Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

does the same thing. Historical prototypes for nineteenth-century small-town southwestern Ontario poets existed, and Munro acknowledged her awareness of the two most likely ones when her story was reprinted in
Best American Short Stories 1989
. These were Clinton’s Clara Mountcastle and Goderich’s Eloise A. Skimings, who was known as “The Poetess of Lake Huron.” Of the two, Mountcastle is the better known, having published books of verse and other material in the 1880s and 1890s; in 1904, Skimings published a collection of poems entitled
Golden Leaves
. Even so, Almeda Joynt Roth is Munro’s own creation. Characteristically, she roots the poet’s circumstances in Wingham and so in details close to her own history: one of the predecessors of the
Advance-Times
was the Gorrie
Vidette
, the name used in the story. When Munro was a child, there was a schoolteacher in Wingham named Joynt. She also creates a first-person narrator analogous to herself as the author of Roth’s story. This narrator, for reasons of her own, is attempting to understand the record left by Roth, “just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” When Munro submitted “Meneseteung” to the
New Yorker
, the ending after “rubbish” read: “I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.” This was cut for magazine publication but, characteristically, Munro considered restoring the original ending. She asked Closewhat she thought, and revised it so it became “And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”
    In some ways a classic short story – focused on a key moment in Roth’s life, contextualized in terms of that life – “Meneseteung” offers Huron County as home place within a longer, and through the first-person narrator more deeply considered, historical perspective. But the remarkable part of the story occurs after the “dead body” that Almeda finds outside her house on a Sunday morning proves merely to be a dishevelled woman, drunk, sleeping it off on the ground. Jarvis Poulter, her neighbour, the person she calls upon to investigate the “body,” and a possible husband for her, goes home afterwards having announced his intention to walk her to church, a sign of serious wooing. Still disoriented from the “nerve medicine” (laudanum) she had taken the night before, Almeda makes tea and takes “more medicine,” even though she knows it is affecting her perceptions. The grape jelly she had begun making the day before is overflowing
(“Plop, plup
, into the basin beneath”); feeling hot from both the summer weather and from her impending menstrual flow, Almeda is presented in a rapt, though disoriented, state of mind. Then Munro focuses on her character’s art: “Almeda in her observations cannot escape words.” Poems. “Isn’t that the idea – one very great poem that will contain everything and, oh, that will make all the other poems she has written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags?” She “has to think of so many things at once”:
    All this can be borne only if it is channelled into a poem, and the word “channelled” is appropriate, because the name of the poem will be – it
is
– “The Meneseteung.” The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem – with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees and its grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter and its desolating spring floods. Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she sees the crocheted roses floating. They look bunchy and foolish, her mother’s crochetedroses – they don’t look much like real flowers. But their effort, their floating independence, their pleasure in their silly selves do seem to her so admirable. A hopeful sign.
Meneseteung
.
    Munro’s creation of Almeda’s medicated state of mind here could bear extended analysis, but precise as they are, her literary effects are of less interest in a biography than her method. She has gone back here to “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious,” having Almeda Joynt Roth peering deep into the Meneseteung/Maitland River flowing by Munro’s own home place – literally and imaginatively. Like her author,