Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Munro never published, “Married People” cannot be advanced as any type of key text, but it is indicative of her focus during 1974. Two passages, especially, seem worth looking at. The first, derived fromNorah’s contemplation of the physical changes she notes in Johnson from her memories of him in the late 1950s, turns back on Norah herself:
    When she looked in the mirror she would sometimes see, with deep respectful feeling, almost of awe, almost of approval, how all that ordinary prettiness, roundness, readiness was melting and slipping away, and what looked out was the broad, deep eye-socketed, final face of her grandmother, her greatgran[d]mother, women who had been photographed on a farm porch, in front of a whitewashed cottage in Ireland, looking as if they had never asked anybody for anything in their lives.
    Such a passage is cousin to some of those found in “Winter Wind,” which also recreate Munro’s grandmother. It might also be seen as a usual contemplation of a forty-four-year-old person looking in the mirror. Yet placed in the trajectory of Munro’s life and, more pointedly, placed in relation to the writing she subsequently did after returning to Ontario, such a passage is resonant in that it reveals her meditating on the living family connections she found awaiting her there.
    So too is the moment on which “Married People” ends, one Norah recalls from their time together one summer when the families shared a rented cottage on an island off the coast. Andrew and pregnant Mary had rowed off on an errand to the mainland. They are considerably overdue. Norah and Bob, worried, watch the horizon. The story ends:
    Norah, objecting to the possibility that Andrew might never come face to face with her, or speak to her, or lie beside her again, was arguing in her mind that there had not been enough time. She did not seem to mean by this that there had not been enough time for ordinary living together or raising their children or any of those things, but not enough time for delivery of some large and particularly urgent message, which was straining in her now, which she would shout at him, throw at him, dazzle and utterly change and save him with, the moment she saw his face, if she was lucky enough to see his face, which was the one faceshe could not do without, not yet, not yet – again. The giving and accepting of any such message was to prove impossible. But it did not seem so to her when she was sitting on the beach, vowing and waiting, in her mortal anxiety, that day. 33
    The whole of “Married People” builds to this moment, likely a moment remembered from the summer of 1957 (the detail places the Munros just after Jenny’s birth), a moment when Munro probably also found herself “in her mortal anxiety.” The story shows Munro looking back in ways different from her recollection of her childhood – now away from her marriage, she is beginning to use its remembered images too.
    Munro’s phrase “mortal anxiety” might well be seen as apt for just where she herself was as an artist when she walked into a CBC studio to talk to Harry Boyle during the summer of 1974. Thinking that she had “written out” the Wingham girlhood-to-young-adult material recalled from British Columbia, having mined her manuscripts of earlier attempts to produce about half the stories in
Something
, Munro was looking not so much for new materials as she was for new ways of seeing, of understanding her “old” material, her home place. Munro herself knew that the mined stories in
Something
were exercises, proficient enough to publish but ultimately dissatisfying, just as some of
Something
’s keener reviewers observed. But that book also contained the new style of autobiographical metafictional stories (and she had done “Home” too), and it also had “Tell Me Yes or No” and “The Spanish Lady,” precursors of what Munro has come to call her “passion” stories. When Munro talked to Joanna Beyersbergen late in spring 1974 and said of Huron County that there were “stories about people there just crying out to be used” she doubtless knew that she might well use them herself. But for a time, it seems, Munro was not yet in any position to do so.
    That “Married People” builds to an ending focused on a remembered moment, long ago and far away, during which Norah saw herself “vowing and waiting, in her mortal anxiety” is indicative of the imaginative change Munro was undergoing. This story