Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

reeling: “You’re sending in these stories faster than I can edit them,” he wrote to Munro, “and each one is more dazzling than the last. I feel the way Rilke’s editor must have felt – if he had one.” When
Progress
appeared in 1986, David Macfarlane asserted in
Saturday Night
that it “is probably the best collection of short stories – the most confident and, at the same time, the most adventurous – ever written by a Canadian.” 2 By then, such a view had become truism, certainly in Canada and rapidly elsewhere too: like the cousins in “Connection,” Alice Munro had made the world take notice. When
Friend of My Youth
was published in spring 1990, eight of its ten stories having already been in the
New Yorker
, that notice was continual.
Both Reader and Writer: Memory and Perception and Self-Understanding
    What McGrath saw in “Chaddeleys and Flemings” and in the memoir version of “Working for a Living,” what Barber sensed as she first read the stories in that first bonanza, what Gibson had seen all along, werequalities that emerged from Munro’s return to Huron County. Probably, too, the compositional difficulties linked with “Places at Home” and
Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid
played some role in this too. Whatever the reason, there is no question but that Munro burst forth in the late 1970s and into the 1980s with successive stories that create the feelings of being alive, that replicate for their readers the very sense of being itself. Those stories offer Munro’s readers moments of insight equal to the events each story creates.
    While other examples might be chosen, the concluding section of “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection” seems best to illustrate this sense. Originally it appeared after the final line in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field,” “the life buried here is one you have to think twice about regretting.” Sometime between its first publication in
Chatelaine
and its appearance as the first story in
The Moons of Jupiter
, Munro moved it up to conclude “Connection” when the two parts were separated at Gibson’s suggestion. Just after the narrator – then named Janet – “threw the Pyrex plate” at her husband Richard’s head, an act that was “so shocking a verdict in real life,” there is a break and Munro harkens back to an image from the cousins’ visit to the narrator’s girlhood town Dalgleish:
    Row, row, row your boat
    Gently down the stream
.
    Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
,
    Life is but a dream
.
    I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and to my surprise – for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of the rounds – the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving.
    Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily
,
    Life is but a dream
.
    Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air.
Life is
. Wait.
But a
. Now, wait.
Dream
.
    This placement creates a very powerful effect. It is an apt embodiment of the narrator’s own sense of her own time, both in sweet childhood memory and sour adulthood present, feeling like a passing dream. Munro infuses the cliché lyrics of the child’s song with new meaning, a “warning,” and this use is rooted in the facts of the cousins’ remembered visit. When he wrote an introductory piece to the first publication of “The Stone in the Field” in
Saturday Night
, editor Robert Fulford commented of Munro that “to suggest that she conveys … her own background with lucidity and honesty is to hint at only a part of her talent. What happens in a Munro story is vastly more complicated than that, a process involving memory and perception and self-understanding on the part of both reader and writer.” 3 Exactly so.
    Later in 1979, Fulford followed this first publication of “The Stone in the Field” by commissioning a major profile of Munro by Martin Knelman, one that begins with her own version of events surrounding the reorganization of
Who Do You Think You Are?
It also captures