Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography by Robert Thacker

Author:Robert Thacker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780771084683
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Published: 2005-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Yet for Munro’s art and the growth of her career, these new arrangements were much more than publication by the continent’s leading venue for short fiction. Her return to Huron County and the renewal of her imaginative connections there meant that the stories Munro wrote during 1976 were imbued with a more immediate sensibility and also a different imaginative relation to her subject matter than she had previously displayed. In the stories she intended for Who Do You Think You Are? (including those ultimately held out of that volume to await the next collection, The Moons of Jupiter), Munro can be seen to be looking back to childhood, but reconnecting to the continuity of life itself in Huron County from her middle-aged perspective. She still remembered her discovery of the complexities of her home (“Connection. That was what it was all about”) but those memories were now more distant. While this balancing of a child’s perspective with the narrating adult’s sensibility is also evident in many of the stories in Dance and Lives, there is a qualitative difference, a new-found complexity, in the stories Munro wrote after she returned to Huron County. The home she wrote about from British Columbia, she recalled, “was just like an enchanted land of your childhood.” But the Huron County she had returned to and began seeing anew in 1975 was harsher and a place she saw in a more sociological way. With Huron’s people, Huron’s culture, Huron’s life staring her full in the face – no longer being remembered over time and distance – Munro saw social differences even more clearly, resulting in greater complexity from Who on. That book felt in some ways like Lives, but its longer perspective and its much more complex composition suggest a writer finding a new relation to her material. Back in Huron County, Munro was literally “a writer in the midst of what was, so to speak, [her] material,” as she wrote in the unpublished proof version of “Who Do You Think You Are?” Munro had never really been in that position before. Thus there is both a perceptual shift and a greater social complexity in the stories Munro wrote from 1976 on. As McGrath commented when he first wrote her regarding “Royal Beatings,” the narrative “seems to work the way that memory works.”

Always an intuitive writer, Munro proceeded as she always had in Clinton. She tried things; sometimes they worked, sometimes they did not. The Rose and Janet stories worked. She attempted stories focused on a middle-aged couple living in the house the man grew up in with the man’s mother. (“Sounds like Mrs. Fremlin, doesn’t it?” Munro commented, hearing of these, having forgotten them.) They did not work. Once she sent stories off to Barber the response was real, and relatively fast; Barber would comment but promptly got them off to the New Yorker, which, for its part, also responded with dispatch. At times too, when it was judicious to wait before submitting a story, Barber did.

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