‘That Summer World’, Alice Munroe 2013 Nobel Laureate for Literature

Many writers of prodigious talent are drawn to Pointe au Baril - for its inspiration and seclusion. We are blessed to have many in our midst.

 A writer of international stature was here in 1948. She was only 16, but memories of that summer percolated into her later writing. She was Alice Munro, recipient of 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Canadian to be awarded this honor.  Munro was credited for her “exquisitely drawn narratives” and “master of the contemporary short story’ by the Swedish Academy.

Alice’s daughter Sheila, married to my cousin, mentioned over dinner that her mother had spent a summer at Pointe au Baril. My fork clattered to my plate. A FUTURE NOBEL LAUREATE HAD SPEND A SUMMER IN POINTE AU BARIL?!!

So, when At The Ojibway: 100 Summers on Georgian Bay ran off the presses in 2006, a copy was expeditiously sent to my nephew’s mother-in-law. Alice kindly responded with more information about her time here.  

 Alice Munro worked as a maid for the Playfair family in 1948.  The Playfair islands were south of the lighthouse, at the west end of the station main channel. The original cottage was on Castor (A207), now the beloved summer home of Dorrity family, connected to the adjacent island Pollux (A206), that of the Bunstons.

 Alice Munro was 16 when she arrived for her summer work as a maid. She turned 17 that summer, on July 10th. Naturally, one wonders if memories of her summer in Georgian Bay would make their way into one of her later stories.

 The Munroe archives are housed at the University of Calgary, and list a 1954 story, The Idyllic Summer. The archivist kindly sent it along. But that was about a girl getting knocked up in Muskoka.

By chance, I found a PHD dissertation up online, in which Pointe au Baril was referenced in two short stories. The first, Sunday Afternoon, published in 1968 in her first book of short stories won The Governor General’s Award. The second story, Hired Girl, is a continuation of the first story. It was published almost 25 years later in the New Yorker.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

 Dance of The Happy Shades, 1968

Alva was 17, working as a maid for the summer for a wealthy Toronto family. The story takes place in their large Toronto home, a week before the family was leaving for their cottage on Georgian Bay. Alva visited the bedroom of Margaret, the 14-year-old daughter, who was beginning to pack.

 ‘The door was open, and there spread out on the bed were Margaret’s crinolines and summer dresses.”

“Where are you going to wear them?” Alva asked.

“To the Ojibway. The Hotel. They have dances every weekend. Everyone goes down in their boats. Friday night is for the kids, and Saturday night is for the parents and other people – That is when I will be going.” Margaret said rather grimly, “If I’m not a social flop. I don’t really like dancing, not the way I like sailing, for instance. But you have to do it.”

Margaret, sitting cross-legged on the floor, looked up at her with a blunt, clean face, and said, “Do you think I ought to start to neck this summer?”

“Yes,” said Alva. “I would,” she added almost vindictively.

Alva went downstairs and into the kitchen. She was thinking of the Island now. A whole island that they owned, nothing in sight that was not theirs. The rocks, the sun, the pine trees, and the deep cold water of the bay. What would she do there, what did the maids do? She could go swimming, at odd hours, go for a walk by herself and sometimes - when they went for groceries, perhaps - she would go along in the boat.

HIRED GIRL

The New Yorker, April 11, 1994

In the second story, the maid sleeps in a loft in a boathouse nestled between the two islands that belonged to the family. Current owners Ann Doritty and Wendy Bunston say a large crib from the old boathouse, where Munroe likely slept, can still be seen.

 ‘Mrs. Montjoy had picked me up at the station in Pointe au Baril and brought me to the island…She had leapt on board the boat like a boy, given a fierce tug to the outboard motor, and we were flung out on the choppy evening waters of Georgian Bay. For 30 or 40 minutes we dodged among the rocky wooded islands, with their lone cottages, their boats bobbing beside the dock, and their pine trees jutting out at odd angles, just as they do in paintings.

 I held onto the sides of the boat, and shivered in my flimsy new dress.” 

 “Feeling sick?” said Mrs. Montjoy, with the briefest possible smile – it was like a signal for a smile, when the occasion did not warrant the real thing. She had large, white teeth in a long face, and her commonest expression seemed to be one of impatience decently held in check. She probably knew that what I was feeling was fear, not sickness, and she threw out this question so that I – and she – need not be embarrassed. What did she not understand was that fear did not embarrass me.

Here was a difference already, from the world that I was used to.

In that world fear was commonplace, at least for a female. You could be afraid of snakes, thunderstorms, deep water, Heights, rats, and the road through the swamp, and nobody thought any worse of you. In Mrs. Monty’s choice world, however, she was shameful, and always something to be conquered.

The island that was our destination had a name - Nausicaa. It was written on a board at the end of the dock. This name seemed to meet a good sign, and I said it aloud as a clambered out of the boat. I was anxious to appear appreciative and at ease.

 The maid was sent to sleep in the boathouse between the two islands that belonged to the family.

 “All night long you could hear the water slapping against the boards of the boathouse. Morning came early here. There was a window at each end of the loft. I got up and looked out.

Through one window the silky water, dark underneath flashing back from its surface, the light of the sky. The rocky shores of a little cove, the moored sailboats, the open channel beyond, the mound of another island, shores and channels beyond that. I thought that I would never on my own, be able to find my way back to the mainland.

But maids don’t have to find their way anywhere. They stay put, where the work is. It’s the other people who come and go.”

The other window looked out on a gray rock that was like a slanting wall, with shelves and crevices on it were a little pine and cedar trees, and blueberry bushes, had got a foothold. Down at the base of the rock was a path – which I would take later on – through the woods to Mrs. Montjoy’s house. Here everything was damp and almost in darkness still, though the sky was whitening at the top of the rock. The trees here were the stripped and fragrant evergreens, with their heavy bows that don’t allow much growth underneath – no riot of saplings and brambles and grapevines such as you find in the hardwood forest. Mostly damp ferns, blueberries. I had noticed this the day before, from the train, and it seemed to me that this was a more authentic forest in the bush lots we had at home – it had eliminated all that lavishness and confusion and seasonal change. And it went on more or less forever.

 I had never been on a tennis court. The idea of getting up on a horse or going out in a sailboat terrified me. I could barely swim. Golf with something that silly looking men did in cartoons. The adults I knew sat down and rested whenever they were not working. That was not often.

Everybody I know works too hard to do any of those things I said. We don’t have a tennis court in our town. We don’t have a golf course, either. Nobody I know onto sailboat.

I did not mention the hockey rink or the baseball park.”

 When Mr. Mont Joy came to the island on the weekends, there was always a great deal of noise and activity. Some of that was because they were visitors, we came by boat to swim or have drinks and watch sailing races. But a lot of it was generated by Mr. Monte Joy himself. He had a loud blustery voice and a clumsy body.