in Stratford. To be precise, I gave two shows, for the SpringWorks Festival. The first, on a Friday afternoon, was for an audience largely made up of students from local schools — including a busload of grade twelve kids from Clinton.
From the stage I told them how lucky they were, and how for the rest of their lives they were going to run into people from all over the world who said, “Clinton, Ontario? You grew up in Clinton? Did you know Alice Munro? Did you know that she was writing world-famous stories around the corner from you, about people like your parents and their neighbours?” I told them how lucky they were to be in touch — even in a brief, glancing way — with world literature, in the form of a quiet neighbour they might pass in the supermarket or on the way to the post office.
Up on the stage I was not aware of any impact my words might be having, and anyway, these were grade twelve kids, being cool, and they were from the notably undemonstrative world of Huron County. So I got on with my show, talking about my authors, and working up to Alice Munro, whose place in literature I described in a way that must have left listeners wondering why she had never won the Nobel Prize.
Alice Munro (1931– )
Word filtered through to me from a teacher on the bus back to Clinton. Apparently, discussing what I had said, one young student said the words, “You know, I’ve never felt proud of coming from Clinton, before this.”
My life has not been a total failure.
Alice’s house is southwest of the town centre, near streets with names like Frederick and Dunlop (!). The nearby street names may ring bells with her readers. Not far from her house is Orange Street, with its links to her story “The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink.” The street’s name comes not from an artistic admiration for the warm colour in question. It goes back to old Ontario history when the fiercely anti-Catholic Orange Lodge was a power in the land. Once, driving in to see Alice from Bayfield, we passed a country road called the Roman Line. Alice confirmed my suspicion that this had nothing to do with gladiators or senators in togas, but with the Catholic religion of the people, usually from Ireland, who settled there in the nineteenth century.
The house is a neat, white two-storey wooden building. This is where she came to live with Gerry Fremlin, in what had been his mother’s house, in August 1975. Gerry’s mischievous influence can still be seen in the large garden, including irreverent pieces of outdoor art. There are no fairies at the bottom of this garden, but a railroad track where Alice and Gerry used to like to walk in summer, and use as a cross-country ski trail in winter, in their younger days.
These days are long gone. But when the Swedish film crew and I roamed around the garden of the unpretentious house, we were joined by Alice’s great friend Rob Bundy (who later was part of the Munro group of celebrants in Stoc
kholm). He told us how he made himself useful as a friend of the elderly couple, in this snow-belt area where walks have to be shovelled clear, and grass cut regularly in the growing season.
He had encouraging news for any car-bound tourist. Gerry, of course, was a geographer, and he loved to drive Alice around, explaining the ridges and moraines and drumlins to be seen. Later, Rob said, Alice’s greatest pleasure (as a non-driver) was being driven around the rural roads in the scenery she has loved so well, the farms, and fields, and patches of hardwood bush that we call Alice Munro Country. All of us can catch the same feeling on these quiet, unchanged roads.
After a brief stop in Clinton, where they planned to return the next day, I rushed the film crew west towards Goderich. Why? Because, I told them, the great natural feature here was Lake Huron, and if we timed it right we could film the sun setting into the lake. This was my Bergman moment, and I think I was right, although it was cut from the final film, dammit.
Before that, however, Lena decided to film an interview with me in “typical Alice Munro Country.” We drove past miles of really typical flat farm country, with me preparing to stop at any moment. Then we turned north of the road to Goderich and found the least typical spot in the entire county — a steep drop into a gorge where the Maitland River surged over rapids between tall, forested hills. It was such an alarming drop that as I posed for the camera at the edge of the cliff, looking wise, a carload of locals stopped to warn me that the edge often gave way. It would have made a very dramatic, Pythonesque end to the interview. But I survived, and we drove on to Goderich.
Although Stratford (or the more distant London) is the main shopping centre — and the main medical centre — for this area, Goderich is the county town. The octagonal central square is based around the courthouse planned from the early days of John Galt and Tiger Dunlop. Until a tornado swept in off the lake in the summer of 2012, the square housed a fine restaurant called Bailey’s, which Alice used to enjoy as a place to meet visiting journalists, while her house in Clinton remained private.
Across Canada by Story Page 17
