Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Such details of composition, admittedly of keen interest only to Munro’s most devoted readers, nevertheless point to the unique process she undertook in the making and shaping of The View from Castle Rock: given its long gestation dating back to the 1970s, Castle Rock is a sustained instance of Munro’s writing her own life as the book’s central fact. With the “No Advantages” section of Castle Rock, Munro creates an ancestral context, in which she places herself in the second section, “Home.” In both sections, her treatment is anchored by pieces she had long meditated and had already written – “Working for a Living” and “Home” – freeing her to imagine, realign, and shape the rest of the book, using many of her fugitive pieces. As she explains in her foreword to Castle Rock – which Munro, urged by Gibson, agreed was necessary to explain the book to the reader (but which had some unintended consequences when connected to her several announcements that it would be her last book) – in these stories she “was doing something closer to what memoir does – exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could.”11

  While it is possible here to point to several instances in which Munro may be seen imagining further, making new connections, bridging gaps in her ancestral story, an entirely new and first-published story, “The Ticket,” is the best illustration of what Munro’s made reshapings in Castle Rock reveal about her own life. Structurally, it is a needed story, for it bridges the gap between the revised “Hired Girl” (1994), which treats Munro’s high school summer spent working for a family at a cottage on Georgian Bay, and “Home,” which has Munro returned home to Ontario in 1973, visiting her father and his second wife in Wingham. “The Ticket” returns to Wingham just before Alice Laidlaw’s marriage to James Munro in 1951 and, in so doing, it recreates her circumstances as she awaits that marriage – her mother ill, her brother and sister much younger, the anticipation, the wedding itself. But most especially it meditates on her relations with her grandmother and aunt – the Code sisters, each a widow helping her prepare for her wedding – and muses over each older woman’s marriage along with, once again, that of her parents.

  At the centre of the story are Munro’s own desires, the feelings that led her to accept the proposal of a young man she here calls Michael: “He had bought me a diamond ring. He had found a job in Vancouver that was certain to lead to better things, and had bound himself to support me and our children, for the rest of his life. Nothing would make him happier. He said so, and I believed it was true.” This established, the story shifts to Munro’s feelings, to details of her grandmother and aunt’s lives, their loves, their marriages – and to their actions as they helped Munro prepare. Eventually, as she usually does, Munro returns to the core of her story, to the central image that carries the most pressing insight she offers: her own, retrospectively seen, lack of faith in what she was doing then, crucially, her own lack of commitment: “And I thought I loved him. Love and marriage. That was a lighted and agreeable room you went into, where you were safe. The lovers I had imagined, the bold-plumed predators, had not appeared, perhaps did not exist, and I could hardly think myself a match for them anyway. He deserved better than me, Michael did. He deserved a whole heart.”

  Although it is possible to say that Munro has described these relations before – in “The Peace of Utrecht,” in “Winter Wind,” in Who Do You Think You Are?, in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: Connection” and elsewhere – “The Ticket” is both precise as to actual biographical detail and, in this quotation and its title image, is explicitly confessional. The ticket referred to in the title is her Aunt Charley’s secret gift of two hundred dollars in cash in case the young bride decided, at the last moment, to flee the marriage. Should she not, though, her aunt tells her, then “ ‘you must be – you must promise – you must be a good wife.’ ‘Naturally,’ I said, as if there was no need to whisper.” Writing here with long retrospection – over fifty years and in full knowledge of what became of the marriage about to be enacted – Munro is especially harsh on herself. This harshness stems from Munro’s by now deeply felt sense that, when marrying Jim Munro in 1951, she withheld the needed full commitment to their marriage. An artist first and foremost, she felt ever directed away from their relationship into her writing. Given her history this is not surprising, but she returns to the writer she was even back in 1951 in a striking way. At one point in “The Ticket,” as she is writing her life, she recalls herself wanting to avoid her grandmother and great-aunt’s house because “the town was enticing to me, it was dreamy in these autumn days. It was spellbound, with melancholy light on the gray or yellow brick walls, and a peculiar stillness, now that the birds had flown south and the reaping machines in the country round about were silent.” She continues: “One day,” as she approached her grandmother’s house, “I heard some lines in my head, the beginning of a story. All over the town the leaves fell. Softly, silently the yellow leaves fell – it was autumn. And I actually did write a story, then or sometime later, beginning with these sentences – I can’t remember what it was about.”

  In fact, the fragment of that story in her papers begins differently: “All over the town the leaves fell; it was autumn. Carelessly, softly, the leaves fell, for there was no wind.” But close enough. Written in the summer of 1951 – the very time Alice Laidlaw was home from university and beginning preparations for her December wedding and so a new life – “The Yellow Afternoon” is about the efforts of a high school teacher, a single woman who wishes to encourage in one of her students a devotion to the life of mind, to poetry and aesthetics, and to a commitment to university studies. The teacher, Miss Levinston, wants also to warn young Frances, who shows sparks of such potential, away from her likely alternative: getting married to a local boy. Frances, for her part, decides to do just that, and the story details her efforts to tell Miss Levinston of her intentions in a rather cruel way. “The Yellow Afternoon” was broadcast on the CBC program Anthology in February 1955 but never published.

