Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

vignette (“Moon-eyes,” “Shot-a-Rat,” “Horse,” “Runt,” “Half-a-Grapefruit,” and others: “Those are names that will last a lifetime, unless you can move away”) and a list of churches and lodges in another (“There is no reason for anybody not to belong to something. If they don’t make you welcome in one place, you can keep on going until you find some place where they do.”). There is also a brief description beginning “Flo knew the best way to kill a chicken, and it was this.” 2
    These lists complement her brief fictional renderings of character and incident in “Places at Home.” Following on “Pleistocene” and “Hill,” she has, among others, “Poison Cake,” about a “woman living on the Huron road [who] had second sight”; “Digging for Gold,” about a treasure believed to have been buried by Jesse James; “Currant Bushes,” about a father who buried his money in jars so as to stymie his children after his death; “June,” about three boys who coerce a country girl into having sex with them under a porch; “Nosebleed,” about a girl whose father gave her away to work for a rich family; “Hearse,” about the “most successful seducer of women that there ever was in that country”; “Suicide Corners,” about “Shepherd Street and Alma Street,” where two men who committed suicide lived; and “The Boy Murderer,” about a man named Franklin who returns home from the war unscathed only to be shot by his brother playing with a loaded gun at Franklin’s welcome-home party. In one of the last pieces, “History,” Munro offers lists of potatoes, roses, and names of streets (grouped thematically) before commenting “Too much altogether. The chronicler’s job becomes depressing” and concluding that “history seems a gentle avocation, orderly and consoling, until you get into it. Then you see the shambles, the prodigal, dizzying, discouraging confusion. Just here, just on this one patch of the earth’s surface where things have not been piling up for very long, or so we think; what must it be like in other places? Nevertheless some people will continue; some people are fired with the lasting hope of getting things straight.” 3
    Reading through the lengthy unpublished manuscripts of “Places at Home” now, one is impressed by the synthesis of Munro’s writing they reveal. Some small proportion of the writing looks back to thingsshe had written previously, the echoes of
Lives
seen in the approach and in “The Boy Murderer,” which reminds us of her depiction of Garnet French’s family. Yet more interesting is how “Places at Home” shows Munro rediscovering her home place and its detail anew in ways appropriate to her own situation in 1975–76. Geographical considerations (the Pleistocene era, pre-glacial lakes, drumlins) reveal Munro’s time and talks with Fremlin, who also provided the story of one of the suicides in “Suicide Corners,” which his father had told him. That incident – a person threatening suicide with a rope not tied to a beam – appears here for the first time; Munro tried several times to place it until she finally got it into “The Progress of Love.” Fremlin also provided her with the details for the girl’s circumstances in “Nosebleed” – his notes about a twelve-year-old girl whose father “gave” her away to work for another family are in Munro’s papers. That same history became Flo’s in “Half a Grapefruit.” Once she had written the text of “Places at Home” and it became clear that the book would not be published, Munro kept it and has used much of it since. “Pleistocene” became the uncollected story “Characters” and was considered for inclusion in
Who
. “June” and several other vignettes were used in
Who Do You Think You Are?
, the apparent shooting in “The Boy Murderer” became part of “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” and the phrasing at the end of “History” (“the lasting hope of getting things straight”) would inform the conclusion of “Meneseteung.” The seducer in “Hearse” reappears in
Who
and, though no longer an undertaker, again as D.M. Willens in “The Love of a Good Woman.” Munro wrote to Gibson when she was struggling with the form of this manuscript; she was apologetic about the time she was taking to realize its best form but, even so, “I don’t feel the effort to be wasted – in this game, eventually, nothing is wasted.” 4
    That certainly