Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

an organic, living thing. Thus after she recounts the “beginnings or essentials” in some of the stories included in her
Selected Stories
, Munro speaks of the time when a story exists in first draft, “has put on rough but adequate clothes” and may need nothing more than “tightening here and expanding there,” or other such adjustment. “It’s then, in fact, that the story is in greatest danger of losing its life, of appearing so hopelessly misbegotten that my only relief comes from abandoning it.” She does still give up, though not so often as she did in her early days – herpapers in Calgary testify to this with abandonment after abandonment, page after page, start after start. As she concludes her introduction, Munro seems to be fulfilling her own assessment of her working methods by avoiding an ending here, shifting uncharacteristically to a quotation from Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
in which he writes, “The most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into.” This continues on and on until, finally, we reach an ending to the quotation, and so to her introduction, after a suitably extended eighteenth-century sentence. But the wondering continues: What is the rest of the story?
    The boat still floating on the Maitland/Peregrine River in 1951 closes “The Love of a Good Woman” but remains there, beckoning to the reader certainly, but most especially to its author herself. What is “the rest of the story” along the Maitland River, that place where “everything is touchable and mysterious.” Still both touchable and most emphatically very mysterious, the landscapes of Alice Munro’s stories from the 1990s are quite recognizable but also frightening. As Lesser said in her review of
Open Secrets
, Munro was not primarily “remembering, but guessing or imagining.” The stories she produced during the decade were at once risky, strange, and familiarly rooted in Huron County. Roger Angell wrote after he had just read “The Children Stay” in manuscript: “She’s onto truth, I think, and that’s why she can write this way, with daring and calm, and absolute pitch.” 15

“But She’s Not in a Class with Most Other People”
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,
the
New Yorker’s
Munro Triptych
, Runaway
    I chart a course which is called a career and expect to make progress in it. I know what I am up to. Short stories, yes. Novels, no. I accept that rural folk are never sophisticated and sophisticates are never rural, and I make my choice. Also I keep an eye on feminism and Canada and try to figure out my duty to both.
– “Introduction,”
Selected Stories
    And it has worked out in some way.
– Peter Gzowski Interview, 2001
    W riting “Home” in 1973 Alice Munro concluded on this brief paragraph: “I
don’t want any more effects, I tell you, lying. I don’t know what I want. I want to do this with honour, if I possibly can.”
As with the wry caricature of herself as a writer she offered at the beginning of the introduction to
Selected Stories
, here too Munro was concerned about the difference between the ways others see her writing and how that same work feels to her, how she sees it. Munro’s desire to write in a way that both honours her subject and treats it honestly (“I
don’t want any more effects, I tell you, lying”)
has been a constant throughout her life and work. In “Home,” describing her father and stepmother living in the home she grew up in, Munro’s desire for an honest balance in that deeply autobiographical narrative was especially acute. (Tellingly, Munro omitted almost all of these analytical comments when she revised “Home” for
The View from Castle Rock;
she was seeking a less strained honesty.) Writing honestly and with honour without effects was then, has been, and remains Alice Munro’s intention, and she has achieved it beyond any argument. Acknowledging just this quality in Munro’s work after her reviews of
Selected Stories
and
The Love of a Good Woman
, A.S. Byatt dropped Munro’s name into another book review in 2000: “One of the best tributes I know to the art of Willa Cather is the work of Alice Munro, who has learned to depict whole lives from a distance in the same strangely unworked-up and unaccented way, while also making it entirely new, as her landscape and
moeurs
are new.”
    When Munro accepted her first Giller Prize in 1998 – on television, since