Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

in the stories Munro wrote after she returned to Huron County. The home she wrote about from British Columbia, she recalled, “was just like an enchanted land of your childhood.” But the Huron County she had returned to and began seeing anew in 1975 was harsher and a place she saw in a more sociological way. With Huron’s people, Huron’s culture, Huron’s life staring her full in the face – no longer being remembered over time and distance – Munro saw social differences even more clearly, resulting in greater complexity from
Who
on. That book felt in some ways like
Lives
, but its longer perspective and its much more complex composition suggest a writer finding a new relation to her material. Back in Huron County, Munro was literally “a writer in the midst of what was, so to speak, [her] material,” as she wrote in the unpublished proof version of “Who Do You Think You Are?” Munro had never really been in that position before. Thus there is both a perceptual shift and a greater social complexity in the stories Munro wrote from 1976 on. As McGrath commented when he first wrote her regarding “Royal Beatings,” the narrative “seems to work the way that memory works.”
    Always an intuitive writer, Munro proceeded as she always had in Clinton. She tried things; sometimes they worked, sometimes they did not. The Rose and Janet stories worked. She attempted stories focused on a middle-aged couple living in the house the man grew up in with the man’s mother. (“Sounds like Mrs. Fremlin, doesn’t it?” Munro commented, hearing of these, having forgotten them.) They did not work. Once she sent stories off to Barber the response was real, and relatively fast; Barber would comment but promptly got them off to the
New Yorker
, which, for its part, also responded with dispatch. At times too, when it was judicious to wait before submitting a story, Barber did. Thus as she worked on the stories that became
Who
and, as well, four of the stories in
Moons
, Munro was receiving more professional response to her work than she ever had before. And because she was also trying oldmaterial in new ways, undertaking new subjects, and revelling in the fact of a new, yet renewed, relation to her home, the period 1976 through the mid-1980s is an especially rich one in her career.
    When McGrath returned a story, he never did so without summarizing the discussion it had occasioned among the editors. The importance of this relation to Munro’s art may be seen in the case of “Simon’s Luck,” a story that she wrote initially as a larger, more complicated narrative than the version eventually published. She continued to wonder over, revise, and tinker with it. A new version of this story helped spark her decision to pull
Who
from the presses and reorganize it, and she was considering a new version for the American edition even after
Who
had been published in Canada. It deals with Simon, an inscrutable character whose personal history Munro had heard from a faculty member at Western, and focuses on his relations with three different women. In August 1977 McGrath had returned a long version of “Simon’s Luck” with a rejection letter. He reported that it “had many readings here, and while we all thought it was brilliantly written, and full of life and intelligence, in the end we agreed that somehow it didn’t quite work.” After commenting on the story’s focus, Simon himself, his attractiveness to women, McGrath concluded:
    I’m sorry to go on so long, and if I sound critical I don’t mean to. The truth is that we all greatly admired this story, and feel very unhappy about sending it back. In fact, we would be more than happy to reconsider it if you decided to revise it. It’s only fair for me to say, though, that for some reason (maybe that editors never really know what they want) resubmissions rarely work out here, and I also think that if you fixed the beginning a little you could sell this in a minute somewhere else. This is all up to you and Ginger, and whatever you decide is fine with us. I really am sorry, and one thing that makes me feel better is knowing that you’re working on another story.
    Despite the warning here – Munro had revised two stories and re-submitted them (unsuccessfully) before this – she revised the story,giving a separate section to each woman. A manuscript of this sectioned version is in Calgary (thirty-three legal typescript pages, double-spaced). Here the women are