Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

immediate and effusive.
    Both “Miles City, Montana” and “Progress of Love,” each drafted in the same notebook and finished about this same time, are stories close to Munro’s own life. The near-drowning incident at the centre of the first is virtually memoir, the four family members who were there remembering it as narrated. Munro and her father rescuing turkeys from drowning is a memory too, but Steve Gauley, his drowning, and his funeral were imagined, though Munro recalls knowing boys who later drowned. “The Progress of Love” draws on the lives of her great-grandmother, her grandmother, and her mother while Phemie (or Fame), its narrator, includes elements of Munro herself. She is given some of Munro’s own memories, certainly, but Fame is also a character offering what might have become of Munro herself had she never got away from Wingham. The narrator’s perspective, like Munro’s, is that of a middle-aged native. All this admitted, Munro is nevertheless right about these two stories: “not one is as close [to her life] as people seem to think.” This is so because of Munro’s “energy and devotion and secret pains” – they transform whatever had been remembered, whatever is “real,” into the different reality that is the story’s world. The story, an artifice, is able to affect its readers on its own terms by way of the words she arranges, those words that she thinks never serve her well enough.
    “Miles City, Montana” and “The Progress of Love” demonstrate just how Munro’s writing during this time began in actual experiences but then, through her art, became something considerably more than experience transcribed. “Miles City” seems to have begun when Munro was working on “The Beggar Maid” during 1976–77; a draft of the Miles City incident includes a courtship for the narrator and herhusband Hugh similar to Rose and Patrick’s. About this time too there was also the draft story, “Shoebox Babies,” which Munro worked on during the late 1970s but never published and which drew from the circumstances of Catherine Munro’s birth and death in July 1955. It moved into a notebook draft called just “Miles City,” which contains a fairly complete rendering of the near-drowning episode and the family’s trip; but rather than just the recollected dead deer the family saw when playing “I Spy” in the finished story, the older daughter recalls Elizabeth, the baby who died. This draft also includes the image of the drowned Steve Gauley being carried by the narrator’s father, although it appears just at the story’s end where it is connected to the narrator’s misgivings about their vulnerability. Its narrator is explicitly Munro herself in 1961: “During those years I was trying to be a writer. I could say that I was trying to write – short stories, and, once, a novel – but it would be more accurate to say that I was trying to be a writer, because I felt as if I had to assemble distant parts of myself and hold them together, before I could start the actual writing. This was my job – this assembling – and it was a tricky business.” Neither version includes the narrator and her father saving turkeys from drowning, an experience in the finished story that confirms the narrator’s role as daughter and allows her to appreciate his hard-working way of life.
    Munro’s own “assembling” of “Miles City, Montana” was indeed a tricky business. It takes her memoir – the near-drowning and its circumstances – and marries it to the imagined drowning and funeral of Steve Gauley. Human helplessness in the face of death, and her parents’ attitudes toward it, are felt as the narrator and Andrew talk in the aftermath. It is then she imagines what it would have been like if Meg had not been saved. “Who is ready to be a father, a mother, who is fit?” the narrator asks in the draft, just before she shifts back to Steve Gauley’s drowning and his funeral, asking the central unanswerable question of “Miles City, Montana.” And though Munro omitted any direct reference to Catherine Munro’s death in the final version, it is felt on the page, created there in Munro’s sensed and mediated human vulnerability.
    So while it is possible to see Jenny Munro’s near-drowning in 1961 in Miles City, Montana, at the centre of the story, to insist on that incident’s recounting as the story’s core misses the point of any fiction, and of Munro’s in particular.