Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

journals published in a literary journal. Second, Munro attacks through her narrator the idea of organizing life in print. Yet her story is itself superbly organized.
    “Material” appeared as the lead story in the November 1973 issue of
Tamarack
and it is, as Fulford and others saw at once, a striking and contradictory piece of work. It was also the first story from
Something
to reach print, so it signalled the very different Munro readers would find when McGraw-Hill Ryerson published that collection in May 1974.
    “Material” offers the first-person point of view of an unnamed narrator, the first wife of Hugo Johnson, who runs across a story he has published in a collection. Focusing on that story, which uses Dotty, a person they both knew when they were married, the narrator caustically dissects Hugo’s pretensions, outrages, and, ultimately, his sustained power as a writer. Ironically, Munro’s dissection of the writer’s world came just at the moment when she was herself most clearly entering into it. Now involved with another proactive and aggressive writer, John Metcalf, Munro was well placed to both observe and live the writer’s life. “Material” was very much a product of her observations and its appearance in the
Tamarack Review
in November 1973 signalled her sharp, self-reflective analysis of the writer’s function.
    “Material” is a story replete with aphoristic turns of phrase and, for that, as well as for its subject, it is one of Munro’s most-quoted and -discussed stories. Though not as prominent as others found there, one quotation captures just what was happening as Munro was composing
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
. Having read Hugo’s story, the narrator says, “The story is about Dotty. Of course, she has been changed in some unimportant ways and the main incident concerning her has been invented, or grafted on from some other reality.” This is true of “Material,” and also of most of the other stories in
Something:
they have been “grafted on from some other reality.” Dotty, the woman who lived downstairs from Hugo and the narrator when they lived onArgyle Street in Vancouver, was “grafted on” to “Material” from a largely finished but unpublished story called “Real People.” There the Dotty character, Ruth, is the central focus but the details of her life are close to those found in “Material.” The narrator and her husband, who look very much like Alice and Jim starting out in Vancouver, merely live upstairs; she is not a writer, only a pregnant young wife struggling with her circumstances. 21
    The relation of “Real People” to “Material” illustrates Munro’s method as she shaped the stories in
Something
. That book’s stories are unique within Munro’s
oeuvre
in that they were mostly refashioned from earlier work, taken from the novels and stories she had struggled with in Vancouver and Victoria but never published. As such, its stories represent a moment in Munro’s writing life when she looked back more than she looked forward. Given the changes in her life and in her ways of writing, this is hardly surprising. Munro needed to publish so as to kick-start her new life; heading back and returned to Ontario, she was in a new relation to her material. “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” the story, began in an attempted novel, as did “How I Met My Husband” and “The Found Boat.” The fiancé in “How I Met,” Alice Kelling, was in “Death of a White Fox.” “Walking on Water,” “Executioners,” and, again, “The Found Boat” use material and characters Munro had originally used in
Lives
– that book had had a much broader scope, with more characters and incidents, when Munro began it. The origins of other stories were found in Munro’s own experiences or in the anecdotes of others – “Forgiveness in Families” had its beginnings with Daphne Cue’s brother, “Tell Me Yes or No” derives from Munro’s work in the bookstore and the circumstances surrounding the breakup of her marriage, and “The Spanish Lady” uses material from Munro’s experience as well – and not only the breakup; she did see a man collapse and die in the Vancouver train station when she was returning to Victoria with her daughters in 1971. On that trip back too, she met a man who claimed to have known her in another life, though he said he was an Arab. “Marrakesh” was called “A Blue-Eyed Arab” when the manuscript