Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

a clearer, more acute world than the one we have briefly departed.” Reading Munro, he continued, “brings back for me, every time, the mood of thrilling expectancy with which I read the entrancing events in all those variously tinted fairy-story collections of my childhood – ‘The Blue Fairy Book,’ ‘The Yellow Fairy Book,’ ‘The Grey Fairy Book,’ and the rest.” When he came to read “Silence” in manuscript, Angell remarked to his colleagues that “these lives seem thick with detail and events and other people, in a way that only Munro seems able to get down, and sad with the sadness of life.”
    In the magazine’s 2004 triptych, Juliet’s life is “thick” with the precise details that Munro has spent her entire life observing, living, imagining, and shaping herself. Riding across Canada by train toward British Columbia and a new life in “Chance,” Juliet recalls Munro’s own such trips – in emotion, most probably, Juliet’s expectations of a new life are rooted in Munro’s own journey west with her new husband in December 1951, leaving Ontario. “Soon” draws upon another trip, that one back home to Ontario in 1954 with her new daughter, Sheila, and also meditates on the Chagall print she has been long drawn to,
I and the Village
. That story too, in Sara’s unacknowledged reassurance –
“Soon I’ll see Juliet”
– reveals Munro writing her lives whole. As she makes clear in “Soon” and emphatic in “Silence,” Juliet’s eager self-assured youthful certainty over her own life, and the ways of being shethinks superior to Sara’s hopeful though empty delusions, will ultimately founder against the rock of Penelope’s silence. “Sad with the sadness of life,” Alice Munro writes Juliet’s life through Sara’s:
“Soon I’ll see Juliet”
is a hopeful sign which resonates throughout the triptych. Juliet becomes a creature bereft, like her mother before her whom she was then able to dismiss, and not even answer with a reassuring “Yes”; in Penelope’s silence she becomes the worse, the one even more bereft. “Sad with the sadness of life,” Munro encapsulates the daughter’s vision felt and understood concurrent with the mother’s – each both remembered and, as one generation gives way to the next, lived.
    “Sad with the sadness of life,” happy in its humour, aware of life’s ironies, knowing always that this life is “touchable and mysterious,” Alice Munro has written her lives and continues to write them in just the ways she always has done – as Anne Enright wrote in her review of
Too Much Happiness
. “There is always a starting point in reality,” Munro told Harry Boyle in August 1974. For her, reality is the life she has lived, the people she has known and, perhaps above all, the place she has felt:
    Whichever road you take, on your way out of Jubilee, you will have to cross a bridge, narrow and high above the Wawanash River, and painted with silver paint that glimmers in the dark. If you are going west, towards Lake Huron, you will see that on the other side of the bridge there are several houses, a school, a grocery store and gas pump and a couple of buildings which look as if they may have been places of business at one time, but now are closed up and rented as living-quarters. The town itself does not extend this far; the last street light shines on the approach to the bridge, and on the place where the sidewalk changes to plain dirt path, bordered in the summertime by waist-high grass. The community across the bridge, which straggles out along some short, intersecting dirt roads, is not part of the town, nor of the country either; it is a place by itself, known as The Flats; this name it takes from the old fairgrounds, which is certainly the most interesting thing to be seen there, with its tumbled ruin of a grandstand and the handsomestone pillars at the gate, supporting a sign that says: TO THE F LLEN H ROES O JUBI EE . A sign like that, hanging boldly against the northern sky, with nothing on the other side of it but that grandstand, and a great field blooming with milkweed and showing some traces of a harness track – a sign like that has such superb irrelevance and finality about it that you do not bother supplying, in your mind, the letters that have fallen away.
    What this is, apart from a fragment dating probably from the 1960s, is a description of one of the scenes Munro saw walking home from school from Grade 4 on – walking