Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

The point of storytelling, as Munro practices it, is to rescue the literal facts from banality, from oblivion, and to preserve – to create – some sense of continuity in the hectic ebb and flow of experience.”
    Perhaps the best single review of
The View from Castle Rock
appeared in the review section of
The Guardian
, written by Karl Miller. This is the Scottish critic who once hailed Alistair MacLeod and Alice Munro, though born and bred in Canada, as among Scotland’s greatest authors of all time. In addition Miller has written a biography of James Hogg. As a result, his review is suffused with his own knowledge of Ettrick and with a deep appreciation of just what Munro was about as she shaped this, her long-contemplated family book that she hoped would achieve something unexpected. In a long passage that synthesizes the whole of her accomplishment, Miller first cites one of Munro’s comments from her foreword and then writes at some length:
    This leaves you feeling that these stories are like the others after all, being at once her life and her art. Old questions, including James Laidlaw’s, about art’s lies and feigning arise here, as they do elsewhere in the book, when Munro alludes, cannily enough, to “canny lying of the sort you can depend on a writer to do.”
    The new stories make use of family papers and public records. Munro once spent time looking and learning in Selkirkshire, with its heritage of battles and ballads and the spirits of the glen. There were those in her earlier life who thought writing meant handwriting; her stepmother assured her that her father wrote better than her. But he was also a writer in the other sense: late in life, after his years as a fox farmer and night watchman, he wrote about the pioneer life of his forebears, and he was not the only family member who could, in a sense, write. The diary of young Walter Laidlaw, James’s son, lends quotations. The archives offered her plenty of stuff toincorporate and supplement, including items unfamiliar to me as a biographer of Hogg. The high house of Phaup, up on the hills above Ettrick kirk, near the burial place of Hogg’s sinner, is identified – correctly, I think – as the place where Hogg’s shepherd friends met for debates and were held to have caused the disastrous storm of 1794 by trying to raise the Devil.
    Offering such knowledge and such a perspective, Miller ultimately provides this assessment of the whole of Munro’s “family book”:
    The collection, which has opened in Ettrick and gone with the pioneers to Illinois and on their great trek north to Ontario, ends with a return to the genealogy of the pioneers and with the author up to her ankles in poison ivy as she searches for a forgotten grave. This is a rare and fascinating work, in which the past makes sense of the present and the present makes sense of the past, and the two are both a continuum and a divorce. It is very much a memoir, as well as a set of fictions. But then the whole corpus of Munro’s stories is a memoir, the novel of her life. It is silly to complain, as some once did, that she writes not novels but stories. The book says barely anything about Hogg’s Confessions, but it’s more than likely that the novel has been an influence on what she has done. She is the cooler, the more deliberate artist of the two, her tales plainer. But they can be drawn all the same to uncertainty and contradiction. “When you write about real people you are always up against contradictions.”
“A Strangeness and Strength, Sometimes Harshness”:
Away from
Her, the Man Booker International Prize,
Too Much Happiness
    During the four years since the publication of
The View from Castle Rock
, Munro has continued to live the life she has long preferred. Health issues – most especially a bout of cancer during 2009 – have been a fact of life for her, as they are for any person her age. She has mostly stayed in Clinton; her trips to Comox have been fewer, the lastone something of a valedictory journey, saying farewell to friends there. She seems to be travelling for purposes connected to her celebrity, if anything, more frequently. For instance, she was in Toronto in November 2007 to participate in a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of McClelland & Stewart’s New Canadian Library series, for which she has long served on the Editorial Board. In 2008, she went to Italy as one of three finalists for the Flaiano Prize – along with Alberto