In an earlier conversation, Robert Thacker remarked that as Munro has aged she has tended to return not only to the county, but to a specific period: the 1930s and ’40s, when she was Alice Laidlaw walking from Lower Town into Wingham. The movement lately has been still further back in time, into the nineteenth century, and the roots of her people, and of the landscape. From her younger self, she is shifting into her pre-self, almost, a kind of genteel erasure of that famous author.
Thacker made another, more speculative point about Munro’s ongoing need to be present in Huron County. Of the stories in Too Much Happiness that are clearly situated in the area (the lengthy title piece is set in nineteenth-century Europe), the two most harrowing touch down along its margins. The opening tale, “Dimensions,” about a woman who must gain back her spirit after her mentally ill husband murders their children, references the “away” town of Kincardine. In “Free Radicals,” another vulnerable woman, a widow living in an unnamed village, outwits an intruder who has committed a triple homicide. He spares her life but steals her car, only to die later in an accident near the village of Wallenstein, to the east of Huron County. In Munro’s mature imagination, Thacker speculated, to dwell inside the Huron County zone I am presently driving — the Wingham-Blyth-Clinton-Goderich nexus — is to be protected, up to a degree, by those attachments to family, place, and landscape. To be outside the zone is to be exposed to more random perils.
Alice Munro delights in the story of mistaken identity at the literary garden. “Maybe I should go work in my garden,” she says. “But I’d have to insist on being paid minimum wage.” She laughs at her own joke, bending forward in amusement. While she is a lean, striking woman, her grey hair curly and her smile dazzling, her entrance into Bailey’s restaurant on the Goderich town square merits just a few nods. I am already seated at the anointed table, which is identified only by a copy of The View from Castle Rock on a cabinet next to it. Without prompting, a waitress brings a glass of white wine and a bottle of fizzy water, and then leaves us alone as well. Gibson remembers a previous lunch where they ended up asking the restaurant staff for help selecting a book cover. He is at the table, too, at once curious about my literary drive and protective of his author.
Munro, who has battled cancer, is funny and alert, her informality and good cheer possibly designed to put interviewers at ease and yet keep them at arm’s length. (She had also, it turned out, recently learned that she had won the Man Booker International Prize, valued at nearly $115,000. It was a secret she had to keep until the public announcement two weeks later.) I had made my intentions known in advance, and she is content to chat about the curious business of people visiting “her” Wingham and “her” Huron County. “I do it myself,” she says of literary tourism, “hoping to find some trace of the writer. But when I think of my own work being pinned down...”
One literary outing in particular mattered to her. William Maxwell was both an editor at The New Yorker and a gifted novelist. After he died in 2000, she drove to Lincoln, his hometown in Illinois and the setting for many of his books. Finding no official recognition that this esteemed writer was a native son, Munro wrote a note complaining about the neglect and slipped it under the door of the local tourist board office. “There’s always disappointment when you see the reality,” she says of such visits. “You want to get close to something you can’t ever get close to.” But she also understands the impulse. Literary tourism, she decides, stands at the “intersection of the actual world with the huge imaginative world” of the work itself.
Still, she isn’t sure what visitors will find in Huron. “It’s not particularly close to my own life,” she says of her fiction. “Everything gets switched around on the page.” But then Munro, who hesitates to probe her own creative processes — “I don’t know,” she replies to several questions about her own intersections — admits she has been over the ground of Wingham so often that she isn’t quite sure “what is purely imaginary” in the stories. “All those things happened to me before I was ten years old,” she says of her awakening.
When I suggest that authors puzzle over the question of the actual versus the imagined nearly as much as readers do, and so may be fated to be equally conflicted about the degree of reality in their books, she decides that the literary pilgrimage, if undertaken largely to “pay your respects,” is just fine. But then she adds a very Alice Munro caveat about visitors to Huron County: “What I really want them to care about is the work. Not me.”
Over the two days of my visit, I’ve kept thinking about how Munro continues to live and work in this intimate, if not claustrophobic, setting. Well known, both from The View from Castle Rock and from interviews in recent years, has been her passion for exploring what one character calls “our part of the country” with her husband. Their focus has been as much on the geography of the region as on its residents, whether living or deceased. She and Gerry Fremlin spend days mapping drumlins and moraines and seeking forgotten crypts. “We go looking for things we hardly dare tell people about,” she admits. Then she immediately confesses one such search: for a car graveyard in nearby Holland Township. Having spotted it once before, they spent a fruitless weekend trying to find the site again. Her vivid description of car carcasses sunken and overgrown, another kind of mark on the land, suggests the search will continue.
Alice Munro, in short, is also a visitor in Huron County. Where others bring copies of Lives of Girls and Women and study the Self-Guided Tour of Points of Interest in the Town of Wingham Relating to Alice Munro, she and Gerry study specialized maps and books with such titles as The Physiography of Southern Ontario. These various pilgrims share in common the land itself, so fecund it can produce and abide writers and their stories, cemeteries and their crypts, tumbledown barns and car graveyards. “So you have to keep checking,” that same Munro character from Castle Rock explains of the land, “taking in the changes, seeing things while they last.”
At lunch with the apparently ageless author at Bailey’s in Goderich, it is hard to imagine things not lasting. But a question to Munro about whether she views these landscapes differently now than, say, a quarter-century ago, brings out the artist who has been observant and clear eyed about life and death alike for a long time — possibly since she was that smart girl in Lower Town. Not content with my time frame, she arcs back to a much older memory to explain her sense of time and change. On a highway between Blyth and Clinton is a field she recently recalled as having once hosted an abundant orchard. The orchard, which had likely been harvested by Laidlaws, probably perished during the winter of 1934. She was only three at the time, and living up the road in Wingham, but the memory of its extinction, either directly observed or passed along as a tale, lives inside her still.
Next, she volunteers that she and Gerry will shortly be rooted in the ground near Blyth as well. They have already purchased burial plots in the town cemetery — in the heart of the heart of Alice Munro country, safe from harm — and though she prefers to go unrecognized now, she will be content to receive visitors later on. “Come see me there,” Munro says of her final resting place. Her laugh is high and sharp, and full of a particular kind of mischief.
