Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

many slice-of-life writers out there, [but] this isn’t enough to explain why Munro is anthologized, collected, offered up in classrooms as a master of the short story. So what’s the big deal about Alice Munro?” Todd sees the answer in the details: “Part of the experience in reading the eight stories here is to be overwhelmed by detail.… Hers are more than slice-of-life stories, concerned not only with depicting life, but with the possible paths a life (and a story) can take.… Like the teller of medieval morality tales, Munro leads readers along awinding path to those moments when the moral decisions that determine a shape of a life are made.” 14 Like the other reviewers of
Love
, Todd certainly does come to see in these details the big deal about Munro.

    When he wanted to know just how Munro’s
Selected Stories
came together, John Updike in the
New York Times Book Review
made a fair point. Judging by Vintage’s swift addition of an Introduction to the paperback, others found it compelling too. One wonders if Munro herself did, though. Once, when granting Helen Hoy permission to quote from her letters, Munro wrote, “I wish I could tell you that more goes into the work than the flippant and casual or serious and evasive, explanations and dodges that the author voices in letters and interviews, and I wish with all my heart the finished work could be let alone, to stand by itself, but I know this is not possible. So you have my permission.” Munro certainly has been consistent to this credo. While she has agreed to be interviewed numerous times, talking amiably, volubly, and thoughtfully about pretty much whatever an interviewer chooses to ask, she has never written a critical explanation of her work as a writer on her own. Such pieces have always been at another’s request.
    Introducing her
Selected Stories
, Munro’s piece is revelatory, precise, and, given its subject and the timing, summative. She seems to bridle a bit at what has been asked of her, beginning her second paragraph with “Some clarifying statements about my work are requested by others” and later, “I am forced, in writing this introduction.…” As she told Hoy, such statements do not interest her, she does not believe them, she has little faith in their utility. Even so, as she makes clear in the introduction, what does interest her are images that she understands as “beginnings or essentials” to her work. Munro highlights one such image, one she saw from the window of the Wingham library when she was about fifteen: “Snow falling straight down.… A team of horses, pulling a sleigh, was moving onto the scales. The sleigh was piled high with sacks of grain.” This image, one she “never wrote a story about,” is one she tried to use in “Spaceships Have Landed” – itappeared in the
Paris Review
version of the story as something Rhea remembered seeing but was taken out of the
Open Secrets
version. And in that earlier guise Rhea’s recollection of the image is connected to Janet’s vision of her hometown in the fictional version of “Working for a Living.” That is, when her college-educated imagination recasts the town into a version of
Winesburg, Ohio
or something from the stories of Chekhov. None of this – Munro makes clear in her somewhat truculent introduction – is a matter of conscious planning for her:
    The only choice I make is to write about what interests me in a way that interests me, that gives me pleasure. It may not look like pleasure, because the difficulties can make me morose and distracted, but that’s what it is – the pleasure of telling the story I mean to tell as wholly as I can tell it, of finding out in fact what that story is, by working around the different ways of telling it.
    Looking back at the image of the man, horses, and sleigh she saw in 1946 or 1947, Munro wrote that she saw the image as “alive and potent, and it gave me something like a blow to the chest. What does this mean, what can be discovered about it, what is the rest of the story? The man and the horse are not symbolic or picturesque, they are moving through a story which is hidden, and now, for a moment, carelessly revealed. How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn’t get hold of it at all.”
    What these descriptions suggest about their author’s intuitive aesthetic is that, for her, a story is and always has been