Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

a woman writer. Most of all, Smiley saw Munro as a writer who creates on the page an intimate sense of the human condition, for she is both quiet and ruthless; to trace the development of Munro’s consciousness is to learn about the cruelty of the world. While others under their considerationshowed some of these same qualities, and were adventurous writers too, Smiley felt Munro’s was the greatest achievement.

    Once she had convinced her fellow judges, Smiley elaborated these sentiments in her chair’s speech at the award ceremony that took place, amid the elegant eighteenth-century surroundings of Trinity College, Dublin, on June 25. She began her remarks with a list of places drawn from the books the judges had read, commencing with “the brow of Castle Rock, with a view across the Atlantic Ocean, in Edinburgh, in 1818,” and ended her list with a comment which resonates throughout the prize-winner’s
oeuvre:
“Fiction, as Cervantes would have been happy to tell you, is and must be geographical.”
    Munro was accompanied to Dublin by her daughter Jenny Munro and by her goddaughter Rebecca Garrett, Jenny’s good friend. Alison Samuel was there as Munro’s editor at Chatto & Windus. But inevitably, given the occasion and their long-shared history, there too, beaming throughout at the utter rightness of all this, was Munro’s longtime editorial triumvirate – Virginia Barber, Ann Close, and Douglas Gibson, who turned into an instant journalist and wrote and published a detailed account of the evening’s festivities for the Toronto
Globe and Mail
. It carried the subtitle “Oscar Wilde’s alma mater ‘gets it right’ with fete for Our Lady Alice.”
    Slowed by the effects of her ongoing medical treatments, Munro took things as easily as was possible during her time in Dublin. She paced herself, noting Jenny and Rebecca’s busy activities while they were there in the Irish capital, during which time she rested at the hotel. She fulfilled her obligations as the winner, appearing also at a public event/press conference that morning in connection with the prize – about two hundred people who were interested in it and in her writing just came to see her. The journalists present were uncharacteristically shy (Gibson had to ask a question to move things along) but that hesitancy seemed to draw Munro out. She was charming and funny as she answered questions, talking about her childhood, her mother, and her writing career over the years. According to Rocco, there was a generaltone suggesting that the people there were
very
pleased that Munro had won. As Gibson noted in his account, James Wood, who writes for both the
Guardian
and the
New Yorker
, and knows the writing scene on both sides of the Atlantic, had some weeks earlier quietly expressed his approval of Alice’s win. “ ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘they get it right.’ ”
    Smiley, pressing on in her speech to give details of the judges’ sense of the quality of the writing, spoke of Munro’s “capacity for empathy.” She also spoke about another quality she cherishes about her work: “No woman in an Alice Munro story is ever less than the agent of her own existence, no matter how impoverished or powerless her circumstances, and no woman’s circumstances, in an Alice Munro story, are seen to be trivial.” 16

    When Smiley argued for Munro as the writer who most deserved the prize, she ended by saying that the trajectory of Munro’s work teaches us “about the cruelty of the world.” In the same way, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” become
Away from Her
, is, as the film critic A.O. Scott asserts, “a love story so painful, so tender and so true.” Claire Tomalin saw in Munro “a strangeness and strength, sometimes harshness” that she admires. And after a long and close association with Munro and her work from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, Daniel Menaker once maintained that
    a Munro story … consists of a number of versions or visions of the same incident or drama which pull sets of inaccurate or only partly accurate “facts” aside like curtains, to reveal deeper truths about character, motivation, and even the event itself, and often, when the story penetrates to the ultimate truth or emotion she is capable of, it takes the form of something about human behavior that is asocial, amoral, almost bestial but that will not be denied.
    As she begins her wending and ruminative review of Munro’s career and of
Too Much