Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Thinking of herself at eighteen, her mother stricken by Parkinson’s and her father working in the foundry after his fox farm failed, she wrote:
    In spite of all the defeats of the grown-ups around me, the incursions of poverty and sickness, my spirits didn’t need much lightening. I was often happy to the point of dizziness, contemplating the world, feeling my own powers, which seemed enormous but hard to get at, anticipating love and victory.… I mourned the passing of the fox-farm, in a rather pleasurable way. I was just discovering nostalgia. And I did truly see that though it might never have made us rich it had made us unique and independent.
    The stories that made up both Munro bonanzas – the five that went into
Moons
and, after, another five for
The Progress of Love
– reveal a writer who had certainly discovered nostalgia. But what Munro did with it, in company with the
New Yorker’s
editors and fact-checkers,bears attention as the stories passed through the magazine on the way to her books. The first of the
Moons
stories McGrath saw was “Accident,” which he thought good but not as good as “The Beggar Maid,” which he bought. After that, they rejected the long “Chaddeleys and Flemings” over McGrath’s objection because Shawn thought it a reminiscence rather than a story. As McGrath makes clear, it was fiction to him. He was right. They then bought a third Munro story, “The Moons of Jupiter,” a piece connected to “Chaddeleys and Flemings” and so one that might also be seen as reminiscence. Certainly the death of the father in the story bears a strong resemblance to the circumstances of Robert Laidlaw’s death. Certainly some of the story’s other details happened – they are close to what occurred. Thus the connections in these stories to Munro’s own life – connections from which she herself derived considerable imaginative power, adding to her fictional magic – are of real consequence to a reader’s experience of them.
    Tracing the stories’ progress, this consequence is twofold: the form the story takes and the work Munro did preparing her stories for the
New Yorker’s
first publication. When Barber submitted “The Moons of Jupiter” to McGrath in late 1977 it was written in the third person; the
New Yorker
accepted it that way, perhaps under its initial title, “Taking Chances.” Early in January, however, McGrath wrote acknowledging that the new version of the story, which Munro had done on her own, had arrived: “The first-person seems more intimate, somehow, and more affecting.… Already I have trouble imagining this as a third-person story.” McGrath continued to ask about Janet’s profession – they had had too many stories about writers, so they wanted her to be something else – and concluded: “You’ve made a fine story even better, and we’re doubly glad to have it now.”
    With “Dulse,” the process of authorial revision between its
New Yorker
appearance in July 1980 and book publication was stark. In writing it, Munro had combined aspects of characters from Sheila and Angela, two of the women in the three-part “Simon’s Luck,” in order to create Lydia. Her boyfriend, named Alex in the
New Yorker
and Duncan in the book, also draws on the earlier Simon. But the story’s central episode – the visit to Grand Manan Island and the meeting ofthe prototype for Mr. Stanley, the “Willa Cather fanatic” as Munro once called him – draws on Munro’s own visit there and her own meeting of that person in 1979. While there, Munro also met the woman who ran the inn where she was staying and, as writers do, she integrated her into “Dulse.” Meeting Munro at an unhappy moment in her life, that woman later recognized herself as she was then; she had “passed into art,” and was not entirely happy about it. Talking about the incident years later, she only wished she could remember what Munro had looked like.
    These matters led to the writing of “Dulse” and, once the story got to the
New Yorker
and beyond, Munro characteristically kept shaping and changing it. The
New Yorker
version is in the first person, the book version in the third; hence, with this story Munro reversed the change she had made in revising “The Moons of Jupiter,” deliberately distancing Lydia and her circumstances from the reader. Also, Lydia’s former boyfriend becomes a less interesting and more negative character with the changes. But the most compelling changes