So in August 1975 Alice Munro left London and moved north to Clinton, back to Huron County, just thirty-five kilometres south of Wingham, the place she had started out from and where her father still lived. She came back a much-praised and greatly valued writer, but she was coming back a grown-up who was moving into a new relationship. Fremlin also knew things about their shared home place that Munro did not know – innocent landscapes revealed as eskers, drumlins, and moraines, as she had commented – and he had his own Huron County history besides, a history he told her about. Having been back in Ontario for two years, Munro had been working on, and publishing, pieces that demonstrated some of the imaginative effects of her return. Something included them, but also revealed her as a writer poised between her past remembered Ontario and a new view of that place, one with the longer view, the deeper realizations, found in “Home,” “Winter Wind,” and “The Ottawa Valley.” An Ontario whose images and associations demanded sharper renderings. When she went to Clinton, Munro returned to scrutinize her home place in ways she had never done before, and with a person who had things to tell her about this place she did not know.37
“Other Stories Are Wonderful and Also Read Like the Truth”
Virginia Barber, the New Yorker, Macmillan, and Knopf, 1975–1980
I was not very comfortable about being identified as a writer in the midst of what was, so to speak, my material. I was aware of having done things that must seem high-handed, pulling fictions up like rabbits out of hats; skinned rabbits, raw and startling, out of such familiar old hats. I knew that some of my inventions must seem puzzling and indecent.
– “Who Do You Think You Are?” (Proof of Supplanted Version)
I am somewhat crazed with admiration for these stories.
– Daniel Menaker, New Yorker, February 1977
At the end of “Privilege,” the second story in Who Do You Think You Are? and one that explicitly renders her two years at Wingham’s Lower Town school, Munro wrote that “when Rose thought of West Hanratty during the war years, and during the years before, the two times were so separate it was as if an entirely different lighting had been used, or as if it was all on film and the film had been printed in a different way, so that on the one hand things looked clean-edged and decent and limited and ordinary, and on the other, dark, grainy, jumbled, and disturbing.” In the collection’s first story, “Royal Beatings,” she had called this effect “a cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.” These phrasings describe the imaginative effect of Munro’s return in August 1975 to Huron County and to Clinton, very near Wingham. As has often been noticed, Munro concluded Lives of Girls and Women and Something with precise references to photography. (In Lives the Epilogue is entitled “The Photographer” while “The Ottawa Valley” includes the line “It is like a series of snapshots.”) When she has described her method in such essays as “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled” or in her introduction to Selected Stories, Munro has focused on the imaginative effects of specific recalled images. In the latter she wrote of the “scene which is the secret of the story” and described an image she once saw when she was about fifteen: it was then “like a blow to the chest.” Confronting her imaginative relation to “the country to the east of Lake Huron,” Munro asserts her love for it, details its components (“the almost flat fields, the swamps, the hardwood bush lots … the continental climate with its extravagant winters”), and goes on to express her hope “to be writing about and through” the life she knew there.1
The great fact of Alice Munro’s writing career was her return to Huron County in 1975. Unplanned as it was, that move brought her back into the very midst of her material: feeling its life, knowing its sights, understanding its ways, speaking its language. And for the first time, in Gerald Fremlin, she was living with a man who shared much the same point of view, the same understandings. When she moved to Clinton, Munro was uncertain about whether, or just what, she would be able to write. With its looking back and its return to early writing attempts, Something had in some significant ways brought Munro to the end of her material; she was clearly uncertain about her future writing at that time. She was working on “Places at Home,” the Peter D’Angelo project that had her focused on Wingham in ways immediate and sharp. Though it ultimately proved an intractable text, this work was crucial nevertheless. A succession of images drawn from the Ontario life she knew as a child, adolescent, and young woman but had not lived (but for visits) for more than twenty years, “Places at Home” was an imaginative return to Huron County concurrent to her literal return. Much of its material was incorporated into Who Do You Think You Are?, which was the critical book of Munro’s career. Who was Munro’s first book with Douglas Gibson and with Macmillan; it was the first book negotiated by her agent, Virginia Barber; the first with an altogether separate New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf; and, famously, it was the book that she dramatically had pulled from the press the month before its publication so that she could reorganize it. All these facts resulted in various ways from Munro’s return to Ontario.
But the great fact was the return itself. Munro returned well aware of what she remembered from her youth, knowing that she had already used such recollections from British Columbia, thinking that she may have “used it up,” looking for a new relation to her material while living in its midst. As Munro returned to Huron to live instead of continuing as the public writer she had been in Toronto and London, and settled into a new relationship with a man who shared her passionate interest in Huron County landscapes, her life was completely changed. Her own close relatives gone or near gone, she was able from August 1975 on to create in her fiction a new imaginative relation with Huron County.
