Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

will remember its emotional terrain as I remember lines and fragments from this Yeats poem or that; a twist of the voice, an intonation separate, perhaps, from any actual words. Each of these is like a chip off some massy substance, a piece that implies the whole. Every one of them seems reinforced by the echoes of another, and to read Munro now, to visit and revisit this house or that marriage, seems like immersing oneself in a great poet’s collected works, a chance to inhabit a mind, a sensibility, that is larger than any of its individual iterations.” This fine review concludes by suggesting that Chekhov is not the Russian that Munro should be compared to – rather, “Turgenev is a different matter.” Wryly too, Gorra notes that Munro’s work “has been translated into thirteen languages. That’s not enough; but one of them is Swedish.”
    In August 2009, just as
Too Much Happiness
was being published, Alice Munro announced that she was withdrawing it from the Giller Prize competition – one of her private reasons was that a head-to-headcompetition was shaping up between her and her good friend Margaret Atwood and, not surprisingly, Munro decided not to let it happen. Equally important to her, having won the Giller Prize twice already, her absence would clear the field for younger writers. At this, the
Globe and Mail
published a head-shaking editorial called “Too Much Generosity.” Such comments remind us of a point made by W.P. Kinsella in his review: describing what he calls “the CanLit scene,” Kinsella sees it as “an industry rife with jealousies, feuds and petty backbiting” yet announces categorically, “I have never heard anyone say anything unkind about Alice Munro, personally or professionally. When Alice wins a prize other writers and critics are not lined up to name ten books that should have won.” To Gibson’s relief (he knew how her Giller Prize withdrawal would cut her sales) Munro forgot to withdraw her book from the Governor General’s Award competition –
Too Much Happiness
was shortlisted but it did not win. Having just published another story, “Axis,” in the
New Yorker
, Munro now has two more awaiting publication at
Harper’s
. Its literary editor, Ben Metcalf, is delighted to have a story from her whenever he is able to get one. One of the two he has, “Train,” seems to have returned to material Munro worked on in the 1960s. She has a contract for another book of stories with Knopf, and the issue of the
New Yorker
including “Axis” announced that collection for the fall of 2012. She continues to write into her ninth decade, for she turns eighty next July.
    Seen by Gorra as akin to Yeats – a comparison that pleases her – compared perpetually to Chekhov, Alice Munro continues to do “exactly what she has always done,” as Anne Enright said. 19 She continues to write her lives – the life she has lived, the lives she has read about, researched, and studied; the lives she has imagined. Like her much-admired William Maxwell, Munro has demonstrated time and time again that she knows exactly how it should be done. Ever revising, ever hoping to do it better, she remains her readers’ Alice Munro, writing on.…

EPILOGUE
Alice Munro
Writing Her Lives, Writing Home, Writing On …
    I worry the story.
–AM to Peter Gzowski, October 22, 1982
    Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
– “Face” (2009)
    J ust before Richard Avedon’s gallery of the magazine’s best-known authors and Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin,” the
New Yorker’s
1994 fiction celebration ran an essay by Roger Angell, “Storyville.” A fiction editor and writer at the magazine since the mid-1950s, Angell took a long view of the
New Yorker’s
record as a venue for short fiction, trying to define the qualities needed to make it into its pages. He saw Munro in the line of the magazine’s mainstays: “Now and then, a writer stakes out an entire region of the imagination and of the countryside – one thinks of Cheever, Salinger, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver, and now Alice Munro and William Trevor – which becomes theirs alone, marked in our minds by unique inhabitants and terrain. Writers at this level seem to breathe the thin, high air of fiction without effort, and we readers, visiting on excursion, feel a different thrumming in our chests as we look about at