Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Bay, B.C., she sought him out. They formed a relationship. They had a daughter, Penelope. “Soon” begins with Munro’s detailed description of a print of Chagall’s
I and the Village
, which she fictionalizes and has Juliet buy for her mother, Sara. On a trip home with Penelope in 1969 – the details of which Munro has said were taken from the one she herself made to Wingham with the baby Sheila in 1954 – Juliet visits her parents. Her father, Sam, is much the same, but Sara is dying. In her old home Juliet discovers the Chagall print off in the attic. “Soon” deals most urgently with Juliet’s presence in her parents’ house, with her interest in Irene, a brisk young woman hired to help them out, and with an argument over belief in God that Juliet has with a visiting minister in front of her mother. This causes a small scene. Defending her own faith to Juliet after Don, the minister, has gone, Sara says, “It’s a – wonderful –
something
. When it gets really bad for me – when it gets so bad I – you know what I think then? I think – Soon.
Soon I’ll see Juliet.”
Originally Munro followed this with the paragraphthat now ends the story, but she later moved it so that after these lines the story moves to the text of a letter Juliet wrote to “Dreaded (Dearest) Eric” and sent to him during that visit.
    Then “Soon” telescopes, for Juliet finds this letter years later – presumably after Eric is dead, for so it feels – and she thinks that he “must have saved it by accident – it had no particular importance in their lives.” Munro then offers us the ensuing years in a paragraph: Sara’s death, Sam’s remarrying, visits made by them to Juliet and Eric, Eric taking Sam out on his boat. “He and Sam got along well. As Sam said, like a house afire.” Then, in the three paragraphs that remain in “Soon,” Alice Munro once again goes home. She does it with honour, as only she can. It is just a moment in the story, but what a moment, encapsulating as it does Juliet’s life. But stepping back from Juliet and her circumstances, these paragraphs may also be seen as encapsulating Alice Munro’s life and art:
    When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories. Then she thought that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered. Some shift concerning where home was. Not at Whale Bay with Eric but back where it had been before, all her life before.
    Because it’s what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can.
    But she had not protected Sara. When Sara had said,
soon I’ll see Juliet
, Juliet had found no reply. Could it not have been managed? Why should it have been so difficult? Just to say
Yes
. To Sara it would have meant so much – to herself, surely, so little. But she had turned away, she had carried the tray to the kitchen, and there she washed and dried the cups and also the glass that had held the grape soda. She had put everything away. 9

“So This Is How It Should Be Done”
The View from Castle Rock,
the Man Booker International Prize, and
Too Much Happiness
    Writing [The
View from Castle Rock]
was very important to me.… I felt it wouldn’t be popular but at my age you don’t care. You do what you need to do. I was encouraged by reading William Maxwell.
– AM to Judy Stoffman, October 28, 2006
    This story is told again and again in Maxwell’s fiction, in stories that seem autobiographical but may not be as autobiographical as they seem – and there is something new with each telling, some new action at the periphery or revelation near the centre, a different light or shading, a discovery, as there must be in the stories at the heart of our lives, stories that grow and change as we do and never go away.
– “Maxwell” (2004)
    Isn’t the really good time when you are getting the idea, or rather when you encounter the idea, bump into it, as if it has already been wandering around in your head? There it is, still fairly featureless, butshapely and glowing. It’s not the story – it’s more like the spirit, the centre, of the story, something there’s no word for, that can only come into life, a public sort of a life, when words are wrapped around it.
– “Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing” (2006)
    I n 1988 Alice Munro