Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

to, something else. I wanted that fifteen minutes to myself for harking-back purposes. I was trying to be a writer but I seldom wrote anything. What I did was try to get clear my mind, and hold on to, something I meant to write about. It was the past, it wasn’t yet my past. In my bedroom I had a print of Chagall’s
I and the Village
which I looked to for help. I don’t like admitting that – the moony white cow’s head, the precious stones, the upside-down church, all seem rather stylish and cleaned-up, in relation to that real past I had to deal with, even as a dream that picture is a long way out – but it is true that when I lay on the bed and looked at it I could feel a lump of complicated painful truth pushing at my heart; I knew I wasn’t empty, I knew that I had streets and houses and conversations inside; not much idea how to get them out and no time or way to get at them. 44
    The draft goes on to explain why this Chagall print hung where it did, and this in turn takes her into an analysis of her marriage, and her husband and men generally. This vignette captures Munro the writer in Vancouver in 1959 feeling “a lump of complicated painful truth pushing at” her heart, but knowing “she wasn’t empty.” It was about this time that in her reading Munro discovered Eudora Welty’s
The Golden Apples
, a book that proved to be talismanic. Comparing her first reading of
Emily of New Moon
to Welty’s 1949 collection of stories, Munro has said that she read Emily “when I was just touching on becoming a writer.” Welty’s book, by contrast, came to Munro when she
was
a writer: “It is so good, it is so good, and I read it over and over again. And not really to find out how she did it, just to let it sink in. Itwas the kind of writing I most hoped to do.… I read it for just transcendence, almost to get into that world.” “That world” is the creation of Morgana, Mississippi – its people, its place, its ethos – so richly and fully drawn that a reader participates in its very being, its essences. So deep was the effect of
The Golden Apples
on Munro that as the years passed she felt “that I shouldn’t read it too often, because there are writers who can absolutely mesmerize you so you’re echoing things they do without even knowing it, so you stay away from them when you’re writing.” And at the time she discovered Welty’s book, as her recollection of that time in the
Funorama
fragment shows, Munro was tentative, open to influence. Just after she spoke about Welty, Munro added that during her early years as a writer she “felt so unsure of my voice. I can still feel unsure of it.” Being a writer is not like being a surgeon – you learn an operation and then just go in there and do it, confident you will do it right – “Writing isn’t like this at all. It isn’t like this at all. It’s just constant despair.” Constant despair over the insufficiency of what has actually been created. Or, as she wrote in her tribute essay “Golden Apples,” she was struck, reading Welty, “by the beauty of our lives streaming by, in Morgana and elsewhere.” 45
    Doubtless part of the appeal of
The Golden Apples
, for Munro, had to do with its form: it is a collection of interconnected short stories, with all its characters derived from the same Mississippi town. When he had written to her about “The Cousins” in May 1957, Weaver had also asked what was to be, for Munro during the late 1950s and into the 1960s,
the
vexed question: “Have you begun work on a novel yet?” At this time in North American publishing in general, but in Canada especially, there was a widely held prejudice against collections of short stories. It was a truism among publishers that such collections did not sell, and that they should be attempted only once an author’s reputation was already established through the prior publication of a novel. Munro came up against this view early, and it hounded her well into the 1970s – indeed, it is fair to see the almost twenty-year genesis of her first book,
Dance of the Happy Shades
, as a direct result of this attitude.
    So much of the “constant despair” Munro felt during the later 1950s and into the 1960s was brought on by her ongoing response toWeaver’s question. Her depression was not clinical, it was derived from her continuing failure during these year to write a novel, despite numerous attempts. The process proved counterproductive for her, but during