Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

What she creates on the page is the feeling of being, the feeling of authentic experience captured through words. This writing has a kind of purity when it works – as it most certainly does in “Miles City, Montana” and in “The Progress of Love.” Yet any created purity is not just in the story’s details, since those may be grafted on from anywhere (the swimming pool in Miles City, Montana, for example, was not a swimming pool but a man-made body called Scanlon Lake). Their connection to Munro’s own life, while real, is secondary to anyone reading a story that emerges from such connections. For Munro, and for her readers too, the significance of any autobiographical connection comes back to the image of Cynthia and Meg, still in their back seat, still headed to Ontario, still expecting to return home to Vancouver: “So we went on, with the two in the back seat trusting us, because of no choice, and we ourselves trusting to be forgiven, in time, for everything that had first to be seen and condemned by those children: whatever was flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous – all our natural, and particular, mistakes.”
    There is a deeply felt but unarticulated wisdom in this ending, just as there is at the end of “The Progress of Love” where Munro invokes the circumstances of “those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.” This story, probably the one Munro described to an Australian journalist as a novel-in-progress “tracing three generations of women,” did grow from the circumstances of her maternal ancestors, but it is much less overtly autobiographical than “Miles City.” Essentially, Phemie’s recollection that is the story examines the way her mother and her grandmother lived their lives, a recollection brought on by the news of her mother’s death. In the wake of “Working for a Living,” a memoir that is in some ways an analysis of her parents’ marriage, “The Progress of Love” fictionalizes the same sort of analysis and pushes it back another generation through Phemie’s grandmother’sthreatened hanging. That act, while a real one, did not happen in Munro’s family, nor did the other central event, the mother’s burning of the money inherited from her father. Yet Bertha Stanley Chamney’s religiosity was real, as her resentment toward her own father likely was. Thus here Munro may again be seen “assembling” materials, some that happened, some that she knows from her own experience, some that she has read or heard about, and some that she imagined. “I make them with such energy and devotion and secret pains,” Munro wrote. Once they are published, “I wiggle out and leave them, to harden and settle in their place.” There they are, asking crucial questions such as what is true about the image Phemie holds in her mind of her mother burning the inherited money as rejection of her father (“That’s a lot of hate,” Phemie’s friend Bob Marks comments). Imagining that scene, Phemie describes it: “And my father, standing by, seems not just to be permitting her to do this but to be protecting her. A solemn scene, but not crazy.” Even though Phemie realizes, once the story’s action is over, that this scene could never have happened, she still sees it as true and emblematic of her parents’ relation. Munro phrased this same mystery in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field”: “Taking the mystery of his life with him.” So Munro knows, and so she writes: “some kind of purity” indeed. 22
    “The Progress of Love,” like “Miles City, Montana” and many of Munro’s most successful stories, had a long gestation; elements of the story connect to pre
-Lives
material and to “Places at Home.” As was her practice, Munro kept revising it. She sent Gibson a second “final” version, which she called “a new,
finally final
, third person version.” McGrath expressed surprise at receiving a new version (probably the same one she sent Gibson) in September 1985 since “it seemed just about perfect to me the way it was – but the new version is even better.” She had shifted it into the third person, which was the way it appeared in the
New Yorker
, but she then returned it to the first person in the book version. Looking at the third-person version for the first time, Close could not decide on a preference since first she “felt that you had