Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

thought of West Hanratty during the war years, and during the years before, the two times were so separate it was as if an entirely different lighting had been used, or as if it was all on film and the film had been printed in a different way, so that on the one hand things looked clean-edged and decent and limited and ordinary, and on the other, dark, grainy, jumbled, and disturbing.” In the collection’s first story, “Royal Beatings,” she had called this effect “a cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.” These phrasings describe the imaginative effect of Munro’s return in August 1975 to Huron County and to Clinton, very near Wingham. As has often been noticed, Munro concluded
Lives of Girls and Women
and
Something
with precise references to photography. (In
Lives
the Epilogue is entitled “The Photographer” while “The Ottawa Valley” includes the line “It is like a series of snapshots.”) When she has described her method in such essays as “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled” or in her introduction to
Selected Stories
, Munro has focused on the imaginative effects of specific recalled images. In the latter she wrote of the “scene which is the secret of the story” and described an image she once saw when she was about fifteen: it was then “like a blow to the chest.” Confronting her imaginative relation to “the country to the east of Lake Huron,” Munro asserts her love for it, details its components (“the almost flat fields, the swamps, the hardwood bush lots … the continental climate with its extravagant winters”), and goes on to express her hope “to be writing about and
through”
the life she knew there. 1
    The great fact of Alice Munro’s writing career was her return to Huron County in 1975. Unplanned as it was, that move brought her back into the very midst of her material: feeling its life, knowing its sights, understanding its ways, speaking its language. And for the first time, in Gerald Fremlin, she was living with a man who shared much the same point of view, the same understandings. When she moved to Clinton, Munro was uncertain about whether, or just what, she would be able to write. With its looking back and its return to early writing attempts,
Something
had in some significant ways brought Munro tothe end of her material; she was clearly uncertain about her future writing at that time. She was working on “Places at Home,” the Peter D’Angelo project that had her focused on Wingham in ways immediate and sharp. Though it ultimately proved an intractable text, this work was crucial nevertheless. A succession of images drawn from the Ontario life she knew as a child, adolescent, and young woman but had not lived (but for visits) for more than twenty years, “Places at Home” was an imaginative return to Huron County concurrent to her literal return. Much of its material was incorporated into
Who Do You Think You Are?
, which was
the
critical book of Munro’s career.
Who
was Munro’s first book with Douglas Gibson and with Macmillan; it was the first book negotiated by her agent, Virginia Barber; the first with an altogether separate New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf; and, famously, it was the book that she dramatically had pulled from the press the month before its publication so that she could reorganize it. All these facts resulted in various ways from Munro’s return to Ontario.
    But the great fact was the return itself. Munro returned well aware of what she remembered from her youth, knowing that she had already used such recollections from British Columbia, thinking that she may have “used it up,” looking for a new relation to her material while living in its midst. As Munro returned to Huron to live instead of continuing as the public writer she had been in Toronto and London, and settled into a new relationship with a man who shared her passionate interest in Huron County landscapes, her life was completely changed. Her own close relatives gone or near gone, she was able from August 1975 on to create in her fiction a new imaginative relation with Huron County.
“Radiant, Everlasting”: “Places at Home”
    There is considerable evidence of the D’Angelo photo text in the Calgary archive, including one manuscript of almost fifty pages that has the appearance of being complete. That version has three renderings of an opening page-long descriptive vignette entitled “Places at Home,” andtwenty other pieces; some of these