Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

gave him – or, more accurately, that he assigned to himself – that day. Like Munro, he was a native of Huron County from St. Augustine, in West Wawanash Township – and like her also he attended high school in Wingham. As he noted at the outset, he saw the young Alice Munro in Wingham during the 1940s where he was working at his first job in radio at CKNX , the local station. Along with other Wingham children, Munro performed recitations and scripted pieces on the radio, so she certainly knew Boyle, whether he specifically knew her then or not.
    While Boyle is at pains to focus on several of the stories in
Something
– the title story, “Material,” “The Spanish Lady,” and “The Ottawa Valley” come in for the most discussion – the interview speaks eloquently to the culture of the people among whom Boyle and Munro grew up, and still owe allegiance to, more than anything else. Boyle compliments Munro for her ability to retain, and “celebrate,” “theessential mystery of individuals.” Talking about the culture of Huron’s Scots and Irish people, farmers and others who worked on the land, they agree that small towns in Huron “make a drama out of life. You’re a character in the whole drama.” To this, Munro remarks that “even the town loonie” has his role to play. More tellingly, she recalls that people were encouraged “not to aim too high”: “ ‘Who do you think you are?’ they used to ask,” she says. And while they do not quite exactly agree, both feel that there are elements of the macabre, what Munro calls “a Canadian Gothic,” in the life of rural southwestern Ontario. People were always being maimed in horrible accidents, living with untreated disease, singling themselves out by some excessive behaviour. Borne of “dispossessed peoples” fleeing eviction or poverty or famine or religious persecution in Europe during the nineteenth century, the people who live in Huron County evince both “enormous energy” and, Boyle and Munro agree, considerable sexual repression. They are the people Munro knows, they have provided her characters she has created, characters whose culture is rooted, and defined by, Huron County – this place where everything is both “touchable and mysterious.”
    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 realreason 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