Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

innocent landscapes.
    Munro went to Victoria for Christmas 1974 with the family. Although there were no scenes, she returned to London determined not to go again. By early January 1975 she mentioned “Places at Home” to Metcalf as something she was working on, and that she was intent on making it a sharp text rather than something bland. She knew and admired James Agee and Walker Evans’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
and Wright Morris’s
The Home Place
, and her idea was to write a textmade up of a series of vignettes to complement D’Angelo’s photographs. These were descriptive of “Places at Home,” but they also included characters. Munro worked on the text throughout 1975, first doing random vignettes and then trying to organize the material around a seasonal theme, what she called “a sort of Ontario Book of Days” in a letter she wrote to Gibson from Clinton on September 16. The Calgary archive contains over 150 pages of manuscript from “Places at Home,” and in it Munro can be seen shaping this material, but she ultimately decided that she was unable to write the text that she imagined. Gibson agreed. Even so, the process of working on the photoalbum text, begun in London, worked on while her relationship with Fremlin was growing, and carried back to Huron County when Munro moved to Clinton that fall was significant to her return home and, as will be seen, to
Who Do You Think You Are?
That book began with a working title of “Places at Home.”
    Once Munro completed her work at Western, she intended to find a place to rent for the summer near Lake Huron in Bayfield or Goderich. But as her letter to Gibson indicates, by mid-September she had moved to Clinton to live with Fremlin and his mother in the family home. When she wrote to Audrey Thomas in March, Munro told her that “my life has gone rosy, again.
This
time its real. I’m almost ashamed to tell you, after my crazy behavior in lost causes. He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing – grown-up. Which is not the same as being middle-aged.… Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it.” Given this, and given Mrs. Fremlin’s frailty – and that was the issue, since she was not then ill – if Munro and Fremlin were to have a relationship she had to go there, or at least move nearby.
    So in August 1975 Alice Munro left London and moved north to Clinton, back to Huron County, just thirty-five kilometres south of Wingham, the place she had started out from and where her father still lived. She came back a much-praised and greatly valued writer, but she was coming back a grown-up who was moving into a new relationship. Fremlin also knew things about their shared home place that Munro did not know – innocent landscapes revealed as eskers, drumlins, andmoraines, as she had commented – and he had his own Huron County history besides, a history he told her about. Having been back in Ontario for two years, Munro had been working on, and publishing, pieces that demonstrated some of the imaginative effects of her return.
Something
included them, but also revealed her as a writer poised between her past remembered Ontario and a new view of that place, one with the longer view, the deeper realizations, found in “Home,” “Winter Wind,” and “The Ottawa Valley.” An Ontario whose images and associations demanded sharper renderings. When she went to Clinton, Munro returned to scrutinize her home place in ways she had never done before, and with a person who had things to tell her about this place she did not know. 37

“Other Stories Are Wonderful and Also Read Like the Truth”
Virginia Barber, the
New Yorker,
Macmillan, and Knopf, 1975–1980
    I was not very comfortable about being identified as a writer in the midst of what was, so to speak, my material. I was aware of having done things that must seem high-handed, pulling fictions up like rabbits out of hats; skinned rabbits, raw and startling, out of such familiar old hats. I knew that some of my inventions must seem puzzling and indecent.
– “Who Do You Think You Are?” (Proof of Supplanted Version)
    I am somewhat crazed with admiration for these stories.
– Daniel Menaker,
New Yorker
, February 1977
    A t the end of “Privilege,” the second story in
Who Do You Think You Are?
and one that explicitly renders her two years at Wingham’s Lower Town school, Munro wrote that “when Rose