Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

just been spoiled by her recent stories. It’s a very high standard we’re holding her to – there is no question about that.” These comments point up sentiments similar to Munro’s own. Just over two years later, when she was working on the stories that became a third “Munro bonanza” for the
New Yorker
and the core of
Friend of My Youth
, she wrote to Metcalf about the stories she was working on: “There is an attenuated bleak feeling about the one long story and an untrustworthy
facility
about two chunky ones. They are not
bad
. I am feeling rather happy – or content – about my life but doubtful about my writing. I want some kind of purity. Instead I’ve got a lot of technique.” One should not look askance at Munro’s comments here – the
New Yorker
published five of eleven stories in
Progress
and eight of ten in
Friend
– but, that notwithstanding, the 1980s reveal her still as a writer who despite past success viewed each story as a new beginning, a desperate struggle.
    “Jesse and Meribeth” went on to the
Atlantic Monthly
before ending up in
Mademoiselle
as “Secrets Between Friends.” The other stories the
New Yorker
passed on followed the same path: “Eskimo” in
GQ-Gentleman’s Quarterly
, “Deux Chapeaux” and “Fits” in
Grand Street
, “Circle of Prayer” in the
Paris Review
, and “A Queer Streak” (published in two parts) in
Granta
. Barber’s strategy was to try mass-market magazines and only then let stories go to more literary publications that paid.Owing to internal changes,
Grand Street
paid less than the $5,000 they paid for “Working for a Living” (“Deux Chapeaux,” for example, brought $1,200), but at least these magazines still paid for contributions. With “A Queer Streak” in
Granta
, too, Munro had her direct first contact with Bill Buford who, under Tina Brown’s editorship, headed the fiction department at the
New Yorker
during the 1990s. The year 1985 proved, though, to be the last time many of Munro’s stories went elsewhere. Barber recalls that once during the 1980s she was almost pleased to have the
New Yorker
turn down a story so that she could send it to Michael Curtis at the
Atlantic Monthly
. He published the two stories in
Friend of My Youth
that the
New Yorker
did not. 21

    In 1985 Penguin Canada prevailed upon Munro to write an introduction for its second edition of
Moons
. There she begins, “I find it very hard to talk about, or look at – let alone read – any work of mine, after it is published, shut away in its book. Part of this is simple misgiving. Couldn’t I have done it better, make the words serve me better?” There is a sense of separation from published work, she continues: “It’s a queasiness, an unwillingness to look or examine. I try to master this, feeling that it’s primitive and childish.… Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” She then writes about the relation between “The Moons of Jupiter” and her father’s death, explaining the gestation of “The Turkey Season” (which grew out of her early attempts to use her own summer 1950 experience as a waitress at Milford Manor, previously attempted in “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, connected to her father’s experience running a turkey barn), and tells when some of the others were written. Munro concludes saying that she has “to make an effort, now, to remember what’s in these stories.… I make them with such energy and devotion and secret pains, and then I wiggle out and leave them, to harden and settle in their place[.] I feel free.”
    Like the stories in
Moons
, those destined for
Progress
seemed to have a different, deeper quality. This same sense pervaded each successive collection, but it might be noted especially in
The Progress of Love, Open
Secrets
, and
Runaway
. Each stands apart as a transforming collection – one in which it feels that the work has become deeper and denser – although the title story of
The Love of a Good Woman
and its “My Mother’s Dream” probably ought to be added to any such list. While other stories in
Progress
certainly might be taken up to illustrate the quality here, such as “Lichen” or “White Dump,” the two stories that seem to best exemplify just how Munro was writing during her second bonanza are “Miles City, Montana” and “The Progress of Love.” The reaction they got, certainly, was most