Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

over the undertaking and bought a new one. He drove the old hearse all over the country, looking for women.” He had been heard, “singing, to himself or somebody out of sight in the back.
Her brow is like the snowdrift / Her throat is like the swan.” 10
His reappearance as Willens, an optometrist who makes house calls on women home alone in “The Love of a Good Woman,” is made the more interesting by his date of death – murdered in the midst of adultery when caught by the woman’s husband “in the spring of 1951.” That is, at about the same time as the first Mr. Willens was created. It is almost as if Munro returned to Willens to give him what he deserved – and coincidental dates continue in the story: Mrs. Quinn, his putative partner in adultery, dies of a kidney problem on Alice Munro’s twentieth birthday, July 10, 1951.
    During the summer of 1950 Munro had a job as a waitress at the Milford Manor hotel on Lake Muskoka in the tourist region of Ontario that bears that lake’s name. In a draft unpublished story titled “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?”, probably written some time later in the 1950s, Munro attempts to make fiction of this experience. It shows her developing a narrative posture toward her personal material – what might be called a wry, distant wonder at the mysteries of being – that later became characteristic. That posture is wholly absent from the
Folio
stories – they all too clearly strive to create particular effects – but it emerged as Munro wrote and published during the 1950s and into the 1960s. One draft of “Is She as Kind as She Is Fair?” begins
    Between my first and second years at college I worked as a waitress in a summer hotel in Muskoka. It was called the Old Pine Tree, and it was a chalet-type firetrap three storeys high, painted dark green and hung with balconies and baskets of petunias. It was not what people call “the better sort of place”, although I don’t suppose it was among the worst; you got your orange juice, which was canned, in a plain saucer without any cracked ice around it, and you got to share the beach, the tennis court and the dance-hall with the hired help. We got a lot of moderate-income honeymooners, often a depressing sight as they munched their way resolutely through breakfast, their eyes lifting occasionally, not to meet, but to blink at the prospect of another staring day, in the anxious country between courtship and domesticity. We got office-girls too, and girls who worked in stores, arriving in pairs to spend their holidays, and entering the dining-room, the first night, in full makeup, earrings, and flowered sheer; not again.
    The story focuses on the waitresses, their difficult relations with the cooks, with a person named Bill, “the mental defective,” and generally deals with the romances and other human relations going on around the hotel during the summer. At one point two of the waitresses are locked out of their room because their roommate, Dodie, is “doing it” with one of the other workers, Joey. Munro works through one girl’s hesitancy over phrasing – she tries out “having intercourse,” to which her roommate replies, “Screwing?” Evie, the hesitant girl, wonders:
    That was what Evie was thinking of. Her wish to see somebody doing it had always run parallel to her wish to see somebody dead – that is, she had wished and not wished at the same time, with alternating violent curiosity and superstitious fear. Though given a chance to battle it out, curiosity would almost certainly have won. And now without anybody seeing or preparing her she had seen it. She was glad she had come to the door first, and not Mareta, for if Mareta had pushed her back andtold her what was happening she could not have said let me look, I want to see too.
    She thought of Joey’s small body with the t-shirt pulled up and the pants around his ankles, his flat white buttocks and narrow back, he was like a child held between Dodie’s thick freckled legs. She couldn’t remember Dodie’s face, or the back of Joey’s head, nothing but the amazing bodies, locked and jerking. The impression remained that Joey was an instrument, Dodie had stuck him in there, she hung on to him and made him do it but she was really doing it to herself. Who would have guessed the fragility, the defencelessness of Joey in such a situation, or the strength of Dodie?
    By way of an answer to this question, Munro later writes, “This was a