Alice Munro
Update July 10, 2024: This week, just a few days after writing this blog praising Alice Munro to high heaven, I learned along with a large part of the public that what I wrote below, that I did not know much about her as a person, was more true than I would have wanted to believe. Writing in the Toronto Star, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner revealed that as a child she had been sexually assaulted by her stepfather, Munro’s second husband, and that years later when she did tell her mother, rather than being a mother to her, Alice Munro swept it under the rug and remained with her husband while becoming estranged from her daughter.
Since this article ran, the literary community surrounding Munro’s sphere has been in chaos. I’m not a part of that sphere, but having just written so positively about Munro, I felt I should acknowledge what we now know. I have seen some writers and critics deploring that her stories are now unreadable to them; personally, I do not feel that an author’s iniquity necessarily detracts from the quality of their work, but I also respect that especially for people who are themselves victims of abuse, there’s no obligation not to respond in that way. I’ve also seen a few people defending Munro, and while I think it is Christian and consistent to empathize with the experience of everyone even when they do grievous wrong, attempting to minimize the harm done to her daughter is obviously unconscionable and flatly wrong.
Having said all this, I am going to leave up everything I wrote two weeks ago as I wrote it, with only this preface. I would have worded my feelings differently, had I known, so as not to praise Munro so personally - but I still stand by the rest of my endorsement of her writing, which I think must come with the clarification that it is in no way a defense of what she did.
I meant to write this soon after Alice Munro passed a little more than a month ago, but I was caught up in a whirl of travel and haven’t written a stitch on any topic since probably April. I’m comforted to know that, like my beloved Tolkien, Munro was another author who often felt encumbered from writing by the busyness of life – although for the moment I have fewer excuses. At any rate, Alice didn’t need me to promptly eulogize her, because she was known to so many; nor am I qualified to do so, having only read a smattering of her stories and little of her biography. Still, I wanted to take the moment of her passing to praise a writer whose work I hold above almost every other that I have read.
I had never heard of Alice Munro until a story of hers – which one, I strangely cannot remember for certain – was assigned as an exemplar in a creative writing course I took my sophomore year of college, two years before she won the Nobel Prize. While I already had a fairly broad taste in literature, her particular mode of quiet, introspective, realistic fiction had never been my favored genre, and I had almost no familiarity with either short stories as a serious form or twentieth-century literature at all, for that matter (I had grown up mostly on a combination of science fiction/fantasy and a strong bias toward very large 19th-century novels). I had even less knowledge of her recurrent subject – the lives and recollections of youth of women born in the Great Depression in Huron County, Ontario. That first story I read – whichever it was – was merely another assignment to efficiently dispense with in a semester where I had taken on too many credits at once. Once I had finished it, however, I found myself unable to leave it behind, like the pasts which stalk her protagonists. In time the specific story quite left my head, but the particularity of how it made me feel remained, fixed as if a real memory had been experienced and gradually forgotten, its outline fossilized in the mind. I did not immediately seek out more of her work; I would defend myself with the enormous syllabus of reading that followed in my junior year, but my sluggishness in finally following up with her belies that excuse. A few years after graduating, I stopped by the University Bookstore across the street from UW one night in winter, a season when I had been visiting the university library to surreptitiously research from books I could not actually check out. In the store, I recognized Alice Munro’s name on a collection of some of her best stories, which I promptly bought and began to read. The first story in the collection, Walker Brothers Cowboy, immediately became a staple of the syllabi I assigned in my English classes over the next few years, but embarrassingly my progress through the book slowed to a fitful crawl, and only picked back up last year, when I finally finished that one of her many collections of stories.
So, I am far from well-versed in Munro’s overall body of work, nor am I any kind of expert on her career. All I know is how the stories I have read felt to me at the time, a feeling which has not altered or dulled for any of them regardless of when I read each. Alice Munro had a way of creating a definite and palpable sense of a specific place and a specific internal mood and momentary inner consciousness of a person closer to my experience of reality than any other description I have ever read, fictional or otherwise. She did this consistently, in every sentence on every page of every story I read. In her stories, I saw a startlingly true reflection of the actual subjective experience of life and memory as a person, not because of any particular commonality with her subjects, but simply through her prose. Her work was quiet, a somber nostalgia without any romanticism – closer to actual human memory than to art. Here was no pressure to be showy or loud, to move with any speed at all through a plot, no hurry to get anywhere – there was simply consciousness in the lived moment of remembrance itself. There was not even a need to adhere to action or dialogue to maintain any sort of interest; instead, her narrator would simply describe thoughts and sensations to the reader. She told her readers in a way which showed them in the telling.
I don’t know much about Alice Munro as a person, nor have I read most of her works. But I’ve read enough to know that she will remain near the very top of the pantheon of writers I love, and I will surely miss her.
Here are a couple of quotations.
“He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the North, pushing deep into the low places. Like that – and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, ‘Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this hand has.’ And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went. I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able even to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive – old, old – when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.” – Walker Brothers Cowboy
“So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.” – Walker Brothers Cowboy
“If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents’ old camera used to take. In these snapshots Aunt Dodie and Uncle James and even Aunt Lena, even her children, come out clear enough. (All these people dead now except the children, who have turned into decent friendly wage earners, not a criminal or as far as I know even a neurotic among them.) The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.” – The Ottawa Valley
“What she never said to anybody, never confided, was that she sometimes thought it had not been pity or greed or cowardice or vanity but something quite different, like a vision of happiness. In view of everything else she had told she could hardly tell that. It seems very odd; she can’t justify it. She doesn’t mean that they had perfectly ordinary, bearable times in their marriage, long busy stretches of wallpapering and vacationing and meals and shopping and worrying about a child’s illness, but that sometimes, without reason or warning, happiness, the possibility of happiness, would surprise them. Then it was as if they were in different though identical-seeming skins, as if there existed a radiantly kind and innocent Rose and Patrick, hardly ever visible, in the shadow of their usual selves. Perhaps it was that Patrick she saw when she was free of him, invisible to him, looking into his carrel. Perhaps it was. She should have left him there.” – The Beggar Maid
“She has written in her journal: I know nostalgia is a futile emotion. Sometimes I feel like tearing out some things I have written where perhaps I have been too harsh in judging certain people or situations but I have decided to leave everything because I want to have a record of what I really felt at the time. I want to have a truthful record of my whole life. How to keep oneself from lying I see as the main problem everywhere.” – Labor Day Dinner
“No wonder she was feeling clammy. She had gone under a wave, which nobody else had noticed. You could say anything you liked about what had happened – but what it amounted to was going under a wave. She had gone under and through it and was left with a cold sheen on her skin, a beating in her ears, a cavity in her chest, and revolt in her stomach. It was anarchy she was up against – a devouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations.” - Carried Away