“Radiant, Everlasting”: “Places at Home”
There is considerable evidence of the D’Angelo photo text in the Calgary archive, including one manuscript of almost fifty pages that has the appearance of being complete. That version has three renderings of an opening page-long descriptive vignette entitled “Places at Home,” and twenty other pieces; some of these are descriptive while others feature characters and actions. Here is the first paragraph of “Places at Home”:
This country doesn’t arrange itself into scenery very readily. Sometimes it will. Sometimes a river valley, everything melodious, the hills and willows and water and the dark cedar bush so cunningly fitted together, no drab edges or dead elms or gravel pits to be seen. But usually not. There is not much call for those places on the highway, where people can step out and give their attention to the view. Some of the country is flat, not plate-flat, not stunningly flat, to show off the sky. No sweeping horizons. Some of it is hilly; but as soon as it starts to get dramatic, with long bold sweeps and rugged knobs, it forgets what it was doing, dwindles into rubbly fields, bumps and bogs. You have to take it as it you find it. Fields and bush and swamps and stones. Rail fences, wire fences, electric fences. Log barns, weathered frame barns, new shiny barns with silos like big deodorant cans. Blooming hawthorn and rusting cars, pick-up trucks with the insides torn out, junk and wildflowers. Open and hidden country, fertile and scrubby. Cleared and tilled for a long time now, wasted and possessed. People who have lived away can complain here that they miss the mountains, miss the seashore, miss the calm distances, the space. But if you leave here and live away, what can you say you miss? Hard to describe.
The next paragraph summarizes the look of the towns, noting especially the post offices (“The old Post Offices had towers, though no Post Office needs one”). At a page long, this piece is representative of what Munro was doing in “Places at Home.”
It is followed by “Pleistocene,” which concerns a scene in a school classroom where “On an ordinary chalked map of Southern Ontario” a teacher named Mr. Cleaver “drew the lakes of former times, the old abandoned shores. Lake Iroquois and Lake Arkora. The Champlain Sea. The Tara Sands. Names [the students] had never heard before, and were not likely to remember.” Introducing the students at this point, Munro uses t
hem subsequently. They are resistant to this teacher’s demands, concerned with more pressing things, as Munro makes clear when she concludes: “Winter afternoons swollen with boredom, secrecy, schemes, expectations, and unfocused fearfulness, messages of sex. Spreading, flattening.” “Pleistocene” is followed by a short vignette called “Little Hill” in which, out for a drive years later with her husband, brother, and sister-in-law, Shirley Pickering “did remember one thing that Mr. Cleaver had told them. It was about the drumlins, left by the retreating ice like pebble tracks, to show the way it had gone. She remembered what it meant: little hill.” When she remarks this while on the drive, her relatives are taken aback: “Convicted of showing-off,” displaying this useless bit of knowledge, Shirley “turned her face to the window,” holds on to her thoughts, which sustain, cherish, and expand these meanings, and keeps her mouth shut. “She was not so far gone as to make mention” of her other thoughts.
“Little Hill” is followed by another half-page vignette called “Airship Over Michigan,” which concerns some old men, “sitting on the bench in front of the Town Hall, [who were] receptive to the idea that what looked like a star in the western sky … was in reality an airship hovering over Bay City, Michigan, lit up by ten thousand electric light bulbs.” This view became so widespread that the editor of the paper felt compelled to assert that “this brightest decoration of the western sky was no airship, or any man-made wonder, but the planet Venus.… Not everyone was persuaded.”
When Munro came to publish Who Do You Think You Are? in 1978, some reviewers complained that she had returned to much the same material seen in Lives. That complaint misses the essence of what Munro did in Who, but there is no question that the text of “Places at Home” recollects Del’s realization in “Epilogue: The Photographer”: “No list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting.” Rather like Uncle Craig – whom Del is reacting against here – Munro includes lists in “Places at Home”: a list of nicknames in one vignette (“Moon-eyes,” “Shot-a-Rat,” “Horse,” “Runt,” “Half-a-Grapefruit,” and others: “Those are names that will last a lifetime, unless you can move away”) and a list of churches and lodges in another (“There is no reason for anybody not to belong to something. If they don’t make you welcome in one place, you can keep on going until you find some place where they do.”). There is also a brief description beginning “Flo knew the best way to kill a chicken, and it was this.”2
These lists complement her brief fictional renderings of character and incident in “Places at Home.” Following on “Pleistocene” and “Hill,” she has, among others, “Poison Cake,” about a “woman living on the Huron road [who] had second sight”; “Digging for Gold,” about a treasure believed to have been buried by Jesse James; “Currant Bushes,” about a father who buried his money in jars so as to stymie his children after his death; “June,” about three boys who coerce a country girl into having sex with them under a porch; “Nosebleed,” about a girl whose father gave her away to work for a rich family; “Hearse,” about the “most successful seducer of women that there ever was in that country”; “Suicide Corners,” about “Shepherd Street and Alma Street,” where two men who committed suicide lived; and “The Boy Murderer,” about a man named Franklin who returns home from the war unscathed only to be shot by his brother playing with a loaded gun at Franklin’s welcome-home party. In one of the last pieces, “History,” Munro offers lists of potatoes, roses, and names of streets (grouped thematically) before commenting “Too much altogether. The chronicler’s job becomes depressing” and concluding that “history seems a gentle avocation, orderly and consoling, until you get into it. Then you see the shambles, the prodigal, dizzying, discouraging confusion. Just here, just on this one patch of the earth’s surface where things have not been piling up for very long, or so we think; what must it be like in other places? Nevertheless some people will continue; some people are fired with the lasting hope of getting things straight.”3
