Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

paragraphs earlier in “Winter Wind” that vie in their importance with the evocative final paragraph in “The Ottawa Valley” (“The problem, the only problem, is my mother”). What she offers is a summary assessment of what shehad herself written and published out of her own experience, what she has just been reviewing and reshaping for the stories to be offered in
Something
, and especially what she has just been doing with her aunt and grandmother and the “true incident” in “Winter Wind.” She asks, “How does a writer know?” and her meditation is worth considering:
    And how is anybody to know, I think as I put this down, how am I to know what I claim to know? I have used these people, not all of them, but some of them, before. I have tricked them out and altered them and shaped them any way at all, to suit my purposes. I am not doing that now, I am being as careful as I can, but I stop and wonder, I feel compunction. Though I am only doing in a large and public way what has always been done, what my mother did, and other people did, who mentioned to me my grandmother’s story. Even in that closed-mouth place, stories were being made. People carried their stories around with them. My grandmother carried hers, and nobody ever spoke of it to her face.
    But that only takes care of the facts. I have said other things. I have said that my grandmother would choose a certain kind of love. I have implied that she would be stubbornly, secretly, destructively romantic. Nothing she ever said to me, or in my hearing, would bear this out. Yet I have not invented it, I really believe it. Without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot be investigated, but have to be relied on. 23
    “But that only takes care of the facts.” What seems to have happened here, and in “Home” and in “The Ottawa Valley,” is that Munro returned to Huron County and confronted memories that, as she worked on the stories that became
Something
, led her to question her very practice as an artist during the years since she left in 1951. Given the autobiographical cast of much of her work, such questions doubtless occurred to her previously but here such questions come into thefiction in a way they had not previously. Munro had come home and found it much the same yet different, its facts lying about, teasing her mind, urgent.
    In “The Ottawa Valley” Munro’s fascinations with her craft also emerge, and there the focus is once again on her mother. There too the question she raises is epistemological – she says she wants “to find out more, remember more” so as to “mark her [mother] off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to
get rid
of her.” But Munro also speaks of the insufficiency of her technical practices (“applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know”) in trying to create the version of her mother, and the memory of this visit to the Ottawa Valley, that she seeks. Munro begins her final paragraph by asserting that what she has done does not meet an accepted criteria for a story: “If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done.”
    But needing to know more, to remember more herself, Munro pressed on beyond the imagined mother-daughter confrontation scene, a scene that would have ended the story with suitable literary mystery but insufficient memory, insufficient “real life.” So briefly, between the confrontation scene and Munro’s comment on what she has done, there appears another scene, this one a remembered image of her mother, her brother James, and their cousin Dodie reciting poetry from their school readers. As it ends “they were all reciting together, and laughing at each other:
Now by great marshes wrapped in mist, / Or past some river’s mouth, / Throughout the long still autumn day / Wild birds are flying south
. ‘Though when you come to think of it, even that has kind of a sad ring,’ Aunt Dodie said.”
    Such a scene is needed, sandwiched between the story’s crucial moment and Munro’s own assessment of what she has done, because of what she was doing with “real people” in “real life.” The literary artifice of the daughter confronting her mother (“Is your arm going to stop shaking?”) is mitigated, and made more authentic, by the much less dramatic though