Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

during 1970 to complete
Lives
and then gently pressing Kiil toward other opportunities, was getting ready for a trip she had long anticipated. Her “long voyage from the house of marriage” was reaching, in 1972 after
Lives
had been published, its point of embarkation.

Waiting Her Chance, Going “Home”
Who
Do
You Think You Are?, 1972–1975
    We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more.
–
Lives of Girls and Women
    Oh, writing makes my life possible, it always has.
– Connolly, Freake, Sherman interview
    I n “Soon,” the second story published in an Alice Munro triptych by the
New Yorker
in its 2004 summer fiction issue, Munro returns to Chagall’s
I and the Village
. “Soon” opens with three paragraphs describing details of the image, a print found in the gift shop of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The first one reads:
    Two pro files face each other. One profile of a pure white heifer, with a particularly mild and tender expression, the other that of a green-faced man who is neither young nor old. He seems to be a minor official, maybe a postman – he wears that sort of cap. His lips are pale, the whites of his eyes shining. A hand that is probably his offers up, from the lower margin of the painting, a little tree or an exuberant branch, fruited with jewels.
    After this description the story goes on: “Juliet decided at once to buy this print, as a Christmas present for her parents. ‘Because it reminds me of them,’ ” she tells the friend who is with her there. “Soon” draws on the details and emotions of Munro’s own visit home to Wingham during the summer of 1954, but the presence of
I and the Village
recalls Munro’s fragment from “The Moons of Jupiter,” where it also figures. There the narrator looks to the picture hanging on her daughters’ bedroom wall “for help” with her writing: “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 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.” In this narrator Munro created a character analogous to herself in West Vancouver in 1959, a person stymied by her circumstances and mostly unable to write. Still, the “complicated painful truth” is pressing at this woman’s heart; she knows she isn’t “empty” because the Chagall print helps bring what she calls her “harking back” during the daily fifteen-minute respite created by
Funorama
on television. The show occupied her daughters, allowing her the daily contemplation she describes.
“Funorama
, I would think with relief, and know that I had fifteen minutes before I absolutely had to start supper.” Starting supper was what she had to do as the mother, and as the wifetoo, since just after that her husband Andrew would arrive home from work in Vancouver across the water.
    In 1959, Munro did have a print of Chagall’s
I and the Village
hanging in her daughters’ bedroom on Lawson because Jim did not like it and would not have it in the living room. Today, Munro does not know what became of it, but she remembers later hanging it in the children’s section of the bookstore in Victoria. “Soon” shows
I and the Village
persisting still in Munro’s imagination, its detail vivid yet, presumably, from those brief moments of respite in West Vancouver when she was in her late twenties, not writing much but longing to do so. After some success with stories that year, Munro went into the period of depression and writer’s block described earlier.
    In “The Moons of Jupiter” draft fragment, Munro continued to describe the print’s personal contexts in a passage that bears attention:
    My husband wouldn’t let me hang it in our room, let alone in the living room where anybody could see it. I deferred, of course, I said “Well, I like it, I really like it,” but I said this in a childishly rebellious way almost with a Shirley Temple stamp. That was how I managed to hang onto something I really wanted. In the years since our marriage it seemed to me my husband had grown harder and darker and denser and I had dwindled, so that his presence was now like a block of something heavy in the house and I was whining and wheedling around it. He was on the lookout for subversion, treachery, which could