Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

“People are curious. A few people are. They will put things together. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” The
New Yorker
version of this story ended with these words, but Munro restored her originally submittedending when she published the story in
Friend of My Youth
and, doing so, revised it further, with these words about the limitations of fiction: “And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if [the protagonist, Almeda Joynt Roth] took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”
    In
Castle Rock
too, Munro ends the long title story, “The View from Castle Rock,” with another personal tour of the family gravestones found in the Boston Presbyterian Church (named after the Ettrick minister she writes about) graveyard in Halton, Esquesing Township, Ontario – built, largely with volunteer labour, on land sold to the church by Andrew Laidlaw, Munro’s great-great-uncle, in 1824. And still seeking another graveyard – one that might reveal the grave of her great-great-grandfather, William Laidlaw, who died of cholera in Joliet, Illinois in early 1839 or ’40 – Munro ends
Castle Rock
in an epilogue entitled “Messenger” with the image of herself in yet another cemetery.
    This one is in Blyth, Ontario – a place midway between Clinton and Wingham, the place where her father was a boy, and the place where she and Gerry Fremlin have bought plots for themselves. There she finds, among those of her relatives, the grave of William’s wife, Mary Scott, who after his death in a foreign country was brought with their children to Canada by William’s brother Andrew and a team of oxen. “Mary who wrote the letter from Ettrick to lure the man she wanted to come and marry her. On her stone is the name of that man,
William Laidlaw. Died in Illinois
. And buried God knows where.”
    Just after this, having made more connections in her mind and memory with others memorialized in the Blyth cemetery, Munro steps back and synthesizes what she’s been doing throughout the whole of
The View from Castle Rock
, writing: “Now all these names I have been recording are joined to the living people in my mind, and to the lost kitchens, the polished nickel trim on the commodious presiding black stoves, the sour wooden drainboards that never quite dried, the yellow light of the coal-oil lamps.” Continuing in this vein to her conclusion, Munro recalls “a magic doorstop, a big mother-of-pearl seashell that I recognized as a messenger from near and far” that she could hold to her ear “and discover the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea.” 10
    If, as Munro wrote toward the beginning of one of the stories she mentions to Gibson from Australia in 1980, “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,” connection “was what it was all about,” then the whole of
The View from Castle Rock
shows Munro pursuing a complex web of connections – personal, cultural, and historical – with the single-minded determination of someone who has been meditating the prospect for some time. When she submitted “The View from Castle Rock” to the
New Yorker
in March 2005, it was in the form of a 140-page manuscript that, seen now against the finished book, was made up of the whole of the first part, “No Advantages,” including parts of “Messenger,” subsequently moved to end of the book. Tellingly, it bore the title “Laidlaws II: The View from Castle Rock.” The editors there were immediately drawn to the manuscript and – characteristically, though in this instance quite practically – set about finding ways to shorten it effectively for their needs. Deborah Treisman, who had written to Munro that her 2004 Juliet triptych was “the longest manuscript I’ve sat down to edit in my history at this magazine, or any other!”, had to tackle an even longer one in “The View from Castle Rock.” Recognizing that in it they had, as she wrote to editor David Remnick, a “combination of family history and fiction,” she proposed for his approval ways to both shorten it and sharpen it, for “it has some real Munrovian highlights” in it.
    As Barber described Munro’s method in
Castle Rock
on Medal Day at the MacDowell Colony, Munro draws explicitly on family letters and other archival