Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

published an appreciation, “The Novels of William Maxwell,” in the literary magazine
Brick
. Maxwell was a writer whose influence she has long and gratefully acknowledged, so much so that she once characterized that influence as “especially and forever.” He was also, not incidentally, one of the longtime editors at the
New Yorker
, whose 1976 retirement brought Charles McGrath and Daniel Menaker to its fiction department where they, in turn, advocated Munro’s stories and brought about her first publication there. After Maxwell died in the summer of 2000,
Brick
republished her essay as its tribute to his passing. Later, when a volume of essays in his honour was being assembled, its editors approached Munro to see if she might expand her essay for the book. Doubtful over her abilities as a critic, she hesitated; but bowing to what one of those editors has called “her love for the man and his work,” Munro took it up again and reshaped it. The original version is matter-of-fact, relying overly on long quotations from Maxwell’s fiction. Concluding with a long passage from Maxwell’s great novel,
So Long, See You Tomorrow
(1980), Munro steps back and writes: “There you are. The simple, banal, terrible story and its mysterious heart.” The revised version is both more considered and articulate, sharper and deeper. There Munro still quotes at some length – “I know it,” she writes, acknowledging this – but then excuses herself by saying in the essay’s final words that the experience “has been such a joy, and something like a renewal of hope, to let the words and sentences of this writer flow through my mind and my fingertips.” Her return to this essay after Maxwell’s death was prompted by a desire to improve it, certainly, but also by a desire to return to the feelings his work occasioned in her, just as she says. And that the essay’sending brought the most telling revisions is wholly consistent with Munro’s own practice and art: revision is perpetual with her. This ending, like those in all of her stories, always seems to call to her for improving, refining, revisiting, reshaping. 1
    In both versions of the essay Munro recounts her reaction to
So Long, See You Tomorrow
: “I went back and reread the novels I had read before, together with
Time Will Darken It
and all the short stories I could find. And I thought: So this is how it should be done. I thought: If only I could go back and write again every single thing that I have written. Not that my writing would, or should, imitate his, but that it might be informed by his spirit.” In one of the newspaper profiles that appeared concurrently with
The View from Castle Rock
in the autumn of 2006, Munro mentioned the whole of Maxwell’s work as encouragement toward that book and, more recently, pointed to his
Ancestors
(1971) as an explicit model for what she was trying out in
Castle Rock
. “So this is how it should be done.” 2
    Seeing Munro’s work since 2005 – when this biography was first published – in relation to her acknowledgement of Maxwell’s influence is important in a variety of ways, but especially through the image she offers of herself, after reading Maxwell, wanting to go back to “write again every single thing” that she had written. From the outset, here in this book, fugitive pieces within Munro’s
oeuvre
– most particularly the deeply autobiographical “Home” (1974) and “Working for a Living” (1981), but also “What Do You Want to Know For?” (1994) and “Changing Places” (1997) – have been emphasized as key texts, because of the autobiographical detail they offer, explaining both Munro’s life and career.
    It is significant too that other autobiographical pieces, more explicitly stories, were held back from publication in book form, since Munro saw them as not fitting the collection then at hand. Some readers noticed these missing stories. For example, Lorrie Moore, concluding her 2004 review of
Runaway
in the
Atlantic Monthly
, noted the absence from any collection of “Hired Girl” (1994) and “Fathers” (2002), but she might then have also noted “Wood” (1980), “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry” (1982), or “Lying Under the Apple Tree” (2002). 3
    Now, in late 2010, we can see that Munro has effectively done what she envisioned after reading
So Long, See You Tomorrow
: she returned to these earlier autobiographical writings and produced
The View from Castle Rock
– a