Reading through the lengthy unpublished manuscripts of “Places at Home” now, one is impressed by the synthesis of Munro’s writing they reveal. Some small proportion of the writing looks back to things she had written previously, the echoes of Lives seen in the approach and in “The Boy Murderer,” which reminds us of her depiction of Garnet French’s family. Yet more interesting is how “Places at Home” shows Munro rediscovering her home place and its detail anew in ways appropriate to her own situation in 1975–76. Geographical considerations (the Pleistocene era, pre-glacial lakes, drumlins) reveal Munro’s time and talks with Fremlin, who also provided the story of one of the suicides in “Suicide Corners,” which his father had told him. That incident – a person threatening suicide with a rope not tied to a beam – appears here for the first time; Munro tried several times to place it until she finally got it into “The Progress of Love.” Fremlin also provided her with the details for the girl’s circumstances in “Nosebleed” – his notes about a twelve-year-old girl whose father “gave” her away to work for another family are in Munro’s papers. That same history became Flo’s in “Half a Grapefruit.” Once she had written the text of “Places at Home” and it became clear that the book would not be published, Munro kept it and has used much of it since. “Pleistocene” became the uncollected story “Characters” and was considered for inclusion in Who. “June” and several other vignettes were used in Who Do You Think You Are?, the apparent shooting in “The Boy Murderer” became part of “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” and the phrasing at the end of “History” (“the lasting hope of getting things straight”) would inform the conclusion of “Meneseteung.” The seducer in “Hearse” reappears in Who and, though no longer an undertaker, again as D.M. Willens in “The Love of a Good Woman.” Munro wrote to Gibson when she was struggling with the form of this manuscript; she was apologetic about the time she was taking to realize its best form but, even so, “I don’t feel the effort to be wasted – in this game, eventually, nothing is wasted.”4
That certainly proved to be the case, but the importance of “Places at Home” has to do with its role in bringing Munro imaginatively back to her home place just as she was literally returning to live there. Peter D’Angelo had approached her with the idea late in 1974; by January 1975 Gibson had contacted him and was expecting sample photographs; by April Fremlin was writing notes for Munro’s use in “Nosebleed” and, toward the end of July, Gibson writes about various matters, commenting that “Peter D’Angelo tells me that you are hard at work on the prose sketches for that book” and asking to see sample text. Munro responded by sending Gibson her manuscript, writing in an undated cover letter that it is “in small and medium-sized segments which could, except for the first and last, be arranged every which way, or cut” and estimating the length at ten thousand words. Throughout, Gibson was acting as an effective editor, responding, making suggestions, and letting both Munro and D’Angelo work toward their text. He was also building his relationship with Munro.
When she wrote again from Clinton in mid-September, Munro had seen D’Angelo’s pictures and said she liked them (“like some of them very much”). At the same time, she rejects the approach they have been taking, an “impressionistic book, done at random.… I don’t think we can use the text I’ve written – after all, there has to be some theme, some connection,” she continues, and suggests using additional pictures from the 1930s and 1940s. “One idea I have is – a sort of Ontario Book of Days, a seasonal book using (or appearing to use) the changes in one community over one year – work, play, a wedding, funeral, etc. The stores, the school, the churches, people. I could do a tight, factual text.” Munro wanted to talk to Gibson about this, and she feared undercutting D’Angelo since she had not talked to him about it yet. Having not heard from Gibson, she wrote again eleven days later. When he responds on Oc
tober 9, Gibson apologizes for his delay and writes that he had already imposed “a fairly strict seasonal division” and “have been driving the poor lad out to get more photos of fall fairs and so on,” so Munro’s “ ‘Book of Days’ idea” works well with that direction.
Such optimism was misplaced. By the end of December Gibson wrote to Munro that “after midnight on December 24 you must stop racking your brain to find a text for Peter D’Angelo’s photographs.” She responded on December 30 thanking him for “the letting-off-the-hook” and, picking up a reference made in his last letter, wrote that “one Calvinist conscience can always tell what ails another.” She admitted that she could not do it but felt she had to make the effort – Munro felt especially bad for D’Angelo, “whose work I like a lot.” While neither Gibson nor Munro have particular memories of the progress of “Places at Home,” Peter D’Angelo recalls that at some point it became clear that the book was not going to happen; he never saw any of Munro’s text.5
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