  It is interesting to see that Munro returned here in “The Ticket” to one of her very early stories, one written during and derived from the very time in her life she was thinking about as she was trying to bridge the biographical gap between “Hired Girl” and “Home” for The View from Castle Rock. Interesting both for this book and as an example of Munro’s characteristic artistic practice: she is, as ever, writing her lives. Turning back to her younger self at a critical juncture in her own life – to the moment when marriage to Jim Munro “rescued” her (a word used in “The Ticket”) – Munro assesses her own heartlessness. Marriage got her out of Lower Town, Wingham, got her away from her mother’s illness and the family’s struggles for survival, and so got her away from the “calamity” that had “arrived with the end of childhood.” So Alice Munro is seen in Castle Rock completing the whole of her own life story as she, once again, writes her own life as it is inextricably connected to the lives of her Laidlaw ancestors, to their emigration to Canada and to Illinois (and thence to Canada), and to Huron County, her own ancestral home place. The place she has used continually from the beginning of her career to write her lives. Long envisioned and pondered, The View from Castle Rock is a critical book in Munro’s oeuvre; in fact, it is like nothing else she has written before or since.12

  The Everyman’s Library edition of Munro’s stories, Carried Away, which Knopf published alongside The View from Castle Rock, and which was later published in Canada in hardcover as Alice Munro’s Best and in paper as My Best Stories, contains what Alison Lurie in the New York Review of Books called a “generous and perceptive” introduction by Margaret Atwood. There, Atwood begins with this assertion: “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time.” Lurie’s own perceptive and extended review of Munro’s oeuvre and Atwood’s matter-of-fact and sharply incisive introduction – these together encapsulate the critical reception accorded Castle Rock. With that book as its
final text (but also treating the 2005 edition of this biography, Sheila Munro’s Lives of Mothers and Daughters, and the Everyman Carried Away), Lurie’s review essay of The View from Castle Rock constitutes clear recognition of Munro’s import and stature in late 2006. Her reading of Munro and her work is ample and informed, thoughtful and precise. As many reviewers of Castle Rock did, Lurie concludes by offering some lines from the cemetery scene toward the end of Munro’s epilogue, “Messenger.” The full passage reads, “We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.” Connecting this with the final scene in “What Do You Want to Know For?,” Lurie writes: “The narrator and her husband wonder if there is oil in the lamp inside the mausoleum” that they have discovered, “so that it might somehow, one day, shine forth. Metaphorically, in this book, it already does.” Ending her review, which is called “The Lamp in the Mausoleum,” with these words, Lurie points to an essential element in Munro’s writing, asserting that “even in these stories, which are closest to her own history, Alice Munro’s commitment to indeterminacy and the essential confusion and mystery of life remains.” Citing the initial scene in “The View from Castle Rock,” when young Andrew and his grandfather look out from Castle Rock in Edinburgh, Lurie maintains that it “contains the message of the whole book: what you imagine as your future is not what you will get: the real future is always farther away and stranger, better and worse.”

  Another indicative long review in another august foreign publication, “The Sense of an Ending” by Stephen Henighan in the Times Literary Supplement, stands in sharp contrast to Lurie’s. It, too, is a wide-ranging overview of Munro and her career, but while the American shows herself generous, perceptive, and appreciative, Henighan comes across as dour, picky, and even petulant. Although writing after the flap in Canada over Munro’s announcement that Castle Rock would be her last book, and so in a position to be aware of the equivocal quality of that announcement, Henighan begins by taking the announcement as fact. He then proceeds to summarize Munro’s career, preferring her early, presumably more Canadian, work over that first published in the New Yorker, where, he nitpicks, there are many signs of a creeping Americanization (“college” for “university,” while the CBC becomes “the national radio network”). Ultimately he pronounces the book at hand “a disappointment” and sadly asserts as he ends that as “the concluding work in a remarkable career, The View from Castle Rock is not the ending for which Alice Munro would have wished.”

  Any reviewer is entitled to a sustained response to a book, certainly, so in that sense Henighan’s carpings are fair enough. As another Canadian reviewer of Castle Rock, John Moss, asserted in his review, “Nothing separates reviewers and critics like a new book by Alice Munro. The former, exercising taste in the present tense, is challenged to find fresh accolades to heap on the author. The latter, whose job is the exercise of judgement informed by an educated imagination, who writes with a sense of historical context, is charged with the task of explaining ‘why.’ Why is Munro so good, how does she do it, what makes her writing so stunning in its casual complexity, its intense directness?” Both Lurie and Henighan combine the two perspectives Moss reasonably defines here, although each comes to different conclusions and each, too, is representative of the poles of response Castle Rock garnered. Most reviewers, just as Moss maintains, responded favorably to the book and struggled to find more laudatory things to say, while a few – like Henighan, proceeding from other aesthetic expectations and either unwilling to understand the book’s unusual position between memoir and fiction or rejecting its effects – chose to find fault and dismiss. That such treatment would eventually come to a writer as celebrated as Munro is certainly not surprising. Nor, given literary values passing from one generation to the next and the jealousy born of long reputation, is it anything other than human.

