Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

lot of snow here. (This is between Stratford and Kitchener.) I met a woman I used to go to school with in the Stratford Depot. She looked like a nice, brisk, grandmother. Grey coat, little hat, United Church Woman. I thought, I bet she has a nice life. I really did think that. I thought about what she’d have in her overnight bag (blue flowered nightie,
The Far Pavilions)
. I am getting an awful interest in that kind of thing. I bet you think this is a bad sign.
    Three years later Munro wrote Metcalf again, this time commenting that she had “been reading a lot about Albania and all the countries that went into Yugoslavia, because there is a story of a Clinton librarian being captured – c. 1900 – by ‘bandits in Albania’.” These two letters, in effect, bookend
The Progress of Love
. Each looks to changes in Munro’s writing already evident in that book – where a middle-aged point of view has come to dominate. It would become clearer still in
Friend of My Youth
and
Open Secrets
. The second letter reveals the basesof the research Munro did for “The Albanian Virgin” and, perhaps too in the librarian’s situation in Clinton, for the story “Carried Away.”
    The same
Maclean’s
profile in which Munro’s writing methods are described quoted Daniel Menaker at the
New Yorker
, who characterized her as “a kind of trailblazer, structurally and aesthetically.… Along with her characters, [Munro] has gone through a very painful and disciplined examination of self.” By that time Menaker had been Munro’s
New Yorker
editor for two years. At the end of 1987, after McGrath had handled the submission of Munro’s first four post-
Progress
stories to the magazine, Menaker had taken her over as one of his authors; as deputy editor, McGrath had taken on other responsibilities. Amid some controversy, Robert Gottlieb had left Knopf in February 1987 to become editor of the
New Yorker
. During 1987 McGrath bought “Oh, What Avails” and “Meneseteung” while returning “Pictures of the Ice” and “Five Points.” A revised version of the latter story, bought early in 1988, was the first Munro story Menaker edited. By the summer of 1989, Menaker had handled his own Munro “bonanza,” her third at the magazine. They had seen seven more stories and bought all but one.
    Friend of My Youth
, made up of these stories, was published in spring 1990. Menaker’s phrasing, “a very painful and disciplined examination of the self,” captures just what Munro was still undertaking in that collection. Two stories in particular, “Meneseteung” and “Friend of My Youth,” have drawn the greatest attention. For good reason.
Friend of My Youth
is dedicated “To the Memory of My Mother” and, as in most of Munro’s previous books, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw is a presence in one story and so in the collection as a whole. Unlike “The Ottawa Valley,” which closes
Something
on the note of Munro’s inability to fictionalize and so “get rid” of her very real historical mother,
Friend of My Youth
opens with the title story examining, in a “painful and disciplined” way, what Munro calls the mother’s “welcome turnaround, this reprieve.” This is the image of the still-living mother, often dreamed by her daughter, which opens the story. There, the narrator would dream of her mother “looking quite well – not entirely untouched by the paralyzing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death, but so much better than I remembered that Iwould be astonished.” This transformation effects a change as the story nears its end. Her mother, transformed in her dream, “changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom – something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy.” Still working with the memory of her mother, in “Friend of My Youth” Munro moves well beyond the transcription of facts recalled. The story is based on her mother, and presumably on her own dreams, yet there is much more there besides. Munro had Chamney relatives who divided their house in ways similar to Flora and to Robert and Ellie, but the information about the Cameronians she got from a friend, who had known some of this sect in the Ottawa Valley. Using this information, grafting it on to her own mother’s story to make “Friend of My Youth,” the logic is the story’s own. Like Frost’s description of a poem, it rides on its own melting. 30
    “Meneseteung”