Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

advance to say, “I’m giving a dinner party tonight, and I’m more nervous about that than I am the three stories I’m working on, so I just put them in an envelope and sent them to you.” As you can imagine, I’ve used this story against her, calling her from time to time to say, when we haven’t received stories in many weeks,“Alice it’s time to give another dinner party.” The stories arrive with no name on them, no date, just typed manuscripts, as if she isn’t ready to own them yet, and sure enough, she sometimes continues to make revisions, even after the stories have been accepted. It takes a great deal of courage to publish your work, thereby asking all the world to read it, and I know how many times Alice has heard “Who Do You Think You Are?” echoing in her head.
    It was on this day of celebration too, this day of “Jubilation in Jubilee,” that Alice Munro found a woman waiting to tell her the details of Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw’s winter 1959 escape from the Wingham hospital. 5
    In one of the stories written about the dedication, Virginia Barber was quoted regarding Munro’s most recent publication in the
New Yorker
, “Lying Under the Apple Tree.” It “chronicles the daily struggles of an adolescent girl, ‘secretly devoted to nature’ and echoes Ms. Munro’s life,’ ” Barber said, continuing, “ ‘Alice’s stories deal with her conflict – the comfort of being part of a family, versus the need to stand outside, alone,’ she said.” “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” published the previous month, does just that – it is a story of adolescent first love and wondering, and it does echo Alice Laidlaw’s circumstances in 1944. Invited to her boyfriend’s house for supper and not willing to tell her mother, who is ill, the narrator lies and says she is going to a girlfriend’s house. A passage excised from the
New Yorker
shows that the narrator’s situation was very close to Alice Laidlaw’s:
    Now that my father had to be at the foundry by five o’clock and my mother was so often not feeling well, our suppers had become rather haphazard. If I cooked, there were things that I liked. One was sliced bread and cheese with milk and beaten eggs poured over it, baked in the oven. Another, also oven-baked, was a loaf of tinned meat coated with brown sugar. Or heaps of slices of raw potatoes, fried to a crisp. Left to themselves, my brother and sister would make themselves something like sardines onsoda crackers or peanut butter on graham wafer. This erosion of regular custom seemed to make my deception easier.
    Preparing “Lying Under the Apple Tree” for publication, Treisman chose to present it as a memoir, and at one point thought of running a picture of a teenaged Alice Laidlaw sitting beside her sister, Sheila, on the bank of the Maitland, circa 1946, which Munro sent at her request. As this excised passage confirms, the story certainly echoed Munro’s life and included biographically correct details. But as they were going through the editing process, it became clear to Treisman that while the core of the story was memoir – Munro has said that this is an account of her first infatuation – there was also invention involved. Talking it over with Buford and the fact-checker (who, in famed
New Yorker
fashion, had doubtless turned up some questions), they elected to insert a disclaimer into the end of the first paragraph: “(To disguise some people and events, I have allowed myself a certain amount of invention with names and details.)” And they decided not to use the picture.
    What was happening here, probably, is just what has been happening in Munro’s work throughout her career. In “Lying Under the Apple Tree” Munro does recreate a sense of her younger self – “Sunday afternoons in 1944,” the magazine’s cutline reads – but whether this is memoir as “Working for a Living” is memoir is doubtful. It reads much like other first-person reminiscent stories – “Nettles,” or “Family Furnishings.” It further confirms, as if any further confirmation were needed, that some major portion of Alice Munro’s core material is made up of her memories, just as Barber said, of being a member of that family in their brick house by the Maitland in Lower Wingham. In “What Do You Want to Know For?” Munro meets a man, through her investigations of the crypt she and Fremlin are discovering, who had known her father when he was in the turkey business.