Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

record but, at the same time, it needs qualification. The Sherriffs cum Halloways were a family that had existed as the Musgraves before she began
Lives;
in the Calgary archives there is considerable material concerning Miss Musgrave, an elderly spinster who inherited the family home from her staunchly Methodist father, who owned the local piano factory. Unlike her teetotalling father, Miss Musgrave drinks. She also has a boyfriend, Mr. Chamberlain, who visits her; she is a holdover from the 1920s, her best time. She had had the family house subdivided and had taken in tenants, among them Del and her family. Some of this material looks back to the circumstances of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” in that the fox-farm father had died of blood poisoning (common from fox bites, Munro says, something her father had suffered from) and his widow took to the road selling Walker Brothersgoods south of Jubilee in places like “Sunshine” (which is south of Wingham) and “Scotch Corners” (which is not). Thus the material Munro was working on as she completed
Dance
combines with the material that becomes part of
Lives
. The “House of Musgrave” gives way to the “House of Sherriff” and each are Jubilee versions of Munro’s reading and attraction to the Gothic element she detected in Wingham and its environs. These relocatings of her imaginings returned Munro to the abandoned house owned by the Cruikshanks where she went as an adolescent and where she found her first Tennyson. At the same time, Munro says she was writing a version of “The Photographer,” a figure who takes revealing, and damning, photographs of people, well before
Lives
. These autobiographical and imaginative considerations combined and were brought into focus by “Epilogue: The Photographer.”
    Munro’s uncertainties with, and difficulties over, the epilogue are evident in her letters to Audrey Coffin. After expressing her doubts in an earlier letter, on December 31 she sent a revision “which seems to me closer to what I want than the one I have, though maybe still not usable. I just had to do it once more and have taken a vow I’ll leave the whole thing alone now.” Then, in a postscript, she writes, “The other sections still seem to fit together better, in a way, without this.” After she had received Coffin’s positive reaction to the whole manuscript, Munro wrote on January 9 that the last revision of the epilogue
    is
better in the last version (done during the indescribable chaos between Christmas & New Years, some of it in the middle of the night waiting for Andrea’s next bout of throwing-up – we’re all dragging around with flu) but it’s not right yet. I don’t like the way it sort of “distances” things. Writing about writing always runs into this problem.
    She says further that the momentum “with regard to this work – sort of played out in early November.… What’s to be done may come to me yet. I was so glad you like the work as a whole.” Coffin was the only person who had read it apart from the typist who, Munro heard from a friend, reported to her husband that it was “a pretty kookymanuscript.” Ten days later, on January 19, “with shamefaced apologies,” Munro prepared to send the epilogue back. She had tried to make it a section about the same length as the others and it “didn’t work.” She was inclined to leave it out, but she decided to send it back to Coffin offering a postscript saying “REALLY , we better forget about Marion/ Caroline. It doesn’t flow – it destroys credibility. I’ve started on a new thing.” The next day she writes another letter to include with the one she wrote the day before, and here she has another plan: to take up some material “about the book” – Del’s – now in “Baptizing,” and use it at the end.
    Recalling this flurry of revisions in 1984, Munro said she continued wavering about the epilogue until Bobby Sherriff’s pirouette came to her (“he rose on his toes like a dancer, like a plump ballerina”; an act that “appeared to be a joke not shared with me so much as displayed for me”). The pirouette “turned it around.… When that came to me I knew I could leave it in.” 41 This pirouette does capture, just as
Lives
ends, Munro’s sense of the factual commonplace happily existing alongside the inexplicable – rather like Yeats’s ending question in “Among School Children,” “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” But Munro