  Surveying the reviews of Castle Rock, what is surprising is how little of this hostile treatment the book actually received. In that vein, Darryl Whetter offers a review in the Toronto Star (where the subheading asserts that “the failure of this new collection – a kind of fictional family tree – comes as a shock”) and writes that “sadly, Munro’s normally enviable skills simply do not transform what ultimately remains a private history.” Like Henighan, this reviewer sees “Hired Girl” as what he calls “the collection’s one gem” – and before that, “we have a narrator-character wedged between these ancestral characters and us. The narrator’s own story doesn’t emerge fully until late in the book.…” Whetter sees that happening in “Hired Girl” and, apparently, manages to miss Munro’s subsequent transformation in “The Ticket,” “Home,” and the balance of her text.

  By way of contrast we see Hilary Mantel, writing in The Guardian, discussing Munro’s ancestor, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, author of The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and the man who helped Sir Walter Scott “steal” the ballads he published in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). Following Munro, Mantel writes that “It’s difficult to draw a line between the objective truth and the truth in his head; and some readers are uncomfortable if they can’t draw the lines between genres.” Such readers as Henighan and Whetter, certainly. Mantel asserts that The View from Castle Rock is “an act of salvage rather than appropriation. It is a memoir that has taken a breath, and expanded itself beyond genre and beyond the confines of one life.… Just as there is no real division here between fiction and non-fiction, there is no turning point at which the epic story of emigration gives way to observation of the nuance and detail of settled lives.”

  And John Moss, for his part, asserts that Castle Rock is not just a memoir; “it is something else, a major achievement, and an exciting revitalisation of a somewhat exhausted genre.… It is a memoir as only Alice Munro could write it. Are there stories in it? Is it fiction? Well, of course.… The difference is, the fiction here is neither subterfuge nor self-enhancing. It is an essential element of an intimate past, both ancestral and remembered, that is transformed by the author into shared revelation.” With this book, Moss concludes, “Munro proves herself once again one of those rare writers whose work changes the lives of her readers.”

  Seen together, a large grouping of the reviews of The View from Castle Rock most frequently take up, as Mantel and Moss do, the numerous ways in which the historical interacts with the fictive in the book to create the numinous. Neil Besner, a sharp, longstanding, and well-informed critic of Munro’s work, especially notes the book’s second section, “Home.” In his review in the Winnipeg Free Press he maintains that “there is everywhere a deeply felt sense of connection to the climate of feeling inhabited by her father – not only his beliefs, expressed and more often silent, but to his habits of thought. In this collection, Munro follows that sense of connection more strongly and widely than she has before. And she does so incomparably.” He speaks of Munro’s “more intimately focused returns, guided by a writer always aware of, and inquiring into her own pastward gaze, with its moments of deception or deceit – and of revelation.” Surveying the stories making up the second section of Castle Rock within the context of the stories contained in Carried Away, A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times that “Whether they are the literal truth is beyond irrelevant. The point of storytelling, as Munro practices it, is to rescue the literal facts from banality, from oblivion, and to preserve – to create – some sense of continuity in the hectic ebb and flow of experience.”

  Perhaps the best single review of The View from Castle Rock appeared in the review section of The Guardian, written by Karl Miller. This is the Scottish critic who once hailed Alistair MacLeod and Alice Munro, though born and bred in Canada, as among Scotland’s greatest authors of all time. In addition Miller has written a biography of James Hogg. As a result, his review is suffused with his own knowledge of Ettrick and with a deep appr
eciation of just what Munro was about as she shaped this, her long-contemplated family book that she hoped would achieve something unexpected. In a long passage that synthesizes the whole of her accomplishment, Miller first cites one of Munro’s comments from her foreword and then writes at some length:

  This leaves you feeling that these stories are like the others after all, being at once her life and her art. Old questions, including James Laidlaw’s, about art’s lies and feigning arise here, as they do elsewhere in the book, when Munro alludes, cannily enough, to “canny lying of the sort you can depend on a writer to do.”

  The new stories make use of family papers and public records. Munro once spent time looking and learning in Selkirkshire, with its heritage of battles and ballads and the spirits of the glen. There were those in her earlier life who thought writing meant handwriting; her stepmother assured her that her father wrote better than her. But he was also a writer in the other sense: late in life, after his years as a fox farmer and night watchman, he wrote about the pioneer life of his forebears, and he was not the only family member who could, in a sense, write. The diary of young Walter Laidlaw, James’s son, lends quotations. The archives offered her plenty of stuff to incorporate and supplement, including items unfamiliar to me as a biographer of Hogg. The high house of Phaup, up on the hills above Ettrick kirk, near the burial place of Hogg’s sinner, is identified – correctly, I think – as the place where Hogg’s shepherd friends met for debates and were held to have caused the disastrous storm of 1794 by trying to raise the Devil.

  Offering such knowledge and such a perspective, Miller ultimately provides this assessment of the whole of Munro’s “family book”: