Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

proved to be the case, but the importance of “Places at Home” has to do with its role in bringing Munro imaginatively back to her home place just as she was literally returning to live there. Peter D’Angelo had approached her with the idea late in 1974; by January 1975 Gibson had contacted him and was expecting sample photographs; by April Fremlin was writing notes for Munro’s use in “Nosebleed” and, toward the end of July, Gibson writes about variousmatters, commenting that “Peter D’Angelo tells me that you are hard at work on the prose sketches for that book” and asking to see sample text. Munro responded by sending Gibson her manuscript, writing in an undated cover letter that it is “in small and medium-sized segments which could, except for the first and last, be arranged every which way, or cut” and estimating the length at ten thousand words. Throughout, Gibson was acting as an effective editor, responding, making suggestions, and letting both Munro and D’Angelo work toward their text. He was also building his relationship with Munro.
    When she wrote again from Clinton in mid-September, Munro had seen D’Angelo’s pictures and said she liked them (“like some of them very much”). At the same time, she rejects the approach they have been taking, an “impressionistic book, done at random.… I don’t think we can use the text I’ve written – after all, there has to be some theme, some connection,” she continues, and suggests using additional pictures from the 1930s and 1940s. “One idea I have is – a sort of Ontario Book of Days, a seasonal book using (or appearing to use) the changes in one community over one year – work, play, a wedding, funeral, etc. The stores, the school, the churches, people. I could do a tight, factual text.” Munro wanted to talk to Gibson about this, and she feared undercutting D’Angelo since she had not talked to him about it yet. Having not heard from Gibson, she wrote again eleven days later. When he responds on October 9, Gibson apologizes for his delay and writes that he had already imposed “a fairly strict seasonal division” and “have been driving the poor lad out to get more photos of fall fairs and so on,” so Munro’s “ ‘Book of Days’ idea” works well with that direction.
    Such optimism was misplaced. By the end of December Gibson wrote to Munro that “after midnight on December 24 you must stop racking your brain to find a text for Peter D’Angelo’s photographs.” She responded on December 30 thanking him for “the letting-off-the-hook” and, picking up a reference made in his last letter, wrote that “one Calvinist conscience can always tell what ails another.” She admitted that she could not do it but felt she had to make the effort – Munro felt especially bad for D’Angelo, “whose work I like a lot.” Whileneither Gibson nor Munro have particular memories of the progress of “Places at Home,” Peter D’Angelo recalls that at some point it became clear that the book was not going to happen; he never saw any of Munro’s text. 5
    Looking at the manuscript remains of “Places at Home,” it is easy to see why Munro and Gibson decided that the text she wrote could not be properly linked to a series of attractive photographs. Munro really needed the sort of photographer she had imagined in
Lives:
“The pictures he took turned out to be unusual, even frightening. People saw that in his pictures they had aged twenty or thirty years. Middle-aged people saw in their own features the terrible, growing, inescapable likeness of their dead parents; young fresh girls and men showed what gaunt or dulled or stupid faces they would have when they were fifty. Brides looked pregnant, children adenoidal.” Important to this connection is “Clues,” the final vignette in the manuscript and one which – along with the first, “Places at Home” – Munro saw as having an absolute position. There she describes what one sees in a “little glassed-in porch”:
    A calendar picture of a kitten and a puppy, faces turned toward each other so the noses touched, and the space between them formed a heart. The dates were not current, the calendar was eleven years old.
    A photograph, in colour, of Princess Anne as a child.
    A blue mountain pottery vase with three yellow plastic roses in it, both vase and roses bearing a soft film of dust.
    Six shells from the Pacific coast.
    The Lord is My Shepherd
, in black cut-out